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Street of Crocodiles Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

Street of Crocodiles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TALES OF THE BROTHERS QUAY

Great Britain USA (78 mi) 1987

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

If you're familiar with the Brothers' work, then you don't need me telling you about this. If you're not, well, I'm not all that sure I can tell you about it. Five films here, including Street of Crocodiles, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Are We Still Married? The Comb, and Anamorphosis. Combining puppetry, stop motion, and lots of dust, the Quay Brothers (American-born identical twins based in London) work in the same vineyard as their apparent idol, Jan Svankmajer, the Dutch surrealist whose work is frequently the visual springboard for the Brothers' nightmarish images. And nightmarish they are, echoing the uneasy, somnolent wanderings of fevered minds the world over. You almost expect Kafka's Gregor Samsa to scuttle across the screen, or “K” to wander by, bewildered as ever. They don't, of course, but they would hardly be out of place if they did. 1986's Herculean effort, the award-winning Street of Crocodile, is among my favorite pieces of animation ever. At 21 minutes, it's just long enough to give you bad (or at least resoundingly odd) dreams for days afterwards, as it follows the meanderings of an accidentally animated puppet-man who wanders about the decrepit interior of some nameless museum. As in most of the Quays' work, everything is coated with a thin film of grime, and their characters are ancient, broken things, come to life and wandering about on strange errands whose significance you never can quite grasp. Another standout here is the recent Anamorphosis, which is an animated demonstration of the principles of this near-extinct art form, with an accompanying, illuminating voiceover. If you're among those who have yet to experience the dark magic of the Quays, here's you're chance to see their haunting, unforgettable work in a theatre, where it belongs.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) dvd review

I first encountered the Brothers Quay, like many, through that pustule on the face of music, MTV. In 1988, the Quays were commissioned to contribute to MTV's series of artist-oriented promos ("Art breaks"). Whilst flipping through channels, it was hard not to stop on MTV every time they aired Dramolet, the spot that the Quays created. Despite being only 60 seconds long, the clip was a hypnotic, bizarre black-and-white creation using stop motion animation that defies easy explanation. Since that time, I have grown to truly admire the brilliant, surrealist work these two filmmakers have brought to the world. Despite MTV's attempts at shamelessly copying their work, be it in promos or videos, the Quays definitely remain servants to their own natures, despite their foray into more commercial work.

The Brothers Quay (Timothy and Steven) are indentical twins living in England. Though born and raised American, their style and intellect seems almost certainly rooted in European traditions. Their films often feature captions in European languages, musical scoring by the classic avant-garde composers of Europe, and are sometimes inspired by European literature. Often classified as "animators", the Brothers Quay are much more. Their films are vast, surrealist epics that open doors to incredible, yet untouchable, landscapes of nightmarish visions. Their worlds use harsh film-stocks, warped lenses, and an impeccable grasp of the artistry behind puppetry and stop motion. The work rarely has any sort of clear narrative or storyline, or in fact anything that distinguishes a typical film. It uses dolls, often deformed, and superbly realistic, almost antique, settings, much like a twisted doll house performance. The imagery will often amaze, if not disturb. I won't pretend to understand what drives the Quays, nor will I pretend to grasp some subliminal context to their work that no one else has. I will say that what I find fascinating is how accurate their stop-motion work is to re-creating the nightmarish quality of a chaotic night of uneasy sleep. I've never liked the attempts at explaining or rationalizing the work presented in Quay shorts, or any seriously surreal artform, so I'd advise that viewers of these films simply turn down the lights and immerse themselves.

This DVD presents 10 of the Brothers Quay's short films (technically 11 since their very first short is presented as an extra feature. The films included are:
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984)
14 minutes, Color.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (or This Unnameable Little Broom) (1985)
11 minutes, Color.
Street of Crocodiles (1986)
21 minutes, Color.
Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies (1987)
14 minutes, Black-and-white.
Dramolet - Stille Nacht I (1988)
1 minute, Black-and-white.
The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep) (1991)
17 minutes, Color and Black-and-white.
Anamorphosis, or De Artificiali Perspectiva (1991)
15 minutes, Color.
Are We Still Married? - Stille Nacht II (1991)
3 minutes, Black-and-white, music by His Name is Alive.
Tales From the Vienna Woods - Stille Nacht III (1992)
3 minutes, Black-and-white.
Can't Go Wrong Without You - Stille Nacht IV (1993)
3 minutes, Black-and-white, music by His Name Is Alive.
Nocturna Artificialia (1979) [credited as a bonus feature]
21 minutes, Color.

The disc contains, essentially, all of the Brothers Quay independent work. Although they have done more work (including the famous Peter Gabriel video Sledgehammer), the films here were done completely under their own creative control, in their isolated studio called "Konnick." While most of the work is completely surrealistic, some of these films have distinct points.

The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer is an obvious tribute to the awe-inspiringCzech stop-motion animator of the same name, whose work (films like Faust and Alice) is the only thing capable of even comparing withthe Quay's. Cabinet has definite undertones of a young boy's mind beingemptied of typical, childhood things, and replaced with the education and desire tobecome a bizarre animator. Anamorphosis is an educational piece the Quays did for a longer film about art history. The piece is an extremely well madelook at the process of anamorphic distortion (a classical form of optical illusiondating back to the 1700's), but done in that distinct Quay style. Usually acclaimed as the "best" Quay short is Street of Crocodiles, one of their longest works. Two of the "Stille Nacht" shorts are music videos commissioned by the band His Name Is Alive, and are among their most potent modern work. Both videos featurethe similar themes of a stuffed rabbit and a fidgety, mysterious young girl. The bonus short, Nocturna Artificialia is similar in some respects to Street of Crocodiles with some of the same artistic themes. This short is, to the best of my knowledge, the earliest Quay short still in existence (their film school work was, sadly, lost some time ago).

The New York Sun (Bruce Bennett) review

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) capsule review

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User reviews from imdb Author: Doug Galecawitz (dougg@evilnet.net) from Lisle, IL

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Michael Machosky) review

STILLE NACHT I: DRAMOLET

Great Britain USA Canada (2 mi) 1988

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

This short is utterly delightful. There's not much to it in terms of what is available to be seen and commented on, but there is a lot to it in terms of what was done and how. Instead of flecking their sets with dust and hair, the brothers Quay place a magnet in a field and let the magnet play with all the little magnetic fragments. It's creepy... but it's fun! I honestly don't know what to make of the babydoll that watches the whole thing, eventually to turn and attempt to eat a meal, but it doesn't make me want to eat anything anytime soon! I think this is more something the brothers have done in order to experiment with something they haven't yet put into a longer film, but wanted to do regardless.

User reviews from imdb Author: Francisco Huerta (fjhuerta@hotmail.com) from Mexico City

This movie comes straight out of your worst nightmares. I remember watching it when I was 13 years old; I had a fever and was staying at home. I could not forget this film until 16 years later, when I finally found who did it (and got the DVD).

There's no plot whatsoever in this movie - I guess that's what makes it so special. As every other film by the Brothers Quay, this is a disjointed trip into someone's imagination. The best description I can find of it is that it's the closest thing I've ever seen to a dream - no wonder I thought for a while this movie didn't exist, and that I had dreamed it!

The only thing going against it is that it's just too short - it was ideal for MTV, circa 1988, but it definitely leaves you expecting something more out of it.

BFI Screenonline: Stille Nacht (1988) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

The Quay Brothers made their first foray into the world of the pop promo in 1986, when they were amongst a number of animators who worked on Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' video (d. Stephen R. Johnson). Although they had mixed feelings about their contribution, 'Sledgehammer' was one of the most influential videos of its era, and opened up new commissioning possibilities. In 1988, the US-based MTV cable television music network asked several animators to create a number of very short pieces that could be played as an 'Art Break' between the music videos that formed the bulk of the station's output.

The typically cryptic subtitle reads 'Dramolet für R.W. in Herisau', which is the first reference in the Quays' output to Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), who ranks alongside Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz in their literary pantheon (and whose work also inspired The Comb, 1990, and the Quays' first feature Institute Benjamenta, 1995). Walser specialised in highly condensed, allusive pieces, including prose, poems and miniature dramas, or 'dramolets'. He spent over two-and-a-half decades in various institutions, culminating in the Herisau sanatorium in eastern Switzerland. On Christmas Day, 1956, he was found frozen to death in a nearby field.

None of this is explicitly dramatised in the film, but there's a pervasive impression of chilly, institutionalised loneliness. The Quays' familiar puppet animation (here looking even more cracked and peeling than usual) is here enhanced by the use of animated iron filings, which suggest the rapid formation of frost over every surface, the swaying of the individual particles suggesting a hefty buffeting by a keen, piercing wind. The puppet watches this 'frost' out of the window, then turns to a bowl that's filled with the same substance. His spoon begins to vibrate and, as if in sympathy, more spoons emerge from the wall behind him. As the picture fades to black (via a silent-movie-style iris-out), the 'frost' is starting to form on the surface of the table. To chime with the shopworn imagery, the music is deliberately distorted, as if sourced from a badly-tuned crystal radio.

The Quays received several more commissions from MTV over the following few years, the one-minute Ex Voto (1989) and what would become the three subsequent instalments in the Stille Nacht cycle: Are We Still Married?, Tales From Vienna Woods (both 1992) and Can't Go Wrong Without You (1993). They also designed an animated MTV station ident.

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Dramolet Zeitgeist Films

REHEARSALS FOR EXTINCT ANATOMIES

Great Britain (14 mi) 1987

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

Don't watch this one if you're going to the doctor's anytime soon. The bright, white mise-en-scene (relatively brighter than most of the dust gray of most Quay brother features) has that clean, scrubbed look of a place you go for surgery. This is very different than the dust bunnies of Quay features, but on the other hand it makes their characters (made of string, wire, and rusted metal) seem that much more dirty and painful. It makes me think that watching this will give one tetanus.

I love the acknowledgements in the beginning. Offering this movie to evangelists seems a particularly harsh move on the Quays' part, but then again so much of this film is jagged-edged and rusted that maybe that direct approach fits it in an odd way.

BFI Screenonline: Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

When the Quays secured funding for Street of Crocodiles (1986), it was on condition that it was based on a recognised literary source. No such restrictions were imposed on their next film, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987), and the result may well be their most baffling work - at least on a first viewing.

The starting point was a piece of music that Leszek Jankowski had written for a Kafka-themed project that never got off the ground. From this, they devised a choreographic plan involving certain precisely calibrated camera movements, and built a set with these in mind. They also came up with a visual conception based on black lines, traced by a calligrapher's pen in the opening shot, but also appearing as barcodes, striped sheets and wallpaper (in an interview with the art historian Nick Wadley, the Quays described their film as "a private documentary on the straight line, that bleeds and runs and is softened by the focus"). The camera movements are also designed to reveal tiny, initially almost imperceptible elements in the décor, hidden spaces that can only be seen from certain angles and which vanish as quickly as they appear.

The thematic content was initially sourced from Le Verrou, an ambiguous painting (and subsequent engraving) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) which depicts a man reaching for the lock of a door and a woman lying on a bed - and to this they added elements taken from the work of the artist's cousin, the anatomist Honoré Fragonard (1732-1799), whose disturbing yet fascinating 'écorchés' preserved flayed human and animal corpses in poses designed to reveal cross-sections of their interior structure.

Whatever the challenges of interpretation, there is little doubt that this is one of the Quays' most visually striking creations. The first of their films to be shot in pure black and white, they make brilliant use of the contrast between the white 'exteriors' and the central room, where the black lines ultimately converge. It's also the first Quay film to make extensive use of exceptionally narrow depth of field, with the slow focus pulls as much a part of the overall choreographic texture as the movement of the camera and puppets. And for all the tantalising lack of coherent 'meaning', there's something inexplicably melancholic about the protagonists, reduced to empty, repetitive gestures and, in one case, to an anatomical structure so basic that it's barely life-supporting.

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies Zeitgeist Films

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

THE COMB

Great Britain (18 mi) 1990

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle Cubr

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

In the Brothers' Quay own words, taking everything as a Freudian symbol is a little too easy and kind of turns 90% of cinema into one single picture. However, this movie is so, well, Freudian. From the undertitle ("from the Museums of Sleep") to the in uteral mise-en-scene, this is a cinepoem of free association.

A lot of Quay brothers features have that feeling, but most of them are set in dusty corners, seemingly within the space of cracks in the walls and dustbunnies, what happens underneath your bed when you're not around to observe it. The use of color in this film, however, gives it a strong internal-space feeling, or to be more precise, the Quay brothers literally take us into a woman's body and send hands feeling all over her.

Essayists of haptic criticism state that a strong way to create a sense of touch from glance in film is to play with focus, and the Quays' do that a lot in most of their films. Saturating that dim slight-focus with flesh-tone sunsets makes it seem even more organic. I disagree that this area looks like something out of a Grimms fairytale... the Grimms like blood and forests, not organics and menstruation.

User reviews from imdb Author: Avant-garde_Addict

Explaining an avant-garde film such as The Comb is like trying to explain the concept of colors to a person who has been blind since birth. The blind may conjure up their own ideas of what colors look like, but they cannot fully realize them. Such is the way of the avant-garde cinema. It simply cannot be explained through mere words due to its abstractness. In order to fully realize it, you must experience it. Viewing The Comb is like entering a nightmare netherworld unimaginable even in your darkest dreams. Much like a dream, it is difficult to explain in mere words. Like all avant-garde films, The Comb must be experienced first-hand to be fully realized. This film is set in a disturbing little world full of moth-eaten 19th century dolls, crooked passageways, rotted wood and trees and mazes of ladders leading to an other-worldly crimson sky. Surrealism is prominent throughout; it seems as if The Comb is a Salvador Dali painting animated to life. The dream scape presented in The Comb has few resemblances to the real world, as everything is given a nightmarish tilt. As in their other films, The Quays once again animate the inanimate and bring lifeless objects to creaky, jerky life.

The main character, if I may call it that, is a dirty, cracked porcelain doll who is intent on climbing a tower clustered by mazes of ladders and small passageways that all lead toward a blood-red sky. Periodically Intercut between the doll's difficult journey upwards is a woman tossing and turning in her bed, which is set in a grainy, Victorian-era room loaded with worn antiques. The brief scenes of this woman (circa 4 of the 18 minutes the film lasts) are live-action (a real human, no animation) and in B&W while the rest of the film occurs in the lushly colored netherworld made living through stop-motion animation. The woman appears to be having a nightmare which may be linked to the world the doll is struggling in. The actions of the woman echo into the doll's dream world and vice versa. At the end of the film, the relation between the doll and the sleeping woman is brought into perspective.

The Comb is very surreal and avant-garde, meaning it breaks from conventional film making practices. There is no dialogue, no narrative story, no named characters; just pure abstract avant-gardism. The nameless characters seem to be symbols, and their antics tell a story that is open to anyone's interpretation. I think The Comb expresses the relationship between Man and his Dreams. What we do in the 'real' world (displayed by the woman in bed) reverberates in our dreams (the doll's journey). I believe the woman in bed is dreaming everything that happens in the film.

There is no score, except for disjointed stabbing violins, scratches and indecipherable moaning, which adds to the already disturbing visuals. Like most avant-garde films, this will tap into your subconscious and have a strange, personal effect on you. Whenever I watch The Comb, I feel as if my life is put on hold for 18 minutes as I'm pulled into this enigmatic, surreal world. I have seen most of the Brothers Quay films and feel this is their second best, under their masterpiece The Street of Crocodiles. The Comb is highly recommended for fans of stop-motion animation, avant-gardism or just something different.

BFI Screenonline: Comb, The (1990) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

The most deliberately dreamlike of the Quay Brothers' films, The Comb is bookended by (and intercut with) a black-and-white live-action sequence of a woman asleep in bed, the implication being that these disconcerting, dislocating impressions of fairytale landscapes populated by decrepit puppets and an endless series of ladders (shot in colour) are taking place in the darker recesses of her mind. However, this is the only aspect of the film that's in any way easy to grasp, the rest setting out to wrong-foot the viewer at every turn, and the result wilfully defies verbal analysis.

Space and scale are ambiguous throughout, the central setting taking on different aspects according to the angle at which it's viewed (which constantly shifts). At the time of production, the Quays were researching the optical phenomenon of anamorphosis (the subject and title of their next film), and the distortions visible in the background décor imply the existence of hidden images. At times it appears to be a discarded theatrical set, an impression given further credence by a camera pull-back to reveal what appear to be stage flats and a proscenium arch - though it could just as easily be a forest.

As far as the foreground action is concerned (if that's an appropriate term for events just as likely to take place offscreen or in blurred areas outside the camera's immediate depth of focus), it draws on various fairytale elements - there's a sleeping beauty, and motifs of hair and ladders suggest Rapunzel - but without coalescing into anything concrete. Even the consistency of the atmosphere is open to question, as one typically enigmatic title reads "And suddenly the air grew hard".

There appears to be some kind of 'dialogue' between the sleeper and the puppet, as their middle fingers twitch in unison (this unnatural effect achieved in the live-action sequence by filming at six frames per second, speeding up the action fourfold), but the precise connection between them is never explained. The soundtrack alternates between multilingual gibberish and Leszek Jankowski's guitar-based score, which sculpts the mood without ever imposing a formal structure.

But if viewed as a purely cinematic experience, The Comb is one of the most inexplicably compelling of all the Quays' creations. Indeed, when the sleeper awakes at the end, the effect of her enigmatic smile is to prompt an immediate repeat viewing: what does she know that the viewer doesn't?

Hand of Hysteria: The Bipartite Body of the Brothers Quay • Senses of ... Amir Mogharabi from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

DVD Outsider Slarek

The Comb (from the Museums of Sleep) Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

DE ARTIFICIALI PERSPECTIVA

aka: Anamorphosis

Great Britain (14 mi) 1991

User reviews from imdb Author: Wayne Davidson from Melbourne, Australia

This is probably the only Quay Brothers film I have seen that is in any way conventional. I understand it was their segment used in a greater work about art styles. The Quay Brothers explore the technique of Anamorphosis (a type of visual trickery where a picture seen at certain angles can reveal a hidden image that is not noticeable when viewed front on).

As with all the Quay's work the film is beautiful and strange and utilises their trademark stop motion techniques and odd, dusty Victoriana , yet as mentioned, it's a little more conventional than usual. It comes with a charming narration and is an utterly engaging documentary on a fascinating and little known subject.

As an introduction to the Quay's work it is hardly typical, but a good place for the timid to start. Then try In Absentia for something truly strange!

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

I tend to find that when people review shorts of this type with prior knowledge of the makers (The Brothers Quay), they tend to talk about how the makers still manage to put their own distinct style into someone else's project. This time it feels like it's the other way around, that a professor (with a comically accented voice) is providing meaning to a Brother Quay film. It seems nothing's out-of-the-ordinary (except of course that the Quay brothers aren't ordinary) in this film.

The topic is Anamorphosis, a visual trick of painters to hide meanings in paintings by requiring a person change their focal point for it. A painting of the countryside from the front looks like a painting of a person praying under a tree from the side. An odd painting-like segment within a painting of vice and greed turns out to be a skull.

The producers of this work couldn't have picked anyone better than the Brothers Quay. It's obvious seeing most of their works that these two artists are well versed in not only art, but issues of perspective and hidden meaning. Most of their films could be considered like semiotic Anamorphoses themselves. Their doll-hero-figure makes a perfect protagonist to explore around this world of pre-cinematic animation.

BFI Screenonline: Anamorphosis (1991) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

Between 1980 and 1984, the Quay Brothers spent much of their time either making or contributing to documentaries. This was part of a conscious strategy devised by their producer Keith Griffiths to help attract television commissions and give their puppet animation wider circulation outside the confines of the experimental film. Their early work included Punch and Judy (1980), The Eternal Day of Michel de Ghelderolde (1981), Leos Janacek: Intimate Excursions and Igor Stravinsky: The Paris Years chez Pleyel (both 1983) and The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984).

Since that time, the Quays have preferred to explore their own fantastical worlds, but in 1991 they made a brief return to the documentary form with Anamorphosis, commissioned as part of The Program for Art on Film, a project backed by the Getty Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In collaboration with art historian Roger Cardinal (who had also contributed to the full-length The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer), the Quays assembled this witty exploration of a fascinating visual phenomenon which, as the opening titles explain, "plays mischievously yet revealingly with the relationship between the eye and what it sees."

Anamorphosis relies on a deliberately deformed image that can be made to reappear in its true shape when viewed in an unusual way (for instance, obliquely, or through a distorting mirror), and the Quays provide several examples. Firstly, there's a short lecture on the principles of perspective, illustrated by an example of how the eye can be fooled (a massively elongated chair appears to be normal from one particular viewpoint). Two woodcuts by Erhard Schön (c. 1535) show how subversive material can be hidden inside outwardly normal images, while an anonymous painting (c. 1550) is arranged with strategic peepholes to reveal lurking religious imagery. On a more ambitious scale, Emmanuel Maignan created an anamorphic fresco for a Roman monastery in 1642, while Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), on permanent view in London's National Gallery, is probably the most famous anamorphic painting, its obliquely-fashioned skull in the foreground hinting at the mortality that awaits even the wealthy.

The Quays alternate between their familiar puppet animation with a new technique incorporating three-dimensional cut-out figures that emerge from and retreat into the background, providing a witty visual equivalent of the anamorphic process. There is also much analysis of the original artworks, viewed in close-up and from several angles.

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Anamorphosis Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

LONG WAY DOWN (LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRUG IN)

Great Britain (3 mi) 1992

Long Way Down (Look What the Cat Drug In) Zeitgeist Films

A playful and gorgeously colorful vignette set to a haunting ballad by Michael Penn.

STILLE NACHT II: ARE WE STILL MARRIED?

Great Britain (3 mi) 1992

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

The Quay Brother's "Stille Nacht" series is their more commercial work, though one without that knowledge would be hard pressed to see what makes these works any different stylistically and thematically from their "independant" works. This one, Stille Nacht II (or "Are We Still Married" after the song by His Name is Alive) is basically a music video, utilizing some repeated elements from Stille Nacht I.

This short is kind of interesting to look at because it shows what can be done with music videos besides making them three-minute commercials for the band's own song you're already currently hearing. It's use is so effective that the style has been used by the band Tool (of which I am a fan) in their own stunningly claustrophobic stop-motion animation.

However, later inspirations aside, the Brothers Quay unique mise-en-scene sticks out. A sort of Alice in Wonderland characterization changes pace completely into a rabbit that interacts with a ball that came from a woman's tear. Rather than creating the "Tortured soul" effect of a Tool music video, the Brothers Quay entrap the audience into the song itself, from a band I'm not actually familiar with, but which seems to sing about the decay of relationships even as the track itself sounds like it's decaying on an old cassette tape.

BFI Screenonline: Are We Still Married? (1992) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

This was the first music video that the Quay Brothers were entirely responsible for, having previously contributed animated sequences to Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' (d. Stephen R. Johnson) in 1986. They had previously been approached by Warren Defever, the Michigan-based founder of the musical project His Name Is Alive (alongside vocalist Karen Oliver and drummer Damian Lang), who wanted to licence extracts from Street of Crocodiles (1986) for use in one of their music videos. The Quays refused permission, but were sufficiently intrigued by Defever's work to agree to shoot a music video for him from scratch.

'Are We Still Married?' was originally released in 1991 as a track on His Name Is Alive's second album Home Is In Your Head. This is very typical of the band's work, and indeed many other releases on the 4AD label, creating a dreamlike ambience through selective distortion of instrumentation and vocals, to the point where it's often hard to make out specific lyrics. Naturally, this approach suited the Quays down to the ground, and they duly ignored the song's textual content in favour of a typically oblique evocation of childhood.

The most immediately striking image is of a young girl, whose head is barely visible, but whose ankles expand and contract in a rhythmic motion. This looks as though it was computer-enhanced, but the effect was in fact entirely mechanical - the Quays' regular technical collaborator Ian Nicholas built a hinge mechanism in the girl's ankles. Around her, a somewhat moth-eaten white rabbit plays a manic solo game of ping-pong.

The video was initially inspired by an image by an anonymous photographer of a girl standing in front of a door holding a paddle. There was also a white doorknob in the picture, which the Quays initially mistook for a ping-ping ball. Although the Quays claimed not to have read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, there are unmistakable echoes, from the general theme of little girls growing and shrinking before one's eyes, mysterious bottles of unidentified substances and doorknobs that turn into ping-pong balls.

This last image is not sourced directly from Alice, but it fits Carroll's dream-logic approach - as did similar departures from the text in the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer's feature-length adaptation, Alice (Neco z Alenky, Switzerland, 1988), which he began work on shortly after the Quays paid tribute to him in The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984).

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

User reviews from imdb Author: Amy Clifford (spookytramp) from seattle

Watch: 'Are We Still Married?' by The Quay Brothers - Cinematical Jenni Miller

Are We Still Married? Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

STILLE NACHT III: TALES FROM VIENNA WOODS

Great Britain (3 mi) 1992

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

It's not very often that I find something that is so entirely the work of unique filmmakers and still find it not nearly as good as their other works.

The Brothers Quay's Stille Nacht III doesn't have the same engaging presence as their other shorts. The motion of the fired bullet is the only thing that really stands out on it. The rest of the short is darker, much darker even than their usual lighting, and it's hard to see. The movements don't seem as up-to-speed as they usually do, and it's much harder to see what the Quays are trying to do, exactly.

Also, as a product of the Stille Nacht series, it has not the repeated imagery and re-workings of the other four segments. It doesn't feel connected at all.

Interestingly enough, parts of this short were used as the theatrical trailer for Institute Benjamenta, the Quay Brothers' live-action full-length film. And, amusingly enough, it works better as a commercial for things to come than a stand-alone work.

BFI Screenonline: Tales From Vienna Woods (1992) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

The third in the quartet of black-and-white films comprising the Quay Brothers' Stille Nacht cycle (the others being Dramolet, 1988, Are We Still Married?, 1992 and Can't Go Wrong Without You, 1993), Tales From Vienna Woods was also made with the intention of exploring imagery that they planned to develop further in their first feature Institute Benjamenta, which was then in limbo awaiting funds. In fact, so close were the short and the feature in terms of overall tone (despite the one being animated and the other live-action) that the former was subsequently recycled as the latter's theatrical trailer, in a slightly but not significantly modified form.

A clue to the film's purpose is embedded in a wreath adorning a pair of asymmetrical deer antlers: Ich bin im Tod erblüht ("in death have I blossomed" - for once, an onscreen translation is provided). This is followed by a sequence in which an animated severed hand explores a dusty archive of arcane exhibits, the central display of which consists of a table with multiple legs that's been suspended from the ceiling above a base of forest detritus, notably pine cones. As the camera circles slowly around to the front, we see that the table has been decorated with the same asymmetrical antlers, and at the back a pair of testicles can be glimpsed beneath the table top.

What the film is doing, in characteristically oblique form, is endlessly replaying the moment when the deer met its death: the film delicately but unmistakably implying (through the metaphorical use of pine cones) that it was shot in the testicles. From time to time, in the dead of night, the table regurgitates the bullet via a long-handled spoon that emerges from between its rear legs, intercut with images of the bullet emerging from the gun and commencing its journey to the target, slowed down to highlight every step.

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Tales from the Vienna Woods Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

STILLE NACHT IV: CAN’T GO WRONG WITHOUT YOU

Great Britain (3 mi) 1993

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

The Quay Brothers return to the Stille Nacht series, they return to His Name is Alive, and they make another music video based around the music and the repeated images of previous in the series (minus Stille Nacht III), and somehow they make it more disturbing and ephemeral than ever before.

Not to describe this as plot, but in this short the white rabbit returns to chase an egg and try and save it from other forces. Meanwhile, the figure with the socks (I consider her a representational relation to Alice) bleeds. The Freudian aspects of this film are more disturbing than I want to get into, but the actual interplay itself seems like the Quay Brother's darkest nightmare.

His Name is Alive's grinding, degrading music fits well into the mood of this piece. After seeing this and Stille Nacht II (Are We Still Married?), I think I'm going to make it a point to check out this band. What do you know? The Quays' more commercial work has helped actually sell something!

BFI Screenonline: Can't Go Wrong Without You (1993) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

Following their first collaboration the previous year with Are We Still Married? (1992), the Quay Brothers reunited with Michigan-based musicians His Name Is Alive to create the video for their 1993 single 'Can't Go Wrong Without You'.

Very consciously a sequel to the earlier video, this recapitulates many of its central Lewis Carrollian motifs: the girl with constantly expanding and contracting height (an effect enhanced here by standing her on scales, her weight fluctuating in time with her changing size), the paddle decorated with the image of a heart and a pair of eyes, the rabit, and recurring impressions of keys, locks and dark, mysterious secrets.

But the imagery takes on an altogether more disturbing aspect as spots of blood form on the scales between the girl's legs. A shot of a cut finger hints at a straightforward explanation, but it could just as easily be the onset of menarche. This theme of surrendered innocence is further developed via a black-clad male figure wearing a demonic mask, who seems locked in a power struggle with the rabbit, the latter trying to prevent him from obtaining a precious egg (a visual echo in more potent form of the white ping-pong ball in the earlier video).

All of this takes place in an off-kilter Expressionist world of skewed angles, doors, rickety balustrades and treacherous steps, squarely in line with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Germany, 1919) via film noir - though the Quays add further disorienting touches in the form of glasses rolling across the ceiling and a pervasive impression that the very fabric of their universe can be unravelled by merely pulling the right thread.

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

User reviews from imdb Author: anirak_anna from United States

Can't Go Wrong Without You Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA, OR THIS DREAM PEOPLE CALL HUMAN LIFE

Great Britain Japan Germany (104 mi) 1995 (view trailer)

User reviews from imdB Author: galensaysyes

If this has a meaning beyond the one on the surface, which carries no conviction, it's one of the classic horror films. But so far I can't see that it does. The authoritarian, sexually perverse world it depicts seems the creation of someone who has never experienced oppression or obsession at first hand and has nothing to say about it. This is a totally artificial and hermetic work. On the other hand, its distance from reality and purpose allows its manufacturers to take as much time as they please to refine and distill its essence, as in a bottle. But what is it they're distilling? Whatever it is, it gives off a lovely scent. One exquisite shot follows another; the actors are perfectly cast. Alice Krige I suppose can be called a cult figure now (I'm one of the cult), and in this she has finally found the ideal environment. The film is never uninteresting but should have been disturbing, and some day I hope to find something inside it.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Sometime this century, somewhere in Europe: Jakob von Gunten (Rylance) enrols at the Institute Benjamenta, a run-down edifice headed by an eccentric tyrant (John) and dedicated to the training of suitably unambitious, humble servants. Though Jakob readily submits to the repetitive regime of incredibly banal lessons in servility, he begins to wonder whether he might be sufficiently princely to rescue his melancholy tutor, Benjamenta's sister Lisa (Krige), from the suffocating half-life she leads inside the school's sinister, shadowy walls. Inspired by the writings of Swiss novelist Robert Walser, the first feature from the Brothers Quay is as outlandishly beautiful, bizarre, mysterious and inventive as one might expect; more surprising, perhaps, given their history as animators specialising in puppetry and rather abstract metaphor, is the firm grasp of narrative and the intense performances elicited from a strong international cast. Overall, the film can be seen as a (finally subversive) variation on traditional fairytale motifs, as an allegory on our progress through - as an alternative title would have it - 'This Dream People Call Human Life', or as a loving tribute to cinema's fantastic capacity for poetry. Genuinely unsettling.

User reviews from imdB Author: August-4 from London, England

Institute Benjamenta is an oddity. Let me say that first, get it out of the way. Part of me hesitates from revealing here that it is one of my favourite films of all time because I know I'll make some people reading this mini-review approach it from the wrong angle. A film like this should never become required viewing. You should stumble across it at a repertory cinema somewhere or be beguiled by the video-box art showing the striking visage of Alice Krige as she paces before her blackboard, deerfoot staff in hand. You should find one evening that its the only thing that sounds interesting on TV, or peer at a still alongside a mention in your TV guide and wonder what on earth the picture is supposed to depict. Contained between main and end credits here is a world so visually ravishing and technically abstruse that you are only in the film while you are watching; the rules of the outside do not apply. You peer into the dreamy, foggy black-and-white and what you can't identify for certain your imagination fills out. These are the most special special effects because you wonder 'what' and 'why' by never 'how.' The Institute of the title is a school for servants, the lessons they are taught bizarre and repetitive to the point of making 'deja-vu' a permanent state of being. Is the repetition the point of it all or has the teacher lost the plot? If she has, how come we care? None of this is vaguely like real life. None of it, that is, bar the characters emotions. Or is the whole thing like real life, like Life with a capital 'L?' In the end does this sort of pondering make for a good movie? I won't answer that because I'm terribly biased. Remember the title and look it up sometime. It's the cinematic equivalent of a stunning old-fashioned magician's trick. A monochrome bouquet, a sad smile. There are images, scenes that may make the hairs on the back of your neck think they're a cornfield with a twister on the way. I tried to warn you as quietly as I could.

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]

The first full-length film from the twin masters of the sublime and bizarre is also their first to utilize, to any great degree, human actors. While some may find this the ultimate departure for the team they consider to be the greatest puppeteers alive, suffice to say the Brothers Quay have created an eerie masterpiece in which living actors very adequately take the place of their less mobile brethren. Loosely based on the story “Jakob von Gunten” by Swiss writer Robert Walser, the film is set entirely within the walls of the titular institute: a bizarre, timeless boarding school for professional servants-to-be, lorded over by an entirely mad principal, Herr Benjamenta (Fassbinder regular John) and what appears to be his sexually explosive sister Lisa (Krige). Into this maelstrom (literally -- the film opens with repeated shots of swirling, spilling, splattering water) arrives our hero, as it were, Jakob von Gunten (Rylance), a butler-in-training who soon finds himself learning far more than he bargained for at the Institute. Trying to describe a Brothers Quay film with any degree of exactitude is nearly as difficult as trying to comprehend the constantly shifting degrees of meaning inherent in the images they keep showing you. As with all of the Brothers' films, you leave feeling slightly shaken, a bit disturbed, and troubled as though you had just awoken from a bitter dream you can't quite recall. Institute Benjamenta is no different in this regard -- there's even a heightened sense of the outre that comes with using real live actors against the familiar, washed-out backdrops that suddenly spring into alarming focus. Shot in hazy black-and-white with an amazing number of subtle camera and optical tricks, Institute Benjamenta is a triumph of the surreal, a masterwork of fantasy, and a breathtakingly tenebrous walk off the beaten path and into the dark, pulsing forest of dreams.

Horrorview.com [Black Gloves]

Made by identical twins who possess a single, and singular, vision, the stop-motion animation of the Quay brothers deserves the "astonishing" tag attached to the title of a new collection of their short films. Though born in Pennsylvania, Timothy and Stephen Quay are best known for the quintessentially European films they created in England. Inspired by Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, the brothers wear their influences on their sleeves in one of their earliest films, The Cabinet Of Jan Svankmajer, but from there they didn't take long to refine their style. Street Of Crocodiles (1987) is an early Quay masterpiece, creating a nightmarish dystopia using actors made from found objects, wonderfully evocative miniature sets, and graceful camera techniques. (Consider the implications of performing a tracking shot with stop-motion animation and you have a sense of the craft that goes into the Quays' work.) When these films work, as in an inexplicably moving video for the His Name Is Alive song "Are We Still Married?" (starring a melancholy, high-strung toy bunny), they work on an almost dreamlike level; trying to figure out a literal interpretation is not only difficult but distracting. This works against the Quays' feature-length, live-action debut, the torturously slow, willfully frustrating Institute Benjamenta. Released elsewhere in 1995 but only now receiving an American video release, Institute follows the educational progress of a man who enrolls at the titular establishment, a school to train servants. Inspired by the work of Swiss author Robert Walser, especially his novel Jakob Van Gunten, Institute might work better for an audience familiar with the relatively obscure early-20th-century writer's work. As it is, the film comes off as an intentionally obtuse, sub-Kafka look at alienation and bureaucracy. Visually, it's a stunner, but in the field of live-action, the Quay brothers have yet to learn the dividing line between dreamlike and somnambulistic. Those interested in their truly astonishing work will be better off sticking to the shorts.

DVD Outsider [Slarek]

Dave Cowen review

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review

Exploded Goat [Kent Conrad]

User reviews from imdB (Page 2) Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Mike D'Angelo review

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]

Movie Magazine International [Michael Fox]

Mondo Cinephilia Timothy Farrell

Boxoffice Magazine review Ed Scheid

Institute Benjamenta Zeitgeist Films

San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Brian Montgomery

IN ABSENTIA

Great Britain (20 mi) 2000 ‘Scope

User reviews from imdb Author: citizen7 from pennsylvania, United States

The Brothers Quay are brilliant artists whose body of work, both their puppet films and live action feature Institute Benjamenta, stands as one of the great achievements in cinema. While their new piece In Absentia does not ultimately compare to past masterpieces such as Street of Crocodiles and Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, it's still a remarkable film that will move the viewer with its hermetic beauty.

A combination of live action and puppet animation, In Absentia details the attempts of a woman to write a letter from within the cracked, faded walls of an asylum, her progress as glacially slow as the movement of the stars. She is doomed to endlessly repeat the steps and be forever left speechless in her cell, while outside a wasteland of waring light and dark reflects her despair.

With a gorgeous score by K. Stockhausen, the film at times feels ever so slightly music video-esque, and one wonders if without the well regarded composer's music it would fall apart rather quickly. But although a lesser work, it is still a fascinating and moving one.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle Cubr

BFI Screenonline: In Absentia (2000) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

Given their preference for working with pre-recorded scores, the Quay Brothers were natural choices for the BBC's Sound On Film initiative, which showcased collaborations between filmmakers and composers. Discounting filmed stage works, In Absentia was the first authentic Quay film since Institute Benjamenta (1995), but attracted most attention because it was a collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, elder statesman of the twentieth-century musical avant-garde.

It was sourced from Zwei Paare ('Two Pairs'), an electronic piece originally composed for the opera Freitag in 1991. Long-term admirers of Stockhausen's work (one of their earliest professional commissions was the cover design of a 1973 book, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer), the Quays agreed to make the film before hearing the music. But when the recording arrived, they were disconcerted to discover that it consisted almost entirely of electronic howls and distorted human cries, with very few melodic, harmonic or rhythmic elements to latch on to.

But this relentlessness fitted their chosen subject, which was a depiction of the mental state of one Emma Hauck (1878-1920). Diagnosed with dementia praecox, she was incarcerated in Heidelberg's psychiatric clinic on her thirtieth birthday in 1909. There, she wrote obsessively to her long-absent husband, the letters consisting of barely legible scrawls rendered doubly incomprehensible by being layered on top of one another. The Quays had encountered her letters at an exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery, Beyond Reason (1996-7), which showcased work from the Hans Prinzhorn collection of artworks and artifacts created by the inhabitants of mental institutions.

But Hauck herself doesn't appear properly until halfway through the film, by which time her mental state has already been established by means of time-lapse studies of light patterns moving around her room, its furniture and windows, as well as low-angle shots of a childlike automaton aimlessly kicking its legs to and fro. Much of this is shot in black and white, with occasional flashes to colour shots of a demonic, horned, insectoid creature.

When Hauck appears (albeit mostly seen from behind), the film's focus narrows, with great emphasis placed on extreme close-ups of the objects central to her existence: the pencils, the sharpener, the paper, her cramped, clenching hands, blackened fingernails, endless stubs of broken-off lead, and finally the letters themselves, packaged up and 'posted' uselessly into a grandfather clock. It's one of the most unflinching depictions of psychosis on film, and one of the most unnervingly convincing.

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

The Ensemble Sospeso - The Brothers Quay Joshua Cody from Sospeso

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

In Absentia Zeitgeist Films

SONGS FOR DEAD CHILDREN

Great Britain (24 mi) 2003

DVD Outsider Slarek (Excerpt)

Now here's a curiosity, a series of animated pieces set to a selection of songs by The King's Singers. Those of you of a younger age may not be aware of these fellows (there are still going strong, I gather, albeit with a modified line-up), a vocal ensemble group formed at Cambridge University who came to prominence in the 70s singing cappella versions of well known pop songs and whose facial animation during performance sometimes bordered on parody. Their work here provides a structurally complex (you've never heard Oranges and Lemons sung like it is here) and melancholic basis for one of the Quays' most abstract and unsettling works to date. There are plenty of familiar Quay elements on display, including blank-eyed dolls, small rapidly oscillating objects, a wooden anatomical model (a fascinating if rather creepy creation), diffused imagery, and a sleeping figure whose arm is under independent control, and in terms of its light levels this is probably the brothers' darkest film to date.

(Animation) Songs for Dead Children (2003) - Quay brothers in AvaxHome

THE PHANTOM MUSEUM – made for TV

aka: The Phantom Museum: Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection

Great Britain (12 mi) 2003

Strictly Film School (NYVF 2003 notes) Acquarello

My favorite entry from the program, the brothers Quay create yet another beautiful, haunting, atmospheric, and exquisitely tactile composition of stop-motion animation and live action as an unseen visitor wanders an empty museum that houses a curious repository of medical school paraphernalia. Observing and manipulating the antique dolls, prosthetic limbs and mechanisms, and surgical devices, the video creates an indelibly poetic meditation on the biological processes of human existence.

BFI Screenonline: Phantom Museum, The (2003) Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online

The Phantom Museum was originally commissioned by the Wellcome Trust as a video installation for the British Museum exhibition Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, which ran from June to November 2003. This provided an opportunity for the public to examine some of the rarer items in the extraordinary collection of American-born pharmaceutical pioneer Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), who assembled over 125,000 medical artifacts, many of which are currently stored in London's Science Museum and normally viewable by appointment only.

Typically, the Quay Brothers' film consists more of a series of impressions of the Wellcome collection than a guided tour, their approach summed up by its subtitle 'Random Forays into Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection'. A linking device (shot on grainy black-and-white Super 8 stock) involves a man clad in a black suit and white gloves ascending staircases, warlking along corridors, switching on lights and investigating rooms full of cabinets bearing tantalising labels ('Shrunken Heads - Scalp').

Interspersed with these are much sharper colour sequences, depicting various objects in Wellcome's collection. Sometimes they're displayed as static museum pieces, sometimes rotated, and occasionally animated. Many of the exhibits are explicitly sexualised, from the diagram demonstrating the use of a chastity belt (next to an example of the real thing) to tender Oriental sculptures of human lovemaking. Many of the collection's many dolls come apart to reveal their anatomically-correct innards - one female body has a baby in her walnut-sized womb, connected via an umbilical piece of string.

Prosthetic arms and legs abound, in one case attached to a live human body, while there are plenty of dead ones glimpsed in the collection's storerooms, their lipless mouths fixed in a permanent grin. If the film is often unsettling, this is less because of the Quays' proven feel for the uncanny than for the way the Wellcome collection itself inescapably exploits our most fundamental fears: of birth, sex, mutilation and death.

The Quays originally edited the film to pre-existing recordings of the music of Czech composer Zdenek Liska (previously featured in The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer in 1984), but were unable to clear the necessary rights. In the final version, filmmaker-musician Gary Tarn provided a plangent semi-electronic accompaniment, occasionally interspersed with sound effects, notably in the shot of an old birthing chair and forceps being pressed into service on an invisible mother-to-be, whose baby can be heard crying as it emerges.

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

Quay Brothers Short Films 1979-2003 DVD review | Cine Outsider Slarek, December 1, 2006

The Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

User reviews from imdb Author: rinopie from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

The Phantom Museum British Museum site for the Henry Wellcome Collection, with two downloadable excerpts from the Quay's The Phantom Museum

The Phantom Museum Zeitgeist Films

Phantom Museums - The Quay Brothers Short Films - DVD Beaver

THE PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES

Great Britain Germany France (99 mi) 2005 ‘Scope

The Village Voice [Karen Wilson]

Evoking fairy tales, European art, surrealist literature, and daguerreotypes, London-based directors the Brothers Quay confound their viewers with as much lush imagery as they can cram into a frame. The twins, Stephen and Timothy, have been making eccentric animation, short films, music videos ("Sledgehammer"!) and commercials (Coca-Cola!) since the late '70s, but The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is only their second feature, after 1995's Institute Benjamenta. The story—about a beautiful opera singer falling captive to an evil doctor, his fetishistic housekeeper, and the doc's innocent piano tuner—is only important in that it gives the Quays a foundation for their fabulous animated tableaux. The doctor's bizarre musical machines whir. They click. They act out primal scenes. And though loose themes like the divide between master and servant resonate, in the end (which mirrors the beginning) it all makes less sense than it did when we started. No matter. As Dr. Droz (Gottfried John) explains to the tuner: What we are seeing is the most rational irrationality—and all sheer artifice anyway.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

There are two major problems that torpedo this film, and they glom onto each other like viral cells, replicating and mutually mutating in an exponentially expanding wretchedness. The Quay brothers (I refuse to capitulate to their self-congratulatory mythmaking by calling them "the Brothers Quay" -- this is not the Victorian era) are filmmakers accustomed to the short-form, and they lack the most basic sense of humor. Piano Tuner is clearly attempting to function as an evocative but unresolved mood piece, providing enough information to imply a dreamlike narrative, with multiple presents and temporal reversals and spatial ambiguity. But as short filmmakers, what they actually accomplish is the stringing together of discrete and unrelated ideas, in little five to ten minute bursts. There's a music thread, an automaton thread, a stop-motion "uncanny" thread, and much much more. The only thing tying any of this together is a wispy, soft-focus, oh-so-Victorian fear of female sexuality. Poor Amira Cesar is reduced to a doe-eyed hysteric in need of mental fine-tuning by the titular rationalist, and there's never a sense that the Quays are critiquing these antiquated stereotypes. Instead, they clearly take them, as well as themselves, with a deadly level of seriousness. They have created something sui generis -- the only reasonable comparison beyond their own work would be Guy Maddin's worst film, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs -- but the result is suffocating and precious. At the end of the screening I wanted to boo, but didn't feel like it was worth getting into.

Time Out London review Geoff Andrew

The all-too-long-awaited follow-up to the Quays’ wonderful first feature (‘Institute Benjamenta’) is as imaginative, eccentric and visually seductive as one expects from these seasoned explorers of the uncanny. Great expertise is again evident in the blending of live action and puppet animation in the tale of Malvina (Amira Casar), a beautiful opera singer abducted during a performance by the sinister Dr Droz (Gottfried John). The mad inventor whisks her away from her lover, subjecting her to a life of mournful seclusion on a remote tropical island that is his home and kingdom, whither Felisberto (Cesar Sarachu), a piano tuner, is meanwhile summoned to repair seven automata…

In other words, the film’s a weird fairy tale, a Gothic fable of obsessive desire, magical prowess and bizarre coincidence that owes at least as much to painting, literature, music and myth as to cinema. (In fact, save for Borowczyk and a handful of horror movies, it’s hard to divine much common ground between this and most cinema likely to screen these days.) The pace, in keeping with the feverish, dreamlike hothouse isle on which the delectable damsel’s kept against her (lack of) will, perhaps tends a little too much towards the languid, and Sarachu’s performance comes over as clumsy; Assumpta Serna as Droz’s devotee also seems slightly adrift, so only Casar and John have the full measure of the piece. Still, no one expects conventional pleasures from the Quays, and for those who like their movies different, ambitious and luscious to look at (Nic Knowland’s ’Scope camerawork is extraordinary), there’s much here to enjoy.

Eleven years after Institute Benjamenta, Stephen and Timothy Quay return to the land of the live-action—and the fixations that have defined their groundbreaking stop-motion animated work—with The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, a tragic fairy tale drenched in otherworldly visual splendor. As with Institute, this new film concerns the appearance of an interloper at a secluded forest mansion, in this case piano tuner Felisberto's (César Saracho) arrival at the villa of Dr. Emmanuel Droz (Gottfried John), who has abducted and imprisoned beautiful opera singer Malvina (Amira Casar). Felisberto has been hired to fine-tune not pianos (of which Droz has none) but seven wondrous musical automatons—stop-motion creations housed in giant boxes and viewable through widescreen glass windows—and it is here that the Quays most directly and evocatively dramatize their overriding preoccupation with the dialectic between waking and slumbering life, the rapport shared by the tangible and the illusory, and the magical animation of inherently inanimate objects.

A combination of allusions both classical (Orpheus, Lazarus) and esoteric (a recurring anecdote about ants, spores, and insanity that forms one of the film's thematic cruxes), the brothers' story follows Felisberto (himself a doppelganger of Malvina's true love) as he's entranced by Droz's housekeeper Assumpta (the lusciously mysterious Assumpta Serna), uncovers the mad doctor's plan to stage an opera starring Malvina that will bring catastrophe to the cultural establishment that's shunned him, and endeavors to rescue the captive princess. However, with the Quays treating their actors like expressive puppets, Piano Tuner's pulse-pounding passion is derived not from narrative plotting—which, though more linear than Institute, is obscure and lethargic by design—but from stunning close-ups of their cast's expressive countenances (John's in particular) and ominously ethereal imagery (as in a backwards-running moonlit sequence). A sense of manipulation pervades the proceedings, with the performers mechanically moving about environments that, constructed with wire, dirt, flesh, and fog, come across as large-scale variations of the Quay shorts' claustrophobic, tracking shot-navigated milieus.

Snow globe visions and gnarly mouth nightmares swirl together in this darkly lyrical fantasia, the brothers' employment of ominous wind-tunnel drones, pulsating underwater-ish shadows, and a burnished palette of silvery black-and-whites and heightened colors giving the film a sense of the unreal and real symbiotically blending together. That this journey through an eerie unconscious landscape is ultimately little more than a collection of familiar Quay constructs and motifs makes Piano Tuner both sumptuously self-contained and frustratingly insular, the directors offering up a private world not easily traversed without at least passing knowledge of their eccentric oeuvre. When married to a general lack of momentum, this abstruse state of affairs requires one to embrace Assumpta's opinion that "after a while, you get used to the confusion." Quay novices will likely beg to differ, but for those on the filmmakers' bizarre, idiosyncratic wavelength, such opaqueness in no way makes this unsettling descent into dreamlike imaginativeness any less haunting.

Time and the Image: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes - Bright Lights ... Arturo Silva from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 28, 2016

Obscure Object: The Brothers Quay's “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes” Jeff Reichert from indieWIRE, November 14, 2006

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005) | PopMatters Michael Barrett

(: the truth is out there :): The extraordinary Brothers Quay James Rose, September 30, 2006

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4.5/5]

The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

DVD Outsider Slarek

CiNEZiLLA [Jason Meredith]

Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella

Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]

TIFF Report: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes Review - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown, September 9, 2005

The Brothers Quay Returning To Feature Film With SANATORIUM ... SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS, by Todd Brown fromScreen Anarchy, February 20, 2010

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib

stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review

Mondo Cinephilia Timothy Farrell

ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review

Mark R. Leeper review [+1 out of -4..+4]

Movieeveryday.com [Scooter Thompson]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

User reviews from imdb Author: el-mno-p from Newcastle, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

cinemattraction (Martin Tsai) review

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes Zeitgeist Films

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [1/5]

The Japan Times Giovanni Fazio

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes | Culture | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]

Los Angeles Times (Kristine McKenna) review

New York Times (registration req'd) Jeannette Catsoulis, November 17, 2006, also here: The New York Times (Jeannette Catsoulis) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Brian Montgomery and Yunda Eddie Feng

EURYDICE…SHE, SO BELOVED

Great Britain (12 mi) 2007

DVD Outsider Slarek (Excerpt)

A live action musical interpretation Orpheus' quest to rescue his dead lover Eurydice from Hades, bristling with extraordinary monochrome imagery, into which colour quietly bleeds in the later stages. An appreciation of the music is probably required to get the most out of the film, despite its visual splendour, and it's not as instantly recognisable as a Quay Brothers work as the two preceding shorts.

VERTIGO | To See, If Only Once: Eurydice - She, So Beloved… James Rose from Vertigo, Winter 2008

The Black Lodge [James Rose]

Eurydice…She, So Beloved, a film by the Brothers Quay John Coulthart, May 20, 2015

Qubeka, Jahmil X.T.

OF GOOD REPORT B 85

South Africa (109 mi) 2013 Website Trailer

An extremely provocative South African film, where the director was born in South Africa, raised in East London, educated in English, where his first feature film is something of an homage to genre pictures, including film noir, as it is shot in low contrast Black and White and features a lead character, Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano), a teacher by trade who is besieged by hallucinations, yet never utters a word. The film certainly plays on audience expectations, where it’s hard to believe anyone entering the theater could have possibly anticipated what this film delivers, as it’s a bit mind blowing. With only one film under his belt, Qubeka is already the bad boy of South Africa, a bit like the brash style of Tarantino, but Qubeka is much more experimental, where the director does resort to exploitive and often horrific imagery, including the naked body of a minor, which has generated criticism that he’s a child pornographer, yet supposedly the film was made to elevate a public discussion on social issues, specifically gender violence. One might question whether the best way to elucidate the issue is to make a film where an adult brutalizes a young girl, but that is one of the fundamental problems in South Africa, where according to the Human Rights watch in 2001, “for many South African girls, violence and abuse are an inevitable part of the school environment.” This is a nation where educators misuse their authority and sexually abuse young girls. It’s not young boys that are impregnating young girls, it’s those with money (which the kids certainly don’t have), the stereotypical “sugar daddy.” In one South African province alone, KwaZulu-Natal, today there are somewhere between 10 – 15,000 female students that become pregnant each year, astonishing figures, which don’t even take into account the number who may have contracted HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.

Initially scheduled to premiere at the Durban International Film Festival, the largest in South Africa, the film was banned prior to the screening on child pornographer issues, something that took the filmmaker completely by surprise as he wasn’t aware they banned films in South Africa post 1994, where prior to that they banned everything, “including Eddie Murphy movies.” The Durban Festival has a history of protest, and of showing taboo work, where even during the apartheid era when films were routinely banned, the festival found a way to show those films. Within about 10 days, the court overturned the ban, as the actress playing the 16-year old child is actually 23, and allowed the film to be seen on the final day of the festival. Mind you, this film offers no moralizing or lectures of any kind, and isn’t remotely a message film, but is a hugely subversive take on genre films, using a radical musical score from Philip Miller, much of it drawn from his LP Music for the Films of William Kentridge, whose unnerving dissonance keeps the audience disoriented and provides a shattered sensibility, reflecting the psychological breakdown of the lead character, Parker Sithole, who served time as a soldier before reporting for duty in an impoverished rural South African township with no local connections, yet he comes with excellent recommendations, a man “of good report” during a time of teacher shortages, so he’s seen as exactly what they need and is immediately enlisted as a school teacher, where everyone involved with the school has high hopes for this shy and quietly introverted man. So with inverted expectations, it’s a bit shocking to see him instead develop into a deranged psychopath, where the film shows the early origins of a serial killer, where Parker becomes sexually involved with a beautiful underage girl, Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma), something of a sirenesque Lolita who turns out to be one of the students in his class, but rather than end the relationship, he escalates the time they spend together, becoming more and more sexually obsessed, where he does little to hide his prurient interest in her.

Using flashbacks and dream sequences, along with frequent hallucinations, Parker goes berserk when Nolitha leaves him, becoming Othello to her Desdemona, often veering into the horror genre, where the past and present converge and it’s often hard to distinguish between some of his mad ravings that exist only in his head and what actually happens, much like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000). While offering a convincing portrait of a tortured man who can’t help himself, it recalls Peter Lorre in M (1931), a psychopathic pedophile who can’t stop himself from kidnapping and murdering little girls. Parker is a miserably lonely man, likely stripped of all dignity during apartheid, endlessly wallowing away his time as a soldier, where he learns to kill, slowly losing touch with the world as he descends further into the moral abyss, escalating into utter depravity, becoming a nightmarish vision of Hell on earth where he hermetically seals himself away from the world outside, utterly alone with his handiwork. We see what he does, which for some will be graphically excessive, generating gasps in the audience, and we see him get away with it, at least temporarily, where he lives to do it all over again, like a deadly parasite attaching itself to another living form. Opening and closing with the same visual motif, a man stumbling through the desert, where the camera shows nothing above the waist and focuses only on his dirty boots covered in mud and dust, a highly effective device, as the film is about the arrival of a stranger, a non entity, someone with no local roots, who comes bearing excellent recommendations, a man “of good report,” where much like the white-gloved, overly polite boys in Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), no sooner have they brutally murdered one family before they move on to the next. Of interest, this is a South African and Icelandic production, where one wonders where the Icelanders came into the picture. The director, who was present for the screening, suggested he would love to come back to this character in about 20 years and pick it up again. When he made it, he was hoping it would become a cult film. It’s a strange and intensely moody portrayal of a post-apartheid society that fails to recognize the continuing existence of an evil presence lurking within, that lives invisibly among us, where over the end credits the film turns to color with an animated red Devil dancing off to the side, a laughing reminder of more victims yet to come.

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]

Originally banned in South Africa, “Of Good Report” also features a strong silent type, albeit a psychopathic one in teacher Parker Sithole. The film’s opening is from the point of view of a shambling monster picking teeth out of his head, like a horror movie walking onto the set of a Sergio Leone Western. Through seamless flashbacks we stitch together Parker’s murky past as a U.N. soldier and a widely respected educator. A drunken liaison with the stunning Nolitha at a bar proves to be the catalyst for the already disturbed Parker to delve into the very depths of depravity when she is later revealed to be of his new pupils.

Jahmil XT Qubeka’s filmis startling, not only for the controversial subject matter but also for the sheer audacity and competency of his direction. Parker shouts, growls, bleats, cries and howls but never speaks-some feat when he is in virtually every scene, at times his hang dog face elicits sympathy. A risky sexual encounter with Nolitha in a toilet cubicle turns into nerve-shredding suspense when her friends are locked outside. We should be shouting from the rooftops for Parker to get caught, but instead we are deceived into rooting for him to escape, because Qubeka manipulates his audience just like Parker manipulates an entire community. “Of Good Report” then leaves the same savage aftertaste as “Cold Fish” or Richard Stanley’s “Dust Devil” and a character in Parker Sithole as shocking as Travis Bickle or Patrick Bateman.

In Review Online [Calum Reed]

Of Good Report, the striking feature-length debut of South African filmmaker Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, opens with the scene of a battered and bloodied man stumbling across a treacherous African desert. It's a particularly unsettling opening for what is, on paper, a seemingly familiar domestic drama about an affair between a male teacher and his female pupil, but one that immediately implants an underlying sense of gruesome volatility that never quite detaches itself from the film's core.

With its stark black-and-white photography and mournful brass-driven musical accompaniment, Qubeka’s style casts the African continent in an altogether different light, immersing us in the cultural identity of the locale but draining away its natural mystique. The Africa of this film is a wilderness rife with primal sexuality and simmering aggression, its monochrome veneer visually hinting at its later detective-led noir plot elements. The film’s story structure, too, bears elements of a classic noir mystery like Crossfire (1947), melding flashbacks and hallucinations into the central narrative with comfortable ease.

In the dread-inducing way that it is able to shift perceptions of its tortured male character, Of Good Report echoes William Wyler’s The Collector (1965), whose antagonist Freddie Clegg slowly transforms from a harmless mummy’s boy to an erratic potential psycho. The psychological turmoil of the teacher, Parker (Mothusi Mangano), bears some similarities to that of Clegg, but unlike Terence Stamp in Wyler’s film, Magano is too disconcertingly opaque and expressionless when called upon to convincingly relay the introverted man’s disturbed inner life.

Even if the acting isn’t always up to par, though, Qubeka’s direction picks up enough of the slack for the film to make an impact nevertheless; his mirroring of the film’s opening and closing sequences is especially effective at heightening its impact as a cynical tale of past trauma and unforeseen danger. Qubeka’s directorial command provides Of Good Report with a lasting bitterness and visceral power rarely seen in cinema these days.

The film you're not allowed to see Charl Blignaut from City Press, July 28, 2013

Of Good Report, denied a classification by the Film and Publication Board, views SA through a prism that makes for uncomfortable viewing. Charl Blignaut sees what you’re not allowed to

The biggest problem when it comes to the discussion around the banning of Jahmil Qubeka’s Of Good Report is that few people have seen it. I have.

It was available to journalists as an online screener ahead of the Durban International Film Festival.

Unfortunately, I saw it on a computer and not in a cinema. I have no doubt it’ll be even more impressive on a big screen.

And it is impressive. Shot in black and white as a homage to film noir, it’s a very dark comedy told as an African Western by a bona fide auteur. It’s a fresh, confident, quirky and accomplished art-house movie with excellent performances and a genius score. It takes experimental South African film up several notches.

What it doesn’t do is wag a moral finger or try drive its message home. It isn’t a piece of social realism or a “message film” (whatever that is). It’s not the kind of film that pushes a line in “nation building” that government film agencies are so keen to see on our screens (think Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday).

Neither does it push a notion of “social cohesion” because it’s about social disintegration and a country of crumbling morals – where an older man, a man “of good report”, can get away with murder. And our sugar daddies do, every day.

When the film maker approached the National Film and Video Foundation for funding they rejected his application because, they said, it doesn’t “offer a protagonist we can root for”. They advised him to look at Red Dragon or Dexter to up the lead character Parker Sithole’s moral convictions.

But easy comparison or classification evades this film. And this makes the debate around its depiction of underage sex even more complicated.

Because the language of the film is difficult, its classifiers will need to understand film language first. And if you see the film, you will wonder if they do.

The sex scene in question is stylised and absolutely inexplicit. It’s the least of the problems the film raises. Yes, the girl is 16, but so is the age of consent.

The Film and Publication Board (FPB) is governed by an act that says she must be 18 or older. The actress playing her is 23.

Where “the aesthetic element is predominant, the image will not constitute pornography”, stated former chief justice Pius Langa. By this definition – a landmark judgment by the Constitutional Court on the FPB’s definition of pornography – Of Good Report is not pornography.

It’s not an overtly political film either. When it takes a jab at political corruption it does so symbolically – President Jacob Zuma talking on the TV while a poster of him is stuck to a wall next to it. The message is clear, but you have to work to find it.

Most people who end up seeing this film will probably not even realise, by the end, that Sithole doesn’t utter a single line of dialogue in it.

He’s a miserable and comical man, stripped of his dignity by apartheid and hardened by his former life as a soldier. He is a killer who is unable to get in touch with his emotions.

In one scene, we finally see him cry. Except he doesn’t. The tin roof of his room is leaking and water is dripping on to his face. When he meets Nolitha, she offers a small glimmer of joy in his dark life.

Yes, she’s a Lolita. She thinks it’ll be fun to seduce this man in authority, her teacher.

She appears to even enjoy the sex. Perhaps it’s this that really upset the FPB.

Here we have a real and complex character who doesn’t easily fit into the portrayal of South African women as either virgins or whores – as academic Sarah Dawson argues in The Con, an online magazine.

Dawson saw the film when helping make selections for the Durban festival. She proposes our problem with Nolitha is we don’t know how to classify her because we barely recognise her rights in our patriarchal society.

The banning, she writes, “has happened purely because the sexualised young female of Nolitha doesn’t yet have a proper meaning in this society”.

As Of Good Report’s powerful final scene ends, it instantly took its place in my all-time South African top-10 favourite films.

Our poor moral report - City Press Senzo Mchunu from City Press, August 19, 2013

“Of Good Report”? - Africa is a Country Zachary Levenson from Africa Is a Country, August 19, 2013

Reopening the debate about censorship, art and its value ... - Africiné Hans-Christian Mahnke

Of Good Report | tiff.net

Durban Festival Opening Night Screening Canceled as Government ...

Durban Fest Offers Rare Spotlight on African Cinema - The ... Rutendo Nyamuda

Of Good Report: The serial killer movie they tried to ban - CNN.com CNN interviews the director, August 21, 2013

Of Good Report: The Serial Killer Movie they Tried to Ban Eric Ford interviews the director from Houston Style magazine, August 21, 2013

Qubeka Brings Anarchy, Mayhem, Dissent to S.A. Biz | Variety Alex Stedman interviews the director from Variety, July 18, 2013

Quillévéré, Katell

LOVE LIKE POISON (Un Poison Violent) B+ 91

France (92 mi) 2010

When you were here before
Couldn't look you in the eye
You're just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry

You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You're so fucking special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here

I don't care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice
When I'm not around
You're so fucking special
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here

She's running out the door
She's running
She run, run, run, run
Run

Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You're so fucking special
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here
I don't belong here

—“Creep,” by Thom Yorke, Radiohead, 1992

From the opening pan of parishioners singing inside a church, this film shows how French culture remains dominated by the influence of the Catholic Church, yet is also a rapturously beautiful coming-of-age story of a sensitive young 14-year old girl, given a thoroughly intelligent overview as seen through the observant eyes of this female writer/director. After attending a private girl’s boarding school, Anna (Clara Augarde) returns to her small town home to spend the summer, where she is reunited with her over-controlling mother (Lio), her sexually candid but dying grandfather (Michel Galabru), along with Pierre (Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil) a cute young boy who enjoys spending time with her. What immediately grabs our attention is the use of music, where the old English folksong “Greensleeves” sung by Barbara Dane, has a mesmerizing effect, where the piercingly melancholic mood is heart rendering, sung during a downpour of rain that falls over the French countryside. This sets the tone for the use of more songs, each bearing a personal stamp of intimacy, many of them folk songs from an earlier era. This music coincides with a young girl’s self-awakening, the discovery of her own body, and the effect she has on the opposite sex. At the same time, her parents are going through a bitter separation which leaves her traumatized by their seemingly petty bickering. The other main character is the parish priest (Stefano Cassetti), a bearded, wire-rimmed young man who expresses genuine interest in the lives of others. As she prepares for her confirmation, one of the more interesting scenes is Anna expressing her doubts to the priest, who reminds her that this is quite common with people of faith, that Mother Theresa continually doubted her faith throughout her life, so this shouldn’t in any way diminish her thoughts of herself as a primarily good person.

The film is understated and low key throughout, where Augarde as Anna is surprisingly assured in this her first screen role, where her character yearns for a kind of individuality and freedom she doesn’t have, that no one has, as problems seem to fall on the shoulders of everyone, holding everyone back. Even in the tenderest moments between mother and daughter, this will be followed by an all too depressed mother who remains bitter and angry at her father, becoming overly critical and hurtful in her remarks to Anna. The film plays out like a short story, as the attention to meticulous details of small-town life is essential to the overall mood of Anna’s experience, as her life unfolds through a series of vignettes that she shares with various people, where her maturity and kindness feels more highly evolved than others around her, where perhaps only the priest has a pretty good window into her character. At her confirmation, the Bishop brought in to speak chooses excerpts from the Apostle Paul which are a harsh reminder of sins of the flesh, which is the only message he’s conveying to a group of teenagers who pretty much only have thoughts of the flesh on their minds at that age. This example of the Church being so out of touch with their everyday lives contrasts heavily with Anna’s own rhapsodic sexual discoveries, which are a universe of walking contradictions, the sacred and the profane. The real showstopper, however, is the extraordinary use of an all woman’s choir singing the Radiohead song “Creep,” (heard here on YouTube: scala creep radiohead 4:45), which reverberates like a church choir, but with a much more humane message that speaks so earnestly about the transparency of the human soul, where all we ever really want is to feel human.

The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]

The teenage daughter of a divorcing couple begins to feel the first pangs of love just as she is about to undergo her religious confirmation. Sensitive coming-of-age tale as seen through the eyes of people struggling with issues of identity and faith, sensibly performed and directed.

CIFF 2010: LOVE LIKE POISON Ben Sachs from Cine-File

A fourteen-year-old girl returns from Catholic boarding school to spend the summer in her small-town home, where she must confront her parents’ separation, her grandfather’s slow death, and the attentions of a cute boy in the neighborhood. This is familiar material, to be sure, but writer-director Katell Quillévéré displays such feeling for her characters and setting that the film doesn’t feel like a series of clichés. She’s also surprisingly frank in depicting sexual subject matter without letting it overwhelm the story at hand: This isn’t THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS, but it isn’t Catherine Breillat territory, either. Quillévéré is after a holistic portrait of adolescence, and her tone–probing, attentive to small things, and honest in its emotional content–reflects the manner in which many teenagers aspire to see themselves. Also commendable is the film’s treatment of Catholicism, which is serious without turning reverent or critical: Anna may come to doubt her religious teaching, but Quillévéré wants us to know that doubt is perfectly natural, too. In recent movies as diverse as Krzysztof Zanussi’s A WARM HEART and Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s GORDOS, European cinema has provided images of religious and secular values operating in mature co-existence; and LOVE LIKE POISON provides several more. (The character of a self-effacing, soccer-playing priest is especially charming.) This is more of a cultural achievement than a cinematic one, but it’s edifying all the same.

Love Like Poison (Un Poison Violent) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Small communities, Catholicism and burgeoning sexuality - it’s a classic, some might say over-familiar, combination in French debut features. But it’s rarely carried off with such confidence and subtlety as in Love Like Poison, Katel Quillévéré’s superb drama, which has already won the 2010 Jean Vigo Prize for first features.

Given the low-key quality of the narrative, there’s nothing obviously commercial in the film, apart from the presence of two stalwart names with some mainstream cachet - Lio and veteran comic actor Michel Galabru. But the film’s sheer command, and the candid central performance by promising newcomer Clara Augarde, will win the film equal support from critics and audiences on the festival circuit, which should help it to respectable sales in a select art-house bracket.

Fourteen-year-old Anna (Augarde) has returned from boarding school to her village in Brittany, where she lives with her mother Jeanne (Lio) in the house of her elderly, ailing paternal grandfather Jean (Galabru). Anna’s father Paul (Neuvic) is absent - he turns up only late in the film - as he and Jeanne have broken up.

One gap between them, it seems, is Jeanne’s committed Catholicism, which Paul doesn’t share and has only recently become a problem for them. Things are complicated by the increasingly depressed Jeanne’s attraction to easy-going young village priest Père François (Cassetti). Anna, meanwhile, is caught between her own religious convictions - she’s due for her confirmation - and her teenage sexual stirrings, which are awakened by choirboy Pierre (Leboulanger-Gourvil), a precocious squirt who’s in a hurry to get beyond best-friend stage.

Not a great deal happens, but when it does, it means a lot: two funerals, a couple of faintings on Jeanne’s part, and a genuinely tense moment between Jeanne and François in which it looks as if he’s going to have to do some soul-searching and fast.

There are also some delicate, but boldly handled, scenes of exploratory physicality between the two kids, which Augarde and the engaging Leboulanger-Gourvil carry off fearlessly, but with just the edge of nervousness that the material calls for.

Galabru, generally associated with broader material, brings an imposing sense of crumbling physicality - it’s anything but a vain performance, given the actor’s age and girth - and has a good time as a blustering rager against piety. Some unsettling sexually-charged scenes between the old man and Anna are carried off with a shrewdly judged tone that shows how much Quillévéré is on top of her material.

The film is beautifully shot by Tom Harari, who captures faces and the Breton landscape with equal sensitivity, and a very individual soundtrack includes English folk songs, church choirs and a highly unconventional Radiohead cover over the end credits.

Variety (Alissa Simon) review

Small in scale, but beautifully written, extremely well-played and sensually lensed, "Love Like Poison" from first-time French helmer Katell Quillevere centers on a middle-class 14-year-old in the Breton countryside about to celebrate her confirmation in the Catholic church. Winner of the 2010 Jean Vigo prize, this naturalistic coming-of-ager encompasses the cycle of life from adolescence through infirmity, confirming the ongoing demands of the flesh and the way they frequently conflict with religious faith. Kudos, strong reviews and name adult cast will draw auds in French-lingo territories with extended life in ancillary. Quality fest item could find niche distribution offshore.

When Anna (newcomer Clara Augarde) arrives at the remote village home of her ailing grandfather (Michel Galabru) during spring break from her Catholic boarding school, she finds her father (Thierry Neuvic) has finally left her devout mother (Lio). While her mother seeks consolation from local priest Father Francois (Stefano Cassetti), Anna cares for her earthy grandfather and explores her budding sexuality with neighboring teen Pierre (Youen Leboulanger-Gourvil).

After a trio of short films, Quillevere appears an assured director of actors, achieving an impressive credibility in both familial heart-to-hearts and scenes of teens on their own. Although her depiction of the relationship between the mother and the priest occasionally feels a little heavy-handed, she makes entire pic underscore theme of the contradictory impulses between one's imposed education and inherent instincts.

Obviously a personal story, prize-winning script by Quillevere and Mariette Desert opposes Anna's youth and beauty with her mother's jealousy over loss of same and her bon vivant grandfather's last stirrings of physical pleasure. Anna's wrestling with her faith is mirrored by Father Francois's own struggle, while protag's essential innocence and the provincial setting offers a refreshing change from current spate of pics about promiscuous, disaffected urban teens.

As Anna, curvaceous redhead Augarde reps a true find. With her lively intelligence, malleable features and sexy figure, she can look forward to a long career. Meanwhile, octogenarian comic actor Galabru steals every scene he's in, bringing an affecting poignancy to a man who has lived life to the fullest but now faces death. In smaller parts, the rest of the adult cast acquit themselves strongly.

Standing out among solid craft credits, the lush location camerawork of Tom Harari fluidly shifts between handheld and dolly work. The well-chosen music track, including hymns and American folk tunes, anchors pic's mood of melancholy and rapture.

French title refers to a Serge Gainsbourg song, though sales agents may want to find a more resonant, less forbidding English moniker.

Camera (color), Tom Harari; editor, Thomas Marchand; music, Olivier Mellano; music consultant, Frank Beauvais; set designer, Anna Falgueres; costume designer, Mahemiti Deregnaucourt; sound (Dolby Digital), Emmanuel Croset; line producer, Mathieu Verhaeghe; casting, Sarah Teper, Leila Fournier, Francois Guignard. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight), May 14, 2010. Running time: 92 MIN.

IONCINEMA.com review [2/5] Eric Lavallee

Soft Touch Dustin Chang from Floating World

The Hollywood Reporter review Bernard Besserglik

Creep (Radiohead song) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

scala creep radiohead “Creep” Scala & Kolacny Brothers (4:45)

SUZANNE B+ 92

France Belgium (91 mi) 2013 Website

Quillévéré’s earlier film, LOVE LIKE POISON (2010), is a beautiful coming-of-age story, one that reflects a rare insight into the mindset of female youth, often using superb choices of music to expand the depth of character. Along with Xavier Dolan, the Canadian French-speaking wunderkind from Montreal, both are among the best of the new directors in probing the interior worlds of today’s youth, where Dolan uses more experimentation, such as wildly colorful artificiality mixed with heavy doses of realism, continually changing the film speed, literally immersing the audience in music, along with shifting moods and atmosphere. Quillévéré is often harsh, brutally honest, heavy on the stark realism in this French working-class drama, but ultimately generous, reaching for a poetic intimacy with her characters, where both use music and novelesque detail to accentuate complexity, ambitiously covering 25 years here in just 90-minutes, where what’s left unsaid or the spaces in between scenes often express more than words could ever do, which means both directors rely upon powerful performances, giving the audience something they’re not used to. That is certainly the case here, which has one of the more beautifully photographed openings, as it’s a colorful montage of exuberant young kindergarten age girls getting dressed up in red, sequined costumes and feathers in their hair, along with sparkle on their faces, just before they give a dance performance. It’s exactly the sort of thing every young girl experiences and it’s a moment to be showcased publicly in front of eager parents with their cameras, where applause and approval greet them afterwards, where it’s a wondrous expression of the innocence of happiness.

Jump ahead ten years, Suzanne (Sara Forestier) and her younger sister Maria (Adèle Haenel) are flirtatious teenage girls living with their widowed father, (François Damiens), who’s often away for extended durations driving a truck, but we also see times when he picks them up after school in his truck, where the warm enthusiasm shows. They are a close-knit family, where the two girls do everything together, always looking out for one another’s interests, while they also join their Dad on regular visits to their deceased mother’s grave. What quickly develops is Suzanne has a mind of her own, often at odds with everybody else, including her father, where her idea of independence is not having to listen to anybody tell her what to do. When she gets pregnant, letting the school inform her father, as she hates confronting him, their relationship instantly deteriorates. Jump ahead five more years, where Suzanne and Maria are seen frequenting bars hauling around her son Charlie, often asleep on her shoulder, but he’s passed around whenever someone wants to get up and dance. When she meets Julien (Paul Hamy), something of a punk gangster with a flair for gambling, irresponsibility, and leaving out the important details, where he tends to get in trouble, often having to leave town on the spur of the moment. When it’s time to make a quick dash, Suzanne leaves Charlie behind, where she doesn’t see him for another several years, but hears that he’s living with a foster family from her attorney inside a prison cell. Without providing any backdrop of this development, the news is received like an emotional cluster bomb, where she literally drops from the impact.

Forestier’s strength is never overplaying any scene, showing quick bursts of infuriorated emotion followed by an immediate attempt at a getaway, usually protected by her sister, where she doesn’t stick around for the lectures or moralizing. Her dizzying love affair with Julien went from being a deliriously rapturous expression of never wanting to say goodbye to never being mentioned again, but when she receives a necklace from him she literally melts. She’s an emotional whirlwind of changing moods, a wandering soul that follows her heart and her desires at the expense of everything else, where the audience may be as exasperated with her as her father, but the director always presents her in a non-judgmental light, where the film continuously explores her unique qualities that make her what she is. When her father has to sit in court and listen to the unending list of charges being made against her, none of which she denies, it’s an utterly devastating moment, as this is not the vivacious little girl we saw in the opening shot. Co-written by the director and Mariette Désert, this is a stunning exposé of indefatigable strength followed by incredulous naïveté, where she’s instantly elated or sullenly depressed, but never for a second does she express vanity or pretension. The bracing scenes of realism with the intoxicating allure of love have rarely been captured with this degree of melancholic immediacy, eventually leading to pure heartbreak, where Quillévéré creates sympathy for a woman who would otherwise typically be seen as an outcast. The hauntingly atmospheric music composed by Verity Susman from the all-girl English band Electrelane offers an impressionistic palette, where this beautifully observed, pieced-together drama has a way of rendering its full impact at the end, once we get a fuller picture of her life, where music high priestess Nina Simone sings the Leonard Cohen song live at Montreaux in 1976 over the end credits, seen here in Rome 1969 at the Teatro Sistina Nina Simone - Suzanne (Live) - YouTube (6:28).

Cannes 2013: Suzanne – review | Film | guardian.co.uk Catherine Shoard at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2013

This up-tempo drama from a young French woman director is acutely observed and at times almost unbearably moving

There may be only one female director with a film in competition at Cannes this year, but new work from women opened both the Un Certain Regard and Critics' Week sidebars. Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (which kicked off the former) was all swag and slebs; Suzanne could hardly be less concerned with shopping. The second feature from 33-year-old Katell Quillévéré, it's the sort of woozily shot, remorselessly emotional, acutely observed socio-realist soap that both confounds and confirms chick-flick prejudice.

Baldly recalled, it sounds like a telenovela: Suzanne and her elder sister, Maria, live with their widowed father in the Languedoc. We see them first in primary school, then as Suzanne (Sara Forestier) is about to leave secondary and announces she's pregnant. Flash forward five years and Charlie is part of the family (his father is never seen or spoken of) and Suzanne works in the office of the trucking company that employs dad. Then she falls in love, with Nicolas (Paul Hamy) who feels the same, but he's a small-time gangster, and when he must leave, Suzanne must choose between him and her family.

It weighs in at just 90 minutes, but Quillévéré crams in 25 years of life, with chiming between the early and late scenes; it takes time to absorb. The rapidity of the jumping between years cuts both ways: the pace is kept tight, but you're often left reeling, not given space for events to settle before their repercussions have already become bread-and-butter to the characters. It's a device that lends the film unusual oomph but after a few too many slaps can feel manipulative.

Yet the brilliance of Quillévéré's direction is in the performances she coaxes from her cast, and the clear-eyed, non-judgmental way she presents them. François Damiens, a Belgian actor previously seen bumbling about in the likes of Heartbreaker and Delicacy, is brilliant as the father: almost unbearably moving in a courthouse scene in which a roll-call of minor charges are levelled at his daughter, whom he hasn't seen for years. As the sister who moves from tearaway to matriarch, Adèle Haenel is terrific, too; but Sara Forestier is just indelible in the lead, brimful of feeling and sympathetic stupidity, now depressed, now quixotic, never obvious or vain.

Mostly, Quillévéré manages to match her lead (there's a brilliant shot from a window of Suzanne and her boyfriend parting), but from time to time the switchback tempo and on-the-button music cues (the Leonard Cohen song is reserved for final credits) highlight Forestier's brilliance by comparison.

Suzanne Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Suzanne | Reviews | Screen

The second feature from Love Like Poison director Katell Quillevere confirms her talent for capturing the precious moments that can define and shape a life. Suzanne offers snapshots of the title character from carefree child to careworn adult. There are rare moments of joy, reckless decisions, heartache and much more in a film that feels like flicking through a family album filled with births, deaths, wrong turns and piercing regrets.

The random nature and episodic structuring of the film presents a problem as it tends to work against a complete emotional investment in what is unfolding. Too many gaps in the narrative are left unexplained or there is such a compression of developments that it risks feeling superficial at best or melodramatic at worst. Quillevere may be guilty of striving to achieve too much in such a conventional running time but there is still enough in the trials and tribulations of Suzanne’s downbeat life to engage the heart and secure further

Festival exposure and a decent theatrical life for the film. Quillevere has a real gift for bringing out the best in her performers. The early scenes of children putting on a show and the giggly fondness between the young Suzanne (Apollobia Luisetti) and her sister Maria (Fanie Zanini) are among the best in the film; fresh, naturalistic and entirely true to life.

They are also among the happiest even as we are made aware of their mother’s death and the widowed father (Francois Damiens) who does his best to care for them. The mood darkens as we quickly jump forward to the day the father is called to school to be informed that Suzanne (Sara Forestier) is pregnant, to a kiss that means everything to Suzanne and her boyfriend Julien (Paul Hamy), to the day she abandons her son and other stops along the way in a life that tips into a downward spiral.

The intensity of Sara Forestier keeps you on the side of what could be construed as a fairly selfish, irresponsible character and there is an equally impressive performance from Adele Haenel as the adult Maria, a woman who remains a loyal and loving sister through everything that happens.

It is only when the narrative moves forward too rapidly that it starts to lose its grip. Years pass, lives change in the blink of an eye and there is no chance to let things breathe or give each moment the weight it really requires. Elements of thriller and melodrama do not always successfully gel and yet they are balanced by the surges of emotion that Quillevere extracts from particularly telling acts and their consequences.

An atmospheric, haunting score by Verity Susman considerably enhances the changing moods of a film that in its finer moments can readily stand comparison with the films of the Dardenne brothers.

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa

In addressing with Suzanne [festival scope], which opened the Critics' Week last night at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, the path followed by a character over a 30-year period, Katell Quillevéré, already noticed on the Croisette in 2010 with her first feature Un poison violent [trailer] (Love like Poison), has set the bar pretty high. A risk accepted and crowned success with a romanesque film, sensitive and moving, borne along by an excellent Sara Forestier in the role of a young woman who tries to take short-cuts and inevitably pays the price.

From this shred of fate over which there wafts a hint of bad luck, the director culls a very clear and affectionate portrait of a family of modest means in the depths of France, that of truck-drivers, working women and waitresses, barbecues in shabby courtyards, children placed in foster families, bars and clubs in which people try to escape, and small-time dealers. This world of solitude where family ties serve as lifelines is conveyed by Katell Quillevéré with a healthy energy, an excellent screenplay (co-written by Mariette Désert) skilfully addressing the time factor, and intelligent staging (without any ostentation), effectively swinging from the intimate to a vaster perception of the outer world.

It all starts with the innocence and laughter of childhood for Suzanne (Sara Forestier) and her sister Maria (Adèle Haenel), lovingly raised by their protective father (François Damiens) in a working-class suburb in the South of France. The absence of their mother, who has passed away, does not seem to weigh on the two little girls who soon become "grunge" and rather forward teenagers. The film is set in the 1990's and the first stroke of fate is about to fall: school-girl Suzanne gets pregnant and gives birth to a boy, Charly, whom she raises alone in the family home. Maria leaves to work in Marseille, though the very strong bond of affection between the two sisters lasts until Suzanne falls madly in love with Julien, a young lout (Paul Hamy) trying to wheel and deal at the race-course. Borne along by passion, Suzanne follows him and disappears, abandoning her young son who is taken care of by the grandfather. A few years later, the young woman finds herself in prison after committing a burglary with a break-in and violence. Julien is on the run, and Suzanne, devasted by loneliness and guilt, discovers that her son has been placed with a foster family. She pays him a visit when she gets out and tries to make her life over after getting back togther with her sister and father. But the smart Julien, who has risen in the ranks of the criminal world, turns up by chance. The couple get back together against a backcloth of drug trafficking with Morocco, which doesn't prevent Suzanne from giving birth to a daughter. Once again far from her family, the young woman pursues her chaotic destiny, but unpleasant surprises are still lurking in her path…

Going one better as compared to her first feature film, Katell Quillevéré (born in 1980, just like Suzanne) has several strings to her bow as a filmmaker. Overcoming with great ease the difficulties inherent to the plot and wide time-span, she succeeds in giving her characters real consistency, even for the most secondary roles (Corinne Masiero, Anne Le Ny), with the overall quality of the acting also worthy of praise. Anchored in social realsim which is perfectly recreated and using music very effectively (composed by Verity Susman from the English band Electrelane), Suzanne deploys a rather irresistible charm in the touching wake of a young woman on a desperate quest for love and freedom.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river... Dustin Chang from Floating World

HEAL THE LIVING (Réparer les vivants)

France Belgium (103 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site [UK]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Andrew Robertson]

The temptation to cliche is great and Heal The Living's subject matter - a cardiac transplant - invites phrases like 'heart-wrenching' and 'haunting' which though accurate are less than this film deserves. It's based on a novel of the same name by Maylis De Kerangal and its events unfold slowly, not quite metronomically, the occasional skipped beat a counter-point to the steady flow of its story. The only antagonists in Heal The Living are time and distance and human frailty, death in triptych.

There are moments of hypnotic beauty, small gestures of comfort documented with an omniscient kindly distance, a dawdling angelic remove. Slowly, steadily, the circumstances of a single life-saving operation are constructed.

Startling and unflinching, this is a film that documents tiny kindnesses amongst the visceral and technical in a way that demonstrates an almost perfect simultaneity of compassion and craft such that it nearly defies description. Strong performances from its cast turn a seemingly slight set of events into something that is gripping.

Katell Quillévéré's direction is assured, equally adept in depictions of twilight surfing expeditions, of tense surgical explorations, in and among alleyways and apartments, theatres musical and operating. She shares writing credits with De Kerangal and veteran writer (and previous collaborator) Gilles Tuarand. Their efforts are partnered with an almost flawless effort in subtitling translation (at least in the version Eye for Film saw at the 2017 Glasgow Film Festival) that ably copes with some relatively abstruse vocabularies. The one oddity (merguez becomes hot dogs) is easily forgiven; the meat of this story is elsewhere.

It's hard to single out any performances, though César nominations suggest someone has tried. Anna Dorval as the transplant's recipient, Dominique Blanc's surgeon, and Emmanuelle Seigner's turn as the mother of the donor are all note-perfect, and Tahar Rahim's performance as the transplant counsellor produces one of the film's most touching moments. Even in small roles - Gabin Verdet's Simon is the all too human source of another's hope, focus of others' grief - the performances are touching.

Alexandre Desplat's score is well-used, but the sound in general is phenomenal. Environmental noises are integrated smoothly, in particular the lead-up to the accident that makes Simon's heart available. Perhaps the most striking sonic note is over the end credits - Five Years from Bowie's Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is song enough, but the semantic weight of a song about time running out from the beginning of the career of a legend now passed is, well, palpable.

At once cerebral and humane, compassionate and clinical, Heal The Living is so staggering in its emotional intensity, even honesty, that it itself rejuvenates, reaffirms - it will make your heart sore, then soar.

Slant Magazine [Derek Smith]

Structured as a loose triptych, Katell Quillévéré's Heal the Living approaches death in prismatic fashion, which allows for its all-encompassing compassion for and understanding of people on every side of a tragedy. Quillévéré deftly slides between three separate dramas surrounding a teenager who's left brain-dead following a car wreck, giving equal attention and respect to the parents, the doctors preparing for the potential use of the young man's still-beating heart, and a woman coming to terms with her impending need for a heart transplant. Heal the Living negotiates matters of the heart in both intangible and material terms, vacillating between the corporeal and spiritual as the emotional consequences of death clash with the cold, dispassionate machinations of a hospital whose concerns lie with healing and not consoling.

The film opens with an ethereal sequence that eloquently sets up Quillévéré's interest in the transition between states of being, from the physical to the metaphysical. The camera exudes a spectral quality as it glides above 17-year-old Simon (Gabin Verdet), leisurely admiring young, healthy bodies in motion as Simon skates to the house of the friend who will drive them to the beach for an early-morning surf. This fluidity of movement continues unabated as three friends ride wave after wave and later make their way back home—and as the driver of the vehicle imagines the road as the ocean surface, it's almost natural how he drifts off to sleep and crashes the car on the side of the road.

Katell Quillévéré's film allows the sorrows of losing a life and the joys of saving it to remain congruent.

Heal the Living's focus then shifts to Simon's parents, Marianne (Emmanuelle Seigner) and Vincent (Kool Shen), who must grapple with the fact that he's brain-dead and is only on temporary life support. Quillévéré keeps a respectful distance from the grieving parents, acknowledging their pain without conveying its depths and as such potentially succumbing to exploitation. In this very same moment of anguish, a young doctor, Thomas (Tahar Rahim), offers his condolences as he struggles to find a way to tactfully ask Marianne and Vincent for consent to use Simon's healthy heart for an emergency transplant. Such dualities are carefully balanced throughout the film as impending death and incomprehensible grief repeatedly run up against the mundanities of medical bureaucracy and its potential for healing.

After receiving approval to use Simon's heart, Thomas informs his supervising doctor and the two share a brief, celebratory high-five. In most films, such a display would seem crass, but Heal the Living allows the sorrows of losing a life and the joys of saving it to remain congruent. The high-five, Simon's unfinished tattoo, and a call to Simon's phone that comes through while his father holds it on the drive home from the hospital all serve to deepen our sense of pathos toward all the characters, grounding them in a reality that's always both individually unique and universally shared. Even the emotional swell of a melodramatic flashback briefly showing Simon's initial flirtatious encounter with his future girlfriend plays as an earned reprieve from the heartache and a tender, melancholy reminiscence of the loss of youth.

As Heal the Living moves into its final section, which depicts a woman, Claire (Anne Dorval), about to receive Simon's heart, Quillévéré refuses to shy away from the material realities of death and the body. The surgical procedure is depicted in great detail, beginning with Simon's heart extracted from his body and put on ice. This final section brings the film full circle, literalizing its themes with a striking resonance and restraint. Matters of life and death are unflinchingly presented not as awe-inspiring or terrifying, but merely natural components of existence. As Quillevere effortlessly weaves these various stories together, a delicate, understated tapestry is revealed, portraying the thin line between life and death and the dichotomy between mind and body as almost imperceptibly fluid rather than rigid and clearly defined.

Film-Forward.com [Kyle Mustain]

It all comes together

Katell Quillévéré's third feature adapts Maylis de Kerangal’s bestselling French novel (Mend the Living), a humanistic medical thriller about events leading up to a heart transplant. It begins with Simon (Gabin Verdet), the bleach-blond surfer boy whose car accident makes him brain dead and his perfect organs available for replacing others' failing ones, if his devastated parents, Marianne and Vincent (Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen) are willing. Meanwhile there are closeups of the medical professionals involved, young cardiologist Thomas Rémige (Tahar Rahim) and his master Docteur Pierre Révol (Bouli Lanners) and nurse Jeanne (Monia Chokri). Then we observe Claire (Anne Dorval of Xavier Dolan's Mommy), the lady who is to receive Simon's heart, a lesbian classical pianist and mother of two college-age sons (Finnegan Oldfield, Théo Cholbi) whose heart's days are numbered.

Like Tell No One, a French version of an American crime story way better than Hollywood could do it, this is a ridiculously vivid, clear, humanistic and tasteful version of what seems the most conventional US TV medical drama material, and you cannot but admire it, while in the back of your mind still wondering, why did she bother? Quillévéré's leap forward as a director of complex, demanding movie dramas - with more budget and more name cast members - is also a step back out of the raw indie territory she inhabited in her first two movies into a safer, more mainstream, even if demanding, work.

But it's still an ambitious, complex film, and not only does she never slip into the saccharine territory that the material threatens to draw her into, but she provides some lovely touches, while the whole fits together impeccably. In a lovely opening passage Simon leaves his girlfriend Juliette (Galatea Bellugi) in the wee hours, leaping out the window, races a pal, suits up and surfs - water sequence magnificently shot to show both perfect marriage with the waves and threat of death. Then comes the fatal drive, turned into a sea death as sleepiness of all three youths makes the road and horizon fade into soft waves, the crash just a bang, no messiness. This whole Simon passage, a model of its kind, is of a sublime simplicity and physicality, delivering nothing but a sense of youth, health, and impermanence. The only further development of Simon is equally physical: to seduce Juliette at first meeting, he successfully races her rail car with his bike, leaps over his bike in a move I've never seen, climbs up breathless to the platform, and they kiss.

Later, the film gets equally intimate in a lower key in following Claire as she interacts with her concerned sons Maxime (Oldfield) and Sam (Cholbi) and attends a piano concert by her beautiful protégée and former lover Anne Guérande (actress and pianist Alice Taglioni). She also meets with her cardiologist, who will perform the transplant; Drs. Rémige and Rémol will remove Simon's heart. Claire's scenes require a refocusing effort from the audeince after the intensity of the earlier passages, all of them at a high pitch further heightened by Alexandre Desplat's piano-based score. The presence of the well-known French movie composer is a sign of the glossier production, but Thomas Marchand, the editor, whose presence is more essential, was present on the director's first two films. Claire's sequences apparently add to a barely outlined character in the novel, and they're still relatively flat after the vivacity and invention of Simon's sequences and the high pitched emotions of his parents' grieving.

A turning point in the film, and a key to its humanism, comes when Marianne and Vincent, still in great grief, come to accept the goodness of allowing their son to be an organ donor.

The still boyish Rahim, who gently elicits this decision, is a good choice for exuding human kindness, and the film's best moment and best evocation of the magic of the medical miracle this story is about comes when he carries out a ritual farewell to Simon in the operating room following the boy's parent's directives, and it's at this moment that this tasteful and economical film indulges in its one repeat sequence, Juliette's tearful face in the light of dawn and Simon's leap out her window: rhythmical repetition, a joining of the circle, death and life.

Still, for all this beauty, though onne may not miss the oddness of the director's debut Love Like Poison, one does miss a bit the wildness and emotional extremity of her sophomore effort, Suzanne, which also put Adèle Hanel on the map. What Réparer les vivants, heavily publicized in France and widely distributed there, does do, is show that Quillévéré is a directorial talent both recognized and worth continuing to follow. "Un feel good movie" is a French term, which critics have applied, and this does what one of those should: it leaves you feeling good.

Review: In Katell Quillévéré's HEAL THE LIVING ... - ScreenAnarchy Dustin Chang

'Heal The Living': Venice Review | Reviews | Screen Lisa Nesselson from Screendaily

Cineuropa.org [Fabien Lemercier]

J.B. Spins [Joe Bendel]

Katell Quillévéré's Mesmeric Melodrama "Heal the Living" - Village Voice Nick Schager

Heal the Living - Curzon Artificial Eye

Daily | Venice + Toronto 2016 | Katell Quillévéré's HEAL THE LIVING ... David Hudson from Fandor

Interview: Katell Quillévéré on HEAL THE LIVING ... - ScreenAnarchy Dustin Chang interview from Screen Anarchy, April 16, 2017

Katell Quillévéré: 'With each film I try to renew myself' Wendy Ide interview from The Guardian, April 16, 2017

'Heal the Living' ('Reparer les vivants'): Venice Review | Hollywood ... Boyd van Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter

'Heal the Living' Review: Katell Quillévéré's Wrenching ... - Variety Guy Lodge

'Heal the Living' is a heartfelt, surprising story that ... - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Rogerebert.com [Sheila O'Malley]

Quine, Richard

THE SOLID GOLD CADILLAC

USA (99 mi) 1956

Several classic Hollywood notions combine here: that capitalism is tickety-boo as long as businessmen aren't corrupt, that one dumb broad can defeat the wiliest crooks in the business, that a male and a female goody will inevitably fall in love. With the rallying cry of 'Somebody's got to keep an eye on these big businesses', Judy Holliday, in a variation on the part that made her in Born Yesterday, takes on the wicked businessmen and rallies Middle America behind her. It's pernicious, but fun.

The Solid Gold Cadillac - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

The hit Broadway stage version of The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), written by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann, ran over 500 performances beginning in 1953 and starred the famed stage actress Josephine Hull. She was 67 when she took on the role, and she earned raves.

But when the Columbia Pictures film version was released in 1956, moviegoers instead saw 34-year-old Judy Holliday in the part. It turns out that the play as originally written had actually called for a much younger actress, but it was rewritten to suit Hull; screenwriter Abe Burrows simply changed things back to the original conception.

Certainly Holliday was already as famous as Hull, a grande dame of the stage who had also left her mark in Hollywood with memorable performances in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Harvey (1950). Holliday had scored big on Broadway with Born Yesterday and recreated that role to astonishing success in the movie version. In fact, Hull and Holliday both won their only Oscars® in the very same year, with Holliday taking Best Actress for Born Yesterday (1950) and Hull nabbing Best Supporting Actress for Harvey. With Jose Ferrer winning Best Actor for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), another stage adaptation, and All About Eve (1950), perhaps the best movie about theater ever made, winning the rest of the major awards including Best Picture, it was definitely a Broadway-themed Oscar®: night. And just to hammer home the point, the greatest movie about Hollywood ever made, Sunset Blvd. (1950), lost the Best Picture award that same evening.

In The Solid Gold Cadillac, a corporate satire, Holliday's comedic abilities are aptly displayed. She plays a dizzy blonde who owns ten shares of stock in a major company and basically serves the profiteering board members their comeuppance. Paul Douglas co-stars as the former head of the company who joins forces with Holliday; a romantic subplot between the two was added for the movie. The stars' chemistry was a known commodity, as they had already worked together a few years earlier on stage in Born Yesterday. Narrating the movie from off-screen is George Burns, a job held by Fred Allen on Broadway.

Critics loved The Solid Gold Cadillac. The New York Times raved that "[Holliday] is knocking the role completely dead... She's an actress who has the ability to move mountains." Variety noted that the production "achieves a plushy look without the use of color or big-screen assists" (though there is a color sequence at the end). Indeed, that "look" landed an Oscar nomination for Best Black-and-White Art Direction, though the movie won only for Best Black-and-White Costume Design.

Film Appreciation: The Solid Gold Cadillac - Thinking Cinema Dana Lemaster

DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review

The Solid Gold Cadillac - Wikipedia

FULL OF LIFE

USA (91 mi) 1956

Breezy comedy, with gargantuan Baccaloni (a popular New York opera singer of the '50s) pissing off Italian-American couple Holliday and Conte by interfering in the birth of their child. Holliday has no special religious convictions but her boozy father-in-law-to-be insists she confirm her faith before the sprog is born. Holliday is vivacity itself; Baccaloni is a roly-poly firecracker; and the script by cult author John Fante (from his own novel) strikes just the right note.

Full of Life - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

In the comedic drama Full of Life (1956), Judy Holliday and Richard Conte play a married couple a few weeks away from having a baby. When their kitchen floor collapses, Conte brings in his Italian-American father, played by Salvatore Baccaloni, to fix it. Baccaloni not only repairs the floor but also builds a large, unnecessary fireplace, all the while attempting to indoctrinate them on Catholicism which he feels they have abandoned.

Driven more by its characters than its plot, Full of Life is probably most notable for being the work of writer John Fante, who adapted his own novel for the screenplay. Fante is best known today for his Depression-era novel Ask the Dust, which was made into a movie by writer-director Robert Towne in 2006 and is one of four Fante novels to center around the fictional character of Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer. While that character does not figure into Full of Life, Conte does play a writer who bears many resemblances to Bandini.

Full of Life was Metropolitan Opera star Salvatore Baccaloni's American film debut. "Amusingly corpulent and mannered," The New York Times said of him. "Judy Holliday, usually outstanding, is decidedly in his shadow as the wife... Conte is excellent as the husband."

Also in the cast is Esther Minciotti, the intrepid Italian-American mother specialist, who played virtually the same mother role in The Undercover Man (1949), House of Strangers (1949), Marty (1955) and The Wrong Man (1956).

Fante's script, with its frank depiction of pregnancy, ran into some trouble with the Production Code Administration. "It plunges into the details of pregnancy with very little discretion and little exercise of good taste," was the verdict. The offending scenes were somewhat toned down but Full of Life remains frank for its time, and for his efforts Fante received a Writers Guild nomination for Best Written American Comedy.

Quinn, Tom

THE NEW YEAR PARADE B 84

USA (87 mi) 2008 Official site

Written, directed, produced, shot, and edited by Tom Quinn, so one would think his imprint is all over this film, and perhaps it is, as it’s a sprawling work of raw, unedited emotions, shot over several years on a shoestring budget, supposedly $7,000, yet offers vital insight into the harsh realities of a particularly unpleasant divorce, leaving the kids to fend for themselves like damaged goods. Set in the working class neighborhood of South Philadelphia, the film uses the Mummers parade as a backdrop, which is a Mardi Gras-like event where rival costume-laden marching bands take to the streets in a battle of the bands competition, which includes guys lugging around those gigantic bass fiddles. What we learn is that generational continuity has been maintained by the tradition of this event, where fathers march with sons, and then their sons, which is what makes this family split so disastrous. Jack and Kat are the affected children, Greg Lyons and Jennifer Lynn Welsh, whose lives are crumbling right out from underneath them and there’s nothing they can do about it. At 16, Kat is in high school where she’s worried about her first boyfriend, yet when she learns that her mother was having an affair with someone else, she can’t seem to trust her mother anymore. The counseling offered is a joke, so she puts up her best front that none of this matters. Her father’s violent outbursts however send her into tears, as it’s obvious her parents can’t live under the same roof anymore, leaving everyone devastated.

Jack, in his mid twenties, works at a local bar and plays sax in his dad’s marching band, the South Philadelphia String Band, who are largely featured in this film, both in endless rehearsals and finally in competition, but he’s growing irritated by his dad’s destructive behavior in splitting up his family, a guy who claims he wants to stay together, but then does all the wrong things to guarantee they stay apart. While we catch glimpses of them in their daily lives, much of this has an amateurish feel, but not necessarily in a bad way, more in the way the film feels sloppily assembled. But this lack of polish accentuates the raw emotions which are surprisingly real, especially in the gutty performance by Jennifer Welsh, whose already messed up teenage life is simply in turmoil, but she pretends she can handle it, and remarkably, for the most part, she does. Her astonishing confidence is underscored by moments when she simply falls apart, as she nearly has to jump into her boyfriend’s lap to get his attention. But somehow, she prevails, and despite the father and son thing going on, she’s really the heart and soul of the film, as she’s so conflicted about her mother’s heartbreaking actions.

The parental behavior on display is tragically self-centered, where Jack tries to assume the role of the more responsible big brother, but he’s conflicted as well and considers jumping ship and playing in another marching band, separating himself from his father, who’s embarrassing him and become too big a burden to bear. Their parents don’t make it easy. What makes it worse is all the talk among the members of the band, as all the family secrets are suddenly an open book. How do kids and young adults handle their business being the subject of jokes and ridicule all over the street? Not easily, as both would rather be just about anyplace else than where they are. Kat goes through a tug of war between her two separated parents, and at her tender age, she’s expected to choose between them? That’s a horrible thing to ask of her when all she really wants is her first kiss, and a guy to appreciate and accept her while her world is coming apart. The performances by the kids especially is very good, while the parental missteps are hauntingly memorable,

as the pain they inflict is unstoppable, a lit fuse waiting to explode. The film doesn’t condescend or offer any real conclusions or moral lessons other than in life one endures. It’s a grim, but realistic portrait of the emotional carnage left behind by parents who stop caring about one another. The director brings a very observational style to his work, and despite its flaws, the quiet moments are perhaps its best, as that’s what draws us into the world of people we grow to understand and occasionally admire.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

Two grown siblings are blindsided by their parents' breakup in this gritty but delicately nuanced indie drama, which plays out against the backdrop of the annual Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. The son (Greg Lyons), a doughy but soulful bartender, is so intent on doing the right thing by everyone that he almost loses himself, while his teenage sister (Jennifer Welsh) resents mom (MaryAnn McDonald) but has qualms about moving in with dad (Andrew Conway). Writer-director Tom Quinn draws heartrending performances from his four nonprofessional leads and grounds this cinema verite feature, his first, by involving the South Philadelphia String Band, working-class stalwarts who exude integrity and venerate family and tradition. 85 min.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Tom Quinn’s genial, four-years-in-the-making “The New Year Parade,” winner of a Slamdance jury prize, is a study of the effects of divorce on the members of one South Philadelphia family across the course of a single year. Set in the world of Mummers, or competitive marching bands, Quinn’s great stroke beyond marshaling the time scheme of the film is getting the motions (and emotion) of hundreds of musicians on screen in such lucid fashion. The seemingly improvised performances have a sweet, ragged edge, and the music swells. Nothing musical on film has touched me the way the first viewing of “Once” did, but “The New Year Parade” is a song in the heart. With Greg Lyons, Jennifer Welsh, Andrew Conway, MaryAnn McDonald, Irene Longshore, Tobias Segal, Paul Blackway, The South Philadelphia String Band. 90m.

eFilmCritic Reviews Jason Whyte

A hit at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, Tom Quinn’s heartbreakingly real human drama is among the best indie dramas this decade. A working class family in urban Philadelphia is going through some pretty tumultuous times; the parents are breaking up, the twenty-eight-and-still-living-at-home son is trying to take that next step in life, and his teenage sister is experimenting with losing her virginity. Spanning the course of a year and utilizing a kind of documentary style filmmaking that feels like we are voyeurs in the lives of these people, Quinn is able to make us feel like this domestic drama is really happening, but it is also thanks to great song selections from Elliot Smith and amazing, real performances from his leads (Jennifer Lynn Welsh as the precocious daughter is a knockout) that makes this film very unique and brutally honest. I also admire the fact that this film was made for nearly no money yet is so rich in scope and drama that it is easy to overlook. It’s kind of awesome to see.

Hammer to Nail [Mike S. Ryan]

Tom Quinn sets the dissolution of a South Philly family against the backdrop of string-band culture, making for a low-key but satisfying blend of melodrama and observant naturalism. Greg Lyons and Jennifer Welsh play the children of oddly named South Philadelphia String Band leader Mike McMonogul (Andrew Conway) and wife Lisa (MaryAnn McDonald), whose infidelities split their marriage apart. Although his cast is largely composed of nonprofessionals, Quinn draws relaxed performances from most, especially rock-scene veteran Lyons (current Eastern Conference Champions and former Laguardia/Trip 66 drummer), although Conway seems uncomfortable with some of his more dramatic moments. The film's best parts have little to do with its leading roles, or even its story. Quinn spent a year hanging around with real Mummers, and the time he put in shows in the film’s detailed but unforced capturing of a culture often reduced to fat drunks in drag. At times, Quinn literally loses the plot, wandering off to let some banjo-playing veteran reflect on years of Mummery, but the stories, and the faces, are so engaging you don’t mind the diversion.

THE NEW YEAR PARADE Facets Multi Media

Set in the Irish-American, blue collar community of South Philadelphia and bookended by the traditional Mummer's Parade, The New Year Parade charts the destabilizing effect the separation of Mike and Lisa has on their two kids. Jack (Greg Lyons) is 25, a bartender and featured player in the South Philly String Band, led by his dockworker dad. Kat (Jennifer Walsh) is 16, a smart high school student whose steady boyfriend wants more from her. Both appear to be coping, but the hurt and doubt cannot help but come out in different ways. Kat believes that their parents will reconcile and keeps the situation secret, but as months pass and tensions mount, she becomes isolated between family and friends with no one to confide in. Meanwhile, Jack is forced to mediate between his parents and carries the burden of the family finances, while questioning his loyalty as the impending divorce adversely affects his own personal relationship. Just as fidelity is central issue in their divorce, Jack contemplates an almost greater transgression: moving to another club. Written with great tenderness and sensitivity and cast with a combination of professional and first-time actors (including the majority of the actual South Philadelphia String Band), this film authentically captures the heritage of the Irish and Italian neighborhoods where fathers and sons pass on the traditions that define their culture. Writer-director Tom Quinn shot and edited the film with a minimal crew over several years and creates a very moving melodrama without trivializing the emotional turmoil that his characters endure. His actors -- all of them new faces -- respond with open and honest performances that cut right to the heart. Winner of the Grand Jury prize at the Slamdance Festival, The New Year Parade is one of the most assured and poignant independent films of the year.

User comments from imdb Author: J_Trex from Philadelphia

This was a fascinating "reality show" type movie set in Philadelphia from Jan 2004 to Jan 2005. The subject matter of the film is a working class family in South Philly going through a messy divorce, the relationships between the Father, Mother, Daughter, & Son. There is a great deal of tension due to the impending divorce. The Father & the Son belong to the South Philly String Band, which marches in the annual Mummer's Day parade each New Year's Day. The story is thus twofold: the dynamics of the family going through the divorce process and the Mummer's Day parade backstory, which is actually the main story and what gives this movie a special edge, especially if you live around Philadelphia and watch these parades each year.

The casting and screenplay did have the appearance of a "reality show". I'm sure there was a screenplay but it's hard to tell while watching the movie. That's not to say the dialog was anything less than outstanding, it just had a spontaneous character to it. It seemed very genuine working class Philly.

The cinematography was outstanding, with many excellent pictures and scenes of South Philly, Mummer's preparing their costumes & practicing their music & dance routines, the screenplay and backstories were great.

As a Philly native, I really loved this movie, but even if you live in LA or NY or Dallas, this is worth checking out. It's a very good movie and as Indie movies go, quite excellent.

User comments from imdb Author: marque63 from Los Angeles

I had the privilege of seeing this yet to be released film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where the director spoke to the audience after the film was viewed. As of this writing, the film does not yet have a distributor, but hopefully, it will, and this review will entice the readers to go see it. I was not involved in the making of this film at all, but I appreciate the artistic endeavors of the creators to get their work seen.

The story is about a troubled family, where the parents are separated and the grown son and younger daughter are trying their best to deal with the traumas it has caused them. The father and son are members of an all-male band in South Philadelphia, and much of the action surrounds their involvement in helping get the band in shape for the annual New Year's Day Parade. Mother works several jobs to make ends meet, while the daughter is in high school and has a paper route. There are hopes that the parents will get back together, but it seems doubtful due to the breakdown in communications between the adults. In fact, the mother and father have very little on-screen footage together, making it seem that their love for their children is the bind that had kept them together as long as they were and that the communication in their 25 year relationship is sorely lacking.

The daughter has anxieties over the separation, which causes the mother to get a school counselor involved. She also has the responsibility of getting chores done after school while the mother works, in addition to getting her own meals and dealing with the various boys who are interested in her for one reason or another. Considering that all four major players are played by unprofessional actors, they all do an outstanding job. The actress playing the mother reminds me of a younger Joan Allen, while the actor playing the father in certain close-ups reminded me of Barry Williams ("The Brady Bunch"). And the children? They are not cotton candy examples of Hollywood actors trying to play real people; They are real people just doing what they were chosen here to do-play real people, and they all do it darn well. If the actress playing the daughter chooses to make acting a career, she could do well; She has an innocent Christina Ricci like quality to her, and is very pretty, without being glamorized like the typical teen actors we are used to seeing in movies today. There is a scene after the parents have a violent argument where the brother consoles the sister that is very touching. I have not seen anything like this in domestic films of this nature, making it much more than just a typical Lifetime TV Movie.

I could also relate to the scenes involving band preparation for the parades as I spent several summers in marching bands, and at least on the North East coast, these events are very important to communities big and small. The costumes for the Mummers are outrageous and fun, and the editing was brilliant as well.

In this day and age when big brassy spectacles are all that make money in movie theaters, films like this tend to go unnoticed. As an adult near the age of the parents, I could also relate to their inability to express themselves to each other and yet be more open to their children and expect to get their loyalty over the other parents. Several strong messages I got from the film were just because a couple is married for a long time and has children, doesn't mean that they have fully and emotionally matured. Some people never do; In fact, some people I know say that most people never do. This is a sweet film that says hang in there, kiddo, we know life is rough, and we're all having a rough go of it. Married, single, young, older.

While apparently the print I saw is not the finished work, what I saw certainly impressed me as an artist to say what I saw I liked, and this film's festival awards did not go undeserved. Best of luck to the creators as they work on getting this out to the mainstream.

J.J. Murphy

The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]

Indiewire Eric Kohn at Sundance

Director's statement Scott Macauley interview from Filmmaker magazine, November 18, 2008

The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

Variety Peter Debruge

TimeOut Chicago Ben Kenigsberg

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Roger Ebert

Qurbani, Burhan

SHAHADA (Faith) B- 80

Germany (88 mi) 2010

This film starts out promising enough with the introduction of multiple characters expressed with a stylish realism through different chapter headings, but eventually despite the headings, three stories become interwoven into a larger fabric about Muslims living in Berlin, as seen through the guilty conscience of a Muslim police officer who accidentally kills another woman’s unborn fetus, feeling unending streams of remorse, the daughter of an Imam who secretly has a back alley abortion with horrible consequences, and two Muslim coworkers who develop a homosexual relationship which is forbidden under Islam. According to the director, this film was his college graduation thesis, thinking it was perhaps a bit “too edgy” for American audiences, as if no one has ever read Dostoevsky before or seen movies that dealt with these themes, while cris-crossing the narrative wouldn’t happen to resemble CRASH (2004), BABEL (2006), or fellow countryman Fatih Akin’s THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (2007)? This film actually won the Best New Director Award at the Chicago Film festival, not because he’s talented or innovative, but because his Islamic idealism matches what Americans want to hear from the Muslim world. That being the case, the gritty realism displayed at the beginning was thrown out the window in favor of wishful thinking and ambiguity, as none of these three stories actually has a resolution. This style of interwoven film actually works to build suspense or complexity, but this director does neither, as instead the stories simply deflate into thin air.

While two of the three stories deal with devout religious beliefs, the story of the guilty policeman shooting an illegal Bosnian immigrant who was accidentally caught in the crossfire when he was aiming at a burglar, has no Islamic religious references and simply deals with age old questions of guilt. However the story of Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), a devout African Muslim, does seek religious guidance from the Imam (Vedat Erincin) when he begins to reciprocate his best friend’s gay affections. Using wisdom that all Americans would love to believe, the Imam suggests that the Koran has many passages to describe what’s right and what’s wrong, but only Allah really understands the love in one’s heart, claiming Islam is a religion based on love, suggesting there is no love that Allah would deny. Now of course, there’s no Imam in the world who would utter such a thing or practice such tolerance, or Catholic priests for that matter, and very few Jewish rabbi’s and Protestant ministers, as the director appears to be going for the entire rainbow coalition.

The most intensely urgent of the three stories surrounds Maryam (Maryam Zaree), the daughter of the Imam, a somewhat westernized, independent thinker who conceals her self-inflicted abortion by taking illegal medicines. When the bleeding persists indefinitely, she believes this is a sign from God and against the more liberal teachings of her father, developing strict fundamentalist interpretations as if the Apocalypse was upon us, as it is certainly within her. Her sudden rigidity shocks everyone, from her friends, family, and Muslim community, as if she became deranged overnight. While the last two stories feature characters who attempt to reconcile their behavior with Islamic teachings, of course, they can’t, as their behavior is forbidden, as it is under the Catholic Church as well, under archaic religious interpretation which outlaws abortions and homosexuality. While the filmmaker acknowledges that this liberal thinking Imam does not represent reality, it instead reflects the views of his grandfather, as the filmmaker himself was raised Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish, which required a real balancing act to theorize a kind of love that they all have in common. As it turns out, the chapter headings, which feel unnecessary with names like Sacrifice and Devotion, are named after a step of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. It'a hard not to think this isn't a similarly contrived Muslim version of Paul Haggis's CRASH.

Three Berliners, children of immigrants, are torn between their beliefs in the Muslim religion and their desire to live their lives the way they want to. Thoughtful mosaic melodrama that has something to say about contemporary Germany and says it very clearly and confidently.

The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at Berlin

BERLIN -- Western Islam in several variations is examined in "Faith" ("Shahada") through the intertwined stories of three young German-born Muslims. A film school graduation project that landed in Berlin competition, written and directed by Burhan Qurbani, shows a promising new talent grappling with an over-written script and too many characters, none of whom come across as real people viewers can care about. Another problem is the somber open-ended finale which leaves too much open to interpretation to satisfy most audiences.

Still, the effort to communicate is there and it's a relief to find the subject of religion treated, for once, without making the seemingly obligatory reference to terrorism, such as in Bruno Dumont's "Hadewijch," another recent tale of faith gone bad. Here, caught between their religious upbringing and the liberated lifestyle of the West, the young characters fixate on lines from the Quran to find an easy way out of their moral dilemmas.

In some ways, the film itself takes the easy road out of the problems it poses, coming to facile, feel-good conclusions like, "Everyone decides how to live his faith," and "The Quran is a book of love that guides and consoles us, but can't tell us what to feel." This approach may create maximum consensus with audiences, but does not a deep film make.

"Faith" is structured in chapters with mythic Arabic/English titles like "Beginning of the Journey," "Sacrifice" and "Self-Sacrifice," which portend intriguing things to come, but unfold more banally as a series of dangerous sexual liaisons.

The most significant of the stories belongs to Maryam (Maryam Zaree). The German-born daughter of a tolerant, kindly local Imam, she first appears as a rebellious nightclubber out on the town with her girlfriend. Barely minutes later, she's having a deliberately provoked abortion in the disco toilet. The sight of the fetus so shocks her that she turns into a half-mad bigot who upsets the entire community with her raving desire for God's punishment.

The growing attraction between Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), a young Muslim believer, and Daniel (Sergej Moya), who works in the same packing plant, throws Sammi into a wrenching inner struggle with his homosexual desires, which are forbidden in the Quran.

Ismail (Carlo Ljubek) is a cop racked with guilt over the accidental shooting of a pregnant woman, who lost her unborn child as a result. When he bumps into her again, Leyla (Marija Skaricic) so inflames his imagination that he leaves his wife and son for her. The story is utterly improbable but the two handsome, brooding young actors raise the temperature a few notches.

Blending urban cityscapes with subtle Orientalisms, the visuals have a very distinctive look. Yoshi Heimrath's cinematography is evocative throughout, from the endless warehouse to the humblest dwellings.

Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review

Three Muslims in Berlin struggle to do the right thing in Burhan Qurbani's good-looking feature debut, "Shahada," a German film-school exam project that was a surprise inclusion in this year's Berlinale competition. Tackling hot-button issues that are contentious in many religious communities, including abortion and sexual orientation, Afghanistan-born Qurbani's level-headed approach thankfully avoids preachy melodrama, but it never quite gets under his characters' skin, either. Topical pic should see further fest play and decent B.O. in Germany, with minor Euro niche potential a possibility.

Maryam (Maryam Zaree) is the daughter of a liberal imam, Vedat (Vedat Erincin), a widower. Very much a Westernized girl, Maryam wonders whether the difficult aftermath of her messy illegal abortion is a punishment from God. Too ashamed to talk to her father about it, she drifts into more radical religious thinking.

One of Vedat's students at his Koran school is Senegalese Muslim Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong), who works at a market hall with his best friend, Daniel (Sergej Moya), a German. Sammi's developing feelings for his friend, who is gay, are difficult to reunite with his firm religious beliefs.

At Sammi and Daniel's workplace, a thirtysomething cop of Turkish origin, Ismail (Carlo Ljubek), checks the papers of the immigrant workers. Last in line is Bosnian Leyla (Marija Skaricic), who was a victim of an accident that also involved Ismail, who has never been able to forgive himself for it.

Maryam's and Sammi's stories, focusing on the generation of religious youngsters who have to reconcile forming their identities with living between two cultures, are the strongest. Qurbani neatly explores the effort it takes for them to live by the rules of their religion, and also suggests that these rules aren't set in stone because each individual is different. The story of Ismail -- who is older, has his own family and is the least religious of the three protags -- never quite feels part of the mix, despite editor Simon Blasi's nimble cutting between the occasionally overlapping storylines. Pic's division into chapters ("Devotion," "Sacrifice") isn't really necessary.

Though Qurbani, who also co-write the screenplay, shows a deft hand in setting up his scenes, he is not quite as successful in taking them through to their final payoff, and there's no sense at the end of the film that we know any of the characters very well. The director's tendency, as with the films of Ferzan Ozpetek, to circle the protags with his camera while the music swells on the soundtrack to illuminate their inner struggles doesn't always work. Some of the thesps, notably Zaree, are much better at conveying their feelings with words and actions than with simple looks.

"Shahada," which can be roughly translated as "faith," looks very good, especially for a first feature (not only for the director but also for the d.p. and production designer). Handsome widescreen lensing, in a combination of static shots and handheld camera during the tenser moments, is aces, and transfer from HD to 35mm is spotless. Production and costume design firmly place the story in contempo Berlin's Muslim community, with Maryam's changing sense of dress a subtle indicator of what her character is going through.

Camera (color, HD-to-35mm, widescreen), Yoshi Heimrath; editor, Simon Blasi; music, Daniel Sus; production designer, Barbara Falkner; costume designer, Irene Ip; sound (Dolby Digital), Magnus Pflueger; creative producer, Leif Alexis; casting, Karen Wendland. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 16, 2010. Running time: 88 MIN.

Radford, Michael

1984

Great Britain (113 mi) 1984

All Movie Guide [Andrea LeVasseur]

Sensibly realising that science fiction is always a distortion of the time at which it was written rather than a prediction of the future, Radford aligns himself with Anthony Burgess' suggestion that the book only makes sense as 1948, with its food rationing, its housing shortages, bad cigarettes and Churchillian slogans. The look of the film certainly achieves the right rubble-strewn, monochrome period feel with precision and genuinely cinematic scope. Perhaps the greatest hurdle cleared, however, is the problem of incident. Radford's achievement is to have incorporated the impossible preaching and crazed ideas into the fabric with hardly any loose threads. The locations look very like modern Britain; and Burton at last found the one serious role for which he searched all his life.

Filmed during the actual dates in 1984 as described in the book, Michael Radford's adaptation is the preeminent film version of George Orwell's infamous novel. The stark gray settings effectively set the mood of a totalitarian state. John Hurt is a beaten-down Winston, whose weathered face shows every result of his tortured existence, especially during the final devastating scenes with the Thought Police. Suzanna Hamilton does what she can as Julia, bringing some human warmth to the otherwise grim and desolate surroundings. In the last performance before his death, Richard Burton conveys Inner Party member O'Brien with a strange fatherly compassion that makes his sadistic role all the more disturbing. In contrast to some other flashy and visually inventive future dystopia movies, 1984 focuses on the plight of humans with an austere landscape, washed-out colors, and severe close-ups signifying the omnipresence of Big Brother. In general, 1984 faithfully follows the book in story, character, and tone, which makes for an authentic if thoroughly depressing and slow-paced movie.

Ted Prigge

George Orwell is probably one of the greatest writers of all time. And his "1984" is probably his best (although I might argue it could be "Animal Farm"). The novel, written around 1948, I think, is a bleak story of a future where there is peace but the expense is a totalitarian state where everyone is miserable and afraid because there are TVs everywhere where "Big Brother" watches so you don't do anything treasonous. It's a frightening idea and pretty much illustrates that "Give Peace a Chance" might be a bad idea.

Michael Radford (director of "Il Postino") directed this film, ironically made in 1984 within the dates the book took place. He paints a futuristic world which doesn't resemble anything else before. There are no flying cars, monorails, or anything. The world is just a ruin with run-down buildings and plain old buses and what-not. In every room, there is a big television where Big Brother, the symbol of the state, is watching and the Thought Police are always the threat of even thinking of a treasonous act.

Our protagonist is Winston Smith (John Hurt), who really looks like he has been beaten down by the state in all senses of the word. He is a state worker who rewrites history the way the government wants it and in his spare time, writes in a journal about his dreams of having rampant sex, which is prohibited. One of his co-workers, Parsons (Gregor Fisher), is the symbol of the ultimate defeat of the state, since he is constantly telling of his love for everything that embodies Big Brother. In one darkly humorous scene, he talks about the processed meat and how it isn't even meat and that's why it's good.

Winston runs into (literally) a woman named Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) who's also a government worker and who passes him a note (Hello? Junior High?) saying she loves him and wants to meet him. They carefully plan their meetings and end up having intense sex in a far off place where no one, not even Big Brother is watching. Their sex is not actually about love, but as a form of rebellion and expression of their way to anti-supress themselves. They try to join the rebellion, headed by an O'Brien (Richard Burton, in his final performance), but that turns out to wind them up in prison and a torture sequence on Winston where he is beaten into admitting that 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4 and stuff like that. It's a horrific scene in all senses of the word.

"1984" the film works because it wonderfully embodies the bleakness that was the book. All of the scenes are drearily set and the film is as depressing and thought-provoking as the book...well, maybe not as thought-provoking. And John Hurt and Richard Burton are fabulous in their respective parts.

I highly reccomend this film for anyone who loved the book, but for anyone else, it's not going to be fun. It's a highly depressing film that is so dark that you might have to watch it in two sittings. But the message is still there and that's what counts. If you want a livelier film (and a better one, in my opinion), try Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." But this one will do if you're looking for a good intellectual film.

DVD Times [Gary Couzens]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson)

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

1984 and Brazil Nightmares Old and New, by John Hutton from Jump Cut, April 1987

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Foster on Film - Dystopias

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) January 1, 1984

IL POSTINO B+ 92

aka: The Postman

France Italy Belgium (108 mi) 1994

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

—excerpt from La Poesía (Poetry), from Memorial de Isla Negra, by Pablo Neruda, 1964

An immensely popular Italian film that screened in American theaters for nearly two years, long after the video release and its initial cable run, spawning millions of new Pablo Neruda fans across the globe, as the film is a fictionalized account of an incident in Neruda’s life, adapted from the 1985 Chilean novel Burning Patience (Ardiente Paciencia, or El Cartero De Neruda) by Antonio Skármeta, which takes place in the early 1970’s on Isla Negra, the tiny Chilean village where Neruda lived, but is transported to a small Sicilian island in the film shortly after his exile from Chile in the early 1950’s when the Communist Party, embraced by the Marxist poet Neruda, was outlawed in Chile. Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for Best Musical Score, where for several years it was the highest grossing film ever made in a language other than English, the film is one of the few foreign-language films to be nominated for Best Picture, something that hadn’t happened since Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972) and the Costa-Gavras film Z (1969). The film is largely a dream project of the lead actor, 41-year old Massimo Troisi, who was known mostly as a comic actor in Italy, but bought the rights for this movie and even helped write the screenplay, as he identified with the lead character. Postponing heart surgery to make the film, the actor was extremely limited by his physical restrictions on the set, yet provided a poignant and enduring performance for which he will always be remembered, yet died tragically of heart failure one day after the shooting finished. The film’s fascination with the poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) is instantly compelling, as he’s known as the greatest poet in the history of the Spanish language, so when he decides to make this remote little island his home in exile, the residents, nearly all illiterate fishermen and their families, light up with excitement while watching cinema newsreels of the upcoming event, where the railway station in Rome that greets Neruda’s arrival was actually commissioned by Mussolini for the arrival of Hitler, but it wasn’t finished in time. Choosing a charming mountainside villa with an outdoor terrace located between a volcano and the sea, the high cliffside location is probably the only luxurious home on the island, reachable by a winding dirt road that overlooks the Tyrrhenian Sea. While Neruda once lived on the island of Capri in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio, this film was shot on the nearby islands of Salina (rural and beach scenes), part of the Aeolian islands north of Sicily, and also Procida (harbor and village scenes), one of the Flegrean Islands off the coast of Naples, where the sunny, idyllic locations lend themselves to a dreamy, slow-moving, romantic adventure.

Set in a tiny Italian seaside village, it’s the story of a simple man, Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi), who breaks from tradition by being disinterested in being a fisherman, which makes him a bit of an outcast, and also out of a job. So when he sees a sign on the post office (which doubles as a telegraph office) for a mail delivery man who has his own bicycle, it’s like a scene out of de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES (1948). Inquiring within, he meets the rotund telegraph operator (the marvelous Renato Scarpa) who is looking to hire a temporary postman to deliver mail to the island’s lone customer, Pablo Neruda, where he’ll need a bike to climb up the cliffs. The anonymity of the island is part of its charm, as there are no cars, few roads, but there are plenty of fishing boats in the harbor, which, outside of the church, becomes the town’s only thriving activity. So when Mario arrives at Neruda’s door, he’s viewed as just another one of the nameless citizens inhabiting the island, all but ignoring him. While Mario can read, he’s flabbergasted to learn that nearly all Neruda’s mail is coming from females, an observance he amusingly shares with his boss, who never forgets to remind him that Neruda is also a fervent communist, where concerns for social justice are something his boss admittedly shares with the poet, perhaps taking refuge in his political beliefs, as nearly all the residents on the island are poor. To Mario, Neruda is a poet of love, jealous of all the women that flock to him, while to his boss, Neruda is a man of the people, a poet of the mistreated, reminding Mario that he shouldn’t linger and bother such an important man, but should at all times show him the respect he deserves. Of course, Mario is a man who can’t help himself, as he’s a dreamer who’s curious about such an important man in their midst, where he can’t take his eyes off the poet (who looks surprisingly like the man himself), wondering about each and every thing, eventually blurting out his own interest in becoming a poet. Neruda’s advice, upon reflection: “Try to walk along the shore, as far as the bay, and look around you.” Over time, Mario’s incessant questioning leads him to spend more time with Neruda, where his quizzical nature and halting speech seem so pure and innocent, almost childlike, yet the ever patient poet seems to delight in offering paternal wisdom, as it probably breaks up his day with these daily visits, often coming even when there’s no mail to deliver. But there is no more excitable moment than when Mario rushes up the mountainside with earth-shattering news, where you’d think the Pope had died, but like a mandatory trip to the confessional, Mario needs the poet’s advice, as he has fallen madly in love.

The woman in question is Beatrice Russo (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), the lovely barmaid that works in her mother’s restaurant and bar, spending her days all to herself for the most part as the men are away at sea. Mario is literally starstruck upon laying eyes on her, stunned, tongue-tied, unable to speak, where she may as well be an imaginary woman that exists only in his imagination, a beautiful woman loved from afar, where he excitedly asks the poet to write a poem to help him win the girl’s heart. Reminiscent of Cyrano’s poems to the beautiful Roxane in Edmond Rostand’s classic Cyrano de Bergerac, Mario is positively befuddled when the poet refuses, stumbling over himself with unleashed anxiety, “Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it; it belongs to those who need it.” Exasperated, with a sense of utter desperation, the poor man is flummoxed, lashing out sarcastically at the poet, “If you make this much of a fuss about one poem, you’re never going to win that Nobel Prize.” Neruda, of course, takes it all in stride, as he’s romantically living with a mistress that will eventually become his third wife, Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia (Anna Bonaiuto), seen dancing together on the flowered outdoor terrace overlooking the sea. While this may sound like the most far-fetched and sentimentalized story, it’s far from it, where both Troisi and Noiret are brilliant together, like long lost brothers who affectionately shelter each other from the storm, always warmhearted and intimate, having long conversations on the beach, where Mario’s driving needs are constantly spoiled by the seething rage of Beatrice’s mother (Linda Moretti), who is sure that communist poet is leading that boy into her daughter’s pants, pleading with the local priest to do something about it. But sincerity wins out in the end, where the film becomes a brilliant blend of romanticism and social realism, where Neruda’s time on the island is short, able to return to his native land, where time goes by and Mario feels the poet has all but forgotten him, where he has to assume his own responsibilities. But there’s a lovely turn of events when Mario returns to the villa to send items left behind, a nostalgic twist that gets at the heart of love and friendship, where he makes a recording of all the beautiful sounds that are unique to the island, including the heartbeat of his soon-to-be-born son, and sends them along, finding an extremely eloquent way to express a poetic finale, reminding viewers of the universal appeal of poetry and its ability to touch the very heart of humanity. Neruda’s work is deceptively simple in the way it celebrates the beauty of everyday objects and people, loving women, loving life, and his fellow man. The passion that Neruda exudes in his writing made him the object of great affection by women all over the world, where he was married three times, though his final love was Matilde Urrutia, the eventual love of his life, for whom he wrote The Captain’s Verses (Los Versos del Capitán) which were published anonymously in Italy in 1952 and not released under his own name until published in Chile in 1963. Neruda’s home in Chile was also a seaside residence, where he identifies with the ocean because of the internal movements of the waves, becoming something that remains alive in the rhythm of his poems. Surrounding himself with the vocabulary of his poems, “Her eyes were the color of faraway love,” he never accepts reality as it is, but expects us to relate to history in a creative way, to offer a better alternative. Much of his life was spent in exile, yet as a poet he is a national hero in Chile (no one fills that position in America), where his poems give identity to a continent and to a country.

Il Postino, directed by Michael Radford | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

When, in 1952, the exiled Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (Noiret) takes up residence in a house on a quiet little island off the Neapolitan coast, the fan mail he receives is so copious that the postmaster hires Mario (Troisi), the none too bright son of a local fisherman, to deliver the celebrity's mail. At first, Mario is simply star-struck by Neruda, who responds with understandable wariness to the postman's gauche attempts at conversation; soon, however, he's teaching Mario about metaphors, and when the postman falls for Beatrice (Cucinotta), a lovely but rather aloof barmaid, the poet agrees to try to help him win her with words. Inspired by an incident in Neruda's life, the story's engaging blend of easy humour and sunny romance takes hold from the start and never lets go. Much of its seductive charm derives from the excellence of the leads: Noiret does his gruff but malleable turn to perfection, while Troisi (who died soon after filming finished) exudes a simplicity of heart, mind and soul that never seems excessively sentimental. Mercifully, Radford avoids making the small peasant community too glamorously Arcadian. Old-fashioned it may be, but it knocks the spots off pap like Cinema Paradiso.

Il Postino: The Movie | Academy of American Poets - Poets.org

Based on true events, Il Postino portrays the story of a shy postman who develops a transformative friendship with the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. On a tiny island off the Italian coast in 1953, the postman has been given the job of delivering mail to the town’s new resident. He is astonished by the remarkable amount of mail from women that Neruda receives, and forges a relationship with the poet to learn the secret of his unlikely power over women. Through their friendship, Neruda not only helps the shy postman capture the town’s most beautiful woman, he also inspires the postman to see himself and his quiet fishing village a in lyrical way.

Nominated for five Academy awards, the film is a graceful masterpiece with beautiful performances by Philippe Noiret as Neruda and Massimo Troisi as Mario Ruoppolo, the postman. The film was Troisi’s dream project, and despite his failing heart he insisted on seeing it through and ultimately died the day production wrapped.

The film is based on the book Burning Patience by Antonio Skarmeta, which takes place in the early 1970s on Isla Negra, the tiny Chilean village where Neruda lived. The story follows the growth of a young postman whose only job is to deliver mail to Neruda, paralleling the changes in his inner life with the political upheavals in Chile.

Nathan Wolfson's review of "The Postman"

In 1970, Salvador Allende, after three unsuccessful attempts, finally became president of Chilé. He was, arguably, the first democratically elected Marxist to ever become a head of state. He began to implement the ideas of his Popular Unity platform and quickly became a target of the imperialistic tendencies of international business. The first major international accumulator of capital to grow wary was the American-based ITT corporation. By 1973, through their enlistment of the US Central Intelligence Agency, international capital was able to subject Chile to a violent military coup (in which Allende was killed). Aided by the United States, General Pinochet's bloody military dictatorship pandered to the interests of foreign investors for sixteen years. Allende's murder sent a resounding message around the world: mess with the interests of the rich and "we" will kill you.

The poet of the proletarian (as well as of the lover and beloved), Pablo Neruda, had been nominated for the same, "communist" party ticket but bowed out once Allende (a seasoned politician) expressed an interest in running for the presidency that fourth time. As fate would have it, Neruda died the same year that Allende was killed by American-backed forces. What would have happened had Neruda become president is open to speculation. His political attitudes, the social milieu in which he lived, and his achievements as a poet (Kenneth Rexroth--the father of the beats--once called him "almost certainly the leading poet of his type") are a matter of record.

Michael Radford's Il Postino (The Postman), now playing in Arcata, draws from this real life intermingling of left wing politics and poetry, while taking some liberties with the facts surrounding Neruda's life. These liberties belie a radically different agenda from that embodied in the life and work of Pablo Neruda. Drawing from--and occasionally diverging radically from--Antonio Skarmeta's novel Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience), Radford presents us with a set of scenes drawn largely from Skarmeta's book set within a somewhat altered scenario. Skarmeta's book was set in Chile prior to and during the Allende presidency. Il Postino takes place on a small Italian island, during and after Neruda's fictitiously composed exile there.

The film takes a cynical stance regarding the ability of the inhabitants of a rural fishing village--and, perhaps, of the film's audience--to understand political issues. The stance implies that working towards social equity is not worthwhile.

Prior to Neruda's arrival in the narrative, we are introduced to Mario. Early in the film, he goes to a movie theater. The newsreel Mario sees depicts the arrival of Neruda, recently cast out of Chile, at an Italian railway station amid protests aimed at convincing the Italian government to let Neruda stay. This newsreel forms a microcosm of Il Postino's attitude both towards the working people in the film and towards those who view the film.

The black-and-white images of the newsreel at first appear to mirror the simplistic voice-over accompanying the images of Neruda walking through a train-station full of protesters. The verbal narrative paints a dichotomous picture of Neruda's political consciousness and those of the newsreel's expected viewers. We, the newsreel implies, will view Neruda as an eccentric (perhaps even as a subversive) for his political views. At the same time, his notoriety as a poet (and, even more so, as a celebrity) will be what matters to us most.

Never mind that Neruda speaks eloquently of our plight as exploited individuals. Pay attention to "Neruda, the poet of love"--and to his romantic aura. But just as black-and-white images are really composed of varying shades of gray, the film subverts itself by pandering to an a- political/apathetic/right-wing understanding of the social world while unintentionally demonstrating this bias to us at the level of a sub-text.

This attitude of post-modern indifference to matters of politics and economics is a frightfully pervasive, implicit, rightist theme underlying many interludes in the film. An initial example occurs with the characterization of Mario's boss, Giorgio.

Giorgio runs the local post-and-telegraph office. Neruda is coming to town and will be receiving bags of mail each day that need to be delivered to his semi-remote home. Giorgio needs an individual to make a single, arduous special delivery every day. With un-acknowledged shades of DeSica's Bicycle Thieves (sic) in the air, Mario is granted a job paying "just enough to go to the cinema once a week" in light of the fact that he owns a bike.

The telling exchange between Giorgio and Mario occurs during their first encounter. In introducing the new postman to the standards of his office, Giorgio states plainly that while he is a "communist" he expects to be called "sir". This kind of ironic utterance is echoed through three or four similar scenes throughout the film.

On the surface, the humor is undeniable. Beneath that, however, lies a contempt for attempts to achieve social equity. The implication is that perhaps the most we can hope for from a movement for social justice is a good laugh based on its hypocrisy. But Radford suggests that we can expect more.

The "more" is not the political reality of being exiled embodied in Neruda's plight. This is part of the statement that the film makes. And it is certainly a necessary plot device inasmuch as it explains why Neruda is in Italy. But the "more" we can expect from social activism exposes itself more subtly.

One result of progressive political participation Radford presents is the untimely death of our beloved postman. Towards the end of the film, through a series of flashbacks, we see the recently politicized Mario attend a "communist" rally. When the rally is dispersed by the police, a small riot ensues. In the tumult, Mario is killed.

One is left with the feeling (expressed by Mario's wife), If only he hadn't gotten involved with radical politics! If only he hadn't gone to that rally on that fateful day! And so on. These views are expressed in the presence of Neruda, so she refrains from directly blaming him. But the implication is there, since Neruda inspired many of Mario's beliefs. And Neruda is visibly shaken with a kind of remorse mixed with disillusionment.

Of course, if it wasn't for "that poet" Mario might never have married the woman he fell in love with. This tension is at the root of the dichotomy Radford constructs. On one side of the balance, all these ideas about equality and democracy expressed by Neruda are either ridiculed or portrayed as dangerous. On the other side of the scale, we find Neruda the poet of love. It is this side of his pursuits that are heralded. Whether in the romantic love he and Matilde shared or in his ability to communicate the state of romantic ecstasy in verse (that permits others to find their own paths to such a destination), Neruda's actions are vindicated when unattached to concern about political, social and economic domination.

There are problems with comparing a film to the book from which it was derived. In most instances, I prefer to view the film as an independent creation and attempt to appreciate it on its own terms. But with Il Postino, examining some of the ways in which the film differs from its inspiration, Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience) offers insight into the films implicit argument against social awareness. There are many variations between the two texts. For example, as already mentioned, they are set in two different countries during two different periods of time. I'll describe just two indicative variations between the two works.

First, in the film, Neruda is portrayed as entirely uninterested in continuing contact with the people he has been living with--whose lives he has touched--once he departs from the fishing village. He stirs things within the hearts of the villagers, plays matchmaker for Mario, inspires the name of the new couple's child, informs Mario's political and aesthetic sensibilities--and then fails to write to or publicly speak of his Italian interlude. As one of the most cynical characters in the film comments, when a bird is done eating, it flies away.

In the book, however, Neruda remains much truer to the spirit of camaraderie he expressed about--and imparted to--the people of the small village near where he lived. Even in his absence, he still thinks of Mario. In the film, Mario turns to making a recording of characteristic sounds of the fishing village to send to Neruda (as a way of reminding him what he has left behind and how intensely Mario still feels for him). In the book, Neruda writes to Mario, sends him a Sony tape recorder, and asks Mario to make just such a recording because he is missing the village so much.

The film creates an implicitly two-faced radical intellectual who appears to live by an out-of-sight-out-of-mind principle. Without faulting the film for not faithfully adapting the book to the screen, this particular re-arrangement of the plot serves to further undermine our faith in the character of Neruda and the ideas of communalism he personifies.

Another telling discrepancy between the book and the film involves Mario's death. In the book he doesn't die. He grows old with his family, experiences the transformation of Chilean society under Allende (before the violent halt), and outlives Neruda. His politics and his love of Neruda do not kill him. These parts of his personality set Mario free.

Both of these inversions (who writes whom and who dies) demonstrate the underlying subtext present throughout much of Il Postino. I have little problem with a screenwriter altering a book however much to create a meaningful, independent film. But the manner in which this film reworks the book that inspired it serves to denigrate the potential for even mildly venerating work for social justice.

The message: Speak of metaphors about the sunset. Watch the sea's rippling waves. But pay no attention to the fellow removing the money from your pocket that you have earned. You're better off exploited than working for change.

The problem: Neruda's possible nagging doubts towards the end of his life not withstanding, I find at the core of Il Postino an undermining of the aspirations of all people (such as Neruda) who spend their lives working for justice.

Il Postino - Culture Court Lawrence Russell

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1995 [Erik Beck]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel

Il Postino / The Postman | Review by Chris Tookey

Review for Il postino (1994) - IMDb Dragan Antulov

Review for Il postino (1994) - IMDb Pedro Sena

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Jersey Film Society - review

Il Postino (1994) - Michael Radford - film review - Films de France James Travers

Il Postino Blu-ray (Italy) - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: Il Postino: Collector's Series

Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]

Film locations for Il Postino (1994) - Movie Locations

The Postman | Variety Derek Elley

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason

Tourists threaten Il Postino beach | Environment | The Guardian John Hooper, May 10, 2007

Washington Post Hal Hinson, also seen here: Hal Hinson

San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]

Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)

The Postman (Il Postino) Movie Review (1995) | Roger Ebert

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) also seen here: Movie Review - - FILM REVIEW: THE POSTMAN (IL POSTINO); A ...

FILM; The Required Deceptions Of 'Il Postino' - The New York Times May 28, 2000

Postino: The Postman - Wikipedia

MICHEL PETRUCCIANI

France Germany Italy (102 mi) 2011

Michel Petrucciani: Cannes Review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 2011

Doc about the French jazz pianist is a clear-eyed, non-judgmental portrait of an artist as a permanent young man.

If you only knew jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani through his recorded music, you’d know this was an extraordinary individual. His phrasing, the electricity of his right hand and the cleanness of his improvisations take jazz to the very heights of artistry. But as many jazz aficionados know and Michael Radford’s film Michel Petrucciani will make known to many more, one needs a better word than “extraordinary” to describe this man.

For Petrucciani was born in the south of France with osteogenesis imperfecta — or brittle bone disease — that prevented him from growing beyond three feet and subjected him to a life of pain as bones broke constantly, even as he was playing. None of this caused him ever to stop. He lived life in a rush — “I hate wasting time,” he says early in the film — knowing that with his affliction he would not enjoy a long life.

The film chronicles his overindulgence in food, drugs, wine, women and discarded friends as he raced against time, playing sometimes 10 hours a day and performing over 200 concerts in a year. He died at age 36 in New York in 1999, not so much from his handicap as foolishly going out into a cold New Year’s Eve with his fragile lungs and then catching pneumonia.

Radford has assembled ample footage and interviews with his subject from many friends and other sources along with numerous interviews with colleagues and lovers to pull together a clear-eyed, non-judgmental portrait of an artist as a permanent young man. Even spurned lovers and friends have mostly kindly things to say about a man who so blazed through their lives that they still have a startled, dazed look about them.

Here, clearly, is a charismatic, dazzlingly talented individual that lived every moment to the fullest. His 36 years is more like 72 for anyone else. He even managed to learn fluent, colloquial English in six months.

What the film never says is that music may be what nourished him, that every hour at the piano may have added an hour or more to his life. Another thing the film only barely mentions is that his deformity, if you will, may have added to his genius. To witness in archival footage the rapidity with which the fingers of his right hand hits the piano keys defies all understanding of that part of the human anatomy. How can fingers move so fast? They don’t seem to with a “normal” person’s hand.

The one great fault with this doc, which makes an ideal film for special runs in art-house venues and, of course, on TV and DVD, lies in Radford’s unwillingness to identify his interviewees. In press notes he claims such identification is “irrelevant.” No, it’s not.

Otherwise though, the film has much to stay about overcoming fate, loving life and living with eternal optimism.

Michel Petrucciani Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

It’s always a labour of love to make a jazz film, a jazz documentary even more so - especially when the musician subject is no longer around to promote it. But the labour pays off beautifully in Michel Petrucciani, Michael Radford’s fond and informative portrait of the phenomenal jazz pianist, who died in 1999. Petrucciani’s life is a story of exuberant triumph over challenge, and of the pleasures and prices of living life to the full.

The film takes a four-square but effective documentary approach, stitching together archive footage with interviews, and features enough of Petrucciani’s performances to make this a must for jazz buffs, whether or not they’re fans of the subject himself (major jazz names interviewed include Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano and John Abercrombie). This will be a hard sell theatrically outside jazz-loving France, where it’s released in September, but its DVD prospects should be brisk.

The film represents a confident return to non-fiction for British director Radford, best known for 1984 and Italian-language hit Il Postino but a documentarist through the 1970s. Here, Radford takes an unshowy and intensely sympathetic rather than reverent approach to the life
Petrucciani, who was born in 1962 in Montpelier, France with the condition osteogenesis imperfecta, sometimes known as ‘brittle bone disease’.

As an adult, Petrucciani grew to only three feet, while his fragility meant that he often broke his bones and that his extremely energetic playing style was a constant physical risk. The son of a jazz guitarist father, Petrucciani fell in love with piano after seeing Duke Ellington on TV at the age of four. Rapidly becoming a prodigy, he played his first professional concert with trumpeter Clark Terry at the age of 13 - although some friends are quick to debunk the myth about the gig being an entirely impromptu marvel.

Through a friend, the pianist visited California, where he was befriended by saxophonist and mystic Charles Lloyd. A phenomenal transatlantic career followed, with Petrucciani becoming the first non-French artist signed to legendary label Blue Note. Success also brought the opportunity to indulge himself, and much of the ’80s, we learn, was spent in a wild rush of champagne, cocaine and partying.

Petrucciani, we learn, was irresistible to women and, one former consort claims, was as talented between the sheets as on the keys. In interviews filmed at various stages in his life, Petrucciani is candid about his hedonistic tendency to overdo things - a penchant which, friends suggest, contributed to his early death. This portrait is anything but reverent about the pianist - we learn from his ex-wives and girlfriends that he had a habit of leaving one abruptly to take up with another, and associates reveal, albeit sketchily, that he had a callous side.

But what emerges, not least from footage of the man himself, is that Petrucciani was a hugely charismatic and ebullient character. Most importantly, we get insights into his blindingly rapid and inventive playing; and ample, hugely pleasurable footage of Petrucciani solo, or in tandem with greats such as Lloyd, Konitz and Stéphane Grappelli will make non-converts want to go out and discover the music.

Radok, Alfred

THE DISTANT JOURNEY (Daleká Cesta) A- 94

Czechoslovakia (103 mi) 1949

A modernist Holocaust film made just a few years after the end of WWII using an experimental film style that includes archival film mixed with re-enactments which offers a vivid feel that resembles Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone. The film opens like the Nazi Academy Awards, as one by one, each top ranking official, from Hitler to Goebbels on down, introduced in a huge title boldly displayed onscreen, is seen at the podium offering a rousing speech for the fatherland, like a series of Nazi greatest hits, accompanied by marching troops and bold Nazi symbols. After a blitzkrieg of Nazi images, another realist story begins about a female Jewish doctor in Prague who refuses to leave her country, despite the rising tide of anti-Semitism and violence, claiming this is her country and her language. So her family decides to stay with her instead of emigrating abroad, even after she marries a fellow doctor, a Gentile man for protection, beautifully expressed during a time when anti-Jewish laws were being written, where being Jewish was outlawed, where one of the guests actually commits suicide afterwards, all happening offscreen, which introduces Jewish symbols, using a split screen, where a Jewish menorah is seen in a small square off to the side of the main images of a Nazi military parade, a method used to juxtapose the two events happening simultaneously throughout the film.

Also of interest, the dialogue occasionally completely disappears, turning the story into a silent film, using shadows and other Expressionist images, also barely lit film noir imagery with occasional jolts of energy from a mixture of avant garde jazz music and orchestral passages to enhance the mood. All in all, it was rather difficult to follow the narrative, as the characters resembled one another, and one did need to have a knowledge of history to understand the nuances, such as the use of the Terezin (Terezienstadt) concentration camp in Prague as a show camp, supposedly built to protect the Jews, a mythical idyllic city cleaned up, with children singing in the corner of the frame, giving the Red Cross from the West a view of Jews living in peaceful harmony before the curtain falls after they leave, turning from a transport camp, a waiting station until they could be transported further East into the death camps, into another one of the Nazi crematoriums where nearly 100,000 died, including 15,000 children.

One by one, where all the Jews are marked by the mandatory wearing of a Jewish star, the doctor’s family is shipped off to the camps, while a Jewish band plays music as they are herded like cattle down the city streets, leaving her in a state of bewilderment, not knowing what happened to any of them, while she herself is eventually fired from her job, and all the other Jews are rounded up to live in a cramped ghetto without walls, totalling some 150,000, until eventually she and her Aryan husband are among the last to be transported to the camps. When the scene shifts to the camps, we see them building the crematoriums, with brief documentary images of actual dead bodies lying in an open field. Unfortunately, this film begins to resemble a style of miserablism, with unnecessarily exaggerated displays of sadistic Nazi temperament, always displaying the most openly cruel behavior possible. The filmmaker Radok was himself imprisoned in the last months of the war in the detention camp of Klettendorf near Wrocław, from which he managed to escape, so the material is never anything less than genuine and riveting. The film had a limited release, suppressed by the Soviet state which controlled Czechoslovakia after the war, which may have actually altered the film in its present form, limiting the view of widespread theft of Jewish possessions, and perhaps suppressing the sentiments of the non-Jewish Czechs, such as the father of the groom who failed to attend the wedding, as the film was not really seen until some forty years later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Today, the film contains historical perspective, like Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1945), as it was filmed so near the end of the war and features many of the devices used by Roman Polanski in his early terrifying horror film REPULSION (1965), such as the use of offscreen sound, a mix of the real and unreal, vivid use of music, particularly percussion, and an understanding of Expressionist cinema.

CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the 1940's Charles Coleman, Facets Film Programmer

Confronting the horrors of history head on, Radok and his crew shot this first feature film about the Holocaust just three years after the war ended. The film combines actual footage with reenactments and Expressionist camera setups to create a vivid, immediate look at the concentration camps. With Blanka Waleská, Otomar Krejča. Directed by Alfred Radok, Czechoslovakia, 1949, 35mm, 103 mins.

Czech Modernism in Film: The 1920s to the 1940s JR Jones from the Reader

Czech director Alfred Radok lost his father and grandfather in the Holocaust and spent several months in a detention camp himself, which makes the poetic control of his 1949 drama -- the first to confront the subject -- even more impressive. He carefully charts the growing anti-Semitic persecution in Prague, as a Jewish doctor tries to protect herself by marrying a gentile, then watches her relatives being shipped off to a transport camp in Terezin. Though the movie is filled with striking expressionist images, Radok also weaves in documentary footage of the Third Reich, telescoping the dramatic action into a frame within the frame that echoes the victims' powerlessness.

Village Voice J. Hoberman (excerpt)

"Czech Modernism" includes only two postwar movies—one, Alfred Radok's 1949 The Distant Journey (December 10), is a masterpiece. Among the first movies to represent the Holocaust, Distant Journey focuses on a Jewish doctor who briefly forestalls her deportation to the "model" concentration camp at Terezin by marrying a Czech colleague. (Their wedding dinner is a remarkable blend of gaiety and terror— the proper bourgeois guests marked for death by their mandatory Jewish stars.)

Like Orson Welles, Radok was a man of the theater and his use of film form has a comparable audacity. Distant Journey is filled with outsize shadows and shimmering reflections; it interpolates newsreels and noir angles, using a spare, mournfully jazzy soundtrack to underscore its expressionist touches. Once the action shifts to Terezin (where Radok's father and grandfather died), the fantastic is a function of the movie's verisimilitude.

This horrifying, emptied-out world seems distinctively Czech—or at least Kafkaesque—with its gnarled old people and vast warehouses filled with confiscated Jewish belongings.

Something similar happened to the movie itself—withdrawn after a brief run and locked in the vaults for the better part of two decades. In his history of Czech cinema, novelist Josef Skvorecky links The Distant Journey to the Czech new wave of the 1960s, remembering it to have been "as much a revelation to all of us as were the films of Véra Chytilová, Milos Forman, or Jan Nemec"—all of whom were profoundly influenced by this "tragically premature and anachronistic work of art."

The Reeler Peter Hames

Central Europe Review an extensive review by Jiří Cieslar

New York Times Bosley Crowther

Rafelson, Bob

Bob Rafelson | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Hal Erickson

The nephew of famed playwright Samson Raphaelson, American director Bob Rafelson decided to forego the expensive education planned for him and take up cross-country vagabondage instead. He worked in a rodeo at 15, became an ocean-liner deckhand two years later, and a jazz drummer a year after that. He entered Dartmouth College, after which he worked as a deejay on an Armed Forces radio outlet. As a writer, Rafelson toiled in numerous New York-based TV shows, then travelled westward to try his luck in Hollywood. His breezy, patchwork writing style was perfectly suited to the Beatles-like TV sitcom The Monkees (1966-67), wherein Rafelson worked as writer, director, and coproducer (with Bert Schneider). In concert with then-partner Jack Nicholson, Rafelson penned the script for the surrealistic Monkees feature film Head (1968), which he also directed. The film was suitable impetus to the Columbia Pictures higher ups to bankroll another Rafaelson-Nicholson collaboration. Five Easy Pieces (1971), was an intensely personal and somewhat autobiographical study of a young man (Nicholson) whose alienation with the status quo causes him to chuck the security of his musical career and his wealthy family for a life of drifting. The critics loved Five Easy Pieces, but were less enthusiastic about the 1972 Rafelson/Nicholson concoction, King of Marvin Gardens, in which Nicholson played the establishment figure, while fellow 1970s icon Bruce Dern played the dreamer. Stay Hungry (1976) was a story of bodybuilding juxtaposed with the changes in the New South, boasting an early leading role for Arnold Schwarzenegger — and the first-ever nude scene for costar Sally Field. Critics of Stay Hungry called Rafelson on the carpet for his credit-grabbing attempts to become an "auteur" director, even though these same critics had applauded Rafelson's auterism in his earlier productions. With The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) — again with Nicholson as star — Rafelson lost much of his critical support for having the audacity to turn out a purely commercial product. Actually, Rafalson's improvisational style had gotten slicker as he gained more experience. Bob Rafelson's most recent film was Mountains of the Moon (1990) a lavish but still distinctly Rafelsonesque period piece about a 19th century "anti-establishment" rugged individualist, explorer Sir Richard Burton.

Film Reference profile by Rodney Farnsworth

Bob Rafelson is a neglected director mainly because he lays bare the myths essential to America. He does not sugarcoat the bitter dose of his satire, as do Coppola and Altman. A distaste on the part of mainstream critics has caused attacks upon, but mostly the neglect of, Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens , which is his most representative film. Head is bound by the conventions of the teenage-comedy genre and shows few marks of Rafelson's authorship; Stay Hungry is a minor work that sustains his standard theme of the dropout—this time it is a Southern aristocrat who falls into the underworld, which is ambiguously mixed with the business world above. Something of a popular success, Five Easy Pieces certainly demands attention.

Five Easy Pieces was the first expression of the burned-out liberalism that was to become the hallmark of American films of the 1970s. Rafelson's film expresses the intelligentsia's dissatisfaction with its impotency in light of an overweening socio-economic structure. Either capitulating or dropping out seemed the only choices. The film's protagonist seeks escape, from a successful but unsatisfying career as a concert pianist into the world of the working class—first as an oil-field worker and then, at the end of the film, as a logger. The film centers on his foray into the bourgeois bohemia of his family's home—a sort of ad hoc artist colony under the aegis of his sister. The world we see is both figuratively and literally one of cripples. His sister's lover is in traction. His father is a paralytic. All are emblems of a pseudoclass, without a vital motive force, that the protagonist rejects, but cannot replace. The protagonist's sole contribution to an intellectual discussion among his sister's friends is an obscene comment on the senselessness of their phrase-weaving. In the largest sense, Five Easy Pieces is about the American intellectual's self-hatred, his disorientation in an essentially anti-intellectual society, and his resulting inability to feel comfortable with his capacity to think and to create.

The King of Marvin Gardens cuts through the American dream—the belief that every man can achieve riches by ingenuity. The protagonist becomes drawn into his brother's success dream. Rafelson sets the film in pre-boom Atlantic City—an emblem of economic desolation. The locale's aptness is affirmed by the scene of the protagonist's sister-in-law throwing her make-up into a fire. Her ageing face, without make-up, is seen against the dilapidated facade of boardwalk hotels. Her gesture (and in Rafelson's uncommitted world we daren't ask for more) of defiance is directed against what has been the female share of the American Dream: the male has traditionally taken for himself the power that comes of wealth and left woman the illusion called "glamour." Another symbol is the blowing up of an old hotel; it collapses in a heap like the dream of entrepreneurship the protagonist momentarily shares with his brother.

Rafelson's elliptical style creates tension and interest in the opening moments of thrillers like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Black Widow , and Man Trouble , but this style makes for occasional plot confusion. It is often hard to tell whether the ellipses are accidental or part of aesthetic strategy. In one instance, whatever the intent, an ellipsis poetically seems to suggest a shudder of horror at the human condition and a desire to drop out entirely from it: Rafelson suddenly presents us with the strangely clipped, abrupt walkout of the protagonist at the end of Black Widow. The films focus on what is the main theme of Rafelson's films of the 1980s and 1990s: betrayal from those closest to you, especially from within the family group. Rafelson cannot ever be said to have been caught up in the recent sentimentalism about the traditional family structure. In his filmic vision, he places no trust in the values found there.

Only in the unconventional pairing between the explorer Burton and a liberated aristocrat (exhilaratingly played by Fiona Shaw) in Mountains of the Moon does one find a positive vision of marriage and human trust, achieved only after the hero drops out from the competitive struggle for grants toward explorations and for credit from the findings. Burton experiences betrayal from Spekes, his boon companion during the exploration of the mountains at the source of the Nile River. While the film tries but fails to exonerate Burton of any deep complicity in British imperialism, it does pointedly show how powerful English interests seek in every possible way to harm his career and discount his accomplishments because he is of Irish birth. The socio-historical impact is otherwise weakened by the narrative. Whereas Rafelson's thrillers benefit from elliptical expositions, they play considerable havoc with much of the first half of Mountains of the Moon. Rafelson has failed to gain audience popularity and rare critical approval because he does not soften brutal political deconstruction with dazzling techniques. He devotes his attention not only to the straightforward expression of his themes but to getting brilliant acting out of his casts. He forces them to explore the darker sides of their characters—each a microcosm of society.

Biography for Bob Rafelson - TCM.com Shawn Dwyer biography from Turner Classic Movies

Bob Rafelson: Information from Answers.com biography

Bob Rafelson | American director and producer | Britannica.com biography

Bob Rafelson The Indie King, which includes a biography, from Film Festival

the lecture bureau presents... Bob Rafelson profile

New York State Writers Institute - Bob Rafelson profile

Bob Rafelson - Screenrush biography

Bob Rafelson - Overview - MSN Movies

Bob Rafelson brief bio from NNDB

Bob Rafelson @ Filmbug brief bio

Bob Rafelson from No Good Deed - at Film.com brief bio and filmography

Bob Rafelson Mubi

Bob Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces' is the quintessential film of the so ... Cinephilia and Beyond (Undated)

Film View; THE STORY IS THE SAME BUT HOLLYWOOD HAS CHANGED Janet Maslin from The New York Times, April 26, 1981

Boardwalk Xanadu: Time and Place in The King of Marvin Gardens ... Boardwalk Xanadu: The Time and Place in The King of Marvin Gardens and Atlantic City, by Maria San Filippo from Senses of Cinema, April 10, 2001

Five Easy Pieces - Bright Lights Film Journal Andrew Culbertson, August 1, 2007

Bob Rafelson | Popdose Ken Shane from Popdose, November 19, 2009

Michael Wood reviews 'Five Easy Pieces' · LRB 9 September 2010 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, September 2010

TSPDT - Bob Rafelson They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

Bob Rafelson | The New Yorker October 24, 1970 interview

Film Journal Interview Bob Rafelson and His Odd American Places, includes an interview by Peter Tonguette from The Film Journal, October 2004

The Monologist and the Fighter: An Interview with Bob Rafelson ... Franz Müller and Rainer Knepperges interview from Senses of Cinema, April 14, 2009

BFI | Sight & Sound | One for the road: Bob Rafelson and 'Five Easy ... David Thomson chats with the director from Sight and Sound, September 2010

Bob Rafelson · Article · The A.V. Club Noel Murray interview, November 22, 2010

Bob Rafelson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HEAD

USA (86 mi) 1968 Director’s Cut (110 mi)

After NBC canceled their innovative sitcom, the Monkees and their TV brain trust, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, hatched this big-screen psychedelic freak-out (1968), a narrative cul-de-sac of genre parodies, musical numbers, smug antiwar statements, and bilious McLuhan-esque satire. Scripted by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson (who would next collaborate on Five Easy Pieces), it's uneven but mostly a blast, with great tunes like Harry Nilsson's "Daddy's Song," Michael Nesmith's barn burner "Circle Sky," and Gerry Goffin and Carole King's grandiose "Porpoise Song." Rafelson directed; with cameos by Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello, Sonny Liston, Teri Garr, and Victor Mature. 86 min.

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review

Rafelson's first feature, made when Monkee mania had all but died, Head proved too experimental for the diminishing weenybop audience which had lapped up the ingenious TV series. It flopped dismally in the US, and only achieved belated release here. Despite obviously dated aspects like clumsy psychedelic effects and some turgid slapstick sequences, the film is still remarkably vital and entertaining. Rafelson (who helped to create the group), together with Jack Nicholson (co-writer and co-producer), increased the TV show's picaresque tempo while also adding more adult, sardonic touches. The calculated manipulation behind the phenomenon is exposed at the start, when the Monkees metaphorically commit suicide. The typical zany humour is intercut with harsher political footage and satire on established genres of American cinema, exploding many a sacred cow into the bargain.

Head (1968) - Articles - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

It sounds like someone's LSD flashback. Frank Zappa, boxer Sonny Liston, Annette Funicello, female impersonator T.C. Jones, San Francisco's legendary topless dancer Carol Doda and other cult celebrities appear in a movie scripted by Jack Nicholson and directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) that showcases the TV-created pop band The Monkees in the leading roles who in one scene play dandruff in Victor Mature's hair. Entitled Head (1968), this Cuisinart-puree of pop culture infused with anti-establishment posturing and served up in the then-current style of a trippy experimental film could only have happened in the late sixties when Hollywood studios were in a try-anything phase to capture the rapidly receding youth market. Rampant use of recreational drugs among Hollywood's elite and film industry personnel might have had something to do with it too.

Virtually plotless with a free-form structure that owed a lot to the scattershot sketch format of TV's "Laugh-In" (1968-1973), Head was like the anti-A Hard Day's Night (1964) for cynical hipsters. Instead of depicting David, Micky, Michael and Peter as the endearing goofballs worshipped by teenyboppers across America, it deconstructed their image, revealing them to be a synthetic by-product of Hollywood marketing. The irony was that The Monkees were in on the joke and were only too happy to spoof their once popular TV series (1966-1968) and their pre-packaged personalities. Head also marked Bob Rafelson's feature film debut after an apprenticeship of producing and directing episodes of The Monkees TV series. And it was clearly a transitional film for Jack Nicholson who already had penned several screenplays including The Trip (1967) and was on the verge of stardom without knowing it - Easy Rider (1969), released the following year, would catapult the actor to overnight success.

Initially called Untitled, Head was an unconventional project from the beginning. According to author Patrick McGilligan in Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, "Bob, Bert [Schneider, executive producer], and Jack, with the four Monkees in tow, went to Ojai [California] for several days. They smoked "a ton of dope" (as Davy Jones recalls) and tossed ideas into a running tape recorder...The script was set up to have the least continuity imaginable, and only the slenderest plot trigger - the four Monkees leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge in an effort to escape the mental prison of a black box, which was "Head," meaning pothead, but also meaning all the rules and straitlaced conventions inside one's head that inhibit enjoyment of life. With their tapes and notes, Nicholson and Rafelson went away to the desert for inspiration. According to at least one account, they scribbled a treatment while tripping on acid."

By the time filming began on Head, The Monkees were less than happy with their circumstances. Not only were they feuding with Columbia over their contracts and salaries but they felt betrayed by Rafelson and Nicholson after they were informed that none of them would receive a writing credit on the film. "We were disappointed and angry," Micky Dolenz said. "Mike was furious. He took all the tapes and locked them in the trunk of his car!" As a result, Micky, Davy and Mike (without Peter's involvement) refused to show up on the first day of shooting which infuriated Rafelson and Nicholson. After a day of negotiations, filming resumed with all four band members but relations between the Monkees and their director were decidedly strained after that...and Mike, Davy, Micky and Peter never received a writer's credit for their contributions.

When Head was completed, Rafelson and Nicholson launched a guerilla advertising campaign in New York City, plastering stickers for the film everywhere on taxicabs, signs, police helmets, you name it. At one point they were even arrested for being public nuisances but their efforts were in vain. The critics were unimpressed and the film held little appeal for anyone who wasn't a fan of the Monkees' TV show. Dolenz stated later, "Because the film was rated R, most of our fans couldn't even get into the theatre to see it in the first place and those who did just didn't have any idea of what we were up to." Nicholson, however, maintains even today that Head is one of his proudest accomplishments and still calls it "the best rock-'n-roll movie ever made." Despite its commercial failure, Rafelson was equally pleased with it, comparing it often to Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

The remarkable thing about Head is how well it holds up today despite being mired in the counterculture of the sixties. Some of the satirical jabs and anti-war rhetoric are as timely as ever, particularly the scene where Micky attacks a defective coke machine in the middle of an Arabian desert set. Or the scene where a deranged football player (Green Bay Packers' middle linebacker Ray Nitschke) repeatedly tackles Peter in a foxhole while chanting, "We're number one, we're number one!" Rafelson and Nicholson also have fun spoofing different movie genres and in one Western burlesque Teri Garr gets to deliver the immortal line "Suck it, before the venom reaches my heart!" after being bitten by a rattlesnake. The film's uneasy mixture of comedic throwaway bits with actual newsreel footage of Viet Nam and other flash points of the sixties gives it a subversive edge though some critics found it pretentious. "There was this one very disturbing sequence," Dolenz recalled, "in which Bob used that famous piece of news footage of Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulling out a snub-nosed .38 and shooting Vietcong Captain Bay Lop in the head....At one point in the movie it is shown thirty-two times simultaneously in split screen."

In the end, The Monkees may have had the last laugh since they were finally able to play their own music in Head after being dubbed by studio musicians in their television show (The band members, with the exception of Michael Nesmith, weren't real musicians when they were first hired for the TV series but learned how to play by the time Head went into production). And Head includes some of their best songs such as Nesmith's all-out-rocker "Circle Sky" (recorded before a live audience in Utah), Tork's two "Summer of Love" ditties, "Can You Dig It" and "Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again," "As We Go Along," a Carole King-Toni Stern composition featuring the guitar work of Ry Cooder and Neil Young, plus "Daddy's Song" by Harry Nilsson and the psychedelic opening number, "Porpoise Song," written by Jerry Coffin and Carole King.

Years after being ridiculed as an infantile imitation of The Beatles, packaged for fickle teenagers, The Monkees are finally getting a little overdue respect for Head whose cult continues to grow whenever it is shown. And Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson have nothing to be ashamed of either.

Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Head (1968) - The Criterion Collection

3B Theater

User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

All Movie Guide [Donald Guarisco]

The New York Times (Renata Adler, Vincent Canby) review

FIVE EASY PIECES A 96

USA (98 mi) 1970

You don’t sit down and say, “I’m feeling alienated today, I think I’ll make a movie about alienation.” —Bob Rafelson (director)

Shot while Nixon was secretly bombing Cambodia in the winter of 1969 – 70 and released in September 1970, the same year as the Kent State shootings, 100,00 people marched on Washington D.C. protesting the war, and the Beatles released Let It Be. A 60’s counterculture film, Counterculture of the 1960s, one that reflects the mood of rebellion and alienation during the Vietnam war era, one of the first to be viewed by mainstream audiences portraying the dissatisfaction of an anti-hero while also using a new indie style in American cinema, where the minimalist approach in telling a story is a different way of expressing itself, a complete turn away from the action and Hollywood glamorization which shoots for overkill, like PATTON (1970) which won the Best Picture and George C. Scott the Best Actor (which he refused to accept) at the Academy Awards that year. Perhaps the industry wasn’t ready yet to recognize and herald in a new era in filmmaking driven by naturalistic performances, but the film, screenplay, and two acting performances were nominated for Academy Awards and certainly left its mark with pitch perfect direction and a moody self reflection that continues to challenge the collective consciousness of the nation. It remains a classic example of dropping out of society, as seen today in the films of Kelly Reichardt like OLD JOY (2006) and WENDY AND LUCY (2008), where disenchantment with the system overall may not lead to any specific new answers, but it does send one in search of new directions. Shot by the brilliant Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács, a lover of naturalist landscapes and fresh off his work in EASY RIDER (1969), his use of differing location shots exquisitely depicts the central character’s state of mind, as it moves from the oil fields of Bakersfield, California to the scenic Pacific coast highway to the upper class exclusivity of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound, Washington.

Displaying an array of skills we only see early in his career, Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his career in Bobby Eroica Dupree, a brooding outsider layered in an understated and downbeat realism that borders on miserablism and discontent, a gifted classical piano student who left his upper class background and traded it in for a life on the road, working the hot and back breaking work as a rigger on the oil rigs, living in a trailer, spending his time drinking beer in cheap bars and motels and bowling alleys while living with his girl Rayette, Tammy Wynette stand-in Karen Black in one of her more superb roles as a pretty but dim-witted waitress with a mouth that won’t quit, where at one point he tells her “If you wouldn't open your mouth, everything would be just fine.” She smothers him with her undying love, while he prefers to keep a safe distance, making no commitments which he obtains through male cruelty and infidelity, regularly spending nights away from Rayette and sleeping with whatever comes around, which includes Sally Struthers in one memorable scene. When his co-worker on the rigs, Elton (Billy Green Bush) lets it slip that Rayette is pregnant, Bobby flips out in a full tantrum, pissed that his life is suddenly in full view for others to pass judgment upon, especially since he went to such trouble to disappear to the ends of the earth where no one would find him.

Around this same time he visits his sister making a classical recording in Los Angeles and learns that their father has had several strokes and can no longer speak, where she urges him to visit, perhaps for the last time. Initially walking out the door without her, Bobby repents in anger and disgust when he realizes he must ask Rayette to come along, which turns into the comic sequences of the film, acerbically written by Carole Eastman under the name Adrien Joyce at the time (the entire film is really a connection of extremely well written sequences), as they pick up two lesbian hitchhikers, one of whom (Helena Kallianiotes) constantly chatters away about how the world is filthy and fucked up and a waste of time to live in, like a Travis Bickel monologue from Taxi Driver (1976), endlessly griping and complaining for the duration of the trip, a marathon of annoyance that is a marvel of comic invention Crap and more crap and more crap - YouTube (1:23). During this segment they stop at a local diner where Nicholson does his infamous chicken sandwich request to a befuddled waitress (Lorna Thayer), hold the chicken, all in an attempt to get a side order of toast which was not on the menu Five Easy Pieces Diner Scene - YouTube (1:53). When his sarcasm gets them kicked out, his iconic reputation for being a wise ass was solidified.

By the time they get to Puget Sound, Bobby parks his girl in some cheap motel while he goes to visit his family, calling in every few days to report nothing’s happening, while in reality, he gets the hots for Susan Ansbach, a young pianist who is studying music and also engaged to his brother Carl. In little time the audience gets a sense of what Bobby was running away from, as this little den of secluded artists is really a picture of family dysfunction, superbly exposed by the roving eye of the camera which catches every meticulous detail. When Rayette shows up unannounced after a week or so with the subtlety of a Mack truck, it turns out to be a hilarious contrast in social class, each more contemptible than the other, where it’s difficult to tell which one he’s ashamed of the most, his family or Rayette. In the end, of course, nothing compares to the loathing he feels for himself. Nicholson does have a brilliant monologue alone with his father Jack Nicholson: Five Easy Pieces ("Life You Don't ... - YouTube (3:15), where he attempts to make some sense out of his messed up life, where he continually fouls things up so bad that he has to run away from his own stupid mistakes, a haunting scene that actually includes tears, perhaps the only Jack Nicholson scene on record to do so. When he makes his escape, it comes in the most unexpected fashion, a moody, existential moment where he takes stock of his life, all shot in a masterful style of picturesque quiet and understatement Five Easy Pieces (8/8) Movie CLIP - I'm Fine (1970 ... YouTube (2:12).

Time Out review (link lost)

Rafelson's second film - in which Jack Nicholson, seemingly a redneck oil-rigger, turns out to be a fugitive from a musical career inherited from a family of classical musicians - is a considered examination of the middle-class patrician American way of family life. Centreing on Nicholson's drifter, the film unswervingly brings him into confrontations with his past as he equally unswervingly attempts to evade everything, preferring to make gestures rather than act consistently. The result is less a story and more a collection of incidents and character studies, all of which inform each other and extend our understanding of Nicholson's mode of survival: flight.

Time Out Tom Huddleston

Hollywood’s early-’70s identity crisis produced a multitude of masterpieces, but few are fit to stand alongside Bob Rafelson’s autumnal 1970 tragedy ‘Five Easy Pieces’. In his most restrained and arguably finest role, Jack Nicholson plays Robert Eroica DuPea, a cultural refugee from a well-to-do musical dynasty hiding out in a California trailer park and trying unsuccessfully to drink and screw away his deep-seated sense of shame and self disgust.

It’s a film of stark, superbly judged and beautifully sustained contrasts, the soundtrack hopping confidently from Tammy Wynette to Chopin as Bobby and his waitress girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) travel from the lusty, sun-baked south to the cerebral, rainswept north to pay final respects to Bobby’s dying father. Refusing to submit either to gross sentimentality or pompous pontificating, Rafelson and co-writer Adrien Joyce play their themes like piano keys, touching lightly but effectively on ideas of masculinity and mortality, class and creativity, family and frustration.

It’s not a particularly subtle film – some of the supporting characters, notably Black’s dogged but witless Rayette, are written and played a little broadly – but it is a magnificently insightful and engaging one, flipping effortlessly from icy realism to heated melodrama while always maintaining a darkly comic, at times quietly satirical undercurrent. All of which is reflected in Nicholson’s phenomenal central performance, for Bobby is himself a kind of actor, playing at being ugly, mean and self-sufficient in a doomed effort to disguise his absolute emotional emptiness, feeling himself exposed layer by layer as the film approaches its devastating climax.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs

The films of the so-called American New Wave were united by an effort to translate European arthouse aesthetics to a U.S. idiom. They fluctuated wildly in their success, but FIVE EASY PIECES is one of the era's few enduring masterpieces. Much of its success derives from its central antihero, Bobby Eroica Dupree, an invention worthy of epic literature but realized in wholly cinematic terms. Carol Eastman (working under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) wrote the character specifically for Jack Nicholson, an actor whose moodiness and darting intelligence have never been better deployed. Dupree's alienation is always a wonder to behold, as the character constantly switches allegiance between his performing-arts background (which comes through in moments of off-handed arrogance) and the perceived authenticity of the working class (which he attempts to emulate by living in a trailer and affecting macho self-confidence). Everything he does is a failed attempt to divert his angst: Working on an oil rig, picking up every blue-collar girl that comes his way, even (in the movie's creepy final shot) trying to rid himself completely of his identity: Nothing can satisfy this soul determined to live in exile. Working with the great naturalist cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, Rafelson says as much about the film's locations as he does the lead character, plumbing the zeitgeist in such disparate locations as the oil rigs of central California and an upper-class manor off the coast of Washington state. This beautiful but haunted island is the setting of FIVE EASY PIECES' final act, where Nicholson's prodigal son returns to visit the dying father he loathes. The place is populated exclusively, it would seem, by neurotic musical prodigies: It's the closest equivalent in U.S. movies to the penitential "resorts" that Ingmar Bergman's late-period characters are always flocking to; and this may be, overall, the most profound U.S. film to take inspiration from Bergman's cinema. While taking a page from Bergman's drama of painful self-examination, FIVE EASY PIECES--collaborative filmmaking at its finest--extends such scrutiny to an entire generation. Note: Facets will be screening a new print of the film in celebration of its 40th anniversary. It purportedly restores all of the film's grainy, sun-bolstered majesty. (1970, 97 min, 35mm)

Last Week - CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs

FIVE EASY PIECES is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the New American Cinema, displaying a complexity worthy of epic literature in wholly cinematic terms. Carol Eastman (working under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) wrote the character of Bobby Eroica Dupree specifically for Jack Nicholson, and it's one of the greatest gifts a writer has ever given to a screen actor. Drawing on the actor's moodiness and darting intelligence, Eastman created an unforgettable antihero, a contemptuous jackass who's also a wounded, pitiable soul. When we first meet Dupree, he's a surly blue-collar type working on an oilrig; we quickly learn, however, that this life is only an epic charade, an attempt to convince the world he isn't really a blue-blood piano prodigy. Yet the charade is a failure, as Dupree lashes out at his friends and cheats constantly on the sweet-hearted girl naive enough to love him (Karen Black, in the movie's other immortal performance). Few U.S. films have depicted so precisely the love-hate relationship between a certain type of intellectual and the working class. The opening passages of FIVE EASY PIECES are careful not to condemn Dupree's arrogance; it's clear that he sincerely respects the authenticity of blue-collar America, even if he can never emulate it himself. (Beneath Dupree's pouting is an unspoken feeling of betrayal by American culture for being far more stratified than it presents itself to be—a sentiment at once immature, jaundiced, and highly relatable.) He displays a similar ambivalence in the movie's final act (to which the film drifts, novelistically, after a brief stint as a road movie), when this prodigal son visits the dying father he hasn't seen in years. The family manor sits on a small island off the coast of Washington state: Rich in natural beauty and appearing chilly even in summer, it's the closest equivalent in U.S. movies to the desolate islands that Ingmar Bergman's characters are always retreating to. Indeed, this may be the most successful response to Bergman's cinema that American movies produced, climaxing in a scene of confession that taps into an almost universal pain. (Nicholson purportedly wrote this scene himself, which may explain why the feeling of self-examination cuts so deep; there's nothing else like it in his career.) There are other noticeable influences of European art cinema in Bob Rafelson's direction, namely Michelangelo Antonioni's portraits of modern alienation; but one of the reasons that FIVE EASY PIECES is so extraordinary is that it manages to speak through its influences instead of simply imitate them. Working with the great naturalist cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (who also shot EASY RIDER and most of Peter Bogdanovich's best films), Rafelson gives each location a vivid sense of place, devoting as much attention to forgotten decor as he does to psychology. (1970, 97 min, 35mm)

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 1, 1970

The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels twenty years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.

At the outset, we meet only the man -- played by Jack Nicholson with the same miraculous offhandedness that brought "Easy Rider" to life. He's an irresponsible roustabout, making his way through the oil fields, sleeping with a waitress (Karen Black) whose every daydreaming moment is filled with admiration for Miss Tammy Wynette. The man's name is Robert Eroica Dupea. He was named after Beethoven's Third Symphony and he spends his evenings bowling and his nights wearily agreeing that, yes, his girl sings "Stand By Your Man" just like Tammy.

In these first marvelous scenes, director Bob Rafelson calls our attention to the grimy life textures and the shabby hopes of these decent middle Americans. They live in a landscape of motels, highways, TV dinners, dust, and jealousy, and so do we all, but they seem to have nothing else. Dupea's friends are arrested at the mental and emotional level of about age seventeen; he isn't, but thinks or hopes he is.

Dupea discovers his girl is pregnant (his friend Elton breaks the news out in the field, suggesting maybe it would be good to marry her and settle down). He walks out on her in a rage, has a meaningless little affair with a slut from the bowling alley, and then discovers more or less by accident that his father is dying. His father, we discover, is a musical genius who moved his family to an island and tried to raise them as Socrates might have. Dupea feels himself to be the only failure.

The movie bares its heart in the scenes on the island, where Dupea makes an awkward effort to communicate with his dying father. The island is peopled with eccentrics, mostly Dupea's own family, but including a few strays. Among their number is a beautiful young girl who's come to the island to study piano with Dupea's supercilious brother. Dupea seduces this girl, who apparently suggests the early life he has abandoned. He does it by playing the piano; but when she says she's moved, he says he isn't -- that he played better as a child and that the piece was easy anyway.

This is possibly the moment when his nerve fails and he condemns himself, consciously, to a life of self-defined failure. The movie ends, after several more scenes, on a note of ambiguity; he is either freeing himself from the waitress or, on the other hand, he is setting off on a journey even deeper into anonymity. It's impossible to say, and it doesn't matter much. What matters is the character during the time covered by the film: a time when Dupea tentatively reapproaches his past and then rejects it, not out of pride, but out of fear.

The movie is joyously alive to the road life of its hero. We follow him through bars and bowling alleys, motels and mobile homes, and we find him rebelling against lower-middle-class values even as he embraces them. In one magical scene, he leaps from his car in a traffic jam and starts playing the piano on the truck in front of him; the scene sounds forced, described this way, but Rafelson and Nicholson never force anything, and never have to. Robert Eroica Dupea is one of the most unforgettable characters in American movies.

One Big Real Place: BBS From Head to Hearts Criterion essay by J. Hoberman, November 28, 2010

Five Easy Pieces: The Solitude Criterion essay by Kent Jones, November 25, 2010

Five Easy Pieces Criterion essay by Michael Dare, February 11, 1990, also seen here: Liner notes from the original Criterion Laserdisc

Five Easy Pieces (1970) - The Criterion Collection

Michael Wood reviews 'Five Easy Pieces' · LRB 9 September 2010 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, September 2010

Five Easy Pieces - Bright Lights Film Journal Andrew Culbertson, August 1, 2007

Bob Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces' is the quintessential film of the so ... Cinephilia and Beyond (Undated)

Five Easy Pieces - Turner Classic Movies Jay Carr

Five Easy Pieces - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Thomas L. Erskine

Slacker Film Guide

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] also seen here: AMC Filmsite [Tim Dirks]

Thoughts on "Five Easy Pieces" Ken D. Kraiker

Reflections on "Five Easy Pieces" Stuart Fernie and David Dieni

Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts] Jack Nicholson for Best Actor (winner, George C. Scott, Patton)

One for the road: Bob Rafelson and ‘Five Easy Pieces’ David Thomson chats with the director from Sight and Sound, September 2010

indieWIRE Peter Bogdanovich

theartsdesk.com [Nick Hasted]

Cinespect [John Bleasdale] also reviewing KING OF MARVIN GARDENS

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Brilliant Observations on 2120 Films [Clayton Trapp]

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Five Easy Pieces Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films

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Independent.co.uk [Geoffrey Macnab]

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Time Out Joshua Rothkopf

Film review: Five Easy Pieces | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, also seen here: The Guardian

Five Easy Pieces was oddly conservative for a 1970s Jack Nicholson film John Patterson from The Guardian, August 6, 2010

Jack Nicholson David Thomson from The Guardian, August 5, 2010

The Observer Philip French

The Daily Telegraph

Los Angeles Times Glenn Kenny interviews the director, April 21, 2010

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] March 16, 2003

Movie Review - - Rafelson's 'Five Easy Pieces' Bows The New York Times, September 12, 1970, also seen here: New York Times (registration req'd)

FILM; Nicholson On Age, Acting And 'Being Jack' Dana Kennedy from The New York Times, September 22, 2002

Laszlo Kovacs, Cinematographer, Dies at 74 Douglas Martin from The New York Times, July 26, 2007

DVDBeaver.com [Gary Tooze]

Time magazine interview with screenwriter Carol Eastman March 20, 1972

Five Easy Pieces - by Carole Eastman The screenplay

Five Easy Pieces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS

USA (103 mi) 1972

Time Out review Tom Milne

An irresistible movie, not least for its haunting vision of Atlantic City as Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome of genteelly decaying palaces, run-down funfairs, and empty boardwalks presided over by white elephants abandoned to their brooding fate. It's like some unimaginable country of the mind, and so in a sense it is as two brothers embark on a sort of game (Atlantic City provided the original place names for the Monopoly board) in which they exchange their lives, their loves and their dreams. One has retreated, like Prospero, from the pain outside into the island of his mind; the other pursues an endless mirage of get-rich-quick schemes which will let him escape to an island paradise. Their fusion is a stunningly complex evocation of childish complicity and Pinterish obsessions, inevitably leading to tragedy as the obsessions founder on reality. One of the most underrated films of the decade.

User comments from imdb Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia.

Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson's creative relationship began because of The Monkees. Rafelson directing and Nicholson writing their weird and wonderful psychedelic cult classic 'Head'. After that the two teamed up for one of the early Seventies best loved movies 'Five Easy Pieces'. A couple of years later they did it again with 'The King Of Marvin Gardens', though inexplicably it doesn't have the reputation or the high profile of their previous collaboration. I really fail to see why. File it under "great lost 1970s movies" alongside 'Scarecrow', 'Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia', 'Tracks', 'Fingers' (and add your own personal favourite to the list). Marvin Gardens features a really strong and controlled performance from Nicholson in the lead role, an introverted DJ with a show in which he spins "true" tales. But even better than Nicholson is Bruce Dern, a wonderful actor who never became a superstar like Nicholson, Pacino or De Niro, despite a long career of consistently good character roles in movies by Hitchcock, Roger Corman, Walter Hill, Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Elia Kazan, Sydney Pollack and many others. Dern is absolutely wonderful as Nicholson's brother, a dreamer and Mob hanger on. He comes back into his brother's life with a nutty get rich quick scheme which ends up going horribly wrong. This is one of the very best performances by Dern I've ever seen, and his scenes with Nicholson make this essential viewing for any 1970s buff. Added to that are excellent performances from Ellen Burstyn ('The Exorcist', 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore') and newcomer Julia Anne Robinson (her only movie role - too bad!) as the women in Dern's life, and nice bits from legendary musician/actor Scatman Crothers ('Black Belt Jones' and appearances in no less than four 1970s Nicholson movies) and the underrated John P. Ryan ('Runaway Train', 'It's Alive', 'Class Of 1999'). 'The King Of Marvin Gardens' is a slow and thoughtful movie, but once you get into the rhythm of it, an extremely rewarding one. One of Nicholson's best, and Dern is just dynamite. Highly recommended.

Bob Rafelson: The King of Marvin Gardens | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm, December 29, 1999

It took some time to decide whether to put Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces or his later King of Marvin Gardens on to my 100 best list. Both films, made in the early 70s, starred Jack Nicholson and expressed the particularly American angst of the period.

In Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson plays a man - whose middle name is Eroica, after Beethoven, and who once studied to be a concert pianist - who rejects middle-class aspirations in favour of a messy life as an oilfield rigger. In King of Marvin Gardens, he is an introspective all-night talk jock whose brief hope of getting away resides in his brother's moonshine plan to win a gambling concession in Hawaii. Both films are funny, poetic and touchingly observant of the kind of American society you don't often see on film. But they are deeply melancholy at the same time, as if there's no rational reason for their characters to behave as they do, only cracked emotional ones.

Rafelson had great success with Five Easy Pieces, which pitched Nicholson into stardom every bit as much as Easy Rider. But the more tragic and acutely personal Marvin Gardens is perhaps ultimately the more reverberating film, pitching into real tragedy with a ludicrous murder at its end. In any case, Rafelson, hard as he continued to try, in particular with Stay Hungry and The Postman Always Rings Twice, never managed the same amazing grace again.

What made Marvin Gardens so good was the dovetailed playing of Nicholson as the talk radio man and Bruce Dern as his conman brother - hopeless cases who can't manage their lives or the equally well-drawn women who come into contact with them. Dern lives with an ageing blonde, played by Ellen Burstyn, and her pretty step-daughter (Julia Anne Robinson) and the film achieves a sexual contest between them. Rafelson's portrait of a wintry Atlantic City as a down-at-heel holiday and gambling resort seems to point up the characters' disillusion. Only Louis Malle, in Atlantic City, pitched a tale into such accurately crestfallen waters.

Rafelson, David Thomson has said, is "a raconteur of vivid, touching events, himself looking on from the dark". And in both films what we see are people we can't dislike, and who seem very real, struggling to make sense of lives which have ceased to be capable of the kind of redemption they hesitantly seek.

It's possible that, after this extraordinary beginning, Rafelson's kind of highly personal cinema became more and more difficult to make. More likely, however, times moved on without him. It happens to the best of directors as well as the worst.

BFI | Sight & Sound | One for the road: Bob Rafelson and 'Five Easy ... David Thomson chats with the director from Sight and Sound, September 2010

Cinespect [John Bleasdale] also reviewing FIVE EASY PIECES

DVD Verdict (David Rogers) dvd review

Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Pam Grady

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review

The King of Marvin Gardens – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review

STAY HUNGRY

USA (102 mi) 1976

After the sombre melancholy of Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, Rafelson pursued his interest in social dropouts and marginal life-styles with this offbeat comedy drama. Bridges oozes carefree charm as a young Alabama heir caught up in a property speculation involving a gym, but instead investing his interest in Arnie and his muscle-building pals. His relationship with gutsy working gal Field helps fill out the picture, although the preponderance of loose narrative threads tends to leave one with an impression of individual scenes rather than any sense of coherent plot. The scene in which Bridges slips though a hole in the social hedge to join a bunch of fiddle players in a country hoedown epitomises the gentle, quirky feel of the film. Based on a Charles Gaines novel about the rootlessness of the so-called 'New South', it has its slack spells, but Rafelson's sure feel for the inexpressible subtleties of emotional relationships is evident throughout.

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Dick Connors from Bloomington, IN

This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. There's something about movies made during this time period - the late 70s, and maybe the very early 80s - that is very distinctive, though I can't really say exactly what it is. It might have something to do with the coloring and lighting and the way it looks visually - there's less "artistic" style, and the aesthetics are more candid looking. It might also be because there seems to be more nudity in those older movies than the ones that are made now. One of the movies this reminded me of is "Caddyshack." Another is "Used Cars" with Kurt Russell. "Stay Hungry" has a really loose story that has very little cohesion. It's almost more of a series of vignettes and oddball scenes (and I do mean oddball - I don't know where they came up with some of the random weirdness in this film) very loosely revolving around a central story of an idle heir (Bridges) whose life intersects with Field and Schwarzenegger's characters.

It's not the plot that makes this movie good, it's the series of strange scenes that make it up. It's almost like someone took a bunch of comedy sketches from the old Saturday Night Live and strung them all together. But the end result is a delightfully bizarre film, the kind of movie that could never be made today because it's just too unstructured and offbeat. This film was written by Charles Gaines, who also created "Pumping Iron." Gaines is a bodybuilding aficionado which would explain the common thread of bodybuilding in both of these films and the presence of Schwarzenegger.

There's little doubt from looking at the case housing this DVD which member of the cast went on to pump up the box office returns in a slew of action movies. It's Arnold front and center, oiled up and with a bad haircut, and a sticker on the packaging reminds us that Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe for his performance—Best Newcomer of 1977. But this isn't a movie for fans of his Pumping Iron years or of his best shoot-'em-ups (The Terminator would surely top that list). Instead, this is a moody coming-of-age picture from Bob Rafelson, at the height of his years as an angry young man—his work in the last couple of decades has been decidedly uneven, but this movie is very much of a piece with the director's early work. Stay Hungry was preceded by Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, and this film may be the most overlooked of the three. It's certainly a mercurial and unusual picture, but it's from arguably the last great period of American filmmaking, and features three performances that changed the courses of actors' careers.

Jeff Bridges plays Craig Blake, orphaned heir of Birmingham, Alabama; he's got oodles of eccentric aunts and uncles and cousins, and lives the lonely bachelor's life in the epic family manse, a man with money but nothing else in his life. He's involved with some real estate developers, who dream big dreams of the New South, and want Birmingham to be at the heart of it—to that end, they want to build a skyscraper, and the only thing standing between them and stories of glass and steel is a seedy little gym. Blake is deputized to negotiate a buyout with the gym's owner; capitalism isn't what motivates him, however, and he gets caught up in the world of the people he's supposed to help get rid of.

Blake gets sidetracked not just by the scene, but especially by Mary Tate (Sally Field), the perky young thing behind the front desk, and the sometime girlfriend of Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger), in training for the upcoming Mr. Universe competition. Bridges is terrific in the lead role, fulfilling the promise he demonstrated in The Last Picture Show; that was an ensemble piece, and here he's asked to carry the picture, and he does so admirably. This is Field's first screen work of any significance, and this performance goes a long way toward eradicating the image of her as either Gidget or Sister Patrice; this seems like a necessary transitional performance for her, making possible her work in movies like Norma Rae and Places in the Heart. And even with superstardom, the Governor of California was never much of an actor; but here, for the first time, he's human, and lacks the annoying self-consciousness and smugness that characterizes so much of his later work.

As Joe Santo, Arnold is Blake's ambassador to the backwoods of Alabama; Joe can play the fiddle and swill moonshine with the best of them. (Arnold doesn't fake the fiddle playing very well, though.) And Blake returns the favor by taking Joe and Mary Tate to a party of the nouvelle riche, where they are hopelessly condescended to and mocked, as if they were a Hee-Haw roadshow. The weak link of the piece is probably Thor, the gym owner who starts stupid and ends violent; he's necessary as a plot element, but he's not very convincing, and R. G. Armstrong gives a cartoony performance. The cast is peppered with notable supporting players, though, including Fannie Flagg in high dudgeon, Ed Begley Jr. begging to get his clock cleaned by Bridges, and Scatman Crothers as a long-suffering Blake family servant. It's worth sticking with this movie, if only for the mad spectacle at the end of bodybuilders flooding the streets of Birmingham like so many greased-up Pamplona bulls.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

DVD Verdict (George Hatch) dvd review

This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

BLACK WIDOW

USA (102 mi) 1987

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

From its opening shot - Theresa Russell's split reflection in a make-up mirror - both the theme and the over-schematic symbolism of Rafelson's thriller are immediately apparent. For Russell plays a homicidal psychopath whose killings of various wealthy husbands are investigated by a Justice Department workaholic (Winger), who slowly but surely becomes a kind of mirror-image of her Protean prey. The story and treatment are familiar from '40s noir thrillers, but it's clear that Rafelson is attempting something more than mere homage. Disappointingly, the femme fatale - apparently in love with her husbands even as she plans their demise - is presented as somehow more female, fulfilled and complete than the career woman, who in turn eventually discovers both dress sense and the joy of sex with her opposite's next victim-to-be. There are things to enjoy - committed performances, Conrad Hall's elegant camerawork, a script that becomes pleasurably tortuous towards the end - but the film finally offers far less than meets the eye.

PopcornQ review Cherry Smyth

Reading mainstream films subversively, lesbians have often constructed heroines who do not officially belong to them. The persistence of the dyke invention of lesbian heroines urged me to reconstruct a mainstream Hollywood movie, a psychological thriller, in which the best thrills happen only if you impose a lesbian reading. At the time of its release, Black Widow met with mixed (let's say heterosexual) press reviews, keen dyke response privately, and severe dismissal from some dykes in public. For several reasons, I believe Black Widow is ripe for another spin. While I do not wish to argue that Black Widow is ultimately a progressive text, it does reveal ambivalences in the patriarchal order and the heterosexist gaze and opens spaces for a transgressive lesbian sexual subject.

Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct may be distinctly antifeminist, but was cited popularly as a lesbian heroine.

Black Widow lends itself to a similar kind of ironic reinvention. Here we have a rich, young, beautiful woman, the eponymous Catherine (Theresa Russell) who picks up and poisons her husbands with the skill of a brain surgeon. She is discovered and sought after by a rather dowdy and workaholic federal agent, Alex (Debra Winger), who needs a bit of hands-on excitement. It's a classic chase movie, with the familiar, and so compelling, ugly duckling motif thrown in. What is less familiar is that not only are there two female protagonists, but that Alex develops an obsession with Catherine far beyond the call of duty.

The psychological motivation is thin. When Alex tells her boss that "no one knows why anybody does anything," the gate opens and the psychiatrist has bolted, leaving the field of supposition totally accessible for a dyke interpretation of motivation. Alex's reply, which deflects her boss's concern that she is obsessed with Catherine, acts as a comic cypher for all the times dykes have no answers for the "why." "Why do you always have to have your hair so short? Why don't you ever wear a dress? Why do you have to be so public about it? Why do you enjoy licking pussy?" Alex may be obsessed, but she's not going to see a doctor. She has become a hunter.

Theresa Russell as Catherine is young, stiff, bereaved, and stylish, conjuring up the image of Catherine Deneuve, not only in Belle de Jour, but also in the later and much more dyke-embedded The Hunger. As a widow, however, Catherine is not upset enough, which the spectator may read as a betrayal or as an opening for a story of female revenge, of a husband killed because he deserved it, murdered because he tried to thwart his much younger wife. Catherine is already constituted as a "bad girl," therefore, ripe for transgressive lesbian identification.

To Catherine men are disposable. She swots up enough specialized knowledge to catch her professional mate, exposing hetero-desire as being as superficial and simple to mimic as a game show. Alex, by contrast, is contructed as operating in an adolescent presexual state of distraction. Her reluctance to socialise with her male colleagues (except when playing cards) reinforces the trope of Alex as a lesbian who doesn't know it. Yet. Black Widow is a slow time-bomb of a movie whose formula is charmingly predictable and whose lesbian subtext is so unimaginable to itself that its frissons have endless repercussions. As soon as lesbianism is suggested it is quickly denied.

SORRY, BUT ONE of the many dark delights of the detective thriller "Black Widow" is seeing "Blue Velvet" villain Dennis Hopper get his -- wooed, webbed and then poisoned by his loving wife, a seductive serial killer.

Theresa Russell and Debra Winger costar as the wicked widow and the Justice Department drudge who picks up Russell's paper trail while researching a mafioso's murder. The mobster, a New York publisher and then a Texas toy tycoon (Hopper) all die of the same rare disease -- and two of them are survived by their newlywed wives. Or is it wife? Winger's boss pooh-poohs her suspicions, forcing the fledgling agent to pursue the case on her own.

Winger, that homespun heartthrob with a cat's purr and a doe's eyes, makes merry work of this widow's chase. Her character is sexually repressed workaholic Alex, whose obsession with murderess Catherine -- a killer who probably reads Cosmo -- finally releases her pent-up womanliness. Winger gets a 10 on the charismometer and gives the film its warmth and innocence. Russell, a wry sensation as Marilyn Monroe in "Insignificance," plays this femme fatale for keeps.

After careful study, chameleon-like Catherine makes herself into the perfect wife for the billionaire bachelor of the moment. Her fourth fiance', for instance, confides a ridiculous wish to build a hotel under the Kilauea volcano. "God," she gushes, "in the right place, it would be fantastic." Whether it's an airhead he wants -- or an egghead, or a ditzy Dallas belle -- he gets what he deserves.

The relationship between the women, as unpredictable as lava flow, is left deliberately ambiguous. Unnerving and mysterious undercurrents keep us guessing as to the possible outcomes of this glossy game of cat-and-kitten.

Ron Bass wrote the solid and entertaining screenplay that never falters till its end, which suffices -- even surprises -- but fails to live up to Catherine's devious promise. Director Bob Rafelson (creator of the Monkees, director of "Five Easy Pieces" and the man who launched Arnold Schwarzenegger the actor) creates a coherent, soundly paced and smart production.

Rafelson draws memorable cameos from a quirky supporting cast that includes B-movie queen Mary Woronov as a dictatorial scuba diver, Diane Ladd as the sister of the Texas toymaker and Nicol Williamson as the Seattle philanthropist who dies happy (if a little prematurely) as Catherine's third hubby. James Hong is especially hardboiled as an island P.I. named Shin. "You been looking for someone for four weeks?" he sneers at Alex. "Once I looked for somebody for 18 years."

Despite the department's skepticism and the lack of cooperation from local dicks, Alex prevails in this liberating vehicle for gal gumshoes -- a leap from those doddering old dears from England to a female with the quiet intensity of a Real Detective.

User comments from imdb Author: ShootingShark from Dundee, Scotland

User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico

Film Freak Central review [Travis Hoover]

Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict: Black Widow Rob Lineberger

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Scott C

Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Rahmanian, Hamid

DAY BREAK C 74

Iran (84 mi) 2005

An atypical Iranian film with plenty of European stylistic touches, which detracts from the eventual power and authenticity of the subject matter. Iranian films are known for their raw, simplistic storytelling that get to the heart of the issue without resorting to cinematic gimmickry. This film attempts to accentuate the Iranian judicial system, which is revealed in a dramatic ten minute sequence, which is then re-hashed from every different perspective again and again for the rest of the film, much of it left to the viewer’s imagination.

One prisoner is facing the death penalty, ironically less than 9 months from the date of his crime, which is a far cry from the decade-long jurisprudence that takes place here in America. A man kills his boss, a crime which is undisputed, but the reasons are never provided, so we see the process of a prisoner woken up in the morning, examined by a physician so that he is in good health, as he cannot be executed unless he is, and then he faces his accuser in the presence of a judge who offers the victim’s family the right to forgive the prisoner or take retribution themselves against the prisoner. We witness a rope placed around the neck, the prisoner placed on a small stand, and the victim’s family has the right to pull the stand away or negotiate another settlement directly with the prisoner.

Our prisoner witnesses this process with another prisoner, as they are both condemned for execution on the same morning. The other prisoner is forgiven, but he must donate his family’s house as payment for his crime. Our prisoner’s proceedings are delayed, as the family has not shown up for the last three scheduled executions, leaving him and his family in a state of purgatory limbo, as the exact same process will have to be re-scheduled again until the victim’s family arrives. To further dramatize his agony, we witness several suicide attempts while in prison, or a prisoner fight that breaks out where he steps into the middle in order to be blamed, attacking a guard that intervenes, guaranteeing solitary confinement. What we are seeing is a condemned man punishing himself even further. Each time he is given a reprieve, the other prisoners celebrate by singing and dancing, looking like something out of a poorly rehearsed Youssef Chahine film, which specialize in exotic musical numbers.

What we witness is the same sequence of events, the prisoner rising in the morning by guards walking him to the physical examination, intercut with flashbacks and dream sequences, all of which allow for different possibilities, all of which are playing out in his head. It becomes impossible to know what is real and what is imagined, but eventually it becomes like a Twilight Zone episode where Dennis Weaver dreams that he is condemned to die, and the court proceedings replay in his head over and over again like the myth of Sisyphus, his own internalized psychological hell from which he can never break. He can not, even awake, separate himself from the sequence, knowing it will re-occur again and again, that he is condemned to participate in this sequence forever. The power of the film is the negotiation sequence with the family, the judge, and the condemned prisoner, as that is a revelation to most of the world’s eyes. The rest of the film, shot in a dark, colorless, shoddy-looking video, we’ve all seen before, put to a better use, as it’s simply a swirling variation of the same theme.

Raie, Motjaba

BIRTH OF A BUTTERFLY A 97

Iran (110 mi) 1997

One of the best examples of the beauty and magic of Iranian films, where the heart is always connected to primeval forces, the dawn of man, the miracle of life, mortality and faith, filmed in the remote mountain areas of northern Iran and Azerbaijan, this film has spectacular landscapes, extraordinary camera composition, and a truly unique use of color, cinematography by Mohammad Davoodi, art direction by Malak Jahan Khazzai.

I. The Birth

The film opens with a spectacular montage of unusual, abstract rock formations rising out of the desert, revealing homes carved into these rocks. There is an eerie chorus, akin to Kubrick’s 2001 monolith music, birds can be heard, the wind, the color blue predominates against the natural dirt and earth, blue doors, fences, skirts, dresses, and suits. A mother can be heard wailing in childbirth. Her two children, a boy and a girl, are alone, guarded by a serious looking stepfather who locks the boy in the house, later released by a kinder uncle who brings them both to the refuge of his green grape vineyards. After a visit by the stepfather, the boy hears the uncle crying in the vineyards, so he runs away into a mountain of clay, where his father was buried in an accident. He sees his stepfather, also in tears, following him into town where the color blue has turned to black. All villagers are weeping over the death of his mother. Voices, like ancient souls in anguish, wail over the tears.

II. The Path

A young boy, Mandanay, walks with a limp and lives with his sick grandmother. His family plans to visit a holy shrine the next morning. Mandanay sleeps under the stars. His father transports people in a tractor-driven cart and leaves early in the morning without him, so he walks alone, led by a few mischievous boys who throw him into a pool of water at the base of a waterfall before running away. Mandanay discovers a multitude of chrysalises that will turn into butterflies, some fly away as water glows from the green moss on the rocks, where drops, like silver, illuminate the landscape and water flows out of trees. An old man offers him a dry change of clothes, wrapping him in a green cloth while listening to the boy’s plans to make a vow, not for himself, but for his ailing grandmother. The old man is impressed, telling him as he gathers water, “Your leg may be limp, but not your heart.”

They both walk towards town. Mandanay offers to carry the water, which is heavy, and is being brought to “pilgrims” along with an iron rod for a friend in town who needs it. The old man thanks him for his generosity and lays down on the road under the green cloth to take a nap, while Mandanay walks on alone. He sees the town in a vision under a special light under a cloud, where an ancient chorus of voices is heard as birds soar in the sky. But then he sees the tractor broken down carrying his grandmother, who is moaning that this is a sign of death, that she’ll never make it to the shrine. But Mandanay hands his father the rod, which is all he needs to fix the tractor, and they drink the water he has brought, his father tells his son, “We are pilgrims.” The music changes to serene, symphonic music as they continue to head for the shrine. A distant shot reveals the tractor small against the giant desert landscape. But it gets dark and they must stop in a village before they reach the shrine. Mandanay decides to go on alone in the dark. The music at the shrine turns into a mixture of East and West, where a man is playing an instrument inside the shrine. Mandanay asks for the holy man. They gesture he is asleep. Mandanay sees the green cloth. The ancient voices soar as the old man raises his head and smiles at him.

III. The Butterfly

A young man walks down a road past an old man who is playing Eastern music in front of his home, which is surrounded by flowers, past a little boy who is chasing butterflies in a lush green field, a color so luminously green that it is intoxicating, particularly after the first two episodes which took place in an arid desert. He walks into a forest past a river surrounded by moss and trees, across a bridge, where he enters a village. He is the new teacher is a small village that has not yet built a school, so he sleeps on the floor of the mosque and teaches the Koran to a circle of young boys. One brings a jar of butterflies to class each day and they can be seen flying around the room when he is asked to read the scriptures. The teacher feels at home, warmly greeted by the villagers, and expresses his inner peace. “Nature, rain, the songs of birds are voices which give me cause to rejoice...I’ve become like a butterfly.” He is warned by the town’s headman, “The nightingale sings ‘I’m in love,’ but the butterfly flies towards a flame and dies without complaining.”

The teacher tells the headman that the river may flood, that the village needs to build fortifications along the banks. The teacher sees one man in tears complaining his cow has been lost, instructing him to stop weeping and start looking for it, then another man in tears complaining his son went to the city to work for 3 months, but it’s been 9 months and he hasn’t heard a thing, comforting the man with gentle words, “Don’t worry, he will return home soon, God willing.” Next thing you know, the cow was found, the son returned, the villagers were beginning to think of the teacher as a Messiah. When the river floods, they all gather outside his door, asking him to pray for a miracle to make the flood subside. He tells them, “What you want is a Saint’s job, I am an ordinary man,” refusing to pray for their miracle.

The next day, only two boys show up for class, one, the boy with the butterflies, was late as the flood washed out the bridge. The teacher asks him to read the scriptures, instructing him to fly across the river the next day “like your butterflies.” No one in town would speak to the teacher. Wherever he goes or sits, they move away, and if he is seen talking to one of the children, the parents grab the child away from him. So the teacher goes to see the headman, but he also turns away, agreeing to visit him the next morning. The teacher pleads with him, “I am not a prophet, I can’t make a flood recede.” The headman responds, “The people need your prayers. The worst that could happen would be for your prayers to go unanswered. If everyone felt every prayer had to be answered, no one would pray except for the prophets. You wouldn’t pray because you feared people would lose their faith in you.”

The next day, the boy with the butterflies comes after the teacher and says he must come quick, that only he, the teacher, can help. So they run out the door, the teacher following the boy, until the teacher collapses, exhausted. When he looks up to where the bridge has washed away, the boy is walking on the water across to the other shore. The teacher enters the water, is waist deep in the water and is in tears. The boy turns and stares at him, as a butterfly lands on the teacher’s scarf.

Three stories encapsulate different aspects of traditional moral instruction. The first sees a stern father banishing his young son from the household to spare him the sight of his dying mother; the second follows the good deeds of a devout disabled boy left at home when his family visit a religious shrine; the third shows the dilemma in which a teacher finds himself when local villagers are eager to believe he possesses spiritual powers. The didactic lessons will be more obvious to Iranian audiences than to Western eyes. That said, the rugged landscapes are striking and there is a captivating reverence in the way the director films a bowl of apples, for instance, or a rippling pool.

Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review

Mojtaba Raei's episodic, three-part 1997 feature is a good example of the vital Iranian cinema our cultural gatekeepers rarely allow us to see, without the packaging and automatic charm of Gabbeh or The White Balloon but with plenty of artistic credentials of its own, a film so deeply involved in its own brand of Islamic thought that the absence of easy access to outsiders is part of its special fascination. (This is also true of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's very bad early feature Fleeing From Evil to God, though in contrast Raei is clearly in command of the material.) Filmed in remote mountain areas of northern Iran and Azerbaijan, Birth of a Butterfly can be recommended for its landscapes, compositions, and employment of color. From the first episode, which begins with a montage of abstract rock formations leading to dwellings carved into a hillside, Raei's choice of settings and sense of how to film them is often astonishing—though I didn't always understand what was going on thematically or emotionally, I was held throughout by the enchantment of the natural surroundings. Ironically, the last and most comprehensible episode culminates in kitschy calendar art and a heavenly choir evoking 50s Hollywood religiosity, but prior to that I was reminded more of Alexander Dovzhenko or Sergei Paradjanov. As for the stories, one finds men weeping a lot and isn't always sure why, but the world they're passing through is infused with beauty and magic.

Deadites Online - The Fan's Official Source For Evil Dead

Mojtaba Raei's mystical meditation, ''Birth of a Butterfly,'' was filmed in the mountains of northwestern Iran, where the people's elemental relationship with nature is colored by an intense spiritual faith. Consisting of three parables in which that faith is tested, the movie suggests that Christianity and Western culture have no monopoly on turning out religious kitsch. Although ''Birth of a Butterfly'' is comparatively restrained and tasteful as these things go, it imitates the Hollywood technique of using gushy music to underscore moments of revelation.

The protagonist of one parable is a shining-eyed teacher who leaves civilization behind to trek through the wilderness and instruct the children in a remote mountain village. Exuding a charismatic radiance, he becomes an informal adviser to the community. When one man who has lost a cow wonders where he can find it, the teacher suggests he look in a certain field. Another man is waiting for his son who disappeared a year ago to return. The teacher counsels patience and says the son will soon come back.

When both insights prove true, word spreads through the village that the teacher is a prophet. And when a flood threatens the community, the villagers plead with him to intercede with God. Even after the teacher insists he has no special powers, they refuse to believe him and stalk off angrily.

The miraculous upshot of the parable could just as well be Christian as Islamic (in the entire movie there's no mention of Allah), and can be summed up in one sentence: And the faith of a child shall lead them.

The other parables are not as clear-cut. In one, a man whose wife is critically ill blames his innocent stepchildren. In another, a young boy on a pilgrimage to a sacred spring whose waters are supposed to cure all ills engages in a dialogue with an old man he meets along the way.

''Birth of a Butterfly,'' which will be shown on tomorrow at 5:45 P.M. and Monday at 9 P.M. at the Museum of Modern Art as part of New Directors/New Films, is best appreciated as a kind of visual poem in which human beings are seen as intelligent wildlife clinging to the rocks of a harshly beautiful natural landscape. The faith the movie explores seems to spring naturally from an environment where human life is so entirely at the mercy of the elements that catastrophic events are assumed to have spiritual and moral dimensions.

Raimi, Sam

Sam Raimi - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Steven Schneider from Film Reference

Director, writer, producer, and occasional actor Samuel Raimi was born the third of five children, and was raised in a large home in Franklin, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. His father, Leonard Raimi, a furniture and appliance store owner, staged and shot elaborate home movies, and Sam quickly became "fascinated by the fact that you could capture reality, however staged, with an 8mm camera, replay it, edit it, and make things happen in a different order than they did in real life."

When he was just eleven years old, the younger Raimi made his first film. At age thirteen, he bought his first 8mm camera, using money he had earned from raking leaves. The movies he made at this time ranged from slapstick comedies that resembled and were inspired by his beloved Three Stooges, to a huge "Civil War extravanganza using props and costumes with fifty extras." Sam and his older brother Ivan (with whom he would later co-write Darkman and Army of Darkness ) were constantly experimenting with different camera techniques in order to get the strangest angles possible—a preoccupation evident in his films to this day. At the age of fifteen, Sam and his friend Bruce Campbell (who would go on to attain cult status as Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy) began attending classes taught by industrial filmmaker Vern Nobles. Nobles hired Sam as a production assistant, and after directing his own amateur films (as well as some commercials in the local Detroit area), Raimi enrolled at Michigan State University. There he met future business partner and aspiring producer Robert Tapert. Sam, Ivan, Tapert, and Campbell formed Renaissance Pictures, and after a few early efforts by Raimi ( It's Murder! , Within the Woods , and Clockwork ), they struck gold with The Evil Dead in 1982.

Stephen King called The Evil Dead , "the most ferociously original horror movie I have ever seen," and this unexpected compliment brought the picture instant credibility. Made on a budget of approximately $50,000, Raimi's backers were at first annoyed because the film appeared to be a comedy, when they thought they would be getting a horror movie. But it is precisely the director's trademark combination of gore and slapstick (otherwise known as "splatstick"), along with his innovative camerawork—particularly his use of demon point-of-view shots—which made the film a hit. The Evil Dead , an expanded version of Raimi's earlier short, Within the Woods (also starring Campbell), tells the story of five students who travel to a creepy cabin in the woods for a weekend break and are cut off from the outside world when a bridge collapses beneath them. In the basement of the cabin, the students find the Book of the Dead (bound in human skin) and a tape recorder. The tape's narrator warns of the evil dead, malevolent demons he has unwisely summoned. Sure enough, the evil dead show up, and all hell breaks loose. One of the female student goes outside and is raped by possessed vines, a scene which incurred the wrath of moralists in Britain, and led to the film being prosecuted under existing "video nasty" legislation. Although The Evil Dead 's super low budget is unintentionally revealed at times, the film's kinetic camerawork, over-the-top gore, and sheer intensity insured its status as a cult fave.

In 1985, Raimi teamed up with friends Joel and Ethan Coen (who hit the big time a year before with Blood Simple ) on the flawed but inspired Crimewave. In this movie, a pair of cartoon-like exterminator/hitmen kill the owner of a burglar-alarm company, and proceed to stalk the partner who hired them, his wife, and a nerd framed for the murder, who tells the story in flashback from the electric chair. Two years later, Raimi would direct the next installment of The Evil Dead on a substantially higher budget than his previous efforts. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn retells the entire story of the first film in about ten minutes, and develops the franchise's underlying mythos, thereby paving the way for the third and most whacked out installment, Army of Darkness , in 1993. One crucial difference between Evil Dead II and its predecessor is that the latter is a more overtly comic film. The gore is still there, in spades, but as one critic puts it, "the flying eyeballs and lopped-off appendages serve as the functional equivalents of custard pies and buckets of whitewash rather than anything psychologically retrograde."

Raimi made his major-studio debut with Darkman in 1990, which he co-wrote as well as directed. Although he tried to secure the eponymous lead role for his friend Campbell, the producers opted instead for established star Liam Neeson. The film—a moderate success at best—concerns a scientist who is horribly burned by a fire in his lab lit by criminals. Using the synthetic skin he had invented, he seeks revenge under different identities. After Army of Darkness , Raimi teamed up with the Coen brothers once again, this time on The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which he co-wrote. In 1993–94, Raimi also co-produced a pair of Jean Claude Van Damme action spectaculars, Hard Target (directed by Hong Kong legend John Woo), and Time Cop. In addition, he found great success as executive producer of the hit schlock television shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. Raimi returned as director on the revisionist Western, The Quick and the Dead (1995), starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, and a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio. But his critical breakthrough came three years later, in 1998, with A Simple Plan , in which Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton play brothers who find a bag full of money in the woods, with disastrous consequences. As well as being Raimi's first heavyweight, serious film, it was also his first shot at directing an adaptation of a bestselling novel (written by Scott M. Smith). A Simple Plan wound up garnering two Oscar nominations, for Best Supporting Actor (Thornton), and for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. Raimi's next feature, the tepid Kevin Costner baseball vehicle For Love of the Game (1999), led some fans to believe he was selling out. But that view should change with his upcoming film, Spider-Man scheduled to appear in 2001.

Sam Raimi > Overview - AllMovie biography from Hal Erickson

Sam Raimi: Biography from Answers.com biography

Sam Raimi - Yahoo! Movies biography

God of Filmaking Sam Raimi director of Spider Man biography and film reviews

Sam Raimi biography and filmography from NNDB

Sam Raimi - Overview - MSN Movies bio

Sam Raimi - Filmbug bio

Sam Raimi | All About Sam Raimi - Moviefone bio

Sam Raimi Biography from Who2.com brief bio

Sam Raimi Biography (2006–) Film Reference

Sam Raimi Filmography Fandango

Sam Raimi Movie Box Office Results

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: A Simple Plan (1998) Philip Kemp, June 1999

Optimus Prime Films | Directors | Sam Raimi May 25, 2000

BFI | Sight & Sound | For Love of the Game (1999) Andy Richards, July 2000

JewishJournal.com Spider-Mensch, Michael Auschenker, April 25, 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Spider-Man (2002) Kim Newman, July 2002

The Three Faces of Spidey: Spiderman 2 • Senses of Cinema Violeta Kovacsics, October 28, 2004

Sam Raimi is Spartacus! in New TV Series for Starz ... Nix from Beyond Hollywood, October 27, 2008

Sam Raimi reveals why he loves horror from the set of Drag Me to ... Patrick Lee from Blastr, April 14, 2009

Set Visit: Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell - ShockTillYouDrop.com Ryan Rotten from Shock Til You Drop, April 14, 2009

'Drag Me to Hell': Sam Raimi's Genre Curse - The 62nd Cannes Film ... Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 14, 2009

Sam Raimi has horror in his clutches - Los Angeles Times Gina McIntyre feature and interview from The LA Times, May 28, 2009

5 DISTURBING SAM RAIMI MOMENTS Buckminster Schumacker III from Screen Junkies, May 28, 2009

Sam Raimi's star Vehicle | Sound On Sight Ricky D. from Sound On Sight, May 28, 2009

Sam Raimi Tortures His Actors for Your Amusement | Little Gold Men ... Eric Spitznagel from Vanity Fair magazine, May 29, 2009

Hell and Back Again: Sam Raimi drags himself back to horror with his new film Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique Online, June 1, 2009

Retrospective Interview: Sam Raimi on swinging from Evil Dead to Spider-Man Steve Biodrowski feature and interview from Cinefantastique Online, June 2, 2009

The Phil Nugent Experience: A Sam Raimi Report Card Phil Nugent, June 10, 2009

Sam Raimi and Lucy Lawless, Bloody and Naked - TV Feature at IGN Matt Fowler from IGN, June 30, 2009

BFI | Sight & Sound | Drag Me to Hell (2009) July 2009

Sam Raimi to Direct World of Warcraft Movie - Giant Bomb Ryan Davis from Giant Bomb, July 22, 2009

Sam Raimi Does World Of Warcraft: Will It Be Brilliant Or Rubbish ... Stuart Heritage from Heckler Spray, July 23, 2009

The week in geek: Can Sam Raimi raise his game for World of Warcraft? Ben Child from The Guardian, July 23, 2009, also including photo gallery here: World of Warcraft: Catalcysm – concept art collection

Sam Raimi to produce 'Refuge' Steven Zeitchik from The Hollywood Reporter, September 23, 2009

Cinematical Article (2009) Directors We Love: Sam Raimi, by Jeffrey M. Anderson from Cinematical, October 11, 2009

Sam Raimi Vs. Christopher Nolan - Mania.com Batman Vs. Spider-Man: Who Is the Better Director? by Joey Campbell from Mania, October 13, 2009

Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi Out of Next SPIDER-MAN Anna Robinson from Alt Film Guide, January 11, 2010

'Spider-Man 4' delayed; Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi out ... GMA News, January 12, 2010

Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi part ways with Spider-Man franchise ... The Telegraph, January 12, 2010

Lions Gate Buys Sam Raimi Film About Jew Ghost « Heeb Magazine Heeb magazine, April 6, 2010

Sam Raimi, Robert Downey Jr. Confirmed for Wizard Of Oz Prequel ... Jennifer Ross from Paste magazine, June 10, 2010

Episode 48: Darkman (1990, Sam Raimi) / Darkman II: The Return of ... Alan Smithee, June 30, 2010

Sam Raimi to do apocalyptic scifi western Annalee Newitz from io9, July 20, 2010

Sam Raimi to Direct 'Earp: Saints for Sinners' - Screen Rant Chris Schrader from Screenrant, July 20, 2010

Sam Raimi lassoes Wyatt Earp for sci-fi film | Reuters Borys Kit from Reuters, July 20, 2010

Tarantino to pen ‘The Shadow’? Tom Powers from Cinefantastique Online, August 4, 2010

Random Facts About Sam Raimi and His Films: His Underrated Gem ... Kristy from the Bloodsprayer, August 27, 2010

TSPDT - Sam Raimi They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They

DGA Interview How to Make a Scary Movie...Sam Raimi on The Gift, by Darrell Hope interview from DGA, March 2001

Sam Raimi discusses Spider-Man Steve Biodrowski interview from Hollywood Gothique (2002)

Film Monthly Interview (2007) Sam Raimi Talks Spider-Man 3... And Beyond, by Paul Fischer from Film Monthly, April 22, 2007

Spider-Man 3 Interviews: Director Sam Raimi | Superhero Hype Superhero Hype interview, April 22, 2007

Sam Raimi Interview - Drag Me to Hell at Comic Con 2008 Video Rebecca Murray video interview from About.com, 2008 (1:39)

Sam Raimi's 'Spider-Man' regrets: 'I would have done everything ... Gina McIntyre interview from The LA Times, May 18, 2009

Dailymotion - Sam Raimi Talks Vampires In Spider-Man 4 - a Film ... FearNET video interview on YouTube (1:09)

Sam Raimi Interview WORLD OF WARCRAFT Movie, Oz, The Hobbit Saturn ... Steve “Frosty” Weintraub video interview from Collider, June 25, 2010 (8:30)

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Sam Raimi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Happy Birthday Sam Raimi from James Franco from James Franco ... YouTube (4:11)

EVIL DEAD

USA (82 mi) 1982

Raimi's first feature, a sensationally bad-taste effort which narrates the rapid decline into demonic mental and physical possession of a clean-cut, all-American holiday party holed up in a mountain Tennessee retreat. The woods come alive, devils possess the living, and Tom Sullivan's amazing make-up effects climax with a final fiery exorcism which makes George Romero look like Playschool. Short on characterisation and plot but strong on atmospheric horror and visual churns, this movie blends comic fantasy (EC Tales) with recent genre gems like Carrie and Texas Chain Saw Massacre to impressive effect.

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review

Countless imitators later, The Evil Dead remains a dizzying bloodbath in which gore proves both nasty and amusing. Setting the template for thousands of subsequent followers, Sam Raimi’s debut film charts the saga of two guys and three girls as they embark on a vacation in a remote forest cabin where, in a creepy dungeon decorated with a torn The Hills Have Eyes poster, they discover the Book of the Dead and an accompanying audio recording. Once played, said tape lets loose the surrounding area’s demons, who proceed to possess the hapless twenty-somethings save for Ash (Bruce Campbell), a sweet, somewhat timid guy who begins the evening giving his main squeeze a necklace and ends it by chopping her head off with a rusty shovel (severing the inflicted’s limbs being the only method of stopping them). Raimi’s rollercoaster cinematography seems no less gimmicky now than it did in 1981, creating a freewheeling vibe that contributes to the goofy comedy that underlies the film’s over-the-top gross-out scenarios, which primarily involve Campbell – in an iconic turn both sweet and terrified – having his face splattered with crimson goo. No serious subtext to be found here, just vigorous love and respect for the simultaneous horror and humor inherent to the genre, here epitomized by an infamous sexual assault carried out by animated tree branches, the chilling sight of girlfriends morphed into milky white-eyed ghouls who taunt victims with nursery rhymes, and endless POV shots that place one directly in the line of Raimi’s projectile-fluid fire.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Stumbling upon a Book of the Dead that zombifies folks might have in the previous decade pointed toward unearthing the characters' own political unrest; here, it's a green-light for unspooling rivers of gore, oozy but giddily unthreatening. Armed with zero budget and tons of film-school antsyness, Sam Raimi and pals hit the woods for the quintessential shoestring horror hit, mining the ol' chestnut about spelunking youngsters stranded in a log cabin fending off demonic forces till dawn arrives. Bruce Campbell, Dudley Do-Right jaw continually moist with splattered viscera, plays Ash, the kind-of leader, in the sequels upgraded into chainsaw-toting Curly and surly knight, but mostly the pantsy here. The opening session is all ominously scuttling cameras, breaking through windows and darting past trees when not hiding behind a swinging pendulum; once the demons are loose, it's full-on slaughterhouse slapstick. Ellen Sandweiss gets raped by malevolent weeds before picking up where Linda Blair left off in The Exorcist, Betsy Baker morphs into a gurgling, white-eyed bobble-head doll while Hal Delrich hacks possessed girlfriend Sarah York with an ax until blood literally douses the lenses. Limbs are rudely separated from their owners, goo squirts from orifices, and the zombies melt until their creamed-corn guts spill all over Ash's hilariously disbelieving mug. For all the bug-eyed panache, the gremlins-at-the-wheel pyrotechnics get wearying, all the more so for trading the radicalized tropes of '70s horror films for jokey film-class flailing. Still, what sets Raimi apart from the condescending emptiness of his buddies the Coens (Joel, incidentally, is credited as assistant editor here) is his lack of snarky distancing -- power outlets start bleeding, but Raimi is always alongside his characters, preferably as a disembodied track zooming into a screaming mouth.

Evil Dead Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Twenty years after its original theatrical release, Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead still feels like the punchiest horror flick this side of a Dario Argento gialli. Made on a shoe-string budget, The Evil Dead is difficult to assess for what initially seems like nothing more than B-movie schlock. Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his friends take a weekend trip to the woods only to stumble across the mysterious Book of the Dead. Spells are unleashed, friends go zombie and Ash is forced to test the limits of his squeamishness. Raimi's script is riotously deadpan, his compositions undeniably breathtaking and inventive. The director relentlessly fashions the film's first half as a creepy-crawly sweat chamber with evil seemingly taking the form of an omniscient, roaming camera. Raimi takes so much joy in poking fun at his five protagonists you might wonder why Kevin Williamson even bothered Screaming. Artist Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is literally raped just outside the film's infamous cabin, busy twigs and branches suggesting horny woods at play. Despite the signs (the difficult-to-start vehicle, the fallen bridge), no one else believes the woods are alive. Ash and his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker) share an intimate, peek-a-boo moment through which Ash gives Linda a necklace. When he is later forced to kill her, Raimi takes great joy in referencing this coquettish exchange of affection. Ash is horrordom's most memorable wuss, victim to both a hissing group of crazed friends and to Raimi's lightweight yet burdensome mise-en-scène. Now infamous for its over-the-top gore and cheesy effects sequences, The Evil Dead is most impressive for Raimi's unnerving wide angle work and his uncanny, almost unreal ability to suggest the presence of intangible evil via distant headlights, bleeding light sockets and, in the film's most awesome set piece, a simple game of cards. Raimi actively teases his protagonist for not being a man. Ash may return for the sequel, but The Evil Dead's finale suggests that he was never really up to the challenge.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Evil Dead Trilogy

DVD Times Anthony Nield, Evil Dead Trilogy

Jerry Saravia review Evil Dead Trilogy

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-] Special Edition

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder

Classic Horror review Nate Yapp

Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 933. Evil Dead II (1987 ... Kevin Lee, September 3, 2007

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Film Monthly (Gary Schultz) review

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

The World's Greatest Critic! [J.C. Maçek III]

Horrorwatch.com : The Evil Dead

DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review

Digital Retribution dvd review Collector’s Edition

The Digital Bits dvd review [Limited Edition] Todd Doogan

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2.5/4] Limited Edition

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review Limited Edition

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review [Limited Edition]

Cinescape dvd review Anthony C. Ferrante, Limited Edition

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Limited Edition

UpcomingDiscs.com (Jeremy Frost) dvd review [4/5] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition] Colin Jacobson

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Doc, Limited Edition

The Evil Dead: Limited Edition Blu-ray vs. Ultimate Edition DVD Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique

DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Ultimate Edition] 3-disc

Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Ryan Daley, Ultimate Edition 3-disc

Twitch (Todd Brown) review Tim Janson, Ultimate Edition 3-disc

DVD Town (Tyler Shainline) dvd review Ultimate Edition 3-disc

DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [8/10] Ultimate Edition 3-disc

Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review Ultimate Edition 3-disc

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review Ultimate Edition 3-disc

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Ultimate Edition] Michael P. Dougherty II

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg] Blu-Ray

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [4/5]

Bill's Movie Emporium[Bill Thompson]

And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]

Dark Horizons (Garth Franklin) review

It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie review [-2.5/5]

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [2/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [8/10]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review

Frankie Paiva review

Mondo Digital EVIL DEAD and ARMY OF DARKNESS

Deadites Online - The Fan's Official Source For Evil Dead

Sam Raimi Bruce Campbell Evil Dead Blu-ray Commentary Clip - UGO.com Matt Patches from UGO, August 17, 2010, including YouTube (1:42)

Evil Dead Continues Cross Country Tour Bryan from Famous Monsters, March 2, 2010, also seen here: Famous Monsters » Sam Raimi

EVIL DEAD by Sam Raimi Screenplay Online

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] comic

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition] Dalton Ross

EVIL DEAD II

USA (84 mi) 1987

Not so much a sequel, more a self-parodic reprise, like some black comic nightmare in the damaged brain of sole survivor Ash (Campbell). This time though, tired of cowering in the corner, Ash gets tooled up with a shotgun and a chainsaw, and lets the monsters suck on some abuse. Meanwhile, four other victims - none of whom has ever seen a horror movie - arrive at the shack and start settling in, unaware that they'll be dead by dawn. The dialogue has been pared to the bone, the on-screen gore toned down, and the maniacal laughter cranked up to full volume. Using the same breathless pacing, rushing camera movements and nerve-jangling sound effects as before, Raimi drags us screaming into his cinematic funhouse. Delirious, demented and diabolically funny.

Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce

Where the original Evil Dead was a juggling act of film-school antics and genuinely evocative creepiness, Sam Raimi's sequel/remake is full-on gore slapstick, more Tex Avery than Dario Argento. All of the first film is wittily telescoped into the opening five minutes, recapping how Ash's (the inimitable Bruce Campbell) weekend getaway in the woods got interrupted by evil forces unleashed by the Book of the Dead, right down to the ominous final tracking shot straight into a screaming mouth. Daybreak gives the hapless hero some much-needed time-out, but, since the film is shaped as a wide-eyed comedy of bravura kineticism, it doesn't take long for the frenetic splatter gags to kick off again. Indeed, for the most part, Evil Dead 2 places Ash as straight man to Raimi's delirious camerawork, with no prankish stone left unturned—winking setups, rotating sets, disorientating lens tricks, forced perspectives, and blood geysers erupting from shotgun blasts. Raimi delights in using sinister movement to suggest unseen menace: In one showstopper, the demonically skittering camera chases Ash from room to room inside the cabin, crashing through door after door, then losing him along the way and retreating back into the woods. A new batch of victims (including Denise Bixler, Dan Hicks, Kassie DePaiva, and Richard Domeier) eventually turn up, donning monstrous make-up and blank eye-caps, though Raimi, despite the picture's pricier budget, remains dedicated to the original's brand of guerilla ingenuity and retro-chintz. The hero's decapitated beloved rises from her grave to provide a little stop-animation ballet, trees crush houses like beer cans, and a skull-faced demon's neck stretches to the sound of shrieking chimpanzees—fond Ray Harryhausen shout-outs all, but my favorite is Ash facing a chortling deer-head trophy. (A literalization of the title of Pupi Avati's underrated chiller The House With Laughing Windows, maybe?) Yet Raimi's resourceful restlessness ultimately pushes the movie beyond gooey genre pastiche and into uniquely absurd farce. Ash may lose limbs as he chainsaws his way through the installment, but Evil Dead 2 holds together as the giddiest treatment of viscera this side of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.

Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987) - Articles - TCM.com Richard Harlan Smith

With Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987), writer-director Sam Raimi pulled off a typically impossible feat – he made a sequel to a cult movie milestone ("the ultimate experience in grueling terror") that was widely considered to be better than the original. Initially, Raimi had wanted to press on from the exposure afforded him by The Evil Dead (1981) to a sequel that would catapult its benighted protagonist Ash (Bruce Campbell) into the Middle Ages. When moneyman Dino De Laurentiis came aboard (at the behest of Stephen King, then making his own directorial debut with the De Laurentiis-produced Maximum Overdrive[1986]), the power behind the newly minted De Laurentiis Entertainment Group demanded a scenario more in line with that of Raimi's original cult hit. With a budget ten times that of The Evil Dead, Raimi's follow-up has a more aesthetically pleasing look and a host of special effects that pays homage to a score of horror and suspense classics: the canted angles of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the anthropomorphic trees of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the fruit cellar of Psycho (1960), stop motion animation reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen, the boarded-up windows of Night of the Living Dead (1968), the "blood flood" from The Shining (1980), the rays of light streaming in through a sundered wall from Raising Arizona (1985) and it's anyone's guess whether Ash's perambulating hand was a nod to The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), The Crawling Hand (1963) or Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965).

With Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi took the opportunity to experiment with time cuts, which advance the action one significant piece at a time in the manner of comic book panels. This technique is most pronounced in the now celebrated setpiece in which Ash amputates his stump with the help of nominal heroine Annie Knowby (Sarah Berry), whose father has unwisely unleashed ancient evil upon the world. In addition to the forward momentum gained by telescoping these events, this editing tack brackets the dumb fun (which so often metastasize into full blown surreal slapstick) with an authorial intelligence that was not lost on moviegoers whose enthusiasm turned Evil Dead II into an instant cult classic rated slightly higher than Raimi's gnarly original. Raimi had grown up on the punishing physical comedy of The Three Stooges and the hyperkinetic cartoons of Tex Avery, which bent the physical world to the demands of animated high comedy. In Evil Dead II, Raimi and crew freshen the shopworn formula of inanimate objects coming to an horrific semblance of life (a gimmick driven into the ground with the trifecta successes of The Exorcist [1973], The Omen and Carrie [both 1976]) by making these items (a rocking chair, a gooseneck lamp, a stuffed deer head) not just so much telekinetic flotsam and jetsam but characters in their own right, who taunt Ash in witchy high octaves, pushing him to hysterical, transcendental laughter even while promising he'll be "dead by dawn."

In a 1988 interview with British journalist Jonathan Ross, Sam Raimi projected for himself an inevitable loss of creativity that would come with the assignment of bigger budgeted studio projects. Indeed, as Raimi became the A-list director-for-hire of such popular successes as A Simple Plan (1998), For Love of the Game (1999) and the Billy Bob Thornton-scripted The Gift (2000), the stately, tasteful manner of his craft seemed a betrayal of his salad days as a DIY splatterpunk using Milk Duds to thicken his bathtub ichor. If Raimi had been suspected by his early fan base of having sold out prior to the New Millennium, his helming of Columbia's mega budget Spider-Man franchise from 2002 on was likely the final coffin nail for the faithful. Yet while these summer blockbusters (the final budget of Spider-Man 3 is calculated to have hit $350 million) seem, at least superficially, to be anathema to the hands-on Raimi aesthetic, there is an obvious and reassuring kinship shared by Ash of The Evil Dead canon and Spider-Man's Peter Parker. We meet both characters on the cusp of adulthood and witness their maturation being interrupted by occult forces, supernatural events that change them physically, complicate their love lives and compel both to rise above their fears and physical limitations to become unlikely and initially unwilling heroes. Although Raimi rarely works in full-on horror these days, Ghost House Pictures, the production company he founded with Evil Dead producer Robert G. Tapert, remains a strong brand in the genre with such box office hits as Boogeyman (2005) and The Grudge (2004) and 30 Days of Night (2007).

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Evil Dead Trilogy

DVD Times Anthony Nield, Evil Dead Trilogy

Jerry Saravia review Evil Dead Trilogy

Classic Horror review Chrissy Derbyshire

Kamera.co.uk review Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell

Juicy Cerebellum (Alex Sandell) review Halloween party pick

eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder

Mike Bracken review [5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long

Cinescape dvd review [Collector's Edition] Steve Biodrowski

The Digital Bits dvd review [Regular and Limited Editions] Florian Kummert

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review [Limited Edition]

Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVD Clinic (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [5/5] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

MovieFreak.com (Greg Malmborg) dvd review [8/10] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

DVDActive (Dustin McNeill) dvd review [8/10] ['Book of the Dead' Limited Edition]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Divimax Edition] Dante A. Ciampaglia

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [8/10] Blu-Ray

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [8/10]

Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review

The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review

Digital Retribution dvd review

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [5/5]

Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [2/5]

Horror Express review Finn Clark

Serdar Yegulalp retrospective [3.5/4]

Lars Lindahl review

Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [4/5]

Washington Post (Richard Harrington) review

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

DARKMAN

USA (96 mi) 1990

Edward Copeland on Film (Damian)

Dr Westlake (Neeson) is on the verge of perfecting a synthetic skin which conceals disfigurements; the problem is, the skin dissolves in sunlight after 99 minutes. When his laboratory is ransacked and blown up by gangster Durant (Drake), Westlake is left for dead, face down in a vat of caustic chemicals. But he survives (sans visage) as Darkman, an avenging angel who uses temporary masks to impersonate and destroy his enemies, while simultaneously attempting to win back his estranged love (McDormand). Drawing self-consciously on the 'misunderstood monster' tradition of Universal's golden age, Raimi's major studio debut abounds with conflicting ambitions, juggling pathos, horror and incongruous slapstick as it attempts to meld (with variable success) an archaic narrative structure with a kinetic, modern visual style. Neeson's performance encapsulates these contradictions, mixing camp histrionics with moments of touching precision. But the breathtaking action sequences find Raimi in his element: wild, woolly and occasionally wondrous, Darkman has the chaotic charm of untrammelled, undisciplined talent.

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5] also seen here: Sam Raimi, Darkman: Old School Reviews (links lost)

I must thank Roger Ebert for recommending Darkman when it was first released in 1990, when most critics generally panned it. His praise for Sam Raimi's low budget film intrigued me enough to check it out before it vanished from the theaters, and a number of scenes have remained in the long time pleasurable memory zone. Recently re-watching Darkman on DVD, I find the film continues to hold up as entertaining melodrama and offers hope for the Spider-Man series.

After two misfires with mainstream releases For Love of the Game and The Gift, it's refreshing to see Raimi taking on the essentially cartoon characters of Darkman and creating a believable universe in a visually rich environment with touches of pathos. Although most Raimi cultists loyally stand by his Evil Dead trilogy in hopes that he'll transform Spiderman into a worthy film, the best indicator of Raimi's ability to work with cartoon material lies with his vastly underrated Darkman.

Liam Neeson (destined to star in Schindler's List three years later) carries the film as Darkman, an identity scientist Peyton Westlake takes on after being horribly burned and left for dead. Westlake has been working on synthetic skin, developed from digitally transforming photographs, but unfortunately the skin breaks up at the 99th minute.

Similar to Hitchcock's protagonists, Westlake is a victim of random circumstance. His girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand, six years before she strikes gold in Fargo), discovers compromising papers from her boss that prove extensive corruption and leaves them in Westlake's lab. Mobster Robert Durant (Larry Drake) and his henchmen show up for the papers, blow away Westlake's lab assistant, thrash and trash Westlake and lab, and leave him for dead as the lab explodes in a beautifully filmed fiery inferno.

Alive, but deformed with burns covering 40% of his body, Westlake anonymously is treated in the hospital by removing nerve endings to make his life tolerable. Ironically, rendering him in this manner subjects his mind to high stages of rage and episodes of extreme strength, similar to the Incredible Hulk without changing green, but now he becomes a creature of the shadows—Darkman.

He sets off to win back his girlfriend, but cannot do so in his deformed condition. Using scientific intelligence, Darkman reconstructs his lab, collects photographs of his adversaries, and creates duplicate masks to extract revenge on Durant and his crew of mobsters in plots reminiscent of Mission Impossible that set the bad guys against each other.

This provides some great humor and also establishes another Hitchcockian theme—the idea that evil dwells within us all. Raimi beats us over the head with that theme often, but as a cartoon this is perfectly acceptable—this isn't exactly in the same territory as Notorious, but I can imagine the Master of Suspense enjoying Raimi's work here. The depiction of good and evil within the protagonist demonstrates that Raimi understands how to bring a measure of depth to characters that would be left paper-thin in more traditional treatments. One memorable sequence with the evil Durant's cigar cutter evokes physical reactions in the audience without even showing the blood, and a subsequent parallel scene with an enraged Westlake crunching a carnival worker's fingers further establishes his theme associating our protagonist with his dark side.

Credit the main actors for translating Raimi's screenplay into the flesh. McDormand delivers the goods believably as the loyal girlfriend, conflicted when Westlake apparently dies. Her part could be expanded more, but the film allows Neeson to demonstrate his acting skills to a much fuller degree. His over the top scenes of rage show excellent comic timing, but he shows a great deal of range. The quieter moments with his pained looks add far more sympathy for his character than we'd expect in such a screenplay.

Darkman contains many pleasures that film aficionados will appreciate. Incorporating Chicago locations in the mix and combining warm sunlit open spaces with darker closed in sets, cinematographer Bill Pope (The Matrix) captures great explosive scenes, surreal dream sequences with lots of reds and yellows, and really gloomy scenes in darkened alleyways with the despondent Darkman character.

Overall, this film shows off Sam Raimi's vision and gives the clearest preview of what we can expect of his Spider-Man. Should the large budget movie fail, we can still bring out this far less seen DVD as definitive proof that Raimi remains one of the better directors working in the business. Of course his Evil Dead fans have believed this for years.

Dorkosphere [Alex Miller]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

Mark R. Leeper review [-1 out of -4..+4]

Classic Horror review Jenn Dlugos

DVD Verdict - Darkman Trilogy [Dylan Charles]

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg] Darkman Trilogy

DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review

DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [2/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [2/5] [HD-DVD Version]

DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]

UpcomingDiscs.com (Ryan Erb) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Nicholas Sheffo

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) dvd review [2/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

High-Def Digest [El Bicho] Blu-Ray

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

Draven99's Musings [Chris Beaumont]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]

Cinephile Magazine [Richard X] Richard Saad

Georgia Straight (Steve Newton) review

eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [5/5]

Blood Brothers [Matt Reifschneider]

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] capsule review

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty

BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review

Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman

Variety review

Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review

Washington Post (Joe Brown) review

Siskel & Ebert (audio)

The New York Times (Caryn James) review

DVDBeaver dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Yunda Eddie Feng

ARMY OF DARKNESS

USA (81 mi) 1993 Director’s Cut (96 mi)

A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]

A calculated tilt at the cross-over mainstream audience, this second sequel eschews the hardcore horror of The Evil Dead and the splatter comedy of Evil Dead II, in favour of a swashbuckling comedy. Catapulted back in time, chainsaw-wielding hero Ash (Campbell) joins forces with the inhabitants of a besieged castle - and damsel in distress Sheila (Davidtz) - in their battle against an army of skeleton Deadites. With its stop-motion effects and knockabout humour, this plays more like a Ray Harryhausen version of El Cid than a horror movie, with plenty of slapstick but very little gore.

With the reluctant hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) having been unwillingly sent from his haunted cabin in the woods back to medieval times, the opportunities for camp indulgence in Army of Darkness have been considerably expanded upon from those in the first two Evil Dead films. Looser than the overdrawn original film but not as tight or relentlessly original as the second, this capper to Raimi’s schlock horror trilogy is wicked fun in delightfully bad taste, the visual gags coming fast and cheap as Ash disposes of any possessed creatures that unwisely crosses his path with prowess and brio to spare. Here, the zombies take a backseat to a skeletal army that wages war against the local castle residents, led by a chainsaw and shotgun wielding Ash (“You see this? This is my boom stick”). The feel is fittingly haphazard, moving from one outrageous visual gag set piece to the next without a moment more of screen time dedicated to the necessitated plot than is absolutely necessary. Perhaps no moment of the film is funnier (at least to knowing film geeks, a la Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still) than when Ash, commanded to retrieve a sacred book that can return him to his own time, tries to cover up his failure to remember the magic words needed to do so with perfectly timed ineptitude. With loving references to the legends of King Arthur, Gulliver’s Travels and The Three Stooges abound, Army of Darkness succeeds thanks to its indulgences into the utterly ridiculous.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kian Bergstrom

Also known as BRUCE CAMPBELL VERSUS ARMY OF DARKNESS, this is the third and, so far, final film in Raimi's saga following the moron Ash (Campbell) as he strives to save the world from the legions of the damned. Dripping with glee, ARMY OF DARKNESS revels in its gore-splattered Deadite lunacy, featuring a plot that's little more than a series of contrivances for visual puns, hackneyed romantic clichés, and action set-pieces of virtuosic, if incoherent, energy. Every poke in the eye, every zombie glare, every threat upon one's edible soul is an opportunity for Raimi's teenage sense of humor to show itself, making this perhaps the most 3 Stooges-inflected action-horror film ever made. Certainly it's the lightest film Raimi's ever made, an effervescent dollop of self-mockery capping off a stage in his career of wild-eyed experiment and go-for-broke invention. This is filmmaking at it's happiest, glorying in the bald capacities of cinema to shrink, duplicate, and transform its actors, to mold and mistreat space, to weirdly stutter and truncate time. Merely getting to move the camera is enough pretext for Raimi to set up an elaborate genre reference or visual gag, and the intricate stupidity of Ash, thrust back in time to Medieval England to fight the zombies he unleashed from the Necronomicon in the previous two (modern day) films is an elaborate counterpoint to his surprisingly badass versatility with a chainsaw and broomstick. In this lead role, Bruce Campbell, long-time muse to Raimi, demonstrates a self-effacing, deeply sensuous performance style that's long been under-recognized. One of the great physicalists of screen acting, Campbell's anti-naturalistic tics, too-careful gestures, and winking, self-aware line readings form a kind of over-saturated scaffold upon which the campy drapery of the narrative hangs. A scene-chewer in the best possible sense, Campbell steals every scene, dominates every shot, never missing an opportunity to deflate the film's artifices or turn his fellow actors' work against them. In the face of his mugging, defamiliarizing body, everyone else plays permanent catch-up. This is the last great Raimi film to date, and a milestone in Campbell's career. "Hail to the King, baby."

Classic Horror review Chrissy Derbyshire

Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a great horror film. Not an auspicious start to any review. Let’s take it one step further. Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a horror film at all. It’s a madcap comedy, avec zombies – but don’t expect Shaun of the Dead either. This third and (thus far) final film in the Evil Dead series is an amalgam of Three Stooges and Monty Python style comedy antics and groovy Harryhausen-esque special effects, all squeezed into an Evil Dead plot so thin it looks ready to rupture at any moment.

The long-suffering Ash (Bruce Campbell) was, if we remember, transported back in time at the end of Evil Dead II. For those of you who don’t remember, never fear: an inexplicably re-shot flashback sequence will explain all. Suddenly, Ash finds himself responsible for saving the Medieval world from the deadites. This, in true Ash parlance, really pisses him off. Campbell is in fine form here, turning a wispy plot and weak script into a whole that merits its unquestionable cult status. He has more lines in this film (the film being generally a lot more ‘talky’ than the previous two) and, despite having little to work with, really develops the antiheroic, arrogant yet lovable character of Ash.

One aspect of Army of Darkness that might truly be called classic is the playful creativity of the special effects. In one particularly memorable sequence, Ash smashes a mirror, and from the shards spring dozens of reflected mini-Ashes who proceed to attack their original in a most ungrateful manner. Eventually they force Ash to swallow one of their number, causing him to grow an evil twin from his shoulder. One gets the impression that Raimi poured all his comic tastes into the character of ‘Evil Ash’, who is far more silly than he is scary, especially in the hilarious fight scene between Ash and his evil clone.

Then again, the whole concept here is more silly than it is scary. The deadites, for instance, seem far more inclined to swing a farcical punch than to swallow anyone’s soul. Resurrected skeletons scream and get blown up – and if you listen carefully you can hear one utter a whispered threat to rip off certain tender parts of Ash’s anatomy.

Embeth Davitz is another predominately comic foil as Sheila, Ash’s love of the moment, whose function (like most women in Evil Dead films) appears to be to scream a lot and become possessed. Unlike Evil Ash (also played by Campbell), she is, unfortunately, not very funny at all. Raimi is a miracle-worker in many ways, but Davitz would be better moulded by a carpenter than by a director. Still, her performance and those of some of the other non-actors in this film cannot take away from Bruce Campbell’s no-holds-barred performance. He’s a great physical actor, he works brilliantly with Raimi, and this combination of actor and director will always be classic.

Watch this film with expectations of comedy, and you won’t be disappointed. It’s good fun, even if it ain’t art. However, I would urge you not to expect horror, or you certainly will be disappointed. Finally, if you’re deciding between editions of Army of Darkness, choose a copy that includes the alternative ending. Look out for this cracker of a sequence. It includes the best line in the film and, in my (never humble) opinion, one of the best closing lines in film history.

Trivia:

An alternate ending (shown in Europe and available on the official "bootleg" DVD amongst others) has Ash waking up a century too late in a post-apocalyptic world.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Evil Dead Trilogy

DVD Times Anthony Nield, Evil Dead Trilogy

RevolutionSF (Kenn McCracken) recommendation Evil Dead: An Appreciation, Evil Dead Trilogy

Jerry Saravia review Evil Dead Trilogy

Army of Darkness – Review & Retrospective Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique Online

not coming to a theater near you (Chiranjit Goswami) review lengthy

John Beachem review [4.5/5]

a wasted life Bryin Abraham

Jay's Movie Blog Jason

filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger) review [4.5/5]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib

CultureCartel.com (Travis Lowell) review [5/5]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review David Milchik

MovieFreak.com (John Teves) dvd review [4/4] [Boomstick Edition]

DVD Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd review [Screwhead Edition]

DoBlu.com Blu-ray Screwhead Edition [Matt Paprocki] also here: Blogcritics - DVD review [Matt Paprocki]

DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review [Director's Cut] [Limited Edition]

DVDActive (Warwick Gaetjens) dvd review [9/10] [Director's Cut]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Director's Cut] Colin Jacobson

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Limited Edition]

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Frank's Reel Reviews (Loron Hays) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [8/10] Blu-Ray

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [5/10] Blu-Ray

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Mark R. Leeper review [low +1 out of -4..+4]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]

Mos Eisley review

Lars Lindahl review

Exploitation Retrospect review Dan Taylor

Mike Bracken review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder

Georgia Straight (Steve Newton) review

Bloody-Disgusting review [3.5/5] The Thinker

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill

Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [3/5]

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [8/10]

Mondo Digital also reviewing EVIL DEAD

Talking Pictures (UK) review Sweets for the Sweet, by Ed Cooper, also reviewing CANDYMAN, BRAIN DEAD, and HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH

Variety (Peter Besas) review

Entertainment Weekly review [C+] Owen Gleiberman

BBC Films review Nick Hilditch

Washington Post (Richard Harrington) review

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2/5]

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Mark Wilson

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

USA Japan (107 mi) 1995

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

This engagingly hyperbolic homage to the style and revenge fantasies of the spaghetti Western centres on a deadly tournament - organised by Hackman, boss of a township called Redemption - to find the fastest gun in the West. Enter a motley crew, among them Sharon Stone's Eastwood-like interloper, who has a secret agenda of her own... A deadpan black comedy, Sam Raimi's fast-paced movie looks and sounds like a Leone oater but more so. The violence is heightened by an intelligent, often hilarious use of special effects. Stone, who co-produced, is surprisingly effective in the lead, and Hackman's Herod is wonderfully, unrepentantly villainous. Terrific fun.

Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review

Sam Raimi, best known for the Evil Dead series, directs this surrealistically action-packed Western (based entirely on a gunfight contest) as if he'd taken the title to heart and slowing down would kill him. Every sequence spills over with visual punchlines, obnoxiously funny zoom-in shots and ferocious one-liners. It's almost too much movie for itself, and protagonist Sharon Stone can't anchor the picture the way it needs; her Clint Eastwood-style sullenness lacks substance. But the gallery of supporting actors, which includes Lance Henriksen, Leonard DiCaprio, Gene Hackman (doing a twisted take on his evil sheriff role from Unforgiven), fill the movie with so much wanton charisma that Stone's performance as the "straight man" actually starts working after a while. It's a weird picture where A-movie and B-movie qualities are blended at such a high velocity that you start to lose track of which is which.

VideoVista review Donald Morefield

A lone rider arrives in the western town of Redemption, seeking vengeance for her murdered father - a marshal who challenged the criminals that killed him. Back in the mid-1990s, following her attainment of stardom in Basic Instinct, in between action roles in Total Recall (opposite Schwarzenegger), and The Specialist (with Stallone), a 'wild west' picture with Sharon Stone was quite an enticing prospect. Here, she plays 'the Lady', later identified as Ellen, a novice gunfighter joining a duelling contest organised by town despot Herod (Gene Hackman, performing a cheekily extravagant variation of his Oscar-winning 'Little Bill' Daggett supporting character in Eastwood's Unforgiven).

For a slick western thriller that also counts Clint Eastwood's seminal High Plains Drifter (1973) among its varied influences, perhaps this particularly astute casting of Hackman as the chief villain, might be viewed as one borrowing too many from Eastwoods' oeuvre... But director Sam Raimi, and screenwriter Simon Moore, have crafted such an obviously affectionate homage to both stylised 'spaghetti' westerns, and traditional Hollywood horse operas, and then blessed the film with simmering undercurrents of both femininity and feminism (Stone's Ellen is a notable amalgam heroine - seemingly inspired by Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, and Jane Fonda's Cat Ballou), that even such blatantly developed influences, aesthetic and narrative, do not, in any significant way, detract from this film's board appeal to mainstream cinema tastes.

Other principal castings for The Quick And The Dead - of Russell Crowe, whose stardom was clearly ascendant back then; and the 20-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, just ahead of his leading role in Baz Luhrmann's modernist Shakespeare, Romeo + Juliet (1996), plus extremely talented supporting actors such as Keith David, Lance Henriksen, Tobin Bell, with superb veteran, Pat Hingle - provided further evidence of the filmmakers' savvy in assembling team players capable of roundly expressing peculiar individualities for their often ironically-mannered iconic western roles. In fact, every key role in the unfolding drama of sudden death is perfectly balanced for easy recognition by genre fans of several wild-west archetypes; from the undertaker Doc Wallace (Roberts Blossom), and victimised saloon-girl Katie (Olivia Burnette), to grungy outlaw, 'Scars' (Mark Boone Jr), and local sleaze, Dred (Kevin Conway), a rapist and paedophile.

It's not immediately clear, in the timetable of clock-strike scheduled gunfights, who is most likely to end up shooting the hateful villains, or the boastful gunslingers (a Sioux Indian, named Spotted Horse, claims invulnerability to bullets; Henriksen's charismatic trick-shot artist, 'Ace' Hanlon, is fatally exposed as an unskilled fraud by Herod's expertise), but there are few genuine surprises here. It's to be expected that Herod will manipulate proceedings to such an extent that he ends up shooting his immodest son 'the Kid' (a rather unsympathetic DiCaprio), and that the villain is wily enough to pit reluctant hero Cort (Crowe, underplaying almost to the point of invisibility), against vulnerably-anxious heroine Ellen, necessitating their rule-breaking ruse to counteract and prevent a wicked twist of fate that Herod plans for them.

Raimi employs numerous camera tricks or displays of prosthetics to enhance, with consummate wit and savage humour, the wounding and killing scenes. This cannot be praised as a modern classic of the western genre, but neither is it a complete flop (as its US box-office receipts had suggested). It's unlikely to be found on any critic's top 10 listing of cult movies, either. The Quick And The Dead is merely a competent production, a lively mix of clichés and talent, which is quite satisfactory by anyone's standards.

not coming to a theater near you (Adam Balz) review

Edward Copeland on Film (J.D.)

Scott Renshaw review [5/10]

Raging Bull Movie Reviews review Vanes Naldi, Dan McGowan, and Mike Lorefice

Steven Krut review

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

Movie-Vault.com (Carl Langley) review [4/10] also seen here: Movie-Gurus.com [Carl Langley]

Rob Furr review

Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review

filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [4/5] also seen here: James Brundage retrospective

The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan

DVDTalk [Jamie S. Rich]

Digital Retribution dvd review Julian

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review Superbit Edition

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [3/5] [Superbit Edition]

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Superbit Edition]

Moda Magazine dvd review Brian Orndorf, Superbit Edition

DVD Town - Blu-ray [James Plath]

DVD Verdict (Eric Profancik) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Colin Jacobson

Georgia Straight (Ron Yamauchi) review

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [4/5]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]

Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [C+]

Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

BBC Films review Matt Ford

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [1.5/5]

San Francisco Examiner (Scott Rosenberg) review

Memphis Flyer (Hadley Hury) review

A SIMPLE PLAN

USA France Germany Great Britain Japan (121 mi) 1998

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

In fiction at least, no plan is ever simple, especially if crime's involved. So when the chance discovery of a wrecked light aircraft on a snowy Minnesota nature reserve places $4m in easy reach of farmer Hank (Paxton), his dim brother Jacob (Thornton), and the latter's ethically challenged buddy Lou (Briscoe), they should surely have known not even to think about keeping it. Still, they're only human, and soon they're arguing over how to hang on to the cash, without arousing the suspicion of friends and families, and desperately trying to conceal the crimes that follow, as if by destiny, hard on their initial lapse from honesty. Raimi takes the old story about dishonour among thieves and renders it fresh through the calm, cool, steady assurance of the telling. The aura of familiarity extends even to the snowscapes, but the sturdy characterisation and taut plotting, which charts the progress towards deadly infighting with all the rigour of a philosophical syllogism, make for an impressively lean thriller.

Potential viewers of A Simple Plan should not be deterred by those trailers and stills of Billy Bob Thornton, in a major supporting role, wearing glasses duct-taped together over his nose and an old knit cap that plasters greasy hanks of hair down around his face. These promotionals, exacerbated by a goofy grin filled with seriously yellowed teeth, suggest that the writer and star of One False Move and Sling Blade may have finally strayed too far over the line into caricature. As it turns out, in A Simple Plan Thornton brings very quietly and subtly to life one of the most interesting tragicomic characters in recent American film. The performance is one of the chief surprises and satisfactions among many in this arresting morality play, adapted for the screen by Scott B. Smith from his best-selling novel, directed by Sam Raimi, with cinematography by Alar Kivilo, design by Patrizia von Brandenstein, music by Danny Elfman, and an acting ensemble that includes Bill Paxton, Brent Briscoe, and Bridget Fonda.

A Simple Plan is a deceptively simple film in which we are reminded – as we too infrequently are by many current films – that drama is not only not afraid of simplicity but recognizes the mastery of it as an essential step toward artistry in the form. Focused tightly on relatively few characters, its storyline correspondingly taut, A Simple Plan sustains the conviction of its good script and actors, its intelligent direction, and strong visual elements; its exploration of good and evil goes deep rather than wide. It is precisely the creative team’s determination not to cover their commercial demographics by throwing in extraneous characters, plot lines, and cinematic kitchen sinks that makes this project refreshing and, despite a few flaws, has earned it several nods in the early awards competitions. The film is involving, disturbing, and highly entertaining.

Set during the long winter in a small town isolated among the forested hills and rolling farmlands of eastern Minnesota, the film’s tone of irony is established immediately. The snowy fields are clean and white, the hills etched softly in the pale sunlight, the stands of trees rise with the timeless authoritarian grace of nature. It is the human figures that cast the only ambiguous shadows in this pristine landscape, and the movie wastes no time in letting us know that, as in any good tragedy, it’s often the good, moral, and happy man – played here by Paxton in his best role and performance to date – who casts the longest shadow.

In part because of the corkscrew-like circumscription of Scott’s screenplay and in part because of Kivilo’s evocatively stark cinematography, A Simple Plan has the odd sensibility of a dark Jacobean drama laced with the mordant humor and ironic fatedness of some medieval Norse saga. There are some important surprises in the story, but much more significantly this is a tale of inevitabilities. Playwright Arthur Miller has said of his Death of a Salesman that the audience response he wanted to incite “was not ‘What happens next and why?’ so much as ‘Oh, God, of course.’” The “why” of A Simple Plan comes early: Hank (Paxton), his brother Jacob (Thornton), and Jacob’s buddy Lou (Briscoe) discover a small plane that had apparently crashed in the woods some time ago; its pilot is long dead and stashed onboard is $4.3 million. “It’s the American Dream in a goddamned gym bag!” crows Lou. “You work for the American Dream,” protests Hank. But he doesn’t protest long. Though we know where this is headed, the “what happens nexts” of this tale of corruption keep the suspense hissing along like a long-fused bomb. But it is specifically the “Oh, God, of course” toward which A Simple Plan ineluctably moves – fueled by the unadorned humanity of Paxton’s and Thornton’s performances – that separates this film from the pack of postmodern noir drivel and gives it staying power.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: A Simple Plan (1998) Philip Kemp, June 1999

Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan may resemble other recent small-town crime films, but its emotional power and subtlety put it in a class of its own

Early on in A Simple Plan, a man cautiously enters the fuselage of a crashed plane. The pilot is sitting in his seat, his head shaking as if in pain or incredulity. Thinking he's still alive, the newcomer speaks to him and starts forward. His movement causes the fuselage to tip, lurching him forward into the pilot - the crows that have been feeding on the dead man's face erupt in a tumult of angry squawks and stabbing beaks.

It's easy to guess how the Sam Raimi we know and love, splatter-happy director of The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Darkman and The Quick and the Dead, would have built on that scene. Easy to imagine the in-your-face shocks, the crow-haunted nightmares, the vengeful zombie with a half-eaten visage chewing its way up the cast list. The humour would have been gleefully ghoulish, the characters and violence pure cartoon, the genre conventions teased and twanged and mercilessly mocked. But A Simple Plan is the work of a very different Sam Raimi, a film-maker who here austerely rejects hyped-up camera tricks and jokey shock effects and creates living, complex characters whose fates we care about. The result is easily his finest film to date.

The subtlety and the pervasive sense of unease are matched from the start by Danny Elfman's insidious score (hailed by Paul Tonks in Gramophone magazine as "the most daringly original score from Hollywood in years"). Like Raimi, Elfman has come a long way from his cartoonish beginnings (a frequent Tim Burton collaborator, he scored the first two Batman films and A Nightmare Before Christmas). Here, he sets up the chill, edgy mood with an off-key duet between detuned piano and banjo, like a distorted reflection of small-town rural values; they're joined by an eerie ensemble of flutes, alto through bass. By the time the three men (Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Brent Briscoe) stand beside the wrecked plane, debating what to do with the stash of loot fallen literally from the sky, there's little doubt where we're headed. Things are already going badly wrong, and they're going to get worse.

The corrosive effect of an ill-gotten windfall on ordinary lives is no new theme, of course (Shallow Grave, to look no further), and the use of bleak, near-monochrome Minnesota snowscapes - in fact shot in Wisconsin, since the Minnesota winter turned disobligingly mild - inevitably recalls the Coen brothers' Fargo. But Raimi's film never feels derivative, thanks not least to the strongly individualised performances he's drawn from his lead actors. Paxton proves once again that he's one of the most underrated (and understated) actors in Hollywood, his Hank a "nice, sweet, normal guy" horrified to find himself sucked down to disaster by one brief capitulation to his own worse instincts. As his brother Jacob, Thornton gives a masterfully gauged portrait of a man whose emotional insights - which are as acute as anybody's - are constantly wrong-footed by his mental limitations. His performance is all the more moving for never lapsing into the sentimentality that tinged his similar role in Sling Blade. Only Bridget Fonda, as Hank's wife Sarah, doesn't quite come together as a character - not the actress' fault but the script's since it requires her to switch a little too abruptly from moral revulsion to all-out avidity.

But A Simple Plan shares with Fargo something more than a use of rural winter backdrops: its stern, absolute morality, as starkly black and white as crows against a snowfield. An alternative title, in fact, might have been that of the film which gave Paxton his previous best role: One False Move. Hank's single moment of weakness, allowing himself to be persuaded by the less-grounded Jacob and their third accomplice Lou (Briscoe) instead of holding out for integrity, leads with horrifying inexorability into the abyss, making their destruction complete. Utterly different in tone as Raimi's earlier films may have been, they held in common with this latest work a sense of the fearful flimsiness of everyday normality. Just one rent in the fabric of things and darkness is let loose.

But while the plot moves with inevitable momentum to its dénouement, it's far from predictable. Central to the film's dramatic impact is the way its moral centre shifts, quite unexpectedly, from Hank to Jacob. To begin with Hank clearly occupies the moral high ground: he's honest Mr Normal, the guy we identify with, while Jacob's eager venality aligns him with the shiftless Lou. When Lou describes the cash as, "the American Dream in a goddam gymbag", Hank retorts (a touch pompously), "You work for the American Dream, you don't steal it." But as Hank embarks on his slow slide into perdition, it's Jacob, a seemingly gormless figure with his protruding teeth and cheap taped-up glasses, who takes on the role of conscience. By the time he asks, "Hank, d'you ever feel evil? I do", he is confronting the questions his brother is desperately trying to evade.

The key point of transition is the scene when Hank, blackmailed by Lou to hand over some of the cash, comes to persuade his brother to help him gain counter-leverage by framing Lou. As the scene progresses it emerges that for all his slowness of brain, Jacob's scruples are finer than Hank's. Where Hank sees Lou as a contemptible lowlife against whom any tactics are justified, Jacob sees a friend he is being asked to betray. His distress as Hank piles on the pressure is pitiable, and he gives in only when offered the one bribe he can't resist: that Hank will help him regain their father's farm.

Before Raimi took it on, A Simple Plan was to have been directed by John Boorman. (A scheduling conflict with The General obliged him to withdraw.) It may well have been this transfer of moral stature that attracted Boorman to the project; one can imagine the film as a snowbound counterpart to Boorman's Deliverance, another study of everyday guys destroyed by a headlong train of events, and of an individual's self-image (Jon Voight then, Paxton now) fractured and degraded under pressure. But Raimi makes the film his own, carrying over from his previous work the sense of encroaching paranoia as formerly solid ground starts to give way beneath the feet and the avenues of escape are blocked off one by one.

Scott B. Smith, scripting from his own novel, charts his characters' descent into hell with remorseless control and impeccable narrative logic. At each step it's made clear how, at that panic-stricken moment and with no benefit of hindsight, these people could hardly have done other than they did. With each turn of the screw the options narrow down, until Hank, broken and weeping, a gun in his hand, finds himself forced into committing the final, lethal act of destruction. His grief is the more lacerating since by doing so he shatters the only thing to emerge from the grim events, a new-found closeness to his formerly estranged brother.

A Simple Plan is bookended by Hank's voice-over. At the outset he reflects how, despite the dullness of his daily round, a man like him should feel blessed in having "a wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbours who respect him." At the end, looking back on the betrayals and deaths, the ambitions raised and crushed, the ruin of that modest measure of contentment, he muses sombrely: "There are days when I manage not to think of anything at all. But those days are few and far between." There's more unbearable anguish in those few spare words than in all the gore and mayhem of Raimi's previous output.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B+]

AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [B+]

Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) review

“A Simple Plan” avoids the shallow grave - Salon.com Charles Taylor, December 11, 1998

The Goblin’s dilemma in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Spider-Man Boyd White and Tim Kreider from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

Scott Renshaw review [8/10]

Louis Proyect review

Images (David Ng) review

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C]

Film Freak Central review Bill Chambers

n:zone (Daniel Kelly) review

Matt Prigge review [3.5/4]

Jon Popick review [4/4]

Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review

Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne) capsule review

Jerry Saravia review

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Michael S. Goldberger

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]

James Bowman review

The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]

filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [3/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]

DVD Verdict (Sean Fitzgibbons) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Mandel) dvd review

Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review

Richard A. Zwelling review [4/4]

Harvey S. Karten review

Walter Frith review [3.5/5]

Mark R. Leeper review [+2 out of -4..+4]

Scott Mendelson review [A]

Movie-Vault.com (Dan Smith) review [10/10]

Needcoffee.com review

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3/5]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]

The Tech (MIT) (Vladimir Zelevinsky) review

Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [B-]

Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]

Mondo Digital also reviewing THE GIFT

Variety (Glenn Lovell) review

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

Los Angeles Times (Jack Mathews) review

The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review

SPIDER MAN

USA (121 mi) 2002

DVD Talk (Loren Halek) review [4/5]

With the stir and crash of Elfman's opening theme, the vertiginous weave of the credit crawl and the hardbitten noir voice-over ('Who am I? Are you sure you want to know?'), this accomplished blockbuster announces itself as a stylish piece of pop myth-spinning. Director and writer afford the old Marvel comic strip the reverence film-makers used to reserve for the Scriptures - which is not to suggest that they miss the fun of it. Every inch the nerd's nerd, Maguire is adroitly cast as Peter Parker, a brainy orphan with a suppressed wild streak and a lot of growing up to do. When the worm turns (courtesy of a GM spider bite), his elation is palpable, a testosterone rush which sends him sky-high. The first thing is to score some greenbacks to impress the red-head next door (Dunst). Meanwhile. Dafoe's arms inventor, Norman Osborn, is the fly in the ointment, trying on his own altered ego - the Green Goblin - to test-Spider-boy's moral mettle. Despite the movie's solid storytelling virtues, it must be admitted that the action spectacular scenes are a somewhat disappointing, and that Dunst is little more than an old-style scream queen.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Everyone wants to be a superhero, even Stan "The Man" Lee. On the April 29th episode of The Simpsons, Lee was convinced he could turn himself into the Incredible Hulk if he pulled a Homer Simpson fit of rage. Poor Lee. Screwed by Matt Groening just when he got the chance to see himself all green and greased up for his fanboys. As played by the perpetually angst-ridden Tobey MaGuire, Spider-Man is less cocky webslinger than rebel-without-a-cause. No, Spidey ain't no wuss. As envisioned by director Sam Raimi, Lee's hyphenated superhero is an existential geek tortured by his superpowers. When a super arachnid bites Peter Parker on a class trip to a hi-tech gene splicing facility, he's kick-driven past that final leg of his adolescent cycle and wakes up with the stud body it takes everyone else half a lifetime to sculpt. Amid the muscle mass, Peter is still a quintessential dork. "Don't be ashamed of who you are," says Uncle Ben not long before irony shoots the wise man in the heart. Spider-Man is a superhero caper cleverly disguised as a coming-of-age saga. With great power comes great responsibility so Peter must negotiate more than silk-clogged pores when the Green Goblin (a carefully campy Willem Dafoe) goes bump in the night. Raimi's millenium Spider-Man is both sensitive and realistically self-serving, rescuing women from rapists but never forgetting that he's got bills to pay. Spidey also does his own PR work, saving a toddler from a fire after the city calls for his arrest. He may be too late to save New York City from Osama Bin Laden (see the film's awesome WTC wink) but Spider-Man is still needed, even if Raimi's New Yorkers treat their superheroes like yesterday's fad. Spider-Man is cheesy and drags at two hours, but Raimi does right by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original creation via an old-fashioned comic-book aesthetic worn on Kirsten Dunst's bright red hair, the Daily Bugle newsroom pyrotechnics and Aunt May's prayers to God. In the end, Spider-Man delivers New York from evil, stares at the face of a selfishly earned moral view and, during the film's bittersweet finale, learns that it sucks being a teenage superhero in love.

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-] also seen here: Radio Silence

Handing Sam Raimi $130 million and the lucrative Spider-Man franchise was anything but a sure bet. Yes, it was a smart move given Raimi's undeniable talent and inherent affection for the material, but the guy hasn't exactly been a box-office dynamo. Moreover, I haven't had much use for anything he's directed since his early masterpiece The Evil Dead, save for his tense A Simple Plan. There are fans who argue that Darkman is a terrific comic-book movie, but I'm not among them, and he was unable to draw any flavor out of genre gimmes like The Quick and the Dead and The Gift.

What a relief, though, that he stood at the helm of this film, investing it with the proper degree of respect for Spider-Man's origin story, a great contemporary mythology. In order to sell this stuff, you have to play it incredibly straight. The result is a wonderful blast of nostalgia; the fancy digital effects that allow Raimi to fashion the kind of web-slinging sequences that seemed impossible to put on film just a decade ago turn out to be essential to setting the film's giddy mood, but simultaneously trivial. In comparison to the disarmingly retro characters, the life lessons delivered with a conviction that's gone missing from the movies, and the breathlessly melodramatic romance at the story's core, they're window dressing and filler.

In case you're completely unfamiliar with this stuff: Spider-Man is Peter Parker, a geeky honor-student-with-few-friends type who's bitten by an unusual spider and subsequently develops superhuman strength, the ability to climb walls, and a cool "spider sense" that warns him of impending danger. The Marvel Comics version was always sort of a Superman knock-off-Parker even works as a newspaper photographer, echoing Clark Kent's career as a reporter-with the key difference that Parker wasn't just mild-mannered, like Kent, but was actually an ordinary schlep. And, boy, did creator Stan Lee beat him up. Being a Marvel superhero was never a piece of cake, and the early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man were full of loss and mourning.

Tobey Maguire, with a poker face punctuated by sad yet dreamy eyes, plays the character to near-perfection just by showing up. Kirsten Dunst plays Mary Jane, for whom Peter carries a torch, with a dash of pathos adding a smidge of depth to her reliable girlishness. And the equally dependable Willem Dafoe plays Norman Osborne with the supernatural aplomb that he brought to such characters as Max Schreck and Jesus. It's in the scenes where Dafoe has manic, staring-into-the-mirror conversations with his villainous persona, the Green Goblin, that Raimi takes his Spider-Man closest to the edge-and gets a massive payoff for taking the risk.

Screenwriter David Koepp has made some changes to the comic-book continuity in a bid to streamline affairs-notably combining two female characters into one and giving Spider-Man organic web shooters instead of the science-project contraptions Peter assembled in the comics-but has wisely maintained the cornpone stylings of the original, including the gentle presence of the elderly Aunt May and Uncle Ben as Spider-Man's foster parents and the "With great power comes great responsibility" tagline that defined Stan Lee's ambitions for the character. Indeed, the film carries that lesson to unexpectedly heartbreaking lengths. Like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man is grandly, emotionally affecting in a way that it had started to seem that Hollywood blockbusters never would be again.

So why isn't this, like, A-plus material? For one thing, while the action scenes are admittedly virtuousic-especially for comic-book fans who have long imagined how this sort of material might be translated intact to film-they're also utterly phony. That Spider-Man gets so much mileage out of its human characters makes it that much more jarring when Tobey Maguire turns abruptly into a cartoon. More significantly, for all its virtues, Spider-Man as a film is missing a strong personality of its own. Raimi seems to have directed mainly by getting the hell out of the way. Sure, some of the touches-like the shots of Peter teaching bully Flash Thompson a well-deserved lesson by kicking, repeatedly, directly into the camera lens-have the startling energy of vintage Raimi, but his generally vivid, in your-face style seems finally to have been mostly subsumed by the rigors of studio filmmaking.

When the resulting film is this good, I can't complain too much-it just feels as though it's been wiped clean of directorial fingerprints on the way into the camera (and the digital-effects workstations), and I prefer movies that feel a little more handcrafted. Those cavils aside, Spider-Man is almost as exciting a kick-off for a summer movie season as we could hope for. (And George Lucas will have a lot to live up to when Attack of the Clones opens on May 16.)

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Spider-Man (2002) Kim Newman, July 2002

The Goblin’s dilemma in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Spider-Man Boyd White and Tim Kreider from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Spider Man Trilogy

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [The High Definition Trilogy] Spider Man Trilogy

DVD Verdict - The High Definition Trilogy (HD DVD) [Dennis Prince] Spider Man Trilogy

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review Spider Man Trilogy

World Socialist Web Site review Alex Lefebvre

National Review (Robert A. Georgr) essay ["New Yorker, American"] May 7, 2002

Spider-Man as Everyman - Salon.com Charles Taylor

Spider-Man swings along with brio David Edelstein from Slate

Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [B+]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib

AboutFilm.com (Dominic Varle) review [B]

Images (Gary Johnson) review

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) dvd review [Deluxe Edition]

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]

Nitrate Online (Elias Savada) review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]

Dark Horizons (Garth Franklin) review

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]

Juicy Cerebellum (Alex Sandell) review

Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]

Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review

Jerry Saravia review [3.5/4]

Mark R. Leeper review [low +2 out of -4..+4]

Jon Popick review [9/10]

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

DVD Talk (Geoffrey Kleinman) review [4/5]

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [4/5] [Superbit Edition]

DVD Verdict (Michael Stailey) dvd review [Superbit Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Superbit Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Journal Damon Houx, 2-discs

The Digital Bits dvd review [Widescreen Special Edition] Todd Doogan, 2-discs

DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [Deluxe Edition] 2-discs

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review 2-discs

DVDActive (Richard Logan Powell) dvd review [10/10] [Widescreen Special Edition] 2-discs

UpcomingDiscs.com (Jeremy Frost) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]

RevolutionSF (Kenn McCracken) review

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

PopMatters (Todd R. Ramlow) review

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review

Film Monthly (Michael S. Julianelle) review

Accessible movie reviews (Joe Clark) review

Movie-Vault.com ("Le Apprenti") review [8/10]

CultureCartel.com (Chris Madsen) review [4.5/5]

CultureCartel.com (Brandon Curtis) review [4.5/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [4/5]

CineScene.com (Nathaniel Rogers) review

eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review

Needcoffee.com review Widge

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]

hybridmagazine.com review Zack Schenkkan

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Jen Johnston

Newsweek (David Ansen) review He's Got The World On A String, May 6, 2002

Newsweek (David Ansen) review Movies: Spy Vs. Spy, June 10, 2002

3 Black Chicks Review Flicks

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Bright Lights Film Journal review Alan Vanneman (capsule review)

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] comic

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]

BBC Films review Neil Smith

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]

The Boston Phoenix review Gary Susman

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze

SPIDER-MAN 2 B 84

USA (127 mi) 2004 Director’s Cut (135 mi)

State of the art special effects film, complete with explosions and flying debris all about, multiple car crashes, and hysterical, panic-ridden street bystanders who scream while chunks of buildings fly every which way, and huge parts of the city get demolished. There is even an elevated train derailment shot partially in Chicago, as there is no elevated train in New York. All the while Spider-Man is fighting the bad guy, here played to a T by Alfred Molina as the mad scientist, Dr. Otto Octavius, whose experiment has gone awry, turning him into a demented, evil villain, Dr. Octopus, with four, octopus-like steel extremities, each like a horrible, insatiable iron serpent, supposedly controlled by the mind of the doctor, but the extremities turn the tables and instead control his mind. While Toby Maguire is busy saving the world as Spider-Man, he is also late for work, misses opportunities to be with his girl friend, and they each grow tired of his futile explanations that always sound so lame, ultimately losing interest in him. So his personal life is a wreck, living in near poverty. Add to this, he may have been personally responsible for killing his own uncle, so his Son of Green Goblin cousin has developed a psychopathic hatred against Spider-Man, as he holds him responsible for his father’s death.

Within this predictable format, there are several slow and quiet moments of poignancy, as Maguire is hesitant, circumspect and humbled by his awesome responsibilities, even losing his powers from time to time as he questions who he is, whether he just wants to be a man, or live with his extraordinary responsibilities which prevent him from living an ordinary life, just like apprentice witch Kiki in the Miyazaki classic KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE. Maguire’s reluctance prevents him from developing a relationship with the woman of his dreams, Mary Jane, played in her usual whiny, self-centered manner by Kirsten Dunst, who here, with her vacuous stare, resembles a silent movie siren, complete with getting tied up at the end, as if on the railroad tracks before an oncoming train, and true to type, an explosive wreck does occur where she needs to be rescued by the hero. However, what’s interesting is there are scenes that go against type, several where the super hero is seen as vulnerable and even (gasp) unmasked, where someone in the crowd acknowledges, “He’s just a kid.” There is a level of complexity here that can be emotionally gripping, and there is a flowing majesty to the Spider-Man whirling through the stratosphere flying from building to building. If you can get past all the violence and the loud, horrid soundtrack with its chorus of neverending sorrows, there’s a kinetic energy to the whole experience with moments of genuine pathos.

Time Out London review

What’s a superhero to do when he fancies – nay, loves – a girl but there’s a whole load of crime to fight in the big, bad metropolis? Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) hits a mid-career existential crisis in this superior follow-up to the original, and the result is all the more interesting for it. Sure, Spidie still emits goo from his wrists and swings through the streets in pursuit of comic book criminals (there’s no terrorist threat in this New York City), but he does so with a heavy heart. Superman was always most intriguing when he was battling his own powers – cowering at the sight of Kryptonite or drunkenly flicking peanuts at bartenders in ‘Superman 3’. Now, poor old Parker joins the line-up of good guys having a crisis. He’s fed up and depressed. Hell, he doesn’t even know if he wants to be a crimefighter anymore, goddammit! Welcome to twenty-first-century America; where even superheroes need a shrink.

The problem? Sweet old Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) is still on the scene, tempting Parker to renege on his earlier commitment to duty over domesticity. But there’s trouble brewing in the world of science: maverick nuclear physicist Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) accidentally turns himself into an eight-limbed, metallic creature who looks pretty nifty in a black leather coat and sunglasses. Molina makes a great bad guy; less of a caricature than Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and more menacing as a result of scrimping on the camp histrionics.

It’s not all neuroses and nuclear science. Two centrepiece showdowns between Octavius (or ‘Doc Ock’ as the Daily Bugle tags him) and Spider-Man – the first on a speeding subway train, the second on a derelict pier – make for excellent, gripping viewing. All in all, this sequel is a blockbuster with both a heart and a brain. And Raimi leaves the door wide open for the next, hopefully welcome instalment.

Kamera.co.uk review Ian Haydn Smith

US critics have been so ecstatic in their praise of Spiderman 2, it seemed all-too-inevitable that the film would prove a disappointment when it finally arrived in the UK: another over-egged blockbuster, like last summer's Hulk, whose triumph of narrative complexity, which favoured ambiguity over conventional Manichean characterisation, was undermined by a botched ending and a ridiculous realisation of Bruce Banner's oversized alter-ego. (At least Ang Lee's offering fared better than the lacklustre adaptation of Alan Moore's 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'). In his review of the film, Roger Ebert claimed that Sam Raimi had not only created the best comic hero film since the trend became fashionable again in 1978, (following the release of Richard Donner's Superman), but also one that desrved to transcend its targeted summer blockbuster market and appeal to more refined cinema-going tastes.

So amidst such hyperbole, it is a pleasure to report that Spiderman 2 is actually very good. A more rounded and satisfying entertainment than its predecessor, its characters have a depth rarely seen in summer films, and those expecting thrilling set pieces will marvel at the battles on the face of a skyscraper and on top of a subway train. Gone are the moments where the webbed-wonder looked ill-matched with the background against which he had been animated. In its place are impressively staged fight sequences across the city skyline. Punctuating these are moments of pathos, as we watch Peter Parker attempting to cope with ordinary life; no mean feat when you've been up all night fighting crime and saving lives.

The film's major strength is its finely-tuned script. From a story co-written by Michael Chabon, whose novels are well-versed in the stylised world of comic book storytelling ('The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' is a wonderful example of a novel that has its cake and eats it – revelling in the pleasures of comic hero lore while at the same time debunking the notion of these myths and poking fun at their heroic foibles), Alvin Sargent's screenplay takes great pleasure in exploring Peter Parker/Spiderman's troubled existence. The opening half hour feels more like a male version of 'My So-called Life', detailing Parker's attempts to hold down a job, continue his studies at college, pay the rent and look after his aunt, all the time ensuring that life is safe in the metropolis. Far from simulating 'nerdiness' the way Clark Kent does in order to cover his true identity, Parker is one of life's genuine losers. Indecision, embarrassment and bad timing ensure he is seen by all as a joke. It's only when he is unmasked in front of a group of subway commuters, shocked by how young he looks, that his awkwardness becomes understandable. Unlike other super heroes, Spiderman is a fledgling, whose powers and temperament are still adjusting to the hormonal imbalances that make most teenagers' lives hell.

This awkwardness permeates the all-too-believable relationship between Parker and Mary-Jane. Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst offer relaxed, unshowy performances, whose ordinariness makes them accessible and likeable, and which has you rooting for them from start to finish. Dunst in particular is wonderful. In a cinema overcrowded with conveyor belt starlets, her persona harks back to an earlier age of screen idols, whose individuality, both in performance and appearance, transformed them from actress to idol. Unusually mature for her years, Dunst's choice of roles has only enhanced her image: enigmatic and original amidst the airbrushed world of Lohans, Biels, Olsens and Duffs.

Sargent's script also fleshes out the support characters. May Parker (Rosemary Harris) plays to the film's core values of responsibility and moral strength in the face of adversity and self-interest, and also makes for a credible – and perhaps cinema's first – septuagenarian action character. James Franco's Harry Osborn is a much darker and tortured soul, with the film's coda offering a glimpse of the story to come in part three. And as Doc Oc, Alfred Molina makes for a worthy adversary. Playing him with a mixture of charm, menace and barely suppressed hysteria, he is a more rounded and entertaining villain than Green Goblin, his prosthetic limbs transforming him into one of cinemas more distinctive megalomaniacs.

It's unlikely that a better film will hit our screens this summer. Raimi, like Peter Jackson, has lost none of the mischievousness of his earlier work in moving to a larger canvass. That both have allowed a degree of sentimentality to creep in is forgivable, considering their achievement. Whether you like their films or not, both have visualised what Michael Chabon called 'the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred ageing boys dreaming as hard as they could'.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 , from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent, based on a screen story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Michael Chabon (and the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko), turns out to be surprisingly and delightfully superior to Mr. Raimi's first Spider-Man (2002). But you don't have to take my word for it. Since I never aspired, even in my grouchy childhood years, to be a comic-book connoisseur-least of all comic books about superheroes-at the recent press screening of Spider-Man 2 , I enlisted the services of two pre-teen consumer consultants, Ezra and Fallon. With the consent of their parents, also in attendance, I asked them which edition of Spider-Man they preferred. They both came down on the side of Spider-Man 2 , which surprised me somewhat, since I'd imagined the opinions of youngsters and adults might diverge regarding the two versions-after all, Spider-Man 2 is much more a grown-up love story than its predecessor.

From the beginning, Spider-Man the superhero has enjoyed an edge over his comic-book superhero predecessors, Superman and Batman. For one thing, Spider-Man is not nearly as forbiddingly omnipotent. Indeed, in the movie, he is strikingly vulnerable-we get to see him in a state of powerlessness and helplessness as he's tossed around like a rag doll by the octopus-like tentacles of arch-menace-to-civilization Dr. Octopus, a position of mortal jeopardy we don't really see Superman or Batman in.

As a child, I recall experiencing something akin to an erotic thrill whenever someone I liked onscreen was saved at the last minute from a dire fate. Both Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and the love of his life, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), find themselves occasionally on the edge of extinction, a fate they face with superheroic sangfroid. This is the grace note of their final union-Mary Jane Watson is found to be worthy as much as he is found brave enough to make a commitment to his sweetheart, despite the danger in which his crime-fighting prowess places her. We're back in the Middle Ages of knights and their lady loves, albeit with Spidey and his sweetheart displaying a romantic intensity few medieval movies ever attain.

There are several possible factors to explain why Spider-Man 2 took off so spectacularly from the unfulfilled premises and promises of the original Spider-Man . Mr. Raimi has clearly experienced a deepening vision of his subject, enhanced by the screenwriting prowess of Messrs. Sargent and Chabon. The maturing roles of Mr. Maguire and Ms. Dunst, and the electrifying expansion of the quasi-maternal Aunt May character by Rosemary Harris, has also added greater depth to the original comic-book characterizations. Perhaps the greatest boon to the Spider-Man sequel is the curiously masochistic pseudo-visionary villain, Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), with his dream of perpetual fusion, who becomes the tabloid-headlined "Doc Ock" with his diabolically energized steel tentacles. Add to this the throwaway pathos of Broadway superstar Donna Murphy as the ill-fated Rosalie Octavius and the sweetly old-fashioned B-picture ambitiousness of having Mary Jane Watson "star" in a small Greenwich Village production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (which Louis Kronenberger once brilliantly summarized as "everything counts and nothing matters").

I must confess, there was a stretch in the film when I felt a childish gee-whiz exasperation with the way Spider-Man was perpetually mistreated and misunderstood by the very people he was trying to save from criminal harm. As Peter Parker, he's unable to hold a job either as a pizza-delivery boy or as a photographer for nasty newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), whose malicious diatribes against Spider-Man make Charles Foster Kane look saintly by comparison.

Worst of all, Peter Parker continues standing up Mary Jane despite all her overtures and advances. She finally seems to give up on Peter and starts a whirlwind romance with a glamorous astronaut who just happens to be John Jameson (Daniel Gillies), the son of Spider-Man's bitter enemy. Here, the essential intelligence of the film is confirmed by its refusal to discredit Mary Jane's suitor in any way. Indeed, John Jameson is not only drop-dead gorgeous as a future husband for Mary Jane, but he even seems to have a sense of humor. If Mary Jane is to leave him at the altar (as so many of her Hollywood sisters did in the past), she'll have to do it on her own and without any encouragement from Peter or the scriptwriters. I wouldn't have thought that today's children would embrace Hollywood's elective affinities, but I seem to have been wrong.

I now think that I was far from being alone in my disappointments with Mr. Raimi's first Spider-Man film for not resolving the romance between Peter and Mary Jane. My more cynical friends assured me that the two had to be kept apart for the sake of the inevitable sequels. After all, does Clark Kent ever marry Lois Lane? Get real. Well, folks, Mr. Raimi and his collaborators have gone and done it, and I, for one, am happy they have. This may create a problem for Spider-Man 3 , but as a comparatively impoverished movie lover, I don't have to face any stockholders with explanations as to why I risked the commercial viability of a future production.

Lest I drown in my own euphoria, let me reassert my professional skepticism: I was less than ecstatic about the gimmicky metal appendages attached to the villainous Dr. Octopus, which my esteemed colleague, Gene Shalit, aptly described as an Erector Set. Fortunately, Mr. Molina is charismatically ambiguous enough to project complex feelings despite his ridiculous encumbrances. His not entirely unsympathetic monster is made to seem humanly redeemable by his recollections of how he'd once inspired Peter Parker, the science student, at Columbia.

Despite the emotional amplitude of the dialogue, what drives the love story most strongly is the overwhelming spirituality of the camera's love affair with Ms. Dunst. I haven't seen such luminous close-ups since the great screen stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. Who would have thought that Mr. Raimi, the director of horror films, would light up the screen with such a chaste depiction of love, and without a trace of lechery?

The Three Faces of Spidey: Spiderman 2 • Senses of Cinema Violeta Kovacsics, October 28, 2004

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers] Spider Man Trilogy

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [The High Definition Trilogy] Spider Man Trilogy

DVD Verdict - The High Definition Trilogy (HD DVD) [Dennis Prince] Spider Man Trilogy

Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review Spider Man Trilogy

Spider-Man 2: Spidey Agonistes. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein

Flak Magazine (Stephen Himes) review

“Spider-Man 2″ - Salon.com Charles Taylor

Pajiba (Jeremy C. Fox) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C-]

Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw

The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette) review comparing the film to SUPERMAN II

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]

The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]

Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [2.5/4]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Scott Von Doviak

Jerry Saravia review [3/4]

Beyond Hollywood review Nix

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]

Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman

Jay's Movie Blog Jason

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) review [4/5]

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review

DVD Talk (Shannon Nutt) review [5/5]

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Extended Cut]

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Alan Lindsay

PopMatters [Bill Gibron] 2-disc Extended Cut

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review 2-disc Extended Cut

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chuck Aliaga) dvd review 2-disc Extended Cut

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, 2-disc Extended Cut

Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) review [8/10] 2-disc Extended Cut

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [3/5] [Superbit Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Superbit Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVDActive (Matt Joseph) dvd review [7/10] Superbit version

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A+]

Movie-Vault.com ("Greg C.") review [10/10]

RevolutionSF (Rick Klaw) review

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]

CHUD.com (George Merchan) review

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A]

stylusmagazine.com (Rob Lott) review

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A-]

Dark Horizons (Garth Franklin) review

Film Monthly (Gary Schultz) review

Culture Wars [Patrick Hayes]

Exploitation Retrospect review

Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review

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The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A]

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

hybridmagazine.com review Edward Rholes

ReelTalk (John P. McCarthy) review

Exclaim! review Chris Gramlich

Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [4.5/5]

Juicy Cerebellum (Alex Sandell) review

hoopla.nu review Mark and Stuart

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh

Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [A-]

Premiere.com review Aaron Hillis

Shadows and Smog Stuart Klawans from The Nation (Page 2)

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4.5/5]

That Cow (Andrew Bradford) review [7/10]

Maclean's Magazine (Brian D. Johnson) review

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] comic

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] Dalton Ross

The Times [James Christopher]

BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review

Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review

Time Out London (Nigel Floyd) review [3/5]

DVDBeaver dvd review

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze

DRAG ME TO HELL

USA (99 mi) 2009 ‘Scope

A gross-out fright movie that is, in the director’s own words, ‘more like a funhouse ride than a bloodbath’, ‘Drag Me to Hell’ takes Sam Raimi back to his B-movie roots, fusing the scary intensity of ‘The Evil Dead’ with the cartoonish, slapstick humour of ‘Evil Dead II’. Originally conceived as a short story way back in 1990, ‘Drag Me to Hell’ has had a long and strange gestation, which might explain its repeated references to ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’.

Inside a mock-gothic pile, all hell breaks loose as female medium Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) struggles to save a young boy from the malevolent force unleashed by a gypsy’s curse. This brilliantly staged prologue seems to herald the Second Coming of Sam Raimi, but the film as a whole never quite lives up to its throat-grabbing opening.

With one eye on the vacant assistant manager’s job, ambitious loans officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) refuses to extend the mortgage of an old gypsy lady, Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver). Christine blames her boss (David Paymer), but the gimlet-eyed crazy lady sees all. Shamed by having to beg on bended knee, Mrs Ganush fixes Christine with her beady peeper and warns: ‘Soon it will be you who comes begging to me.’ The slighted woman’s campaign of terror involves the projectile vomiting of blood, maggots and green slime, a slice of cake with a swivelling eyeball implanted in it and the summoning of a black goat.

A late replacement for ‘Juno’ star Ellen Page, the sparky Lohman seizes the lead role with both hands and confidently makes it her own. As does the aptly named Raver, whose vengeance starts with cackling laughter, then spirals upwards into imaginative spitefulness. The flashy pyrotechnics make up for a plot that is riddled with holes, and there is a wickedly funny gag about the possibility of ameliorative kitten-sacrifice. But the crude ‘eye for an eye’ morality recalls an average EC Comics story, and you don’t need a crystal ball to predict the wicked twist in the tale.

Scott Tobias The Onion A.V. Club

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell opens with the ’80s Universal Studios logo, only the first indication that Raimi, who’s been shackled to the Spider-Man franchise for the last decade, intends to go back in time. Specifically, he’s recalling his own time at Universal in the early ’90s, when he brought the splatstick hokum of his Evil Dead days to the studio playground with 1990’s Darkman and 1992’s Army Of Darkness. A sort of de facto Evil Dead 4, Drag Me To Hell picks up where he left off, trafficking in lots of supernatural mumbo-jumbo (gypsy curses, psychics, ass-whomping ghosts) as an excuse for gloriously over-the-top horror-comedy. Just as Spider-Man 3 seemed to buckle under the weight of increasingly unwieldy endeavor, Raimi’s new film feels distinctly unburdened and fun, happily frolicking in its own pulp silliness.

Playing a farm-girl wallflower with surprising moxie, Alison Lohman stars as a sweet-natured loan officer competing for an assistant-manager position. Her boss (David Paymer) warns her that the job requires making the tough decisions, but Lohman chooses to demonstrate her toughness on the wrong customer, denying a spooky old woman (Lorna Raver) an extension on her home loan. The spiteful women unleashes an ancient curse on Lohman that involves three days of torment—Evil Dead-style spirit-beatings, basically—followed by a creature that drags her… well… it’s right there in the title.

Starting with a hilariously protracted confrontation between Lohman and the old woman in the parking deck—it may be the first time anyone has been in danger of being gummed to death—Drag Me To Hell piles on the cartoon horror setpieces in rapid succession. That PG-13 rating may sound like a liability for a director who once hosed Bruce Campbell with torrents of blood shooting out of the walls, but Raimi makes a sly asset of this limitation. Just like other PG-13-rated horror movies, the film relies on shock effects instead of blood, but Raimi pushes those effects to a full-on visceral assault. He wants viewers to jump out of their chairs, to laugh and scream and cheer, and to nudge each other over the transcendent ridiculousness of what they’re witnessing. This is junk filmmaking at its finest.

Drag Me to Hell Brent Simon at Cannes from Screendaily

Clearly delighting in a return to his roots, Sam Raimi downshifts from the billion-dollar Spider-Man franchise with Drag Me to Hell, a slickly made, engaging horror film that evokes the spirit of much of the director’s early work, particularly the Evil Dead series. Mixing different modes of horror storytelling with dark touches of humour, Raimi proves here that gore isn’t necessary for a cathartic horror-thrill ride.

Raimi’s name should pull in some Spider-Man fans, but those unfamiliar with the humour of his early work will likely feel baffled by how much Drag Me to Hell differs from current teen-baiting horror fare. Still, mid-eight-figure grosses seem certain, outstripping the returns of similar genre hybrids such as Slither and Cabin Fever.

Los Angeles loan officer Christine Brown (Lohman) has a good life; she’s happy with her boyfriend, Clay Dalton (Long), a young professor at a nearby college, and seems to have the inside track on a promotion. In an effort to impress upon her boss (Paymer) that she can make tough-minded decisions with an eye on the bottom line rather than human compassion, Christine denies a third extension on the home mortgage of an old woman (Raver), which means certain foreclosure.

Feeling that she has been shamed, the woman viciously attacks Christine after work in the parking lot and places a curse on her. A spooked Christine consults with psychic Rham Jas (Rao), and learns the specifics of the gypsy curse: that she will be tormented for three days by a spirit which will eventually come to claim her soul. Increasingly panicked attempts to alter that destiny ensue.

Drag Me to Hell trades in an aggressive sound mix and plenty of conventional horror signifiers — creaking windows and wind-slammed garden gates, mewing cats and clattering pans. But the movie also shows a smart sense of construction.

Working from a script with his brother Ivan, a frequent collaborator, Raimi seeds his story with alternately small and amusing details (farmgirl Christine used to be overweight, which quietly feeds her insecurity and anxiety over being accepted by Clay’s rich parents) that help give the movie the feeling of an anchored drama. Overall, the emphasis is definitely on the thrills and horror, but comedic notes are interwoven throughout as well.

Raimi also proves himself to be a master manipulator of genre mood, efficient with effects both practical and computer-generated. Ominous shadow play and a handful of low-angle tracking shots are intermingled with other trademark Raimi flourishes, like his resurrected fetish for wildly over-the-top, hand-to-hand violence perpetrated by and against seemingly possessed old ladies. These low-fi sequences help give the film’s artificial visual effects greater punch and value.

While Drag Me to Hell is rated PG-13 in the US, it’s unlikely that most horror buffs will feel cheated. The director gleefully dispenses with the usual sacred cows (neither children nor kittens are safe), and also leans on wild gross-out moments to goose his audience. There are effusive sprays of slimy phlegm and vomit, as well as one comedic blood-gushing sequence, all of which would make Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote proud.

If there’s a problem, it’s that the film doesn’t quite feel tethered enough to a forceful personality, as with Bruce Campbell’s Ash in the Evil Dead movies. This is mitigated slightly by a final 30 minutes in which Christine becomes more assertive.

Lohman brings a steadying presence to the picture, while Long nicely balances sympathetic assistance and confused ambivalence at watching his girlfriend mentally unravel. It’s the disgustingly made-up Raver, though, who steals the show, guaranteeing that viewers will think twice about speaking ill of old women taking too long to cross the street.

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

There is nothing I can write that would better convince you that Drag Me to Hell is inarguably the best horror comedy since Evil Dead 2 and, arguably, the best horror movie of the decade than this simple fact: Rex Reed hated it. Yes: The New York Observer critic who thought Batman Begins was “the worst Batman movie ever made,” who wrote that Memento was “despicable,” that Being John Malkovich was “abominable,” who opined that Oldboy was a “noxious helping of Korean Grand Guignol as pointless as it is shocking,” who suggested that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was “one of the greatest films ever made” and who once got caught shoplifting Mel Tormé albums absolutely loathed Drag Me to Hell. Is there a more forceful stamp of approval short of a boot heel imprint of “Go See It, Asshole” to the back of your head than Rex Reed’s disdain? Is there any better reason to see it than to spite that cantankerous old shit?

Yes, there is. And it comes, perhaps, in this line from Reed’s DMTH review: “Seeking the help of a loopy carnival medium, Christine finds herself up to her pierced ears in corpse vomit, animal sacrifice, violent séances and open graves.”

Corpse vomit? Sign me up, you curmudgeonly old bitch. Forget Spider-Man 3. Hell, forget the Spider-Man series and For Love of the Game while you’re at it. Drag Me to Hell represents a complete return to form for Sam Raimi, who hasn’t made a movie this good since he kicked Ashley J. Williams to the curb. Take an adult diaper, folks, because when DMTH isn’t making you piss yourself with laughter, it’ll be scaring the shit out of you, which makes for an awfully messy movie-going experience. But it’s worth a few Depends undergarments and half a pack of wet wipes. And only a director as talented as Raimi could force a series of X-Rated exclamations out of you while you’re watching a PG-13 movie.

What’s even more remarkable is that Raimi is working from the flimsiest script he’s ever had. Co-written by Sam and his brother Ivan, the storyline is layer-free and straightforward, nothing more than a framing device for a series of shock-your-balls-off sight gags and shock-cut jump-scares that will put you in the lap of a theatergoer sitting six rows in front of you, begging him to hold you. Alison Lohman stars as Christine, a loan officer who is forced to foreclose on the house of an old milky-eyed gypsy woman who looks eerily similar to the comically gnarled Possessed Henrietta at the end of Evil Dead 2. The gypsy hag takes umbrage and puts a hex on Christine, and she spends the rest of the film trying to remove it, all the while aiming to convince her yuppie boyfriend (Justin Long, perfectly cast) that the funhouse of horrors that’s following her around isn’t a sick delusional joke being played on her by a demented Jack-in-the-Box with a twisted sense of humor popping phantom weasels into her life. Christine eventually finds her way to a psychic (Dileep Rao), who reveals that — in three days time — a goat demon (yes! A goat demon) will pull her down into the bowels of hell for all eternity.

What ensues is a series of maliciously hilarious gross-out visuals, each more amusingly repulsive than the other before: Christine fights off the gypsy with a stapler to the head; she sprays from her nose a geyser of blood on her boss; and her face accepts more projectile vomit than a sidewalk outside the Viper Room, including — yes, Rex — corpse vomit.

Drag Me to Hell is as rapid-paced a film as I’ve seen in years. Raimi goes elephantine balls to the wall, completely for broke, attacking the material with a feverish insanity of a pimple-popping teenager fucking his pillow. It’s frantic — gonzo even — but completely controlled. There’s no subtext to the story; Raimi isn’t trying to tell you anything. There’s no big metaphor; there’s no connection to real-world events; and there’s no cultural commentary. It’s just campy, over-the-top, off-the-hook, over-the-backboard, and through the net with a gloriously bloody squish.

Rex Reed has it all wrong, folks. He writes that “the true test of any successful horror flick is how wretched it makes you feel.” That’s the most boneheaded retarded statement I’ve ever seen a critic write. No wonder print journalism is dying. You don’t watch a horror flick so you’ll feel wretched afterwards. Sometimes, you watch them because it’s fun. Because you want to laugh so hard you embarrass yourself releasing a rectal tremor on the guy next to you. Because you want an honest excuse to cling to your date’s arm with all your might. And because nothing is more satisfying than telling the world that a movie was so scary that your tattooed, 6’2” metalhead music editor shrieked like a 12-year-old girl who’d espied a protuberance in the crotch area of a Jonas Brother. Hell, I didn’t leave this movie feeling wretched; I left reinvigorated, giddy, and absolutely sure of one thing: That Drag Me to Hell is as successful a horror film as you’re likely to see for a long time.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Drag Me to Hell (2009) July 2009

Kim Nicolini: Foreclosure is Hell Kim Nicolini from Counterpunch, June 12 – 14, 2009

Hell and Back Again: Sam Raimi drags himself back to horror with his new film Steve Biodrowski from Cinefantastique Online, June 1, 2009

Cinefantastique Online [Steve Biodrowski] May 30, 2009, also seen here: Drag Me to Hell - Horror Film Review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]

This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]

Drag Me to Hell - Reviews - Reverse Shot Gag Reflexivity, by Michael Koresky, June 2, 2009

filmcritic.com (Bill Gibron) review [4/5]

Twitch review Canfield

Classic Horror review Timothy J. Rush

The Horror Review [Horror Bob]

Las Vegas Weekly [Mike D'Angelo]

Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]

Robert Cashill, Popdose

“Drag Me to Hell” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

James Bowman review

Slant Magazine review Ryan Stewart

Raimi's Drag Me to Hell Romps Back to Evil Dead ... - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton, May 27, 2009

CBC.ca Arts review Lee Ferguson

n:zone (Daniel Kelly) review

Electric Sheep Magazine [Mikita Brottman]

The L Magazine [Benjamin Sutton/Henry Stewart]

Eric Kohn Borrowing From Himself: Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell,” from indieWIRE, May 27, 2009

The Video Graveyard Chris Hartley

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [B]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]

PopMatters (Jake Meaney) review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]

Little White Lies magazine Matt Glasby

Edward Champion

Eye for Film (Andrew Robertson) review [3.5/5]

DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review [4/5]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) review [Theatrical Version]

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [4/5]

The Digital Bits dvd review [Director's Cut] Adam Jahnke

DVDTalk - DVD (Unrated Director's Cut) [Tyler Foster]

DVD Verdict (Michael Rubino) dvd review Director’s Cut

Digital Retribution dvd review Mr. Intolerance, 2-disc Special Edition

DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Colin Jacobson

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

Now In Theaters: "Drag Me To Hell" (Raimi) Glenn Kenny from The Auteurs, also seen here: The Auteurs

Drag Me to Hell : Sam Raimi's Genre Curse Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 14, 2009

What Has Happened to Sam Raimi? | The New York Observer Rex Reed from The New York Observer, May 26, 2009

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A-] also seen here: Dark Horizons review and here: DVD Talk and here: Brian Orndorf

Critical-Film.com (Jason Pitt) review [4/5]

RevolutionSF (Gary Mitchel) review

Cinema Suicide Bryan White

Film School Rejects [Cole Abaius]

BeyondHollywood.com Nix

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker]

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

Film Monthly (Jason Coffman) review

ReelTalk (Joanne Ross) review

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

The Lumière Reader Caleb Starrenburg

Scott Mendelson review

Mark R. Leeper review

jjmoya1955 review

Jerry Saravia review

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg]

eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [3/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]

Future Movies (Matt McAllister) review [8/10]

Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review

Screen Rant (Vic Holtreman) review [4/5]

Film.com (Ammon Gilbert) review [A-]

Eclipse Magazine (Sheldon A. Wiebe) review

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]

They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Jeff

Bloody-Disgusting review [4.5/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)

Georgia Straight (Steve Newton) review

Horrorwatch.com Splatterscribe

Jam! Movies review Jim Slotek

Movie Gazette review [8/10]

Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [4/5]

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [B]

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin]

A Nutshell Review Stefan S

Twitch (Rodney Perkins) review

Illustrated Journal of Cinematic Diversions

Drag Me to Hell | A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe, May 29, 2009

Drag Me to Hell David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 21, 2009

David Bourgeois covers the Cannes press conference by Raimi, May 21, 2009

Lane Brown interviews Raimi for The Vulture section of New York magazine, May 22, 2009

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman

Peter Debruge at Cannes from Variety, May 20, 2009

Time Out Chicago (David Fear) review [4/5]

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [3/4]

The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Mike McCahill

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5]

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

Philadelphia Inquirer (Steven Rea) review [3/4]

Philadelphia Daily News (Gary Thompson) review [B]

Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review

The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz

Ramos, Maria

JUSTICE C+ 76

Netherlands (100 mi) 2004

Grim and unengaging, much of it amateurish, particularly in the way the film was loosely edited together, rambling all over the place, spreading itself too thin, losing much of the focus when it attempts to cover too much ground. However, there is some interesting material. We see cameras allowed inside the Rio de Janeiro courtrooms in Brazil, following the preliminary first level proceedings as a judge interviews arrested suspects, most are young adolescents just past age 18 who are being tried for the first time as adults, usually for robbery, petty theft, or drug possession, clarifiying their stories, checking it against the prosecution’s version of events, sometimes with their wives, girl friends, or mothers sitting silently in a corner, as the judge enters their plea into the record, setting a date for their trials. The prisoners are handcuffed, transported back to prison, where we see dilapidated cells so completely overcrowded, packed like sardines, where not 6 inches separates any one prisoner from the next, all stuffed together, maybe twenty or more in one cell, dressed in their underwear in a sweltering heat, as there are makeshift fans blowing everywhere. The conditions are a disgrace, but that’s the system, and for many of these kids, that’s their future.

Of interest to me was the version these inmates gave to their public defenders, completely contradicting their sworn testimony to the judge, claiming they couldn’t tell the judge what really happened, as that would be stupid. What wasn’t so effective was the cameras following the judges home in their cars, or the public defender, witnessing their banal dinner conversation, where they repeat the business of the day to their families, as if they’re interested, or we see the mothers or wives of the prisoners having to make it on their own, revealing the harsh realities of slum living. Contrast this to the ceremony of judges being accepted to the higher court, where the only problem was deciding whether or not to bring their old robe to the new court. Interesting that the words used at the judges ceremony were very similar, using some of the exact same phrasing as slum pastors who promised the impoverished and the destitute that God had heard “enough” of their strife-filled lives, that salvation, through belief in Him (or is it in justice?), was just around the corner. Much more interesting was witnessing visiting day in the prison, where again families are stacked together all out in the open, without an ounce of privacy, making sure the families themselves, with pain etched all over their faces, feel the anguish and embarrassment of prison confinement.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

Brazilian director Maria Ramos opens a window on a criminal courtroom in Rio de Janeiro, peering at public attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and the accused as they navigate the country's prickly legal system. The film brings to mind the good and bad of two other courtroom documentaries, Raymond Depardon's rigorous 10th District Court and Kim Longinotto's good-hearted Sisters in Law: Like Depardon, Ramos is almost objective to a fault, her camera gawking at her subjects from a distance that exudes both respect and trepidation, but she gets at truths that evaded her predecessors. When one of the documentary's judges lectures a classroom, he discusses the struggle he faces when trying to determine the truth of a specific situation. There's no doubt that there are bullshitters among the documentary's accused fold—which includes a young man who claims not to have stolen the car he drove into a tree and a boy who insists, no joke, that he was flying a kite, not harboring guns and drugs, when cops arrested him—but there is also a sense that the nation's police officers are doing more harm than good. Over and over again the accused report having been framed and beaten by officers, but what's most shocking is the casual tone with which the crimes of the country's authority figures are detailed, suggesting police brutality has become a way of life in the nation's favelas. The judges hardly break a sweat, but from the glimpses we get of their personal lives, their compassion is evident, and it's clear that they struggle to tell truth from fiction. Ramos's coup, though, is how she lingers on dirty, overcrowded prisons not far removed from the seething inhumanities cataloged by Hector Babenco in films like Pixote and Carandiru, suggesting that her country's legal system still faces considerable renovation.

The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray

By this point, some adventurous cable channel could probably carve a pretty substantial reality series out of the recent spate of fly-on-the-wall documentaries about international criminal justice. Since Frederick Wiseman's Florida-bound epic Domestic Violence five years ago, we've had a look at the French court system in Raymond Depardon's 10th District Court, Cameroon's in Florence Ayisi and Kim Longinotto's Sisters In Law, and now Brazil's in Maria Ramos' Justice. Like the rest of the Wiseman-inspired flock, Justice dedicates most of its running time to scenes of people sitting in public offices and courtrooms, trying to hash out what they did wrong and what the punishment should be, while the officials on the other side of the desk offer varying degrees of sympathy. By the time everyone's done talking, viewers are more likely to be interested in whether the process is fair and humane than in the cases' actual truth.

Justice carries that question even further by giving glimpses of Rio De Janeiro's holding cells, where prisoners are jammed in like factory chickens, and their loved ones wait outside in long lines for visitation. Ramos follows two defendants in particular—a juvenile accused of being a lookout for drug dealers, and a young man who was a passenger in a stolen car—and she implies that while both boys are likely guilty, neither deserves the punishment in store, and neither should have to endure a trial process that has the judge dictating biased statements for them.

Because Justice is from the Wiseman school of documentaries, there's no narration and people don't share their thoughts with the camera, which means the movie can come off as a little hollow. But Ramos fills some of the gaps with artful slice-of-life scenes of urchins and fervent churchgoers, to give some sense of the mix of poverty, religion, and overpopulation that informs Rio's legal process. She also visits the homes of the judges and lawyers, listening to them complain to their families about a system more concerned with tallying up convictions than, as one judge says, determining "the truth of an intention." As a result, Rio's jails are packed to the walls with people who are technically criminals, though some are hardcore, and some just took a ride with the wrong friend at the wrong time.

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The Village Voice [Joshua Land]

Lynne Ramsay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York Times (registration req'd) Neil Genzlinger

Ramsay, Lynne

Ramsay, Lynne Art and Culture

Lynne Ramsay has the qualities of a good ghost: she swings open doors and pulls back curtains, not to nag or threaten but just to remind the present of the values of the past. In her short career as a director and writer, Ramsay has brought a beautiful, slowed-down sensibility back into contemporary filmmaking. Ramsay creates confident films that blossom; her images sometimes demand patience, but they do resonate emotionally once they've finally developed.

Ramsay has been compared to Bill Douglas, Ken Loach, and Robert Bresson. Of course, it's easy to see the comparison between "Ratcatcher" and a certain other Ken Loach film about an alienated little boy. But Ramsay's work has a languid kind of stylization that's all her own; there’s no existing genre that really suits her style. Critics rave about the photographic "stillness" in her films, her use of repeated images, and her painterly sense of composition.

In her debut feature film "Ratcatcher," Ramsay uses these techniques to tell the story of a 12-year-old boy named James growing up in the slums of Glasgow in the early ‘70s. When an innocent bout of play turns into accidental murder, the ill-fated James is condemned to spend the rest of the film haunted by guilt. His abusive alcoholic parents and a depressed, bitter community only make things worse. James’ only solace is his friendship with 14-year-old Margaret, who is frequently sexually abused by the older boys in the neighborhood. Throughout the film, Ramsay patterns her narrative with images of the canal -- it's a gloom-filled symbol of both the tragic guilt and the oppressive community that threaten to drown the young protagonist.

But "Ratcatcher" is more than a social commentary. The film’s real mission is to question whether James is a child or an adult; the audience is torn between the James who is independent, tough, and pays no societal debt for his friend’s death, and the James who is playful, needy, and lonely.

Althoug Ramsay hasn’t yet produced many films, her small repertoire is undoubtedly strong. "Ratcatcher" has earned dozens of prestigious awards and her earlier short films has garnered three jury prizes: at Cannes in 1996 for "Small Deaths"; at Clermont Ferrand in 1997 for "Kill the Day"; and at Cannes in 1998 for "Gasman."

BFI Screenonline: Ramsay, Lynne (1969-) Biography Annette Kuhn from Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors

Born in Glasgow on 5 December 1969, Lynne Ramsay was educated at Napier College in Edinburgh, where she studied photography. From there she went to the National Film and Television School, specialising in cinematography and direction. Her graduation film, Small Deaths, won the Prix du Jury at Cannes in 1996, and her other short films Kill the Day and Gasman (both 1997) also garnered numerous awards. Hailed as one of the brightest new talents of British cinema, in a short directorial career Ramsay has already produced a promising and distinctive body of work.

Ramsay's acclaimed debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), is a darkly redemptive film set in '70s strike-bound Glasgow, piled high with bags of rotting refuse. A boy is pushed into a polluted canal, and the rest of the film follows his accidental killer, twelve-year-old James. Its grim setting notwithstanding, Ratcatcher is more Dovzhenko than Loach, and in the end James finds a world of hope and redemption at the end of a bus line. Ratcatcher opened the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1999 and won its director the 2000 BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for a newcomer in British film.

Reduced to its storyline, Morvern Callar (2002), Ramsay's next film - adapted from Alan Warner's cult novel - sounds grim too: a young supermarket worker in the West of Scotland discovers that her boyfriend has committed suicide, claims authorship of the novel manuscript he has left behind, and goes on a spree in Spain with her best friend. But the plot is hardly the point: Morvern Callar is as emotionally open as it is narratively spare, allowing the silent, and strangely innocent, world of its heroine to unfold in a succession of haunting images.

Relentlessly experimental, Ramsay brings a photographer's eye to the cinematic image: through silence and space within the frame her films unfold in expanded time, showing rather than telling. Everything is on the surface; there are no hidden depths. Against this visual canvas, sound assumes a special importance, carrying weight and resonance in its own right. "Sound is the other picture," Ramsay has said, and this is certainly true of Morvern Callar's sophisticated use of the music on Morvern's compilation tape (a posthumous gift from her boyfriend), which works at every level from (apparent) underscoring to expression of Morvern's near autistic relationship with her surroundings.

Lynne Ramsay acknowledges the influence of the work of US avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, with its trance-like meditation on detail; and of Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer ("If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear"). Other filmmakers whose work has been likened to Ramsay's include Bill Douglas and Terence Davies - both influences which probably have less to do with cinematic style than with a shared openness to the silent, brutal and magical world of the child and the innocent.

Lynne Ramsay: Information from Answers.com biography

Profile: Lynne Ramsay Academy Films

Lynne Ramsay brief bio from NNDB

Lynne Ramsay British Film Directors

Lynne Ramsay | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Andrea LeVasseur biography

Famous Alumni Edinburgh Napier University graduates

ALWIN KUCHLER Ramsay’s cinematographer

The History of Cinema. Lynne Ramsay: biography, filmography ... PIero Scaruffi reviews

BFI Screenonline: Women and Film Emma Hedditch from BFI Screen Online (Undated)

40 best directors | Features | guardian.co.uk Film - The Guardian Listed at #12, Lynne Ramsay, from The Guardian (Undated)

The Roddick Profile: Lynne Ramsay Ramsay profile as RATCATCHER is presented to the Cannes Festival, May 1999

"Festival de Cannes: Ratcatcher" Cannes film profile, May 1999

Lynne Ramsay RATCATCHER is presented to the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, Inside Out Film, August 15, 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Ratcatcher (1999) Charlotte O'Sullivan from Sight and Sound, November 1999

Poetry from the rubbish tip | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, November 12, 1999

Now for her next flick Lynne Ramsay, the Glaswegian director whose ... Maggie Shiels from The Herald Scotsman, August 29, 2002

FilmFestivals . com - EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS December 7, 2002

Save the Last Trance Jessica Winter from The Village Voice, December 17, 2002

"Ramsay needs to shoot a film about Kevin" Paul Arendt from The Guardian, June 6, 2006

What's happened to Lynne Ramsay? - Scotsman.com News The Scotsman, February 2, 2007

Whatever Happened to Lynne Ramsay? « Movie Musings Movie Musings, November 19, 2008

The Lovely Bones Review, Preview, Photos, Posters, Trailers ... Worst Previews on THE LOVELY BONES, August 24, 2009

Director Profile: Lynne Ramsay (Part 1) Amy Flinders from Flickering Myth Movie Blog, January 16, 2010

Director Profile: Lynne Ramsay (Part 2) Amy Flinders from Flickering Myth Movie Blog, January 23, 2010

Lynne Ramsay's Columbine-like horror movie 'We Need to Talk About ... Superheidi from Fangirltastic, February 17, 2010

In Stratford, sweet love drowns out sour weather John Burgeson from CT Post, March 30, 2010

The welcome return of Lynne Ramsay Adam Dawtrey from The Guardian, April 22, 2010

BBC - Press Office - We Need To Talk About Kevin to begin filming ... BBC News, April 26, 2010

In Which The Films of Lynne Ramsay Stare Back At Us - Home - This ... Helen Schumacher from This Recording, January 17, 2011

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film review: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Tim Robey, November 2011

Why the Odds Are Still Stacked Against Women in Hollywood ... Kim Masters from The Hollywood Reporter, December 9, 2011

Lynne Ramsay Is Back. Finally. - The New York Times - The 6th Floor Dan Kois, January 13, 2012

Lynne Ramsay and the Senses of Cinema - Harvard Film Archive February 4 – 12, 2012

Lynne Ramsay: Outsider Auteur - Scan | Journal of Media Arts Culture Denah Johnston, 2013

Film director Lynne Ramsay in million dollar row | UK | News | Express ... Stephen Wilke from The Express, November 7, 2013

Lynne Ramsay rebuts Jane Got a Gun lawsuit | Film | The Guardian Ben Child, November 11, 2013

Spotlight: Lynne Ramsay | - European Independent Film Festival Saffy Mirghani, August 16, 2016

Gasman • Lynne Ramsay • Senses of Cinema Tanya Farley, September 14, 2016

Ratcatcher • Lynne Ramsay • Senses of Cinema Carlota Larrea, September 14, 2016

Morvern Callar • Lynne Ramsey • Senses of Cinema Kristy Matheson, September 14, 2016

Foreplays #2: Lynne Ramsay's "Gasman" on Notebook | MUBI Cristina Álvarez López, July 3, 2017

TSPDT - Lynne Ramsay

Running Into a Bright New Future Sean O’Hagan interviews Ramsay for the Guardian, October 31, 1999

Nitrate Online (Interview) Paula Nechuk interview with Ramsay, January 26, 2001

About a girl | Film | The Guardian Danny Leigh interviews Ramsay and actress Samantha Morton, October 4, 2002

BBC - Films - interview - Lynne Ramsay David Michael interview from the BBC News, October 17, 2002

Lynne Ramsay | Film | The Guardian Geoff Andrew interview from The Guardian, October 28, 2002

Film makers on film: Lynne Ramsay - Telegraph Sarah Donaldson discusses Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence with Ramsay from The Telegraph, November 2, 2002

Ordinary People With An Edge; Lynne Ramsay on “Morvern Callar ... Adam Hart interview from indieWIRE, January 3, 2003

Gerald Peary - interviews - Lynne Ramsay April, 2003

Greetings from the Scottish New Wave / Lynne Ramsay brings a ... Paula Schwartz interview from Moviemaker magazine, February 3, 2007

'Kevin' Director Lynne Ramsay Working On 2 New Projects, Trashes ... Edward Davis interview from indieWIRE, May 16, 2011

Lynne Ramsay: 'Just talk to me straight' | Film | The Guardian Sean O’Hagen interview, October 1, 2011

Paul Davies Special: The Lynne Ramsay Collaboration – Exclusive ... Peter Albrechtsen interview with Sound Designer Paul Davies on working with Lynne Ramsay, from Designing Sound, November 16, 2011

Lynne Ramsay Frames the Picture - Page - Interview Magazine Durga Chew-Bose interview, January 13, 2012

Academy Films | Academy | Music Videos | lynne ramsay a selection of music videos from Academy Films

KILL THE DAY

Great Britain (18 mi) 1996

User reviews from imdb Author: Darren O'Shaughnessy (darren shan) from Limerick, Ireland

A junkie breaks into a locker and steals a bag, to get money for drugs. Later we see him in prison. He seems like a loner. Guards taunt him and try to make him lose his temper, so that he will be denied parole. When he's released, he tries to go straight. Interspersed with these scenes are flashbacks of his younger life.

Ramsay's second short film is similar in structure to her first. There are long time lapses between the scenes shown, and we learn nothing about what happens during that time. But it's a more ambitious piece, and works more as a whole. It tells a small, intimate, powerful story, and the final scene makes a big impression.

Another step forward for Ramsay. Definitely worth seeing if you can catch it.

User reviews from imdb Author: Jeffrey from Bowling Green

Ramsay sure knows how to make the most of 18 minutes. This, her second short film, is available along with two others on Criterion's "Ratcatcher" DVD.

The plot is very simple, but the story is told in such an unexpected and refreshing manner you just can't wait to see what happens next. Brilliant editing and unexplained scene changes which only become clear later.

Particularly charming is the filmmaker's approach to working with children. Only completely innocent and natural shots are used. A scene here where a group of boys are running about in underwear and eventually skinny-dipping seems more like home movies than a deliberate scene in a film.

Ramsay is definitely a director to keep an eye on and it's quite nice to be able to collect her work right from the beginning, including these early shorts.

BFI Screenonline: Kill the Day (1997) Dominic Leppla from BFI Screen Online (Show full synopsis)

The young Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay's second short film shares many of the same preoccupations of her feature debut Ratcatcher (UK/France, 1999). While both focus on subjects that fall under the heading of social realism, Ramsay eschews the naturalistic trappings of this genre in favour of close studies of her characters' inner worlds, blurring the boundaries between reality and dream life. But where the imagistic poetry of Ratcatcher figured in an off-kilter coming-of-age story, the more paranoid and pessimistic Kill the Day has a memory-obsessed, junkie jailbird for its protagonist. It implicitly poses the question, 'where does one go when innocence has long since been lost?'

The film is structured around crystallised moments of emotion that emerge from the shifting mental landscape of James, played with lean ambivalence by James Ramsay (a Lynne Ramsay regular). The direction foregrounds recurring visual motifs, such as a disc-like pattern that suggests paranoia about surveillance. Sound is used carefully to stress the stillness and stagnation of James's world; the oppressive droning of a fly bookends the journey into James's thoughts. These deft touches have the double effect of situating the viewer within the film's achronology while dislodging the protagonist from his own story. As he lies in bed pondering his fate, James would appear to ask himself not 'who' but simply, 'where am I?'

As in Ratcatcher - which also contained a fetid body of water heavy with metaphor - guilt is something transferred onto the unknown, a dark canal one can slip into without warning. Explanations remain elusive, partly by design and partly because of a few false notes struck along the way. Ramsay had at this point not quite found the lightness of touch that made Morvern Callar (UK/Canada, 2002) - about the partner of a suicide victim - a film of such unknown pleasures, and here idyllic scenes of childhood frolicking keep strange company with the desultory figure cut by James.

If the tone is less hopeful and full of wonder than in her features and other shorts, Kill the Day impresses with its exploration of memory. The junkie at its centre seems to be its prisoner, and despite the familiarity of the themes of crime, punishment and the true walls that enclose us, he is strangely compelling.

SMALL DEATHS

Great Britain (11 mi) 1996

User reviews from imdb Author: Darren O'Shaughnessy (darren shan) from Limerick, Ireland

Promising short feature, made by Lynne Ramsay as her graduation movie from film school. It covers 3 events in a girl's life. The first shows her as a very young girl watching her father get ready to go out for a night. In the second segment she's a teenager who witnesses a nasty incidence involving a cow. While in the third she's a young adult who goes to a creepy building with her boyfriend. He goes upstairs, leaving her to fidget nervously below. But then he calls to her ...

Dark, intimate snippets of everyday life, lovingly captured. An impressive debut by the director of Ratcatcher. This immediately establishes the mood, focus and ambition of her later work. It won a prize at Cannes.

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

GASMAN B 87

Great Britain Scotland (15 mi) 1997

To the music of “Walkin’ in the winter wonderland, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow..,” a divorced couple meet at an empty railroad track, offering a young girl the opportunity to meet one of her father’s other children. None of this is known at first as we see them join together and play and dance and go to a Christmas decorated pub, where the kids dance with Santa, seen later on his own downing a pint, but one of the little girls asks her father if he’s this other girl’s daddy? He walks them all back to the railroad tracks, holding hands with the kids in a night fog. The mother and father walk away with two kids each in opposite directions. The little girl who asked the question can be seen picking up a rock, perhaps to throw it at them, but drops it.

User reviews from imdb Author: from United States

This short film from Lynne Ramsay is extremely impressive on a technical level as well as emotionally stirring. The director has an uncanny ability to capture those seemingly small and insignificant moments in a child's life which have a lasting and profound effect; those moments when everything changes, innocence is lost and nothing will ever be the same again. The children in her films learn the facts of life the hard way and quite often have to make sense of them on their own without the aide of an understanding parent. I was more moved by "Gasman" than I was with "Ratcatcher" (her first feature length which is a must see for true film connoisseurs) for this reason. The director keeps information from the audience, so that when we discover what the little girl discovers it's just as new and poignant for the viewer without being predictable. Lynne Ramsay is a true "auteur" who possesses the uncanny ability to capture beautiful and haunting moments of life.

User reviews from imdb Author: Mariana Silva from United States

Gasman is a short film that stirs up a great amount of detail and emotion in a short period of time. Seen very much from a young child's point of view, it shows nothing in the beginning but then starts to develop itself with a great potential. For example, in the beginning, the kids are getting ready to go out with their father but the mother stays at home and watches out the window as they leave. Then, you just see them walking through the tracks until finally they get to a stop. Then you start to realize that the father has another family and his kids seem very much confused by what is going on. There are a lot of mixed feelings throughout the film and it is very much clear, although not many words are said. The way the camera moves around from character to character is what tells the story and gives it so much power. The mixed feelings between the characters are clear through the way that the camera moves around between the characters. It is an extraordinary piece that is told by its form, rather than text.

User reviews from imdb Author: D Hooper (twistedhooch) from United Kingdom

It's grim up north the old saying goes; Gasman by Lynne Ramsey won't change that stereotype but it does illustrate the talent of this director. This short film shares similarities with the both work of Mike Leigh and social realist 'kitchen sink' films of the sixties, in showing a slice of life story from the lower classes. Read; bleak setting and diegetic sound.

Set in an undisclosed Scottish city at Christmas, the story concerns a day in the life of lower class father (James Ramsey), daughter Lynne (Lynne Ramsey Jr) and son Steven (Martin Anderson) as they walk the tracks. En route, they mysteriously pick up more children from a woman (Jackie Quinn), Lisa (Lisa Taylor) and Robert (Robert McEwan).

Gasman is a powerful piece, due in no small part to the performance by Lynne Ramsey Jr. It is a powerful portrait of a working class young girl and the confusion she faces. When pretending to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, you really believe that 'There's no place like home.' The supporting cast are also suitably bedraggled for their characters to be believable. There are some fine visual flourishes in this short piece; the close shots of people getting ready for their day out give the film a very intimate feel, as if you are really looking into their family life. There is appropriate use of light and dark contrast, in particular as they are in wide shot walking up the tracks. Also, the working club Christmas party is visual delight, with child POV shots, slow motion and chopped up editing.

At times the Scottish dialect is quite hard to follow with the sound quality being quite raw. My main issue with the film would be that Gasman doesn't have anything original to say. Gasman is suitably bleak according to genre convention but its essential message being that it's challenging growing up in a lower class environment has been a mainstay of social realist cinema since before Kes. Still grim it would seem.

Gasman • Lynne Ramsay • Senses of Cinema Tanya Farley, September 14, 2016

Foreplays #2: Lynne Ramsay's "Gasman" on Notebook | MUBI Cristina Álvarez López, July 3, 2017

British Short Films - cinema16 | short film dvds brief bio and comments by Ramsay on the film

UNLV Short Film Archive - Archive 100 also reviewing RATCATCHER, with a Ramsay bio

The House Next Door [Robert Humanick] Cinema 16: European Short Films

DVD Verdict [James A. Stewart] Cinema 16: European Short Films

Turner Classic Movies review Glenn Erickson, Cinema 16: European Short Films

Lynne Ramsay - Gasman (1997) (Reupload) in AvaxHome movie photos

RATCATCHER A 95

Great Britain France (93 mi) 1999

User reviews from imdb Author: Paul Sutton from Cambridge, England

This is the most beguiling British film about childhood since Kes (1969), a slowburning look at days in the life of a small boy on the brink of adolescence. He has adolescent encounters, including an uneasy bath with an unpopular older girl, but he's very much a pre-adolescent child, with all the helplessness and vulnerability that that means. Lynne Ramsay's great strength as a filmmaker is an ability to recreate the world as seen through her characters' eyes. From with the deprivation, the film is set on a housing estate during a binman's strike, she finds moments of real beauty - a joyfully filmed tumble in a hayfield - and strikingly surreal moments, such as a backward boy's pet mouse flying to the moon on a balloon. If Ratcatcher has a forerunner, excepting Ramsay's own award-winning shorts, it is not The Bill Douglas Trilogy, a semi-still life of a Scottish slum boy, which it eclipses completely, but the great hand-crafted films of Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life; If..., and O Lucky Man!

The imagery in Lynne Ramsay’s feature debut comes at right angles to the story, pulling you up and away from the morbid tale of murderous Glasgow poverty. Like other directors who’ve made the transition from poetic shorts to more conventional features (Jane Campion, Under the Skin’s Carine Adler), Ramsay sprinkles her narrative with arty tableaux which sometimes derail the story — you can get away with such indulgences in a short, but the full-length format is less forgiving. Still, sometimes it’s a relief to be given a chance to breathe, as Ratcatcher’s plot is unremittingly bleak. Beginning with 12-year-old James (William Eadie) accidentally drowning another boy in a waste-clogged canal, the film is set during a garbage strike; filth piles up literally in the streets as it does metaphorically in the characters’ lives. We clutch at the few moments of hope like drowners clinging to driftwood — a half-smile or a moment of kindness seem like epiphanies. While it doesn’t have sophistication to match its visuals, Ratcatcher builds to a profound truth: that life can only be lived once we’ve confronted death.

Ratcatcher (1999) - The Criterion Collection

In the first of many self-consciously—but still genuinely—poetic shots in Lynne Ramsay's auspicious directorial debut Ratcatcher, a poor young Glaswegian boy wraps himself in his mother's white drapes like a mummy, as if sensing his premature ossification. His death in a fetid canal a few minutes later is as cruel as it is inevitable, especially in light of other working-class films from Britain, where those who can't sing and dance their troubles away are pummeled by tragedy instead. But just when Ratcatcher seems overly content to bathe in Euro-art squalor, Ramsay counters with passages so breathtakingly lyrical and improbably optimistic that they shake off the oppressive pall that too often passes for hard realism. Much like another recent debut, David Gordon Green's George Washington, Ratcatcher keeps poverty and death omnipresent in its young characters' lives. But both Green and Ramsay prefer to view childhood as a richer experience, rife with moments of humor, tenderness, and offhand beauty. Apart from the opening scenes, which play like a mini-Psycho in introducing and then killing what appears to be the main character, the story is told through the eyes of 12-year-old William Eadie, a tough-minded boy living in a Glasgow apartment block in the early '70s. While a garbage workers' strike leaves piles of stinking refuse to fester in the summer heat, Eadie spends his afternoons at the nearby canal where his friend died earlier as a result of their horseplay. Nagged by occasional feelings of guilt, Eadie skirts a band of young thugs, fosters a tentative relationship with a gawky misfit (Leanne Mullen) with skinned knees, and fantasizes about his family's possible transfer to the countryside. The sunny pastoral scenes, which are all the more gorgeous in contrast to the overcast city gloom, owe a debt to Terrence Malick's Days Of Heaven, as does a magical sequence with a mouse tied to a balloon that uses the same music ("Musica Poetica") as Malick's Badlands. (Coincidentally, George Washington also borrows heavily from Malick.) Ramsay employs these lyrical bits sparingly, as a brief respite from the grim cycle of alcoholism and abuse in Eadie's family. But they make all the difference in setting Ratcatcher apart from other films of its kind, by exploring childhood's vast possibilities. Ramsay's singular obsession with the dreams and traumas of lower-class adolescents was first developed in three outstanding short films, which have been included on the new DVD. A photographer first and a filmmaker second, Ramsay makes ideal use of snapshot portraiture in 1995's Small Deaths, 1996's Kill The Day, and 1997's Gasman, scrapping formal stories in favor of small, vibrant impressions of everyday life. Her interest in children trapped in urban squalor never wavers, but she makes the most of a limited palette.

BFI Screenonline: Ratcatcher (1999) Dominic Leppla from BFI Screen Online (Show full synopsis)

Lynne Ramsay's first feature is a harrowingly beautiful tale of adolescence that deepens and refines the themes articulated in her three award-winning shorts. Much like American director David Gordon Green's contemporaneous debut, George Washington (US, 2000), Ramsay's film is concerned with the subjective experience of childhood and its relation to death amid urban decay - against the backdrop of 1973's crippling Glasgow dustmen's strike. Ratcatcher, however, is contemplative rather than didactic, hijacking the British tradition of social realism and steering it into uncharted and distinctly poetic waters.

One body of water in particular - a forbidding local canal - provides an anchor for the impressionistic and episodic narrative and holds a mysterious attraction for the young protagonist, James Ramsay. The water's murky surface marks a tenuous boundary - between life and death, innocence and experience - to which James constantly returns. In the bold opening sequence, James is secretly implicated in the accidental drowning of a neighbourhood playmate. The scar this incident leaves only makes the awkwardness of emerging adolescence more acute, from the disinterested father who insists on buying the sensitive, unathletic lad football shoes to the older girl who befriends James by placing his hand on her leg.

Taking her cue from still photography, Ramsay hones her narrative in its moments of inactivity, in their potential for movement. Time seems to slow for James, and pangs of discovery intermingle joy with sadness, as when his fingers touchingly examine his sleeping mother's toe, suggesting poverty by poking out through an old nylon. It is also with the patience of a photographer that Ramsay approaches her subjects. Her family scenes breathe with a rare naturalness, and her direction of children allows for their irritating qualities, making them wholly un-irritating. A willingness to spend time with her complex, broken characters - especially James' Da - rather than relying on thumbnail illustrations, is what grants the often grim Ratcatcher its moments of sublimity and grace.

In the film's ambiguous conclusion, Ramsay confers upon her child hero the same measure of redemptive grace, allowing us to see through his eyes. The canal finally claims him beneath its reflective surface, but in his mortality he sees an exultant vision. The earth and slate tones of the slum fall away and an ordinary housing development by a field becomes a paradise of promise. The viewer is lifted with James in the hope of a better world to come.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Ratcatcher (1999) Charlotte O'Sullivan from Sight and Sound, November 1999

Glasgow, the 70s. A dustmen's strike is on. Two boys, Ryan Quinn and James Gillespie, fight in a canal. Ryan drowns, James survives. James notices an older girl, Margaret Anne, being picked on by Matt Monroe's gang and the pair become friends. One day James decides to follow his sister Ellen when she takes a bus ride. Instead of finding out what she's up to, he discovers a new housing estate being built in the countryside. James' friend Kenny falls into the canal and is rescued by James' dad. Plans are afoot to relocate some of the families on James' estate to the new houses, but when the inspectors visit his house is in chaos. James' dad receives a bravery award for rescuing Kenny. Going home, he's beaten up by a gang of boys and at home hits James' mother.

The army arrive to clear up the refuse. James returns to the estate in the country, but the houses are no longer accessible. Back home he discovers Margaret Anne having sex with the older boys and begins rowing with Kenny, who blurts out that he saw James "kill" Ryan. Later James jumps into the canal, but images also show the family arriving at the new house with their possessions.

You can't help liking Ratcatcher. Like the canal that dominates so much of the film, Lynne Ramsay's painterly portrait of childhood drags you in. You believe in 12-year-old James, all Prince Charles ears and snappable wrists. You adore his mousy mother. You're glued to his sister Anne Marie (her bouts of giggles erupt like the foam around a shaken bottle of pop). But does it work? Ultimately Ratcatcher is most successful when scribbling in its own margins. The beginning, for instance, is a triumph, precisely because it isn't a beginning but an end. We follow the progress of Ryan, an intense little boy who all of a sudden dies. James' mother hugs him, saying, "I thought it was you," her skin shining with relief. The audience might say the same thing: we are temporarily dumbfounded, assuming our hero, our narrative centre, is dead. Ramsay has shown us a horrible possibility right from the start. We obey the Darwinian principle: we want to back a winner.

It's when the film tries to be linear that problems arise. James' father's rescue of Kenny leaves him in a stupor. As a result, when the council inspectors pop by, he and the flat are a sorry sight. And for some reason this jeopardises the family's chances of relocation. Why this should be so is never quite made clear, but Ramsay seems desperate to push home a grim message: good deeds are rewarded only by punishment. In the same way, Mrs Quinn's sweet request for James to have Ryan's shoes results in destruction (a box of possessions is smashed). Still more importantly, when James' dad helps a little girl by holding her kitten, he attracts the jeers of some macho lads and is beaten up.

Another message seems to be that good people are masochists. When James saves his friend Kenny's mouse Snowball from Matt Monroe's gang, Kenny himself then tries to impress the boys by attaching the mouse to a balloon and letting Snowball drift into the sky. Unprotected, doomed Margaret Anne also chooses to go with the older, abusive boys rather than stay loyal to James. Most crucially, James' mother takes back his dad after she's battered. Not only is the world a predictably bad place, but everyone in it seems wilfully self-destructive. In justifying the grim ending, the plot feels contrived. As central narratives go, it's just too neat.

Even more disappointing is James' relationship with Margaret Anne. In a scene in which they share a bath the pathos feels strained and she fails to become distinctive – she could be any giggling, uneasy-bodied girl. So when we see her betray James with Monroe's gang she really does seem a faceless victim, the "poor cow" that Kenny dubs her. (The reference to Loach's 1967 film seems particularly inappropriate. In Poor Cow, Joy's need for leery male attention is allowed to exist as a banal, pleasurable kink in her character, not a pathetic flaw.)

This is a shame, since James and Margaret Anne's relationship begins so well. There's one gorgeous scene, for instance, where Margaret Anne, having been poked by all the other boys, receives young James. In one of the film's many powerful silences we see him lying on top of her, as if he'd been there for ever, his brain as well as his body at peace. And yet the real tension in his character remains intact. As usual, his small-adult desire is to protect – he's covering up Margaret Anne's body from the other boys' lecherous gaze, keeping her warm, like a rug or an extra layer of clothing.

This brings us back to what Ramsay's feature debut does best. Ratcatcher makes you see the world with bigger eyes, revealing the layers beneath every surface. We're frequently asked to notice materials in conjunction with each other: flesh beneath curtain fabric, a bathtub beneath plastic, a toe beneath nylon, spectacles beneath water. These textures don't cancel each other out, they just add mystery, blurring our perceptions. The pugnacious Ryan, who begins the film twisted in a net curtain, is visible but we don't know whether he's in pleasure or pain – from the twists and turns of his dancing mouth, his mood seems enigmatically extreme.

The film works in the same way, providing an impression of intensity without judgement. Thus what might appear to be an easy distinction – contaminated rubbish versus pure countryside – is made complex. The rubbish is dangerous, but it's not aberrant. It's merely another layer, partially but never entirely obscuring the view. The council workers make us realise this when they judge the Gillespies' flat negatively. They assume the family are also rubbish and can't see the mess as simply the surface of the Gillespies' existence. And it's the council people, therefore, who are exposed as superficial.

In the radiant scene when the mother cleans the flat we fall into the same trap, assuming this is the start of good, wholesome things, but the family is just as fractured as before. Similarly, and most importantly, the dream that closes the film – a dream of life, wealth and nature – is as real (or unreal) as James' possible death. Ratcatcher has two beginnings; it also has two ends. The dream is a layer of James' consciousness that neither covers up nor is covered by the matter of his drowning. A layer of material can be read as a shroud: a preparation for, and protection from, the ultimate nakedness of death. William Faulkner would have loved the slow burn of Ratcatcher, a film that won't choose life or death, but makes perfect sense of the phrase As I Lay Dying.

Ratcatcher Criterion essay by Lizzie Francke, September 2, 2009

Ratcatcher • Lynne Ramsay • Senses of Cinema Carlota Larrea, September 14, 2016

First-Timers Get Under the Skin | Village Voice Amy Taubin, October 10, 2000

Lynne Ramsay Starts With a Punch | Village Voice Dennis Lim, October 10, 2000

World Socialist Web Site review Paul Bond

“Ratcatcher” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, October 24, 2000

eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]

Harvey S. Karten review

Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

Images (Derek Hill) review Derek Hill

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

World Film Review: Ratcatcher

Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review [8/10]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion Collection

DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review

DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [3/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review

Kamera.co.uk review Monika Maurer

Jonathan F. Richards review

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [2/5]

Steve Rhodes review [1/4]

Jaap Mees Talking Pictures UK

UNLV Short Film Archive - Archive 100 also reviewing GASMAN, with a Ramsay bio

Nitrate Online (Interview) Paula Nechuk interview with Ramsay, January 26, 2001

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3.5/5]

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Poetry from the rubbish tip | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, November 12, 1999

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak

DVDBeaver.com [Mark Balson]

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review Elvis Mitchell, April 7, 2000, also seen here: FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Intimate Look at a Boy Navigating a Fetid Glasgow Landscape

Scotland and wales - Great Britain - film, voice, director, cinema ... Wikipedia

MORVERN CALLAR A 95

Great Britain Canada (97 mi) 2002

Whoah! What a way to end a film fest! Described by the director, who was present, as “a bit of a head trip,” this is an extraordinarily precise, brilliantly sensual and expressionistic film, which, if you can follow me here, is told in a wildly impressionistic style, small miniature portraits, unraveling vignettes from the life of the character of Morvern Callar, another wonderfully original performance by Samantha Morton, think of JESUS’ SON (1999), as she literally re-invents herself from frame to frame. Opening with her boy friend’s suicide, where he leaves a message on her computer claiming he loves her, dedicating a book he wrote to her, and while still in an eerie, trancelike daze, she changes his name as the author to hers, something Ms Ramsay described as “very punkish.” There is a dreamy moment in the night where a man on a ship passes, where Morvern is standing on the shore, and she briefly flashes for him, an oddly hallucinogenic reference to her friend’s passing in the night.

The rest of the film explores her wildly intense adventures through Spain in what might be termed an acid-western-style road movie, as most of it is happening internally, she literally transforms herself into a new human being before our eyes, partying and traveling with a friend, played by the non-professional actress, Kathleen McDermott, with large periods of no dialogue. Ms Ramsay originally intended the entire film to be wordless. I found this to be a highly personal, yet very dreamy homage to love, with sections reminding me of the LSD sequence in EASY RIDER (1969), also with some terrific accompanying musical selections. Not easily explained, written by Ramsay and Liana Dognini, based on Alan Walker's novel, and there’s not much explanation offered, just an exquisitely crafted montage of a film, beautifully shot by Alwin Kuchler, who also shot her previous film, RATCATCHER (1999). I can’t think of another film I’ve seen at this festival that had such originality of images that were each so stunningly beautiful.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

When Morvern (Morton), a supermarket assistant living in a small Scottish port, wakes to find her would-be-novelist boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor, she's unsure what to do, except carry on living. He's sent her a message hoping that posthumous publication of a book left on his computer might help her get by, but after the initial shock, Morvern finds she has ideas of her own. Ramsay's adaptation of Alan Warner's novel is as visually expressive, assured in its control of mood, and adept with its cast as was Ratcatcher. Morton is especially good (and given sterling support from newcomer Kathleen McDermott), making plausible some of the plot's more far-fetched moments, and really coming into her own (like the film itself) when Morvern takes a break in Spain and gets a better perspective on her options. A film that very clearly means a lot to its maker.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

Short of a letter penned in blood, a good mix tape may be the most personal and intimate gift one lover can give to another, at least among Nick Hornby types. In Lynne Ramsay's evocative, often startlingly beautiful second feature Morvern Callar, Samantha Morton inherits a homemade tape and a Walkman from her boyfriend, who commits suicide under the Christmas lights in their apartment. Throughout the film, tracks from the expertly chosen playlist (which includes Can, Aphex Twin, Stereolab, Boards Of Canada, and The Velvet Underground, among others) take on the quality of a mourning ritual, the boyfriend's way of speaking to Morton from beyond the grave. In a brilliant touch, Ramsay abruptly cuts off a song and filters it down to the quiet, tinny bleed outside of Morton's headphones, a poignant reminder that she's immersed in her own private world. Therein lies the challenge: Morvern Callar not only attempts to reveal an interior life, usually the province of novels, but also focuses on the interior life of a woman who refuses to open up to anyone. Morton plays the title character close to the chest, reacting to the suicide with an eerie nonchalance that could be read as shock or apathy. In either case, Ramsay doesn't care so much about prodding along the audience's feelings, instead eyeing Morton from a sympathetic distance, allowing her peculiar behavior to do all the talking. A natural companion to Tsai Ming-liang's brilliant What Time Is It There?, Morvern Callar considers the mourning period with the same offbeat curiosity, as well as a melancholy tone that's relieved by welcome bits of dark humor. Based on Alan Warner's novel, the shaggy-dog story sets Morton on the road after she disposes of her boyfriend's body, submits his finished manuscript to publishers under her own name, and withdraws some cash from his savings account. Eager to get out of town, she heads off to a Spanish resort with her bubbly friend Kathleen McDermott, a fellow hedonist who seems content to bounce around clubs and parties for the indefinite future. Morton finds her an amusing distraction (the two are nominal "best friends"), but after a few days, McDermott's utter lack of reflection begins to wear on their relationship. A stunning advance on Ramsay's lyrical debut feature, Ratcatcher, and her widely admired shorts—all of which focused intently on the miseries of working-class Glasgow—Morvern Callar pares its story down to skeleton bones, grafting the loose pieces with hypnotic, exacting impressions of its heroine's life. Ramsay's refusal to explain away Morton's behavior flies in the face of countless other films about death, which are overly concerned with finding emotional release and closure. At times, Morton seems a little hard to figure out, but that's because Ramsay feels that part of her pain is unknowable, or at least open to interpretation.

MORVERN CALLAR Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

The final scene of MORVERN CALLAR sums up the title character's attitude towards life.. Dancing at a rave and lit by red flickers, she's surrounded by partiers. However, the soundtrack isn't filled by Sasha & Digweed trance remixes. Instead, we see and hear her listening to the Mama’s & Papas on her late boyfriend's mix tape. Morvern (Morton) lives by blocking the world out with her own tune. It often turns her into an anti-heroine. She's callous, selfish and willful, sometimes to an extremely disturbing extent. She's also open to possibilities to which more settled people are blind.

Laurent Cantet's TIME OUT reinvents the 70s European road movie for an age of post-political burnout, where the idea of satisfying work is a chimera or an impossible fantasy. MORVERN CALLAR breathes new life into the genre, partially because it stakes a female claim on the Beat idea of finding oneself on the road. The films of Wim Wenders and Theo Angelopolous, the novels of Peter Handke and the music of Kraftwerk have already given this concept European form. However, Ramsay creates a character whose wanderlust is something new. Her hunger for experience isn't an escape from history or echoes of dictatorship. It's a personal rite, as is almost everything else that she does.

MORVERN CALLAR begins with her discovery that her boyfriend has committed suicide overnight. He's left a computerized note for her, in addition to the manuscript for his latest novel, a mix tape and his ATM card. Rather than using his money to pay for a funeral, she submits the manuscript under her own name and ditches her job at a supermarket to visit Spain with her friend Lana (McDermott). Lana has a good time partying at a resort, but Morvern insists on dragging her deeper into the countryside.

In her debut, RATCATCHER, Ramsay got stuck between poetic reverie and an inescapable vein of Anglo miserabilism. She's now ditched the miserabilism and distilled her poetic qualities. The first third of MORVERN CALLER, set in a small Scottish town, recalls Claire Denis, the Hou Hsiao-hsien of GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE and the Olivier Assayas of COLD WATER. In fact, a scene at a bonfire refers overtly to COLD WATER. You can almost reach out and touch these images.

Using shallow focus, cinematographer Alwin Kuchler keeps Morton close to the camera while surrounding her with blinking lights off in the distance. (Her apartment is decorated with a Christmas tree.) Scotland looks dark and uninviting, but there seems to be something more behind it, just out of reach out of the camera and Morvern. Her quest to find it propels the film. Kuchler and Ramsay create three distinct looks for each third of MORVERN CALLER. The second part, set at a Spanish resort, looks the most realistic. No distant lights here, just sun, sun and more solar rays. The third, which takes place in the Spanish countryside, is grittier, tinted green and yellow and occasionally extremely stylized.

The cast's often-undecipherable Scottish accents - although the English Morton doesn't adopt one - make MORVERN CALLER seem less loquacious than it is: dialogue sometimes sounds like a sound effect. Nevertheless, the film hinges around Morton's performance. Ramsay and Dognini don't idealize her as a benevolent, neo-hippie free spirit. She pulls Lana out of bed to drag her off to the Spanish countryside without paying much attention to the location of her friend's luggage or the man she's in bed with. And of course, she doesn't exactly treat her boyfriend's body with the greatest respect, although one never knows if she's acting out of numb apathy, depression or shock. (Critic J. Hoberman has compared her to Albert Camus' anti-hero Mersault, who greets his mother's death as no big deal.) Much of the time, one doesn't know what Morvern is feeling - Ramsay eschews backstory or overt psychology - yet Morton's performance makes it clear that she's feeling something behind a numb facade. She can't talk about her emotions, which remain a mystery, but their cost is visible in her face. . Similarly, there's something logical behind her willingness to travel anywhere at the drop of a hat. Her desire to keep moving at any cost is all that keeps her afloat.

If Ramsay ever learns how to completely integrate poetry and storytelling, she'll make a great film. As it stands, MORVERN CALLAR never really lives up to the sensual promise of its first third, becoming more prosaic as it progresses. However, promise is exactly what the film's about. As it ends, Morvern stands at yet another destination on a road trip. It's anyone's guess where she'll wind up. I'm more confident about how Ramsay will progress.

Morvern Callar • Lynne Ramsey • Senses of Cinema Kristy Matheson, September 14, 2016

“Morvern Callar” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, December 20, 2002

“Morvern Callar” - Salon.com David Thomson, September 12, 2002

Film for the Soul: The Year 2002: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay) Joe, adding more insight in the Comments section, comparing the film to Trainspotting

Jared Sapolin review

Road Warriors | Village Voice J. Hoberman, December 10, 2002

Save the Last Trance | Village Voice Jessica Winter from The Village Voice, December 17, 2002

Indelible Ink : Morvern Callar | Dear Scotland Indelible Ink : Morvern Callar, by Alistair Braidwood from Dear Scotland, December 7, 2009

All About Lily Chou-Chou / Morvern Callar - Archive - Reverse Shot Life in Concert, All About Lily Chou-Chou meets Morvern Callar, by Nicolas Rapold, May 16, 2005

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

VideoVista review Tom Matic

Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B+]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) dvd review March 15, 2004

Bechdel Test Canon: Morvern Callar | Bitch Media Alyx Vesey, September 22, 2010

Scene It: mix tapes and Morvern Callar | Feminist Music Geek Alyx Vesey, January 31, 2010

DVD Times Eamonn McCusker

Kamera.co.uk review Monika Maurer

Bright Lights Film Journal review Millions Like Us, by Richard Armstrong, also reviewing actress Samantha Morton’s UNDER THE SKIN, August 2004

Slate (Michael Agger) review

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review March 20, 2003, also seen here: Nitrate Online [Cynthia Fuchs]

Plume Noire review Anji Milanovic

Slant Magazine review Chuck Rudolph

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Mitchell Hattaway) dvd review

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [3/5]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss

eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Thom

Harvey S. Karten review [3/4]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3/4]

ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [4/5]

Reel Movie Critic (Lee Shoquist) review [2/4]

Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review

Exclaim! review Michelle Devereaux

Talking Pictures (UK) review Jaap Mees and Howard Schuman

Movie Habit (Andrea Birgers) dvd review [3/4]

Moda Magazine (Brian Orndorf) review [7/10]

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

Jam! Movies review Louis B. Hobson and Liz Braun

Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan

eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]

Offoffoff.com review David N. Butterworth, also seen here: David N. Butterworth review [2.5/4]

stylusmagazine.com (Cam Lindsay) review

SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C-]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

hybridmagazine.com review Jesse Trussell

CineScene.com (Les Phillips) review

Tiscali UK review

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [0.5/5] easily the most negative review out there

Movie House Commentary Tuna

Lynne Ramsay - Morvern Callar (2002) in AvaxHome movie photos

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]

Variety (Derek Elley) review

City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Terri Sutton) review

The view: The 10 most underrated movies of the decade | Film ... Danny Leigh from The Guardian, December 22, 2010

BBC Films review Laura Bushell

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3.5/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

Movie review, 'Morvern Callar' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Donald Brown]

The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review December 20, 2002, also seen here: FILM REVIEW; Following the Dream Without Waking

FILM; Spinning Poetry From a Stark World Karen Durbin friom The New York Times, January 5, 2003

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Liana Dognini co-screenwriter

YouTube - "Morvern Callar" - Christmas party (10:00)

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN B+ 92

Great Britain USA (112 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

“Way worse than I imagined,” was the comment heard coming out of the theater, which perhaps unintentionally perfectly expresses the point of the film, where the words of the title suddenly take on greater magnitude. A decidedly difficult film, told completely out of sequence, which has a jarring effect on the viewer, keeping them continually off balance, as the story has a fractured and impressionistic style, revealed only in pieces. It’s simply impossible to get comfortable with this film due to the harsh and uncompromisingly bleak nature of the story, despite the beautifully chilly and austere production values that might resemble a Kubrick film, cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, and once again a superlative musical track from Jonny Greenwood, but the downbeat mood, especially from Tilda Swinton’s continuously frustrated portrayal of the mother of a loathsome child Kevin, a son who hates her from birth, couldn’t be more oppressive. Based on the best-selling novel by the same name from Lionel Shriver, adapted by the director and Rory Stewart Kinnear, the film hints all along of greater catastrophes lurking ahead. Ramsay interestingly presents the town’s hateful reaction to Swinton before revealing what horrifying event they are responding to. But all along, Kevin devises ways to express his contempt for his mother, while switching gears to become the supposedly happy and perfect son to his clueless father, John C. Reilly. In another realm, this would be a child of the devil, told with horror subtext, where grotesque exaggerations would fill the screen along with impaled bodies, but here what damage Kevin does is almost always offscreen, where the audience is forced to draw their own conclusions.

Originally trained as a photographer, Ramsay reworks the text into a highly stylized, contemporary visual world, including the perfect suburban home that becomes infested with dread, like a haunted house, where Kevin becomes the personification of evil. Moving freely between the present and the past, Swinton experiences her own horrors from Kevin early on, where he simply refuses to do anything she asks, but she matches his vitriolic meanness directed at her with her own inappropriate behavior, growing more irritated over time, as the two develop their own language of avoiding one another. In one of the strangest sequences of the film, Swinton is reading him a bedtime story, where in reality her eloquence with language is renowned, like listening to the voices of Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles, but this time Kevin grows so attached to the lurid description of bows and arrows in Robin Hood that he doesn’t want his mother to stop, actually curling up next to her in a sign of affection. Afterwards, however, he remains his meanspirited and completely detached self, feeling nothing but contempt for his family members. His father, however, buys him a bow and arrow set, becoming extremely proficient over time, which has the effect of introducing firearms to a mentally unstable kid. Jumping ahead, while we never see any traces of Kevin with other students in high school, the audience is instead treated to the aftereffects of a horrendous, catastrophic event at the school which turns the entire town against Swinton, where interestingly Ramsay uses the lovely innocence of Buddy Holly’s song Buddy Holly - Everyday on YouTube (2:13) as a prelude to the event.

While the film recounts shocking and astonishing events by connecting personal family tragedy with the public’s reaction to unspeakable horrors, one might wonder why there’s an absence of psychiatric intervention, as this kid is definitely a danger to himself and others, and while that may be true, he’s also likely a smart and gifted student and not exactly a willing participant for treatment, especially at an early age where he’s already learned to manipulate adults through his own behavior, so why would he want to change that? Swinton grows so suspicious of him that she searches his room for any sign of something amiss, intriguingly set to the Beach Boys In My Room - The Beach Boys on YouTube (2:10), where it’s as if his room has been wiped clean of any and all forensic evidence, knowing this would be one of the first places people would look. His entire life shows a cunning and willful emotional detachment, which Swinton tries to match in personal indifference by avoiding having her buttons pushed, but she’s hopelessly drowning in the turmoil of her own shortcomings, feeling completely powerless and inept at being able to reach this kid. What’s evident, however, is that this is a story of communal judgment, where she’s been judged an incompetent mother by the entire town, subject to sneers and stares, even getting socked in the face, and worse, developing a witch hunt mentality where she’s judged responsible for the behavior of her sociopathic son. Swinton herself may be her own worst critic, grown weary from continually blaming herself, expressed through her cold and severe manner, but what’s inevitable is every day having to face the horror, guilt, and shame of living with a world soiled and contaminated by your own offspring. Nine years since her last film, the first to branch away from working class Scotland, Ramsay’s unflinching vision spares no one and offers no easy answers, and is in itself a horrifyingly bleak and brutal film.

· Mule Skinner Blues” — Written by Jimmie Rodgers & George Vaughn, Performed by Lonnie Donegan

· “Ham N Eggs” — Written by Lonnie Donegan, Performed by Lonnie Donegan

· “Everyday” –Written by Buddy Holly & Norman Petty, Performed by Buddy Holly

· “Nobody’s Child” –Words and Music by Coben/Foree, Performed by Lonnie Donegan

· “In My Room” — Written by Wilson/Usher, Performed by The Beach Boys

· “Mother’s Last Word To Her Son” — Words and Music by Washington Phillips, Performed by Washington Phillips

· “Wwoooo” — Written and Performed by Rory Stewart Kinnear

· “Last Christmas” — Written by George Michael (CA), Performed by Wham!

· “Tephra” — Written by Helena Gough, Performed by Helena Gough

· “Aquaculture” — Written by Jana Winderen, Performed by Jana Winderen

· “Once In Royal David’s City” — Composed by Anonymous

· “Christmas Wish” — Composed by Paul Fletcher, Patrick Sturrock, Marc Williams

· “Greensleeves” — Performed by Matt Fletcher

· “Bossa” — Written and Performed by Sean Hargreaves

· “Ballad” — Written and Performed by Sean Hargreaves

· “Happy Days — Cues” — Words and Music by Fox/Gimbell

· “The Ambush” — Performed by Liu Fang

· “Farewell To My Concubine” — Performed by Liu Fang

Based on Lionel Shriver's ponderous novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin follows Tilda Swinton's Eva Khatchadourian as she attempts to cope with her increasingly sinister son (Ezra Miller's Kevin) - with the film unfolding largely in flashback as Eva struggles to get on with her life after Kevin commits a heinous crime. Filmmaker Lynne Ramsay has pared Shriver's novel down to the bone and essentially offers up a freewheeling, impressionist piece of work that is, at the outset, nothing short of exhilarating. The viewer is forced to wonder just how long Ramsay is going to be able to keep this up, and it's worth noting that the director by and large sticks to the time-shifting narrative right to the bitter end. It is, as such, not surprising to note that the movie suffers from a palpable lack of momentum, though this ultimately isn't as problematic as the character of Kevin himself. As portrayed by both Miller and Jasper Newell (as a young boy), Kevin comes off as a ludicrously evil force who often seems as though he'd be more at home within a throwaway thriller (eg Orphan or The Good Son). The viewer is consequently left with the feeling that We Need to Talk about Kevin doesn't entirely work as either an art-house drama nor an over-the-top horror flick; despite this issue, however, the movie certainly remains quite watchable from start to finish and it's hard to deny the impact of the admittedly gripping final half hour. Both Swinton and Miller are superb in their respective roles, undoubtedly, and Ramsay has accomplished something quite unique here - which is, in itself, reason enough to embrace this challenging yet erratic piece of work.

Cinephile [Matthew Thrift]

Beyond the obvious sense of realist discomfort and ambiguity present in Lynne Ramsay's films, there is also the unique tactile sense of immersion. Along with seeing the set design and colour palette, we get a sense of the smells and textures present. We notice the dirt in the corner of a room, or the scrape on a chair routinely used by the characters that, incidentally, often appear unkempt and wear the same outfits throughout.

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the adaptation of the Lionel Shriver novel, this particular directorial skill exacerbates the tension and sense of grotesque, caged repetition of bewildered mother Eva (Tilda Swinton), trapped at home with her perpetually unbalanced, sociopathic son Kevin (Ezra Miller/Jasper Newell) throughout the years.

Jumping back and forth in time, from Kevin's conception to Eva's eventual social damnation after her son goes on a killing spree in his teen years, Ramsay's inconclusive exploration of nature versus nurture focuses on unease and maternal guilt rather than actual plot points. While Kevin's upbringing is told in a linear fashion, broken up by present day moments of Eva being assaulted and sneered at by locals, the impetus is behind the reactions and the sense that something unspoken is very wrong.

Ramsay is careful not to depict the many scenes between mother and son with a specificity that leads the audience to conclusion or blame, rather she balances it with Kevin's irrational, but consistent sociopathic manipulation and rage, mixing it with Eva's occasional frustrated reactions and resultant self-loathing. She undeniably blames herself for bringing such a person into the world, but at the end of the film, it's questionable whether the audience will.

Unsurprisingly, this isn't an easy movie to watch, featuring an endless array of unsettling and cringe-worthy moments, even of simple things, like Kevin chewing his nails and lining them up for his mother during a detention centre visitation.

Like Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, Ramsay has no interest in lightening the mood or making things more palatable for the viewer, instead cutting to the unseemly, discomforting centre of any given moment, delivering an unflinching, upsetting and intelligent assessment of a complex relationship.

The first two shots alone of We Need to Talk About Kevin are enough to make it abundantly clear that we’re in the hands of a master filmmaker, one who having taken nine years between her second feature, Morvern Callar (2002) and this, her third, has been away from our cinema screens for far too long. The opening slow push onto a billowing curtain is the first of multiple images to return throughout, foreboding omens that build in intensity with each subsequent recurrence, portentous fragments that form a collage of disquietude, underscored with sounds at once familiar but unidentifiable, non-diegetic shreds that conceal their source, simmering underneath Ramsay’s pressure-cooker direction until the frame seems set to burst. As she explosively jump cuts to a writhing mass of bodies, covered in what will soon become a primary visual motif, a bright red which here comes from the tomatoes at the Tomatina festival in Spain where we first meet Eva (Tilda Swinton), borne aloft in flashback by the crowd with her arms outstretched, a brief glimpse of soon forgotten freedom whose Christ-like pose seems to presage the relentless Passion play of suffering that begins with the birth of her son.

Advancing the woozy, deconstructive way with storytelling and commitment to a heightened, colour-coded aesthetic so brilliantly established in Morvern Callar, itself an intensified advance on the hyper-real experimental moments of her debut, Ratcatcher (1999), Ramsay’s narrative here is made up of flashes both forward and back, a disorientating patchwork of images and sounds (once again with an astonishing utilisation of music), transfiguring her literary source material about the lead-up to and fallout from a Columbine-style massacre into something entirely cinematic. The first half especially is really something to behold, as we’re plunged into the aftermath of the event, Ramsay’s camera scrutinises every emotion on the magnificent Swinton’s face as she barely clings on to an existence in isolation, scrubbing the blood-red paint thrown across the poky house in which she spends her evenings in drunken anesthesia, desperately attempting to avoid confrontations with a hostile community. Images of decay and disintegration abound, a home falling apart, a poster in the travel agency where she finds a menial job detached from the wall, forgotten meals rotting in the foreground of the frame. Close-ups of Eva picking out clumps of red paint stuck in her hair, the diffusion of red light as she wakes up, even the backdrop of cans of tomato soup when she hides from a neighbour in the supermarket suggest that escape is impossible, that her recent past is all-consuming. Red is synonymous with her tragedy, and its everywhere she looks.

This sense of dread and anxiety begins to be broken down as we flash back to Kevin’s young childhood, witnessing the ever-deteriorating dynamic between mother and son from its inception. There’s a darker-than-dark sense of humour at play in many of these formative relationship scenes, Eva gaining respite from Kevin’s incessant crying as a baby by standing beside a roaring pneumatic drill in the street or her attempt later to explain to him where babies come from, “you’re talking about fucking, right?”. These moments are few though, and as Kevin grows older, the compounding of his sociopathic behaviour takes more of a toll on Eva and by virtue of the subjective direction, also on us. Ramsay unsettles and unnerves at every opportunity, microscopically focussing on the crack of fingernails being bitten, shards of eggshell picked from a mouth, food debris and detritus as it squelches and splats, it’s an experience akin to nails being dragged across a blackboard, or the razor scratching across glass Eva uses on her the windows of her paint-covered home. It all amounts to an almost unbearable build up of tension, we may know where we’re heading, but the journey is squirm-inducing and wholly ambiguous, by the end we’re left gasping for air, for a release, but the ellipses of the narrative have already shown us there’s nowhere to go, that the end is just the beginning.

Even if occasionally Ramsay is perhaps too overtly literal in her psychologising of Kevin, or her metaphors sometimes a little heavy, especially in a sequence set during Halloween, children in horror masks attacking her house like something from a Romero film, they’re minor complaints in light of her breathtaking formal control. The way she places her characters within her frame; Eva totally alone in a hospital bed as her oblivious husband sits beside her, or Kevin and her sitting on the floor of their new home angled miles apart, it’s apt that in following a character desperately attempting to find balance and a sense of control in her own life, over seemingly insurmountable odds, that Ramsay’s sense of both is so staggering, creating a work imbued with breathtaking cinematic technique that also delivers an emotional gut-punch of indescribable force.

We Need to Talk About Kevin – review | Film | The Observer Phillip French, October 22, 2011

The general outline of Lionel Shriver's novel must be widely familiar by now. We Need to Talk About Kevin has been around for eight years, there's a brief synopsis of the plot on the cover of the paperback, and the film was widely discussed when it premiered in Cannes last May and to most people's surprise failed to win a major prize.

It is an astonishing, truly shocking book that connects unspoken terrors in the domestic world to social horrors exploding in public. It uses the epistolary method, which like the diary form was popular among early novelists as a way of giving fiction a documentary authenticity. In this case the letters are written by Eva Khatchadourian, an adventurous travel writer and tour organiser, to her absent husband. She's a classic unreliable narrator, someone we feel isn't always telling us everything or telling it straight, and Shriver has given her a self-consciously precise voice, at once cold and intimate.

Lynne Ramsay, the director of We Need to Talk About Kevin, and her co-adaptor, Rory Kinnear, have dropped the epistolary technique. That would have demanded a voiceover narrator and greatly restricted the film's tempo. But they've maintained much of the book's tone through the casting of the estimable, closely controlled Tilda Swinton. Eva is described by observers in the book as an "ice queen", which is the mythic role Swinton plays in the films of CS Lewis's Narnia stories.

Taking place over some 20 years (in New Jersey just across the Hudson from New York in the novel; in an unidentified American suburb on screen) the film takes us directly into Eva's mind by abandoning a linear narrative. Instead it employs an advanced form of the mosaic structure developed in the 1970s by Nicolas Roeg, whose son, Luc Roeg, is co-producer of Kevin. Eva is first seen at the centre of some colourful folk event in Spain where everyone is drenched in tomato pulp, and the colour red is carried over into wine, clothes and ketchup. Eva's small clapboard house and the car in front are sprayed with red paint by vengeful vandals. We know in our hearts and retinas that this red will eventually become blood.

Brief sequences in the achronological mix establish Eva in a variety of roles. She's the concerned mother of two children (Kevin and his devoted little sister, Celia) with a kindly husband, Franklin (John C Reilly). She's a woman who once lived in a splendid, tastefully appointed country house with plain pine walls and spacious garden but now inhabits a squalid shack. She has terrible memories of a horrendous incident at her son's school and visits the son in a high-security jail. She's become a pariah, warily approached by some, attacked and tormented by others. This portrait of the troubled Eva – withdrawn, suspicious, steeped in self-mortification – is brilliantly sustained.

There are two narrative and psychological strands in the story. One culminates in a terrible outburst of seemingly motiveless violence. It first entered mainstream cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's early film Targets (inspired by Charles Whitman's killing spree on the University of Texas campus in 1966), and has since been seen in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant's Elephant. Kubrick once considered tackling the subject. The earlier, more established strand centres on the question of original sin, inexplicable malevolence, the appearance of evil in everyday circumstances. It's found in such brilliant short fictions as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (filmed as The Innocents), Paul Bowles's Pages From Cold Point and, more recently, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, as well as horror movies such as The Bad Seed and The Omen and in real life in the James Bulger case.

Eva's son Kevin screams and rejects her as a baby. His behaviour is transformed into a foreshadowing of disruptive violence when the screeching suddenly combines in the mother's ears with a pneumatic drill in the street. At age six (a brilliantly cast Jasper Newell), Kevin is moody, aggressive, sneering. As a teenager (the truly demonic Ezra Miller) he is, from Eva's point of view, a sadistic, manipulative monster. But Franklin, the liberal humanist, always looks on the bright side. Everything is interpreted optimistically: "He's just a boy, a sweet little boy." Let's all move into the country, he suggests.

The novel's title is of course ironic, as they never truly get around to the earnest discussions it proposes. In fact we see before us the supposedly constructive, canalising parental activity that leads from reading Robin Hood as a traditional bedside story through children's bows and arrows to a lethal crossbow and the brief, reflective transformation of the pupils of Kevin's eyes into archery targets.

This is a thoughtful, deeply disturbing story, less explicitly violent than the novel and never showing us Kevin in any other environment than the home. Where it takes us is deliberately unclear. What are the book's and the film's politics? Is it pointing at a creeping anomie, to a society without a moral compass? Is it a challenge to liberal complacency? Is it exploring areas of darkness and depths of horror we prefer to sweep under the carpet? In the book the 16-year-old Kevin pleases his English teacher with his knowledge of the word "maleficence": she doesn't recognise that it might reveal more than just a large vocabulary.

What is certain is that Lynne Ramsay, in her third feature film (her first since Morvern Callar almost 10 years ago), has moved confidently out of the world of working-class Scotland without losing any of her authority, and that the Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and Werner Herzog's regular editor, Joe Bini, have done remarkable work on her film. The courageously uningratiating Tilda Swinton has never been better.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film review: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Tim Robey, November 2011

The Atlantic [Ian Buckwalter]

Ruthless Culture [Jonathan McCalmont]

CANNES REVIEW: Tilda Swinton, Slow-Burn Horror Save We Need to Talk About Kevin Stephanie Zacharek at Cannes from Movieline, May 12, 2011

Raining on the Tilda Swinton Love Parade - Slate Magazine Stephanie Zacharek, January 4, 2010

Cannes Review: Lynne Ramsay's 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' Is ... James Rocchi at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 12, 2011

“We Need to Talk About Kevin”: A mother-son horror film - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, December 8, 2011

Cannes: Tilda Swinton's “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes, May 12, 2011

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Cannes

The Reel Bits [Richard Gray]

We Need to Talk about Kevin - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

We Need to Talk About Kevin: The Face of Pure Evil Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 16, 2011

Sight & Sound [Tim Robey] November 2011

Perfectly flawed - FT.com Lionel Shriver explores the appeal of unlikeable characters from The Financial Times, October 21, 2011, also in Slate seen here: We Need To Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver: Why Literature Requires Unlikable Characters

Diary of a failed housewife Patrick Z. McGavin

We Need To Talk About Kevin review: Wallow in ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

Bad Mommy: Tilda Swinton and Her Problem Child in ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth

Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]

Fantastic Fest 2011: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Review J. Hurtado from Screen Anarchy

Blu-ray Review: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN - ScreenAnarchy J. Hurtado from Screen Anarchy

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez] an essay on sociopath porn

We Need to Talk About Kevin Review | Mamas, Don't Let Your - Pajiba Brian Prisco

We Need to Talk About Kevin: the evil of banality Michael Sicinski from The Nashville Scene

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay) Paul Clark from Smoke a Lot of Big Monkey Butt

Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]

Paste Magazine [Donal Foreman]

The MacGuffin [Brandi Sperry]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

We Need To Talk About Kevin | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

We Need to Talk About Kevin James Kendrick from QNetwork Entertainment

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Two – We Need to Talk About Kevin, Trabalhar Cansa, and Polisse Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 12, 2011, also seen here: The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Cannes ’11, day two: an evil child, a new Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and a TV pilot that isn’t Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 13, 2011

We Need To Talk About Kevin Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

CANNES REVIEW | 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' Puts a Brilliant Spotlight on the Problem Child Eric Kohn from indiWIRE, May 12, 2011

Drew McWeeney at Cannes from HitFix, May 12, 2011

TIFF 2011: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Review Kurt Halfyard from Twitch, September 9, 2011, also seen here: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Review

A Mighty Fine Blog [Edwin Davies]

Afrofilmviewer [Byron Pitt]

Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]

Film Blather [Eugene Novikov]

Filmcritic.com Anthony Benigno

Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]

They Live by Night [Bilge Ebiri]

2 or 3 Things I Know About Film [Alan Vallows-Dancy]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

Aisle Seat [Mike McGranaghan]

Blog Critics [Ross Miller]

SBS Film [Fiona Williams]

JWR [S. James Wegg]

Canadian Cinephile [Jordan Richardson]

Film-Forward.com [Peter Gutierrez]

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg]

Movie Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin | Jeffrey M. Anderson

We Need to Talk With Kevin is Just a Long ... - The New York Observer Rex Reed

Twitch [Todd Brown] at Cannes, May 13, 2011, also seen here: Cannes 2011: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Review

PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]

Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]

Sick Joke: We Need to Talk About Kevin | The House Next Door Michał Oleszczyk, December 9, 2011

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Box Office Magazine Pete Hammond

Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]

Digital Spy [Simon Reynolds - Cannes 2011]

we need to talk about kevin JDB Records

Cannes 2011: Teenage Death Trip Double Feature Karina Longworth at Cannes from The Village Voice, May 13, 2011

Melissa Anderson on day two of the 64th Cannes Film Festival ArtForum, May 12, 2011

At the Cannes Film Festival: The New Woody, Sex Games and the Return of Lynne Ramsay Simon Abrams from L magazine, May 12, 2011

Pros and Cannes: Upcoming Festival Highlights and Lowlights John Lopez at Cannes from Vanity Fair, May 13, 2011

Ramsay's back with a vengeance, Leigh one to watch Mike Goodridge from Screendaily, May 12, 2011

Poster Lab: We Need to Talk About Kevin | The House Next Door R. Kurt Osenlund on the movie’s poster art, November 5, 2011

Cannes 2011. Lynne Ramsay's "We Need to Talk About Kevin" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 12, 2011

BOMB Magazine Jenefer Shute interviews author Lionel Shriver from Bomb magazine, Fall 2005

Guardian book club: Lionel Shriver John Mullan audio interview with novelist Lionel Shriver, from The Guardian, May 16, 2008 (49:33)

'It's a bloody business having a child': stars Talk About Kevin at Cannes Charlotte Higgins interviews actress Tilda Swinton from The Guardian, May 12, 2011

Tilda Swinton Tells the Truth: 'It's a Bloody Business, Being A Parent' Dana Harris interview with Swinton from indieWIRE, May 12, 2011

Cannes sensation Lynne Ramsay finds inspiration in her own family drama Vanessa Thorpe interview at Cannes from The Guardian, May 14, 2011

Lynne Ramsay: 'Just talk to me straight' Sean O’Hagan interview from The Observer, October 1, 2011

Tilda Swinton's We Need to Talk About Kevin: Cannes Review Kirk Honeycutt from The Hollywood Reporter, May 12, 2011, also seen here: The Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]

Variety [Leslie Felperin]

Adam Dawtrey at Cannes from Variety, May 12, 2011

Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin Dave Calhoun from Time Out London, May 12, 2011, also including an interview May 9, 2011: Lynne Ramsay: Exclusive pre-Cannes interview

Cannes 2011: We Need To Talk About Kevin Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes from The Daily Telegraph, May 12, 2011

The Telegraph [Robbie Collin] also Jenny McCartney, October 20, 2011

First Night: We Need To Talk About Kevin ... - The Independent Kaleem Aftab at Cannes, May 13, 2011

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay ... - The Independent Jonathan Romney, October 23, 2011

Lionel Shriver wins Orange Prize The Guardian, June 7, 2005

'I acted like a man - and prepared for victory' Lionel Shriver from The Guardian, June 12, 2005

'It pains me that I can no longer feel sorry for myself' Lionel Shriver from The Guardian, March 12, 2006

Ramsay needs to shoot a movie about Kevin Paul Arendt from The Guardian, June 5, 2006

'I could easily see myself doing a Jimmy White' Lionel Shriver from The Guardian, May 6, 2007

Shriver attacks British television Jason Deans from The Guardian, August 26, 2007

Post codes John Mullan from The Guardian, May 2, 2008, also seen here in Week One: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Early warnings John Mullan from The Guardian, May 9, 2008, also seen here: Week two: Knowing what comes next

Week three: Shriver's refusal to blame Lionel Shriver from The Guardian, May 16, 2008, also seen here: Week three: Shriver's refusal to blame

Mother load John Mullan from The Guardian, May 23, 2008, also seen here: Week four: Readers' responses

We Need To Talk About Kevin is UK's favourite Orange prize winner – ever Alison Flood from The Guardian, June 9, 2010

We Need to Talk About Kevin: foreword by Kate Mosse Kate Mosse from The Guardian, June 9, 2010

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood to score We Need to Talk About Kevin Sean Michael from The Guardian, February 15, 2011

Palme pioneers: women directors at Cannes Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian, May 10, 2011

Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 12, 2011, also here: Guardian.co.uk [Peter Bradshaw]

Cannes 2011 diary: We need to talk about Kevin and Faye Dunaway Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 12, 2011

Tilda Swinton: We need to talk about eccentricity Andrew Anthony at Cannes from The Observer, May 14, 2011

Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin Lionel Shriver, author of the book, from The Guardian, May 16, 2011

Poster notes: We Need to Talk about Kevin Paul Owen from The Guardian, October 19, 2011

We Need to Talk About Kevin – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, October 20, 2011

Lionel Shriver: The dangers of film adaptations Lionel Shriver from The Guardian, October 21, 2011

We Need to Talk About Kevin – review Philip French from The Observer, October 22, 2011

We need to talk about Kevin's lack of empathy Simon Baron-Cohen from The Guardian, October 24, 2011

We need to talk about men David Cox from The Guardian, October 25, 2011

EdinburghGuide.com [Dylan Matthew]

We Need to Talk About Kevin: Just another evil child Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail

We Need To Talk About Kevin - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Movie review: 'We Need to Talk About Kevin ... - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

We Need to Talk about Kevin :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

We need to talk about Tilda :: rogerebert.com :: People January 21, 2012

Will Netflix Win Tilda Swinton an Oscar? - Slate Magazine Roger Ebert, January 4, 2010

'We Need to Talk About Kevin,' With Tilda ... - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott, December 8, 2011

The sins of the mother - Salon.com Suzy Hansen book review, May 8, 2003

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

Great Britian France USA (95 mi) ‘Scope

You Were Never Really Here | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew

British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay returns with this concise, poetic and violent drama in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a troubled US war veteran

With this impressionistic and often daringly enigmatic thriller taken from a short novel by Jonathan Ames, British fimmaker Lynne Ramsay (‘Ratcatcher’, ‘Morvern Callar’) is back on top form with a vengeance – quite literally, though that emotion is not hers but part of the story. ‘You Were Never Really Here’ centres on burly, big-bearded, taciturn hitman Joe (Joaquin Phoenix in determinedly unglamorous mode), whom we encounter in the opening scene already carrying out a contract – though we never find out who’s the victim or what it’s all about.

In fact, Ramsay’s film gives mere visual and aural hints as to Joe’s backstory, motives and character. The briefest of flashbacks suggest he’s been in the military and the police, and that as a child he suffered a brutal father. But apart from seeing him carry out his work – his preferred weapon a hammer – all we know about Joe is that he lives with and cares for his elderly mother. Still, we do witness his dealings with a contractor, who lines up a job for him: to discover the whereabouts of and return to her politician father an underage girl abducted into sex slavery.

All this may bring to mind ‘Taxi Driver’, but Ramsay’s film is very different. Not wanting to distract us with the precise details of the storyline, or those of the world Joe inhabits, she focuses instead on his inner life. She uses Phoenix’s subtly expressive face and body language, a complex soundtrack, an elastic editing style and Thomas Townend’s wonderful cinematography to evoke his fragile, sometimes surprisingly tender, sometimes ruthless state of mind. The story occasionally takes its time over small moments – Joe singing along affectionately with his mother – but elsewhere it suddenly proceeds in rapid fits and starts, rushing through a series of deaths with barely a pause for breath. If one is left a little in the dark as to what’s happened and why, no matter, as the execution is so assured that one simply goes with the flow of striking, suggestive images. (Jonny Greenwood’s score also helps in maintaining the momentum.)

Wisely, Ramsay doesn’t linger or focus on the violence, but implies it through expert editing and composition. Accordingly, what might have been an almost unbearably grim trip into a sordid underworld of corruption, cruel exploitation and brutality does, against all the odds, have a solid underpinning of compassion. ‘You Were Never Really Here’ comes some years after Ramsay’s uneven ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and her aborted involvement with ‘Jane Got a Gun’ – making it a reminder of a very distinctive directorial talent as well as a hugely audacious, imaginative and strangely compelling movie.

The House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]

In the six years since her last feature, We Need to Talk About Kevin, which also premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Lynne Ramsay seems to have come very close to figuring out a mode of experimental but psychologically lucid filmmaking that almost completely eluded her before. You Were Never Really Here, adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella of the same name, is every bit as oblique as its lengthy title makes it sound. It’s a character study conducted primarily through an aesthetic vision: Heavy-for-hire Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) stumbles through his daily existence in an expressionistic haze of prescription drugs and disturbed memories, his mind flashing on images of childhood abuse and former lives as a military soldier and an F.B.I. agent.

The only people Joe interacts with are his elderly, doddering mother (Judith Roberts) and an occupational middle-man, John McCleary (John Doman), who gets him his assignments from wealthy clients. Joe’s latest job is to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the abducted daughter of New York Senator Votto (Alex Manette). He prepares for an assault on a heavily guarded apartment complex by psyching himself up in the mirror and by going on paranoid night drives, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. He also tries his best to quell memories of other girls he’s failed to save, which makes this job feel personal.

You Were Never Really Here is possibly the most thrillingly unclassifiable film to play at this year’s Cannes.

Phoenix’s performance here is one of seemingly unassailable physicality; the actor has never looked so robust, at once muscular and just plain thick. At the same time, he projects an unmistakable interior fragility. Few concrete details are ultimately given about Joe’s past, as Ramsay often even chooses to elide his most gruesome acts of inflicted violence. But Phoenix’s pained facial expressions and daunting body language—in tandem with the Ramsay’s impeccable, if thoroughly unconventional, editing and montage—color the film’s negative space with various implied meanings. And rising above that impressionistic surface are galvanizing moments of levity and duress that reorganize the narrative around fresh emotional anchor points.

Joe is a quintessential wayward protagonist in the mold of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye or Phoenix’s own Larry “Doc” Sportello in Inherent Vice. The difference is that Ramsay has pared down even those sparse neo-noir plot beats to mere fragments—all splayed across a persistently unresolved narrative that represents an uncompromising approach to its genre. In its still slightly unfinished cut, You Were Never Really Here is also only about 85 minutes, making it the rare ambitious and messy film that’s also short and economical. Ramsay has simultaneously scaled back and stepped up her craft: Her filmmaking here is prone less to overblown visual metaphors, as it was in We Need to Talk About Kevin, and instead it only half-articulates its ideas, making it possibly the most thrillingly unclassifiable film to play at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Sight & Sound [Jonathan Romney] May 27, 2017

A bulked-up Phoenix carries the weight of the world into nightmarish terrain in Ramsay’s hardboiled, sharp-edged, audacious adaptation of Jonathan Ames’s novel.

Whatever else you can say about You Were Never Really Here, it’s not the Lynne Ramsay film you might have been expecting. Exactly what one should expect from her is a moot point – her films to date have been very varied, stylistically and in theme, but they’ve always had a poetic sensibility, a contemplative delicacy beneath the often harsh realist surfaces. You Were Never Really Here is different, an exceptionally violent thriller that chooses to tell its hardboiled, even sordid story in predominantly visual terms, cutting dialogue to the bare minimum, so that it almost feels like a graphic novel for the screen. Given the fact that it was presented at Cannes without credits, and that the final film is expected to be at least a fine-tuned version, I’m hesitant to pronounce definitively on a film that’s sometimes perplexing, that in some ways seems both overstated and unresolved, but that, whichever way you cut it, is intensely cinematic, confrontational and intrepid.

Based on Jonathan Ames’s novel, the New York-set film centres on a lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix, heavily and scraggly bearded as loner Joe, a part for which he’s transformed his body – bulked up, shambling, carrying the weight of the world in every muscle. Its intense, telegraphically-edited opening sequence establishes Joe as a troubled man with a grim personal back story and a grimmer present occupation.

There’s some misdirection at work, however. When Joe comes home to the shabby house he shares with his ancient, infirm mother (Orange is the New Black regular Judith Roberts, fragile and super-emaciated), we think we know what we’re seeing – although the film throws us off the track with some jokily overt references to Psycho.

Joe is a killer, for sure, but of a specific kind: an ‘enforcer’, as the synopsis terms him, who’s entrusted with a mission to free a young girl, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), from the luxury HQ of a paedophile ring. Joe accomplishes his mission, but that’s when the bloodletting really begins. He now has to save the girl and grapple with his personal agonies, which stem both from childhood and the horrors of war.

Without doubt, You Were Never Really Here is a bold piece of storytelling, with a dream-like feel that evokes its hellish, predominantly nocturnal world very compellingly. Phoenix gives one of his most troubling performances, lending his character derangement and a somewhat Depardieu-like physicality, and Jonny Greenwood’s score, alternating electronics and strings, is integral to the oppressive mood. Shot by Thomas Townend and edited by Joe Bini, the film reaches an apogee of telegraphic precision in the brutal climax.

Still troublesome, however, is what sometimes comes across as a certain glibness in the use of paedophilia as a theme (images of a man’s hand playing with the furniture in a dollhouses), while the elaboration of Joe’s back story doesn’t quite provide the psychological ballast the film seems to reach for. At its present length of 85 minutes, You Were Never Really Here leaves you wanting just a fraction more breathing space. But we’ll see: unlike just about everything else in competition this year, it’s a film that demands to be revisited.

The Best Film At Cannes Almost Didn't Make It There ... - Village Voice Bilge Ebiri, May 30, 2017

Cannes 2017: 'You Were Never Really Here' Review - Vulture Emily Yoshida, May 27, 2017

Lynne Ramsay's Extraordinary 'You Were Never Really Here' Starring ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist, May 26, 2017

Joaquin Phoenix In 'You Were Never Really Here' - IndieWire Eric Kohn, May 26, 2017

Cannes 2017. Through a Genre Darkly—Lynne Ramsay's "You ... - Mubi Daniel Kasman, May 29, 2017

Cannes closes with its best movie, and we close our coverage with our ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club, May 24, 2017

You Were Never Really Here – first look review - Little White Lies Sophie Monks Kaufman

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

The Upcoming [Sam Gray]

Screen Comment [Ali Naderzad]

What should have won the 2017 Cannes Palme d'Or? | Sight & Sound ... BFI Sight and Sound, May 28, 2017

Notes and Observations: Geoff Andrew May 29, 2017

Filmmaker: Blake Williams Cannes Dispatch #4, May 30, 2017

Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson Cannes at 70: Bad Times, Good Time, Cannes overview, June 23, 2017

Artforum: Dennis Lim Squared Circle, Cannes overview, June 05, 2017

Film Comment: Nicolas Rapold Catastrophes on Parade, Cannes overview, July 03, 2017

[The Daily] Cannes 2017: Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here David Hudson from Criterion

'You Were Never Really Here' Review | Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin

'You Were Never Really Here' Review: Lynne Ramsay's ... - Variety Guy Lodge

RogerEbert.com [Barbara Scharres]

Cannes 2017: You Were Never Really Here, review ... - The Telegraph Tim Robey

The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang May 28, 2017

Rancière, Jacques – film writer

A Thwarted Fable an excerpt from the prologue of Film Fables by Jacques Rancière, from Rouge, 2001

Randl, Lola

DAYS IN BETWEEN (Die Besucherin) C+ 77

aka: In Between Days

Germany (104 mi) 2008

Another unpleasant German film that examines the elusive happiness of the middle class, where an ordinary woman in an ordinary family discovers her life has been a big disappointment so far, where not only is she deeply unhappy with herself, but her strained relationships with others are reflected by her cold and distant tone. Agnes (Sylvana Krappatsch) works in a medical lab as the family breadwinner while her stay at home husband writes a detective novel while also looking after their teen daughter who is completely dismissive of her mom. All of the opening conversations between family and friends suggest a woman so predictable that others routinely take her for granted. Written and directed by Randl, the film is about finally reaching that point where she’s so fed up with herself that she’s forced to start doing things differently. Unbeknownst to her, her sister and husband reached a similar point long ago that led them into sexual affairs. When her sister runs off to Spain on a spur of the moment thing searching of love, she gives Agnes instructions to water the plants in her apartment, leaving her the keys, which may as well be a portal to a different universe.

Slowly, the barriers of self protection such as work and family routines are open for discussion, as she decides to spend more time in this vacant apartment where occasionally visitors drop by, one of whom is in bed with her the next morning. Befuddled by it all, Agnes is caught between two worlds. Since she starts coming and going as she pleases, disappearing from her family at a moment’s notice, her marriage falls apart leaving her in an existential no man’s land. There’s nothing fancy here, no cinematic tricks, no flashbacks or out of sequence storytelling, simply a straightforward narrative that dulls the senses with such a monotonous exploration of class mediocrity, where even after an attempted break from her predictable patterns, the world she discovers instead is filled with unanswerable questions shrouded in moral uncertainty, perhaps no better than the world of certainty from which she is attempting to break free.

User comments from imdb Author: dingoberserk from Australia

This is a sad movie about the gradual disintegration of a middle class marriage which involves some cute role-reversal elements: Agnes, the wife, holds a reasonably responsible, well-paid position in a medical research institute (not at the top, of course, as we may assume there is a glass ceiling). Her husband, a writer of crime fiction, stays at home, looks after their teenage daughter and does the housework (well, most of it anyway). As mutual sexual attraction inevitably decreases, each of the two spouses seeks alternative partners, more as a form of escapism than a search for deeper, lasting commitments. Credible thus far, the plot becomes silly when Agnes commits adultery, apparently (but not quite clearly) 'doggie-style', with a totally unknown man whom she has never met before and whom she does not even see on that first occasion (he will turn out to be fatter and uglier than her husband, and it remains a mystery how he could have aroused her so skilfully). Having neglected her professional duties in the process, Agnes finds herself at an existential crossroads and we, the viewers, are left with a quandary as to which course of action might be best for her and her family.

Ranga, Dana

EAST SIDE STORY B+ 90

Germany (80 mi) 1997

A rather zany look at the world of Socialist musicals made behind the iron Curtain, with a truly remarkable collection of clips of a dancing proletariat, singing tractor girls, and various energetic workers, all enthusiastic about their work and their factories. Soviet musical comedy was founded by JOLLY FELLOWS in 1934, a landmark film directed by Eisenstein’s assistant, Grigori Alexandrov, followed by VOLGA VOLGA, Stalin’s favorite film, also A BRIGHTER PATH, the Socialist version of Cinderella, where an illiterate servant girl becomes the leader of the textile industry. Jean-Luc Godard said, “Boys just want to make movies filming girls,” one realizes Stalin wanted to make movies filming tractors. There follows a half dozen 50’s and 60’s musicals from Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany, with an explanation about the significance of revealing entertainment and untruths to socialist audiences by Maya Turoskaya, dedicated to Karl Marx – without whom none of this would ever be possible. A film that begs the question: “Who knows what would have happened if Socialism could have been more fun?”

Time Out

Romanian Dana Ranga and American Andrew Horn's documentary on the little known story of socialist musicals casts a colourful light on screen life behind the Iron Curtain, a place and time where the pressure on film-makers was to deliver didactic propaganda in the Socialist Realist vein, while light entertainment was frowned on as expensive decadence. Yet it was Stalin, an avid if unpredictable cinephile, who first championed the cause of Soviet musicals, promoting former Eisenstein assistant Grigori Alexandrov's musical comedy The Jolly Fellows over the work of frowning ideologues and apparatchiks. Later, East German audiences lapped up such '60s divertissements as My Wife Wants to Sing and Hot Summer. All in all, though, producing such trifles proved an uphill, thankless task, faced with technical, economic and official constraints, critical disregard and instant oblivion. Ranga and Horn approach their subject with a light, self-effacing touch.

Nashville Scene [Noel Murray and Rob Nelson]

Communist ideology is fine as far as it goes, but at some point, human beings have to stop being utilitarian cogs in a system and start being, well, human beings. During the chilliest days of the Cold War, state-run film production companies behind the Iron Curtain attempted to split the middle between propaganda and escapist entertainment, cranking out a series of Western-style musicals that espoused the virtues of being a good worker and learning to be happy with one's lot in life. This oft-hilarious, more often poignant documentary intercuts clips from those films with reminiscences by the people who tried to sneak as much art as they could into the production. Also weighing in are the audiences who knew they were being indoctrinated, but who went along for the ride because the songs were good and the costumes were pretty. What hangs in the air is a kind of wistful pragmatism, as citizens who had their best years stolen by well-intentioned totalitarianism describe the ludicrousness of their leisure hours with a blend of sarcasm and genuine nostalgia.

The Unknown Movies [Keith Bailey]

East Side Story tells the unknown history of an unsung genre: the Iron Curtain musical. Dana Ranga's revelatory overview intersperses clips from the sporadic history of Communist musical films—fewer than 40 were made between 1934 and 1973—with incisive narration and interviews from filmmakers and actors. The obvious approach would be to ridicule these movies, made mostly in the USSR and East Germany, for applying Marxist values to a form that would seem to be capitalist decadence incarnate. But the Romanian-born Ranga takes a more sophisticated approach, recognizing the films' absurdities while placing them in a historical context and showing the very real effect they had on the audiences they enthralled.

Eastern European musicals were often created to lure moviegoers who had grown tired of the Party line away from the Western movies that always outperformed the propaganda films. Some of the most surreally hilarious moments in East Side Story come when you recognize moments from those Western films recreated in a different context. The barn-raising scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers becomes a hymn to the joy of harvesting wheat, and Jane Russell's big number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is transported to a Czech beauty salon.

Particularly fascinating is the story of Gregori Alexandrov, creator of the Soviet musical. His second movie, Volga Volga (1938), is said to have been Stalin's favorite, and earned Alexandrov a military decoration for his efforts. That Alexandrov apprenticed under Sergei Eisenstein, and that Eisenstein's celebrated montage style is evident in a clip from Alexandrov's first movie, The Jolly Fellows (1934), only heightens the irony that Stalin was protecting Alexandrov from Party apparatchiks at the same time he was leaving Eisenstein to the wolves. Nobody thought Stalin was a great guy, but who knew he had such lousy taste in movies?

East Side Story (1997) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Paul Tatara

The Unknown Movies Page

DVD Times Michael Brooke

East Side Story Gerald Peary

Plume Noire Anji Milanjovic

Ransen, Mort

MARGARET’S MUSEUM

Canada Great Britain (114 mi) 1995

The Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary

There have been loads of them in the past, and if government subsidies continue, there'll be many more: sincere, humanist Canadian regional dramas that don't have enough muscle and brawn and punch for the USA. Margaret's Museum is a competently told love story set in the 1940s in a mining town in Cape Breton, and it almost gets exciting, thanks to a passionate guest turn by English actress Helena Bonham Carter. She's the uncombed, unsentimental, snorting protagonist, Margaret, who actively despises the coal mines that are the region's bread-and-butter. She hates them so much, she threatens to leave her gentle, bagpipe-playing, D.H.-Lawrence-look-alike husband, Neil (Clive Russell), should he take a shoveling job.

Director Mort Ransen seems to have studied his John Ford, checking out How Green Was My Valley for the mining and The Quiet Man for a stubborn, locking-of-horns love story. But where Ford was a poet, soaring from the humorous to the lyrical to the tragic, Ransen is a mortal, ordinary talent. Margaret's Museum is pretty good; that's all. And that's probably not enough, even with the weird, not-quite-credible Grand Guignol ending. At the Coolidge Corner.

Helena Bonham Carter plays a gawky, iconoclastic teenager in a poor Canadian mining village who finds a kindred spirit when a tall, bagpipe-playing miner approaches her in a diner and follows her home. Carter's mother, Kate Nelligan, is a viciously misanthropic widow who, having lost both a son and a husband to the mines, views all human endeavor as ultimately futile and soul-crushing. Against Nelligan's wishes, Carter marries the miner, who tries to avoid the harsh, oppressive, dangerous mining life by getting fired and taking a job as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, Nelligan's son falls in love with the mining manager's daughter, and the two star-crossed lovers plot to leave the godforsaken hamlet with their souls intact. While there are limits to how entertaining a movie about dirt-poor miners and their horrible working conditions can be, for the most part, Margaret's Museum is a rewarding film. Carter in particular is excellent, managing the difficult task of making her character at once stubborn, clear-headed and insane. Nelligan turns in powerful work, giving her character an almost predatory glee as she feeds on the misery of the mining town. But the real star of the film is the town itself, which has a desolate beauty that makes the desperation of all its inhabitants seem doubly tragic.

Austin Chronicle (Alison Macor)

The opening shot of ``Margaret's Museum'' looks like a painting by Andrew Wyeth, of a little clapboard cottage in a sea of grass on a cliffside. Two visitors drive up to the ``museum,'' and a moment later one runs from the house screaming. Then a title card takes us back ``three years earlier.'' As openings go, this one plays as if it belongs on another film. That it doesn't gradually becomes clear. We are in the mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in the late 1940s, where the coal pits take a terrible toll in life and limb--and where Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and her family live in half a house, because the earth subsided into a mine shaft beneath the other half.

Margaret scrubs floors at the hospital. One day a strapping fellow named Neil (Clive Russell) walks into the restaurant, half drunk, and begins to serenade her with big bagpipes. She scorns men, but likes this one, and brings him home to meet her bitter mother (Kate Nelligan), who has buried a husband and a son after pit disasters, and cares for a father whose lungs are so filled with dust that he needs to be regularly slammed on the back (``Don't forget to thump your grandfather!'').

``Margaret's Museum'' is the story of the people who must make their living from the cold-hearted, cost-conscious mining company, but it isn't like other films with similar themes (like ``Sons and Lovers,'' ``The Molly Maguires'' or ``Matewan''). It's quirkier and more eccentric, and has a thread of wry humor running through it. The dialogue, inspired by the short stories of Sheldon Currie, shows that Celtic wit has traveled well to the new land. (When Margaret encourages her younger brother to ask his girl to the Sunday dance, he replies, ``They're not supposed to dance on Sunday.'' She tells him, ``They're not supposed to work. Dancing's not work.'' And he replies, ``They're Protestant, aren't they? For them, it's work.'') Most of the movie is the love story of Margaret and Neil. He towers above her slight frame and threatens to force them all out of the house with his drinking, his buddies and his songs. But he listens when she protests, and mends his ways. Soon he has built her the curious house near the sea, using parts scrounged around town. (The bedroom, with walls and a ceiling made from old windows, is going to be bloody cold in a Nova Scotia winter.) As Margaret's mother, Nelligan is hard and dour, and can see no point in a life that snatches all of your loved ones away from you. ``I'll have five sons and three daughters,'' Margaret tells her. ``I can hear them in the bagpipe, screaming to be born.'' Her mother's predictions about the fates of these unborn infants are blood-chilling.

The margins of the movie are filled with colorful characters. With old grandfather, who coughs and writes his song requests on a note pad. With Uncle Angus (Kenneth Welsh), who dreams of sparing his nephew a life in the mines, and works double shifts in hopes that if he just once sees Toronto, he'll see there is a different life waiting for him. With the pit manager, who orders his red-haired daughter (Andrea Morris) not to see Margaret's brother (Craig Olejnik). The daughter and the brother perform their own marriage ceremony solemnly, before two candles in a root cellar.

The destination of the film may be guessed by some, but I will not reveal it, nor how it contributes to Margaret's museum and its sign, ``The Cost of Coal.'' What is surprising about the film is not its ending, but how it gets there. Helena Bonham Carter might seem an unlikely candidate for this role (she took it in preference to the lead in ``Breaking the Waves'') but she is just right--plucky, sexy, bemused, glorious in a scene where Neil sneaks her into the miners' cleaning area and she takes the first hot shower of her life. Russell, as Neil, is sort of a rougher-hewn Liam Neeson, strong, gentle and poetic. And Nelligan is astounding in the way she allows her humanity to peek out from behind the mother's harsh defenses. ``Margaret's Museum'' is one of those small, nearly perfect movies that you know, seeing it, is absolutely one of a kind.

Froilan Vispo

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

Rapper, Irving

NOW, VOYAGER

USA (117 mi) 1942

Time Out Tom Milne

Davis, impeccable as usual, turns the sow's ear of Hollywood's notion of a repressed spinster (remove the glasses and lo! a beauty) into something like a silk purse. Great stuff as a worldly-wise psychiatrist (Rains at his smoothest) recommends a cruise, and bitter-sweet shipboard romance soars with an unhappily married architect (Henreid, suavely performing the archetypal two-cigarette trick). The women's weepie angle gets to be a bit of a slog later on, but it is all wrapped up as a mesmerically glittering package by Rapper's direction, Sol Polito's camerawork, and Max Steiner's lushly romantic score. (From a novel by Olive Prouty.

A Night at the Opera to The Nutty Professor Pauline Kael

A campy tearjerker variation on the Cinderella story: a psychiatrist (Claude Rains) enables the sexually repressed, neurotically dowdy Bostonian Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) to become an attractive, confident woman. The scenarist, Casey Robinson, adapted the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, the genius of kitsch who also wrote Stella Dallas; both novels are about the glories of female self-sacrifice. A couple of the most quoted bits in film history come from this movie: Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and tenderly handing one to Davis, and her parting line to him: "Oh, Jerry, don't ask for the moon--we have the stars." The best scene may actually be Charlotte's brisk dismissal of her priggish suitor, played by John Loder--"Let's not linger over it." The score, by Max Steiner, aims right for the jugular; the director, Irving Rapper, is just barely competent, and the action plods along, yet this picture is all of a piece, and if it were better it might not work at all. This way, it's a schlock classic. (Mary Gordon's novel Final Payments has the markings of an 80s equivalent.) With Gladys Cooper, Bonita Granville, Lee Patrick, Ilka Chase, Charles Drake, Franklin Pangborn, James Rennie, Frank Puglia, and Janis Wilson as Tina. Warners.

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)

I hope I never get too cynical to enjoy obviously sentimental claptrap like Now, Voyager. It's an old-style weepie of the first order, high melodrama from a time when Hollywood could pull this stuff off on a grand scale, without knowing, wiseacre winks; and it's got more great hats in it than just about any film I can think of, with the exception of The Women. And it stars Miss Bette Davis—I admit to liking her better with her fangs bared, in full-bore Margo Channing mode, but this will do just fine, thank you very much.

This is also the only rival to The Heiress for Hollywood's best spinster movie, and goodness knows that's a title far overdue for a DVD release. Anyway, to the matter at hand: Davis stars as Charlotte Vale, the maiden aunt of a Boston Brahmin family, and, unlike her siblings, who wisely escaped, Charlotte is absolutely hobbled by her domineering monster of a mother. We meet Charlotte when she's close to a nervous collapse—so close, in fact, that one of her sisters has whisked in Dr. Jaquith, a psychiatrist with a Vermont sanitarium pastorally called Cascades. Perhaps a stay at this magic mountain will be the very thing to keep Charlotte from complete psychological meltdown.

Charlotte of course resists the very notion that something's wrong with her—in the movies, everybody must, prior to their conversion experience—but taking the air at Cascades and working out her mother issues with Jaquith (nicely played by a rumpled Claude Rains) does wonders for our Charlotte, who drops those extra pounds, dyes the gray out of her hair, and heads off on a restorative cruise to South America. There's still no man in her life, but there's nothing like an ocean liner to right that wrong, and Charlotte meets the lovely, delicate, and tragically married Jerry Durrance, played by Paul Henreid, just a year before his indelible turn as Victor Laszlo. What of Jerry's problematic off-screen wife? His two adorable daughters? What of the unparalleled personal connection between these two lost souls, hungry for one another?

That's the juice of the movie, and it drives us through some great soapy episodes, including Charlotte finally facing down her mother, and her socially desirable but emotionally tepid engagement to Mr. Livingston, the leading light of a Boston family more prominent even than the Vales. Bette Davis really is absolutely ripping as Charlotte—never one for much subtlety, she juices up Charlotte's longing, inhabiting it, yet never mocking it. Henreid is lovely, too—after seeing him repeatedly light two cigarettes in his mouth and handing one to Charlotte, it makes me want to start smoking again, and to try to convince the wife to take up the habit, if only because in that one moment we'd look so impossibly romantic and cool.

What's notable, too, is the movie's almost touching faith in psychiatry—it's not clear just what it is that Dr. Jaquith does with his patients, and this mental hospital actually seems more like a high-end resort, much more Club Med than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's too much to claim that this is a great movie, and it doesn't even really want to swing for the fences—before the term was invented, this was as good as the studios ever did at making a chick flick. And even if much of it seems improbable and feels overwrought, it's likely to get you rooting for our Charlotte, even long before the famous and glorious last line.

Now, Voyager Jeremiah Kipp from Slant magazine

Now, Voyager remains a highly narcotic, swoon-inducing romance in the Bette Davis canon. It's an unabashed soap opera about how true love gets hindered by social conventions, and manages to squeeze in a moralistic tale of female self-empowerment to boot. Toss in a third act bit of passive aggressive wish fulfillment where our high society heroine projects the love of a man she cannot have onto his unsuspecting, needy daughter, and there's enough to make one's head spin. But that cloudy feeling isn't a drawback—it's more like floating with a movie whose indulgences are reminiscent of foolishly falling in love. You ignore the flaws.

Boston heiress Charlotte Vale is a walking disaster of sheltered neurosis, a slave to the domineering whims of her elderly bitch of a mother (Gladys Cooper). Enter kindly psychiatrist Dr. Jasquith, played by Claude Rains as a soft-spoken healing balm who adores the messiness of pipe smoking and draws Charlotte in with his bedside manner and winning curiosity. Before you can say Henry Higgins, the doctor has completely transformed her life. It seems all poor sweet Charlotte needed was a new hairdo, dresses in the latest fashion, and to take off those dowdy spectacles! To test this new, improved Charlotte, Dr. Jasquith encourages her to take a pleasure cruise to Rio and take advantage of her rediscovered womanhood.

Now, Voyager's extended prologue belongs to the great Claude Rains, playing the idealized therapist any woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown would dream of. But rest assured, this is a Davis movie, and she rightly takes her place as the repressed female coming into her own through a charming dalliance with suave, debonair Jerry (Paul Henreid). The pleasure cruise grows all the more pleasurable as Charlotte takes courageous risks in meeting Jerry, struggling through conversations and gradually realizing she's an interesting person, and that an interesting guy is into her. Henreid, best known for his stiff idealist in Casablanca, handles this role with easy, continental grace, and of course all the girls wish they were Bette when he casually lights two cigarettes at once and offers one to her. By moonlight, I might add.

This is all ladled on with velvety, manipulative broad strokes, yet Now, Voyager somehow manages to surpass its corny woman's movie template. I suspect much of it has to do with Davis, who always threw herself headlong into these parts and enjoyed playing mad hysterics as much as glamour. She gets to do both here, and because Charlotte is fighting against being a stay-home spinster and has picked the right Mr. Right we actually give a damn beyond the camp antics Davis is sometimes notorious for. Naturally, these lovers are blocked because Jerry the brilliant architect is trapped in an unhappy marriage and struggling with a daughter as crazed and unhappy as the former Charlotte.

Jerry and Charlotte enjoy their ephemeral moments of happiness before parting, and Charlotte survived the experience and became Ms. Popular with the social set, rubbing elbows with celebrities and big shots. If only she can figure out how to deal with that sinister mother character, and through some elaborate plot contrivances save herself by saving Jerry's tormented daughter. Yes, a lot of ground gets covered within the two-hour running time—it feels like three or four different features crammed together, but none of them commit the cardinal sin of being dull.

In true Old Hollywood fashion, the final scene ties it all together rather neatly and elegantly. Jerry and Charlotte draw together and move apart as if they were floating in orbit, so of course their final sequence together has them on the balcony…once again under the night sky. Who can forget Charlotte's rapturous moment of awareness: "Don't ask for the moon—we have the stars." Now, Voyager is like a box of your favorite Valentine's Day candy; you know it's tacky but you just can't resist. This is the stuff of young lovers and hare-brained idealists, for weepy women with handkerchiefs, and if it's all ultimately pretty foolish stuff it reminds one of another time-honored affectionate cliché: only fools falls in love.

The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks

Dark Victory, The Great Lie and Now Voyager Women's pictures and the perfect moment, by Deborah H. Holdstein from Jump Cut, April 1987

Film Freak Central Review [Alex Jackson]

Projections Jon

Now, Voyager (1942) - Articles - TCM.com Frank Miller

Now, Voyager - TCM.com Roger Fristoe

DVD Town [John J. Puccio]

CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)

The Onion A.V. Club [Donna Bowman] reviewing The Betty Davis and Joan Crawford Collections

DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell, also from Amanda DeWees: The Bette Davis Collection

The New York Times T.S.

The Village Voice [Jim Ridley]

Rashid, Ian Iqbal

HOW SHE MOVE B- 82

Canada (91 mi) 2007

Over and over in movies we see these phenomenal superhuman feats that blacks must somehow achieve in order to work their way out of the ghetto. This all goes back to one of those overrought Stanley Kramer films, GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967), where in an era of civil rights advancements blacks had to prove to whites that they were equals, but in doing so, had to be overwhelmingly perfect. Blacks have always had to prove they were “better” than whites just to be accepted as equals. And in the movies, unfortunately, the area where blacks rule remains on the athletic playing field, or in this film, on the dance floor. While to its credit, the film makes a stab with the lead character to show that education also matters, but she’s the only one the film seems to care about, so it feels like a thrown in suggestion that’s available only for the most fortunate. And in fact Raya (Rutina Wesley) has been a gifted student attending an expensive prep school in the suburbs with plans to enroll in medical school, but has to return to living in the projects and attending public school again when the money’s gone after her sister dies of a drug overdose. The weakness of the film is the tired, formulaic predictability, which pretty much takes all the suspense out of it, as the outcome is known by the opening credits. But the film has formidable strengths as well, from the highly energetic and crowd pleasing dance sequences which are a mix of multiple dance styles from hip hop to break dancing, modern, tap, even adding gymnastic jumps, while also providing a gritty cultural realism, believable dialogue, and fresh, credible performances from some new faces.

Set in the mean streets of Toronto surprisingly featuring Caribbean dialects, Raya immediately embraces the highly competitive, ghetto step dancing culture, which features an ultra aggressive physicality of in-your-face dance offs where kids bust a move rather than pull out a weapon and threaten to kill somebody, which is the American formula. But it works, because all the kids featured in the film are heavily into the tightly choreographed group dance numbers, where individualism is constantly threatened, their street credibility is challenged, yet the outcome must be delivered through a group dynamic. When she learns there’s a $50,000 dance contest payout in an upcoming Step Monster competition in Detroit, Raya realizes her only route to medical school is to join an old friend Bishop’s (Dwain Murphy) all-male team to realistically have any chance of winning in an overtly sexist culture. The two lead characters show plenty of onscreen chemistry through an on again and off again relationship, excellent dance moves, where Raya has to prove she belongs, but one of the strongest dancers fumes in protest, claiming Raya’s preferential treatment is due to Bishop’s private interests and takes his business elswewhere. Despite the mounting tension, some of it provided by Michelle (Tré Armstrong) who’s still furious at Raya for leaving in the first place, and despite the still troublesome home life, it’s all a matter of time before the dance sequences take on a life of their own. Of significant importance here, the brilliantly choreographed dance routines are filmed head to foot without superficial edits or cuts, allowing the full power of the body moment to explode off the screen. Always super-charged, they’re undeniably appealing to people of all ages, so who really cares if there’s an oversimplistic, cop out, happily ever after ending? Only in the movies.

High School Musical excepted, dance figures now in teen movies mostly as competitive sport: Either it's an NBA-like ticket out, as in Save the Last Dance, or it's an NFL-like face-off, as in Stomp the Yard. In this diverting Canadian drama, it's both: The big-money pay-off to a step-dancing contest lures a studious inner-city girl (Rutina Wesley) to join an all-male neighborhood dance crew, in hopes of getting the private-school tuition her working-poor Jamaican parents can't afford. For once, the movie—written by Annmarie Morais and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid (Touch of Pink) with a gritty overlay of 16mm grain—regards book learning as at least as important as physical prowess. Wesley's tenacious heroine embodies this, as does her crew captain's day-saving little brother (Brennan Gademans), a bespectacled sharpie who proves as well-versed in move-bustin' as he is in Tolstoy. Apart from the exuberant athleticism of the step battles—choreographed by Hi-Hat with equal room for grace, physical wit, and aggression, if not always sympathetically shot or edited—the movie's chief appeal is a largely unknown cast. Especially good are Wesley, whose expressions are a study in shifting thought, and Tre Armstrong as her street-hardened but good-hearted rival, a stock role that Armstrong fills with unmediated feeling.

The New Yorker (David Denby)

A story of high school kids who wield wicked cool dance moves as their ticket out of poverty and hopelessness, "How She Move" is the latest urban music drama from MTV Films, and it manages to give a familiar story a vivid jolt of character.

It's not that anyone in this tale offers anything beyond the requisite stereotypes. Rutina Wesley has a strong presence and quiet intensity as the far-sighted Raya, who joins a step crew with mercenary calculation. Her educational future was yanked from under her by a junkie sister, and she needs the prize money for private school tuition. Back in the old neighborhood, her awkward relationships with old, neglected public school friends give her story an interesting dynamic.

Even more interesting is the unique culture of her Caribbean-Canadian community in Toronto. These first-generation Canadian kids are not that different from their American cousins, and the culture of drugs and poverty not much different from Detroit or New York. But the lilting accents of their parents seep into their own speech patterns even as they seem to fight the old world accent. Their embrace of stepping, the tightly choreographed mix of dance, drill and hip-hop street duel, feels like a rebellion against their immigrant roots.

How does she move? Very well, indeed. The spectacle of crews and their moves is the reason the film exists. But Raya also moves into an otherwise all-male crew and in the process challenges the barriers and assumptions that separate male and female crews.

To director Ian Iqbal Rashid's credit, he lets the subtext just bubble up from the screen. Which is refreshing in an otherwise predictable story of loyalty, identity, and the charge of expressing yourself through art.

Watching some of the popular dance movie musicals of recent decades—including “Flashdance,” “Footloose,” “The Cotton Club,” “Strictly Ballroom,” and “Chicago”—I’ve been astonished that audiences could endure and even applaud the bizarre way in which they were shot. Again and again, directors like Adrian Lyne (“Flashdance”) and Rob Marshall (“Chicago”) broke dance movement into fragmentary closeups—furiously tapping feet or thrusting elbows or churning thighs. Dance is devoted to the splendor of the body, but these movies turned bodies into pistons, pumps, cylinders—at times, we might have been watching a Soviet documentary on milk production. The shots yielded repetitive movement for film editors, who, with the directors sitting over their shoulders, rechoreographed the dance into rhythmically stimulating but humanly nonsensical patterns. The impulse to fragment movement came from music videos, I suppose, but videos have a practical purpose—they have to sell music as mood and product—and a dance musical is, or should be, a dramatic form, a special way of expressing emotions too powerful for words.

Thirty years ago, the director John Badham created a sensation by putting John Travolta front and center on a dance floor in “Saturday Night Fever,” a movie that crystallized disco madness before the public got bored with it. Last year’s “Stomp the Yard” tried to do the same not for a new dance craze but for step dancing, or stepping, a craze that forever renews itself. Cultural historians will eventually sort out the origins of step, but the rough consensus is that it originated in Africa, where it may have served as a means for people without a common language to get to know one another. (It is specifically associated with the late-nineteenth-century “gumboot” dancing of mine workers in South Africa.) Step can be seen as an assertive style of talking through the body—stomping with boots, slapping one’s chest, thighs, and legs, whirling and spinning. It’s not social dancing; it’s a way of saying, “This is who I am. This is what I can do.” In the early twentieth century, stepping emigrated to America and settled into the fraternities and sororities of black colleges like Morehouse and Spelman, where it picked up elements of military drill. Set in a black college in Atlanta, “Stomp the Yard” featured a good performance by the dancer and actor Columbus Short as a poor kid from Los Angeles who winds up teaching his élite frat brothers how to dance. Short was exciting, but “Stomp the Yard” turned into a slick piece of commercial manufacture that relied on embarrassingly obvious plot turns and the usual supercharged battery of glib camera tricks—slow motion, fast motion, jump cutting, freeze-frame. The director, Sylvain White, who has made music videos, didn’t chop up the dancing, but he was too impatient to hold an image for more than a few seconds. A lot of the dance movement got lost in whipped-up “visuals” and in macho posturing so insistent that even in a football movie it would have been hard to take.

The much greater excitement of the new “How She Move”—a rudimentary but thoroughly enjoyable step musical from Canada—is that you can see the dancers from top to bottom, and they all look great. The movie is about step dancing as a high-school obsession—kids defining themselves personally and then as a group in dance, and matching styles in duels with other groups. The heroine, Raya Green (Rutina Wesley), is a smart, ambitious black girl who’s been away at an all-white boarding school. After her sister dies of a drug overdose and her parents run out of money, she returns home, somewhat abashed, to the Toronto projects. At her old public school, she’s now resented as a snob. She’s not snobbish, but she’s frankly opportunistic—she wants to get ahead and leave the projects behind—and her mother, a stern Jamaican, won’t stop pressuring her to study hard. The plot elements are formulaic, but they’re presented plainly and earnestly; the movie is anything but glib.

In the school sequences, the screenwriter, Annmarie Morais, and the director, Ian Iqbal Rashid, produce the same kind of taunting and jostling and romantic troubles seen in American teen movies—though these kids are Canadian, so they seem saner, or, at least, less violent, than Americans. When Raya and her rival Michelle (Tré Armstrong) snarl at each other, the confrontation turns into a step duel—slap, stomp, thrust—and suddenly the movie sheds its teen clichés and takes off. Raya needs money for college, so, against her mother’s wishes, she crashes an all-boy step group that’s competing for a cash prize. Like Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer,” eighty years ago, the heroine disobeys a parent in order to find herself in performing—this girl gotta dance. Yet the movie is not entirely a celebration of self. The final meaning of Raya’s story is: you have a great personal style, but you also have to submit to group discipline—to steps.

Morais and Rashid, who directed “Touch of Pink,” were both brought up by immigrant families in Toronto, and the atmosphere of the local step scene feels right. “How She Move” was shot on the cheap in 16-mm. film, and some of it is a little drab-looking, but it has energy and bravado. The filmmakers, including the New York choreographer Hi-Hat, who has liberated women from their backup, sex-toy role in hip-hop videos, gathered dancers from all over America and Canada and trained them for five weeks. Step is muscular and volatile. The women as well as the men are in amazing shape, and can do anything they want with their bodies; Rutina Wesley, leaping on top of cars and smashing windows, brings the same strength to step that the men do. But the feminist charge is only part of the movie’s desire to restore dance to its dramatic function. Rashid kept the cameras out in front of the performers (the groups are small—six dancers usually), and, since he doesn’t cut too much, the identity of the different groups—some have canes or umbrellas or wear fancy-Dan white suits—comes through as an aesthetic form of power. Step includes many kinds of movement, and the steadiness of the direction and the editing allows you to see the individual variations—especially Wesley’s—within the cluster. Like Columbus Short’s street moves, her personal flourishes shake up stale step traditions. When she’s in the middle of things, the old dream of transcendence through dance suddenly becomes real again.

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs)

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

The Onion A.V. Club Nathan Rubin

Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones)

Los Angeles Times (Michael Phillips) also seen here: Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)

New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz

Rasin, James

BEAUTIFUL DARLING B+ 91

USA (84 mi) 2010

Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybodys darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was given head - she said

Hey Babe, take a walk on the wild side…

—Lou Reed, “Walk On the Wild Side” (1972)

A nicely done and touching tribute to Candy Darling, born James Lawrence Slattery, one of the first transgender stars to find success and fame in America, if only so briefly. Nonetheless, her influence on other major pop stars is endless, from David Bowie to Lou Reed, Madonna, and even Lady Gaga. The archival material here is well organized, revealing an extremely handsome young man in high school from Long Island who was extremely moved by a movie photo of Kim Novak, a stunningly beautiful ice blond, and developed a propensity for wearing women’s clothes and make up to emulate her, but in contrast to transvestites who dress up as girls, Candy was a boy who actually preferred “being” a girl at all times, never reverting back to a boy despite his male anatomy. Darling grew up in the era of television and watched plenty of old movies, where she could emulate her favorite scenes, eventually developing an insatiable desire to be a movie star, becoming a Jean Harlow/Marilyn Monroe/Kim Novak-inspired bleached blond sex symbol with the accompanying demure voice. By the age of twenty, she created her Candy Darling persona and caught onto the Andy Warhol Factory crowd, described by John Waters as a group that took a lot of LSD and especially speed, arriving too late to be seen in CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), but appeared as herself in two Warhol produced films FLESH (1968) and WOMEN IN REVOLT (1971) directed by Paul Morrissey, and also starred in fellow transgender playwright Jackie Curtis plays Glamour, Glory and Gold (1967) and Vain Victory: Vicissitudes of the Damned (1971), and even a Tennessee Williams play Small Craft Warnings (1972). Darling and Curtis were known in the Warhol family as the “chicks with dicks” who were left out of the future Warhol ventures, as he apparently grew tired of them. But her fifteen minutes of fame ended after the closing of that play, where so long as she had a stage, she had an outlet for her movie star persona, which became inseparable from her living life, as they were one and the same. But without the stage, few paid attention to her any more and she died a sad death from leukemia at the age of 29 in 1974.

Besides photos, there are a collection of short Factory films, where Darling can be seen answering the phone in a state of melodramatic shock, and a screen test with Dennis Hopper. Much of the material came from Darling’s ex-boyfriend and closest friend, Jeremiah Newton, who is given a producer’s credit but also appears onscreen, claiming he was the only one who “stepped up to the plate” after she died, interviewing most of her friends while adding his own recollections on audio tape after she died, while collecting some valuable memorabilia from Darling’s mother who re-married a profoundly anti-gay man, so she burned the rest. His recollections strike a chord with the audience as they are really loving tributes and offer a generous amount of tenderness. What’s most compelling is a look back at the era of Darling’s sexual conversion, as it was against the law in New York City at the time to be caught wearing women’s clothes on the street, where a photo shows Darling being dragged off by two policemen, his clothes above the waist torn to shreds. Also there are passages read from Darling’s diary, which reveals the heart and soul of the daily toll this took out of her life, as even during the best years, many reviled her and it was not uncommon to find transgenders beaten up and left on the street. This was the reality she was forced to deal with even while she was making herself glamorous and beautiful every day and despite the romanticization expressed in the Lou Reed songs “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Candy Says” (1972), and being the subject of such famed photographers as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and James Mapplethorpe, among others. Stick around after the end credits where a final passage from her diary is heard, discovered by Newton in a book she was reading during the final 6 month’s of protracted illness, eloquently read by Chloë Sevigny.

Film-Forward.com Kent Turner

Everybody has something to say about one of the most dynamic Warhol starlets in James Rasin’s Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar. The title pretty well explains this documentary of the late, dynamic transvestite, which occasionally checks in with her widowed best friend, Jeremiah Newton, who labors to transfer her ashes to a grave in a Long Island cemetery. Candy’s beauty and her classic Hollywood-influenced persona lit up the Factory scene until her eventual “junking,” as one of the former Warhol assistants puts it. Writer Fran Lebowitz leads an ultra cool cast of personalities, who give great commentary on the period.

Beautiful Darling Star Jeremiah Newton « Hot Splice Adam from Hot Splice

“Candy says I’ve come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world” – Velvet Underground

The real star of Beautiful Darling James Rasin’s portrait of Warhol superstar Candy Darling, which screened this afternoon at the Berlinale, isn’t the starlet herself. Nor is it any of the regulars of the Warhol community, although many of them make appearances. The real star of this film is Darling’s devoted and amicably gentle sidekick Jeremiah Newton, a man whose dedication to his friend has preserved her image and story warts and all.

Newton hands Raisin a treasure trove of material, which the director brilliantly turns into a dual portrait not just of Candy Darling but of of Newton as well as, who appropriately receives a producers credit on the film. This insightful picture of the tragic life and sudden death of one of Warhol’s most confident stars was only possible because of the tireless efforts Newton put into documenting Darling’s life. Newton interviewed scores of Warhol regulars and salvaged a wealth of personal belongings (photos, films, diaries, clothing etc) from Darling’s mother which allows Rasin to assemble one of the finest accounts of the Warhol factory, its tragic relationship to its coterie and its profound effect on the lives of its manufactured stars. As told through these collected stories and belongings, Rasin and Newton offer us one of the most authentic and personal portraits that factory has known.

Beautiful Darling Chris Knipp from Filmleaf

Edie Sedgwick, Andy's druggie socialite "muse," and a real girl, was dead by 1971. Among the "chicks with dicks" who gathered at the second, Union Square version of Andy Warhol's Factory, Candy Darling was the most ethereal and beautiful and pure, it seems from this documentary, which recounts her short life. She died of lymphatic cancer before reaching the age of thirty, already by then cast off by Andy, who used Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis in later films. One of the many photographers who lensed her, Peter Hujar did a glamorous portrait of Candy on her hospital deathbed, garlanded with roses and still perfectly made up.

This documentary's existence is due to the devotion of Candy Darling's closest male friend, Jeremiah Newton, prominently featured and also a producer. He still carries the flame, and Beautiful Darling is book-ended by his arranging for Candy's ashes to be buried along with his (Jeremiah's) mother's, under a tombstone for them and, when his time comes, Jeremiah himself. Back in the day, he attached himself to Candy Darling when he was only sixteen and when she had a preferred place in Andy's Factory and the Factory hangout, Max's Kansas City.

Newton approached James Raisin (who's made films about the Beats and written stuff about Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith and a screenplay for Abel Ferrara about Warhol) with piles of memorabilia about Candy and interview tapes he made right after her death with people who knew her. He also had archival film footage. Raisin has woven together all these records and his own recent interviews with some germane and often pungent talking heads, including Fran Lebowitz, Glenn O'Brien, Taylor Mead, Bob Colacello, John Waters, Gerald Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Holly Woodlawn, Pat Hackett, George Abagnalo, and Sam Green, among others, to make Beautiful Darling an excellent record of the person and the context and another valid entry in the collection of cinematic Warholobilia. There is lots of good and appropriate music, and for readings of letters and statements, Chloe Sevigny does the voice of Candy Darling.

She was originally Jimmy or James Slattery, and as we're told in Lou Reed's famous song "Walk on the Wild Side," which describes the "chick with dicks" Andy used and threw away, "Candy came from out on the Island," Long Island, that is, from a flat monotonous development in Forest Hills. Candy came from out on the Island/In the backroom she was everybody's darlin'/But she never lost her head/Even when she was giving head/She says, Hey babe/Take a walk on the wild side/I Said, Hey baby/Take a walk on the wild side/And the coloured girls go/Doo do doo do doo do do doo...'

While Edie Sedgwick was born a real girl, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis were among the various trannies who gathered at the Factory. 'Take a walk on the wild side' was a come-on to prospective johns, meaning, Have sex with a transvestite prostitute. But what we learn from Beautiful Darling is that the Warhol Factory girls weren't all alike.

None of them worked harder at being a girl than Candy, but not just at being a girl -- at being glamorous and beautiful, inspired by memories of Forties screen divas seen in TV movies and dreams of Hollywood fame. She didn't always necessarily say much, except when performing somebody's lines, always in that special breathy feminine voice of the drag queen (or Marilyn). She was in Warhol's Flesh and Women in Revolt. Candy used her Warhol film fame to land other screen appearances, and Tennessee Williams, who was among her admirers, cast her in his play, Small Craft Warnings.

Warhol, in one of the clips, says he was making movies because it was easier than painting. Cross dressing, though, was not only hard work but dangerous work: back in the Sixties it was illegal in New York for a man to be on the street dressed as a woman. They could be hauled off by the cops just for wearing heavy mascara, so the trannies carried their dresses in shopping bags and slipped their gear on slowly till night came, and it was safer. (Agosto Machado tells us about this.)

Beautiful Darling shows us hints of Candy's Jimmy Slattery origins, including a still of the then boy of 14 or so stretched on a chaise longue in shorts, showing long, sleek ivory gams. It's strange to see Jeremiah, who like not a few of the former Warhol beauties, is a big limping blob of a person now, as a wraith-like androgynous beauty himself, when with Candy. But in a self-penned obit, Candy mentions poor Jeremiah way down in her list of people she loved and owed it all to.

John Waters is always a sharp voice, but Fran Lebowitz, one of the wittiest and most articulate non-writing writers of our times (and of course author of the droll Metropolitan Life, first aired as columns for Andy's Interview magazine), is the treasure here. Not just she but Andy himself says Candy should not lose the penis. She just wouldn't be the same. Apparently she and Newton were not a couple and she had no man in her life. The film ends with the line that to be true to yourself is the greatest morality. But as Lebowitz points out, a transsexual who becomes female never had a girlhood. And so Candy, though wonderfully successful at being a glamorous mirage, found it terribly hard work. Fran points out real women don't work so hard all the time. And so it is artificial, and exhausting, and Candy was ready to die of cancer. When the tumor was found, it ushered in one of her greatest roles, that of a tragic early death.

Beautiful Darling had its world premiere at the Berlinale in February 2010, showed at the BFI Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in London in March, and will be presented as part of the New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, April 2, 2010 at MoMA and April 3 at the Walter Reade Theater.

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [5/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: cathy-earnshaw from Berlin, Germany

TheHollywoodReporter.com [Stephen Farber]

Candy Darling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Images for candy darling

Candy Darling Superstar: the official home page of the estate of ... Candy Darling site

Candy Darling, Andy Warhol superstar Andy Warhol site

Candy Darling Warhol Stars

Small Craft Warnings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Candy Darling" Find a Grave

Rasoulof, Mohammad

The Film Sufi: “Head Wind” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2008) January 29, 2013

The Film Sufi: “Iron Island” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2005) February 24, 2013

THE WHITE MEADOWS (Keshtzar haye sepid) B 86

Iran (93 mi) 2010

Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested in March 2010 along with fellow Iranian director Jafar Panahi, which was part of the government’s reaction to reports from inside Iran that called the June 2009 election of President Ahmadinejad a fraud, effectively calling it a dictatorship where artists in Iran may no longer speak freely. Rasoulof was released shortly afterwards, but Janafi was held for nearly three months. After seeing this film, playing as part of the Iranian Fest at the Film Center, a story largely told in code where the metaphoric imagery is designed to obscure its intent, one would think Iran has replaced Siberia as the cruelest place on earth. The story unfolds through a mysterious series of events all taking place on the white islands of Lake Urmia in the northwestern part of Iran close to Azerbaijan, the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest saltwater lake in the world. Reminiscent of Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk’s THE ISLE (2000), which is easily one of the most gorgeously photographed films ever seen on the surface, but one of the cruelest and most extreme under the surface, this film similarly features one of the most hypnotic settings, where the ravishing beauty hides some of the most grotesque human behavior on the planet, an example of the kind of backwards thinking that still exists in remote areas in Iran that rely on an archaic, yet rigidly dogmatic rule of law.

Like a modern day Charon, a boatman who transports the dead across the River Styx, Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) is an old man of the sea who rows his boat across the white saltwater seas of this desolate purgatory using a small glass vial to collect the tears from the small clusters of inhabitants who live on these white islands, where custom has it their tears will turn to pearls. He gains the trust of the people by bearing witness to their heartbreaking stories, always as a silent observer, never intervening in their affairs. When the villagers are unhappy with the gods who will not bring them rain, they sacrifice the most beautiful young maiden in a marriage to the sea, whose tears Rahmat collects before they carry her through a purifying ring of fire and set her adrift on a wooden raft to be carried out to sea. When a young boy swims out to join her, the villagers collectively stone him, leaving his body brutally injured where Rahmat collects his tears as he progressively weakens. Rahmat literally throwns salt on his wounds, which only makes the pain worse. On another island, the elders are unhappy with a painter who paints the sea red instead of blue, where they bury him up to his neck for Rahmat to collect his tears before bathing him in the saltwater, then instruct him to climb a ladder and keep staring at the sun, hoping this will cure the problem. When it doesn’t they pour monkey urine in his eyes. When that fails, they send the painter and the stoned victim to a desolate island to be prisoners of a deranged warden who otherwise lives there in utter solitude. When the stoning victim eventually dies, he is sunk to the bottom of the sea with a floating device that serves as his headstone, where we see a graveyard of headstones of those buried at sea.

Ebrahim Ghafouri is the cinematographer capturing the breathtakingly poetic visual imagery, all forming a kind of backwards mythology of harsh cruelty. Perhaps the cruelest irony is saved for the film’s editor, who happens to be Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s leading directors who has made only a single feature film following his censure after the banning of CRIMSON GOLD (2003) in Iran, a film that upset the Iranian religious hierarchy because it featured a suicide, police routinely rounding up innocent civilians on the street, petty thievery, the drinking of alcohol, also prostitution and homelessness in Tehran. There’s even slang, and the use of the word “dude” spoken by an Iranian in the script. For this crime, he’s been unable to secure adequate funding to make more films, so in order to work he’s forced to take a secondary role as editor of this film. Interesting that both filmmakers were subsequently arrested, where only the future will tell if either filmmaker will ever make another film in Iran.

21st Annual Festival of Films from Iran Barbara Scharres

In a pure white land where sea and sky merge, an itinerant boatman has the job of collecting the tears of those who grieve in a glass flagon, and listening to their sorrows. THE WHITE MEADOWS, by the director of IRON ISLAND, casts a folkloric spell as rituals and music define the parameters of an ancient and unknowable way of life. Some critics read the film as an allegory that may or may not refer to Iran’s present-day sorrows.

The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]

Building on the allegorical critique of his earlier film, Iron Island, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof emerges as one of the most vivid cine-folklorists since Sergei Parajanov. His is a world of landscapes both visceral and symbolic, in which the country's sprawling salt flats appear forever on the verge of engulfing the nomadic characters. One village mourns the death of a woman whose bodacious body, even fully covered, is said to have moved too provocatively for the locals; another commemorates a virgin's reluctant sacrificial "marriage" to the sea in an attempt to end a divinity-controlled draught. Rowing between these and other sorrowful gatherings is Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi), a grave, middle-aged traveler always ready with a glass jar to gently scoop up the people's tears. Is he a mythical guide? Communal healer? Silent witness to a catalog of veiled yet unmistakable forms of oppression? A fiercely compassionate call for freedom, the film features downright tangible sensory dimensions: The sky's infinite color and the ocean's saline taste are integral elements of the narrative, never more so than in the sequence of the painter being painfully "treated" for his unorthodox canvases—Rasoulof's most personal portrait of the responsibilities and dangers of a questioning artist.

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

The White Meadows, a stinging neo-realist fable, looks like it’s set on an ashen, alien salt-planet of milky seas, white-sand deserts, caves like slavering animal mouths, and beaches so blank they must be purgatorial. But the allegorical criticisms that emerge from this lunar, lacunal landscape are clearly aimed at the real world—an impression buttressed by the news that writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested in Iran this March as part of a post-election program of intimidation.

Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) sails the pearly pale seas of Lake Urmia, hopping between islands in his rickety rowboat, collecting the locals’ tears in a playset-sized pitcher. And there are no shortages of tears—each locale’s hardscrabble inhabitants relate their heartaches, but Rahmat also witnesses his fair share: a shaved-hairless dwarf thrown down a well to appease the fairy imprisoned at the bottom; a virgin girl wedded to the sea (i.e. drowned); an artist, mad enough to paint the sea a color other than blue, blinded by monkey urine meant to “restore” his vision.

Rahmat, with an adolescent stowaway (Younes Ghazali) for a companion, wanders this aquatic trail of tears, moving between absurd and surreal set pieces, each illustrating lives sacrificed for strange superstitions. It’s the Face of Theocracy, driven home by a devastating, allegory-capping finale. In its wanderings laden with clear symbolic meaning, The White Meadows plays out like The Little Prince—except, since the setting is a veiled-in-fantasy Iran, the hero knows better than to ask any questions.

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

Last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Mohammad Rasoulof, Iranian director of the allegorical fable The White Meadows, spoke out against the Tehran regime saying ”I come from a country full of contradictions and suffering, where there is a dictatorship," and "censorship does not allow me to talk openly about what happens in my country." The following March, both Rasoulof and world-acclaimed director Jafir Panahi were arrested as part of the government’s reaction to those claiming that the election of President Ahmadinejad in June 2009 election was a fraud. These arrests prompted Iranian directors, actors and artists to sign a letter urging their release. The petition ends with the sentence “Like artists everywhere, Iran’s filmmakers should be celebrated, not censored, repressed, and imprisoned.”

Rasoulof was released shortly after his arrest in March but Panahi remained in prison until the following May, released only after he threatened to go on a hunger strike, complaining about mistreatment in prison and threats made to his family. The White Meadows, Rasoulof’s mesmerizing and poetic film about an old man who travels to places of sorrow to collect tears, appears to be a disguised attack on oppression and the perils of religious dogmatism in Iran, though it also can be taken simply as a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare. Set in Lake Urmia close to Azerbaijan, Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi), an aging boatman, visits the region’s white salt islands to collect people’s tears in a glass vial. “I’ve come to listen to people’s heartaches and take away tears,” he says as he rows among the gray waters in the third-largest saltwater lake in the world. It is an otherworldly landscape.

Rahmat encounters many tales of grief and sees many injustices but he is powerless to intervene. He has been doing this for thirty years and the people cooperate because they believe that their tears will turn into pearls. What he does with the tears is not fully explained. We see him first at a funeral for a young woman whose body was preserved in salt until Rahmat can take her off the island and dispose of her body. It is not clear how the woman died but the implication is clear that she was killed, possibly by stoning, by having too provocative a figure. One of the villagers tells Rahmat that it was good that she had died because she was “too beautiful to live among us”. She could not be buried on the island because lustful men would dig up her body and violate the corpse.

When Rahmat takes her in his boat, he uncovers her far from shore only to find a very much alive teenage boy, Nassim (Younes Ghazali), who snuck off the island so that he can look for his father. Rahmat first throws young Nissim into the cruel waters then relents and says that the boy can go with him if he pretends to be his deaf and mute son. Recalling that tears can turn into pearls, the naïve youngster steals a jar full of tears and is severely reprimanded by Rahmat when discovered. At the next island, a beautiful young virgin, dressed for a wedding, is offered as a bride to the sea to appease the sea gods. No one does anything to stop this barbaric action and Rahmat is content to fill up more vials of tears.

At the last minute Nissim swims out to sea to try and rescue her but he is intercepted and brought back to the island to be stoned by the elders. Rahmat saves his life but the boy is severely injured and once again the powerful succeed at the expense of the compassionate. On the next island, a crippled dwarf (Omid Zare) is chosen to deliver the secrets of the villagers (whispered into a glass jar) to the fairies at the bottom of a well before daylight. Fearing that he will not make it in time, the rope is cut and he perishes. An even more bizarre occurrence takes place at the next island.

A painter is harassed and blinded because he has painted the sea red instead of blue, a reminder of the harsh repercussions felt by independent artists in Iran. The White Meadows is an upsetting film filled with many tears but it is a film of stark visual beauty and the powerful imagery of Ebrahim Ghafouri’s camerawork makes it clear how ignorance and doctrinaire rigidity can never be a substitute for morality and justice.

Cinema Scope | When the Salt Attacks the Sea: The Films of ... When the Salt Attacks the Sea: The Films of Mohammad Rasoulof, by Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope (2010)

The Islamic Republic of Iran v. Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof: A Developing Story

Over the past month, there have been a number of promising indications that the heinous, unjust situation in which Iranian filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi are ensnared might change. Although at this point most members of the cinephile community around the world are well aware of this situation, and I do not wish to belabour it here (better to think ahead, to the future, and what might still be done), a brief recap is in order. On March 1 of last year, Rasoulof, Panahi, and 17 others were arrested. At the time of the round-up, the filmmakers were supposedly making a film in support of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the pro-reform Green movement. (According to Panahi, the film was a domestic kammerspiel focusing on “a family and the post-election developments”; no further specifics having been determined.) All present at the time of the raid were taken to Evin Prison. Rasoulof was released 17 days later, but Panahi remained in detention until his May 25release on bail. On December 20, both Panahi and Rasoulof were sentenced to six years in prison, along with a 20-year prohibition on leaving the country, talking to foreign press, or writing or directing any films. Their official crime: “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”

A sense of guarded optimism remains mixed with frustration and more than a little confusion, since it still remains unclear whether or not the Ahmadinejad regime will actually carry out the sentences against these men. On January 19, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, reported to several internal media sources that the Iranian president was opposed to the filmmakers’ sentences, finding them unduly harsh. (He also commented that the matter was in the hands of the judiciary, and not an executive decision.) Despite this stray comment, Ahmadinejad has made no further indication that he will directly intervene on the men’s behalf.

However, as Anthony Kaufman reported (IndieWire, Feb. 9, 2011), the full complexities of the situation are only beginning to be understood. As of his report, neither Panahi nor Rasoulof were actually in prison, both were actively engaged in an appeals process, and Rasoulof had even received preliminary approval to begin work on a new feature film. This information, from scholar/filmmaker Jamsheed Akrami and echoed by anonymous sources close to the filmmakers in an earlier story in Variety, suggested that hardliners and not-so-hardliners in the judiciary were at odds regarding the verdicts. While legal and political face-saving would not allow for an outright commutation of the sentences, some lessening of them, or a replacement of jail time with a hefty fine, might be possible. These reports indicated that international support for the filmmakers was making a difference.

But then, at the start of the Berlinale just a few days later, Panahi, who had been invited to serve on the jury despite (really, because of) his travel ban, issued a sobering open letter. In it, either for rhetorical purposes or out of sincere personal belief, he made it quite clear that he was going to prison, and would not be able to work for 20 years. And so we find ourselves once again understanding less about the Panahi/Rasoulof situation the more we learn.

International outcry is mounting, and as we have seen from Ahmadinejad’s schizophrenic positions, he simultaneously wants to behave like a dignified head of state and be perceived as standing firm against Western, especially American, pressure. This means we have no way of knowing whether the filmmakers will truly be made examples of, whether the mullahs will take it to the brink and then commute the sentences as a warning against free expression, or, worst of all, if Panahi and Rasoulof will be sent down the hole just as the regime becomes more closed off, more paranoid, in the face of this bold wave of popular uprisings in autocratic Muslim states.

It seems that one of the most concrete contributions to the cause of Panahi’s and Rasoulof’s free expression would be fully to exploit the fact of living in societies in which their films can be freely shown, disseminated, and debated. In recent months there have been widespread tributes to Panahi, which stands to reason in light of his high international profile. His empty jury seat on the Cannes 2010 jury prompted a poignant homage from Juliette Binoche; this year’s Berlinale screened four Panahi films (Offside [2006]; Crimson Gold [2003]; The Circle [2000]; The White Balloon [1995]), one in each of its four sections; and he will receive the Golden Coach award for lifetime achievement at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar this year in Cannes.

By contrast, the coverage of Rasoulof has been rather secondary, given that he is a director of lesser stature. This is regrettable, particularly because his most recent work finds him going from strength to strength, and his latest film is one of the finest Iranian films in recent memory. In light of this, what follows is an in-depth analysis of Mohammad Rasoulof’s four feature films. Together, these films provide a picture of an artist increasingly at odds with his society’s inability to find room for its misfits and free thinkers, an artist employing elemental imagery to turn the merely sociological into the near-mythic. If the imams have their way, and effectively end this burgeoning career, the loss would be immeasurable.

The Twilight (2002)

At the risk of damning with faint praise, every young filmmaker has to begin somewhere, and even though the problems with Rasoulof’s debut feature are numerous, its conceptual starting point is very much on target. Like many of the most esteemed Iranian films of the past 30 years, The Twilight is a fiction/documentary hybrid, based on real events and cast with the individuals to whom those events occurred. The film begins with a prison fight between protagonist Reza (Ali-Reza Shalikaran) and another inmate, oddly staged before the camera in a chanting circle of men in front of a flat wall of bars. A career thief serving out a medium-length sentence, Reza is summoned by the prison warden (Ali-Reza Madaviyan), who has a bold new idea for rehabilitation. With the help of Reza’s mom (Farajollah Shalikaran), an inmate in the women’s prison block adjacent to the men’s unit where Reza is doing time, the warden plans to marry the wayward thief off to a young female inmate. The logic: a marriage, even one conducted behind bars in once-a-week, supervised conjugal visits, will ground Reza, and put an otherwise useless female criminal to good use.

After awkward introductions and matriarchal wheelings and dealings, Reza is married off to Fatemeh (Fatemeh Bijan), a young girl serving a life sentence. The couple has a child. Fatemeh is released, and later so is Reza, and they attempt, with little success, to lead a normal life in the straight world. Rasoulof’s condemnation of sexism and social hypocrisy, as well as the avuncular authoritarianism of the prison system, is unmistakable. Undoubtedly, having these unfortunates recreate their own sad tale adds a certain layer of anti-representational frisson. But instead of the cinematic meta-commentary and sublime re-engagement with an anguished past that one finds in masterworks like Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990) or Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996), Rasoulof’s work with non-professionals and direct reality comes across as a kind of liability. The Twilight exhibits a blocky staging and stilted didacticism that, together with its consumer-grade videography, seems more of a piece with activist documentary, or even a de-melodramatized Nollywood. But despite its clear limitations on the formal front, The Twilight already displays the fundamental basis of Rasoulof’s cinema of social engagement.

Iron Island (2005)

In three short years, Rasoulof solved many of the major issues that hobbled The Twilight, and he did so through a complex set of dialectics. Iron Island works on a spatial canvas that is just as bounded as that of Rasoulof’s previous film, arguably even more so. Apart from a brief sojourn to a scrapper and the eventual evacuation at the film’s end, the entirety of Iron Island takes place on board a decommissioned old oil tanker off the Persian Gulf coast. (In television terms, Iron Island is an extended “bottle episode” of sorts.) However, this narrower physical focus is conjoined with a broader, more expansive social tapestry. The film is a portrait of a community, bonding and fraying, held together both by their precarious minority status and, not unrelatedly, by the charismatic authority of one man.

This man is Captain Nemat, and he is the de facto mayor of the “iron island,” the tanker in the middle of the gulf that is part makeshift apartment block, part Arab Quarter, and part rust-bucket fiefdom. (The Captain is played by Ali Nassirian, a veteran actor whose earliest credits include Dariush Mehrjui’s 1969 classic The Cow.) We see him bringing a new family onto the ship, taking them around to the various work stations, the small classroom, the various neighbours, as he is accosted at every turn by tenant-citizens needing something—more flour for the “bakery,” a new light bulb, or some plumbing assistance. At this stage in Iron Island, Rasoulof provides an uncertain image of the Captain, but he comes off as a cross between a real-estate huckster and a harried film-director type, familiar from Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) or especially Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (1973). What we do know right off the bat, however, is that the Captain is autocratic: the middle-aged schoolteacher, who exhibits a certain urbanite affect, is repeatedly ignored when he tries to provide hard evidence that the ship is sinking.

Rasoulof’s depiction of this insular community is multifaceted and quite bold for a number of reasons. First of all, the “islanders” are Sunni Arabs, part of the small minority who dwell on Iran’s Gulf coast. Iron Island shows them stuck out on the ship, surrounded by the deep blue with only one link to the larger Persian nation—the bilingual Captain, who owns the motorboat to the mainland, holds their passports, and eventually demands that they sign over their power of attorney. What’s more, Rasoulof’s command of mise en scène and visual texture has grown exponentially. The hulking mass of the ship, cutting a lonely figure against the sky, is continually contrasted with the dark cavities and differentially light-strewn portals of the interior, off-white panels and massive stretches of rust. Recurring locations have minor characters identified with them; social relations are subtly echoed in the movement through light and dark, visibility and invisibility; and, eventually, large portions of the tanker are welded off and thrown overboard, Rasoulof showing increased in-group anxiety becoming literal ballast.

But most significantly, although the film’s combination of anthropological distance and dramatic intrigue apparently helped the Sunnis appear “other” enough to satisfy the Shiite establishment’s censors, Rasoulof’s broader allegory regarding absolute power is unmistakable. The Captain’s young ward, Ahmad (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh), is in love with a young girl on the ship (Neda Pakdaman), but is deemed by all to be an unworthy suitor, not least by the Captain himself. When push comes to shove, the Captain exacts brutal punishment on his surrogate son as a public ritual. The schoolteacher pleads for clemency, but the self-appointed despot contends, “If I let this happen here, the entire ship will slide into chaos.” Rasoulof frames this scene and its illogic on the ship’s edge, amidst a wide, empty sea, a clear correlative for the cultural and national isolation that such thinking guarantees. And, before long, the Captain is boldly leading “his people” into the middle of nowhere.

Head Wind (2008)

Both The Twilight and Iron Island begin with the customary title card of the Bismillah (“In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Compassionate”), signalling that these were films that Rasoulof had pretty much successfully squared with the official Iranian film agency and its censors. There was obviously no such attempt with Rasoulof’s third feature, the medium-length guerilla documentary Head Wind. Shot with consumer-grade video that makes The Twilight look luxurious by contrast, with a low-key but exacting professionalism that nevertheless eschews needless aesthetics in favour of direct engagement, this is the Rasoulof project where the gloves come off, so to speak. If the filmmaker wasn’t on someone’s enemies list before this film, he certainly was afterward.

Building, implicitly at least, on a brief scene in Iron Island in which the young kids hook up a rusty pirate satellite dish, only for the enraged Captain to throw it, tuner, and TV overboard into the drink, Head Wind is a study of Iran’s pirate satellite industry. Cable and satellite TV are illegal in the Islamic Republic, but what we learn here, and what everyone including the clerics seems to already “know,” is that citizens everywhere, from inner city Tehran to the goatherding boondocks, are breaking this law. Where do these satellite dishes come from? Rasoulof, ever the materialist, includes a brief but thorough, Farockiesque interlude where we see tinsmiths fashioning the dishes out of sheet metal, alongside their pot and pan production. They’re then slipped out the back and sent down into the black market. But some people just make them out of old scrap flaked with orange rust. Rasoulof introduces us to a couple of very busy pirate TV dealer/installers, one more of a mercenary capitalist, the other with a somewhat larger sense of purpose regarding availability and access. “I show them how I block all the ‘inappropriate’ channels,” he says. (This isn’t porn he’s talking. It’s non-Iranian news programming, Indian TV…basically anything not censored by the regime.) “Then when I leave they can climb the roof and unblock it.”

A few commentators have compared Rasoulof’s film to the work of Errol Morris, and in some ways this is apposite, not just because the film employs necessary re-enactments (a police dish confiscation; people buying cable who would not want to appear on video breaking the law). The real interviews in Head Wind display a Morris-like knack for catching the moronic doublethink of social repression as it begins to work against itself. Straight-faced clerics tell Rasoulof that the dishes are a problem in all the other villages, but not in theirs. Pious men say they’ve never seen the foreign filth, and proceed to describe it in detail. A woman coyly hints at the salacious Hindi programming she watches in secret, obviously more titillated by talking to a strange man about her habits than by the surreptitious viewing itself.

By the end, Rasoulof expands the frame, showing how ordinary citizens, including young people, use remote servers to bypass internet censorship, or how the simple act of reading foreign newspapers or pirating the BBC World Service can help stranded intellectuals retain a sense of cosmopolitan connection. Head Wind begins as a humorous look at how Iranians steal glances at the movies and football matches their theocratic government deems anathema. But at its core, it’s a film about technology and the fruitless attempts to contain it. Less well-travelled on the festival circuit than Iron Island, Head Wind nevertheless drew praise disproportionate to its actual exposure. This is not just because it is a fine piece of documentary activism. It’s that Rasoulof’s investigations through the dirt-poor Iranian hinterlands and the labyrinthine housing blocks of Tehran lead him to the exact same conclusion as the champions of Pirate Bay, open-source code, and net neutrality, the WikiLeakers and the international revolutionaries communicating via Live Tweet. No matter where you are, information wants to be free.

The White Meadows (2009)

“I come from a country full of contradictions and suffering, where there is a dictatorship. …The conditions were very difficult, we had trouble getting permission, our budget was very limited…It was a clandestine, underground film.”—Rasoulof, on The White Meadows, at the San Sebastian International Film Festival press conference

After the rather direct ironization of social control in the Islamic Republic, Rasoulof took a different tack for his fourth film. In a bold move that is quite the opposite of what we see from too many concerned filmmakers on the left, Rasoulof joined his increased anger and frustration not with greater literalism or artlessness, but with a shift into the allegorical, mythic register. While the bitterness and protest underlying The White Meadows—currently showing across North America in the Global Lens series—are crystal clear, the film explores the state of Ahmadinejad’s Iran through a series of absurdist horror vignettes, staged against an unforgiving Lake Orumieh, and witnessed by a man condemned to merely observe and chronicle, but helpless to intervene.

This man is Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi), an empathetic traveller by boat whose long-term charge has been to pay regular visits to the coastal villagers along the lake, bear witness to their woes, and collect their teardrops in a ceremonial vial. His itinerant sorrow-work is, of course, a mythological premise, which allows Rasoulof the opportunity to construct numerous scenarios based on prejudice, superstition, or the excesses of Sharia law. In his first stop, Rahmat is to collect tears at the funeral of a young girl. He soon learns that she was very likely murdered by a fellow villager, and that this is common knowledge. “The way she moved her body excited all the men unnaturally,” he is told. In fact, only women are allowed at the funeral, and Rahmat has to dispose of her body, because her overpowering sexiness has instilled a fear of necrophilia.

As it happens, a young boy named Nassim (Younes Ghazali) has taken the place of the corpse (now presumably being ravished), because he wants to find his father who left the village some years ago. Pretending to be a deaf-mute, Nassim joins Rahmat on his further stops along the somewhat literal sea of tears. There are frequent comments that the level of salinity has continued to increase, either causing or further contributing to the greater misery of life. To solve this, one small village “marries” their most beautiful young virgin to the sea, sending her off on a raft to drown in a full-on wedding ceremony. (She pleads to Rahmat, “I don’t want to be a bride!” and Nassim tries to steal her, but to no avail.) In another cruel incident, which recalls Shirley Jackson by way of Buñuel, the people of a small town enter a booth and speak confessions into baby-food jars. These 50 or so glass jars are then strung around the neck of a diminutive man who has but a few minutes to climb down a well, deliver these oaths to “the fairy,” and get back out of the well. Needless to say, he collapses under the weight, another citizen of difference sacrificed to collective ignorance.

But in what has perhaps become the signature sequence in The White Meadows, for several reasons both intrinsic to the text and regrettably situational, Rahmat encounters an old acquaintance, a painter (played by documentary filmmaker Mohammad Shirvani) who has run afoul of local authorities. His crime: depicting water as red in a painting, when it is obviously blue. If he will just admit his error, and agree to paint normally, with his right mind, everything will be fine. But the painter is stubborn—he looks out and he sees a red sea. And so, in an effort to “cure” him, the imam’s thugs hold his eyes open and force him to stare directly into the sun until he is blind. They also “wash” the offending visions out of his eyes with monkey urine. Ironically, when he is given one more chance to gaze at the water and describe it as blue, his optical ordeal has provoked even more dazzling Impressionist sensations. “I see so many different colours now!” In the end, Rahmat is forced to take him to a Beckettian prison island, where he is the sole inmate (and Nassim’s missing father, surprisingly, is the lone jailer).

Despite the plot-heavy, anecdotal nature of The White Meadows, Rasoulof weaves this tale of interlocking allegories through visual as well as dramaturgical means. This is a strikingly beautiful film, simultaneously lush and austere, characterized by expansive, elemental landscapes and seascapes. Within these broad fields, human forms are enveloped, knocked hither and thither, struggling to maintain balance and dignity. In an aerial shot, we see jailer and painter on a dead-end rock, the former putting the latter through half-blind calisthenic paces. (“Run! Hurry! The water is blue! Go, go!”) We see the saltwater bride recede into a floating buoy of nothingness. But Rasoulof also provides intimate images, particularly as related to Rahmat’s mysterious profession. Single tears roll down weather-beaten cheeks, but they are not allowed to moisten these leathery faces. Rahmat’s fluted glass and decanter bears the sorrow away.

And in the final scene of the film, when Rasoulof shows us what these tears are actually for, The White Meadows reveals a new, final facet to its quiet rage. Yes, in their fear and ignorance, the poor will set upon one another quite easily, and often use fundamentalism to do it. But sitting back, watching the sideshow and benefitting from it are the powerful, the untouchable, the unseen. Rasoulof shows us in no uncertain terms that every driftwood marker in The White Meadows’ floating cemetery—a picture as agonizing as it is unforgettable, a glowing white expanse punctuated by irregular, dark signposts of the dead—is not just a fellow citizen lost to tyranny. It’s a strike at the wrong target.

“The White Meadows” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2009) The Film Sufi, also seen here: The Film Sufi

Film Review: The White Meadows | Iranian.com Hamsade Ghadimi

The House Next Door [Nick Schager]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Cinema: The White Meadows - Tehran Bureau ... - PBS Dan Geist

The White Meadows (2009) - Michael Pattison's idFilm

The White Meadows (Keshtzarhaye Sepid) | Review | Screen Barry Byrne from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen Daily.com [Barry Byrne]

Tears in the Neighborhood « Film Quarterly Richard Beck

User reviews from imdb Author: pantelispa from United States

Row Three [Marina Antunes]

The White Meadows | Chicago Reader Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Watch The White Meadows, the Iranian Fantasy by ... - Fandor

Variety (Jay Weissberg) review

Austin Film Society [Chale Nafus]

DVDBeaver [Eric Cotenas]

The White Meadows - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lede: Iran Jails Filmmaker for 6 Years Robert Mackey from The New York Times, December 20, 2010

2 opposition Iranian filmmakers jailed for 6 years The Washington Post, December 20, 2010

Jafar Panahi, Iranian Director, Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison, Banned from ... J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, December 20, 2010

Iranian film-maker sent to jail BBC News, December 20, 2010

Iran jails director Jafar Panahi and stops him making films for 20 ...‎ Saeed Kamali Dehghan from The Guardian, December 20, 2010

February 21 – 27: Iranian Film Blogathon | The Sheila ... The Sheila Variations, February 26, 2011

Lake Urmia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charon (mythology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pluto and Charon

GOODBYE (Bé omid é didar) C 72

Iran (100 mi) 2011

Along with Jafar Panahi, this director was arrested in March 2010 after calling the election results of the June 2009 re-election of Iranian President Ahmadinejad a fraud, effectively calling it a dictatorship where artists in Iran may no longer speak freely. Both were sentenced to six years in prison for “propagandizing against the regime,” where Panahi remains imprisoned while Rasoulof was released under house arrest. This is a film that is a product of its political circumstances, as it was made while the director was under house arrest, seriously limiting the opportunities for filming on location, shooting nearly the entire film indoors. This is a complete 360 degree turn from his previous film, The White Meadows (Keshtzar haye sepid) (2010), a near mythological experience filmed in the eerie white islands of Lake Urmia in the northwestern part of Iran close to Azerbaijan, the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest saltwater lake in the world. That film took full advantage of its surreal on location shooting, while this film is admittedly restricted, becoming suffocatingly cramped over time. The entire film features the plight of a single person, Noora (Leyla Zareh), onscreen throughout the entire film, a human rights lawyer who has had her license pulled and is essentially out of work, also currently apart from her husband who is a journalist on assignment. We follow her as she makes repeated trips to the doctor, as she’s pregnant, but necessary tests will not be authorized unless she provides signed permission from her husband, which is of course impossible. She’s also attempting to get their passports in order for a possible trip abroad, again, impossible without the signed permission of her husband. There are more inevitable complications while this same obstacle recurs multiple times in the film.

It’s an Orwellian film that reeks of the presence of Big Brother government constantly looking over her shoulder, as she’s actually visited unannounced several times in her home by a government team that removes her satellite connection, computer equipment, and anything else connecting her to the outside world, even some professional papers, where after awhile one suspects her entire apartment is bugged as well. Her threat to the regime is that she’s an intelligent, well educated woman, where her growing exasperation is continually being treated like an elementary school child who is required to provide a permission slip from her husband to receive any social service. Every visit to a different official also involves expected payments of cash, as the system is notoriously corrupt, where each level of the bureaucracy needs its own rewards. Getting more fed up over time, she utters to a friend, “If you feel like a foreigner in your own land, it’s better to be a foreigner abroad,” an existential quotation that feels right out of The Stranger (L’Etranger) by Albert Camus, especially because the writer also explores the absurdism of human existence. The only absurdity shown here is a government official’s closed covered window with a small hole at the bottom for people to bend down and speak into, never allowing anyone to view the official they’re speaking to, like something out of the dark days of Eastern Europe.

The film is reminiscent of an earlier film by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, considered Iran’s leading female filmmaker, called THE MAY LADY (1997), which is another woman’s portrait, a modern woman in a modern city in a modern apartment, expressed as an existentialist essay in the emotionally detached manner of Godard, a lifeless and tiresome film that examines the life of a self-absorbed, divorced, middle-aged professional filmmaker who is attempting to raise her teenage son alone, manage her career, and respond to developing feelings in her life from a new relationship which appears to benefit her yet alienate her son, an emotionless film defined by an inertia of ambivalence. But this movie never varies its gloomy, downbeat tone, dominated by a grayish color scheme, and never once offers even a hint of humor, feeling excessively fatalistic and downright morbid after awhile. While it may take courage to release a film like this while under arrest, it’s a monotonous and overly repetitive effort where the theme of the movie is clear in the opening five minutes, a hastily put together portrait of a largely unseen totalitarian presence, where one can easily predict the outcome, but the director puts us through the grueling step by step routine of her harrowing existence, where her life is defined by the lack of freedom, stuck in the bottomless pit of Sartre’s No Exit.

The House Next Door [Phil Coldiron] at Toronto

An oasis of restraint in the big, loud mess that is the Toronto International Film Festival, Mohammad Rasoulof's Good Bye brings Rossellini's '50s to today's Tehran. Leila Zare is in the Ingrid Bergman role, and her face—a well of infinite grace and conviction—proves material enough to sustain the film's 104 minutes. Rasoulof fills out the space around her in this melodramatic story of the thousand-and-one terrors of fleeing Iran with a clean, direct compositional sense that pares away any sentimentality. It's a film built of small gestures: The hurried, urgent way that Zare hands a pack of money across a table is a great dramatic event here. There's no miracle, but the final image—a slow fade on a ransacked suitcase—is one of the kind of hope that could only have come from a place of great desperation.

The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

The political and social tension surrounding the recent imprisonment of Mohammad Rasoulof will inevitably influence the way his most recent film, Good Bye, is received at Cannes. A late addition to the festival's lineup, along with fellow political prisoner Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film, Good Bye unassumingly drops the viewer into the center of Tehran, where a beautiful young lawyer (Lelya Zareh) ideologically lives between a rock and hard place. Recently disbarred for participating in activist campaigns against the government, the woman happens to be pregnant and alone, her husband exiled to work in the desert because of his role as a political journalist. Fed up with Iran, she has decided to leave, aided by an off-the-books immigration specialist (Iran's version of a coyote) who we see only once.

The narrative builds slowly, mostly from long takes and static shots of interior spaces cropped by crisp tile and stone. The whole film has a disturbingly clean look; grays, blues, and whites dominate the frame, as if the landscape itself was permanently stuck in a stagnant stasis. While the narrative is surprisingly linear for an art film, Rasoulof skewers the ruling state through a careful attention to details of human discontentment, not by sensationalizing free-speech martyrdom or oppressive forces. Small moments add up though: The lawyer wipes away nail polish on a public train to avoid conflict, gets spied on from afar by a man while smoking a cigarette at night, and given little moral choice when forced with a life-altering decision about her child. The woman isn't even afforded the opportunity to decide between the lesser of two evils. Even tragedy isn't a human right under the guise of this fundamentalist state.

Pirates of the Riviera Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog:

My next film of the day was "Goodbye" or "Be Omid e Didar" by Mohammad Rasoulof ("White Meadows," "Iron Island"), the Iranian director who, along with Jafar Panahi, has been sentenced to six years in prison for allegedly "propagandizing against the regime." Panahi also has a film in the festival, which will screen on May 20. The festival has announced that a press conference will follow that screening in order to clarify the current situation of these two directors, who have been made outlaws by their own government for the act of making art.

In the meantime, updated information regarding their plight is slight. No press notes have been made available for "Goodbye," and I'm not completely clear on whether the director is now in jail, out on bail, or allowed to work at all. I've been told by Iranian friends that some of the details of his sentence are not as harsh as Panahi's. In any case, the content of "Goodbye" would suggest that he is taking a very great risk to send this film to Cannes.

A woman's increasingly difficult and desperate attempt to leave Iran is the focus of Goodbye." Noora, a young lawyer, has been disbarred. It is hinted that this was due to some form of activism. Her husband, a journalist, lost two jobs in succession when the newspapers he worked for were shut down. He has since gone underground and broken off contact with her. Noora's pregnancy is a factor in her complex dealings with a man who specializes in devising immigration schemes for hire. When her doctor suspects that she may be carrying a Down syndrome child, Noora begins to consider an abortion, but this too is a problem.

Through the routine of Noora's life, Rasoulof details the abundant threats to freedom that plague the average citizen--her satellite dish is taken away because satellite TV is illegal in Iran; as a woman, she cannot undertake a whole range of medical procedures, or even check into a hotel, without her husband's permission. Rasoulof also depicts the specific terrors that attend anyone who is seen by the regime as a dissident. The scene in which two plain-clothes police ambush Noora in the tiny elevator of her apartment building and interrogate her as they keep the car in motion is a standout example.

"Goodbye" is filmed in muted colors. Rasoulof's frame compositions are elegant but convey a deadly, sleepwalking calm. A pet turtle becomes a metaphor for Nora's situation as it circles and paws the slippery sides of a plastic tray, unable to get a foothold to get out. One day the turtle disappears.

2011 Toronto International Film Festival Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Ever since Iron Island, Rasoulof's work has been characterized by an incisive visual style, modulated acting in the realist mode (but well outside the usual non-professional confines of so much Iranian cinema), and deep political conviction that has tended to remain on the level of allegory, although is none the more unmistakable for that. Rasoulof's methods have remain consistent, even as his films have been rather different. Iron Island is a largely about containment. Head Wind is guerrilla documentary. And his most ambitious film, The White Meadow, is magic realism saturated with barely suppressed rage against the abuses of the Islamic regime. Considering what has happened to Rasoulof -- arrested along with Jafar Panahi, interrogated, potentially banned from working legally in Iran, his entire future a looming question mark -- we'd expect that his latest film, Good Bye, to be quite unlike anything else he's made up to this point. In fact, we'd probably have trouble even imagining what it might look like, given the sheer miracle of its even having been made. Remarkably, Good Bye is another exquisite turn in Rasoulof's still-evolving career where we might've expected a mere stopgap. Claustrophobic and shadow-laden where The White Meadow was expansive and grayish-white, Good Bye plays out almost entirely within middle-class interiors, private spaces that are nevertheless crisscrossed with the ever-present paranoia of Islamic totalitarianism. It's a virtually first-person story of Noora (Leyla Zareh), a disbarred lawyer living alone in Tehran while her husband is working on a pipeline far from the city center. We see her in her sparsely furnished apartment, dark and painted in deep midnight blues. (Eventually her mother comes to visit unexpectedly, because she hasn't been able to reach Noora on the phone.) Noora is perpetually nervous and quiet, and leaves the apartment only for very secretive errands whose mystery Rasoulof maintains for a few moments even as we view them. In time, we learn that Noora and her husband were left-wing (or perhaps just anti-Ahmadinejad) activists, and her husband is in hiding due to articles he published. Noora is pregnant, and trying to wheedle her way out of Iran by gaining permission to present at an academic conference, and going into labor while abroad. Where The White Meadow and even aspects of Iron Island displayed the fantastical visual imagination (within an oppressive overall social landscape) that we might associate with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Good Bye is very much of a piece with Darioush Mehrjui's middle-class kammerspiels. (The achingly apposite final shot shows the State thundering down into private life, in no uncertain terms.) Nevertheless, the complete desperation, the poly-tendrilled reach of the regime -- which would be absurd were it not potentially life-ending -- is very much an expression of Rasoulof's own view of contemporary Iran, up and down the social strata. That the director, who may have narrowly escaped a sentence as harsh as Panahi's, would turn around and make Good Bye with his tenuous freedom takes some serious guts.

Goodbye: Cannes Review Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2011

This dark tale focuses on a young woman lawyer and openly attacks the blind repression of Iranian civil society.

CANNES – Arrested together with Jafar Panahi while they were preparing a new film, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof has succeeded, under what the Cannes Film Festival refers to as “semi-clandestine conditions,” in completing Goodbye, a dark tale focusing on a young woman lawyer and openly attacking the blind repression of Iranian civil society. A slow-moving mood piece in which women are virtually the only actors on screen, it is a powerful statement against the political regime in art film format, of chief interest to afficionados. Still, the international wave of sympathy for Rasoulof and Panahi’s plight and general interest in first-hand information about Iran could broaden the circle of international art house audiences for this courageous and well-made work, guaranteed not to be released in its native land.

Either because the film was finished at the last minute, or to protect the film’s crew, complete technical credits were unavailable at the time of writing. Rasoulof is credited as producer, director and scriptwriter. He was not permitted to attend the film’s Cannes première in the Certain Regard section.

It is rare to see an Iranian film that so directly attacks the lack of personal freedom, going far beyond the usual hair and make-up issues that so strike Westerners. Noura (Leyla Zareh) does remove her nail polish and don a hejib before exiting the subway at Imam Khomeini station. But what comes next is much worse.

Even more than in Rasoulof’s 2009 film White Meadows, which used symbolism to talk about repression, Goodbye refuses to mince words about the frightening consequences faced by Iranian dissidents and their kin. At the same time, it is a close-up, psychologically realistic portrait of an educated professional woman grappling with an unbearable situation. Her licence to practice law has been revoked, her journalist husband has been forced to go underground, and she is considering terminating her pregnancy, which is part of a complicated scheme to leave the country. A loner used to living on her own, Noura fights all these battles alone, interacting with women doctors, secretaries, functionaries and a mother who seem distant and cold, yet occasionally exhibit a bit of unexpected female solidarity.

Men most notably appear as the police agents who confiscate her satellite TV decoder and ransack her apartment. Yet they are not really absent from the film, because they are constantly being invoked for “authorization” as Noura tries to have an amniocentesis performed, opt for an abortion, get a visa stamped on her passport and even check into a hotel. It’s an uncomfortable situation indeed for an ambitious lawyer involved with human rights activists who defend women condemned to death.

Building up a sinister atmosphere, Rasoulof shows the trap inexorably tightening around his heroine, portrayed as a portrait of anguish by the glacial Zareh. The film’s pace is too leisurely to keep tension mounting, however, and rigorous re-editing could do much to tighten the story and clear up some early plot points that get lost in translation. Camerawork, filled with disquieting oblique shadows, is elegant and atmospheric throughout.

Goodbye Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily

CANNES REVIEW | Jailed Iranian Filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof Delivers An Indictment With “Goodbye” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17, 2011

CIFF 2011: Good Bye (Bé omid é didar, 2011) Marilyn Ferdinand from Ferdy on Films

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Four – The Kid with a Bike, Pina, and Good Bye Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 14, 2011

Cannes 2011. Rushes: "Ninja Kids", "Goodbye", "Le gamin au vélo" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi, May 17, 2011

Good Bye Thomas Caldwell from Cinema Autopsy

Cannes 2011. Un Certain Regard and More Awards David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 21, 2011

Cannes 2011. Mohammad Rasoulof's "Good Bye" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 15, 2011

Variety Reviews - Goodbye - Toronto Film Fest Reviews - - Review ... Alissa Simon

Cannes '11 Day 4: Unfair Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 14, 2011

Mohammad Rasoulof - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mohammad Rasoulof | Facebook

| Bios | Mohammad Rasoulof SILVERDOCS brief biographical information

Cinema Scope | When the Salt Attacks the Sea: The Films of ... When the Salt Attacks the Sea: The Films of Mohammad Rasoulof, by Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope (2010)

Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof Sentenced to 6 Years in ... Human Rights House of Iran, December 21, 2010

International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran blog December 21, 2010

Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof unjustly ... Gabe Wardell from Creative Loafing, December 23, 2010

Who's afraid of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof? - Cinema ... Vera Mijojlic from Cinema Without Borders, January 2, 2011

Peter Bradshaw on Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof | Film ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, February 2, 2011

CANNES REVIEW | Jailed Iranian Filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, May 17, 2011

Bonjour Planet Earth: Absent Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof wins ... Bonjour Planet Earth, May 21, 2011

Iranian Film 'Good Bye' From Imprisoned Director Mohammad ... Scott Roxborough from The Hollywood Reporter, September 14, 2011

Mohammad Rasoulof – Deadline.com Mike Fleming at Toronto from Deadline, September 26, 2011

Jafar Panahi loses appeal Ben Child from The Guardian, October 18, 2011

MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN (Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand) B 86

Iran (125 mi) 2013 Cannes site: Un Certain Regard

Considering the pervasive influence of Iranian films since the late 70’s, reflecting a revitalized spirit of the post Shah Iranian Revolution, producing such prodigious talents as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi, Dariush Mehrjui, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Jafar Panahi, and Asghar Farhadi, it’s more than disheartening to revisit the current state of Iranian cinema. Since the last disputed Iranian Presidential election in 2009 where it is widely believed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election, the government has cracked down on artists and intellectuals who alleged widespread vote fraud while retreating into a totalitarian, police state mentality where freedom of expression has been crushed. Film director Jafar Panahi was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on directing movies, writing screenplays, or giving any form of interview with Iranian or foreign media, while Mohammad Rasoulof was also arrested and condemned to six years in prison, which was later reduced to one year, but his passport has been confiscated. Both have daringly defied the court’s decisions by continuing to make films surreptitiously and smuggling them out of the country. Much like The Act of Killing (2012), the director’s name is prominently featured in the closing credits of this film while the cast and the rest of the crew remain anonymous. While Rasoulof’s style has been severely restricted by shooting on the sly, remaining out of sight, with only occasional street shots, unable to produce the ravishing imagery of his earlier films that reflect a visual poetry unto themselves, much of this film is shot indoors. Like his previous film Goodbye (Bé omid é didar) (2011), a woman’s descent into a psychological nightmare, the repressive conditions expressed here have only grown darker as the noose around the collective intelligentsia has been pulled even tighter. Written and directed by Rasoulof, what’s most menacing about this film is the shuddering ease with which the government reaches its arms into the lives of ordinary citizens, where the film becomes an expression of the Banality of Evil originally conceived by political theorist Hannah Arendt at the trials of Nazi SS Officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961-62, where she observed a man displaying neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job,” writing “He did his duty…he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.”

Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, the film resurrects a fictional recreation of actual events surrounding the chain murders of Iran that occurred from 1988 to 1998, a series of murders and disappearances of as many as 100 reformist writers, intellectuals, poets, political activists, and ordinary citizens who were critical of the Islamic Republic, where nearly half were discovered afterwards, their brutalized or mutilated bodies found in the outskirts of Tehran, where under a cloud of suspicion and repeated government denials, most of the murders remain unsolved to this day, yet secret government operatives within the Iranian regime were deemed responsible. Perhaps the most vicious was the killing of Dariush Forouhar, founder of Iran Nation’s Party, with eleven knife blows while sitting on his chair in his study, and his wife Parvaneh with twenty-four stabs. Their bodies were mutilated and their home ransacked, where Dariush was decapitated while his wife’s breasts were cut off. In another incident in the summer of 1995 there was an unsuccessful attempt to kill a busload of twenty-one writers en route to a poetry festival in Armenia, where the driver waited until most were sleeping and then attempted to steer the bus off a mountain cliff, jumping out at the last moment. However one of the passengers alertly grabbed the steering wheel and prevented a disaster. The driver tried it again a second time, running away afterwards, where the bus miraculously hit a boulder and stopped, preventing a 1000-foot fall. All of the passengers were interrogated and warned never to discuss the events with anyone. However the names of many of the assassinated victims were brought to light by the investigative journalistic work of human rights activist Akbar Ganji, who was jailed from 2001 to 2006, Iran's Top Journalist Accuses Authorities of Torture, but wrote a book on the subject, His Red-Robed Highness and the Grey Eminence, naming Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered the richest man in Iran according to a 2009 BBC News profile, BBC News Profile: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, currently serving as the security advisor and possible successor to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as His Red-Robed Highness, while Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, former Minister of Intelligence, as the Grey Eminence, with both men implicated in the chain murders, also noting that Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeyi, now Minister of Intelligence under Ahmadinejad’s presidency, was also allegedly involved in the assassinations. In addition, Saeed Hajjarian, newspaper editor and former Minister of Intelligence, believed to have played a key role in providing damaging information about the chain killings, was shot in the head by an unknown assailant on March 12, 2000, where he remains paralyzed for life.

While Rasoulof provides none of this background information, it is front page headline news in Iran where it is presumed to be common knowledge, not that this film will ever be screened in Iran, as it will be viewed almost exclusively by Western audiences and therefore given a decidedly politicized, pro-democracy slant for its daring heroism, yet it is the exact kind of darkly disturbing story coming out of a repressive Iranian regime that plays into the hands of stereotypical Western ideals of freedom of speech, much like Jon Stewart’s recently misguided Rosewater (2014), which becomes bogged down in its Americanized moral self-righteousness. Rasoulof’s film is not like that, coming from an Iranian perspective, where he is more concerned with expressing his seething indignation at the cloaked invisibility of brutal interrogation and torture techniques taking place right under the public’s noses without anyone showing the least bit of concern. The story centers on Kasra, an Iranian poet and novelist living in Tehran secretly writing his memoirs that the authorities want to destroy, because in it he describes the incident when the Iranian government tried to kill twenty-one writers by staging a bus accident, where the authorities insist upon eliminating all traces of the incident. Told almost entirely through a flashback mode, the central focus of the film, as it happens, is actually the two secret government agents, Khosrow and Morteza (surprisingly played by Rasoulof himself, the only credited actor, as the rest remain anonymous), who are sent to destroy the manuscript and any surviving copies. What’s perhaps most startling is how brutal they become in the presence of Kasra, but in each other’s company, they’re best friends who typically couldn’t be more ordinary, where their work, which includes torture before killings, has become mundane and routine to them by now, where they barely give it a thought, often seen casually smoking a cigarette, waiting for their dirty actions to take effect, as they’re more wrapped up in the concerns of their own lives, where Khosrow is constantly seen talking to his wife on his cellphone while regularly checking for expected payments on his ATM, which is needed to pay for his ailing child’s operation. Subject to accusations that he doesn’t care, as he’s not around when his own child needs him, his wife, a stand-in for the clueless nation, has no idea what he actually does for a living. His partner Morteza, on the other hand, has that methodical look of a paid assassin, where killing a man doesn’t even phase him anymore. The title comes from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Russian novel The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940, but unpublished until 1967, a critique of Soviet society and its literary establishment in which a manuscript that cannot be burned plays a central role.

While the fascination with the subject can be overpowering, the film itself has only mixed results, overaccentuating the banality of the events, where everything is downplayed, while at times the film tends to be overly wordy, completely detached, and emotionally underplayed, where there’s an obvious disconnect with the audience, especially when we realize these are only the foot soldiers, the neighborhood face of state repression, where far more disturbing is their superior, a man dressed in designer suits who lets the other guys get their hands dirty while he remains impeccably spotless throughout, only arriving on the scene when a significant escalation occurs that he masterminds. Much like a secret government within, extremist elements secretly concealed inside a government use religion and absolute power to intimidate and extinguish their opponents at will, labeling them dissidents, branding their views as outdated, hostile, and Western-influenced. From our initial introduction to Khosrow, where he still has a bloody hand print on his neck, later learning he was the man driving the bus for the writer’s conference, we are well aware of their diabolical methods, where the film reeks of torture porn imagery, people tied up and tortured, black hoods on their heads, often murdered afterwards. Only here this is not some sort of exploitive Hollywood stylization, but an unflinching portrait of state-sponsored evil, where the underlying rage that lies beneath this film is an angry and supremely pessimistic artist who knows this subject all too well, having been jailed, interrogated, tortured, and censored, where cinema becomes a voice for the voiceless, a dying man’s last breath, a plea to the world to take this subject seriously, as Iran has become a totalitarian dictatorship, a Stalinist police state intent on arresting and silencing anyone who disagrees with the official views of the state. While the exterior scenes were shot in Iran, all the interior scenes were shot in Hamburg, Germany, including visits to several of Kasra’s friends who (supposedly for protection) have copies of the manuscript. While they are all under constant surveillance, living under the threat of intimidation and brutality, where each of them is visited by the secret agents, only slowly does the film reveal how easy it is for these otherwise polite and cordial men to kill someone. While this is a look at well-educated upper and middle class writers and intellectuals, men who have had a hand in shaping the nation’s identity, and possibly its future, it’s chilling to see what can happen to them in the blink of an eye, all underplayed throughout, told through a kind of mundane naturalism, always justifying their actions under Islamic sharia law, but no courts or laws are involved in what the audience witnesses, a brief look behind a veil of government secrecy, where villainy and murder never looked so commonplace.

MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN | siskelfilmcenter.org Barbara Scharres

Laboring under a 20-year ban from filmmaking, director Rasoulof, whose previous films IRON ISLAND and WHITE MEADOWS are forbidden in Iran, takes a dangerous step with this fictional yet fact-based political thriller steeped in darkest absurdity, as devoutly religious government thugs persecute two writers in pursuit of the galleys of a damning book. Changing regimes, shifting agendas, and changing sides are all masterfully underlined as the escalating violence in the name of censorship and suppression is portrayed as just the fallout from another day’s work. Winner of the FIPRESCI (International Critics) prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. In Persian with English subtitles.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

My final film of this year's Cannes Film Festival was, if nothing else, an exceptionally angry one, in some ways matching Jia Zhang-ke's politicized fury in A Touch of Sin, if not nearly as consistently electrifying. This latest film from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof forgoes the reliance on poetic metaphor that distinguished early films like Iron Island and The White Meadows; instead, as was the case with his last film, the far more naturalistic Good Bye, Rasoulof, he voices his criticism of the repressive Iranian government directly, thunderously—and, in the case of Manuscripts Don’t Burn, brutally, what with its last hour or so devoted to detailing the agonizing path leading to the death of a dissident artist at the hands of two local state enforcers. As a result of Rasoulof’s pull-no-punches directness, his new film can’t escape a feeling of heavy-handed didacticism, especially in its rather tedious first hour. But he is too intelligent an artist to fall into the trap of a one-dimensional polemic: He infuses one of the enforcers, at least, with a welcome bit of moral shading that nevertheless culminates in a final shot that stunningly suggests the evil that can lurk in even the most anonymous-seeming civilian. Even if Manuscripts Don’t Burn lacks the richness of his previous work, one can’t help but be glad films like this exist, and that Rasoulof is managing to put his voice out there however much the government tries to silence him.

TIFF 2013: Manuscripts Don't Burn (Mohammad Rasoulof ... Richard Porton from Cinema Scope, Summer 2013

By contrast to The Past, this year’s predominant Iranian Cannes entry, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn (which screened in Un Certain Regard and took home the FIPRESCI prize for that section), is not at all evasive when it comes to politics. Filmed clandestinely in Iran with a cast that must remain anonymous to protect their own safety, Manuscripts bypasses allegory entirely and levels a lightly fictionalized j’accuse against the abuses of Iran’s autocratic state in the age of Ahmadinejad. The film’s title is an allusion to a famous passage in Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s anti-Stalinist novel The Master and Margarita, and Rasoulof obviously encourages the viewer to draw parallels between the Iranian regime’s repression of dissident writers and Stalin’s disdain for literature that challenged socialist-realist shibboleths.

Whether due to a deliberate strategy or the technical constraints imposed by shooting sub rosa, there are elliptical aspects of Rasoulof’s narrative that make mincemeat of Jonathan Romney’s attempt in Screen Daily to label it a Costa Gavras-style thriller. The contrapuntal structure yields two narrative strands that converge by the film’s conclusion. In the film’s opening sequences, Rasoulof adapts the intriguingly perverse ruse of viewing state terror from the perspective of the victimizers instead of the victims: two government agents drive around town engaged in what would seem like banal domestic banter, until we realize that they are motoring with a man they’ve bound, gagged, and thrown in the trunk. Although this is not as extreme an exercise in getting inside an unsavoury point of view as, say, Jim Thompson’s novel The Killer Inside Me, the skewed narrative vantage point is destabilizing enough to induce queasiness. The other narrative strand involves rather arid bickering between elderly, disillusioned writers on the state of intellectual debate in the age of the internet, which culminates in a shockingly matter-of-fact murder of one of the dissidents. These strands finally coalesce in a colloquy towards the end of the film between the thugs’ elusive quarry Kasra—a writer whose manuscript chronicling the bungled murder of rebellious writers during the so-called Chain Murders of the late 1980s and 1990s—and a journalist and former dissident who now carries out the dictates of the state.

Unlike most thrillers, political or otherwise, there isn’t a satisfyingly cathartic conclusion to Manuscripts Don’t Burn, only a thwarted dialogue in which the representative of the status quo claims that rebellious intellectuals have joined some ill-defined entity known as “the cultural NATO” and is met by Kasra’s defiance. Still, the unresolved nature of their interchange is infinitely more satisfying than The Past’s overheated bag of melodramatic tricks.

Manuscripts Don't Burn / The Dissolve Sam Fragoso

The existence of Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn is a luxury not to be taken for granted, and its dissemination and debate in America even more so. While Rasoulof is one of Iran’s foremost contemporary auteurs, not a single film in his oeuvre has ever been legally distributed in his native country. The same is true for Rasoulof’s latest film, which was surreptitiously shot on location in Tehran after he was sentenced in 2010 to six years in jail (later reduced to one) and a 20-year prohibition from filmmaking for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Still, no matter how improbable, impressive, and illegal it is that Manuscripts Don’t Burn was clandestinely made under the nose of the Ahmadinejad regime, Rasoulof’s dissident return to filmmaking is ultimately little more than a sporadically searing, though more often unfocused and listless treatise on the pervasive censorship enforced by the autocratic Iranian government.

Drawing from the Chain Murders of Iran, which occurred from 1988 to 1998, the film picks up after a botched assassination of the country’s premier intellectuals, who were on their way to a convention when their bus nearly fell off a cliff and into a ravine. The attempted murder of these incendiary aesthetes—writers, poets, etc.—was concocted by the government, prompting Kasra, an author who witnessed the attempt, to recount it in vivid detail. Fully aware that such provocative prose could lead to incarceration, Kasra gives two copies of his manuscript to trusted colleagues, Kian and Fourouzadeh.

Unfortunately, the Iranian censorship department, spearheaded by an ex-intellectual turned tyrant, is omnipresent, tapping the phones and wiring the homes of every writer deemed part of the “cultural NATO”—i.e., any free-thinking intellectual who refuses to be docile. To prevent anything resembling dissenting opinions from being published, the government moves beyond censorship and into violence. This is where the other half of Manuscripts Don’t Burn’s narrative comes into play, as the government hires a pair of professional killers to do whatever’s necessary to keep Kasra’s memoirs from seeing the light of day.

This jarring narrative juxtaposition, hell-bent on showing both sides of the equation—the victim and the persecutor—ends up being the film’s most damning shortcoming. Although it’s clear where Rasoulof’s sociopolitical allegiances lie, he tries to paint as even-handed a portrait of this situation as possible. For example, Rasoulof attempts to humanize Khosrow (one of the killers) by making him a middle-class father who isn’t murdering people “for the money,” but for his sick child who needs to be hospitalized. All this is gleaned from lengthy conversations between Khosrow and Morteza (played by Rasoulof), which jaggedly dovetail into scenes where the three writers, despondent and enervated, lament their living and working conditions. “If, after all these years, you still don’t know what life’s like here,” Kian says, “dying isn’t a bad idea.” It’s a foreshadowing line, illuminating the pessimism that has permeated the intellectual community.

What should be a seamless transition from one side of the story to the other comes off as two films lodged into one. The disparity between the vile security apparatus and the writers is perceptible, but rarely felt. The characters in Manuscripts Don’t Burn are drawn thinly, each serving as a mouthpiece for political problems, fears, and desires rather than acting on them.

Rasoulof’s script only sparks to life when it depicts the government pitting writers against one another through brute force and blackmail. It resembles what occurred at the height of McCarthyism—government officials forcing artists to deceive their colleagues and abandon their livelihoods in order to keep working and avoid being blackballed. In these scattered scenes, Rasoulof seems to not only draw from history, but from his own experiences with Iranian censorship.

Making matters even bleaker, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is as visually claustrophobic as movies come. Employing tight close-ups and a color palette limited to industrial grey, Rasoulof caustically depicts a dire, hopeless environment, fitting for the quandary in which these intellectuals are ensnared. His aesthetic choices aren’t always effective, but they shouldn’t be surprising, considering that as of September 2013, Rasoulof is being held captive in Iran after the government confiscated his passport. As of today, he is still unable to leave.

'Manuscripts Don't Burn' is the Most Important Moviegoing Experience of the Year Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

"Manuscripts Don't Burn" does such a thorough job of highlighting the tyranny in modern day Iran that its very existence represents a victory of creation.

Some movies are designed to expose national problems by doing little more than illustrating their activist intentions. But two features opening stateside this week take more personal approaches.

Mexican director Amat Escalante's unnerving "Heli" explores the underbelly of his country's drug war through its reverberations for an innocent young couple, whose cursory involvement with a cocaine deal leads to a series of murders and other morbid developments. With more effective results, Iran's Mohammad Rasoulof's suspenseful "Manuscripts Don't Burn" focuses on the plight of an older generation, by tracking the country's censorship department as it cracks down on a group of journalists planning to publish a report about a botched assassination attempt.

Both "Heli" and "Manuscripts Don't Burn" contain scenes of brutal kidnappings and horrific torture, but only one of them manages to place the cruelty in context.

While "Heli" contains believable turns by Armando Espitia as the 17-year-old star and Andrea Vergara as his younger sister, its descent into morbid inevitability suffers from a simplistic dimension. Once the sister's boyfriend attempts to steal a cocaine package in a feeble attempt to fund their planned life on the lam, "Heli" devolves into a series of unnerving retributions. Chief among them: corrupt forces nab both Heli and the boyfriend, tie them up, and—in an abrupt act that generated heated chatter immediately following the movie's Cannes Film Festival premiere—light the boyfriend's genitals on fire. That's the worst image "Heli" offers up, but far from the last moment of suffering displayed in this consistently hopeless look at rural life south of the border.

Escalante's ability to punctuate the stillness of various scenes with such explicit savagery speaks to his command of the medium, but no amount of graphic extremes can rectify an overall emptiness to the story, which focuses too bluntly on the power of inflicting pain on sympathetic characters.

Rasoulof's tale, based on actual events from the nineties, offers a far more sophisticated portrait of persecution. A masterwork of understatement, the movie shifts between various older journalists—labeled merely "intellectuals" by the government authorities tracking them down—and the conflicted hitman forced to torture and murder them. While the writers evade tapped phone lines and the advances of various shadowy figures, they bicker amongst each other about the value of getting the story out there and the ensuing sacrifices being made in the process.

With their families' survival at risk, one by one they become compromised, but not without a palpable sense of rage; meanwhile, the weak-willed hired gun gripes about his own compromises for the sake of his sick child. Even the scheming overlord of the censorship office, who coldly goes through the motions to contain the story, has a history of doing time that suggests he works out of necessity rather than conviction. Nobody in this closed-minded system has it easy, but they keep fighting ahead, which prevents the movie from devolving into a pity party and instead transforms it into a captivating survival story.

Though its series of tense exchanges and disquieting portrayals of physical abuse, "Manuscripts Don't Burn" does such a thorough job of highlighting the tyranny in modern day Iran that its very existence represents a victory of creation—albeit one that does not arrive without sacrifice. Banned from his home country, Rasoulof currently resides in Europe, while the rest of the cast and crew are not named in any credits associated with the production for the sake of their safety.

That's unfortunate, because they're all first-rate, effectively conveying the claustrophobia of each scene. From the grey-haired writers desperately clinging to a radical spirit that faded long ago to the wide-eyed killer at the bottom of the totem pole, each man expresses a tragic disconnect between responsibility to their principles and immediate needs. "Fighting and change were 40 years ago," sighs one journalist. "That's over now." But he keeps at it anyway. "Should I just lay down and die?" he asks. That question hovers in the subtext of each scene.

Rasoulof compliments his ensemble's somber performances with a patient, clear-eyed approach familiar from his previous efforts. Yet while his last feature, the female-centric "Goodbye" (about an attorney vainly attempting to flee the country) foregrounded its heroine's urgency, "Manuscripts Don't Burn" is predominantly defined by despair. Many scenes have a ghostly quality that expresses the dissonance between the implied urgency of each moment and its less sensationalistic form. Evil acts, from surveillance to murder, unfold while the offending characters chow down on snacks. Dialogue between various feuding parties sometimes transitions into voiceover, highlighting the grief on their faces. Rasoulof populates numerous scenes with jarring jump cuts, as if the movie itself has been subjected to the censorship at its center.

But rather than relish in the stark proceedings, "Manuscripts Don't Burn" preys on its viewers' imagination, leaving several deaths and other dreary outcomes off-screen. In the unbearable tension of its final moments, the movie arrives at an expected destination, but the outcome stings more than anything preceding it. In a final shot that brings the reality of the situation into prominent focus, Rasoulof creates the sense that we're not only witnessing a bleak reality, but hovering inside of it, uncertain if the nightmare will ever end.

Meet the Man Confronting Iran's "Chain Murders" | Mother ... Tamara Straus from Mother Jones, September 7, 2013

Journalist Who Identified Rafsanjani in 'Chain Murders ... Arash Karami from Iran Pulse, May 17, 2013

The Chain Murders Of Iran - Gatestone Institute Anna Mahjar-Baeducci, December 17, 2008

Manuscripts Don't Burn, Mohammad Rasoulof, Review - The ... Damir Hodzic from Film Focus

Review: MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN, An Angry ... - Twitch Christopher Bourne

Joshua Reviews Mohammad Rasoulof's Manuscripts Don't ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast

Manuscripts Don't Burn - 4:3 Conor Bateman

SBS Film [Shane Danielsen]

The Bravery of MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN | Keyframe ... Steve Erickson from Fandor

theartsdesk.com [Tom Birchenough]

Manuscripts Don't Burn takes us inside the Iranian police state JR Jones from The Chicago Reader

Battleship Pretension [Dayne Linford]

Movie Review: "Manuscripts Don't Burn" Dan Schindel from Movie Mezzanine

Manuscripts Don't Burn | Socialist Review Christine Lewis

DVD Talk [Oktay Ege Kozak]

Manuscripts Don't Burn | Reviews | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily

PopMatters [Michael Barrett]

The Defiant Manuscripts Don't Burn Exposes Iran's Brutal ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice

Keswick Film Club - Reviews - Manuscripts Don't Burn Vaughan Ames

Little White Lies [David Jenkins]

Film Review: Manuscripts Don't Burn | Tarumatu ... Tarumatu

Mohammad Rasoulof's 'Manuscripts Don't Burn' - Parallax .. Sean Axmaker from Parallax View

Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, also see: The judgment against Panahi and Rasoulof for “the crime of making a film”

Critic Speak [Eric Beltmann]

Daily | Cannes 2013 | Mohammad Rasoulof's ... - Fandor David Hudson

Manuscripts Don't Burn - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton

Cannes Film Review: 'Manuscripts Don't Burn' - Variety Alissa Simon

Manuscripts Don't Burn - Time Out Trevor Johnston

Manuscripts Don't Burn review – brave and defiant film-making Mark Kermode from The Observer

Manuscripts Don't Burn review – Iranian hitmen on a ... Leslie Felperin from The Guardian

Movie review: Art defies power in 'Manuscripts Don't Burn ... The Boston Globe

Manuscripts Don't Burn Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire

Barbara Scharres at Cannes from The Ebert Site, May 24, 2013

'Manuscripts Don't Burn - The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis, also seen here: 'Manuscripts Don't Burn,' About Repression in Iran - The ...

Ratanaruang, Pen-Ek

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - Biography Personal quotes from IMDb:

New York is where I caught the cinema virus. Living there made me aware of art cinema and world cinema and personal cinema. It introduced me to the cinema of Fellini, Bergman, Woody Allen. And Jim Jarmusch cinema, of course.

It was the most charming thing I had ever seen. I couldn't believe cinema could be about something so small, so unimportant, so lazy and yet so funny and moving and so unpretentious. It was a very special feeling. I didn't want to go anywhere after the film finished. I just wanted to go sit somewhere and smoke cigarettes. It was magical for me. Every scene involving the character Aunt Lotte is great. She's superbly natural. When I was watching the film for the first time I was wondering whether she knew there was a camera recording her and that she was in a movie. I'm sure it must have had some sort of influence on my own film-making, but I don't know what exactly. And that's not very important. What's important for me is that Stranger Than Paradise introduced me to another kind of mentality and taste; a taste very natural to me but which I didn't know. After that film, I started reading about Jarmusch and following his later films, got to know and love the cinematography of Robbie Muller, got to watch and enter into the films and universe of Aki Kaurismaki, got to know Ozu's films, got to listen to Tom Waits.

In Last Life In The Universe we wanted the audience not to notice when the music comes in or when it goes out. It's there to create atmosphere. I'm drawn to any style of music as long as it's sad. I'm very fond of depressing music. I think it's beautiful. My favourite musicians are Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Marianne Faithfull.

AFA - Forum on Asian Cinema: Social Memory on Film Kenneth Chan, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University, September 9 – 18, 2005

Thai cinema has come into its own, featuring films with a fresh vibrancy that often characterizes cinematic new waves. The films of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang constitute a major part of this rising body of work, garnering him much critical acclaim and, hence, establishing him as a significant figure in global cinema. Born in Bangkok in 1962, Ratanaruang began his career when he moved to New York City in 1977 to study at Pratt Institute and later to work as a freelance illustrator and designer. New York City provided him the exposure to the cinema of Bergman, Fellini, Ozu, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, and Aki Kaurismaki. Upon returning to Thailand, he worked as an art director for five years before directing his first feature Fun Bar Karaoke in 1997, which debut in Berlin and went on to screenings in the festival circuit. His marvelous second film, Ruang Talok 69 (6ixtynin9), won him special recognition in Berlin and at the Hong Kong Film Festival in 2000. While Monrak Transistor (2001) is probably his most accessible and charming film to date, it is Last Life in the Universe (2003) that has cemented his reputation as one of the freshest directorial voices in Thai cinema. The film was shot by Christopher Doyle, the renowned cinematographer of Wong Kar-wai’s films. Invisible Waves is Pen-Ek’s much anticipated new film, scheduled for release sometime this year.

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has a knack for capturing the mundane, the everyday, and the expected, and then making them fresh and new for the audience. In Ruang Talok 69, the sad story of the female protagonist Tum, having been retrenched during the Asian economic crisis, turns into a tale of murder, intrigue, and female empowerment. The seemingly predictable melodrama of Monrak Transistor is made immensely entertaining and engaging through the quirky acting and fabulous Thai soundtrack. And what would be a Pulp Fiction-inflected gangster flick in Last Life in the Universe turns into a philosophical musing on intercultural connection in the midst of social alienation. All the major characters in these three films occupy marginalized positions in Thai society, which ironically is becoming increasingly “connected” through media, telecommunication, and computer technology via circuits of globalization. The alienation of these figures thus presents a discourse of personal “disconnection” in contradiction to the dominant ideology of progress through connectivity. The body and its desires provide sites for material “reconnection,” which Ratanaruang deploys powerfully with shocking narrative turns, intense imagery, and poignant representations. This reading of Pen-Ek’s filmic corpus can only begin to suggest the rich thematic and interpretive possibilities that his works offer.

Kaiju Shakedown: ThaiWorld - Film Comment Grady Hendrix, May 1, 2014

What’s up with Thailand? Politically, the country’s a mess. A coup kicked Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra out of office in 2006, and an offer of amnesty to him earlier this year sparked massive protests and unrest. But while Thailand’s politics are full of turmoil, its film industry has entered a sleepy state of stasis. Big-budget action, historical, and fantasy films have been replaced by cheaper horror movies, romances, and comedies aimed at the local audience, and independent cinema keeps getting hobbled by restrictive censorship. Even reading Wise Kwai’s list of the best Thai films of 2013 feels like you’re hearing the echo of an echo. No matter how good some of these films might be, it’s a far cry from that crashing wave of Thai movies unleashed upon the world back in the early 2000’s like Nang Nak (99), Tears of the Black Tiger (00), Last Life in the Universe (03), Ong-Bak (03), Tropical Malady (03), Beautiful Boxer (03), Born to Fight (04), Shutter (04), Bangkok Loco (04), Art of the Devil 2 (05), Tom Yum Goong (05), Invisible Waves (06), and Syndromes and a Century (06), to name a few.

But why dwell on the past? Let’s catch up with what the big names of Thai cinema are doing today!

Tony Jaa

After a huge falling-out with the studio powerhouse Sahamongkol, who seemed to treat their contract with Jaa as equivalent to owning his soul, the star retreated to the forests of Thailand, toyed with becoming a monk, freaked out, disappeared, reappeared, and made Ong-Bak 3 for Sahamongkol. Now, with his old contract expired, he signed a new 10-year contract with Sahamongkol but only for movies he makes in Thailand, which meant that he immediately started making movies overseas. His biggest part is in the upcoming Fast and Furious 7, which he didn’t even inform Sahamongkol about—they had to learn about it online. He’s also in Skin Trade, with Dolph Lundgren and Michael Jai White. Jaa recently posted some fight clips from the film on his Facebook page and this action flick, about Lundgren and Jaa breaking up a human trafficking ring, looks terrific. However, some people are reporting that there’s a crisis in Thailand’s film bureaucracy about whether it’s a foreign or a domestic production, and it may never even screen in Thailand for unknown reasons.

Ekachai Uekrongtham

After rocketing to fame with Beautiful Boxer (04), a fantastic biopic about Thailand’s Nong Thoom, a transsexual muay thai champion, Ekachai made Pleasure Factory (07)—a Cannes selection—and then the horror movie The Coffin (08) a Thailand-Singapore-Hong Kong co-production. After that, he went back to directing theater. He’d previously directed several popular musicals in Singapore and Thailand, like Chang & Eng about the original Siamese twins and he’s been seeking funding for years to turn Chang & Eng into a film, but without success. His run of bad luck continued as several of his recent stage productions based on muay thai have flopped. However, he recently shot back to success with Muay Thai Live a wildly popular stage show about the history of muay thai and he’s also directing Tony Jaa, Ron Perlman, and Dolph Lundgren in Skin Trade (watch the trailer).

Nonzee Nimibutr

Nonzee’s wildly popular Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters (97) was a Fifties-set gangster flick that kicked Thai cinema out of a rut and launched the country’s New Wave movement. His follow-up movie, Nang Nak (99), was a sensitive ghost romance based on the popular folktale “Mae Nak Phra Khanong” and became a huge box-office smash. Nonzee followed up with the inexplicably neglected comedy, OK Baytong (03), in which a Buddhist monk leaves his monastery to raise his niece after his sister is killed in a terrorist attack. An instructional manual on how to live with other people, set in the mostly Muslim south of Thailand, it’s a warm, human story that seems to grow more profound and necessary with each passing year. But after his massively budgeted fantasy film, Queens of Langkasuka (08), flopped, he’s been relatively quiet. In 2012, he directed the poorly reviewed horror movie, Distortion (watch the trailer). Then, in February of this year he released the melodrama Timeline, which got much better reviews (watch the trailer). Currently, he’s trying to raise financing for a long-in-the-works project called Toyol about a wicked stepmother tormenting a Hong Kong Chinese family who have recently moved to Bangkok. You can read a longer profile and interview with Nonzee here.

Banjong Pisanthanakun

Shooting to fame as the director of Shutter (04), a relatively forgettable horror movie with some excellently engineered scares which did huge box office and was remade by both Hollywood and Indian studios, Banjong has gone on to find his groove. He directed another popular horror flick, Alone (07) before turning in segments in three horror anthologies, including a segment in the 2012 American film festival favorite, The ABCs of Death (“N is for Nuptials”). He directed a well-received romantic comedy, Hello Stranger (10) before rocketing back to massive success with his comedy-horror flick Pee-Mak. Based on the same Thai folktale as Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak but taking a more comedic approach, it was released in March 2013 and quickly became the highest-grossing Thai movie of all time (watch the trailer).

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

The man behind art-house films like Last Life in the Universe (03), Invisible Waves (06), Ploy (07), and Headshot (11), Pen-ek has been a constant presence on the festival scene. Now he’s announced that he’ll be continuing in the more genre-oriented direction he explored with the underseen and underappreciated Headshot, a riff on the hit-man movie. The new flick is called Samui Song, and it’s produced by Headshot producer Raymond Phathanavirangoon. It stars Ploy (star of the Buppah Rahtree film series) as a wife trying to free her husband from a cult run by a charismatic guru, played by Vithaya “Pu” Pansringarm (the guy who kicks Ryan Gosling’s butt in Only God Forgives). It sounds like it’s going to be a thriller/head-exploder, as Pen-ek has cited everything from Hitchcock and Shinya Tsukamoto to Sixties Thai cinema as influences.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

There’s no need to ask “Where’s Apichatpong?” The art-house hero is the most famous director currently working out of Thailand. Constantly running afoul of government censorship, he’s turned out a string of movies that have premiered at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, winning Un Certain Regard, the Jury Prize, and the Palme d’Or at Cannes for, respectively, Blissfully Yours (02), Tropical Malady (04), and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (10). His latest movie was announced back in March 2013 at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and by the end of the festival, half of its $1 million budget was secured. Titled Cemetery of Kings, it’s the story of a small village where soldiers suffer from sleeping sickness; there’s a river monster, ghosts and…well, you can just read the financing proposal for yourself. Shooting hasn’t begun yet, and by all accounts Apitchatpong is taking it easy before diving headfirst back into a new movie.

Chookiat Sakveerakul

Not nearly as well-known as the other names on this list, Chookiat directed the thriller 13 Beloved (06) which was an award-winning sleeper hit in Thailand, and deservedly so. Like the recent American film, Cheap Thrills, it’s about a guy hit hard by the economic crisis who winds up performing dangerous and degrading stunts to earn cash. Remake rights were sold quickly (though the resulting movie, 13 Sins, was pretty much being declared dead on arrival). After 13 Beloved, Chookiat went on to make The Love of Siam (07), which turned model Mario Maurer into a huge star. A movie about the romance between two high-school boys, Love of Siam became a word-of-mouth hit and a bona fide cult classic in Thailand, winning “Best Picture” and “Best Director” at pretty much all the Thai film awards that year. Since then, Chookiat has made Grean Fictions (13) which did so-so business at the box office.

Wisit Sasanatieng

Probably one of my favorite Thai directors, Wisit burst onto the scene with his eye-melting 2000 tribute to Thai Westerns, Tears of the Black Tiger. He followed it up with his visually gorgeous Citizen Dog (04), and then a retro horror movie, The Unseeable (06). In 2010 he spent untold time and energy shooting a massive superhero film, Red Eagle, which bombed at the box office. Since then, he’s found himself in a kind of limbo as he looks for funding in a market where the money just isn’t there for ambitious projects. He’s been shopping around an independently produced muay thai project called Suriya and rumor has it that he’s currently shooting a horror movie.

So what’s going to happen in Thai cinema in 2014? I hate to sound pessimistic, but my guess is:

* Tony Jaa is going to star in a lot of international action movies.

* Romances and romantic comedies will continue to clean up with local audiences.

* Someone will make a horror movie.

Thailand, you had an amazing decade…It’s okay to take a rest!

We miss you! Feel better soon!

Thai Cinema - Thai directors

List of Thailand's official entries to the Academy Awards: Facts ... Absolute Astronomy

Collected Consciousness [on MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 22, 2002

Asia Pacific Arts: Thailand's Submission for Best Foreign Language ... Chau Nguyen from Asia Pacific Arts, January 23, 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Last Life in the Universe (2003) Ryan Gilbey, August 2004

Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film - Current Awards March 20, 2005

Asian Film Archive: Films From Pen-Ek Ratanaruang offering a brief synopsis from a film Retrospective, September 9 – 18, 2005

New Thai Cinema - FIPRESCI - World Cinema - Cinemas of the South Anchalee Chaiworaporn from Fipresci, 2006

Pen-ek Ratanaruang - Criticine :: elevating discourse on southeast ... Alexis A. Tioseco from Criticine, December 29, 2006

Reigning light Parinyaporn Pajee from The Nation, September 17, 2007

Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing Guest lecture, October 23, 2009

Top 10 Thai films of 2009 - Nationmultimedia.com Wise Kwai from The Nation, January 8, 2010

Focus on Asia & Workshop film shorts, October 31, 2010

'Headshot,” Directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang - The New York Times September 27, 2012

Small screen, big effort - Bangkok Post article Kanokporn Chanasongkram, February 13, 2014

Pen-ek made a movie that you can only watch on TV Wise Kwai’s Thai Film Journal, February 18, 2014

Stop Making Sense: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Last Life in the Universe ... Kelley Dong from Mubi, August 25, 2016

TSPDT - Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

A Conversation with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Director of Last Life in the ... Interview by Aditya Assarat, a Thai filmmaker, from Culture 360, March 29, 2004

Out of Time and Place; Pen-ek Ratanaruang on “Last Life in the ... Howard Feinstein interview from indieWIRE, August 6, 2004

A Conversation with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - Criticine :: elevating ... Alexis A. Tioseco interview from Criticene, October 18, 2005

A CONVERSATION WITH PEN-EK RATANARUANG, DIRECTOR OF - SEA-images Aditya Assarat interview from Sea Images, 2006

Battling the waves: Interview with Penek Ratanaruang - :: THAI ... Kong Rithdee interview from Thai Film Foundation, March 29, 2006

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang Talks PLOY - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown interview from Screen Anarchy, December 14, 2007

YouTube - Pen-Ek Ratanaruang interview Video YouTube interview, December 19, 2007 (5:15)

Interview Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - Cinemasie Interview by Cinemassie magazine, June 2008

Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang Talks about Nymph and Bad ... Dean Napolitano interview from The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009

Interview: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang on Headshot | Feature | Slant Magazine Gary Kramer interview, September 23, 2012

“My films are who I am” – Pen-Ek Ratanaruang – STORYSCAPES | the ... Ioana Mischie interview from Storyscapes, April 25, 2013

Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang on Risking It All to Film the Paradoxes ... Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang on Risking It All to Film the Paradoxes of Thai Democracy (Q&A), Patrick Brzeski interview from The Hollywood Reporter, July 8, 2013

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang | BFI How he voted in the 2012 BFI Sight and Sound Director’s Poll

Aion: The Tower of Eternity Instances - Pen-ek on various YouTube films, including trailers, interviews, and other things

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FUNBAR KARAOKE

Thailand (103 mi) 1997

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

With its racked up soundtrack, fancy dissolves, slo-mo camera and moments of Tarantino-like casual violence, this dreamy tale of a young commercials film-assistant (or is she a check-out girl?) seems more an exercise in style than an exploration of modern Bangkok. Young Pu lives with her dad, who forgets her birthday, more concerned, it seems, with the femme fatale down at the karaoke bar. He's beaten up by a gang of bouncers including a cool young hitman whom Pu fancies. Pu goes to the swimming pool a lot and visits a fortune teller who predicts her father's death. The director, whose debut this is, comes from commercials, so maybe he's fed up with unmistakable meanings.

Coffee coffee and more coffee: Fun Bar Karaoke Peter Nellhouse

The original Thai title is said to translate as "Dream Crazy Karaoke". Pen-Ek Ratanuruang's debut is a movie about dreams, and at one point a dream about movies. The influence of Jim Jarmusch's deadpan humor is very evident as well as one scene that seems inspired by Michael Madsen's deadly dance in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Pen-Ek's background in advertising is very much at play with a scene of a photo shoot for a face cream, part of the action taking place in a 7-11, and some unusual product placement for Coca-Cola. There are a couple of scenes of people dancing, not dance numbers per se, but still it suggests that it would most likely be Pen-Ek who might create the great Thai musical.

Many of the elements of Pen-Ek's future films are already in place. Characters are connected to each other in ways they don't expect while the family unit is often fractured. One of the characters, a young man named Noi, is a small time gangster whose dream is to walk away from that life. The film is in part about the clash between traditional Thai beliefs and like in modern, crowded and international Bangkok.

That Fun Bar Karaoke is currently only available on a frequently unavailable VCD belies the film's historical importance. Pen-Ek's film was one of the first films to bring attention to Thailand by western film critics, and helped kick off the era of younger Thai filmmakers who were college educated, and often studied abroad. In terms of an era of Thai cinema that seems to have been curtailed following the 2006 military coup, to not have a better version of Fun Bar Karaoke available is almost the equivalent to not having the first feature of Claude Chabrol or Francois Truffaut.

As the title play on words indicates, this is a film about a part of Thailand that is not strictly Thai. Thailand's history is one of resistance and absorbing of Anglo-American, Japanese and Chinese influences. As such, Fun Bar Karaoke is a reflection of the changes in Thai identity. Even the soundtrack incorporates this cultural meshing with Thai pop music as well as a song by Nina Simone (an American woman with a French stage name). Pen-Ek's films reflect the push and pull of identity with characters either going further into the country, that is to say deeper into Thailand and Thai identity, or leaving Thailand altogether. Fun Bar Karaoke begins with the beautiful image worthy of a Minnelli or Donen, with two characters dancing together in a totally white studio, the first of the dreams within the film. The real life dreams that the characters achieve in the end are far more mundane. I hope that Fun Bar Karaoke gets the kind of DVD treatment it deserves. Almost in advertising fashion, Pen-Ek's first film is that of someone who developed his style before fully articulating what he had to say.

6IXTYNIN9 (Ruang Talok 69)

Thailand (118 mi) 1999

Village Voice (Dennis Lim) review

A black-comic thriller from Thailand's most inventive commercial filmmaker, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 6ixtynin9 (1999) enlivens some dingy genre predicaments (dirty money, corpse disposal) with gusts of dreamlike whimsy and a sardonic take on local economic woes. (Palm recently released the movie straight to DVD and is now playing it for a week at Anthology.) A day after being laid off from her banking job, suicidally glum Tum (Lalita Panyopas) wakes to find herself in possession of a cash-stuffed instant-noodle carton. Turns out a couple of goonish thugs botched a drop-off—the 6 on Tum's door, missing a nail, sometimes flips down into a 9, hence the title—and when they return to claim the stash, Tum, without quite meaning to, kills them. As the carnage mounts, the alienated heroine gains an amusing aura of invincibility, her dazed numbness in effect rendering her bulletproof as she sleepwalks through a network of fight-fixing mobsters and corrupt high-level execs.

Though overlong at two hours, 6ixtynin9—only the director's second outing (after 1997's spoofy Fun Bar Karaoke)—is impressive for the tonal control Ratanaruang applies to his swerving scenario. The director's knack for harmoniously melding disparate moods and genres is in greater evidence in the two films he's made since: the 2001 retro musical Monrak Transistor (available on import DVD) and Last Life in the Universe, which opened here last summer and returns to Anthology this week for an encore run. Reconfiguring 6ixtynin9's suicide scenarios and problematic corpses into a languid, bruised rumination on chance, symmetry, and international relations, it's a minor-key ballad filled with delicate but haunting shifts in register, best summed up by its original Thai title: Tiny Enormous Love Story.

6ixtynin9 | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson

6ixtynin9 has all the ramped up energy of the Tarantino and Boyle films it has been arbitrarily compared to, but director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang enriches his crime caper—spiked as it is with straining-to-be-colorful heavies and literal visions of blood money—with a backdrop of an economy in flux. The film opens not with a bang, but with a whimper. Tum (Lalita Panyopas) is a secretary at a nondescript financing corporation, and the building's entire secretarial pool has been summoned to play a cruel game of fate in order to downsize. An almost surreal tableau, the identically blue-uniformed women shake a can of red plastic sticks with gold numbers on them until one falls out, representing each woman's bid to remain employed. If their number is chosen, they will lose their job. Tum's number is called, and she immediately contemplates suicide. But when she wakes up the next morning, she discovers that a box filled with an obscene amount of money has been left on her doorstep. Just as the numerical serendipity of the colored sticks threatened to plunge her into a fiscal abyss, likewise her sudden good fortune is the result of a stroke of arithmetical chance: the gold number 6 on her apartment door is missing a nail, causing it to swing around and become a 9, which just happens to be the apartment for a Mafiosi drop-off of crooked kickboxing profits. Ratanaruang's preoccupation with the vicissitudes of fate ensure that, as a character, Tum is never more than an open vessel, reacting with screen-door-eyed acquiescence. Likewise, after the first few bodies pile up, it's hard to look upon any new character as anything other than a potential straw-casket filler. But as far as clay pigeons go, 6ixtynin9's rogue gallery is vividly drawn with an attention to (make that fixation on) detail—from the friendly, melon-biceped cop's uncanny resemblance to John Cassavetes (the prurience of his presence fulfills the Anglicized title's Rick James-worthy sex pun) to the corpulent mob boss's sinister way with a pink plastic kids' comb. And Ratanaruang's suggestive pallor of economic despair lends a tricky moral dimension to a film that, most often, formally resembles the casually amoral cinema of grunty sensation. Its deadly punchlines suggest the archetypal "cosmic joke" with more emphasis on the tragic side of the tragedy-comedy continuum.

Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge

“6ixtynin9″ is an early film from Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, who has recently won acclaim for “Last Life in the Universe”, his stunning slice of cross-culture ambience. “6itynin9″ has actually been around for a few years on the festival and art house cinema circuit, having won prizes at the Berlin and Hong Kong events, and has helped to introduce Western audiences to the fact that there is more to Thai cinema than the ghost stories of the Pang Brothers. Strangely enough, the literal English language translation of the film’s title is “Funny Story Six Nine”, which although perhaps not as intriguing, actually makes a great deal more sense, as “6ixtynin9″ is not a sex film, but rather a dark comedy about fate and corpse disposal. Lack of skin aside, the film is unlikely to disappoint fans of Asian cinema, being well directed and intricately plotted, and despite a few unfortunate failings, it stands as a minor gem which is well worth watching.

The plot begins as a young woman named Tum (Lalita Panyopas) is fired from her secretary job after choosing unfortunately during an unemployment sweepstake. Devastated by this, she returns home to her apartment, only to find a mysterious box containing a great deal of money on her doorstep. The actual reason behind the box’s appearance is the fact that Tum’s apartment number on her door habitually falls down, making it seem like a ’9′ instead of a ’6′. The money has been mistakenly left by a couple of low-rent Thai kickboxing gangsters, who soon come calling once they realise their mistake. Despite the obvious danger, Tum lies about having found the money, a decision which sends her into a complex whirlpool of deception and violence.

“6ixtynin9″ is a film driven by its plot rather than its characters, and is basically a series of interwoven events which act as an increasingly dire trap for the central protagonist. Ratanaruang, who also wrote the script, expertly escalates the tension, and the film is very engaging, being clever enough to keep the viewer guessing as to what will happen next. Ratanaruang also has a very talented eye for the surreal, and adds an air of randomness to the film’s events which establishes quite early on that the narrative is unlikely to stick to the conventions of the thriller genre. Fate plays a very large part in this, and Ratanaruang quite neatly sidesteps the fact that the plot does rely quite heavily on coincidence through its layers of spiritual and moral choice, and as a result the film most resembles a sort of karmic obstacle course.

The problem with this approach is that Ratanaruang never really fleshes out the main character, leaving her at the mercy of, and indeed for the viewer to define her through the film’s events. Although we are given a sense of her desperation at losing her job, the viewer learns very little about her, and as such never really cares too much about what will happen to her, or whether her choices will lead to her eventual salvation or destruction. This does give the film a rather cold, at times rather ruthless feel, which does sit comfortably with its broad streak of black humour, though it also means that a few moments which had the potential to be quite moving instead falls flat.

The other characters in the film are basically a series of thinly sketched, amusing anecdotes that exist solely as cogs in the narrative machine or as punch lines for the myriad subplots. Thankfully, Ratanaruang manages to create a cast of amusing, disparate miscreants, most of whom are used effectively, and who are in their own ways quite charming.

Ratanaruang is an excellent director, and “6ixtynin9″ is a visually captivating experience, packed full of local scenery and colour, which gives it a distinctly different feel to similarly plotted thrillers from other Asian countries. The direction is a comfortable mix of flashy editing and traditional story telling techniques, which keeps things moving at a fast, almost break-neck pace, whilst never allowing things to slump into vacuous showing off.

The film is a little rough around the edges, as Ratanaruang relies too much on the trick of deceiving the viewer by playing out the main character’s fantasies, before showing what actually happens (a device he would put to far better use in “Last Life in the Universe”), and on cutting away from the action at vital junctures. However, neither these relatively minor criticisms, nor the lack of a real emotional core are enough to detract from what is a well-plotted and slick film, which is recommended to all fans of Asian cinema.

Filmbrain If a 6 turned out to be 9, from Like Anna Karina’s Sweater, June 20, 2009

6ixtynin9 by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Review) - Opus

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

6ixtynin9 (Ruang talok 69) (1999) | PopMatters Kevin Jagernauth

JackassCritics.com (Matt Fuerst) dvd review [8/10]

Thoughts on Stuff Patrick Meaney

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]

DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review

Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) dvd review [3/4]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

CHUD.com (Adam Dimuzio) dvd review

Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen) capsule review [8/10]

Shadows on the Wall by Rich Cline

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]

Chen Chiou Beng review

Sundance Channel : Film : 6ixtynin9

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B+] Ty Burr

The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]

San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]

The New York Times (Jeannette Catsoulis) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Donald Brown

MONRAK TRANSISTOR

aka: Transistor Love Story

Thailand (90 mi) 2001 Toronto Fest run time (115 mi)

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Pen-ek's social/moral fable may have a slight Coen Brothers flavour, but it goes places no US movie has ever mapped. The first chapter celebrates the bucolic romance between Pan (Suppakorn, outstanding) and his village bride Sadaw (Siriyakorn, charming). Then, as Pan is sent off to do military service, the film's prison-guard narrator observes that what could have been a 'delightful short' still has a long way to go: Pan becomes a deserter to pursue a singing career, commits manslaughter while fending off his gay manager, and eventually winds up begging on the streets of Bangkok. Meanwhile the ever-loyal Sadaw gives up on him and allows herself to be seduced by a smooth-talking salesman of de-worming pills. Not exactly a musical, the film integrates songs by Surapol Sombatcharoen, a Thai C&W star of the 1960s. (It also boasts a new song by Wisit, director of Tears of the Black Tiger, and pays a very sly homage to that film.) Great retro music, pop morality, social satire and absurdly potent drama. Wonderful, and one of a kind.

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Postmodern Odyssey - Like Anna Karina's Sweater FilmBrain, March 13, 2006

Nobody could ever accuse Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang of being a modernist. His characters aren't men (and women) of action, nor do they fall into any of the classic "hero" models. Burdened with a postmodern indeterminacy, they are less likely to define their own path than they are to become victims of happenstance. Tadanobu Asano's failed suicide attempt in Last Life in the Universe is about as close as any of his characters get to forging their own destiny, though he too soon gets caught up in a chain of unlikely but interconnected events. While Ratanaruang obviously possesses the critical distance to spin his PoMo fables, the joke (as it were) isn't always evident to those of us not well versed in Thai culture, history, tradition etc. Yet even so, his films are infused with the universality of human experience, which goes a long way in explaining his worldwide critical success.

Coming between 6ixtynin9 and Last Life in the Universe is 2001's Monrak Transistor, a lighthearted and playful film that takes us on a Homeric-inspired odyssey through the villages, cities, and jungles of Thailand, complete with pop/folk musical numbers. Pan (Supakorn Kitsuwon) is young dreamer with only two goals -- to become a famous singer and to win the heart of village beauty Sadao (Siriyakorn Pukkavesh). Nothing ever gets him down, nor does he let anything stand in his way, including Sadao's father, who would sooner see the boy dead than as his son-in-law. Yet Pan's perseverance and irresistible charm (which includes bursting into song at just about any moment) eventually win the old curmudgeon over, and it's not long before the couple marry and settle down for a life of passion and bliss.

Though completely carefree, Pan is also cursed with horrible luck, and he is soon called up for mandatory military service. This is the trigger that drags our slacker Odysseus away from his Penelope, and signals the start of an epic journey that, like his Ithacan counterpart, will keep him away from home for many years. In the course of his journey, Pan will fight his way through the military, the seedy world of show business (including a lecherous promoter), life on a sugar cane plantation, and ultimately prison, where he will literally wind up in the shit.

As if cursed with the postmodern condition, Pan is oddly accepting of these cruel twists of fate. He has the power to change things, at least somewhat, but chooses to surrender to passivity. As with other Ratanaruang characters, Pan finds himself involved in a homicide, but unlike Tum (6ixtynin9) or Kenji (Last Life...), he doesn't even make a half-hearted attempt to cover it up.

Ratanaruang incorporates other standard PoMo cinematic devices, including expository chapter headings (Foot Pollen, Son-of-a-Bitch, etc.), and moments of self-reflexivity with characters directly addressing the audience. Whereas we wouldn't think twice about seeing them used in a Woody Allen film, they here feel somewhat awkward, but at the same time surprisingly new. Again, this might have to do with not being as well versed in the history and grammar of Thai cinema. But this is in no way a criticism of Ratanaruang or the film -- quite the opposite in fact.

Though all of Ratanaruang's films can be thematically and stylistically linked, and though he often employs the same devices, they never feel derivative. Each film contains unique and unexpected pleasures that never fail to surprise. Even in its heavier moments, Monrak Transistor remains as joyously unrestrained as the wonderful pop songs scattered throughout the film. It's a perfect blending of the films that precede and follow it -- with the wry humor of 6ixtynin9 and the emotional dulcitude of Last Life in the Universe, Monrak Transistor is a magnificent film from one of the most consistently interesting directors working today.

Film Review: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's “Monrak Transistor” Christopher Bourne

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2.5/4]

A Nutshell Review Stefan S.

Box Office Prophets review

2002-3 Winter films journal Ken Rudolph’s Film Journal

FilmsAsia [Wong Lung Hsiang]

BBC Films review Tom Dawson

The Japan Times (Giovanni Fazio)

LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

Thailand Japan (112 mi) 2003

Last Life in the Universe Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

An interesting one; although the grand narrative arc was rather predictable, the journey was filled with odd, lovely little moments. I come away from this (Pen-ek's third film, the first I've seen) impressed by the obvious directorial talent but still finding it a bit too young of a film. Lots of it works. But some minor touches, like the Ichi the Killer poster in the library, or the precise organization of Kenji's apartment, are not as clever as Pen-ek would have us believe. Still, this guy has promise. Also, nice change of pace for Tadanobu Asano.

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Weltschmerz never seemed more dynamic than it does in Pen-ek's sly and seductive movie about an ex-yakuza working as a librarian in the Japanese Cultural Centre in Bangkok. Obsessive, fastidiously ordered and allergic to fish, Kenji (Asano) constantly rehearses his own suicide - he identifies with the lizard in a children's story which finds itself the last lizard on earth - until the day he witnesses a girl killed in a traffic accident during a row with her sister Noi (Sinitta). Next day he has urgent reasons to get out of town (there are two bodies in his apartment: his brother and the hitman sent to get him) and he hitches a ride with the grief-stricken Noi to her tumbledown house near Pattaya. In the few days before her departure to work as a bar girl in Osaka, he cleans up her place, inherits her car and reaches out to her to form an unexpected human bond. Hardly anything happens, but the film grips like a thriller; tone and pace, atmosphere and imagery tell voluminous stories of their own. It has Doyle's best camerawork since Happy Together and a snazzy cameo from Miike in shades and a snakeskin suit.

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Lonely librarian Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) and forlorn schoolgirl Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) are inextricably bound after a shocking traffic accident, and together they lounge around her apartment quietly ruminating on their chance encounter. "This is bliss," reads an existential note written by Kenji, who spends much of Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe concocting seemingly motivation-less suicide scenarios. The clean-freak Kenji tells the slovenly Noi that he can't return to his apartment because there are "two dead people inside." She thinks he's joking (he's not), but he could be talking about himself and this bereft young girl he speaks to in two or three different tongues (who's counting anyway?). She's getting ready to leave for Osaka. He's being pursued by yakuzas (one played by Japanese schlockmeister Takashi Miike). Together they wait for something, anything to happen. As photographed by the greatest cinematographer in our known universe, Christopher Doyle, this Thai love story seemingly evokes what life must be like inside a scarcely populated snow globe. For optimum etherealism, space and time is shaken up (the film's title doesn't even appear on the screen until some 30 minutes in) so that the past and the future exist at the same time. The cinematic equivalent of Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Last Life in the Universe isn't so much weightless as it is liable to inspire weightlessness. Like any good mood piece, it's best to be in the mood for it. Now, can someone pass whatever Noi is smoking?

Village Voice (Jessica Winter) review

Life or death—which one has the nastier sense of humor? A couple of the characters in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe may be starting to wonder. A shy Japanese librarian in Bangkok, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano of Zatoichi) has a chronically interrupted suicide wish—he's unsuccessfully acquainted with the noose, the smothering pillow, even the gun secreted inside a teddy bear. His morbid energies do seem, however, to pollute the air around him: Two yakuza corpses are rotting in Kenji's apartment (a similar predicament bedeviled the protagonist of Ratanaruang's 1999 feature 6ixtynin9), and he abandons a planned leap off a bridge when a car strikes a girl dead at the scene. He takes refuge with Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak), the distraught driver, and their somewhat language-impaired rapport develops in locking strands of symmetry and opposition. He's from Osaka (yakuza capital of Japan) and she's on her way there. He's a neat freak while her ramshackle house reaches Murdoch-Bayley proportions of slovenliness. Both have recently lost a sibling—though one is significantly more torn up by the loss than the other.

Following Ratanaruang's ingenious, bittersweet musical odyssey Mon-Rak Transistor (2001), Last Life unfolds as a serene experiment in dissonance: long snatches of boy-girl quiescence occasionally broken by snarling bursts of gangster mayhem. (The film deploys a punchline cut to a poster of a bleach-blond Asano starring in Takashi Miike's notorious bloodbath Ichi the Killer, and Miike himself shows up as a fearsome thug.) Notwithstanding a visual debt to the early domestic interiors of Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Christopher Doyle's cinematography again carries the strongest signature of any DP in contemporary movies short of Eric Gautier. Last Life inevitably recalls Doyle's mid-'90s work for Wong Kar-wai, especially in the abundant attentions paid to Noi's pensive, attractively posed chain-smoking sessions; elsewhere, a torn curtain fluttering plaintively in the breeze could have been sewn in from Wong's Happy Together. But Doyle's always-welcome presence hardly overshadows the film's delightful idiosyncrasies—the director approaches montage as musical variation, and the camera as magic-realist lantern. Time and matter in Last Life become flexible, permeable, permutable; a single shot can serve as flashback or flash-forward, speculation or possibility; books reshelve themselves and the dead come back to life. Cheeky and elusive, Last Life in the Universe inhabits a high-lonesome world unto itself, a bright daydream that dissipates in the aching gap of a missed connection.

Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)

Entrancing, breezy and deep all at once, Last Life in the Universe toys with the viewer’s state of mind, and makes me rethink my choice to refer to Chungking Express as a dream-like experience. It’s indescribable once you let it sink in, whether you were touched by Kenji’s hopelessness, the tragic circumstances of his meeting with Noi, or the impending finale that you can’t help but speculate on. But even this is overshadowed as the emotional depth inspires, only a tiny fraction of the amount of the simply dazing cinematic experience.

Kenji, (Tadanobu Asano) a suicidal Japanese librarian in Thailand lives an indifferent life convinced, but always stopped from entering what he expects to be a blissful death. Unfazed by a series of tragic events, and drawn to a Thai woman (Sinitta Boonyasak) who appears to be his complete opposite, things begin to slowly change for the two as they grow to connect to one another.

Wong Kar Wai, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Ozu similarities aside, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, despite representing this side of Asian cinema, does come across with his own unique voice for the film; whether it be through his many contradictory elements like the fluid and awkward language transitions between Japanese, Thai and English, or the toned down Doyle cinematography that resonates but merely remains a stage for the actors. There’s no frenzied Chungking Express handicam or a rich detailed color emphasis like Hero, but less obvious, yet still valued photography that represents a simple combination of all his work. The atmosphere is the cornerstone of the film as the visuals and the subtly captivating score blend together to make this a necessary theatrical event. There’s even a “Learn Japanese through Thai” tape that slowly continues on in the background for ten to fifteen

On the surface, Last Life in the Universe resembles an arthouse film that could be maligned for pretentious style over character development. Once you delve deeper into character study, it's obvious the style in no way distances you from the characters in this film and proves in fact, to only be beneficiary. The dreary mood mixed with the dark comedy and indifferent monologues of Kenji helps the audience identify with him and understand his reasoning. Comparisons with a children’s book about a lizard strengthen the bond and really keeps us with the main character. It’s the occasional negative scenes regarding the woman, Noi that can’t engulf the viewer in the relationship. The audience has to take leaps of faith to remain fascinated by her flawed character drama. It's simply just the fact that we can't sympathize with her at times the director expects us to. Nevertheless, the plot still is an asset, as there are those delightful not-your-average relationship moments that shine through more often than you’d expect. The comedy can unexpectedly hit you too, making use of some deadpan humor, dark jokes that you don’t know whether to laugh at or not and a fun reference to a previous role of Asano’s. Making use of the dream-like state, Ratanaruang presents clever symbolism and thematic significance that have several interpretations and provide for neat discussion. There's your substance.

The characters were handled very well as the prime attraction to the film. Playing with contrasting elements again, we get a clichéd opposites attract relationship, but we’re presented with two unique and very likeable characters personified perfectly by the actors playing them. Asano, having won best actor at Venice for the role, has this glowing charm as an obsessive-compulsive loner and displays brilliant versatility when you relate this performance to his Kakihara one. Sinitta Boonyasak also has charisma and beauty that draws attention and reminds me of a mean Faye Wong. The cast was rounded off well with the brief appearance of Riki Takeuchi tackling a surprisingly new role, and Takashi Miike’s memorable presence. One of the most impressive ways the film plays with its characters is the alteration of their roles and the significance behind them. Characters are meshed together (to put it in vague terms) and it strikes the viewer, leaving us to determine the symbolism behind it all. In the case of our main characters, the added nuances seal it, with the gradual character transformations that occur. Those little habits we notice in the beginning of the film that reveal themselves to have meaning later. It's those traits that made Kenji a great character and made their relationship more meaningful. For the near unanimous praise it’s getting, and the decent distribution at the moment, Last Life in the Universe is one of those films that you must see in a theatre. Maybe because you’ll hate it and it will salvage what little beauty it contains? Or you’ll relish in the engaging ambiance that you rarely witness in a Hollywood film released these days? You should know if you want to see it by now. And if you do, you can count on the latter response.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Last Life in the Universe (2003) Ryan Gilbey, August 2004

Colin Marshall: Last Life in the Universe (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, 2003) Colin Marshall

Last Life in the Universe by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Review) - Opus Chris Brown

Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge

“Last Life in the Universe” - Salon.com Charles Taylor

Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Phyrephox from Milk Plus

Found in Translation - Like Anna Karina's Sweater FilmBrain, May 31, 2004

Last Life in the Universe meets Punch-Drunk Love - Archive - Reverse ... How to Fight Loneliness, by Tom J. Carlisle, May 13, 2005

VideoVista review Paul Higson

5 for the Day: Cinema of the Personal Daydream Kenji Fujishima from Slant, August 24, 2007

Last Life in the Universe (2003) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

not coming to a theater near you (Matt Bailey) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) dvd review

Stop Making Sense: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Last Life in the Universe ... Kelley Dong from Mubi, August 25, 2016

Errata [Robert Davis]

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]

stylusmagazine.com (Josh Timmermann) review

Last Life In The Universe | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey, November 22, 2004

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Last Life in the Universe Noel Mehagey, April 9, 2004

Gilles Deleuze and Contemplative Cinema » Reviews and analysis of ... Gravity 7, January 2007

Nippon Cinema Kevin Ouellette

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]

Offoffoff.com review Peter Theis

Strictly Film School review Acquarello, also seen here: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

KN | Kitsune Noir » Films Danica Van de Velde

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj] Using Godard as a film guide

PopMatters (Sharon Mizota) review

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]

Movie-Vault.com (Aaron West) review [9/10]

FilmsAsia 4 reviews by Soh Yun-Huei, Drakula, Sinnerman, and Adrian Sim

DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [4/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Jesse Ataide) dvd review

CHUD.com (Russ Fischer) dvd review

Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) dvd review [9/10]

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo

The Lumière Reader Mubarek Ali

Man Overboard: Last Life in the Universe (2003) Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]

IONCINEMA.com review [2.5/5] Eric Lavallee

Film Threat Eric Campos

Harvey S. Karten review [B]

Last Life in the Universe - Jeremy Silman

Boxoffice Magazine review Wade Major

Film-Forward.com Yancha

eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [1/5]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]

Asia Pacific Arts: Thailand's Submission for Best Foreign Language ... Chau Nguyen from Asia Pacific Arts, January 23, 2004

Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film - Current Awards March 20, 2005

Modern Mondays: Last Life in the Universe (2003) Kimberly Lindbergs, brief comments and photos

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - Ruang rak noi nid mahasan ('Last Life in the ... photos from Avax

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris

The Boston Phoenix review A.S. Hamrah

San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

'Last Life in the Universe' Kevin Thomas from The LA Times and Chicago Tribune

TIFF Report: Invisible Waves Review - ScreenAnarchy Opus

DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow

INVISIBLE WAVES B+ 92

Thailand Netherlands Hong Kong South Korea (115 mi) 2006

The film that was initially shown in the first week of the Festival on a screener video, with the numbers whizzing by, which had to be a distraction in such a somnambulistic film, a film that stakes out entirely new territory for a crime thriller, utilizing the downbeat mood of noir, where the atmosphere remains set in a grim murkiness, almost like a dream state, where the lead character, consumed in the realm of his own guilt, becomes a walking ghost. The entire color scheme is dark, washed out colors, with only occasional, somewhat absurd entries of noticeable color, returning to the emptiness of an everpresent vacuousness, featuring hypnotic cinematography by an understated Christopher Doyle. One odd element is the use of language, where Japanese, Korean, and Thai characters speak broken English, which certainly adds to the mood of this oddly disorienting film which is set entirely in a fog of ambiguity.

Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano plays the hesitant lead Kyoji, who’s uncomfortable at the outset, preparing a poisoned meal for a girl friend he’s been assigned to murder, who turns out to be the boss’s wife. The boss in this case is a culinary chef, Wiwat (Thai actor Toon Hiranyasup), who employs Kyoji in his upscale restaurant in Macao. After the deed is done, the boss sends him on a pleasure cruise to Phuket, a Thailand island resort. Beyond that, the film is almost completely without narrative, a mixture of bizarre and humorous, much of it long periods of wordlessness, with an interesting sound design by Koichi Shimizu and barely audible electric piano music from Hualampong Riddim that quietly plays throughout the entire film.

The cruise is like a ghost ship, as there is barely anyone on board. Kyogi is assigned a cabin in the boiler room, where things continue to go wrong, where the world feels wrong, or at least his place in it, as all that’s left is a pervasive haunted feeling, as if everything he touches becomes contaminated. He meets a mysteriously beautiful woman named Noi (Korean actress Gang Hye Jung), who wants him to look after her baby, who she constantly leaves alone. He meets a bartender who hates his job, who believes he is atoning for his past sins by performing such an unpleasant task, who works in a darkened room illuminated by a giant aquarium that takes up an entire wall that is filled with swimming sharks. And he is being shadowed by a mysterious man in shades and a tropical shirt (Japanese actor Mitsuishi Ken), who pretends he’s an old school buddy, but Kyogi’s never seen him before, and the man, who loves karaoke, appears to have ulterior motives. There’s a feeling that the world is turning its back on him, that he’s caught in a universe that only moves slower in time, as the detachment that consumes him seems to grow ever larger, until it appears all he can do is welcome it with an eerie resignation. This is truly one of the strangest films one could ever experience, leaving inexplicable clues laying around everywhere, none of which make any sense except to add to the haunting ambiguity of the film. Wow. Has Thai cinema risen to become the focal point in the world today, or is it only from the limited selection of films here in the “Hog Butcher for the World?”

INVISIBLE WAVES (d. Pen-ek Ratanaruang) ** 1/2 Ken Rudolph’s Movie Site

This was the fourth film by this interesting director that I've watched, and unfortunately the worst. Even Christopher Doyle's cinematography (which mostly featured dark foreground action against brighter backgrounds which just didn't work for me) couldn't rescue a ridiculous script about an inept chef running from Macao to Thailand to escape from his gangster boss's revenge for sleeping with his wife. The film wound around itself too many times; and even the usually reliable actor Asano Tadanobu couldn't make me relate to or believe in the plot. ** 1/2

42nd Chicago International Film Festival Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune

A beautiful enigma, as well as a master class in how to keep audience expectations off-balance. Stoic Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano plays Kyoji, a resident of the Chinese Macau region who kills his lover, the boss' wife, on orders from the cuckold himself. Then the boss sends the assassin on a shadowy extended vacation to Thailand. The premise sets up the doings for a revenge drama, but the director keeps slipping you mickeys, notably some surprising and oddly funny bits of business aboard the cruise ship taking Kyoji to his destination. (The routine wherein our Wenders-like antihero gets locked inside his own stateroom -- "You want to get inside the room?" "No! I'm inside!" -- is worthy of existential Abbott and Costello.) This one-of-a-kind reverie won't be for all tastes, but I found it singular and, like the Hualampong Riddim musical score, quietly hypnotic. In Japanese, Thai, with English subtitles.

Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)

This psycho-thriller centers around a Macau chef's battle against the guilt of killing his lover and the more immediate threat to his life in Thailand where he is hiding from the justice...this classic thriller delves into the psychology of killers and reunites Ratanaruang with Asano who won the Best Actor award at the 2003 Venice Film Festival for Last Life in the Universe.

A more detailed synopsis: "Asano plays Kyoji, a Japanese chef in a Hong Kong restaurant run by a Thai bigwig. In the opening scene, Kyoji is duped to kill his boss's wife, but once finding blood on his hands, the chef's forced to escape on board a cruise ship heading towards Phuket.

On the cruise, strange things start to happen. You'd say it's a Kafka-esque scenario, though Pen-ek prefers to describe it as something from a David Lynch film. Kyoji gets lost in the bowels of the vessel, runs into somebody who could be his long lost father, meets a witchy matron (Maria Cordero) and a Korean girl (Kang Hye-joeng from Oldboy), then strikes up a bizarre friendship with a hitman called Lizard who's sent to zap him. Once he lands in Phuket, Kyoji, drugged by his own guilt, shares more campy, hallucinatory trips with Lizard, as other characters disappear and reappear before the mafia boss comes down to look for his runaway chef himself.

Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt

BERLIN -- If Jacques Tati, the French comic absurdist, had ever made a gangster thriller, it probably would have looked like Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's "Invisible Waves." Much of the movie is given over to comic bliss in which the protagonist, played by Japanese star Asano Tadanobu, is assailed by minor indignities and malfunctioning amenities aboard a ship. Guns do go off and people die, but Pen-Ek de-emphasizes the thrills in favor of an existential slapstick. The film should make waves on the festival circuit before specialty pickups.

The movie starts out more in a thriller mode, albeit obliquely. Kyoji (Asano), a Japanese ex-pat, lives in the former Portuguese enclave of Macau and takes the ferry daily to Hong Kong, where he works as a chef's assistant. One night his lover drops by for a romantic dinner. The lover (Kuga Tomono), who happens to be his boss' wife, dies immediately after a meal laced with poison. Turns out his boss (Thai star Toon Hiranyasup) has learned of the affair and forced his cook to kill a wife he now considers an inconvenience.

The deed has made Kyoji so mentally and physically ill that the boss presents him with a pleasure cruise to the Thai island resort of Phuket. Once aboard ship, the fun starts. Kyoji's luxurious stateroom turns out to be a room the size of a locker next to the noisy engine with mysterious steam seeping through an opening. A pull-down bed jerks right back up, the shower and wash basin squirt water unexpectedly, and one day he gets locked in the room and can't get out.

He meets a mysterious woman named Noi (rising Korean actress Gang Hye Jung). She has a baby but is vague about the identity or whereabouts of the father. She also possesses an ironic, almost flirtatious manner that intrigues Kyoji. Meanwhile, a mysterious man (Mitsuishi Ken) in a tropical shirt is shadowing Kyoji throughout the voyage.

Once in Phuket, strange things continue to befall the hapless chef. The most unfortunate is a robbery at his hotel that leaves him broke. He is forced to call his boss, who promises to help. The mysterious stranger now reveals himself as a karaoke-loving hit man employed by the boss. Kyoji quickly realizes the boss wants to eliminate him.

There's a bit of chasing and shooting in Phuket before the final reels back in Hong Kong and Macau. Alas, these sequences don't live up to the delightful, often perplexing comic rifts that brought us to this showdown. Perhaps too much philosophy and not enough slapstick absurdity dominate the ending.

Nevertheless, "Invisible Waves" is yet another example of the creative forces at work in pan-Asian cinema, which plucks locations and actors from any number of territories. Asano makes a wonderful Keaton-esque clown, struggling helplessly but without losing his cool against a universe conspiring to thwart him. Still sickened by his deed -- the chef throws up every so often -- Kyoji doesn't know whether he seeks revenge or redemption.

Gang gives the heroine a beguiling innocence tinged with sage knowingness. Hiranyasup brings a light touch to the gangster-restaurant owner. Mitsuishi's weary exterminating angel is only happy when he is singing. And singer-actress Maria Cordero as Kyoji's landlady acts as a kind of Greek chorus, offering up Old World/New Age wisdom.

The great pan-Asian cinematographer Christopher Doyle shot the film, working in unusual palettes, making the ship interiors fluorescent green, Hong Kong glumly overcast and even finding darkness in the paradise that is Phuket.

Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge

“Invisible Waves” is the latest offering from Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who scored a cult hit in 2003 with the excellent “Last Life in the Universe”. The two films actually have a lot in common, both being surreal mood pieces, beautifully lensed by master cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and featuring pan-Asian casts headed by Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu. Here, Ratanaruang has made an even more internationally-flavoured film, bringing in Korean actress Gang Hye Jung (“Oldboy”) and Hong Kong veteran Eric Tsang (“Infernal Affairs”), and locating the action in Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand.

The dreamlike plot follows Kyoji (Asano), a chef in a gangster-run Macau restaurant, who is rather unwisely having an affair with his boss’s wife. After their illicit relationship is uncovered, the boss orders him to kill her, and then sends him on a decrepit ocean liner to begin a new life in Phuket, Thailand. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned for Kyoji, as he encounters all manner of strange characters, and upon arrival in Thailand finds himself alone, tormented by visions of the past which are accompanied by bouts of vomiting. After losing all of his money, he calls his boss, who puts him in contact with an eccentric gangster who has been similarly exiled (Japanese actor Mitsuishi Ken). Although his new friend seems amiable enough, taking Kyoji on a series of karaoke-filled adventures, it soon emerges that he may in fact have more sinister plans in mind for the gradually unravelling former cook.

“Invisible Waves” is a bleaker affair than “Last Life in the Universe”, being mainly concerned with themes of guilt and regret, and with the protagonist’s introspective journey being very much one into his own heart of darkness. As such, the film works as an intimate psychological study, with a brilliantly realised character arc which aims not for some unrealistic ideal of redemption as is so often the case, but for acceptance and a sense of internal peace.

The proceedings are very much seen from Kyoji’s perspective, and Ratanaruang puts the viewer squarely in his shoes, sharing his bewildered disorientation, isolation and growing sense of paranoia as the tension slowly mounts. Much of this comes either from the fact that nothing in the film seems to work out as expected, especially during the bizarre scenes at sea in which Kyoji spends half his time locked in his cabin trying to figure out how to work the taps in the bathroom. Ratanaruang also makes good and believable use of the language problems which Koji encounters, resulting in most of the characters talking in a mixture of English and their own native tongue.

The narrative of “Invisible Waves” progresses toward its uncertain conclusion at an unhurried pace, never taking the obvious routes, and featuring many long, dialogue-free stretches where very little happens. This is not to say that the film is dull, but rather that what Ratanaruang has crafted is more of an ambient, almost hypnotic piece of cinematic poetry than a traditional viewing experience. Of course, this does mean that a certain measure of patience is required, and though it does feature a rich vein of black comedy and a handful of violent scenes, those expecting conventional thrills may well be frustrated.

As might be anticipated, the film is absolutely gorgeous, with Doyle employing a palette of pale, washed out colours which perfectly compliment the melancholy mood and which bring out the sense of dilapidation in the locations. There are a number of beautifully composed shots, which are all the more effective for the fact that they feature not epic vistas but quiet, everyday scenes. The visuals work well throughout to reflect the mood of the protagonist, being quiet and understated, but with certain strangeness to them, as if hinting at something unpleasant lurking just out of sight.

In the hands of a lesser director, “Invisible Waves” could have been overstretched and dull, though under the guidance of Ratanaruang, it becomes an emotionally and spiritually rewarding experience which adds layers of depth beneath a deceptively calm surface. Eerily atmospheric and unpredictable throughout, the film sees the director further developing his unique style and vision, and confirms him as one of the most interesting directors in modern Asian cinema.

Invisible Waves | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

A Persistent Vision [Vernon Chan]

A Nutshell Review Stefan S.

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4.5/5]

DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [2/5] [Region 3]

Chicago, je t’aime: The 42nd Chicago International Film Festival Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2006

Sign and Sight Ekkehard Knörer

Kam-Hung Soh retrospective

Invisible Waves - Pen-ek Ratanaruang (2006) in AvaxHome photos

Variety (Russell Edwards) review also seen with additional photos here: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang – Invisible Waves (2006) | Cinema of the World

PLOY B+ 92

Thailand (107 mi) 2007

This is another film along the lines of YELLA (2007), seamlessly integrating the real and the imaginary worlds to the point where they are indistinguishable, but rather than exploring the underlying fear of having to deal with a psychopathic stalker, this version explores the paranoiac ruminations of a mind beset with jealousy, creating entire plot twists that may have never happened, that were simply imagined, where this ingrained behavior also allows us to question whether reality can also be suppressed in this manner, treated just like another daydream that perhaps never happened. A successful Thai couple, restaurant owner Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) and his wife, former movie star Dang (Lalita Panyopas), have been living in America for the past ten years and are returning home for a funeral, spending most of their time in an upscale Phuket hotel where their every action is captured in exquisite detail. Without question, the filmmaker becomes fascinated by the mind-altering effects of jet lag from their 20-hour flight, exploring their moods, their secrets, their faltering trust, and even their suspicions, finding a slow, easy going rhythm to their lives, always embellished by a subtle and hauntingly original musical score created by Koichi Shimizu and Hualampong Riddim, sound design by Shimizu and Akritchalern Kalayanamitr, among the quietest and most hushed, yet also pitch perfect uses of hypnotic, barely audible music, generating “invisible waves” of what pops into people’s heads as they move in and out of various states of sleeplessness.

Arriving at 5 am, Wit heads for cigarettes in the coffee shop, where he unexpectedly meets a curious and fascinatingly attractive young kid, Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk), a girl who looks much younger than her alleged nineteen years, who has another 5 hours or so waiting for her mother to arrive from Stockholm. His interest piqued, in a gesture of friendship as she’s from his home town of Phuket, Wit invites her upstairs to their room, offering her a place to spend time or freshen up before her mother arrives. Dang is noticeably upset, as she can barely stay awake but is suspicious of a stranger lurking in their room, becoming more outraged when she finds something missing, which immediately triggers thoughts of her husband's infidelity. This sets the scene for various naps and daydreams and candid conversations, where an attractive hotel maid (Phorntip Papanai) has a sexually explicit yet amusingly off-beat morning rendezvous in an empty hotel room with one of the bartenders, all elaborately constructed, interwoven through the aroused jealous suspicions of the married couple whose nerves are suddenly on edge. Gorgeously photographed by Chankit Chamnivikaipong, immersing us in an obscure, completely ambiguous world where secrets begin taking on a life of their own, where the director seems to enjoy playing mind games with the audience’s expectations, keeping us guessing, defying anyone by the end of the film to decipher just what really happened in this film. Every bit as much fun as his last film INVISIBLE WAVES (2006), this is not so wordless or bizarre, yet despite the drowsy pace of the film, the director’s calm, deliberate offerings are oftentimes lovely, playful, erotic, tense, and always mysterious, keeping us just a little bit off balance, such as when the maid breaks out into a post-coital Tsai Ming-liang style love song questioning the meaning of love, where we are especially intrigued by the likability of the characters and the choices they ultimately face.

Screen International Lee Marshall (subscription required)

Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang's most mature, measured film to date, Ploy offers a darkly poetic variation on the theme of The Seven Year Itch. Though its slow pacing demands a certain patience, the slow waltz of story, editing and camerawork goes beyond the surreal, open-ended ditherings of the director's last film, Invisible Waves, to deliver a solid dramatic punch and an unforced moral message.

This is such a tasty slice of cinema, by turns onieric, erotic, funny and emotionally perceptive, that it could easily have made the Cannes competition rather than the Quinzaine sidebar. Ploy imposes its own unhurried rhythm but then rewards its viewers for their indulgence, and within the arthouse niche that it will inevitably inhabit this could turn out to be a strong seller for Fortissimo, possibly outdoing Last Life In The Universe: it's difficult to see distributors in territories with resilient cineaste audiences passing this one up. Critical buzz and further festival dates should help to get the word out.

Right from the beginning it becomes clear that we are in a transit zone, both geographical and emotional. We see a couple arrive at Bangkok airport, take a cab and check in at an anonymous contemporary hotel in the small hours of the morning. The husband, Wit (Pornwut Sarasin), goes down to the bar for a packet of cigarettes and starts chatting to Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk), a vivacious, Lolita-like girl who claims to be waiting for her mother, and looks younger than the almost-19 she declares. As there are still several hours to go until Ploy's mother arrives, Wit invites her to get some rest in his suite, where he has left his wife Dang (well-known Thai film and TV actress Lalita Panyopas) asleep.

But she's not asleep now, and is understandably annoyed with, and suspicious of, her husband. Just like her, we're never quite sure whether Wit's invitation was purely altruistic, just as we're not sure whether Ploy's acceptance was as innocent as it seems – or rather, didn't seem. Ratanaruang plays with this uncertainty in a masterly way throughout the film – in fact, Ploy (the film) is a fine example of his skill as a scriptwriter as well as his assured way with actors, staging and framing.

Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated story, Nut (Ananda Everingham), the barman we saw downstairs, meets Tum (Phorntip Pananai), a chambermaid, for a gently erotic illicit encounter in a hotel room. Australian-Laotian Everingham is a hot star in Thailand – though its difficult to know whether his fans at home will be amused or annoyed by the fact that, as the director declares in the press book, "he spends most of his screentime inside a girl's skirt". Gradually the connection between the two plotlines is revealed, or half-revealed. Because although the dreams

Wit, Ploy and Dang have during their fitful slumbers invade the story (and this may or may not be one of them), they do so with an inventive edginess that keeps us guessing.

Charnkit Chamniwikaipong proves a worthy successor to Chris Doyle, who worked as cinematographer on Ratanaruang's last two films: Ploy is beautifully framed and shot, most of the time in a painterly half-light that stresses the transitional zone that Wit and Dang's relationship has reached: it's a kind of emotional twilight. Music consists mostly of subdued electronic suspense chords and fugue-like organ notes, with more dramatic free-jazz impro raising the temperature near the end. Even a torch song delivered straight to camera by Tum, the chambermaid, does not break the mood: like everything else in this impressive film, it is perfectly judged.

Fin de cinema [Joe Bowman]

Pen-ek Ratanaruang's latest, Ploy, is quite a beautiful film. It's a marital thriller mostly set in a Phuket hotel where restaurant owner Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) adopts nineteen year old Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) for a few hours. Ploy's invasion of the married couple's hotel room arouses feelings of suspicion and jealousy for Wit's wife Dang (Lalita Panyopas).

The film's mood is sleepy, wherein the characters are indefinitely in a state of being half-awake and half-asleep (there's a mighty big difference, I believe). The couple arrives in Phuket from a twenty hour flight. They're in that blurred zone of jet lags and lazy early mornings, forcing Wit to spend a moment in the hotel bar where he catches up with sleep-deprived Ploy, waiting for her Swedish mother while listening to quirky Thai reggae. They prolong that atmosphere of sleeplessness with idle chat and cups of coffee, before going up to their room; casually being greeted by a random hotel maid (Phorntip Papanai), who becomes the object of an erotic dream along with the bartender (Ananda Everingham).

Ratanaruang deftly pursues this atmosphere of half-consciousness wherein dreams have the palpable quality of reality, and reality has the surreal mood of dreams. There's a very thin filament that would separate sleep and consciousness; further marred by the gravity of emotions imputed to Ploy's invasion of that marital harmony. The difference between half-awake and half-asleep divides the film into two parts: pre and post marital quarrel (wherein Dang leaves the hotel and becomes victim to a crime). Ratanaruang gets the details right: the way light is an annoyance when one is half-awake, and the way light urges one to consciousness in a phase of half-asleep.

Ratanaruang plays the differences with utmost details and keeps the daydream fantasy as hypnotizing --- the little portion of uncovered window that allows the morning light to invade the sleep-deprived wife, the vodka-drowned coffee that Dang drinks in the hotel lobby, the haziness and laziness that accompanies the lack of mental, physical, moral and emotional alertness of the three characters. That way, he infects his audience with the same contemplative mood (well enough to make impatient viewers sleep), wherein lapses in logic and quick jumps to conclusions (which are the obvious criticisms to this slow yet perceptive Ratanaruang thriller) should be appropriate in ways that would be impossible in total consciousness.

It's gorgeously photographed (by Chankit Chamnivikaipong, Ratanaruang's cinematographer in his earlier works like Fun Bar Karaoke (1997), 6ixtynin9 (1999), and Mon-rak Transistor (2001); Ratanaruang previously worked with Christopher Doyle in Last Life in the Universe (2003), and Invisible Waves (2006)). It's not only gorgeous, but very intelligent. Ratanaruang has a gift for visual humor --- the way he would start a shot with the naked calves of Wit and Ploy (using such cliche to give the presumption of consummated infidelity) only to reveal that they are fully dressed; or the way we would see a man (Thaksakorn Pradapphongsa) observing Dang while out of focus, before we become aware that the man turns out to be a bigger part of the story than he was introduced to be.

Ploy is a film that is engineered with exhilerating precision. Its dreamy feel and rhythm which delightfully hopscotches from dream to life to nightmare and back (there's a lovely musical interlude that concludes the hotel-bound hallucination), keeps the relaxed pace bearable, if not totally engrossing. Ratanaruang is gearing up to become one of the most interesting filmmakers from the region.

"Blissfully Thai" Review: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy" - The Bourne ... Christopher Bourne

Cannes Report: Ploy Review - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown

Ploy Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Eternal Sunshine Of The Logical Mind [Bob Turnbull]

CHUD.com (Russ Fischer) review

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

Jigsaw Lounge [Sheila Seacroft] Tallinn Film Festival Report

Tickets to the Dark Side: The 43rd Chicago International Film Festival Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2008

Variety.com [Russell Edwards]

NYMPH (Nang Mai) B 88

Thailand Netherlands (109 mi) 2009

Don’t get to the theater late for this film, as while we hear the everpresent chirping of birds, the virtuoso shot comes at the beginning, a long, uninterrupted tracking and crane shot that moves in and out of the trees in the jungle, capturing the screams and barely recognizable bodies running through the brush in a rape sequence, with the camera continuing to move past the incident through the forest with only tiny glimpses of light making its way through the cracks in the leaves for several minutes afterwards, lifting high up into the air several times and returning to ground level, offering views between branches, overlooking treetops, and finally to a river below where two bodies (the presumed rapists) are floating face down, dead. From this ominous opening foreshadowing events yet to come, Ratanaruang creates what amounts to a near indecipherable ghost story, where the brilliant wall to wall sound design by Koichi Shimizu evolves as the most prominent feature, overwhelming the visual palette with an eerie sense of alluring mystery and foreboding.

In a quiet, near wordless film with long uninterrupted silences, a young couple decides to camp in these same woods, where the husband Nop (Jayanama Nopachai) is a still photographer and his wife May (Wanida Termthanaporn) works as a journalist. On a long walk through the forest, Nop discovers a particular tree that captures his attention, where we see him hugging it at one point. Later that night, Nop investigates a noise, using a flashlight as his guide, where some 30 minutes into the film he is somehow drawn into an invisible force where he is left lying on the forest floor unconscious, abducted by the wood nymph who can be seen dragging him by one arm. May awakes to the disappearance of her husband, notifying authorities, but eventually her own curiosity consumes her as she investigates on her own in the middle of the night, where we appear to see the same set of circumstances with the nymph dragging her unconscious body by one arm. Nothing makes rational sense afterwards, as if May has been drugged and we are left to sift through a dreamworld, as the rest of the film resembles the real world, but is instead a netherworld where the real and imaginary worlds are indistinguishable. While May returns from the forest, still stunned and a bit incoherent, Nop remains missing, eventually turning up on her doorstep later without a word about the incident. Things appear to happen that never happened, as every moment becomes laced in ambiguity. The forest becomes a metaphor for the subconscious, where May has been having an affair with her boss, where the thought of it after the loss of her husband becomes darkly disturbing. When she tries to end it all with her boss due to Nop’s return, he curiously reminds her that Nop has never returned from the forest.

The slow pace of the film is hypnotic, but never difficult or uninteresting, as the performances are all uniformly good, so everything feels in synch in this film, all pointing towards a creepy incomprehensible mood that is all symbols and dream imagery. The steady tempo and beguiling sound design, some of it resembling early Pink Floyd, lures the audience into a neverending dream reverie, but the film is humorless and exhibits little personality, mired in an overly detached somnambulistic mood where clues remain shrouded in mystery, where most will make little sense out of what they see onscreen. In that sense, it’s nearly unreadable, where we may understand the set up of human betrayal, but not the payoff or reward for the viewer’s patience, as the narrative has all but disappeared, submerged into the otherworldliness of atmospheric mood. This may work entirely as a near experimental visual and aural experience, where during the long stretches of silence one can get lost in this imaginary world where at least for some, it’s nearly impossible to find their way back out again without feeling altered by the process.

Special notice - cinematography Charnkit Chamnivikaipong, sound design Koichi Shimuzu

eye WEEKLY capsule review [4/5] Jason Anderson

An incomplete version of the Thai director’s latest got a mixed reception at Cannes but the cut for TIFF turns out to be very beguiling. Borrowing cues (and jungle settings) from his countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nymph plays out like Tropical Malady retooled both as a marital drama and a horror movie. A couple investigating the existence of a wood nymph inadvertently adds a supernatural element to their troubled relationship. The spellbinding forest scenes have plenty of Lynch-ian menace and the sumptuous cinematography and sound design compensate for the gaps in Pen-ek’s typically elliptical storytelling.

Movie Moxie [Shannon Ridler] at Toronto, including video clips: Nymph Introduction and Q&A with director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

The screening of Nymph tonight was introduced by directer Pen-Ek Ratanaruang who provided the following context for the audience: Almost every Thai person grows up hearing a legend/story that becomes a belief that the trees in the forest have female spirits living in them. So, when you go into the forest that you have to respect the trees and nature.

This is very important to know going into the film, and it lead me to ponder what kind of film Nymph is. Not that classification is ever a requirement, and it has elements that range from drama, horror, the supernatural and even occasional humour. But, it makes me think about what defines each those categories. The logical choice would be fantasy, but if the fantasy aspect is based on actual beliefs, is it really fantasy - or perhaps magical realism? The realism in the film is what brings out the creepy moments so clearly, the sense that something that is going on is not quite right and in transitions to not quite right so subtly it can be hard to pin point that line. It's that sneaky line you only know after it's been crossed. The film deals with crossing boundaries in various ways, and in how people deal with the consequences. The phenomenal acting holds these moments with distilled strength. Add to that a rich and textual soundscape and haunting forest locations and you are in for one visceral ride through the wilderness and beyond.

Cannes 09: NYMPH Review - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown

In my opinion Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's supernaturally tinged drama Nymph bears roughly the same relationship to his previous film Ploy as his Invisible Waves did to Last Life In The Universe. Both Last Life and Ploy marked first forays into a new style of film, forays quickly followed up by second movements meant - at least in part - to push deeper into that style of film making, with several key elements and the basic style of shooting repeated. But, unfortunately, the second shot at the new style in both Invisible Waves and Nymph is just simply not as successful as the first steps were.

Like Ploy, Nymph revolves around a relationship in trouble - in this case the marriage of May and Nop which seems to have nothing left but inertia to hold it together at this point. The two barely speak to one another and May has been involved in an affair with her boss for months. As little as they speak to one another, signs of physical affection are still more rare. And yet, despite the emotional distance between them, May decides to accompany Nop on a photography trip in the deep forest, a part of the forest where some time before two young men were mysteriously struck dead while attempted to rape a woman. Nobody has ever been able to sort out what happened, but Nop cannot help but feel a certain attraction to a tree near where the incident occurred and then one night he simply disappears.

To call Nymph a languidly paced film is to put it mildly. Once you get past the opening sequence - a stunning, virtuoso single take shot that tracks the would-be rape through the forest on what appears to be a blend of dolly, steadicam and crane work - Ratanaruang is beyond deliberate in his pacing of things. Given that the film revolves around two characters who barely speak to one another the film moves through long stretches of total silence, a silence reinforced by the complete lack of any sort of score whatsoever, the only sound being dialogue and ambient noise. Ratanaruang has certainly never been scared of silence in his films but this takes that impulse to an entirely different level and, as a result, many will find the first two thirds of the film somewhat difficult to make it through before things pick up a bit in the home stretch.

As already stated, the similarities to Ploy are obvious but another striking point of comparison would be the work of countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ratanaruang trying on a number of techniques and themes here that Weerasethakul has employed consistently throughout his career, particularly in Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century. Unfortunately Nymph lacks the sort of subtle playfulness that Weerasethakul uses to keep his audience engaged. Though very well acted and clearly well constructed, Nymph is certainly the least commercial film of Ratanaruang's career.

Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]

If Terrence Malick made a horror film this would probably be it - a moody Thai nature creeper about a metaphysical connection between a haunted forest and our human frailties - a film which teases us with traditional genre scare tactics but ultimately delivers only on it’s artistic and, thus, frustrating oblique tendencies.

Director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang tells us what kind of film we’re in for with his grandiose long take opening shot. He puts us in a Thai forest following a young girl pursued and ultimately raped by two young boys. The camera, which at first appears to be an observer, wanders through the forest with a human point of view, but when it cranes up into the air looking down on the two rapists now dead in a river we know there’s something ghostly at play. The shot lasts minutes and establishes a slow, languid pace and moody voyeuristic tone which becomes the language of the film.

Our hero is young May (Wanida Termthanaporn), a journalist who lives with her husband Nop (Jayanama Nopachai), a still photographer. Their ‘vacation’ happens to be that really creepy spirit-inhabited forest. Their vacation involves camping and walking around admiring the surreal architecture of the trees. Nop seems especially obsessed with one particular tree, a snaking Dali-like piece of organic art. Before long Nop disappears, leaving May alone in the jungle. Where did he go? Possessed by the forest? Why?

We’re appear to be in the cinema of minimalism here with very little happening in between the two or three distinct story beats, and so the picture pushes our patience to the max.

It’s all ambient noises and wandering camera moves until the 30mins mark when Nop is abducted. Ratanaruang doesn’t tell us much but when he reveals May’s extramarital affair with her boss, the film finally gives us some explanation to the near 45mins of obtuse build up. The pacing is so deliberate creating a strong sense of cerebral dread we desperately want the film to pay off and shock us into submission.

In a film festival like this there’s a point when we have to make a decision to stay or leave a film, especially when there’s 2 or 3 other films you could be seeing. The spirit of the forest, whether that’s Nymph or not, compels you to stay, the same spirit which entrances Nop slowly seeps into the audience. Ratanaruang does it all with sound, it’s a remarkable and complex design, echoing that Malick’s moodiness and David Lynch/Alan Splet’s horrific noises. The sounds of the jungle merge with the artificial ambient music and other weird ingredients, which blankets the entire film.

Visually, it’s mostly observational handheld work with a smattering of formal compositions. Ratanaruang manages to craft a number of impressive suspenseful moments, the most terrifying being the nighttime forest scenes which bring to mind the terror of darkness and absence of life which made ‘The Blair Witch Project’ so effective.

Unfortunately Ratanaruang keeps it all much to obtuse to make it a truly satisfying picture. The mixture of art and horror leaves us worn and torn and wanting more.

Nymph (2009, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) – Brandon's movie memory January 9, 2010

Nymph Directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang Kim Voynar from Movie City News

Notes on SFIFF 53: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's “Nymph” (2009) / Maren ... Benito Vergara from Film, Eyeballs, Brain

Jigsaw Lounge [Sheila Seacroft] Tallinn film-festival report

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]

Screen International (Lee Marshall) review

Matt Bochenski Little White Lies at Cannes

Top 10 Thai films of 2009 - Nationmultimedia.com Wise Kwai from The Nation, January 8, 2010

Nymph David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 21, 2009

Maggie Lee at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2009

Variety (Leslie Felperin) review at Cannes from Variety, May 21, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [4/5]

Ratliff, George

JOSHUA B 83

USA (105 mi) 2007

Another child from Hell flick, only this time with no supernatural references. Veering between the child horrors of ERASERHEAD, THE OMEN, and THE BAD SEED, 9-year old child prodigy Joshua is chillingly played by Jacob Kogan, a morbidly creepy little kid that wears a suit and tie even in his own home, a spoiled, over-privileged kid who his school teachers suggest could skip two grade levels due to his uncanny display of maturity and intelligence, a lethal combination for rich, clueless parents who continually get outmaneuvered by their own child at every turn, as their perception is not based on reality, but a perceived reality that’s supposed to exist, much of it only in their minds. They’re so busy falling all over themselves reveling in what a brilliant child they have, they crudely and obnoxiously disparage other parents and their more normal children, while continually overlooking Joshua’s obvious deficiencies, his utter lack of empathy, his lack of remorse, and his psychotic ability to tell a lie. When all the classroom animals mysteriously end up dead, the first of many calamities, the finger of blame is always pointed elsewhere. But the audience catches on pretty quickly in this flick, as Joshua ain’t no ordinary dude. He’s able to play classical piano, including an atonal improvisation in a school performance, an astonishing Mozartian feat, yet we never actually see him receive a piano lesson or fret the details of practicing. The trouble begins when his parents bring home his newborn little sister, where a detailed timeline develops, as Joshua’s activities escalate proportionately to the deterioration of the state of mind of each parent.

Taking place in an upscale Manhattan apartment, Sam Rockwell is terrific as the wealthy, businesslike, but happy go lucky dad who has an easy relationship with his kids, whose presence in the film is defined by announcing his arrival home from work, like Robert Young from FATHER KNOWS BEST, a banal, overly cheerful 50’s TV classic that is eerily converted here from a place of comfort and safety into a panic ridden Twilight Zone. At first it’s his wife, Vera Farmiga, whose horrifyingly grotesque and hysterical postpartum depression is off the charts, yet little is actually done to treat or alleviate her symptoms. The film displays such a glaringly unsympathetic and uncaring understanding of a newborn mother and instead exacerbates her depersonalization by accentuating the idea of the mechanized breast pump as literally sucking the life blood out of this woman. Strange industrial sounds emanate from the apartment above them, supposedly from rehab construction, but as no workmen are ever shown, and as Joshua’s evil handiwork is similarly never shown either, the presence of the sounds hovering above them more likely represents the unseen deteriorating mental breakdown, presented much like Charles Boyer’s attempt to drive Ingrid Bergman mad in GASLIGHT (1944). Similarly, the use of the baby monitor becomes a psychological weapon to terrorize the parents. So long as it continues to be activated by strange noises, the parents remain in a state of panic, most horrifically personified by the ceaseless ERASERHEAD-like crying noises coming from the baby.

Certainly one aspect that pushes Farmiga over the edge is Joshua’s sudden interest in his grandparent’s religious fundamentalism, a born-again Christian set of beliefs so at odds with her Jewish heritage that Joshua may as well have joined a cult. Again, the perception of religion is so glaringly distorted and unsympathetic, which along with a sadistic game of hide-and-seek-gone-wrong come to represent a psychological house of horrors, and in no time she is quietly shown to a room in a nearby psychiatric hospital where she can discover the wonders of psychotropic drugs. Dallas Roberts plays Joshua’s uncle, Farmiga’s Truman Capote-like brother, a calm, neutral, or male neutered, presence, seen almost like an old shawl that has been lying on the sofa for a number of years and has simply blended into the stratosphere. Joshua takes a liking to him as he represents no authoritative threat. Missing his wife, Rockwell plays an earlier home video, where there is mysterious unseen footage apparently shot by Joshua creeping into their bedroom at night while they slept, also into the bedroom of the baby where he may have choked her, which precipitated her unending crying spells. In response, Rockwell now locks the baby up with him at night and turns the apartment into a fortified zone protected against the evils that Joshua might do. Rockwell orders a visit from a mental health professional whose initial reading is to sympathize with Joshua, who is perceived as the victim of parental abuse, which turns this film upside down, as Rockwell tries to keep from sliding down a mysterious Alice in Wonderland drain where all rationality is lost, an illusory world controlled by the alleged evil perpetrated by a 9-year old child, a world, as Rod Serling used to say, “that exists only in The Twilight Zone.”

New York Magazine (David Edelstein)

George Ratliff, of the scared-straight documentary Hell House, turns to fictional spooks in his confident but thoroughly goofy fiction debut. Cribbing shamelessly from (or, more charitably, paying fervent homage to) Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, the movie stars Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga as wealthy Manhattan parents whose 9-year old son (Jacob Kogan) takes devilish exception to the looming arrival of a new sibling. In little-boy suits and menacing bowl cut, Kogan is the picture of eerie affectlessness; you can tell he's evil, because his hair never needs combing. Driven mad by a series of her son's implausibly clever tricks, Farmiga goes convincingly to pieces, showing the breadth if not the depth of her gifts, while Rockwell does his best to keep his eccentricities in check as a boyish hedge-fund whiz who never seems quite as mature as his son. Ratliff's grasp of scarum mechanics is assured, but mechanics is all the movie has. It's as unnerving as a windup toy.

George Ratliff’s Joshua is a pretentious, secular, art-house remake of The Omen. It centers on a demonic kid (Jacob Kogan) and the clueless parents (Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga) who suspect the truth too late—and when they do, can’t convince anyone they’re not nuts (and who thereby go nuts). The movie works on its own terms. It’s hard not to be creeped out as the boy hovers over his smiley infant sister, and by the bumps and changes of pitch on the parents’ baby monitor. (Those things are an endless source of anxiety, especially when they pick up stray signals; mine once broadcast a shrink telling a friend about what a lousy, inattentive therapist she’d been that week.) But the line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid. And if not Satan, what’s eating this kid? The most interesting question posed by Joshua—as well as by the charmingly improbable Swiss comedy Vitus—is whether the average affluent, ambitious parent (in Switzerland or on the Upper East Side) is more disturbed by the prospect of a gifted but deeply screwed-up child or a happy but average one. The answer in many cases might give even Joshua the willies.

The frayed nerves and emotional intensity (not to mention nonstop screaming and sleep deprivation) that accompany a baby's first days make it a natural and underutilized subject for a psychological thriller. In its superior first hour, Joshua, the narrative-feature debut of Hell House director George Ratliff, uses this charged, anxious period to create an atmosphere of unbearably raw tension. In an almost heroically non-narcissistic performance, Vera Farmiga stars as a mother suffering from one seriously hellacious case of postpartum depression. An agitated mess of a woman with nerves stretched tighter than piano wire, she's never more than seconds from breaking into tears or exploding with rage at a world that has devolved into a waking nightmare.

Sadly, Joshua isn't really about how a blessed event can double as a nightmarish ordeal. No, the film is really more concerned with the baby's older brother, a creepily precocious moppet, played with doe-eyed menace by Jacob Kogan, whose jealousy over the attention his newborn sibling receives soon turns sinister. The always-strong Sam Rockwell co-stars as Kogan's father, a boyish man who can't quite understand how an extroverted jock like himself could have spawned such an otherworldly, introverted child. Rockwell and Kogan's relationship is initially sketched with tenderness and vulnerability, but as the film devolves unadvisedly into standard horror-thriller territory, it becomes increasingly one-dimensional. The film follows suit.

Farmiga's recession from her household heralds the film's fall from a classy psychological thriller suffused with atmosphere and dread into one of those silly fright flicks about a child whose angelic visage masks a heart of pure evil. It isn't an encouraging sign when the Dave Matthews song playing over the end credits qualifies as the creepiest aspect of a film's third act. It's regrettable that Joshua veers into outlandish Omen/Bad Seed/Good Son territory when the real terror lies much closer to home.

The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror." So said the solemn hippie cannibals of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. And so it is with George Ratliff's Joshua, a nifty psychological thriller—part Bad Seed, part Rosemary's Baby—that deals in a manner both comic and creepy with the parental anxieties of a Manhattan haute yuppie family.

The birth of a baby triggers the tale. Mom (Vera Farmiga) and Dad (Sam Rockwell) are both severely stressed—she's a neurotic harridan, he's a happy-go-lucky hysteric. These parents are like kids themselves, while their nine-year-old son Joshua (Jacob Kogan) is a parody adult—stiff, unsmiling, always dressed in his private-school blazer and tie, curiously morbid, and alienated to the point of autism. "Do you ever feel weird, Dad?" he asks. "How do you feel about your weird son?" Weirdness is compounded by the supporting in-laws: Mom's bizarrely cheerful gay brother (Dallas Roberts) and Dad's stridently born-again mother (Celia Weston).

Young Josh is a compulsive piano-player, and his pounding at the keyboard sets the mood the way that "cool ghoul" John Zacherley did on the old TV show Chiller Theater. Josh's musical career peaks at a maliciously rendered private-school recital; his rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle" goes clamorously atonal before passing into performance art of an ominously visceral nature. Josh, who has a disquieting habit of just appearing, develops some strange nocturnal patterns, staying up all night watching home videos of his colicky baby self. This, just as the newbie goes on a five-day crying jag. Mom, who is already expressing her milk because of nursing difficulties, does not react well.

Ratliff renders this all with a suitably queasy visual style, using a wide-angle lens to deform the apartment space and further maul Farmiga's drawn features. As she gets crazier, so does her son— resolving to give away all his toys and embalm his pet panda. What with the strange noises emanating from the empty apartment upstairs, it's hard to tell who is the most disturbed member of the family— although it's understandable that Dad freaks out at the fate of the pet dog. Around the time Mom starts to hallucinate things coming through the ceiling, Grandma moves back in, announcing that Josh has found Jesus. "Too bad that his mother is a big fat Jew!" Mom screams, introducing a bit of religious conflict that remains tantalizingly underexplored.

So far, so good—for all the craziness, Joshua is still based largely on the power of suggestion and caginess as to which character is actually having the breakdown. But as Dad's hair grows progressively wilder and his speech less coherent, so does the narrative. Ratliff lost me with the introduction of a child psychologist who makes house calls and snap diagnoses. Still, it's refreshing to see a horror film based on adult anxieties: The terror of the baby cam can only be overcome by more terror.

Mike D'Angelo

The first discordant note in Joshua, George Ratliff’s spectacularly creepy tale of an affluent New York family in crisis, is neither sinister nor supernatural, and yet for some reason it puts you immediately on edge.

Hotshot hedge-fund analyst Brad Cairn (Sam Rockwell), cheering on his 9-year-old son Joshua (Jacob Kogan) at a Central Park soccer game, gets a phone call from his wife, Abby (Vera Farmiga), who’s just gone into labor. Yanking Josh from the field, he hurries out of the park and quickly spots an available cab pulling up on the opposite side of the street.

After dashing across, however, he turns to discover that Joshua hasn’t followed him. His son is just standing there on the opposite curb in his uniform and cleats, looking vaguely apprehensive. “C’mon, buddy, let’s go,” Brad yells, waving him over. Joshua dutifully takes one tentative step into the street, only to immediately step back when a car whizzes past. Ratliff cuts to black (and the film’s title) on the boy’s placid, I-think-I’m-fine-over-here gaze.

For obvious reasons, Fox Searchlight, which acquired Joshua at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, has chosen to sell the film as your basic bad-seed thriller, inviting audiences to watch a diabolical Damien clone skulk around a cavernous Manhattan apartment seeking creative ways to destroy his relatives. In truth, the movie does eventually arrive at that point, to its very slight detriment. But walk in unaware, as I did at Sundance, and you could easily mistake Joshua for a remarkably sharp, disquietingly offbeat family drama, exploring the fissures created by the introduction of a new baby to the Cairn household. Abby, who’d experienced severe postpartum depression nine years earlier, sees her moods start to violently swing once again. Brad’s born-again parents demand to know whether little Lily, unlike Joshua, will be baptized—oblivious to the feelings of their mother, a self-described (and decidedly secular) “big fat Jew.” And Josh, like most kids who suddenly find that they’re no longer the center of attention, begins acting out in his own nerd-prodigy fashion, playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in lieu of Bartok at a school recital and giving his toys away to the poor.

By the time Joshua develops a morbid fascination with Egyptian mummification, we’re unmistakably in horror territory, awaiting the inevitable body count. Even so, Ratliff jangles our nerves not with gore or with cheap “boo” effects (though Josh does possess the standard genre ability to abruptly appear from behind refrigerator doors and so forth), but via subtly dissonant editing and unsettlingly inexplicable behavior.

Scenes frequently end half a beat before you expect them to, while you’re still attempting to process something peculiar you’ve just glimpsed or barely heard. And while any old fright flick of this sort might mysteriously kill off the family dog, what chills you here is the way that Joshua, after observing his father’s outpouring of grief over the mutt’s forlorn remains, proceeds to mimic Dad’s every word and gesture in an obscene simulacrum of mourning. That it’s not clear whether Josh intends this performance as cruel mockery, or whether he’s simply incapable of expressing emotions he hasn’t learned by rote, only makes you empathize with Brad’s look of incredulous disgust.

Sadly, Sam Rockwell won’t even be mentioned when critics and pundits start floating possible Best Actor candidates at year’s end, though I can’t imagine anybody equaling his flash-free portrait of a genial doofus determined to love a child who, as Brad admits at a parent-teacher conference, is exactly the kind of kid he himself would have bullied and tormented in school.

“You’re my boy, I’ll always love you,” Dad assures an insecure Joshua early on; by the film’s black-comic final act, however, father and son regularly sit on opposite sides of the kitchen or family room, locked in mutually distrustful stare-downs. Joshua exploits a rarely acknowledged fear: that your child will turn out to resemble you in no way whatsoever. Which makes its truly bizarre denouement—a piano duet between the newly liberated Joshua and his favorite uncle, Ned (Dallas Roberts), a rather swishy musical-theater composer—that much more daring. Most movies wouldn’t even acknowledge a straight couple’s unspoken, perhaps guilty wish for their offspring, much less detonate it.

Joshua Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot, June 29, 2007

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)

DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron)

Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review

New York Times (registration req'd) Jeannette Catsoulis

Ratman, Mani

From the Heart: the Films of Mani Ratnam Pat Padua from CineScene

DIL SE…

India (163 mi) 1998 ‘Scope

The Illuminated Lantern Peter Nepstad

Amar (Shahrukh Khan), a reporter for All India radio, goes on assignment to Kashmir, and on the way falls in love with Meghna (Manisha Koirala), a girl who refuses to open up and rebuffs all his efforts, and may be involved with terrorists. He doesn't give up: some might call it true love, I call it harassment, but whatever. By Intermission, she is gone, and with it his heart. The second act involves a potential arranged marriage for Amar with a sophisticated urban girl (Preity Zinta), and a planned terrorist attack in New Delhi. A movie that dares pose the question (and I quote): "Which is more important, our love or terrorism?" The music is among the best I've heard (and am considering buying the soundtrack), but in the structure of the film, the songs are all inserted as basically dream sequences that do nothing to advance the plot, which massively undercuts the emotion of the music and leaves you feeling like you've paused the movie for a moment to watch some MTV. The ending of the movie feels tacked on and dream-like. Strange to say when talking about a Bollywood film, but they could have used more time to end it properly.

Planet Bollywood - Film Review Anish Khanna

It is indeed a case of truth proving stranger than fiction with the release of a film on terrorism at the very height of a global terrorist scare. One would think that this fact could only aid "Dil Se" by heightening the impact on the audience. Unfortunately, this is not the case. "Dil Se" is a valiant effort on Mani Ratnam's part but gets lost somewhere along the way in a weak screenplay and sketchy characterizations.

The first half of "Dil Se" relies more on images than a solid screenplay, but Santosh Sivan's camera work is simply stunning and perhaps the best I've ever witnessed on the Hindi screen. Every image is like a celluloid poem and thus very effective. "Chaiya Chaiya", "Dil Se", and "Satrangi Re" are some of the most aesthetically pleasing songs ever shot. The locations are gorgeous! Mr. Sivan single-handedly holds the audience's interest despite the fact that they are left to contend with the very drawn out interactions between Amar (Shahrukh) and a cold, lifeless caricature called "Meghna" (Manisha).

Amar is on a terrorist interview assignment for All-India Radio somewhere in a northern territory, where he keeps bumping into "Meghna" (which she says is not even her real name). Despite repeated attempts to get close to Meghna, all Amar really finds himself in is trouble, and after being ditched by Meghna, Amar quickly returns to his family in Delhi and an engagement to the frank and outspoken Preity (Preity Zinta). The audience then learns that Meghna is a terrorist.

The script completely falls apart after intermission. Manisha's character waxes and wanes between acting human and acting for her terrorist cause, but with no real pattern or logic to her actions. One minute she will feel guilty about using Shahrukh in order that she may be incognito in Delhi, while the next minute she doesn't bat an eyelid when he's arrested or in danger. Her breakdown scenes seem extremely forced into the script, and the only reason why these scenes prove even somewhat effective is because Manisha is and remains a phenomenal actress, even in an improperly-defined part like this. The sequence where she tries to cry but the tears won't come out is mind-blowing, and no other actress could have portrayed this scene as well.

Shahrukh's character talks forever about how much he loves Manisha, but his "love" really has no reason to be anything more than infatuation and intrigue. Not once do you have reason to suspect otherwise. Again, Shahrukh does the best one can do with his role, but the redundancy and ignorant nature of the part work against him. The chase sequence towards the end shows a new, diversely intense side to Mr. Khan's acting. Preity Zinta, in the brief but welcome appearance as a real 90's woman, has a gol-matol face and child-woman quality reminiscent of the late Divya Bharti.

What was the message Mani Ratnam was trying to portray with this film? If he wants us to see how the mind of a terrorist works, he failed, as I could never tell what Meghna's pattern of thought was. If it was a statement on the futility of terrorism, the statement is incomplete as we never find out if the assassination plan is carried out by the terrorist group. If it is a statement on love vs. warfare, I don't believe it, because - again - I have no reason to believe that Meghna loves Amar or that Amar is more than infatuated with Meghna. Maybe if Mani highlighted Meghna's transition more from stoic terrorist to sensitive lover, it would be more plausible. Her action at the very end (one that supposedly proves her love for him) seems to come out of the blue. One moment Meghna is telling her group leader how confident she feels about their terrorist plan, and the next moment she gives up the whole terrorist thing by making her final "act of love" to be with Amar.

I was very sad and disappointed by this film. Mani Ratnam's strengths are always his intensely-filmed sequences and the portrayal of relationships between people. This film had several great sequences, but the relationship aspect was lacking. This is especially disappointing after we have just seen "Maachis", which excellently portrayed the humanity and love of terrorists. A film that had the potential to be in the league of some of the best cinema ever ends up falling flat on its face. If it weren't for Manisha and Shahrukh's excellent performances and Santosh Sivan's unbelievably good cinematography, I would give this film a much, much lower rating. Ironically, with a title like "Dil Se", the film loses its heart somewhere along the way.

Rediff - Weekend Watch: Dil Se (Oct 2005) Raja Sen

Dil se Philip Lutgendorf from Philip’sfil-ums

Bollywood Film Reviews

Subway Cinema

Planet BollyBob Reviews

David M. Arnold

A PECK ON THE CHEEK B+ 92

India (136 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

Paraphrasing from film critic Patrick McGavin, Ratman is a disciple of the great Indian director Satyajit Ray, who made lyrical, poetic movies about the inner lives of children, most famously PATHER PANCHALI. His genius was refusing to sentimentalize his subjects’ lives, making their sense of discovery both vivid and complex. Ratman has a ravishing eye for detail. With the help of cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran, the screen is alive with fantastic compositions, stunning natural landscapes and saturated colors. Apparently, this movie was inspired by a Time magazine article about an American couple who took their daughter to the Philippines to meet her biological mother. In Bollywood films, it’s rare to invoke such realistic political content, but the presence of music throughout is a given, balancing the mood and imagery with a poetic inner world of its own, in this film, very tastefully done by A. R. Rahman.

After a slowly developing opening sequence where a couple is separated by war, where the husband proclaims he refuses to have a child until there is peace in his country, the credits appear, followed by a swirling series of narratives that are impressive in their ability to completely shift the central characters while retaining the same intense mood and focus, reeling in the audience with a combination of spectacular musical numbers, as seen through the world of a 9-year old child (P.S. Keerthana), abandoned at birth in a refugee camp, adopted by a loving professional family, who explain they are not her real mother and father on her 9^th birthday. This sends the already precocious girl into inquisitive overdrive, becoming obsessed with the idea of meeting her birth mother, running away twice, until the father agrees to help his daughter find her. The search sends this peaceful, middle class threesome into the ravaged war zone of Sri Lanka, which is fighting a bloody civil war, including hideous acts of terrorism, where girls her same age are carrying rifles and risking their lives, the same circumstances that led to the girl’s abandonment at birth. Nothing has changed. After being caught in a blistering crossfire where they are lucky to escape with their lives, the calm after the storm allows an opening where a mysterious reunion takes place. Only in the last few moments does the film change its realist tone, as the burning reality of war and despair is replaced by an artificially contrived, emotionally overblown ending.

A Peck on the Cheek Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

About an 8 or a 9 for the first hour, during which fantastic kid-centric song-and-dance numbers brush up against finely wrought details of middle-class domestic life in Madras. But then, the film develops whiplash as it becomes a melodrama about the plight of Tamil rebels in the Sri Lankan civil war. It’s not just that this literal shotgun wedding of frivolity and seriousness doesn’t work. It relies on preposterous lapses in narrative logic (most obviously, would a loving father take his family into a war zone just to allow his adopted daughter to meet her birth-mother?) which undercut the film’s strengths. All the same, Ratnam is clearly in control of his medium, and I look forward to checking out other films by him.

MyBindi.com [Amreen]

Upon entering the theatre to view a Mani Ratnam film, one has certain expectations: a riveting story, breathtaking cinematography, a pulsating score, and well-defined, complex characters. A lot to ask of a film, you may say, but not when it comes to Ratnam.

Mani Ratnam is one of the few Indian filmmakers, others include Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, and Mira Nair, who is recognized both artistically and commercially in India. His films fit into the Bollywood genre, yet also possess the depth and complexity which liken them to art-house cinema. Like many of his films, A Peck on the Cheek uses contemporary politics as a background to familial and romantic relationships. The extreme circumstances of war and terroristic activity bring families and individuals to situations where raw emotion comes to the surface.

Peck, a Tamil film subtitled in English, begins with the fairy-tale marriage of two Sri Lankan youths, the beautiful and innocent Madhavan (Nandita Das) and Dileepan, a committed activist opposed to the invasion and military dictatorship in his country. Their nuptial bliss is shattered prematurely when Dileepan runs away to oppose the military and leaves Madhavan alone and pregnant in a refugee camp.

Here, the film shifts to the domestic bliss of another family in Chennai. Indra (Simran) and Thiru (Madhavan) are the proud parents of three boisterous children. Of the three kids, Amudha (P.S. Keerthana), the effervescent eight-year old daughter, is the shining light in the family. Amudha is charming, intelligent and perceptive enough to know how to wrap her parents around her petite fingers. The most spectacular musical number in the film revolves around Amudha and her schoolfriends and pays tribute to the beauty, energy and innocence of children of that age.

Above the happiness of Thiru's family lies a shadow of the past: Amudha is adopted; she is the abandoned child of Madhavan and Dileepan. Thiru and Indra, liberal educated parents who raise their children with respect and integrity, tell Amudha the truth about her birth. Amudha responds with a multitude of emotions, beautifully captured by Keerthana, a sixth-grade student with no previous training or experience as an actress. Amudha's emotional deluge culminates in a desire to find her mother and confront her with questions. Thiru decides to attempt to fulfill Amudha's wish, knowing that in order for his family to move on, he will need to banish the ghosts of the past and give closure to his daughter's angst.

The final phase of the film takes the audience back to war-torn Sri Lanka where Ratnam places Thiru's family in the midst of political and ethnic strife. Suicide bombers, children with guns, and ravaged homes and villages colour the screen as the audience becomes witness to the savagery that has become routine in our times. What shines on the screen is the love between parent and child; Thiru and Indra are willing to face anything for the happiness of their child and it is this love that carries the entire film. The audience shares Amudha's pain and longing for her mother as the family combs rural Sri Lanka looking for a trace of the elusive Madhavan.

Unlike most Bollywood films, where many of the song sequences chronicle romantic love, Peck's songs passionately address parental love and childhood fantasy. The multi-talented A.R. Rehman has produced a joyous soundtrack for the film; the various melodies correspond perfectly to the changing moods and desires of the characters, and Rehman has incorporated the traditional Sri Lankan "bayla" beat into his music to capture a true Sri Lankan feeling. Peck is a breathtaking cinematic achievment that takes the viewer on a sensual and emotional journey. In this film, Ratnam succeeds in creating a film with mainstream appeal while illustrating true artistic genius. Bravo!

Kannathil Muthamittal (A Peck on the Cheek) | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere

India Together Lalitha Sridhar

DVD Talk (Don Houston)

MyBindi.com [Steve Gravestock]

DVD Reviewer Shahran Audit

Chennai Online Malini Mannath

San Francisco Chronicle [Jonathan Curiel]

YUVA

India (160 mi) 2004 ‘Scope

Yuva Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

SPOILER WARNING. Ratnam is one of Indian cinema's oddballs. Usually working in Tamil (his native tongue) rather than the standard Hindi, he's also tended to create bizarre, fascinating hybrid films, shoehorning political content into the Bollywood formula. The three other Ratnam films I've seen have all been near-misses, since he didn't find a way to keep his tonal shifts and cross-purposes from centrifugally unravelling the films. (Cf. A Peck on the Cheek, with its implausible melodramatic touches alongside doctrine-spouting, all-singing, all-dancing Tamil Tigers.) Yuva (Ratnam's first mostly-Hindi film since Dil Se) is the most fully-realized, structurally complex work I've seen from Ratnam. Part of its strength as cinema comes from the fact that Ratnam has recognized the unlikelihood of a complete synthesis of his ambitions and integrates this problem into the construction of the work. Yuva begins with dizzying cross-cutting between multiple, as-yet-unintroduced characters, hurtling toward a pivotal event that brings the three principals together. Then, we enter a tripartite structure that provides the backstory for each. But this isn't just a nifty directorial trick. Ratnam ever-so-subtly codes each of the three segments with a distinct directorial and writing style. The first is a gangster tale, crisply directed and paced, shorn of the stilted performances frequently endemic to Bollywood gunplay epics. (In overall tone and approach, it reminded me of City of God.) The second part follows a student activist as he tries to unseat a corrupt local politician. This segment is most of a piece with Ratnam's usual style, foregrounding hard-hitting political content and the random violence that the elites use to confuse and frighten the peasantry. The third segment is full-on Bollywood, showcasing a lovestruck playboy who can't move to America as planned after meeting Kareena Kapoor in a club. While the first two sections incorporated music (all by the peerless A. R. Rahman) in a rather subdued fashion, part three has synchronized dancing, a silly number at the beach, a token genre nod to generational conflict -- in short, it's a frivolous, well-crafted entertainment. Each segment features the characters from the other two in background roles, recalling Belvaux's Trilogy without the ostentatiousness. All three character-studies are of equal quality, which makes it all the more disappointing that Ratnam concludes the film with a 30-minute integrative coda. Yuva loses steam at this point, and the narrative wrap-up feels labored and a tad awkward, a bit of a backslide to the structural difficulties of Ratnam's earlier work. But I don't want to overstate the coda's faults; it's merely okay whereas the first 120 minutes of Yuva are awesome. One final thought -- Ratnam's earlier work has been overly ambitious, and as a result has felt overstuffed. But there was always a devotion to very specific social, political, and ethnic problems. Yuva is an altogether more elegant film, skillful, exacting, yet breezy. (Some critics' comparisons to MTV are appropriate for the third section but otherwise off-base.) But Ratnam's new-found assurance as a director ironically comes in a film where political matters are toned down and generalized; it's about an election, not a revolution. I'm optimistic, however, that Ratnam will continue to find new ways to keep his dialectic in motion.

Upperstall

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GURU

India (166 mi) 2007 ‘Scope

Rediff On The NeT (Raja Sen)

GURU is a handsomely produced but cumbersome film based on the life of Indian rags-to-riches businessman Dhirubhai Ambani.

Co-written and directed by Mani Ratnam (director of the infinitely better YUVA), GURU is unambitious in its narrative structure and thematic material. It follows a young man as he leaves his small Indian village and learns his trade in the markets of Istanbul. Cue a credibility-busting "item number" involving excruciating belly-dancing from Mallika Sherawat. Composer A.R.Rahman should know better too. Guru returns to India and marries a disabled girl, ostensibly in order to get the money to stake his business. He starts a cloth trading company, successfully breaking up the corrupt local bosses with the help of a local crusading journalist. Before long he is running one of the biggest companies in India, if not the world. Naturally, there is some bribery, some corruption, some adversity, some triumph over adversity. And then it's over. But nowhere do we have the kind of emotional exploration that we see in a film like GODFATHER II - another film about a powerful but corrupt man.

With the nicely drawn visuals offset by the weak narrative in the second half of the film, do the performances tip this into a must-see movie? Basically, no. The movie stars Bollywood's Brangelina, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai as the businessman and his wife respectively. Bachchan has done better work, not least in YUVA. Rai returns to her plastic big-Bollywood persona - a million miles away from her early performances in art-house movies CHOKHER BALI and RAINCOAT. The talented Madhavan, Mithun Chakraborty and Vidya Balan are good in the supporting cast, but this is small recompense in a near-three-hour slog.

Guru Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I'm a fan of Mani Ratnam. I still firmly believe that he's not only one of the two or three best directors in the Indian film industry, but an underrated master of world cinema, worthy of consideration outside the typical frameworks / excuses one tends to use when assessing Bollywood. Granted, I have yet to fall madly in love with one of Ratnam's pictures (although with Yuva I came awfully close). But in the four features of his I've seen, his direction has always been muscular and unconventional, forging a fascinating combination of the spectacular and the gritty. Gliding crane shots, wide angles, and bold color schemes collide with the grizzled skin of laborers, the thick dust of hinterland slums. Working with equal skill in Bollywood and in his native Madras, always employing his keen intelligence to subvert the slick demands of industrial entertainment, Ratnam still strikes me as the great hope for contemporary Indian popular cinema to leave something of lasting cinematic value. That's why Guru is such a stunning disappointment. Essentially a rags-to-riches epic about a bumpkin turned polyester magnate (Abhishek Bachchan) and the marriage of convenience that becomes a passionate love affair (the fact that it's with Aishwarya Rai no doubt helps), Guru is a nonsensical libertarian hybrid of Citizen Kane and Scarface, except that Ratnam clearly wants us to think Bachchan's Gurukant Desai is one swell captain of industry and a true son of India. If only there were more guys like him -- self-made, driven, incapable of hearing the word 'no,' and willing to stop at nothing to succeed. In the logic of Guru, Gurukant's ruthless entrepreneurial vigor is good for the nation, simply because his polyester business, Shakti Corporation (the goddess Shakti represents "power," by the way) is a publicly-held concern. That's right! Since Indian investors could buy into Guru's company, and since he built it without any substantial Western investment, his Enron-style rise to the top is allegedly an inspiration to us all. So what, the film claims, if he cuts some corners, like paying taxes or refraining from securities fraud? The Indian government is so hopelessly corrupt, only a renegade corporation helmed by a flamboyant, ballsy CEO can save the country from squalor. (Guru is sort of a Ross Perot / Donald Trump / Ted Turner type of fellow, but by the time he delivers his egregious courtroom tirade, you'd be forgiven for thinking Ollie North.) No Mani Ratnam film could ever be completely without merit; little grace notes like a Rai song-and-dance interrupted by a nighttime escape by bicycle, or an extended series of small flashbacks as the Desais return to the home of their salad days, sharply remind you of Ratnam's talent. But even on the level of pure skill, Guru is lacking, with lapses in exposition and emotional truth that are beneath not only Ratnam but Bollywood itself. Granted, having the severely limited Abhishek as your leading man cuts you off at the knees somewhat. It's jarring how much he looks like his father yet commands none of the Amitabh charisma. But in all honesty, I doubt anything could have made this project less of a slog. For the most part, Guru finds the director swallowed whole by incoherent ideology. If you think you'd be interested in a movie that plays like a two-and-a-half hour infomercial for the Democratic Leadership Council's new Mumbai office, put Guru in your Netflix queue immediately. Otherwise, check out Yuva, Dil se . . ., Bombay, and A Peck on the Cheek and see the master in top form.

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Ray, Billy

SHATTERED GLASS B+ 91

USA (99 mi) 2003

Probing, well-crafted look at the erudite tradition of journalism, that, in detailing the fall of Stephen Glass, one of The New Republic's real-life rising stars until he was found to be doctoring stories, really examines the nature of the truth, and how difficult it is to know it when you see it, as unembellished, it's never so attractive as the juiced up versions that are swirling around the newsstands dressed up and posing as the truth. Wonderfully written, with multiple stories within the story, it takes a wonderful turn when the wheels start to spin out of control and the slow, laborious investigative process begins to unravel some of these ingenious fabrications. Terrific performance by the low-key editor, played by Peter Sarsgaard, who keeps his head, while reality as he knows it, takes him for a ride.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Shattered Glass (2003) Edward Lawrenson from Sight and Sound, June 2004

Shattered Glass Gerald Peary

BREACH B 88

USA (110 mi) 2007

This film is a character study of the man accused of the largest intelligence security breach in the history of the United States, which is announced in early 2001 newsreel footage by then Attorney General John Ashcroft in the opening moments of the film. A humorous aside at the FBI headquarters is witnessing the workers pull down the wall portraits of President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno and replace them with Bush and Ashcroft. The date is a few months preceding 9/11, a little event that has been lost or dwarfed by the more publicly scrutinized terrorist attacks inside our country. None of that has happened yet when this film takes place, so most is told in flashback. Chris Cooper coolly and calmly plays Robert Hanssen, who in real life is now serving a life sentence for selling security secrets to Russia and for also causing the deaths of several other agents, a brainy, highly skilled, extremely low profile 35-year veteran CIA operative who feels the FBI has taken all the credit and glory, suggesting the FBI higher ups come from a gun culture where they actually capture the bad guys, instead of the more behind the scenes nature of CIA intelligence gathering. Hanssen feels comfortable gathering information and has earned a reputation as not only highly intelligent, but a man who knows how to operate even while he’s aware he’s being watched and under investigation himself.

Ironically, the FBI initially placed Hanssen in charge of overseeing the whole operation searching for a mole within the CIA who was believed to be releasing top secret government information. The search was impeccably run, using the highest standards of professionalism, yet of course it uncovered nothing. Eventually, working behind closed quarters with fifty or so agents working tirelessly to gather evidence against Hanssen, eventually placing a new FBI recruit, the boyish looking Ryan Phillippe, to clerk for Hanssen, reporting his every move to his superior, Laura Linney, in another one of her tough as nails roles. Hanssen himself turns out to be a highly focused, well educated and likeable man filled with Catholic conservative values to the core, yet he’s suspected of harboring ventures into pedophilia. Caroline Dhavernas plays Phillippe’s East German wife, who suspects Hanssen of crude behavior from the outset, as the holier than thou Hanssen pressures his clerk and his young wife to become more devout Catholics, casting more than mere suggestions that the foreign born wife is somehow not American enough to be the wife of an FBI agent. This, and the secret nature of Phillippe’s assignment, which he can’t discuss, throws them both into a culture of secrecy and professional liars, where the CIA and the Bureau are constantly undermining the credibility of the other agency, suspecting them not just of disloyalty, but of disservice to their country. Hanssen’s superior views reach a level of arrogance that he is untouchable by the hacks at the Bureau and that he shouldn’t even waste his time following protocol. The film does an excellent job creating this quagmire of suspicion, all within the cold veneer of the top law enforcement and intelligent gathering officers in the nation. Despite the somber setting, there is plenty of humor in this film, as Hanssen has a very distinctive way of describing his inflammatory and intolerant views of others.

Phillippe is initially met with suspicion, but Hanssens grows fond of his young protégé, brutally challenging him on occasion to the point where he is ready to jump ship, and ponders quitting the agency, as he grows fond of Hanssen’s outspokenness, his lack of pretense, and finds his assignment an insult to the man’s professionalism and intelligence. When the truth about his 20+ years of treasonous activities are finally revealed to him, however, Phillippe acknowledges he missread Hanssen terribly, but no more so than he missread Linney, whose suspicions of Hanssen were thought to be totally unfounded. When the cracks around Hanssen’s veneer start to break, it feels unlikely, especially within two month’s of his targeted retirement, so his unravelling, though barely noticed by others, takes center stage, revealing a lapse in his stability and judgment, exacerbated by the lone feeling that the world is closing in on him. Hanssen’s conflict really isn’t with the US government, which he apparently sneers at and disdains, but with his faith, where he feels twisted inside like a pretzel, finding it hard to rationalize his actions to a higher power. The psychological isolation of both men is very effective, and their likeable congeniality with one another feels genuinely unforced, with an intelligent script that grows more gripping as the plot unfolds, reminiscent of the 1987 film NO WAY OUT, where each side tries to outsmart the other, leading their bait into a mouse trap. What doesn’t feel authentic is Philippe’s supposed manipulation of Hanssen, who has clearly out maneuvered and outsmarted everyone around him. Despite the fact it actually happened, it still feels surprising that such a seasoned professional would allow himself to fall into this trap so close to his regularly planned exit strategy. It’s almost as if he wanted to get caught, that his capture was intentional, perhaps a sacrificial lamb crying out for help from the intelligence community. Knowing what has taken place in the woefully inadequate intelligence gathering in our recent military ventures in the Middle East, perhaps Hanssen was on to something.

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Having established himself as a screenwriter well before making his directorial debut with Shattered Glass, a compelling account of Stephen Glass' fabulist antics at New Republic, Billy Ray has an unusual devotion to the page. He makes what could be called "screenwriters' movies," where the no-frills storytelling approach makes up in true-to-life detail and characterization what it lacks in visual panache. His new thriller Breach, a gripping tale about the most devastating security breach in U.S. history, goes at its business with a refreshing lack of pretense, all the better to capture the gray bureaucracy that makes FBI headquarters seem like every other drab office building. In the process, Breach nearly suggests that Robert Hanssen—an enigmatic agent who sold secrets to the Russians for a good chunk of his 25-year tenure with the bureau—committed treason as a relief from the dull, windowless banality that nags at the average cubicle-dweller.

Mere months before his capture, the FBI dispatched agent-in-training Eric O'Neill (played by Ryan Phillippe) to clerk for Hanssen (Chris Cooper) and gather information about how he spent his days. In the film, O'Neill is told only about Hanssen's alleged sexual deviance, not about his more relevant extracurricular activities, which the bureau had been following for a while. Though Hanssen greets his young charge with paranoid suspicion, O'Neill takes a liking to his mark, and joins Hanssen and his wife on outings to a conservative Roman Catholic church with ties to Opus Dei. When his superior (Laura Linney) finally lets him in on the truth, O'Neill has to overcome his ambivalence and help capture his exceptionally smart, wily target.

As Hanssen, Cooper gives shape to a rich, contradictory character, one who seems genuinely devoted to God and country, even after it's revealed that he's compromised himself on both fronts. The main problem with Breach is that the story is told through O'Neill, who's far less compelling, in part because Phillippe doesn't have the chops to draw out his own set of contradictions. By committing himself to O'Neill's perspective, Ray misses the opportunity to uncover more information about Hanssen's relationship with his wife and church, his aberrant sexuality, and his mysterious connection to the Russians. But to a certain extent, perhaps it's best that Ray leaves so much to suggestion: Hanssen was enigmatic even to those closest to him, and Breach does well not to explain away his motives. Much like the young villain's eyes in Shattered Glass, Ray's impression of the real Hanssen remains frighteningly opaque.

Mike D'Angelo

Billy Ray has made only two movies, but so far he's batting 1.000 when it comes to performing miracles. Shattered Glass, his feature debut, somehow transformed a fairly inconsequential case of journalistic malfeasance into one of the most gripping cat-and-mouse sagas in recent memory. Ultimately, Stephen Glass' invented anecdotes harmed nothing save for The New Republic's reputation; in the film, however, one reporter's desperate attempts to cover his ass seem freighted with world-shaking significance. So when Ray's sophomore effort, Breach, turned out to tackle genuinely seismic secrets and lies—namely, the FBI's sting operation against Robert Hanssen, one of its own agents, who spent 20 years funneling intelligence to the former Soviet Union—anticipation ran high among fans of espionage thrillers. This time, however, Ray has taken an inherently momentous subject and somehow transformed it into a banal, drably bureaucratic study in cranky constipation. Hanssen's crimes compromised U.S. national security and cost a number of lives, yet Breach manages only a small fraction of the tension and anxiety induced by Glass' comparatively paltry trangressions. Very strange.

Opening with John Ashcroft's February 2001 press conference announcing Hanssen's capture, Breach flashes back only a few months, to the point at which the Feds lured Hanssen (Chris Cooper) to Washington to head an imaginary new department and installed untested surveillance operative Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) as his make-believe assistant. Initially, O'Neill knows nothing of Hanssen's spy activity—his superior, Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney, wasted in a colorless role), tells Eric only that Hanssen is a sexual deviant whose predilection for hookers and Internet porn could embarrass the branch. Even when O'Neill learns the whole truth, however, he finds it nearly impossible to reconcile the Bureau's charges with the sternly principled, devoutly religious man he's been observing. Crisis of conscience? Not really: O'Neill swallows hard, makes one Oscar-clip speech, and then sets about stealing Hanssen's Palm Pilot. For better and (mostly) worse, Breach sticks close to what actually happened; when Hanssen finally goes down, after making one last drop at a park near his Virginia home, our hero isn't even there.

Part of the problem with Breach may be that its antagonist comes across as so much more formidable than his pursuer. It's easy to imagine Phillippe, whose mannequin features practically define callow, as Stephen Glass, squirming in the steely-eyed gaze of his suspicious editor. (Hayden Christensen, a similarly limited actor, did a workmanlike job in the role.) O'Neill, however, is at once the scrutinizer and the scrutinized, keeping tabs on Hanssen while maintaining his own cover opposite an expert in the art of deception, and Phillippe never seems quite sure whether he's supposed to be intrepid or apprehensive. Cooper eats him alive, and to the extent that the film works, it functions primarily as a character study of this deeply weird individual, who evidently harbored no ill will against the United States and was paid a pittance for his information—not much more than a million dollars over more than two decades. Why did he do it? Cooper cannily suggests a superiority complex gone haywire, making Hanssen the kind of guy for whom every fleeting interaction becomes a contest of wills.

Actually, the most compelling conflict in Breach pits Hanssen against his God. He may have been a traitor and a perv, but his devotion to the Catholic church was no act, and while the film's attempts at ticking-clock suspense mostly fall flat, Ray does manage to eke considerable ironic pathos from the way that O'Neill repeatedly uses Hanssen's noblest instincts against him. Whenever the younger agent finds himself backed into a corner, he experiences an abrupt crisis of faith—an ethically dubious ploy that penetrates Hanssen's otherwise impregnable emotional fortress without fail. It's a bit like flushing out a terrorist by deliberately starving kittens outside his front door; were Phillippe remotely capable of expressing the inner turmoil such a betrayal of trust would likely engender, Breach might have found a psychological fissure well worth exploring.

In December 2002, ABC's 20/20 ran a story on Eric O'Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled "Spycatcher," because it was O'Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than two decades, sold thousands of secrets to the Russian government. FBI agents told ABC that O'Neill was but a bit player in the Hanssen investigation; there were 500 others on the case, which was personally run by FBI director Louis Freeh. But none of them were situated inside Hanssen's office and ordered to steal his Palm Pilot and download all the KGB contacts stashed therein. And none of them have had movies made about how they helped arrest "a traitor of unparalleled dimension," as David Vise wrote in his book The Bureau and the Mole.

O'Neill, played by dead ringer Ryan Phillippe in Billy Ray's low-key Breach, was Hanssen's photonegative—a baby-faced go-getter trying to work his way up the ranks, a kid who loved his former job as an alleyway shadow trailing suspected terrorists. Hanssen, on the other hand, was a burned-out veteran who, as early as 1980, had grown bitter toward the agency, which he considered full of Neanderthals who didn't understand or appreciate his genius. Hanssen wasn't merely a traitor, he was also a thrill-seeker, an Opus Dei–dreaming Catholic with a penchant for strippers and a thing for posting to the Web sexually explicit fantasies about his wife Bonnie.

Breach, which details Hanssen's final days as a turncoat, plays like a sequel of sorts to Billy Ray's last film, Shattered Glass, about the fabulist Stephen Glass, fired from The New Republic for proffering fiction as fact. Only this time, Ray need not stretch too far to give his story weight; he need not remind people that "The New Republic is the in-flight magazine of Air Force One" in order to justify telling the story of a twerp who did some egregious shit. This is the FBI we're talking about, and Hanssen, played here by Chris Cooper with stolid, brute force, was a certified bad man—and a mesmerizing one as well, despite his being known as "The Mortician" within the bureau for his deadly dull demeanor. Cooper plays him as history has portrayed him: a sneering, self-righteous counterintelligence genius whose Nowhere Man exterior belied a darker truth.

Phillippe, up to now seeming like a minor-leaguer swinging a small stick in the bigs, is perfectly cast as O'Neill, who got lost in bureau offices the first day he was assigned to work undercover as Hanssen's assistant. He positively shrinks in Cooper's estimable presence; there are moments when you forget he's even in the scene. Everyone in the film, including O'Neill's direct supervisor, Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney), speaks to him like he's incapable of deep thought. Initially, Burroughs even lies to O'Neill when giving him the assignment, telling him that Hanssen's under surveillance because he's a sexual deviant, not a man giving the names of U.S. spies to the Russians so they can kill them.

Like the inferior The Good Shepherd, whose release late last year caused Universal to bump Breach to the February graveyard, this is a spy movie bereft of the genre's usual, casual kicks. It's not interested in cheap thrills or playing gotcha with the audience. (Which isn't to say parts of it aren't exhilarating: The scene during which Hanssen's colleague spirits him off to the gun range so O'Neill can steal the Palm Pilot is boilerplate suspense but effective.) But Ray's more interested in dissecting the relationship between O'Neill and Hanssen, who resists the kid initially but then takes him in as one of his own, insisting that they go to church together and inviting him into his home. As his affection for the boy grows, Hanssen ends up trusting the last person on earth he ever should have.

The movie does not and cannot hide its ending. The finale is referenced in the very first scene, when John Ashcroft speaks to the media about Hanssen's 2001 arrest near a footbridge in a Virginia park, where he was dropping off a cache of documents for his KGB contacts. But Ray, a storyteller in love with liars he wants to hate but cannot, doesn't need a surprise ending. The real one's heartbreaking enough: a tragic love story between the ticked-off traitor who thought he'd found a kindred spirit and the true believer who didn't want to admit that his father figure was one of the world's most dangerous men.

The House Next Door (Travis Mackenzie Hoover)

While rebuking a wayward FBI spook, one of Breach’s characters says, "The whys are not important," a statement that sums up the strengths and limitations of this so-so espionage thriller. It epitomizes a film that is task- and not character-oriented, implying that personal motives and psychological make-up are of no ultimate importance in the face of massive and deadly crimes. Not only does the film use this statement as both a narrative and political strategy, it also adopts it as a moral point of view. Breach doesn't ask questions about the deviousness of American foreign policy, nor does it delve into the psychological makeup of the schizoid personality at its center -- it just gives us a mouse to catch, and we hope that the hero is up to the challenge. The film is surprisingly absorbing on this level, but it’s also good enough to give you a whiff of the more complex movie that might have been.

Wannabe agent Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) is sent to work with FBI stalwart Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), initially, he's told, to sniff out the older man’s “sexual deviancy.” Yet O’Neill finds no trace of perversion: Hanssen is an ultra-conservative, arch-Catholic, super-pious rock of a man and O'Neill is nearly tricked into blind admiration until the full extent of Hanssen's rap sheet is revealed. Aside from being a sicko, Hanssen has, in his 25 years at the bureau, also perpetrated the largest security breach in US history. Numerous American agents have died for Hanssen's sins and, with his retirement fast approaching, he’s about to get away scot-free. O'Neill is recruited to catch him in the act of espionage and expose his crimes. With that, the race is on.

To be sure, there are minor amounts of intrigue involving ambivalence towards FBI service: O’Neill has to reconcile the fact that he’s got to lie not only to his “boss”, but to his wife Juliana (Caroline Dhavernas) in order to be an effective agent in the war on espionage. And there are also a few (wholly unconvincing) husband-wife blowups as Hanssen infiltrates the younger man’s life, unloading secret porno tapes involving Juliana. But the film doesn’t really have much to say in this regard beyond “lying is bad for your relationship.” Breach’s main point of interest is the bizarre spectacle of Hanssen, a man who is simultaneously a God-fearing right-winger and an agent for the Soviets, not to mention a sexually conservative ideologue who writes internet bondage porn about his oblivious spouse (Kathleen Quinlan) on the Internet. He seems determined to privately defile everything to which he has publicly pledged allegiance, and he's all the more fascinating for it.

Alas, the film only half-explores the fissures of the character's soul. Hanssen is treated as interesting only insofar as he provides menace and horror: he’s sort of a pencil-pushing Hannibal Lecter, except he doesn’t let on that he’s a killer. The film uses that sense of horror to cloud our minds and quash any thoughts deviating from the mission to bring him down. This allows for great tension as the mission progresses: we’re given an objective, a monstrous villain who seeps into the hero’s life, and the consequences of not succeeding (which are indeed personal as well as legal and moral). But neither director Billy Ray nor his co-scenarists Adam Mazer and William Rotko have any interest in opening up this exquisite shell of a man to see what lurks inside. The film isn’t really interested in finding out what the enigmatic Hanssen is composed of, to come up with a hypothesis for his behavior. And in leaving us hanging with that issue, it dooms itself to be nothing more than a very superior Washington thriller instead of the probing psychological drama it might have been.

If it seems I’m being overly harsh to Breach, bear in mind that its strengths are what lift me up to see its failings. Ray is very, very good at using space and framing to create dread -- he’s not a montage director, but more of an austere, less flamboyant Alan J. Pakula, using rooms and hallways and streetscapes to inundate us with a sense that some new threat or clue is hidden out there. Though relentlessly linear in plotting, the film favors mood over cliché, drawing our attention away from certain all-too-familiar story elements via an all-encompassing, highly-satisfactory sense of dread. And though I can’t verify the truth of the characterizations, “inspired” as they are by an actual case, the portrait of Janssen is well-drawn enough -- especially by Cooper -- to be entirely credible. It’s just that credible and complete are not the same thing, just as spooky and sinister aren’t necessarily penetrating and insightful.

Breach is a nail-biter, no question about it: it’s a more than watchable movie that always delivers and never bores in its molasses-crawl to the finish line. But as the story is based on an actual case of espionage, and as its chief aggressor is a man of baroque psychological contradictions, I feel we’re somehow entitled to more than just a thriller about a heroic agent and the bogeyman. Leaving aside the matter of politics (no doubt America wished it had someone just as capable as Hanssen ensconced behind the Iron Curtain), it’s just not interested in how people work. Though it makes a couple of overtures about the lonely life of FBI agents (spoiler: O’Neill drops the bureau for law practice, while superior Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney) continues her life of tragic emptiness: end spoiler), it has little interest in examining its quarry -- and thus neglects the real problem that needs to be solved. You will not regret your choice to see Breach, but you just might regret some of the choices the film makes in its rush to be as "normal" a movie as possible.

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek)

"Breach" is based on the true story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was convicted of treason in 2001 for having sold U.S. secrets to Moscow for some $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. Hanssen, an expert on Russian intelligence, was a 25-year veteran of the agency. When the authorities caught wind of his extracurricular activities, they gave him a new job, one that allowed him access to extremely sensitive information, and assigned a young and rather green surveillance specialist, Eric O'Neill, to be his assistant. They hoped, in a gambit that paid off, that O'Neill would help uncover the evidence they needed to catch and convict Hanssen.

That story sounds more like a movie than like real life, the sort of material that could lure even a smart filmmaker into the wilds of overdramatization and overkill. But the director of "Breach," Billy Ray, is too wily, too hip to the value of understatement, to make that mistake. Ray -- also the director of the 2003 "Shattered Glass," another movie about a creepy guy leading a double life -- likes to explore that murky gray area where self-delusion and the deception of others blend into a kind of egotistical religion of the self. When lies -- your own lies -- are all you can believe in, what use do you have for any sort of God?

Hanssen's story in particular is ripe for that kind of exploration: He was a devout Catholic, a member of the ultraconservative faction Opus Dei. He also made videotapes of himself and his wife having sex, which he'd share by mail with certain friends. In "Breach," Ray doesn't profess shock that a deeply religious guy could also be very kinky; nor does he take the blasé, jaded route of assuming that most deeply religious people are just pervs at heart anyway. With the help of the actor he's cast as Hanssen, Chris Cooper, Ray does something much more subtle and unnerving: He simply builds a case against Hanssen, layer by creepy layer, suggesting that this guy's religious zeal, his sex drive, his superior intelligence and his contempt for his country had somehow mingled into a bizarre and dangerous guiding philosophy. Cooper's interpretation of that is always fascinating to watch, and sometimes terrifying.

Ryan Phillippe plays young O'Neill, and he's got just the right look for an untested, aspiring FBI guy: His eyes, in their wide-open blueness, practically invite spilled secrets, but they're not yet capable of hiding hurt feelings. When he and Hanssen move into the new office they're going to share, the senior agent stares him down with his X-ray vision. Then O'Neill tries to get Hanssen to call him by his first name, and Hanssen shoots back, "Your name is clerk." The younger officer looks as if he'd been shot through the heart, but he rallies, as if Hanssen's arrogance had only bolstered his determination. I've often found Phillippe to be a bland, unreadable actor, but maybe he's finding ways to use his inscrutability as an acting tool. Particularly in some of the later scenes, where O'Neill realizes that betraying Hanssen's trust is going to cause him some pain as well, Phillippe finds ways to telegraph his feelings to us, even as he hides them from Hanssen. This may not be a dazzling performance, but it's at least an intelligent, carefully shaded one.

"Breach" is really Cooper's movie. Cooper is a marvelously expressive actor, and he's been wonderful even in terrible pictures, like Spike Jonze's egregiously self-congratulatory "Adaptation." As distinctive as his facial features are, he often looks like a different person from movie to movie: Here, he's a distrustful lizard with slippery-looking lips, and there are moments when it's hard to even look at him.

But Cooper also pulls off the near-impossible, making us feel dashes of sympathy for this twisted and unscrupulous man. In one scene, Hanssen is being groomed and fussed over by a photographer who's come to take his 25th-anniversary portrait. He tries to smile, an effort that nearly cracks his face in two. But his discomfort intensifies by the second as he sits stiffly in that chair: We can see him wishing he could jump not only out of that chair, but out of his own oily skin. He rushes out of the room before the session is finished, later, predictably, calling the photographer a "fag" and confessing that he just doesn't like to be scrutinized. Seeing Hanssen crack like that is gratifying, but it's also a little horrifying: We'd rather write him off as a monster than see him as a human being.

"Breach" -- the script is by Ray and the team of Adam Mazer and William Rotko -- is a nicely crafted picture, made with lots of intelligence and restraint. Sometimes that restraint makes it feel a little dull: In patches the movie is more sluggish than it needs to be. Still, it's far more vibrant, and far less self-important, than that other recent picture about powerful guys with big secrets, "The Good Shepherd." It even has its moments of grim levity: Laura Linney shows up as an FBI higher-up who's so devoted to her work that, as she puts it, she doesn't "even have a cat."

The picture is suspenseful where it counts, and at times, it's truly terrifying. There were moments that made my skin crawl: Hanssen and his wife, Bonnie (played with Stepford-like glassiness by Kathleen Quinlan), openly attempt to lure O'Neill -- who is Catholic, which is part of the reason he was chosen for the assignment -- and his wife, Juliana (Caroline Dhavernas), into making a deeper connection with the church. They show up uninvited at the young couple's apartment, bearing reheatable leftovers, and adopt an air of glazed friendliness as they chatter on about the importance of making babies, urging Juliana to eat lots of protein so she'll be able to conceive.

The scene is almost a mini homage to "Rosemary's Baby," and there are other moments in "Breach" that are unsettling in the same tacit, subterranean way. When Hanssen makes the "drop" that leads to his arrest, his actions are both unnervingly weird and shockingly mundane. In this pivotal moment, there are no drab overcoats, no mysterious code letters, no furtive phone calls: The tools of Hanssen's betrayal include some everyday items that you'd find in your kitchen or pantry. If you've got the wiles, and the desire, to bring down a country, the means are all too close at hand.

The New Yorker (David Denby)

Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)

Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)

The Director's Chair - Nicholas Ray - DVD Beaver

Ray, Nicholas

Nicholas Ray was viewed as a typically unsettled artistic figure - perceptively creative yet restless and unrestrainable. Quick tempered, financially extravagant, leaning to bold sexual proclivities and, in his later years, dependent on the brief respite of drugs and alcohol, Ray seemed to continually advance his enigmatic reputation. Like Federico Fellini, he essentially taught himself filmmaking and hence his oeuvre is encrusted with a deep personal layer of expression. Ray invested his film language with a constant pragmatic examination of alternate lifestyles which violently conflicted with the surrounding world. His unromantic vision defines the legacy of a poet who was frequently constrained by a bludgeoning production system - his survival in it was yet another of his fascinating curiosities. He leaves us with a paradoxical work of instabilities, often embracing self-destructive or confused protagonists who are forced to cope in a subtly maligned modern environment.

About Nicholas Ray BFI Screen Online (link lost)

Nicholas Ray trained as an architect with Frank Lloyd Wright before turning his hand to film, first as an actor and then as director. Ray was taken to Hollywood by Elia Kazan as assistant director on A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and quickly established himself to become one of America's greatest directors with seminal titles such as Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause to his credit.

Nicholas Ray's auteur approach to film was highly influential on a generation of film-makers. The most vocal of these were Godard and Truffaut who formed part of the French New Wave movement. Ray's friendship with the German director Wim Wenders led to the resumption of Ray's acting career in the Wenders' title The American Friend, which is said to be a homage to Bigger Than Life. Ray co-directed his final title Lightning Over Water with Wenders and assistance from a young Jim Jarmusch. This final collaboration is a sad portrait of Ray's own torturous battle with cancer.

Andrew Sarris, from The American Cinema (excerpt, pages 107 – 108)

Nicholas Ray has been the cause celebre of the auteur theory for such a long time that his critics, pro and con, have lost all sense of proportion about his career. Nicholas Ray is not the greatest director who ever lived; nor is he a Hollywood hack. The Truth lies somewhere in between. It must be remembered that They Live by Night, The Lusty Men, Rebel Without a Cause, and Bigger Than Life are socially conscious films by any standards, and that Knock on Any Door is particularly bad social consciousness on the Kramer-Cayatte level. His form is not that impeccable, and his content has generally involved considerable social issues. Ray has always displayed an exciting visual style. For example, if one compares They Live by Night with Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle – and these two films are strikingly similar in mood, theme and plot – one will notice that where Ray tends to cut between physical movements, Huston tends to cut between static compositions. Ray’s style tends to be more kinetic, Huston’s more plastic, the difference between dance and sculpture. If Ray’s nervous direction has no thematic meaning, he would be a minor director indeed. Fortunately, Ray does have a theme, and a very important one; namely, that every relationship establishes its own moral code and that there is no such thing as abstract morality. This much was made clear in Rebel Without a Cause when James Dean and his fellow adolescents leaned back in their seats at the planetarium and passively accepted the proposition that the universe was drifting without any frame of reference. Even thought Ray’s career has been plagued by many frustrations, none of his films lack some burst of inspiration. Johnny Guitar was his most bizarre film, and probably his most personal. Certainly, we can sympathize with Everson and Fenin trying to relate this “Western” to the William S. Hart tradition, and finding Ray lacking; but this is the fallacy of writing about genres. Johnny Guitar has invented its own genre. Philip Yordan set out to attack McCarthyism, but Ray was too delirious to pay any heed as Freuidan feminism prevailed over Marxist masochism, and Pirandello transcended polemics.

Nicholas Ray - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Philip Kemp from Film Reference

"The cinema is Nicholas Ray." Godard's magisterial statement has come in for a good deal of ridicule, not by any means entirely undeserved. Yet it contains a core of truth, especially if taken in reverse. Nicholas Ray is cinema in the sense that his films work entirely (and perhaps only) as movies , arrangements of space and movement charged with dramatic tension. Few directors demonstrate more clearly that a film is something beyond the sum of its parts. Consider only the more literary components—dialogue, plot, characterisation—and a film like Party Girl is patently trash. But on the screen the visual turbulence of Ray's shooting style, the fractured intensity of his editing, fuse the elements into a valid emotional whole. The flaws are still apparent, but have become incidental.

Nor is Ray's cinematic style in any way extraneous, imposed upon his subjects. The nervous tension within the frame also informs his characters, vulnerable violent outsiders at odds with society and with themselves. The typical Ray hero is a loner, at once contemptuous of the complacent normal world and tormented with a longing to be reaccepted into it—to become (like Bowie and Keechie, the young lovers of They Live by Night ) "like real people." James Dean in Rebel without a Cause , Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground , Robert Mitchum in The Lusty Men , all start by rejecting the constraints of the nuclear family, only to find themselves impelled to recreate it in substitute form, as though trying to fill an unacknowledged void. In one achingly elegiac scene in The Lusty Men , Mitchum prowls around the tumbledown shack that was his childhood home, "looking for something I thought I'd lost."

Ray's grounding in architecture (he studied at Taliesin with Frank Lloyd Wright) reveals itself in an exceptionally acute sense of space, often deployed as an extension of states of mind. In his films the geometry of locations, and especially interiors, serves as a psychological terrain. Conflict can be played out, and tension expressed, in terms of spatial areas (upstairs and downstairs, for example, or the courtyards and levels of an apartment complex) pitted against each other. Ray also credited Wright with instilling in him "a love of the horizontal line"—and hence of the CinemaScope screen, for which he felt intuitive affinity. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who found it awkward and inhibiting, Ray avidly explores the format's potential, sometimes combining it with lateral tracking shots to convey lyrical movement, at other times angling his camera to create urgent diagonals, suggesting characters straining against the constrictions of the frame.

Equally idiosyncratic is Ray's expressionist use of colour, taken at times to heights of delirium that risk toppling into the ridiculous. In Johnny Guitar , perhaps the most flamboyantly baroque Western ever made, Joan Crawford is colour-coded red, white, or black according to which aspect of her character—whore, victim, or gunslinger—is uppermost in a given scene. Similarly, the contrast in Bigger than Life between the hero's respectable job as a schoolteacher and his déclassé moonlighting for a taxi firm is signalled by an abrupt cut from the muted grey-browns of the school to a screenful of gaudy yellow cabs that hit the audience's eyes with a visual slap.

Nearly all Ray's finest films were made in the 1950s, their agonized romanticism cutting across the grain of that decade's brittle optimism. "The poet of American disenchantment" (in David Thomson's phrase), Ray viewed social conventions as a trap, from which violence or madness may be the only escape. In Bigger than Life , James Mason's smalltown teacher, frustrated by his low social status, gains the feelings of power and superiority he aspires to from a nerve drug. Under its influence the character is transformed into a hideous parody of the dominant father-figure enjoined by society. Similarly—but working from the opposite perspective— In a Lonely Place subverts Bogart's tough-guy persona, revealing the anguish and insecurity that underlie it and, as V.F. Perkins puts it, making "violence the index of the character's weakness rather than strength."

"I'm a stranger here myself." Ray often quoted Sterling Hayden's line from Johnny Guitar as his personal motto. His career, as he himself was well aware, disconcertingly mirrored the fate of his own riven, alienated heroes. Unappreciated (or so he felt) in America, and increasingly irked by the constraints of the studio system, he nonetheless produced all his best work there. In Europe, where he was hailed as one of the world's greatest directors, his craft deserted him: after two ill-starred epics, the last sixteen years of his life trickled away in a mess of incoherent footage and abortive projects. Victim of his own legend, Ray finally took self-identification with his protagonists to its ultimate tortured conclusion—collaborating, in Lightning over Water , in the filming of his own disintegration and death.

Welcome to NicholasRay.net

Nicholas Ray > Overview - AllMovie biography by Lucia Bozzola

Nicholas Ray Profile - TCM.com biography from Turner Classic Movies

Nicholas Ray Profile - TCM.com Rob Nixon essay from Turner Classic Movies

glbtq >> arts >> Ray, Nicholas profile essay by Richard G. Mann

Nicholas Ray • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Jonathan Rosenbaum from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002

Nicholas Ray | American author and director | Britannica.com biography

Nicholas Ray: Biography from Answers.com

Nicholas Ray Biography Encyclopedia of World Biography

Nicholas Ray bio from NNDB

Nicholas Ray - Yahoo! Movies biography

Nicholas Ray Biography from Who2.com

Nicholas Ray Foundation: front-splash

Nicholas Ray Mubi

clydefro.com » Nicholas Ray various reviews

The Films of Nicholas Ray - by Michael E. Grost various reviews

The History of Cinema: Nicholas Ray Piero Scaruffi reviews (English-Italian language)

Nicholas Ray Filmography Fandango

Nicholas Ray: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Libraries

Nicholas Ray | Facebook

MySpace Page Nick Ray

NICK RAY previously at Film Forum in New York City Film Forum

Nicholas Ray - Director by Film Rank Films 101

Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (Part I) page 1 Page 1, Christopher Funderberg, Second Chances from The Pink Smoke (Undated)

Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (Part II) page 1 - The Pink Smoke

Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (Part III) page 1 - The Pink Smoke

Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (part IV) page 1 - The Pink Smoke

James Dean, the Actor as a Young Man: Rebel Without a Cause Director Nicholas Ray Remembers the Impossible Artist Nicolas Ray essay on actor James Dean, republished at The Daily Beast, October 2, 2016, originally published October 31, 1956

Photos of Nicholas Ray at SUNY Binghamton (Harpur College) from 1970-72 during the making of “We Can't Go Home Again” by Mark Goldstein

The Screen:Nicholas Ray Subject of 'Stranger Myself' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, January 17, 1975

THE LAST MONTHS OF NICHOLAS RAY'S LIFE Vincent Canby from The New York Times, September 26, 1981

Looking for Nick Ray [upgraded, 1/23/2012] | Jonathan Rosenbaum December 2, 1981

I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies written by Nicholas Ray (243 pages), 1995

Amazon.com: Nicholas Ray: An American Journey (9780571178308 ... written by Bernard Eisenschitz (599 pages), 1996

Nicholas Ray | The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page excerpts from the book, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey

Ray of Hopelessness Richard von Busack from Metroactive Movies, February 20, 1997

And God Created Nicholas Ray - Tangents fun'n'frenzy filled web ... Marino Guida, 2000

Finding the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Rebel Without a Cause ... Chris Wood from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000

Shadows on the Horizon: In a Lonely Place • Senses of Cinema Fiona Villella, November 5, 2000

Nicholas Ray, a Sentimental Bloke: They Live by Night • Senses of ... Rose Capp from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002

THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST,FILM DIRECTOR NICHOLAS RAY: WORDS OF ... Al Aronowitz, October 1, 2002

MoMA | Nicholas Ray, Writ Large Moma Nicholas Ray Film Retrospective, March 13 – April 12, 2003

FILM; A Director Whose Life Could Have Been a Movie David Thomson from The New York Times, March 16, 2003

Only the Lonely : The New Yorker Only the Lonely, by Anthony Lane from The New Yorker, March 24, 2003

NICHOLAS RAY; The Self as Source Letter to the Editor from Susan Ray, from The New York Times, March 30, 2003

I Like His Face - Bright Lights Film Journal Scott Thill, April 30, 2003

Breathing Together: The Author in Search of Investors • Senses of ... James Leahy from Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003

CRITIC'S CHOICE/Film; A Western With Echoes Of the Blacklisting Days Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, August 15, 2003

Nicholas Ray's rise and fall - Features, Films - The Independent Nicholas Ray's rise and fall, by Geoffrey MacNab from The Independent, December 26, 2003

The poet of nightfall | Features | guardian.co.uk Film David Thomson from The Guardian, December 27, 2003

Essential Cinema Ray excerpts from Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, by Jonathan Rosenbaum (472 pages), 2004

Rebel without a Cause The Rebel, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Globe, 2005

FILM; Rebel With A Surprising Legacy Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, May 29, 2005

Remembering Nicholas Ray Gerald Peary, October 2005

NicholasRayRetro In A Lonely Place – The Rebellious Cinema of Nicholas Ray, from American Cinematheque, December 15 – 25, 2005

Dangerous Talents | Vanity Fair Sam Kashner, October 10, 2006

Coffee coffee and more coffee: True Stories of Nicholas Ray Peter Nellhouse, August 25, 2007

The Lusty Men and the - Bright Lights Film Journal Homeless on the Range, by Imogen Sara Smith, July 31, 2008

notcoming.com | The Mystic: The Films of Nicholas Ray Jenny Jediny introduction to 20 film reviews from Not Coming to a Theater Near You, August 14, 2008

Review: Bigger than Life - Film Comment Paul Brunick, November/December 2008

“God was wrong”: Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life • Senses of Cinema Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, March 10, 2009

Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » Nicholas Ray: A Webliography Kevin Lee, March 20, 2009

OpEdNews - Article: Nicholas Ray: Rebellion and the Darkness of ... Nicholas Ray: Rebellion and the Darkness of Evening, by Bill Hare, April 27, 2009

1More Film Blog » Nicholas Ray Kenneth R. Morefield at 1 More Film Blog, May 26, 2009

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review Bogart's In A Lonely Place at Film Forum, July 15, 2009

FILM; Button-Down Era's Rebel With a Camera A.O. Scott from The New York Times, July 16, 2009

A Wide Range of Dark Visions and Fever Dreams A.O. Scott from The New York Times, July 17, 2009

Rebel with a Retrospective: Nicholas Ray at Film Forum - Film ... Eugene Kotlyarenko from Interview magazine, July 22, 2009

Nicholas Ray Retrospective @ NYC's Film Forum - BlackBook Edmund Mullins from Black Book, July 27, 2009

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City - Bright Lights Film Journal Imogen Sara Smith, July 31, 2009

Ranking the Oeuvre: Nicholas Ray Clydefro Film Journal, August 23, 2009

Read the whole interview posted by Mark Asch at The L Magazine. Five Questions for Cullen Gallagher About Nicholas Ray, by Mark Asch from L Magazine, September 4, 2009

La Biennale di Venezia - Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again ... world premiere scheduled for Venice in 2011, November 20, 2009

TCM Tomorrow: Nicholas Ray's PARTY GIRL (1958) - Bright Lights ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 11, 2010

Ten Warner Bros. Box Sets That Should Have Been Clydefro Film Journal, March 9, 2010

John Huston, Nicholas Ray « davekehr.com discussion forum, March 27, 2010

The Major and the Minor: The 27th Torino Film Festival • Senses of ... Conall Cash from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Bigger Than Life: Nicholas Ray in the Life of the Gray Flannel ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2010

Some Came Running: That's okay; Nicholas Ray doesn't like YOU, either. Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, June 10, 2010

Reclaiming Causes of a Filmmaking Rebel Patricia Cohen from The New York Times, June 16, 2010

Dangerous Minds | Nicholas Ray: I'm A Stranger Here Myself Bradley Novicoff from I’m a Stranger Here Myself, June 18, 2010

Nicholas Ray's Experimental 'We Can't Go Home Again' To Play In Venice Christopher Bell from The Playlist, June 21, 2010

Bigger than legend - Features - Boston Phoenix Chris Fujuwara, July 6, 2010, also seen here: Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray: Hollywood's Last Romantic - Harvard Film Archive Film retrospective July 9 – August 9, 2010

Tativille: Nicholas Ray's Least Seen Signature Features: Wind ... Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, July 31, 2010

Nicholas Ray | HiLobrow Annie Nocenti from HiLobrow, August 7, 2010

Claudio Mazzatenta, Nicholas Ray's MARCO. Memory of working of Nick, "La furia umana", n° 3, winter 2010

Tom Farrell, We Can't Go Home Again. Directed by Nicholas Ray, "La furia umana", n° 3, winter 2010

The Heart is a “Lonely” Hunter: On Nicholas Ray's ... - Senses of Cinema Serena Bramble, June 2011

They Live by Night • Senses of Cinema George Kaplan, June 23, 2011

Rebel Without a Cause • Senses of Cinema J. David Slocum from Senses of Cinema, June 23, 2011

Johnny Guitar • Senses of Cinema David Sanjek, June 23, 2011

Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director Review ... Lewis Whittington book review of Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director (560 pages), by Patrick McGilligan from Culture Vulture, July 7, 2011

David Thomson on Films: The Lonely Legacy of Nicholas Ray | New ... David Thomson from The New Republic, August 3, 2011

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: Poet of Violence | The House Next Door ... Budd Wilkins, September 5, 2011

Why Nicholas Ray is in a class of his own | Film | The Guardian Geoffrey Macnab, September 8, 2011

Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director—a new ... Charles Bogle from The World Socialist Web Site, September 12, 2011

How Natalie Wood Seduced Her Way Into 'Rebel Without a Cause ... Bill Higgins from The Hollywood Reporter, November 24, 2011

Nicholas Ray: An American Journey - Screening the Past D.B. Jones book review of Nicholas Ray: An American Journey (624 pages), by Bernard Eisenschitz, February 2012

The Essentials: 5 Great Films By Nicholas Ray | IndieWire June 15, 2012

Gay Influence: Nicholas Ray Terry, November 5, 2012

CINEPHILIA and FILMMAKING • Dennis Hopper knew Nicholas Ray ... How Would Lubitsch Do It?, 2013

Nicholas Ray Couldn't Go Home Again: On the DVD Release of His ... Peter Winkler from The LA Review of Books, February 21, 2013

I Knew You Before I Ever Saw You: In a Lonely Place (1950), Part 1 ... Elaine Lennon from Offscreen, April 2013

Hollywood Can Be a 'Lonely Place': In a Lonely Place (1950) Part 2 ... Elaine Lennon from Offscreen, April 2013

Weekly Top Five: The Best of Nicholas Ray | Bleader Drew Hunt from the Chicago Reader, July 14, 2013

“It's Never All In The Script:” Dennis Hopper on Nicholas Ray and ... Sara Salovaara offers a video from Filmmaker magazine, April 29, 2014 (5:13)

The Strange Case of Nicholas Ray - DGA Terrence Rafferty, Summer 2014

No moss gathered: Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again ... - BFI Demetrios Matheou from Sight and Sound, May 14, 2015

The 11 Best Nicholas Ray Movies You Need To Watch - Taste of Cinema Ekin Göksoy, May 18, 2015

On the Bold Melodramas of Nicholas Ray | Movie Mezzanine Christina Newland, October 27, 2015

The 10 Best Nicholas Ray Films - The Playlist May 17, 2016

Don't forget about (Nicholas) Ray | BFI Geoff Andrew from Sight and Sound, August 5, 2016

Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place as Psychodrama - Cineaste Magazine Graham Fuller, Fall 2016

Nicholas Ray: The 7 Essential Films You Must See | IndieWire Chris O’Falt, June 30, 2017

Nicholas Ray's Outsiders, on the Lam and Under the Gun - The New ... The New York Times, July 28, 2017

TSPDT - Nicholas Ray

Cinema Scope | Interviews | Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life: A ... Jim Healy interviews writer Jonathan Lethem about Ray’s Bigger Than Life, from Cinema Scope, February, 2008

Nicholas Ray (1911 - 1979) - Find A Grave Memorial

Nicholas Ray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Images for Nicholas Ray

KNOCK ON ANY DOOR

USA (100 mi) 1949

Nicholas Ray wrestles with his social consciousness and loses in this drab 1949 drama about a slum punk (John Derek, of Bo fame) on trial for murder. Humphrey Bogart stands piously for the defense, begging the jury to blame society, not the boy. With George Macready and Allene Roberts; based on a book by novelist Willard Motley. 100 min.

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg]

Nick Romano must be the ideal name for a flawed Ray hero-victim. As embodied to vulnerable, narcissistic perfection by John Derek (long before he took up with Bo), he's the centre of a fascinating, slightly askew mix of social document and romantic agony. The basic material may be determinist melodrama - slum boy with deck stacked against him winds up on Death Row despite the efforts of a liberal lawyer (Bogart, whose Santana company made the film). But it's hard hitting in its own right, tautly crafted, and repeatedly stabbed through with Ray's impulsive generosity and anguish towards his characters.

Knock on Any Door - TCM.com James Steffen

In Knock on Any Door (1949), a tense courtroom drama with undercurrents of social commentary, Humphrey Bogart plays Andy Morton, a lawyer from the slums. He finds himself defending an old friend, Nick Romano (John Derek), accused of murdering a policeman during a robbery. Nick, who insists on his innocence, comes from a troubled background: after his father was jailed, leaving the family without any income, Nick fell into petty thievery and wound up in jail repeatedly despite attempts by a social worker and his girlfriend Emma (Allene Roberts) to set him straight. Nick's motto is "Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse." Andy's final courtroom plea on Nick's behalf becomes a broader cry for social justice. "Knock on any door," in the slums, he tells the jury, and you will find someone like Nick.

Knock on Any Door (1949) is based on the critically acclaimed, best-selling 1947 novel of the same title by Willard Motley. Motley, like fellow African-American writer Richard Wright, was a product of the federally funded Writers' Project in Chicago. Persecuted during the political witch-hunts of the era, Motley fled to Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1965. Motley's novels were notable for their trenchant social critique and often frank subject matter. The multi-layered plot of Knock on Any Door features a number of motifs, including Nick Romano's bisexuality and the depiction of sadistic police officers, that had to be toned down or removed altogether in the screenplay in order to satisfy the Production Code. A sequel, Let No Man Write My Epitaph, focused on the struggles of Nick Romano, Jr., the protagonist's illegitimate son; it was made into a film in 1960.

Knock on Any Door was the first production of Santana Pictures, an independent company formed by Bogart, business manager A. Morgan Maree and producer Robert Lord. Bogart named the company, incidentally, after his beloved boat. Director Nicholas Ray was loaned out to them from RKO pictures on the strength of his recently completed debut They Live By Night (1949), also known at the time as Your Red Wagon. Their next project together was In a Lonely Place (1950), an outstanding film noir which features one of Bogart's most complex performances. Ray liked to tell a story that when it came time to film Bogart's dramatic courtroom speech, the actor balked at having to memorize such a long monologue and deliver it in one take. Ray offered to have him rehearse the scene before the camera; however, he surreptitiously let the camera roll. When Bogart delivered the speech successfully on the first try, Ray ended up using the take. However, it should be noted that the scene is broken up into several shots in the finished version of the film.

Variety described young lead John Derek as "a new bobbysoxer dream and a personality who will click with the femmes, motherly or otherwise." After appearing in mainly adventure films, he became a professional still photographer and tried his luck at directing. Although he died in 1998, he is best remembered as the husband/impresario of a succession of sex symbols: Ursula Andress, Linda Evans and Bo Derek, each of whom he directed in films that are largely forgotten today. The most successful (financially, at least) of these ventures was the Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan the Ape Man (1981).

If the piano player looks familiar, he should be; Dooley Wilson previously appeared as Sam in Casablanca (1942).

not coming to a theater near you review Cullen Gallagher

The Heart of the System: "Knock on Any Door" on Notebook | MUBI Evan Davis

Breaking the Bravado: Interpreting the Subdued Performances of ... Breaking the Bravado: Interpreting the Subdued Performances of Humphrey Bogart, by Parker Mott from Film Slate

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dougdoepke from Claremont, USA

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: blanche-2 from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

Movie Mirror [Sanderson Beck]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review February 23, 1949, also seen here: THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; Humphrey Bogart, John Derek Seen in 'Knock on Any Door,' New Tenant at Astor

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

A WOMAN’S SECRET

USA (85 mi) 1949

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Something of an RKO chore for Ray, to be sure. But a nicely structured script by Herman J Mankiewicz (from a novel by Vicki Baum) - repeating the investigative flashback structure of Citizen Kane as it examines the events leading up to the death of ex-singer O'Hara's devious and ungrateful protégée (beautifully incarnated by Grahame) - is well served by the civilised direction, which not only turns the Vicki Baum melodrama into a noir-ish mystery, but also stresses, as so often in Ray, the importance of interior space and the way it reflects/influences action. Entertaining, and less routine than it sounds.

Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz recycles several themes and techniques from his script for Citizen Kane in this oddball melodrama about a singer (Maureen O'Hara) who confesses to the killing of her double-dealing protegee (Gloria Grahame). But Kane II it isn't; the the flashbacks here—as Melvyn Douglas leads the inquiry—snarl up into a turgid mess. Nicholas Ray directed it, though his touch is apparent only in the handling of the unstable Grahame character; otherwise, it's probably his stodgiest, driest piece of work. (Mankiewicz's brother Joseph later turned a similar story into All About Eve.) With Victor Jory (1949).

A Woman's Secret (1949) - TCM.com Frank Miller

For his second film as a director, Nicholas Ray took an unexpected trip into the world of romantic melodrama for what critics at the time would have called a "woman's picture." It's not that Ray's worldview didn't allow for a feminine perspective. Among the most memorable characters in his films are those played by Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar (1954), Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and wife Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950). But A Woman's Secret, the 1949 film about a has-been singer (Maureen O'Hara) whose life is almost ruined by her ungrateful protegee (Grahame) was the farthest he ever went into pure soap opera. Yet it also offers an intriguing, more mordant version of a subject filmed with more success in All About Eve (1950).

A Woman's Secret was a movie that had to be made, but not because of any urgency to its subject matter. RKO had to make it to justify paying a staff of designers and technicians and finish off a contract to borrow O'Hara from 20th Century-Fox. Moreover, with Grahame's recent hit as a sympathetic call girl in Crossfire (1947), the studio needed a suitable follow-up for an actress they hoped to promote to stardom. Finally, producer John Houseman had recently secured a studio position for Herman J. Mankiewicz, the writer with whom he had worked on Citizen Kane (1941). Generally considered unemployable because of his drinking and gambling problems, Mankiewicz was taking one last shot at success as the film's producer and writer.

The vehicle they chose to meet all these needs was a novel by Vicki Baum, author of the original Grand Hotel. As "The Long Denial," the film's original shooting title, the story had been serialized in Collier's magazine before being published as Mortgage on Life. Mankiewicz tried to shore it up with multiple flashbacks, including some depicting the same scene from different viewpoints (a device he had used in The Power and the Glory (1933), as well as Citizen Kane). But two of the flashbacks also lied, a gimmick Alfred Hitchcock would point up as a sure ticket to box-office failure when he tried it in his own Stage Fright (1950). And though the has-been singer in the novel was supposed to have lost her looks, RKO insisted on casting the amazingly beautiful O'Hara, changing the story so that it was the loss of her voice that had cost her stardom.

The first choice to direct this tangled tale was Jacques Tourneur, who had worked his way up from the studio's profitable Val Lewton unit, where he had directed such horror classics as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). His moody, psychologically intense work, particularly on Out of the Past (1947), could have given the film a touch of style, but he turned it down - and so did Ray. Coming off his first film, They Live by Night (1949), which was generating buzz at the studio, he wanted a stronger project for his second film. But when he took a vacation after finishing his first picture, he came back ready to work on anything and allowed himself to be assigned the film. At least he could look forward to working with two of his favorite character actors -- Jay C. Flippen and Curt Conway -- whom he cast in small roles.

Ray kept the production moving at a good pace and even finished four days ahead of schedule. The main concern during shooting was O'Hara's low-cut costumes and provocative posing on camera. Leading man Melvyn Douglas would later say it was the only time he had found himself physically aroused while shooting love scenes. After a preview screening, Ray shot a new scene with Grahame, and then the film sat on the shelf for over a year. Howard Hughes had bought RKO Studios during the last days of production. Not only did he put the production through a number of different titles before settling on A Woman's Secret, but he then lost interest. By the time of its delayed release, Grahame had lost her career momentum, and the film lost almost all of its $853,000 budget. That marked the end of Mankiewicz's comeback. He would only have one more writing credit before his death in 1953.

A Woman's Secret brought Ray more than a box-office disaster, however. It also brought him a new wife. On the set, he and Grahame had developed an electric attraction to each other. He didn't really like her, he would later admit, but when he got her pregnant, he had to do the right thing. With his $5,000 bonus for completing the film and advances from RKO and his agents, the two went to Las Vegas, where they married a few hours after she secured a divorce from her first husband, actor Stanley Clements. The couple tried to make marriage work. Grahame even took time off from the screen to raise their son, Timothy, which may have contributed to A Woman's Secret's failure. In a curious footnote to movie history, the marriage ended partly because she had fallen in love with Ray's son, Tony, whom she would marry in 1960, thereby making Timothy his own uncle.

not coming to a theater near you review Cullen Gallagher

The Disparities of a Studio Journeyman: "A Woman's Secret" - Mubi Evan Davis, also reviewing ON DANGEROUS GROUND

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT A- 93

USA (95 mi) 1949

Take it easy, but take it. —Chicamaw (Howard da Silva), becoming Chicagoan Studs Terkel’s famous radio sign off line

Adapted by Ray from the Edward Anderson Depression novel Thieves Like Us, filmed again by Robert Altman in THIEVES LIKE US (1974), this is one of the better doomed lover stories about a couple of innocents who never had a chance at life, framed in a black and white world of criminality, where consequences await those who pursue a life of crime. Opening with a noted helicopter shot, unusual in its day, Farley Granger is Bowie, a handsome young kid on the run with a couple of seasoned bank robbers, where all three break out of prison together, headed by T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) and his psychopathic partner Chicamaw (Howard de Silva). While temporarily holed up, Bowie meets Chicamaw’s niece Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), initially dressed in overalls and cap, looking plain and ordinary, boyish even, without an ounce of feminine allure, which becomes markedly different over time. But the awkward interest they take in one another develops quickly through an intense yearning expressed through an unpretentious series of personal questions for each other, where their closely guarded selves open up ever so slightly. Despite warnings from Keechie that nothing good can come from robbing banks, Bowie feels he owes these guys his help, like some sort of apprentice, and basically does what they ask, but after a successful heist, he screws up with a car crash afterwards, leaving his gun and traceable fingerprints behind, where the newspapers start calling him the ringleader, which aggravates his veteran partners, a kid getting top billing, but also brings the cops down upon them in greater force. In an interesting move, they each split up, where the camera only follows Bowie and Keechie, where a hardened crime story turns into a tender youth romance on the run, featuring close up shots of the couple gazing into each other’s eyes, filled with heart rendering moments and melodramatic twists.

What’s memorable about this film is the moody tone, which shifts from the criminal milieu of hardened cynicism to romantic adolescents dreaming about their place in the world, where the two couldn’t be more opposite. But they give it a try in a beautifully developed interlude sequence, getting married on a whim and leading a short life of domestic tranquility, living in some idyllic remote mountainside cabin in the woods that may as well be a million miles from anywhere. But Chicamaw interrupts the marital bliss, claiming they made an “investment” in choosing Bowie to break out of jail with them, refusing his request for freedom, pressuring him back into criminality, which is all they really know. In an interesting twist, they don’t show the subsequent robbery itself, just the downbeat aftereffects, as the tone of doom and gloom is everpresent as the radio announces the updated news reports. By the time Bowie gets back to Keechie, his face is plastered all over the newspapers, even in the isolated mountain regions, where they quickly make an escape, sleeping by day, traveling only by night, where they soon learn they can’t trust anyone, beautifully expressed in a Marie Bryant jazz vocalist scene gone wrong, where psychologically the world is closing in on them as they know of no place left to go. What’s interesting are the familiar themes expressed in Ray’s later work REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), doomed romance, the rhapsodic intimacy of young love, adolescent flights of fantasy, a safe place protected from the outside world, the ineffectual family structure, or having no reliable friends to turn to, where the depths of alienation are so deep that all these kids ever talk about is being just like other people, just like real people. All they want is to have a chance in this world. But by the end, the framing of the two lovers is like a practice runthrough of the final scene in REBEL, as the scenes of haunting emotional devastation have an eerie familiarity about them.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Where Altman's later adaptation of Edward Anderson's novel (as Thieves Like Us) opted for the detachment of hindsight, Ray offers us the poetry of doomed romanticism, introducing his outcast lovers with the caption, 'This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in'. Though Ray never shirks from action and violence (indeed, Howard da Silva's crushing of Christmas baubles as he warns Granger against going straight is extremely menacing), he turns the film to focus upon his misfit innocents, continually contrasting their basically honourable ideals with the corrupt compromises of 'respectable society'. Passionate, lyrical, and imaginative, it's a remarkably assured debut, from the astonishing opening helicopter shot that follows the escaped convicts' car to freedom, to the final, inexorably tragic climax.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]

Celebrated by the Cahiers du Cinema clique for its formal inventiveness and melodramatic grandeur, Nicholas Ray's first feature They Live By Night remains essential predominantly because of the former, its ominous aerial shots, evocative framing, and meticulous acoustic design all contributing to an atmosphere of tormented romanticism. Its socially conscious lovers-on-the-lam tale (from Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us), alas, has grown somewhat creaky, whether it be Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell's virginal smitten kittens confessing their inexperience at kissing (tee hee!) or O'Donnell's belief that a good woman "is sort of like a dog" (loyal to the end!). Fortunately, in scenes such as Howard Da Silva shattering the naïve couple's Christmas tree ornaments—and, in the process, their quixotic dream of ever escaping the criminal life—Ray's plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty.

"This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in."

Bowie (Farley Granger) teams up with fellow thieves Chicamaw and T-Dub to rob a bank - he needs the money to hire a lawyer to prove he's innocent of murder. He completes the heist but fucks up the getaway. On the run from the law with his lover Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell), he finds that no-one he knows will help him and he can't trust anyone. Then Chicamaw and T-Dub want him for one more job.

Ray's powerful first feature - he went on to make Rebel Without A Cause - is one of the best examples of the road movie. What distinguishes his effort from contemporary examples such as Guncrazy and You Only Live Once is his sympathetic treatment of the protagonists, so that the movie feels more like a love story than a crime thriller. His tightly framed composition, though the use of close ups is not excessive, and the tenseness of the staging and the dialogue adeptly conveys the plight of the doomed innocents. With its innovative sound, based on Ray's experience in radio and that opening helicopter shot to give a sense of God-like fate to the characters this debut is enough to confirm Godard's claim "the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Pierrot Le Fou by the way, is almost a remake.

Big House Film [Roger Westcombe]

First film from director Nicholas Ray, who would go on to make In A Lonely Place, with Bogart, and Rebel Without A Cause. According to Francois Truffaut They Live By Night "is still his best film".

Today it is remembered for two distinctly un-thrillerish reasons. Firstly, there’s its pervasive atmosphere of melancholy and missed opportunities. (No wonder the French loved it.) Then there’s the central romance and the soft innocence of its leads. In Film Noir - The Dark Side of the Screen, Foster Hirsch cites both these attractions: "The film’s bittersweet, rueful tone, which sets it apart from any other noir drama, is supported by shrewd casting". Granger was "a perfect noir victim, the eternally dazed man in a net", says Hirsch. Cathy O’Donnell is luminous, but at the same time vulnerable and genuine - a lost talent and a real ‘whatever happened to?’ case. (She and Farley would reteam two years later in Anthony Mann’s Side Street.)

This couple is extremely androgynous (our first sighting of her is in overalls with her hair up) - and sexless. They realise that their new union means they can now learn how to, ahem, ‘kiss’. This sophomoric quality is reinforced by their being under the wing of gang cronies who seem parental, or at least like bad uncles. Their leader Chicamaw is notoriously (and literally) ‘one-eyed’, and foreshadows the Jim Backus father figure whom James Dean bridles against in Rebel. When Chicamaw crushes the Christmas ornaments out of frustration with an uncooperative Bowie (Granger’s character) it’s a clear portent for our pretty but fragile protagonists.

Besides casting, visuals tell the story, consistently remaining in a deeply claustrophobic darkness. There’s a great shot of O’Donnell where she is framed behind broken glass, through which a gun passes, vividly showing her as distanced, vulnerable and fated. They Live By Night is justly famous for the overhead helicopter shots which open it and punctuate the action. These are thrilling but also, through repetition, show the protagonists as rats in a maze, from which they can never escape.

As with all such ‘His-and-Hers crime spree’ films there’s an interlude (complete with swelling romantic music) where they briefly live the dream of the happy couple, young and blissfully in love... But this outdoorsy ‘honeymoon’ is the only time they are allowed to ‘breathe’ and the gloom is so all-enveloping it makes most of their life seems oxygen-deprived. Originally titled The Twisted Road, the film’s eventual title achieves full expression in a scene driving across the Mississippi late in the ‘honeymoon’ phase, when she wistfully longs to visit this beautiful countryside by day.

There are two outstanding supporting performances. Helen Craig plays Mattie, wife of a jailed gang member who, as she rats out the ‘kids’ on the run to free her man, projects a real poignancy of inner conflict that recognises her own entrapment even as she sets up theirs. The gaunt features of Will Wright (seen also in The Blue Dahlia) animate the shifty mien of the nocturnal wedding celebrant Hawkins, whose diverse corruption is ultimately shown to have even its limits.

Of course there’s no mistaking whose side we’re meant to be on as the final shot of Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) that ends with a corona of light around her fading-to-black face to form a halo makes plain (underlined by silence, despite her being surrounded by cops swarming on to a fresh crime scene).

One of six Hollywood features in five decades inspired by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s exploits, They Live By Night is based on Edward Anderson’s novel Thieves Like Us. It was remade - poorly - by Robert Altman under that title in 1974, though Altman claims never to have seen it beforehand.

"Acclaimed for his first film", Leslie Halliwell said of Ray, "he later seemed to lack a particular style". However from the very outset with this debut, a lyrical, bittersweet tone stylistically unifies his best work. Francois Truffaut saw commonalities in his content: "All his films tell the same story: the violent man who wants to renounce violence and his relationship with a morally stronger woman". Ray’s perspective often reveals an empathy with the teen-angst version of Romantic suffering; here, as in Rebel, the grown-ups are basically another species. Jean-Luc Godard said They Live By Night scored a "B budget, but it deserved an A for ambition". In 1965 Francois Truchaud called Ray "the cineaste of the twilight of the soul, of the falling night". U.S. critic Steven H.Scheuer went even further, calling They Live By Night "perhaps the best debut film of an American director, and I’m not unmindful of Citizen Kane".

Nicholas Ray, a Sentimental Bloke: They Live by Night • Senses of ... Rose Capp from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002

They Live by Night • Senses of Cinema George Kaplan, June 23, 2011

They Live by Night Clydefro Film Journal, August 13, 2007

not coming to a theater near you (Evan Kindley) review

They Live By Night (1948) Nicholas Ray « Twenty Four Frames John Greco from Twenty-Four Frames, April 25, 2010

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: page 2 and page 3

The First Dream: "They Live by Night" on Notebook | MUBI Evan Davis

They Live by Night (1948) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Film Noir of the Week Marie

They Live By Night - TCM.com Roger Fristoe

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing Anthony Mann’s SIDE STREET, also here: They Live by Night (1949) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

"They Live By Night" and fellow noirs, "Zodiac" Michael Atkinson from IFC Films

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]

The Lumière Reader Tim Wong

HorrorDigital.com [Rhett Miller]

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [48/100]

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 4

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 4

DVD Verdict [Rob Lineberger] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 4

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 4

All Movie Guide [Hal Erickson]

They Live By Night (1949) Classic Film Guide

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review November 4, 1949

PopMatters (Scott Thill) review

IN A LONELY PLACE A- 93

USA (94 mi) 1950

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me. — Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart)

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

The place is Hollywood, lonely for scriptwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart), who is suspected of murdering a young woman, until girl-next-door Laurel Gray (Grahame) supplies him with a false alibi. But is he the killer? Under pressure of police interrogation, their tentative relationship threatens to crack - and Dix's sudden, violent temper becomes increasingly evident. Ray's classic thriller remains as fresh and resonant as the day it was released. Nothing is as it seems: the noir atmosphere of deathly paranoia frames one of the screen's most adult and touching love affairs; Bogart's tough-guy insolence is probed to expose a vulnerable, almost psychotic insecurity; while Grahame abandons femme fatale conventions to reveal a character of enormous, subtle complexity. As ever, Ray composes with symbolic precision, confounds audience expectations, and deploys the heightened lyricism of melodrama to produce an achingly poetic meditation on pain, distrust and loss of faith, not to mention an admirably unglamorous portrait of Tinseltown. Never were despair and solitude so romantically alluring.

CINEFILE.info Tristan Johnson

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." Harried screenwriter Dixon Steele pens his own epitaph at the height of his ongoing part in the murder investigation of a hatcheck girl, but it's his impressionable girlfriend Laurel Gray who appropriates it to devastating effect at the culmination of Nicholas Ray's noir masterpiece. All Dix wants is a lucky break on a screenplay, but when an innocent evening with attendant Mildred ends with her as a corpse, suspicion follows him around, a burden he can't seem to shake even as he enters a whirlwind relationship with aspiring actress Laurel. IN A LONELY PLACE earns its exalted roost in the annals of classic Hollywood thanks to two towering performances, one from the inimitable Humphrey Bogart, and the other from the Grand Dame of film noir herself, Gloria Grahame. Of course, there's the Ray factor as well (who, at the time, was enjoying his short-lived marriage to Grahame, which would go very sour, far too soon), and his reckless determination to turn typical narratives on their head is in full bloom here. In sowing the seeds of suspicion against Dix, we careen after an ill-fated night drive into Laurel's perspective, with even a gruff "You drive!" and a passing of the wheel to mark the occasion. Bogie's greatest performance betrays no clear indication of innocence or guilt, and as Grahame ascends to the role of audience surrogate, her dilemma is all to palpable. By the end, it hardly feels hard-boiled, but it sure packs a mean punch.

Bashing Hollywood has, perhaps ironically, birthed more than its share of truly amazing cinema. Films like Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Robert Altman's The Player, and David Lynch's dream noir, Mulholland Drive, have emptied their respective barrels on the industry where art and profit have become inextricably linked.

Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place is another such challenge to business as usual. A near-analytic treatise on the danger of faith in image and artifice, it also offers the wholly compelling image of Humphrey Bogart himself. Already a screen icon when he made Lonely Place in 1950 (having made some 60 films, including Key Largo, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Big Sleep, and The Maltese Falcon), Bogart's persona overwhelmed his individual roles in a way that might lead Norma Desmond to overdose on sleeping pills.

Casting Bogie as the aptly named Dixon Steele, a bankable Hollywood writer prone to violent outbursts, was a canny move on Ray's part. What better way to confuse the order of images than to fill the central role with a star bigger than life, to say nothing of the movies? Although the film has been championed as one of Bogie's finest performances, it is nevertheless deeply invested in turning his celebrated image -- as well as the more general image of "Hollywood" -- inside out.

Take, for example, the murder, which occurs off screen. A star-struck hatcheck girl, Mildred (Martha Stewart), goes home with Dix to synopsize the boring bestseller he is supposed to be adapting. Carried away by her own breathless histrionics, she disappears. When Dix hears her narrating the book's murder, screaming "Help, help!", he is torn away from his voyeuristic viewing of his neighbor, Laurel (the wonderful Gloria Grahame), framed in Steele's window, as if he's watching a movie. Steele warns Mildred to keep her voice down, being familiar with sensational movie plots, and so, knowing too well that the people next door might misconstrue her overacting.

Of course, this foreshadowing wink comes to life when Dix is called in for questioning about her murder (the police inform him that she has been strangled to death). The only thing saving him from imprisonment is the same neighbor he ogled the night before; he gets off scot-free when Laurel, who hasn't even met Steele, is sure of his innocence because, on first sight, she says, "I like his face."

Indeed, Laurel and Steele fall in love on her first sight (as he's seen her before), in the way that people do in the movies, without time to develop the mutual trust they will need to weather the suspicion that falls on Steele like a hammer. In fact, Steele's likeable face disguises his repressed violence. Like the doomed Mildred, who loved images so much that she ended up immortalized in a few garish ones (the camera lingers on her murder scene photos, long enough to displace, from every angle no less, any memory of her alive), Steele is fated to remain at odds with his amiable facade; it only hides the psychopath beneath.

In an unforgettable dinner scene with his old WWII pal -- and officer on the Atkinson case -- Brub (Frank Lovejoy), and his wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), Steele re-enacts his conception of the murder, using Brub and Sylvia as actors. His version is so convincing that Brub almost unwittingly strangles his spouse as he's listening. It's a chilling moment, enhanced by the miniature spotlight on Bogart's eyes throughout its duration, the same eyes highlighted in a rear-view mirror during the film's opening credits.

Put simply, the eyes cannot be trusted, not in film noir generally, and especially not in In a Lonely Place. This notion is brought home when Steele beats a UCLA quarterback senseless, nearly smashing a rock into his face. This is the event that causes Laurel to second-guess their love, bringing her own trust of surfaces full circle: the man whose face she so admires is hiding a demon that gets off on bashing faces.

In a Lonely Place's cleverness doesn't end there. Like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Ray's film could care less about the crime that initiates its plot. But unlike Hitchcock, who exhausted Janet Leigh while shooting Psycho's infamously multi-shot shower scene, Ray doesn't even show Mildred's murder. He's interested in the effect, the ways his characters respond and interact. Many people have died on screen; it's rarer to see a relationship deteriorate so beautifully underneath the nagging weight of suspicion.

Dix Steele, as tough as he is, is ultimately done in by his face. Ray uses aspects of melodrama as well as noir to make the point, that art -- and by extension, Hollywood -- depends on trompe l'oeil, a trick of the eye.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Not unlike Albert Camus' The Stranger, Nicholas Ray's remarkable In a Lonely Place represents the purest of existentialist primers. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter under pressure to produce a good screenplay, has been given the simple task of writing a cut-and-dry adaptation of a novel when he meets a hatcheck girl named Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), who he invites to his home in order to discuss the adaptation. An hour later Mildred is found dead on the side of a road and Dixon becomes prime suspect in her murder. Dixon's history of abusing women seasons his material but it certainly doesn't help his credibility factor. What unravels—or, rather, how Dixon begins to unravel—becomes a brilliant extrapolation of what Camus called "philosophical suicide."

A lesser film may have established Dixon's innocence early on, and though the spectator naturally assumes the man is free of guilt, screenwriters Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt go to great lengths to play with the spectator's expectations. Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a new tenant in Dixon's apartment complex, sees her neighbor saying goodbye to Mildred on the night of her murder, and as such provides police with Dixon's alibi. Laurel is emotionally wounded, having recently left an abusive lover. It's no surprise she ends up falling in love with Dixon, typing his screenplay and becoming susceptible to his burgeoning rage. Like Dixon, she's alone in the world and the filmmakers suggest this loneliness is her ulterior motive for saving him. Maybe he isn't innocent—maybe she's just attracted to him.

The male heroes of Ray's films—from Robert Ryan's cop in On Dangerous Ground to James Dean's classic loner in Rebel Without a Cause—are all consumed by deep-rooted, seemingly irrational feelings. Women hover around them hopelessly trying to find a way to crack their guarded psyches. In On Dangerous Ground, Ryan's hard-boiled but humane cop struggles to understand the reasons behind a murderer's violent behavior—an answer revealed to him by the killer's blind sister (Ida Lupino). The film's vast countryscapes are in sharp contrast to the crowded and noisy city streets that drive Ryan's cop to near-madness and the invisible border between the two locations comes to represent the divide between rationality and irrationality.

Ray understands the effects of environment on the human condition. Had Bogart's Dixon been moved from his diseased Hollywood milieu to a more remote and morally scrupulous locale, could his violent disposition have been tempered? Though On Dangerous Ground is comparatively more hopeful than In a Lonely Place, seemingly counteracting the common notion that existentialism is rooted solely in despair, the more claustrophobic In a Lonely Place truly embodies a unique but nonetheless existential purpose that supreme happiness is inextricably bound to the absurd.

Just as Camus' Meursault was condemned for showing little remorse in the wake of a crime he committed, Dixon is similarly judged for his emotionless. His scorned refusal to feign empathy is a personal and ethical choice that is condemned by the film's moral order: the officers at the police station. Dixon understands the existential ideal that every decision has a cause and effect, yet he refuses to change his ways in order to dodge suspicion. The tragedy of the film becomes Dixon's dogged honesty to the self. From his macabre recreation of Mildred's death at a dinner party to his conscious decision to incorporate real life events into his art, Dixon is unwilling to part with his violent proclivities. He remains conscious of his violent streak and accepts it. Both Camus and Ray never address whether their protagonists are atheists, but their logical—almost unapologetic—approach to life evokes men who are not only governed by their free will but who are also prepared, however lackadaisically, to defend it. To thine own self be true.

In The Stranger, Meursault murders an Arab youth during a vacation to the beach. When Dixon beats a young man by the side of a curvy Hollywood road, he showcases a kind of instinctual disdain for the world around him. Like Meursault, Dixon is seemingly possessed by primal, uncontrollable urges. One could also say unexplainable. If both men seem incapable of justifying their crimes it's because they live so strongly inside themselves to ever be able to explain their actions on a moral, scientific, natural, or psychological level. The greatest tragedy here is that Dixon was about to commit a murder out of frustration for the very frustration that got him into trouble with the film's moral police to begin with. Yes, it's a vicious cycle. Had Dixon killed the young man, who would have been to blame: Dixon or the police that doubted his innocence and thus stirred his anger?

That Laurel's window can be seen from Dixon's apartment evokes a special kind of connection between these characters. Halfway through the film, Dixon goes over a piece of dialogue with Laurel while driving in his car: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." By this point in the film, their love seems relatively absolute. Dixon has seemingly transformed himself from a louse to a poet, but this exchange of words, through raw and empowering, foreshadows the end of their romance. Laurel and Dixon may love each other but it's evident that they're both entirely too victimized by their own selves to sustain this kind of happiness. In the end, their love resembles a rehearsal for the next and hopefully less complicated romance. This is the existential endgame of one of Ray's smartest and most devastating masterpieces.

Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place as Psychodrama - Cineaste Magazine Graham Fuller, Fall 2016

Numerous Hollywood movies celebrate the redemptive power of love. Few trace, step by step, the progress of a love affair that brings about a protagonist’s redemption only to disintegrate, canceling hope irrevocably. That is the fate of Dixon Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). Dix carves it out for himself after little more than three weeks of romantic bliss with his neighbor Laurel Gray. The cause is his inability to subdue his violent temper.

Cinema is peppered with personal psychodramas, films in which directors or stars participate, knowingly or not, in alternative versions of their own lives: Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, François Truffaut in the Antoine Doinel series, Jean-Luc Godard in Pierrot le fou, Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata, Jodie Foster in Nell, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. In a Lonely Place is one of the most bitter and disturbing examples.

When Ray directed his wife Gloria Grahame as Laurel opposite Humphrey Bogart’s Dix, he made art imitate life by fueling his atypical film noir with the atmosphere of his ailing marriage, which wasn’t seventeen months old when production began at the end of October 1949. They split up during the shoot, reunited, and eventually divorced in August 1952. Each would have a third and fourth spouse (Grahame’s last being her former stepson Tony Ray, Nick’s first-born), so they did continue to reach for the kind of happiness that Ray must have felt would elude Dix permanently. Yet for both Ray and Grahame, In a Lonely Place was an existential nodal point; given Grahame’s history of turbulent relationships with unstable men, it might even be argued that the circumspect Laurel was a restrained self-portrait.

Dix and Laurel’s idyll is marred by each partner’s gathering mistrust of the other. The police detectives Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), who served under Dix during World War II, Captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid), and Ted Barton (William Ching) play their parts in stoking Dix’s paranoia by harassing him as a plausible suspect in the murder of the cloakroom attendant Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart). His ungovernable rages—what would now be termed collectively as “intermittent explosive disorder”—give Laurel good reason to suspect Dix of Mildred’s murder. For his part, Dix suspects Laurel of colluding in the police’s surveillance of him and eventually questions her fidelity, too. His persecution complex kicks in during the nightclub scene where Dix and Laurel are at their most publicly intimate until Barton and his wife show up, and on the beach after Brub’s wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell) lets slip that Lochner had interviewed Laurel a second time. Driving crazily from the shore into the hills with a terrified Laurel beside him, Dix cuts off and damages another car, then nearly batters the irate young driver to death. Dix draws not only on Ray’s inherited manic depressiveness but also on Bogart’s insecurities, alcoholism, and habit of brawling.

Ray, who was contracted to RKO, had directed Bogart in the courtroom noir Knock on Any Door (1949), the first film made by Bogart and Robert Lord’s Columbia-based Santana Productions. The collaboration was comfortable so Santana exercised their option to have Ray direct a second film, which was In a Lonely Place. Edmund H. North’s adaptation of Dorothy Hughes’s novel was set aside for a screenplay written by Andrew Solt that Bogart approved but which Ray tweaked constantly during the shoot. Bogart wanted Lauren Bacall, his wife, to play Laurel but Warner Bros. refused to release her. Columbia chief Harry Cohn suggested Ginger Rogers, but Ray persuaded him that Grahame, also at RKO, would be a better choice and Howard Hughes permitted her loan-out.

Before filming began, according to reports in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Grahame signed a bizarre contract stipulating that “my husband shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct and even command my actions during the hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., every day except Sunday…I acknowledge that in every conceivable situation his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail.” Grahame was also forbidden to “nag, cajole, tease or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him.” In Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame, author Vincent Curcio notes that it was Lord who insisted on the contract, based on his “twenty-five years of experience as a married man.” Grahame fought it, believing it indentured her to “slave labor,” but she was quoted as saying she signed it in the end. Curators of exhibitions devoted to the women’s movement might want to seek out this document, assuming it existed, and display it as an example of male supremacism.

Details about Laurel disclosed by Mel Lippmann (Art Smith), Dix’s motherly agent, and Martha (Ruth Gillette), Laurel’s over-opinionated masseuse, reveal that she is a struggling movie actress avoiding her former lover, an unseen real-estate investor called Baker, who had built a swimming pool at her last home because it raised the property’s value for him and who was implicitly as domineering as Dix. (Because Martha is butch, many commentators regard her as a lesbian attracted to Laurel, but since she is aggrieved that Laurel left Baker, her main value to the film is as Baker’s aggressive surrogate.) So far unsuccessful in movies, Laurel is in danger of becoming a chattel or, as Bernard Eisenschitz writes in Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, “a negotiable asset…passed from hand to hand and trying to take decisions which aren’t hers to make.”

This was “strategically…not without its dangers,” Eisenschitz ventures, referring to the possibility that Grahame might have resented the worrying implications for her image and tried to liberate Laurel from such a demeaning position after shooting had begun. Thus Ray supposedly “took extreme precautions with the consent of the producers” by imposing the contract on his wife. Ray had married Grahame in 1948; later, he admitted, “I didn’t like her very much.” According to Patrick McGilligan’s Ray biography, she was unfaithful to him; Curcio’s theory is that Grahame sought to incite Ray to the kind of jealous passion she had experienced in her marriage to the actor Stanley Clements. Though the filming of In a Lonely Place went smoothly—candid photos from the set show Ray and Grahame working harmoniously and enjoying each other’s company—they reportedly feuded after hours. Ray believed Frank Lovejoy was covering up for Grahame’s nocturnal absences from their home and retaliated by limiting close-ups of him. Jeff Donnell recalled that when she and her husband, drama coach Bill Anderson, had dinner with Ray and Grahame during production, Ray grilled Grahame about where she had been the night before—Gloria used Jeff as an alibi—and the Rays ended up screaming at each other.

Ray must have known that getting Grahame to sign a work contract that was antediluvian even for 1949 would have no effect on her after-hours activities. What, though, if he imposed it to instill in her the sense that she was being controlled for nine hours a day, to induce in her the caged-animal quality Laurel exudes in Dix’s presence after the beating incident in the hills? Grahame was too intuitive an actress to need manipulating in such a way, but even if the contract—which she may have signed because starring opposite Bogart would boost her Hollywood status—did not seep into her conception of the character, contributing to Laurel’s evident anxiety, the efforts at psychological control it suggests are nevertheless mirrored in Dix’s increasing possessiveness.

Once Laurel has admitted to herself that she has fallen for Dix and is “interested” in embarking on a relationship, Ray instantly reorients the mise en scène to place her in subservient positions to him (which echo her position to Martha during the massage scene). After Dix makes an arch quip about Laurel’s hesitancy in announcing “the official results” of her deliberations on getting involved with him, Ray shows him looking down at her from a very high angle, then cuts to a shot of her looking up at him from below, her head suggestively adjacent to his loins at a distance of about ten inches. Another high-angle shot of Dix is followed by one of him placing his hands around her throat as he leans down to kiss her. The next shot shows her head dwarfed by his body as his hands appear to tighten. The tone of the sequence, set by George Antheil’s deceptively soupy score, is contrapuntally romantic and even elicits audience sympathy for Dix, who confesses to the more assured Laurel that he had been looking for someone to love. Neither character is conscious of the murderous implications of his body language, unlike the viewer, who is privy to cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s claustrophobic framing, the sequence’s oppressiveness, and—having seen Dix gloatingly “direct” Brub and Sylvia in re-creating Mildred’s strangling as he imagines it—his ingrained misogyny, otherwise manifested via off-color wisecracks.

As film noirs reflected, the late 1940s was a period characterized by sociosexual tensions: military personnel brutalized by the war returned to a much-altered American home front, in which women were exerting newfound independence. Perhaps responding to these tensions, Ray further demolished audience expectations for a satisfying resolution to In a Lonely Place by making the marriage proposal sequence one of the film’s most dispiriting, in defiance of the romance genre convention. Before Dix presses Laurel to give him the only answer he’ll accept, their interaction in the kitchen shatters any residual illusions the viewer has about his character and Laurel’s willingness to tie herself to a dangerously paranoid man. As Dix straightens out a grapefruit knife—suggesting his dislocation, as Laurel’s earlier looking for a jolt of coffee in the dregs of some cop’s used cup undercut her elegance—and utters screenwriterly lines about how anyone can see that they’re in love, Laurel’s expression indicates that she no longer is. Ray’s medium close-up of her struggling not to cry, after Dix has stood over her threateningly again and left the kitchen, isolates her in a very lonely place. Grahame’s infinitesimal registering of each of Laurel’s emotional fibrillations is something to behold: hers is an exquisite performance.

Ray considered the couple’s inevitable sundering to be the lesser of two evils. Halfway through production, he shot the ending Solt had written. Learning that Laurel is about to desert him, Dix strangles her (as Grahame’s unfaithful wife would be strangled by her paranoid husband in Fritz Lang’s 1954 Human Desire) and carries on working (his obsessive typing anticipating that of the psychotic Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1977 The Shining). Ray hated this ending, as he explained when interviewed by Myron Meisel in February 1973 for the biographical documentary I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1975), included as a supplement on the Criterion release of In a Lonely Place.

“In the meantime, I had separated from my wife,” he said of the murder scene’s place in the production schedule. “And if I had let the producer Bobby Lord or Bogie know that, they would have gone crazy, or Harry Cohn would have gone crazy. So I said, ‘Look, I’m having trouble with the third act. Make an apartment for me in a couple of dressing rooms, ’cause I don’t want to drive to Malibu every night. I want to get downstage and work at night.’ Which I did. And Gloria behaved beautifully. Nobody knew that we were separated. And I just couldn't believe the ending that Bundy [Solt] and I had written. I shot it because it was my obligation to do it. Then I kicked everybody offstage except Bogart, Art Smith and Gloria. And we improvised the ending as it is now. In the original ending we had ribbons so it was all tied up into a very neat package, with Frank Lovejoy coming in and arresting him as he was writing the last lines, having killed Gloria. Huh! And I thought, shit, I can’t do it, I just can’t do it! Romances don’t have to end that way. Marriages don’t have to end that way, they don’t have to end in violence. Let the audience make up its own mind what's going to happen to Bogie when he goes outside the apartment.”

Ray preserved the film’s ending from the nihilism augured by Dix’s admission that he’s “nobody” by suffusing its last few seconds in lush romanticism. Tears stream down Laurel’s face as she leans against the door jamb watching him depart—below her now—and murmurs words from the mantric lament he had prophetically originated for the script she, as his muse, had inspired him to write: “I lived a few weeks while you loved me. Goodbye Dix.”

She is young enough to find someone else. Dix halts fleetingly as he strides out of the courtyard where they had first met but then exits the frame. In an interview with Movie, Ray said: “You do not know whether the man is going to go out, to get drunk, have an accident in his car, or whether he is going to go to a psychiatrist for help,” as Mel had once recommended he do.

“And that’s the way it should be; either one of the two things could happen to him because now the pressure is off, but now there is an internal pressure,” Ray concluded. “He has a problem about himself.” It begs the questions: did Ray or Grahame, in partially feeding their lives to their art, learn anything about themselves from making In a Lonely Place? If they did, why were they powerless to prevent their marriage becoming a fiasco in 1951, to the extent that Ray had to move out and could never go home again, as if he were walking in Dix Steele’s footsteps.

I Knew You Before I Ever Saw You: In a Lonely Place (1950), Part 1 ... Elaine Lennon from Offscreen, April 2013

Hollywood Can Be a 'Lonely Place': In a Lonely Place (1950) Part 2 ... Elaine Lennon from Offscreen, April 2013

Shadows on the Horizon: In a Lonely Place • Senses of Cinema Fiona Villella, November 5, 2000

The Heart is a “Lonely” Hunter: On Nicholas Ray's ... - Senses of Cinema Serena Bramble, June 2011

I Like His Face - Bright Lights Film Journal a more complete version of the above Pop Matters article by Scott Thill, April 30, 2003

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City - Bright Lights Film Journal Imogen Sara Smith, July 31, 2009

On the World's Finest Female Noir Writer, Dorothy B. Hughes - Los ... Sarah Weinman from The LA Review of Books, April 12, 2012

Dorothy B. Hughes Biography by Megan Abbott

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes | Women Crime Writers of the ... The Gimlet Eye of Dorothy B. Hughes, Megan Abbott on author Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place

Breaking the Bravado: Interpreting the Subdued Performances of ... Breaking the Bravado: Interpreting the Subdued Performances of Humphrey Bogart, by Parker Mott from Film Slate

In a Lonely Place Clydefro’s Film Journal, May 1, 2007

Heart of Darkness 3-page essay on Burnett Guffey's cinematography by George Turner from American Cinematographer, July 1998

Ray of Hopelessness Richard von Busack from Metroactive Movies, February 20, 1997

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: page 3 and page 4

In a Lonely Place - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Bogart's In A Lonely Place at Film Forum | Village Voice J. Hoberman, July 15, 2009

Underneath the Bottle: "In A Lonely Place" and Alcoholism on ... - Mubi Glenn Kenny, July 15, 2009

"In a Lonely Place" and the Dark Side of Freedom on Notebook | MUBI Evan Davis, July 23, 2009

When In Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes: Close-Up on ... - Mubi Sherry Johnson, June 2, 2017

The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]

Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Tom Huddleston]

Review by Brian W. Fairbanks

Film Noir of the Week Steve-O, August 3, 2007

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] great photos from the film

Critical Culture [Pacze Moj] more great photos

In a Lonely Place (1950) James Travers from Films de France

Edward Copeland on Film (Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.)

Jake Weird/Cinema Kendra does a complete Bogart profile, with multiple photos, October 9, 2010

100 films Lucas McNelly

Film Intuition Jen Johans

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [5/5]

In a Lonely Place Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television

Film Monthly (Del Harvey) review

Gone with the Twins (Mike Massie) review [9/10]

filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]

IN A LONELY PLACE – Mad, Bad, and... Nelson Kim from Hammer to Nail

Screencrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

Ray: In A Lonely Place (1950) Billy Stevenson from A Film Canon

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]

Few There Be That Find It

Brilliant Observations on 2122 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Radio Times [Adrian Turner]

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing KING OF KINGS

In A Lonely Place (1950) Classic Film Guide (capsule)

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [5/5]

Baltimore City Paper (Eric Allen Hatch) review

Austin Chronicle [Claiborne Smith]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review May 18, 1950, also seen here: THE SCREEN: THREE FILMS MAKE THEIR BOWS; Humphrey Bogart Movie, 'In a Lonely Place,' at Paramount --Import at Trans-Lux 'Annie Get Your Gun,' Starring Betty Hutton, Is Presented at Loew's State Theatre

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]

BORN TO BE BAD

USA (94 mi) 1950

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

While far from being one of Ray's finest films - he himself was decidedly unhappy with the basic material - this is still a highly watchable bitchy melodrama. Fontaine is admirably cast as the deceitful, ambitous go-getter dying to get her claws into a rich husband and playing off various suitors against one another; her customary 'nice' image is undermined throughout, exposing the wiles that may underlie traditional 'feminine innocence', and at the same time revealing that men gullible enough to believe in such sweetly simpering pleasantry deserve what they get. A pretty predictable story, in fact, but directed by Ray with great attention to emotional states and telling camera compositions (all those staircases!).

Born to Be Bad (1950) - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri

Based on the novel All Kneeling by Anne Parrish, Born to Be Bad (1950) is the story of Christabel, a gold-digging femme fatale who steals another woman's fiance and marries him, while continuing to dally with her novelist boyfriend. Like many films made at RKO during the chaotic regime of Howard Hughes, Born to Be Bad has a long and convoluted history, filled with behind-the-scenes sex, intrigue and betrayal as juicy as any on the screen.

Actress Joan Fontaine had bought the rights to the novel, then sold them to RKO. Born to Be Bad was scheduled to go into production in 1946, was put on hold twice, and had gone through seven screenwriters when it finally went into production early in 1949. By that time, Hughes had bought the studio. According to Fontaine, he had been proposing to her for ten years (he had also wooed Fontaine's sister, Olivia de Havilland), and now he continued his pursuit. By that time, Fontaine's marriage to producer William Dozier was rocky, and in her memoirs she implied that when she told her husband about Hughes' latest proposal, the two of them decided that she would agree to divorce Dozier and marry Hughes if he hired Dozier to run the studio. Fontaine wrote that she was not in love with Hughes, and was unwilling to have an affair with him before she was divorced, because she did not want to risk losing custody of her daughter. So negotiations broke down, the relationship with Hughes never went anywhere, and Fontaine's marriage eventually ended. Dozier, however, did end up working at RKO. As for Born to Be Bad, Fontaine writes that "the only acceptable part of the film was my wardrobe designed by Tina Leser." (Fontaine's costumes are credited to New York couturier Hattie Carnegie.)

The rest of the cast included former Warner Brothers ingenue Joan Leslie, giving a strong performance as the discarded fiancee, and Zachary Scott as the rich man who becomes Christabel's prey. Mel Ferrer, recently signed by Hughes to a contract, played an artist who paints Christabel's portrait and observes her villainy. Ferrer was also a writer and director, and his second directorial effort, The Secret Fury (1950), was released in the same year as Born to Be Bad. Ferrer was also the fifth and only credited director on the Hughes fiasco, Vendetta (1950).

Director Nicholas Ray insisted on Robert Ryan for the part of the novelist who falls in love with Christabel. Born to Be Bad was the first of five films Ray and Ryan made together, and the start of a lasting friendship. Ryan's rugged good looks and ability to portray complex and often conflicting emotions made him an ideal Ray protagonist. His performance as the troubled cop in Ray's film noir On Dangerous Ground (1952) is one of Ryan's best.

Born to Be Bad was the fourth film directed by Ray, who had made an auspicious debut the previous year with the powerful They Live by Night (1949). Already, though, Ray had demonstrated a strikingly original visual style, and an ability to convey emotional intensity even when working with the most banal material. The opening scenes in Born to Be Bad are a bravura exercise in style, as he introduces the main characters preparing for and attending a party at the apartment of Leslie's character. The brilliantly choreographed and lit movement through the apartment hallway with many doors leading off it provides a visual metaphor for the characters' tangled relationships. The work of cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who had been working in films since the early 1920s, and whose work on Out of the Past (1947) helped define film noir, is stunning in this sequence.

As was becoming typical of Ray's working method, he agonized over every scene of Born to Be Bad, which producer Robert Sparks was treating as just another romantic melodrama. After the film was finished, Hughes, typically, began tinkering. He ordered reshoots with other directors. He changed the ending. Ray asked for the right of final cut, but was denied. Somehow, an ending without retribution for Christabel managed to slip past the censors. When the film was finally released, critics dismissed it as just another soap opera. But over the years, as the cult of Nicholas Ray has grown, Born to Be Bad has undergone a critical re-evaluation. Franklin Jarlett, in his book on the life and career of Robert Ryan, writes "Born to Be Bad was well-written, fast paced, and convincingly played....In Nicholas Ray's perceptive hands, it emerged as a morality play." Born to Be Bad even received the ultimate movie lovers' accolade, when it was parodied on the Carol Burnett TV show, as "Raised to Be Rotten."

not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review

Born to Be Bad Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television

Sly Precursors to Gay Liberation: "Born to Be Bad" on Notebook | MUBI Evan Davis, July 27, 2009

The Major and the Minor: Notes on Two Early Films by Nicholas ... - Mubi Daniel Kasman, August 13, 2009

From The Warner Archive: Born To Be Bad, 1950 (dir. Nicholas Ray ... Marya from Cinema-Fanatic

Born to Be Bad (1950) - full review! Classic Film Guide

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review

User reviews from imdb Author: Roger Burke from Australia

User reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: aimless-46 from Kentucky

The Toledo Blade [Mitch Woodbury] November 3, 1950

The Bridgeport Herald November 26, 1950

'Born to Be Bad' on Screen at Capitol The New York Times, September 29, 1950

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE FLYING LEATHERNECKS

USA (102 mi) 1951

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Made between the marvellous In a Lonely Place and On Dangerous Ground, this is arguably Ray's least distinguished film, a relatively conventional, anonymous WWII drama made for RKO mogul Howard Hughes - hence the authentic, Technicolor aerial footage of fighters in combat, as a Marine Corps squadron fight the Japs at Guadalcanal. Rather more interesting, perhaps, is the private conflict between Wayne's sternly no-nonsense disciplinarian CO and Ryan's more openly compassionate executive officer, who is afflicted with several of the neuroses commonly found in Ray's protagonists. Finally, however, it's all very predictable, even culminating in a flag-waving endorsement of traditional heroism. Thanks to the solid performances and fine camerawork, the film is not bad, merely professional.

User reviews from imdb Author: jjulian1009

I saw this overlooked Nicolas Ray film for the first time this week and was surprised by the director's ability to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear within the tight limitations of the post WWII propaganda war genre. Of course, the jingoism, the low budget fx and the formula finishing lines are dated and tedious, but the core of the film is the fascinating relationship between Wayne, as the tough Major with a good heart, and Robert Ryan as his compassionate second-in-command with a tough mind. If you zapped past the battle and home front scenes, you would have a highly charged exploration of male-bonding issues. As well, the film seems to be covertly raising questions which go as far back in our literature as ancient Greece when officers initiated their men into rites of passage. The intensely rich Technicolor and the interior tent sets evoke a crucible environment which powerfully thrusts along the character development. Ray draws from Ryan a brilliant portrayal and from Wayne a solid effort that seems to prepare him for his splendid characterization in a similar conflicted relationship with Maureen O'Hara for his very next film, John Ford's "The Quiet Man", for which Wayne got an Oscar nomination in 1952.

"Flying Leathernecks" has the virtue of a director taking on a run of the mill commercial film project, infusing it with his idiosyncratic style and providing the audience with some thematic depth and many fine moments. The most interesting example for me is a scene two-thirds into the film when John Wayne receives orders to depart immediately for another assignment and seeks to explain to Robert Ryan why the command of the squadron will be passed to another officer and Ryan not promoted into the job. Instead of an explosive argument, the conflict is conveyed mainly through non-verbal signals that each man is unable or unwilling to read from the other. A frustrated Wayne finally shrugs his shoulders and strides out of the tent while a tight-jawed Ryan keeps his backed turned away from him. Fortunately, there are enough of such involving scenes to make this a worthwhile film, even though this is not in the same league as Ray's great ones like "Rebel Without a Cause".

In some ways, it's hard to believe that the same Nicholas Ray that made the grim anti-war statement Bitter Victory a few years later first made The Flying Leathernecks, which follows a squadron of Marine bombers during the Guadalcanal assault. Though there's obviously some reticence in the characters to engage in combat, when it's time for action, there's a shift toward the gung-ho as the men invariably step up to the challenge that The Great War presents. That's not to say that the characters act inconsistently. Quite the opposite, since there are surprisingly nuanced and psychologically sound roles for both Robert Ryan and John Wayne here. What is most surprising is that Ray, who usually offers up a strong liberal sensibility, doesn’t spend energy here decrying the war so much as he examines the value of the individual soldier’s life in the grand scheme of things and the difficulty in issuing a command that might cost some of those lives. Wayne’s hardened Major Kirby understands that it’s necessary to incur some casualties during an operation. Tensions arise when it becomes apparent that this unfortunate fact of life is something that Ryan’s Captain Griff can’t quite wrap his inexperienced mind around. That the realities of the world don’t live up to the idealized wishes of those in it is one of Ray’s key themes, and it’s by illustrating this gap that the film feels most like the work of its director.

The requirements of military rank demand that a commanding officer not reveal too many of his emotional concerns to his subordinates, so one of the most interesting things about Leathernecks is the way that Ray manages to show Kirby’s efforts to let his troops know that he’s human too. Saddled with both the unfortunate task of sending his men to their possible demise and the unenviable position of authority over his stressed men, he still manages to exhibit compassion, thanks in no small part to one of John Wayne’s better performances. As unintentionally corny as some of the scenes that show Kirby at home might be, they undeniably show a different side of the man than the one that dominates the rest of the film. The strain of assuming a leadership position in a situation where losses are guaranteed allows the director a chance to once again examine a form of male estrangement that can’t quite be articulated. The uneasy alliance between the Major and the Captain doesn’t contain the broad ideological gulf that exists between most of Ray’s conflict, but because of the common ground between their points of view, it feels more realistic and ambivalent in its allegiances toward either side. If it can’t be said that Ray is accepting the evils of the system here, for once it seems that he’s begrudgingly attempting to reconcile himself with them. Because of that sensibility, The Flying Leathernecks packs a surprising amount of intelligent insight in with its nationalistic rally cry.

Flying Leathernecks - TCM.com Scott McGee

Mark O'Hara retrospective

DVD Verdict (Mark Van Hook) dvd review

Three Movie Buffs review [3/4]

The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell

The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico, USA

New Drama of War in the Air The New York Times, September 20, 1951

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr]

ON DANGEROUS GROUND A- 94

aka: Dark Highway

USA (82 mi) 1952

Guy Maddin, transcribed from a 2009 introduction of the film at the IFC Center:

Has there ever been a face—rugged and manfully handsome yet fragile with inner agonies promising to explode into volcanic rage—like Robert Ryan’s? Nick Ray harnesses the violent force of this face as Ryan pounds his beat, and every face on it, to Bernard Hermann’s greatest score. Ward Bond has never been more precipitous or more startling—his grief and stupidity as powerful and natural as a mountain cataract.

Actually filmed before his previous film FLYING LEATHERNECKS (1951), this feels like a natural extension of an earlier character, Humphrey Bogart’s Dix Steele at the end of IN A LONELY PLACE (1950), an outsider with a penchant for violence who can’t conform to the rules of society, perhaps the template for John Ford’s Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) character in THE SEARCHERS (1956) or even Scorsese’s Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) character in TAXI DRIVER (1975). While the arc of their lives is decidedly different, when we are introduced to all these characters, their propensity for violence is key to understanding their pent up, out of control inner rage, where these men are defined by the jagged edges of their soul, always irritable and dissatisfied, railing at the world around them, but usually it’s a personal disgust with themselves, how ineffectual they are at preventing the sick and twisted perverts of the world from ruining so many people’s lives. The opening half hour of this film is textbook film noir, On Dangerous Ground -- (Movie Clip) Cop Killers YouTube (3:32), introducing Robert Ryan as a New York City cop Jim Wilson, a guy living alone in a depressingly tiny tenement apartment, who’s been on the force 11 years and seen it all, growing sick of continually dealing with the lowlifes and scum of the earth, “garbage, that’s all we handle,” always having to see the worst side of human nature, growing increasingly rough and physical when making arrests, perhaps crossing the line of police brutality, which he justifies by making the collar, but he’s turned into a loose cannon where his partners think he’s losing it and may crack under the pressure. Nonetheless, he always starts out cool and collected before something drives him over the edge, as we see in two interrogation scenes here On Dangerous Ground (1952) - Video Dailymotion (5:42).

Adapted by Ray and A.I. Bezzerides from Gerald Butler’s novel Mad With Much Heart, this is not as well known as other Ray films (though believed to be his favorite), partly because the release was delayed for a year while Howard Hughes tinkered with the editing, adding a new scene condemning police brutality, dropping a posse subplot in the snow, and adding a lushly romantic ending that Ray and film noir devotees disavowed. By the time it was released, it followed William Wyler’s DETECTIVE STORY (1951), making this feel like a copycat movie. Structurally, it’s also quite unique, as it breaks formula, starting out as a straight film noir, good cops doing the city’s dirty business but at a psychological price, but in the second half of the film they get out of the city into the snowy expanse of the mountain country, where it feels more like an Anthony Mann western that certainly had its influence on the Coen brother’s FARGO (1996). Bezzerides’ novel Long Haul was used for Raoul Walsh’s THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940), while also co-writing William Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT (1954) and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), all highly influential projects. Bezzerides is actually seen early in the film as a corrupt bar owner attempting to bribe Ryan while he’s making the rounds attempting to collect information about a local cop killer on the loose. When the police chief (Ed Begley) informs Wilson that the police force is being sued for his excessive use of brutality, the chief decides to send him upstate, to get him out into the country where he’ll have a new start and perhaps a fresh attitude. Little did he know that’s exactly what happens, making this actually feel like two entirely different films. Perhaps the film’s biggest influence is the outstanding Bernard Hermann music, very pronounced from the opening credits, then all but disappears as the cops make their rounds in searing realism, before becoming perfectly integrated into the film again, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays a brief excerpt ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1951) - Death Hunt ... (2:26) and Hermann himself can be heard in brief audio clips of highly demanding rehearsal sessions On Dangerous Ground - Scoring Outtakes - YouTube (2:21).

As soon as Wilson arrives upstate and hears the particulars, we hear a young girl’s been killed, where her father, Ward Bond at his angry best, is on a vigilante rampage, shotgun in hand and ready to shoot at the first thing that looks like the killer. Bond drives this second half with his near psychotic rage, which tempers Wilson, seeing himself in the old man, becoming a more restrained police investigator instead of utilizing the heavy handed brute techniques of vigilantism. Interestingly, Bond was politically to the right of John Wayne and likely Attila the Hun, where he led the Red Scare witch hunt to publicly identify and castigate communists from under every rock in America, where here he plays someone very close to his real character, as much like Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, he’s driven to mercilessly track down and find the killer. This psychological shift from one psychopath to another can be heard in Hermann’s remarkable score which pulsates with mad energy in wordless sequences as they follow the footprints in the snow, Bond leading at a brisk pace, stomping through the snow, rifle in hand, one following right behind the other until they come upon a cabin in an open meadow On Dangerous Ground -- (Movie Clip) Scared People (4:13, followed by the trailer). Entering carefully, they discover a quietly polite blind woman inside, Ida Lupino, playing against type, becoming the calming voice of a gentle woman who is largely dependent on others, due to her condition, changing the tone of the film from wrath to reason On Dangerous Ground : The Blind And The Cop ... (3:22). But Bond is hell bent and will not be dissuaded until the killer is caught, where the struggle is as much Ryan against Bond as the two of them trying to find the killer. An interior melancholic mood established through the quiet of a wintry night turns into a psychologically riveting chase scene during the light of day, as by morning, the escapee leads them on a hunt through an open expanse into the rocky cliffs nearby, very similar to the ending in Mann’s Winchester '73 (1950), where a tense struggle leads to an enduring tragedy, where a film noir turns into a film blanc due to the heavy cover of snow. The music really makes this film, as there are rapidly changing moods that are only accentuated by the score, adding interior depth to what turns into a glorified depiction of fullblown romanticism by the end, as Wilson finally discovers his humanity, where the earlier violence and anger shifts to forgiveness and love, where the close-up image of the embrace of hands is a transcendent Bressonian moment.

One of the loveliest of Nick Ray's movies: this 1952 feature begins as a harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in love with the killer's blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside, filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann. 82 min.

The Nick Schager Film Project

Perched between late-'40s noir and mid-'50s crime drama, this is one of the great, forgotten works of the genre. Robert Ryan is a time-bomb of a New York cop, tormented by the urban squalor he sees around him; after roughing up one too many crooks, he's assigned to track down a killer in wintry upstate, where he falls for Ida Lupino, the main suspect's blind sister. Easily mushy, the material achieves a nearly transcendental beauty in the hands of Ray, a poet of anguished expression: The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir. Despite the violence and the steady intensity, a remarkably pure film.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

A superb noir thriller with a difference. Ray's second film with producer John Houseman (the first being They Live By Night) starts off in the sinister urban jungle, with Ryan's cop increasingly brutalised by the 'garbage' he is forced to deal with. Finally, his methods become so violent that he is sent to cool off in snowy upstate New York, where his search for a sex killer brings him into contact with Lupino's blind woman and her mentally retarded brother (Williams). It's a film about the violence within us all, about the effects of environment and family upon character (Lupino, peaceful and a healing force, even has a tree in her living room), and about the spiritual redemption of a fallen man. If it sometimes seems a little schematic, there is no denying the power of the performances (Ryan in particular is ferociously effective, a true precursor to Siegel's Dirty Harry), nor the eloquence of Ray's poetic but tough direction. Aided enormously by George Diskant's high contrast camerawork and by Bernard Herrmann's stunning score, which emphasises the hunt motif in Ryan's quest, it's a film of frequent brilliance.

One of noir’s most soulful and poetic expressions of hope and redemption – two commodities usually in short supply in the fatalistic genre – Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground begins hard and bitter, only to slowly transform into something gentle and poignant. Detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is so repulsed by the seedy urban underworld he’s forced to inhabit that, his face frozen in a disgusted grimace, he seems ready to explode – until, that is, he does, using clenched fists to beat a confession out of an uncooperative crook. Sent north to help investigate the murder of a local man’s (Ward Bond) son, Wilson instead finds therapeutic help himself, which comes in the compassionate guise of the suspect’s blind sister Mary (the always radiant Ida Lupino). It’s an exceedingly melodramatic turn of events, and yet Ray’s graceful handling of the material turns potential schmaltz into blissful sentimentality, the director beautifully juxtaposing the dark, gritty shadows of his opening’s metropolitan streets with the soft white snow of the countryside. Vividly visualizing inner torment is Ray’s specialty, and the early encounters between Wilson and Mary, as well as a series of climactic close-ups, prove so moving that, even when the plotting eventually becomes a tad creaky, the outpouring of pained, plaintive emotion is nothing short of overpowering.

Even among Nicholas Ray movies, On Dangerous Ground is overlooked, without the punched-up dialogue of They Live by Night or the operatic scale of Johnny Guitar. But it's among the most nakedly emotional of Ray's great works, at once taut and poetic, like the man himself.

Available as part of the third volume of Warner Bros.' Film Noir Classic Collection (along with Anthony Mann's Border Incident and three others), On Dangerous Ground was released in 1952, at the end of Ray's astonishingly prolific run at RKO (six movies since 1949, plus two more for Columbia). Beginning as the story of a hard-boiled city cop (Robert Ryan) who gets a bit too aggressive in questioning his prisoners, the movie waits half an hour before shipping him upstate, where the disgraced Ryan is literally sent to cool off. Assigned to investigate a young girl's murder in a snowy small town, Ryan spends as much time preventing the girl's bloodthirsty father (Ward Bond) from gunning down the fleeing suspect as he does trying to solve the crime. Wandering through the snowy terrain, a moral wasteland as bare as the African desert in Ray's Bitter Victory (or the Coen brothers' Minnesota), Ryan and Bond stumble on a cabin inhabited by the blind Ida Lupino, who instantly senses a kinship with Ryan that he is slow to recognize. Lupino's performance is almost hilariously affected ("Tell me ... how is it ... to be a cop?"), but it only enhances the strangeness of Ryan's frigid exile, the sense that he's stumbled into territory where he might get lost for good. An Ivy League boxing champion, Ryan rarely got the chance to be both tough and tender on the big screen, but Ray understood the way a wounded soul might lie beneath a tough, even frightening, exterior. (He pulled the same trick with Bogart in In a Lonely Place and Mitchum in The Lusty Men). Warner Bros.' disc does the best with a damaged source, and Dana Polan's commentary fills in a wealth of production history detailing the movie's frequent reshoots and restructurings.

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review

Up to now, Warner Home Video has done a wonderful job resurrecting the greatest noir classics for their first two "Film Noir Classic Collection" DVD box sets. The titles packaged in these previous sets included such miracles as Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1949), John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947) and The Set-Up (1949) and Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952).

But "Vol. 3" ($49.98, SRP) unleashes a slate of lesser-known titles, the kind of second-gear stuff you might have found yourself unexpectedly enjoying as second-billed attraction in a Saturday matinee. It's actually just as much fun pouring through these unknowns as it is looking once again at the greats. The titles included in the new set start with Anthony Mann's vicious, striking Border Incident (1949), which teams a Mexican agent (Ricardo Montalban) with an American agent (George Murphy) to stop corruption near the border.

Next, we get John Farrow's baffling His Kind of Woman (1951), starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell and Vincent Price in a film full of gamblers, stolen identity, actors and Mexican resorts. Mitchum returns in John Cromwell's shaky The Racket (1951) -- co-starring the lovely, heavy-lidded Lizabeth Scott -- about an honest cop and an old school gangster who team up against a common foe. The Racket comes with an audio commentary track by San Francisco writer and film noir expert Eddie Muller.

Also in the set is Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (1947), adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. Montgomery stars as gumshoe Philip Marlowe, although he's hardly ever on camera. In one of cinema's oddest experiments, Montgomery films the entire thing from the detective's point of view; we get the odd glimpse of him in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. His gambit doesn't entirely work, but it's fairly interesting.

Despite all this, the real reason to pick up this set (in this case, the titles are not available separately) is Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1951). On Dangerous Ground came in the middle of an astonishing string of masterworks from Ray, including In a Lonely Place (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956) and Bitter Victory (1957).

Championed by Jean-Luc Godard and the other famous critics at Cahiers du Cinema, Ray was unique among Hollywood directors; he had a way of hammering through the most intense, unfiltered emotions. Even the stoic Humphrey Bogart comes across as open and fevered in In a Lonely Place. But more importantly, Ray understood unlike any other how to use the space around the characters as part of this emotional landscape. Think of the apartment courtyard in In a Lonely Place, the planetarium in Rebel Without a Cause or the hilltop hideout in Johnny Guitar. On Dangerous Ground does double duty in that capacity, opening in the big, violent city, with its dark alleyways and crooked stairwells, as cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) searches for his latest suspect.

Surrounded by soft, family men -- one keeps a rose garden and another likes ice cream sundaes -- Wilson takes his work seriously and finds desperation taking hold. When an informer refuses to talk, Wilson proceeds to beat it out of him, but first asking, tremblingly, "Why do you make me do it? You know you're gonna talk! I'm gonna make you talk! I always make you punks talk! Why do you do it? Why?!" Ryan specialized in these damaged types, calling forth a reservoir of burbling acid behind his square, stony exterior; he was the best at it. Perhaps because he was not much of a clear-cut hero type, he never earned the adoration and acclaim he deserved. But to think of anyone else in this role is inconceivable.

When Wilson's actions get him into trouble, his superiors send him on a mission out of town, upstate, to the snow-covered countryside, where a murderer is loose. Once there, he's teamed with an irate, shotgun-wielding farmer, Walter Brent (Ward Bond), the father of the murdered girl, who intends to kill the murderer.

Obviously, Wilson is torn between his own penchant for violence and sticking to the law, especially when he meets and interrogates the killer's beautiful, blind sister Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), who only knows her brother as a kind soul that helps her "see" the world. Lupino is terrific, bringing her trademark intelligence and sadness to an otherwise gimmicky role. The part came near the beginning of her own directorial career (Never Fear, Outrage, Hard, Fast and Beautiful, etc.), and she reportedly took over the helm for a few days when Ray was ill.

Ray depicts Wilson's torment with an astonishing use of the snow-covered hillsides. Characters actually have to tromp through the icy sludge (it certainly does not look like a studio back lot). And when they enter Mary's home, with its many sculptures and driftwood samples, their bulky coats and boots tend to bowl over the house's delicate interior design.

If that's not enough, the movie is blessed with a musical score by the great Bernard Herrmann; some of which sounds like his future work with Hitchcock, but here it's refined for Ray's tastes, made softer or going completely quiet when the mood strikes. Rounding out a complete package is a screenplay by the great Turkish-born novelist and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, who also wrote Thieves Highway (1949), Track of the Cat (1954) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He was so influential that he has inspired two new (as yet unreleased) documentaries.

On Dangerous Ground (1952) Clydefro from Noir of the Week, November 14, 2008, also seen here: Noir of the Week

On Dangerous Ground Clydefro’s Film Journal, December 14, 2006

On Dangerous Ground - TCM.com Paul Tatara

On Dangerous Ground (1952) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

Saturday Editor's Pick: On Dangerous Ground (1952) Alt Blog

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: On Dangerous Ground (1952) Tony Dayoub

Sound On Sight Edgar Chaput

filmcritic.com (Paul Brenner) review [3.5/5]

On Dangerous Ground Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television, also seen here: The Films of Nicholas Ray [Michael E. Grost]

Few There Be That Find It

FilmsNoir.Net [Tony D'Ambra]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Gail Spencer

Monsters and Critics - Film Noir V.3 DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Film Noir Classics Collection, Volume 3

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini]- Film Noir Classics Collection: Volume Three

The Disparities of a Studio Journeyman: "A Woman's Secret" - Mubi Evan Davis, also reviewing A WOMAN’S SECRET

On Dangerous Ground (1952) | Nicholas Ray | Robert Ryan Ida Lupino ... Movie Title Stills Collection

Baltimore City Paper (Ian Grey) review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review February 13, 1952, also here: THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; ' On Dangerous Ground,' Story of Detective Turned Sadist, Opens at the Criterion

DVDBeaver.com - Region 1 reviewed

MACAO

USA (81 mi) 1952 d: Josef von Sternberg, Nicholas Ray was uncredited

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Not an entirely happy production - Sternberg, according to Mitchum, shot and cut it in such a way that characters kept walking into themselves, with the result that Nicholas Ray was called in to reshoot (uncredited) many of the action scenes - but still a delightful bit of RKO exotica. The thin story, set in the port of the title, sees Mitchum's drifter joining up with Russell's sultry singer and helping the local cops catch a criminal bigwig. But what is so enjoyable, apart from Harry Wild's shimmering camerawork, is the tongue-in-cheek tone of the script and performances, best evidenced in the sparkling banter and innuendo between Mitchum and Russell.

Film Noir of the Week Kristina

I remember a few years back Macao was scheduled for the Film Noir Festival at the Egyptian. Eddie Muller was the host and he told the audience he had called Jane Russell that day and told her the Egyptian was showing Macao. Her response was “Why”?

Her less than enthusiastic response is easily understood once learning about the making of the troubled RKO production. I can understand why she’d probably just want to forget the experience. The audience though sees the film differently, not having participated in the taxing production and can accept the film as a good example of the film noir genre, with the most interesting parts being the story of the production and the opening scenes of the film..

Macao’s production began after the success of the first Mitchum/Russell flick, His Kind of Woman, a better film than Macao in my opinion. Howard Hughes hired Josef von Sternberg (who helped Dietrich rocket to fame) to direct Macao, despite the fact Sternberg hadn’t done anything recently. Perhaps Hughes was hoping to recreate the atmosphere of Shanghai Gesture which Sternberg had directed, but more likely it was to propel Jane Russell’s star higher in Hollywood. Sternberg had all the right ingredients to start with: the very capable writing team of Stanley Rubin and Bernard C. Schoenfeld and a terrific array of noir actors including Mitchum, Russell, Gloria Grahame, Thomas Gomez, Brad Dexter and William Bendix. Unfortunately for the crew and the studio, Sternberg didn’t play well with others and made the set quite unpleasant. A showdown ensued between Mitchum and Sternberg and the director lost. He was replaced by Nicholas Ray after most of the movie (if not all of the movie, depending on which source you read) had already been filmed. Nicholas Ray and various members of the crew added dialogue and scenes and they shot over most of the scenes, but some of the remnants of Sternberg’s product are hinted at times through the use of unusual camera angles and lighting. Scenes of Gloria Grahame behind beaded curtains, Dexter spying behind shuttered windows, and Mitchum & Bendix shrouded by fish nets add to the veiled mystery of Macao and were probably filmed by Sternberg. The final product is a good, but not great, film featuring typical noir characters - a crime boss (Dexter), his mistress (Grahame), an ex-serviceman on the run from the law (Mitchum), a bad girl with a heart of gold (Russell), an undercover cop (Bendix), a crooked policeman (Gomez), and a odd assortment of various characters.

The opening of the story draws the audience immediately into the action and into a romance between Mitchum and Russell. The pace is pretty tight in the 81 minute movie and besides a tidy plot we are treated to some snappy dialogue including a great closing line (how’d that get by the 1952 censors?) and 3 songs by Jane. The story opens with a chase on a dock. The man being chased is a New York cop & is killed. We see that Vincent Halloran (Dexter) is involved in the murder.

Cut to Julie Benton (Russell) aboard a ferry. She’s broke and has hooked up with a seedy salesman so she can get to Macao. The salesman gets a little rough, even for Julie, and she throws her shoe at him, but it goes out the window and hits Nick Cochran (Mitchum) instead. Nick comes into the room and busts up the party. Cochran helps himself to a kiss from Julie and Julie lifts Nick’s wallet. They land in Macao, Julie and another passenger, Lawrence C. Trumble (self-proclaimed businessman of coconut oil, pearl buttons, fertilizer, and nylon stockings) gain entry but Cochran is without wallet and passport, so he has to check in with the local police, Lt Sebastian (Gomez). Sebastian allows Cochran into Macao for the time being.

Sebastian is on Halloran’s payroll and tells him that Cochran must be the cop sent in to finish the dead officer’s work of bringing Halloran to justice since Cochran has no identification papers. Halloran’s casino, The Quick Reward, attracts the characters from the boat – Julie gets a job singing there, Trumble gambles, Cochran tries to find work there. Also at the Quick Reward is Halloran’s girl, Margie (Grahame).

The major characters are now in place and the story moves steadily forward. I want to leave some mystery for those who haven’t seen the film yet, even though it is easily figured out, so that’s all of the story I’ll give.

The actors are good, but Grahame is somewhat underused. We see her but she doesn’t get enough dialogue and that is interesting too because Nicholas Ray was the clean up director and added extra scenes. Dexter is great as the crooked casino owner with the hots for Julie. He speaks in a soft voice and often with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Bendix gets to go a bit against type in this movie, playing a relatively calm character. Male audiences will enjoy Russell’s gowns, er that is cleavage, and take a look for that lame dress rumored to weigh 26 pounds. Women will enjoy Mitchum’s charms.

Macao is a worthy entry in the noir genre, but some more mention must be made of Howard Hughes involvement in the film. His obsession with Russell's wardrobe and tactics he used while running RKO directly affected the quality of films made during his regin at RKO. The days of RKO noir films like Crossfire, Out of the Past, and They Live by Night were over by 1952. Hughes had script and star approval for all features by 1951 and the creative talents of the studio were not usually permitted to make decisions. So, RKO's noir products of this era turned out to be the type and quality of films like Clash by Night, Beware, My Lovely, Angel Face, and the exception to this list of lesser film noirs - The Narrow Margin (the best of the bunch from this period, Hughes must have left his one alone). So, all said, Macao turned out pretty well considering the chaotic production, switch of directors, and meddlesome tactics of Hughes.

Macao (1952) - Articles - TCM.com Bret Wood

Self-Styled Siren

not coming to a theater near you review Thomas Scalzo

filmcritic.com (Paul Brenner) review [2/5]

The Films of Josef von Sternberg [Michael E. Grost] also seen here: Macao

Macao (1952) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

DVD Verdict - Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection [Dylan Charles]

User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New York

User reviews from imdb Author: James Hitchcock from Tunbridge Wells, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: ackstasis from Australia

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: blanche-2 from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Robert Mitchum, The Signature Collection

The DVD Journal | Reviews: Macao DK Holm, Robert Mitchum, The Signature Collection

Macao (1952) Classic Film Guide

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

LUSTY MEN

USA (113 mi) 1952

Time Out review Tony Rayns

Nick Ray understood character and psychological pressures better than almost any of his contemporaries, and The Lusty Men was one of his happiest breaks: sympathetic producers, a great cameraman (Lee Garmes, who shot Sternberg's Dietrich movies), and one of Robert Mitchum's finest performances. The story isn't much (the security of family life versus the rootlessness and danger of working as a rodeo rider), but the situation is rich in emotional resonances which Ray conjures into life convincingly.

A masterpiece by Nicholas Ray--perhaps the most melancholy and reflective of his films (1952). This modern-dress western centers on Ray's perennial themes of disaffection and self-destruction: Arthur Kennedy is a young rodeo rider, eager for quick fame and easy money; Robert Mitchum is his older friend, a veteran who's been there and knows better. Working with the great cinematographer Lee Garmes, Ray creates an unstable atmosphere of dust and despair--trailer camps and broken-down ranches--that expresses the contradictory impulses of his characters: a lust for freedom balanced by a quest for security. With Susan Hayward, superb as Kennedy's wife. 113 min.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]

One of the very best westerns, permeated with a grim yet poetic sadness. Ray tended to depict and pick holes in the testosterone driven nonsense he was so prone to himself, and no subject he ever tackled was more suited to this than the rodeo. His other favorite theme, the father-son relationship (in this case surrogate) is also here in abundance. Robert Mitchum, in one of the greatest of his great performances is the broken up now penniless former champion who winds up taking on Arthur Kennedy, who gives a pathetic one dimensional grinning performance, as his protégé because he's intrigued by Susan Hayward. Hayward is given far too little to work with (the role was virtually non-existent when she was borrowed from Fox). We want to admire her for her ability to take care of big infant Kennedy, but despite the social consciousness of the film her responsibility tends to be shown in a poor light and she comes off rather narrow and dimensionless. It's only when she acts like a man, brawling to protect what's hers that we are supposed to cheer her. Nevertheless, the relationships are handled with rare depth and maturity for the genre, and the film is excellent at teasing the predictable then going in other directions. It's also a rare Hollywood film that deals with class, as killing themselves for our enjoyment is the only way a cattle hand has a chance to ever make enough to own property. The rodeo scenes are very professional, as Ray spent months filming the circuit and used a good deal of actual footage, but in this case that's not totally a positive. So much time is devoted to rodeo footage, as the danger of the rodeo is a constant theme, but it's mostly shot from quite a distance to try to hide the fact that the stars aren't the riders (occasionally they did violate the studios insurance and do some stunts). Despite this major handicap, Ray still manages to make each riding scene very suspenseful, the atmosphere is so strong that we expect injury at every moment.

The Lusty Men (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine Leonard Quart

Nicholas Ray was an original—an emotionally intense, visually inspired, and self-destructive American director who was at war his entire working life with the artistic compromises demanded by the Hollywood studios. His best works, They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), andBigger than Life (1956), were suffused with a romanticism that centered on lonely, wounded outsiders at odds with American middle-class values, like familial domesticity, that dominated their lives. These films conveyed a passionate sympathy for the alienated and the marginal, with whom Ray clearly identified. Still, like many great Hollywood directors of his era, most of his films involved a variety of studio assignments and genre films. To express his personal vision and style he had to find artistic space amidst the narrative conventions and commercial demands of the industry. More often than not he succeeded, but at great emotional cost. Toward the end of his life, Ray became increasingly difficult to work with, developing a serious dependence on drugs and alcohol and a reputation for instability. He retired from commercial filmmaking after directing two epic films in Spain.

The Lusty Men (1952) was an early work of Ray’s, shot in striking black and white by cinematographer Lee Garmes, that takes place in the very male subculture of rodeos and its participants. One of the film's strengths is its central character, Jeff McCloud, a sleepy-eyed, laconic, calmly masculine, and charismatic Robert Mitchum in one of his strongest performances. McCloud is a former rodeo champ who has dissipated his winnings on gambling and women, and after being injured by a bull has left the circuit penniless. After nearly twenty years away, he has drifted back to his boyhood home in Texas. Ray depicts McCloud’s departure from the rodeo with a stunning melancholy long shot of him limping in a desolate field with papers blowing about, while on the soundtrack we hear the wind whistling through the emptiness. Reaching his old home—a shack—he finds a toy gun, a cowboy magazine, and a tobacco tin in which he used to keep his money. That’s all that remains of his past, and the film seems to convey, for just one moment, that Jeff may feel some regret for the life choices he has made.

Jeff meets a married couple, the fiery, sharp-tongued, redheaded Louise (Susan Hayward) and Wes (Arthur Kennedy), a poor but ambitious cowhand. Their dream is to buy a ranch, and Wes calculates that Jeff could be the mentor who will turn him into a rodeo champ, enabling him to make some quick cash. Wes turns out to be a natural and, despite Louise’s objections and fears, becomes a star on the circuit.

The tense triangular relationship between Jeff, Wes, and Louise centers the film. Wes’s sudden celebrity goes to his head, he forgets about his dream of a ranch and begins to live high, to play around with other women, and to reject Jeff and the sound advice he offers. A frustrated Louise begins to confide in Jeff, who has fallen in love with her. It’s all rendered in a low-key, natural manner, without melodrama or tearful scenes. Louise may be attracted to Jeff, but her enduring commitment is to Wes, who holds out the only hope of something solid and rooted in a life that from childhood has been fragmented and impoverished. It’s the Fifties, and marriage is the only option that a woman like Louise can conceive of to give some meaning to her life.

Ray’s deepest sympathies are for outsiders, not for those who choose domesticity. But the film doesn’t sentimentalize the rodeo ethos and its peripatetic participants. Using documentary footage, the film provides us with a detailed and seamlessly integrated portrait of the stadium ambience: the pageantry touched with patriotism, the rodeo clowns and trick riders, and the calf roping and bronco and bull riding, where the contestants get scarred and crippled, and a few even die. It’s rare that any one of them ends up with much to show for their efforts. There are no real winners in the rodeo.

It’s also a swaggering male world where heavy drinking, womanizing, and hard partying are the norm, and it’s dominated by a kind of foolhardy macho fearlessness and stoicism. While the men’s wives and girlfriends sit in the stands through the events, rooting for their men and hoping they come out unscathed, life on the circuit is transient and often mean. Most of the contestants live in small trailers where family life is close to impossible. Aside from Louise, however, most of the women bear the difficulties and dangers of the life with little complaint.

Notwithstanding, Ray is sympathetic to the men, who revel in the applause of the crowd and are willing to risk their lives for small rewards. His heart goes out to those who wander endlessly, like Jeff, who love the rodeo life. Jeff has his flaws, but he conveys a touch of nobility—more so than any of the other characters in the film.

The Lusty Men concludes on a relatively realistic note—Jeff dying in a rodeo accident, and Wes reaffirming his respect for him (“He was the best”), and abruptly quitting the circuit and heading back with Louise to Texas and ranching. Ray, however, had to fight the producer and the studio to conclude the film the way he wanted. They pushed for a Hollywood-style sentimental finish with Jeff surviving and going off into the sunset with an ex-girlfriend. Ray’s ending is truer, and there is no happy future in the offing for any of the characters. Louise and Wes have chosen a more secure and tedious, but less autonomous and adventurous life. From Ray’s perspective, nobody wins in a film where one feels a gloomy fatalism underlying all the action. The Lusty Men is a small, poetic film with an emotional resonance that goes beyond its bare narrative.

Leonard Quart is the author or co-author of several books on film, including the fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945.

The Lusty Men and the - Bright Lights Film Journal Homeless on the Range, by Imogen Sara Smith, July 31, 2008

960 (102). The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray) — alsolikelife Kevin Lee at Shooting Down Pictures, March 20, 2009

(Sexy) Video Essay on Nicholas Ray's "The Lusty Men" - Mubi Kevin Lee Video essay, August 5, 2009, also seen here: An Arena of Hurt: A (Sexy) Video Essay on Nicholas Ray's "The Lusty Men"

Isolation on the Frontier: "The Lusty Men" and "The True Story ... - Mubi Evan Davis, August 5, 2009

The Lusty Men - TCM.com Roger Fristoe

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review

Film Noir of the Week Curt

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dougdoepke from Claremont, USA

Lusty Men, The (1952) - full review! Classic Film Guide

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review October 25, 1952, also here: ' Lusty Men,' Tale of Rodeo Riders With Robert Mitchum, Makes Debut at Criterion

JOHNNY GUITAR

USA (110 mi) 1954

I bet there are still people in this world who know what this allegorical cowboy film is about. Senator Joseph McCarthy, obviously, but what else? Nicholas Ray was a Communist (protected from McCarthy by Howard Hughes, an architect, and an alumnus of Elia Kazan. There's the map, now why don't the landmarks match? Mercedes McCambridge (with her lynch-mob dressed like puritans and breaking every promise they make along the way) is obviously McCarthy, but the more intriguing question is who, or what, is Joan Crawford? The repartee' between Guitar and The Dancin' Kid is droll and extraordinary. The metaphors are multi-layered, esoteric and arcane; impossible to decipher from here like Kennedy assassination documents or 16th Century Rosicrucian texts. Joan takes off her white dress, puts on a red shirt, and takes up her gun in earnest. The blue collar guys are blowing up the pass through the mountains, but look up in questioning admiration as the bandits ride by. Joan gives her three workers enough money for six months and says, "If I'm still here in six months I'll expect you back. If I'm not, keep wheeling and dealing." Demands multiple viewings, and stacks of memoirs that haven't yet been published for reference.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Emma (McCambridge) has the hots for The Dancing Kid (Brady). The Kid is wild about Vienna (Crawford). But Vienna can't drive Johnny Guitar (Hayden) out of her head. Ray's film is not a romantic comedy, but a Western. Or is it? Taking a story about two gutsy, gun-totin' matriarchs squabbling over the men they love and the ownership of a gambling saloon, Ray plays havoc with Western conventions, revelling in sexual role-reversals, turning funeral gatherings into lynch mobs, and dwelling on a hero who finds inner peace through giving up pacifism and taking up his pistols. Love and hate, prostitution and frustration, domination and humiliation are woven into a hypnotic Freudian web of shifting relationships, illuminated by the director's precise, symbolic use of colour, and strung together with an unerring sense of pace. The whole thing is weird, hysterical, and quite unlike anything else in the history of the cowboy film: where else can one find a long-expected shootout between two fast and easy killers averted by a woman's insistence that they help her prepare breakfast? Crawford and McCambridge are fallen angel and spinster harpy, while Hayden is admirably ambivalent as the quiet saddletramp with a psychopathic temper. Truffaut called the film 'the Beauty and the Beast of the Western', a description which perfectly sums up Ray's magical, dreamlike emotionalism.

not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review

A real rarity in the western genre, this film stars two women in the typical "this town ain't big enough for the both of us" gunslinger roles. Crawford, with her usual strength and sex appeal, stars as a saloon keeper forced to fight for her existence against the town "saint" (i.e. largest land owner) and resident bitch on wheels Emma, played by McCambridge, who is filled to the brim with hatred. Of herself for being in love with Dancin' Kid (Brady), an unscrupulous outlaw, and of Vienna (Crawford), who's allowed herself the pleasure of a few nights with him. Since their mere presence in the vicinity makes Emma's life a living hell of jealousy and longing, she decides to return the favor by blaming all of the local crimes on them with the intention of seeing them both hang. Thus solving her problem permanently. The only trouble is, Vienna has worked too long and hard, sacrificing her body and soul, to give up her business without a fight. Lucky for her, her old lover Johnny (Hayden) has returned to give her a hand. He passes himself off as a musician with no love for fighting, but it soon becomes clear that though he can play his guitar, he's much, much better with a gun. Tensions escalate, placing Vienna's live on the line, but she refuses to run. The finale is a real nail-biter filled with death, mayhem, betrayal and redemption. The bad guys get what's coming to them, a few good ones pay the ultimate price and Joan has one more chance at true love. Even at 50, Crawford could still pack a punch. And McCambridge, wow. Her character is more mean-spirited than Hannibal Lector. A solid effort from all involved that's as romantic as it is suspenseful. A western both men and women will enjoy.

Johnny Guitar Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

Even the title seems to wink at you. "You call that a name?" asks the Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady), tossing an enormous boulder through the facade of his glass house. "Care to try and change it?" Johnny Guitar snaps back, with the unique combination of amusement and bravado that only Sterling Hayden could muster. Seeing this colorful, perverse Western with an audience—particularly the downtown audience that tends to frequent Film Forum—one could easily come to the conclusion that it's intended as parody, but what makes the film a masterpiece is its delectable, almost mythic combination of high camp and deep feeling. If the movie works on you as it should, you won't be entirely certain whether the tears leaking from your eyes are from laughter or sorrow.

In any case, the title is deliberately misleading, for while gunslinger-turned-troubadour Guitar is unquestionably a handy fellow to have around when a skirmish breaks out, the film's primary showdown involves two strong, passionate women: hard-bitten saloon owner Vienna (Crawford, never more iconic—and thus never better) and crazed do-gooder Emma Small (McCambridge, radiating the sort of moral high dudgeon that fairly screams repression). The male characters, by contrast, tend to be stalwart at best, ineffectual at worst; it's no coincidence that Guitar keeps his six-guns holstered out of sight, or that his nemesis is referred to almost exclusively as "Kid." (He might as well be "Boy," although the word had a different connotation in 1954.) Director Nicholas Ray would do his finest work in CinemaScope, which had just been introduced, but his squarish compositions here beautifully capture the claustrophobic ghost-town atmosphere. It's the rare Western in which spaces are scarcely ever wide open.

Johnny Guitar Review | Movie - Empire Kim Newman

Gunslinger Johnny Guitar (Hayden) does his darndest to protect casino boss Vienna (Crawford) from the bitter jealousies of the ruthless Emma Small (McCambridge).

A truly demented Western, with vividly colourful settings and and an almost operatic intensity of emotional and physical violence. The saloon where much of the action takes place is hewn out of a mountanside and boasts an interior wall of jagged red rock, which – along with several clouds of red dust – gives the whole proceeding an infernal tinge, while characters are symbolically clad in devil-black or angel-white.

Many of the genre's rules are broken: big confrontation scenes take place indoors and are framed like stage tableaux, the suggestively named and fetishistically outfitted cowboys Johnny Guitar and the Dancin’ Kid are the sex symbols (though both Hayden and Brady are well into battered middle age), and strong-willed women (Crawford, McCambridge, both unique creatures with their gargoyle-like snarls and Expressionist body language) take leading roles as the antagonists who square off in gunfights, lead or face down lynch mobs and are driven to slaughter by their lusts.

Deliberately artificial‑looking and heavy on high-flown dialogue, this has a certain subversive aspect for the 1950s as leftist director Nicholas Ray casts Ward Bond, a real‑life McCarthyite, as the bigoted head of the lynch mob (as an inside joke, Bond got a lot of similar roles while the blacklist was in force), but it is most cherishable for its wonderfully overwrought performances (note John Carradine as the broom-pusher who finally gets noticed in his death scene, Royal Dano as a consumptive outlaw and Ernest Borgnine as one of his patented cowboy brutes) and bizarre musical stretches.

It has been called Freudian, feminist, operatic, high camp and plain bizarre. Best of all, the film acts as a vigorous indictment of the McCarthy witch-hunts; as a lynch mob rides after Crawford while McCambridge bullies witnesses into false confessions.

Nicholas Ray: Johnny Guitar | Film | guardian.co.uk Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, March 25, 1999

"There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."

The quote is from Jean-Luc Godard and whether you agree or think him mildly mad, it is certainly true that those who admire Ray are often besotted enough to resort to hyperbole. Count me in as far as Johnny Guitar is concerned. But I'll try to contain myself.

This baroque and deliriously stylised Western, along with Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious and Raoul Walsh's Pursued, proves it is possible to lift the genre into the realms of Freudian analysis, political polemic and even Greek tragedy.

Sterling Hayden, an actor who wasn't exactly a major star but certainly had an unforgettable screen presence, is Johnny Guitar, a gunslinger who is summoned by his ex-lover Vienna (Joan Crawford) to protect her saloon from the violent opposition of the locals, who fear her plans to build a rail station.

Led by Mercedes McCambridge's Emma, who loves Scott Brady's Dancin'Kid, who is obsessed with Vienna, they give her 24 hours to leave town. Finally, Emma kills the Kid and then goes after Vienna.

It is difficult to describe what makes Johnny Guitar so fascinating, except to say that Ray's orchestration of Philip Yordan's almost literary screenplay gives a small budget film, made for Republic Studios, a kind of heady but clipped dignity which renders Truffaut's remark about a "hallucinatory Western" seem a good deal less daft than Godard's.

On the political level, which was more important then than now, the film is a brave indictment of the McCarthyite bigotry that swept America during the fifties - "an impression of the present," one American critic wrote at the time, "filmed through the myths of the past".

No movie is unrelated to the time in which it was made and every film changes when viewed from a different time. So perhaps the most affecting feature of the film now is it's deep romanticism. Johnny, who no longer carries a gun, is still in love with Vienna. But she is now an independent woman in control of her own destiny. If he wants her back, he's going to have to take her on her own terms. Even as he saves her from her rabid, almost pathological enemies, he knows that.

The film is infinitely detailed and infinitely complicated. It was made at a juncture in movie history when Westerns were attempting to rid themselves of the Hopalong Cassidy-Roy Rogers matinee image, and it's pretty sure that Ray used Crawford, who wanted to play up rather than down-market, because he was attracted to her, like Johnny to Vienna.

What she does in the film transcends either camp or melodrama. It's like watching a legend at work throwing off her previous baggage and gaining a new acting skin. As for Hayden, his almost stiff stillness, which could be dull (in duller moves) here seems remarkable.

Of course the film is an acquired taste. Not every American film beloved by Cahiers gets the British behind it. But there is no doubt that Ray, always a maverick and finally a tragic, neglected figure surrounded by obsequious young acolytes and filmed on his death bed by Wim Wenders in the doubtfully intrusive but admiring Lightning Over Water, could make great films.

For myself, Johnny Guitar is one of them. For all its slightly tatty sets and off-the-mark decor, the film abounds in wonderful lines and acting that doesn't betray them. If you are still unconvinced, just have a look at this scene:

Johnny: How many men have you forgotten?

Vienna: As many women as you've remembered.

Johnny: Don't go away.

Vienna: I haven't moved.

Johnny: Tell me something nice.

Vienna: Sure. What do you want to hear?

Johnny: Lie to me. Tell me all these years you've waited...

Vienna: All these years I've waited.

Johnny: Tell me you'd have died if I hadn't come back.

Vienna: I would have died if you hadn't come back.

Johnny: Tell me you still love me like I love you.

Vienna: I still love you like you love me.

Johnny: Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Johnny Guitar — Cineaste Magazine Catherine Russell, Spring 2017

Johnny Guitar was shot in the dramatic landscape of Sedona, Arizona, which before this new Blu-ray release featuring the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio could be glimpsed only at the edges of the frame. While the terrain is still mere background to a melodrama of loyalty and desire, the film’s coloring and staging make much more sense when complemented by the vista of towering, sculptured red mesas. Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) rides into town without a gun, but by the time he leaves he has been revealed as the fastest draw in the West. Robert Warshow noted many years ago that the Western hero is the man who knows when not to shoot. The cowboy with the guitar is thus emblematic of the Westerner who knows how to play the part, but chooses his roles and when to play them. Johnny Guitar is all about role playing, but it is a dangerous game with high stakes because it turns out that in 1954 America neither playing the guitar nor making movies was “just entertainment.” By the end of the movie, Johnny’s guitar has long been abandoned, but he has gained the love of a woman (Joan Crawford) who is introduced to the audience early in the film, in direct address, as “more a man than a woman.”

Order is eventually restored over a series of dead bodies, but through its unsettling of gender roles in the surreal landscape of Sedona, Nicholas Ray’s film serves as a ballad for a time of deep distrust in Hollywood. “Operatic” is the term that best describes this production, noted for its archetypal figures, dramatic choreography, costume changes, and extraordinary use of color, even if the romantic musical theme, scored by Victor Young, is applied with a light touch. If Johnny Guitar has become a cult film for the blacklist era, it is because the drama of naming names and taking sides is set within a mise en scène built of fire, water, earth, and air, the latter in the form of dust clouds that often obscure the view.

Olive Films’s new Blu-ray of Johnny Guitar is packed with special features that provide substantial context for this multilayered film, including analysis from critics Miriam Bale, B. Ruby Rich, Kent Jones, Joe McElhaney, and Larry Ceplair, a commentary by Geoff Andrew, and an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Mark Wannamaker provides some detail on Republic Pictures and owner Herbert Yates’s ambitions in the early 1950s to become a major studio by casting established stars like Crawford, and investing in Trucolor, which was both cheaper and more garish than Technicolor. The psychological Western was gaining traction through the success of Anthony Mann’s films, among others, and kingmaker Lew Wasserman brought the Johnny Guitar package to Republic with Ray as an independent producer–director along with Crawford and the original script by Ray Chanslor. Credit for the blacklist allegory seems to go mainly to Philip Yordan, who substantially altered Chanslor’s story, even though he was a front for many blacklisted screenwriters (the theory that blacklisted writer Ben Maddow might have written it seems to be largely discredited). Crawford herself forced the issue of her own cross-dressed character by picking a well-publicized fight during the production with Mercedes McCambridge who plays her nemesis Emma Small in the film. Crawford threatened to quit if Yordan didn’t come out to Sedona to rewrite her part so that it would be bigger than Hayden’s—even demanding a climactic shootout with McCambridge, with which Yordan obliged her.

As B. Ruby Rich points out, Johnny Guitar was embraced as a feminist Western in the 1970s mainly because there were usually so few women with power to be found on or off screen. Crawford’s character Vienna is completely uncompromising, and not without maternal instincts, even if she capitulates in the end to the romantic impulse of the genre. When Vienna confronts Emma and her posse who have come to run her out of town, she orders her dealer to stop spinning the roulette wheel. She is in charge. Her saloon, her future, is built on the business of gambling, sex, and booze, but she has carefully scoped out the future that will come with the railway. She even has a tabletop model of the new town in her bar, complete with toy trains, but, as fate would have it, she loses it all to Emma’s fiery rage.

In addition to the catfight, Johnny Guitar is a continual testing of masculinities, as its title promises. The Dancing Kid (Scott Brady), who the two women are supposedly fighting over, is clearly in love with the young member of his gang called Turkey (Ben Cooper)—and both of them are casualties of the violence that grips the town. Ernest Borgnine as Bart, another member of the Dancing Kid’s silver mining gang, and Ward Bond as John McIvers, the mayor of the unnamed (and unseen) town, provide ample bona-fide manhood pumped up as arrogant paternalism. The mayor is accompanied by a crowd of funereal apprentices, silently taking up space, while the Kid’s gang, besides Turkey and Bart, includes Cory (Royal Dano), a consumptive bookworm. Vienna’s loyal dealers and bartenders are all men, whose green visors match the card tables. Her venerable cook (John Carradine) is emasculated in turn through his name of “Old Tom,” so it is a complicated, competitive man’s world in which Vienna and Emma pitch their battle…

Johnny Guitar • Senses of Cinema David Sanjek, June 23, 2011

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: page 2

Johnny Guitar - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

James Vanarsdale review (2000), also seen here: Johnny Guitar, a film by Nicholas Ray, starring Sterling Hayden ...

Images Journal review Grant Tracey

Johnny Guitar (1954) Tony Dayoub from Decisions at Sundown, March 21, 2010

Review by Brian W. Fairbanks (1999), also seen here: Johnny Guitar

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]

Love's Delirious Perversions: "Johnny Guitar" on Notebook | MUBI Evan Davis

Johnny Guitar | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Dennis Cozzalio

411mania.com [Chad Webb]

Johnny Guitar Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television

Week in Rewind (Christopher Smith) review

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [53/100]

The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

Nicholas Ray - Johnny Guitar (1954)-Cinema of the World

Baltimore City Paper (Eric Allen Hatch) review

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review May 28, 1954, also seen here: The Screen in Review; Johnny Guitar' Opens at the Mayfair

CRITIC'S CHOICE/Film; A Western With Echoes Of the Blacklisting Days Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, August 15, 2003

RUN FOR COVER

USA (93 mi) 1955

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Made between Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, Ray's second Western lacks the baroque, bizarre excesses of his first, and the intensely troubled romanticism of the Dean film. Despite its superficially conventional plot, however, its theme is again the gulf between generations: Cagney rides into town with Derek, whom he has only just met, only to be mistaken for train-robbers. Before the error is recognised, the boy is crippled by a bullet, provoking his bitter slide into delinquency while his surrogate father accepts a job as sheriff. The situations may be the stock ones of deception, betrayal and revenge, but the film is rare in Ray's work in that it focuses not on the youth but on Cagney, who attempts to curb his own anger at the injustices he has suffered. Despite the violence of certain scenes, it's a strangely gentle, even poignant Western, and Ray's sensitive handling of actors and his exact compositional sense are as much in evidence as ever.

“Nobody guarantees you a free ride. The only difference is, most people don’t run for cover — they keep right on going, picking up the pieces the best way they can.”

A drifter (James Cagney) and his hotheaded new acquaintance (John Derek) are mistaken for train robbers, and shot by a local sheriff (Ray Teal). With the help of a Swedish farmer (Jean Hersholt) and his daughter (Viveca Lindfors), Cagney nurses Derek — whose leg has been crippled — back to health. Soon Cagney is elected as the town’s new sheriff, with Derek as his deputy; but Derek’s resentment over being injured for life leads to unexpected consequences.

Made in between his better-known Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Nicholas Ray’s Run for Cover clearly conveys Ray’s interest in (and sympathy for) societal misfits, as well as his concern with Freudian “parental” relations. The opening scenes of the film — following the memorable, rousing title song — are particularly strong, as Cagney and Derek’s friendship is established, only to be rudely disrupted by the impatience of vengeance-hungry townsfolk (who are reminiscent of the frightening posse in William Wellman’s Ox-Bow Incident). Once this initial drama of mistaken identity is resolved, Cagney’s character gradually emerges as a more complex figure than we expected, and we watch with interest as he takes on a deeply paternal interest in the bitter young Derek. Unfortunately, the script begins to unravel towards the end, as events (and character motivations) take some unexpected turns, and Cagney’s relationship with Derek takes a turn for the melodramatic. Equally disappointing is Cagney’s budding romance with Lindfors, who — despite her fine performance — is hampered by the relentless stereotypes (loyal daughter, admiring wife) afforded in her role. Despite its flaws, however, Run For Cover remains a worthy western to check out once, and will be of special interest to fans of Ray’s unique oeuvre.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

"Run for cover" occupies a curious place in Nicholas Ray's brilliant filmography. Sandwiched between "Johnny Guitar" and "Rebel without a cause, it suffered accordingly. They say Ray himself disliked it. And however, in "Run for cover" he opened up as he never did before.

In "knock on any door," Ray had already displayed a "father" -"son" relationship between Bogart and John Derek (who takes on here roughly the same kind of part he played at the beginning of the fifties). Ray would reach his peak with the following work ("Rebel" ) where Plato wanted Jim to be his dad and began to think of a new family with his pal and Judy.

Davey is a tragic character. He seems to be born under a bad sign, he is known to have a very bad reputation wherever he goes. It's obvious in the scene of the train: whereas Matt (Cagney) wants to give the money back to the town, Davey is thinking of the life he could lead if this loot were his.

Matt knows that Davey needs someone to become a man. Alone he would walk on crutches. His leg is a transparent metaphor. Maybe he thinks of a new family he would rebuild with Helga (Viceca Lindfords). The relationship between the mature man and the Swede is full of tenderness and human warmth, a permanent feature in Ray's canon (see the lovers of "they live by night" and the teenagers in "Rebel without a cause." Like Jeff in "lusty man," Matt had a raw deal and he wants to make the best of the years which he's still got to live. Jeff will help Wes become a man in the cruel world of rodeo, but it's a different matter with Davey Bishop (what a surname!).

It's remarkable that violence appears twice after scenes depicting children: the first time when Matt is making a wooden gun for a boy; the second time in the church as a choir of little boys and girls is singing a canticle to praise the Lord.

"Rebel without a cause" is probably Ray's most underrated work. Davey remains his most moving character; without any mawkishness, the director paints the picture of the rebel with a cause, who cannot understand why he should work for eight dollars a week when there's plenty of money to take.

The last line is my favorite in any Ray movie. In its own special way, it preserves the viewer from despair.

User reviews from imdb Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

User reviews from imdb Author: Poseidon-3 from Cincinnati, OH

User reviews from imdb Author: classicsoncall from United States

Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan]

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE A 99

USA (111 mi) 1955 ‘Scope

James Dean’s most memorable iconic performance, unforgettable in his blue jeans, white shirt, and red jacket, he plays Jim Stark, a confused middle class loner who’s tired of remaining on the outside, who fights his way inside one of those high school closely- knit, nearly inpenetrable social cliques, even at the risk of losing his life. Along the way he impresses Natalie Wood, and is idolized by one of the loneliest characters ever conceived in American cinema, Sal Mineo. Their three-way friendship is not like any other, it’s in a class by itself. And therein lies the dramatic staying power of this film, it remains unique in its depiction of loving but patronizing parents who haven’t a clue who their own children are, or why they have to associate with bullies and thugs at school, whose parents probably represent a high social standing in the community, but who are just as clueless about their children. Into this world, teenagers enter a strangly personalized realm, beautifully captured in intimate close ups and daring confrontations with one another, never more vulnerable, yet placing themselves at risk physically. Tragedy befalls many who don’t survive, while another tragedy is that so many others come so close to the same fate. With emotional bombs going off in every which direction, kids learn how to survive off the tragedies of others.

Geoff Andrew from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Too often, this acknowledged classic is unwittingly damned with faint praise as being the finest of the three features in which James Dean starred during his tragically short life. Rebel remains by far the best 1950’s film dealing with the then-new phenomenon of teenage delinquency. It is also a key work from Nicholas Ray, an enormously talented and distinctive director who, sadly, remains as underrated now as he was when he worked in Hollywood.

“You’re tearing me apart!” screams Dean’s Jim Stark at his bickering parents, giving voice to the agonizing confusion and alienation felt by so many of ray’s protagonists. From his first film, They Live By Night (1949), the director had repeatedly treated the lonely predicament of America’s outsiders, showing himself especially sympathetic to the vulnerable one who looked for guidance from an older generation no wiser or happier than themselves. Jim feels let down by his family, his teachers, the cops, and most of his peers. The constant quest for kicks is as irresponsible (albeit it less culpable, given their youth) as the adults’ refusal to confront moral dilemmas. Together with other lost souls, Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo), Jim tries to establish his own alternative family, one based on mutual understanding. Small wonder that the trio, brought together by the absurd, unnecessary death of a friend driven to boredom to test his worth in a clifftop “chicken run,” and united by idealistic notions of “sincerity,” lives in a derelict dreamhouse in the Los Angeles hills, well away from other people.

Ray’s response to the question of how to depict his young dreamers’ romantic idealism is admirably and exhilaratingly physical. The film was originally slated for black-and-white, but Ray persuaded Warners to let him shoot in color. The often luridly expressionist hues and Ray’s typically fraught CinemaScope compositions evoke the feverish nature of adolescent experience. Similarly, Ray uses architecture and setting, particularly the difference between public and private space, to heighten our understanding of the characters’ emotions. The darkness inside a planetarium becomes a space to indulge in private jokes, refuge, and reverie, even contemplation of the individual’s place in the cosmos. The terrace outside is later transformed by a lofty camera position into a sunlit arena where a bullfight-like knife fight is played out with appropriately histrionic gestures. Ray understands how, especially when young, we view our lives as drama. His immaculate sense of color, composition, cutting, lighting, and performance enhances the importance of the action.

One reason why he and Dean were made for each other; it wasn’t just the actor’s style but his whole body that gave dramatic life to the turmoil within. Seeing Dean’s Jim is witnessing a character being born, growing from moment to moment before our eyes. That, of course, is fitting for Rebel’s subject matter, but it also compliments Ray’s direction in terms of how its acute physicality expresses the tormented vitality within. How sad, the, that the projects Ray and Dean planned to work on together never came to fruition. One great film had to suffice.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Dean's finest film, hardly surprisingly in that Ray was one of the great '50s directors. The story, much imitated since, might sound like nothing much - unsettled adolescent from good home can't keep himself out of trouble, and gets involved with bad sorts until tragedy takes over - but what makes the film so powerful is both the sympathy it extends towards all the characters (including the seemingly callous parents) and the precise expressionism of Ray's direction. His use of light, space and motion is continually at the service of the characters' emotions, while the trio that Dean, Wood and Mineo form as a refuge from society is explicitly depicted as an 'alternative family'. Still the best of the youth movies.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE has had more lives than many auteurist causes: it's A Film By Nicholas Ray, but also a genuine popular classic sustained by an endless supply of James Dean posters, magnets, t-shirts, and tchotchkes. Modern viewers often find it dated, largely because fashion dictates a less didactic and purpose-driven form of expression. If the psychological jargon and parenting advice are hopelessly rooted in the 1950s, the sex is something else again. Here, the title is misleading, perhaps disingenuous: treating Dean's Jim Stark as a privileged creature of inchoate disaffection is only possible by willfully turning a blind eye to the quite legible and articulate critique of straight sexuality that limns nearly every exchange. It's in Sal Mineo's tentative entreaties to Dean, but even more brashly in the moment Natalie Wood interrogates William Hopper on the proper way for a teenager to express love for her father; her desires literally know no established form. It's a movie about people denied a framework and vocabulary for coming to terms with themselves and their environments. Luckily, this confusion does not infect the movie's craft. Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR bustles with so much action that its cramped frames feel primed to burst, as if the director had exhausted the limits of flat cinematography; REBEL, Ray's Cinemascope debut, reverses course and uses the wide canvas to describe new dimensions of loneliness and isolation.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

Shrouded in Hollywood legend, Rebel Without a Cause was James Dean's second of three films (East of Eden, 1955; Rebel Without a Cause, 1955; Giant, 1956). By the time the film opened on October 27 1955, the 24-year-old star had been dead for 27 days, killed at the wheel of his Porsche on the way to a road race, his true passion. He had made just three films in 18 months, but he was to become a bigger star dead than he had been alive.

James Dean as Jim Stark patented the teenage look and condition: blue jeans, tight white T-shirt, red bomber jacket and a sense of indignation. His melancholic, boyish good-looks and faraway expression (he was very short-sighted) gave him the vulnerability and yet somehow also the superiority of the tragic outsider.

Jim Stark is a boy of middle-class parentage who is tortured by his parents' lack of empathy. Natalie Wood plays Jim's girl, Judy, whose father rejects her affections because she's 16 now, and Sal Mineo plays Plato, who finds in Jim Stark someone who seems genuinely to care about him, the very thing lacking in his life. Jim Stark is new to town. During his first day at high school he's taunted by a gang of youths and his honour is questioned. He's invited to prove he's not 'chicken' by taking part in a reckless race in which two stolen cars are driven straight toward the cliff-edge and the first driver to bail out is 'chicken'. Jim survives and the other dies. Jim, Judy and Plato hole up in a deserted mansion on the hills and the gang of youths, police and parents close in on them.

Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo both received Academy Award nominations for their roles as did Nicholas Ray for Best Director. Rebel Without a Cause - with its superb handling of the actors as well as of spatial composition, colour and camera movement - remains as vital and relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

Profoundly romantic and lacerating in its despair, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, a self-contained portrait of three isolated teenagers, is James Dean's best film and best performance (it ranks high in Ray's work as well). You'd think that Rebel would date more than Dean's first film, East of Eden, and it’s true that some of its details and performances don't ring true, especially the cartoonish portrayals of the teen's parents. At revival houses, the scenes with the parents tend to get unwanted laughs, and they are flawed, but only on the surface. The attitudes of East of Eden are hopelessly dated and broad, but the poetic longing for connection in Rebel can never really date.

Dean isn't fussy here, as he is in his agonized Brando-esque contortions in East of Eden; he's emotionally direct, tenderly seductive, protective of others, and blessed with courtly humor. Dean's Jim Stark is clearly laboring under a burden of heightened sensitivity, which is why the '50s complacency of his parents and their milieu is, in his words, tearing him apart. He doesn't want to be called a chicken by his peers, but he realizes that the tests of manhood he is forced to endure by the thugs at school are bullshit, as false in their way as the world of his parents. So, in the most magical section of the film, Jim and his friends Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) take over a deserted mansion and try to make a family for themselves. This primal, Borzage-style sequence doesn't last long, but it has made a major impact on anybody who has seen it.

Stewart Stern's screenplay can be didactic, but Ray and his young trio of actors transcend this limitation. Ray emphasizes the reds and blues in his widescreen frame for an unforgettably neurotic effect, and he showcases savant-like Dean as gently as Jim Stark takes care of Plato. Ray seems to understand the self-dramatizations and exaggerated melancholy of adolescence, but he portrays these qualities with deep affection, respect and insight.

The most complicated aspect of Rebel, and the thing that makes it seem daring even today, is its sexuality. Ray was bisexual (as was Dean) and he was sleeping with both Wood and Mineo while they shot the film. He brings Wood's beauty into full flowering and gets a simple, touching performance from her (though she is overwrought in her first scene). With Mineo, Ray craftily put together a portrait of a tormented gay teenager. Stern's script tells us that Plato is searching for a father figure in Jim Stark (and Plato's famed locker photo of Alan Ladd shows that he wants a Shane-type father, not a lover), but the way Mineo looks at Dean leaves no modern audience in doubt as to what his real feelings are.

Ray's sense of location is as keen as his sureness with actors. The planetarium set, where the kids go on a field trip and later return to at night, is especially evocative. During the field trip, a stentorian narrator tells of the upcoming destruction of the earth, and says, "Man, existing alone, seems himself an episode of little consequence." Then, after the kids have taken in this existential truth, he says briskly, "Thank you for your attention!" It's that dash of humor in Rebel that is little remarked upon; it gives you a nice '50s hipster-style shot of relief, and it also sets you up for the raw tragedy of the ending.

The teenagers' idyll in the deserted mansion is ended by school thugs (one of them a young Dennis Hopper). Plato, confused and unbalanced, starts firing a gun he took from his mother's room. He finds refuge in the planetarium, and Jim goes in to get him, talking him outside and surreptitiously taking the bullets from the gun. But Plato gets scared and runs, the cops see the gun, and they shoot him. When Plato is shot, Ray has Jim and Judy in the frame with him and he tilts the camera with the impact of the bullet; it's one of the most devastating shots in film history because it visually annihilates the rapport the three teenagers have built up in an instant. Jim and Judy go off together, but Ray underlines the film's sense of loss by saving the last close-up for the only other person who loved Plato, his nurse (Marietta Canty). As everyone drives away, it is Ray himself who enters the planetarium at the break of day, a great film director surveying the blank slate left after Jim, Judy, and Plato's wishful, improved civilization is wiped out in a flash of gunfire.

Finding the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Rebel Without a Cause ... Chris Wood from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000

Rebel Without a Cause • Senses of Cinema J. David Slocum from Senses of Cinema, June 23, 2011

James Dean, the Actor as a Young Man: Rebel Without a Cause Director Nicholas Ray Remembers the Impossible Artist Nicolas Ray essay on actor James Dean, initially published October 31, 1956, republished at The Daily Beast, October 2, 2016

Nicholas Ray's 1955 movie "Rebel Without a Cause" - Cliomuse.com

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - Articles - TCM.com

Rebel Without a Cause - TCM.com Felicia Feaster

Rebel Without a Cause Doug Tomlinson from Film Reference

Mad about the boy | Film | The Guardian James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment. Who would have guessed he was gay? Fifty years after his death, it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer from The Guardian, May 14, 2005

Rebel Without a Cause vs. Bully - Archive - Reverse Shot Go With the Kids, Leo Goldsmith on Rebel Without a Cause and Bully, from Reverse Shot, May 9, 2006

not coming to a theater near you (Beth Gilligan) review

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

kamera.co.uk - film review - Rebel Without A Cause directed by ... Antonio Pasolini

"The Making of Rebel Without a Cause by Sam Kashner 8 page essay from Vanity Fair, March 2005

Rebel without a Cause The Rebel, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Globe, 2005

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Ben Stephens

Rebel Without a Cause (1955): The Synergy Between Nicholas Ray and James Dean Tony Dayoub, March 24, 2010, also seen here: Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review

Pain from the Beyond: "Rebel Without a Cause" on Notebook | MUBI Evan Davis

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]

Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review

Eye for Film ("Chris") review [4.5/5]

American Cinematographer dvd review Jim Hemphill, October 2005

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Long Che Chan retrospective

Rebel Without a Cause Louis Gerber at Cosmopolis

Cinephile Magazine [Clarence X]

Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [79/100]

eFilmCritic.com (Elaine Perrone)

JWR [S. James Wegg] a gay perspective

Rebel Without a Cause as Autobiographical Validation" Nate McKeen from Images

Ways of Seeing: Yoel Meranda's Web Site - Rebel Without a Cause ... Editing in Rebel Without a Cause, by Yoel Meranda, January 17, 2001

Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review

MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [9/10] [Special Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

Nicholas Amado retrospective

Rebel Without a Cause a somewhat negative review from John Barker from Cinetext, 2002

Three Movie Buffs review [3.25/4]

Urban Cinefile [Andrew L. Urban]

Lars Lindahl retrospective [3.5/4] Stewart Stern

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Brad Laidman, also seen here: Brad Laidman: Elvis Needs Boats review

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [2.5/4]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]

Stomp Tokyo review [4/5] Chris Holland and Scott Hamilton

Anthony's Film Review

DVDTalk -- TCM Greatest Classics Coll. -- Paul Mavis

Rebel Without a Cause Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Complete James Dean Collection

DVD Verdict [Brett Cullum] The Complete James Dean Collection

DVD Verdict- TCM Greatest Classic Films: Romantic Dramas [Christopher Kulik]

Teen Angels Michael Giacalone from The Village Voice, November 23, 1999

The Original Rebel Giant, Lost to the East of Eden Jessica Winter from The Village Voice, May 31, 2005

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson] 'Yesterday's Angel: Natalie Wood' at Walter Reade, August 18, 2009

Variety (Robert J. Landry) review

Guardian/Observer Peter Bradshaw

BBC - Movies - review - Rebel Without A Cause Jamie Russell

San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review October 27, 1955, also seen here: The Screen: Delinquency; ' Rebel Without Cause' Has Debut at Astor

FILM; Rebel With A Surprising Legacy Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, May 29, 2005

Film locations for Rebel Without A Cause

"Rebel without a cause" by Raymond Weschler Educational Study Guide

Ali Nihat Eken Blog another study guide

Rebel Without a Cause: Classical Tragedy yet another

Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Catherine Lavender Library notes

Rebel Without A Cause: Movie fan website

Rebel Without A Cause : A tribute to James Dean British fan site

James Dean Remembered

James Dean, Tribute to a Legend

Official James Dean site

The Death of James Dean Franks Reel Reviews

Sal Mineo Official Website - Newstand

Natalie Wood - A Tribute fan website

Classic Movies movie page with various links

Old Hollywood Book Reviews: Live Fast, Die Young – The Wild Ride ... Kristen Lopez comments on the book, Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, by Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel, August 13, 2012

Nick Ray and the Making of Rebel Without a Cause Peter Winkler from American Legends interview the authors of the book

Rebel Without a Cause - Live Fast, Die Young which now has its own blog

Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a ... a composite site for collective reviews on the book

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Scott Van Doviak, September 30, 2005

Philadelphia City Paper Frank Halperin, October 6 – 12, 2005

The Rebel - The Boston Globe Chris Fujiwara’s comments on the film and the book, October 30, 2005

The Advocate David Ehrenstein, November 4, 2005

Behind the Scenes of 'Rebel Without a Cause': James Dean, Sal ... Gregory McNamee from Book Standard, November 28, 2005, also seen here: Hollywood Reporter

New York Times Book Review Stephanie Zacharek, January 8, 2006

James Dean - One of the Gang--The Making of Rebel Without a Cause personal essay by Jack Grinnage, a member of the cast, from American Legends (undated)

Irreverent Iconographer Brandon Yip interviews Warren Beath, the author of The Death of James Dean, from American Legends (undated)

A Historian Looks at James Dean The James Dean Scrapbook introduction by Vagn Hansen from American Legends (undated)

James Dean: A Rebel for All Seasons The James Dean Story introduction by Ron Martinetti to the paperback edition (1995)

Dark glamour / Natalie Wood's troubled life explored in a ... Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, reviewed by Edward Guthmann from the SF Chronicle, July 22, 2001

Polishing a Star's Legacy; A New Book and Television Film Pay Tribute to Natalie Wood Natalie Wood: A Life, by Gavin Lambert, reviewed by Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, February 4, 2004

Stephen Dedalus: Rebel Without a Cause? Ben Foley essay connecting Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to the outsider otherness expressed in the film, April 2005

Rebel Without a Cause - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HOT BLOOD

USA (85 mi) 1956 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

While admittedly far from being one of Ray's best films, his tale of the stormy courtship of Wilde and Russell - gypsies from rival tribes introduced to one another by their parents for an arranged marriage which obeys the laws not only of tradition but financial enterprise - is fascinating both for its mise-en-scène and as an example of the director's interest in ethnology. Indeed, the two elements combine to create a boldly flamboyant celebration of ritual, the gypsies' love of music, dance and colourful costumes allowing Ray to transform a potentially clichéd romantic sparring session into lurid, restless images often strangely reminiscent of the musical. An oddity, then, but one distinguished by Ray's characteristic refusal to patronise or glamorise his characters.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

If not Nicholas Ray's greatest movie, then surely the rapturous culmination of his palpable desire to do a musical -- The Taming of the Shrew recomposed from the vantage point of Cinemascope and Jane Russell's wry half-grin, with results as thrilling as any Donen bonanza. The Romany community is the other side of Rebel Without a Cause's Los Angeles, an outcast society no less beset by strictures yet awash in fervent music, dance, flashing emotion. The weary Gypsy King (Luther Adler) learns of an incurable illness (the X-ray machine from Bigger Than Life makes an appearance) and seeks a successor, but his younger brother (Cornel Wilde) is a roving hothead introduced jumping off a blonde's cerulean convertible, and "so stubborn he double-crosses himself." A marriage is arranged to quell Wilde's wanderlust; the bride (Russell) schemes with her folks to run off with the payment, yet her father (Joseph Calleia) is overcome with feeling at the altar and cannot go through with the ruse. The honeymoon is spent with furniture hurled out the window, the morning brings a blotto cartwheel by the camera and Russell's sublime ditty of amused acceptance ("We're thrown together, it's our fate / The deal was made and here we are"). Ray's gypsy universe is a series of orgasmically colliding hues (beaded curtains at the fortune teller's shop plus neon, with crimson never too far off), often prone to abstraction yet always brought back to earth with a jangly romantic gesture or two. The outside world, by contrast, is a circle of trailers and, when Wilde confronts a gadjo impresario via a passionate jig, a glass pane to be grandly shattered. This is too marvelous for words, really, though Godard gave it a valiant try in Cahiers du Cinéma, name-checking D.H. Lawrence, Renoir, and Van Dongen before proclaiming it "nothing but cinema." Ray's own statement on his filmic approach, meanwhile, is voiced smilingly by Adler in the middle of a dance orgy: "Not to be burned is not to live." Cinematography by Ray June. With Jamie Russell, Mikhail Rasumny, Nina Koshetz, and Helen Westcott.

Hot Blood - TCM.com Jay Carr

When the ultimate Nicholas Ray clip reel is assembled, Hot Blood (1956) won't likely be on it. But if the lurid gyrations of Cornel Wilde's gypsy heir apparent and Jane Russell's tempestuous arranged bride are preposterous, they're at least never boring. They often seem at a loss for what to do and how to do it, not surprising in a film that began as a serious attempt to render American gypsy life in almost ethnographic terms, but veered into a misbegotten musical. Ray consulted Frank Loesser, fresh off the filming of Guys and Dolls (1955), but the only evidence of it is the way Wilde wears his straw fedora in a cocky Frank Sinatra-Sky Masterson mode. Still, Hot Blood is a heady swirl of tutti-frutti excess propelled by reds, oranges and purples into the primitive expressionist universe that was meat and drink to Ray.

The trouble here is that he didn't digest much or drink deeply enough. Part of Ray's indecisiveness about where to take the film stemmed from the fact that he was simply tired, still drained by the unforeseen effort of completing Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Ray didn't even stick around for the film's final editing. Coming in at a trim 86 minutes, it may not have much to say, but at least doesn't take long to say it as it lurches through a plot in which Wilde's American urban gypsy prodigal playboy is shaped up by the jolting news of the impending death of his older brother, gypsy king Marko, played by Luther Adler in a far more detailed and thought-out way than the leads.

Bringing to the role a gravitas that is nowhere else matched in the film, Group Theater pioneer Adler almost overcomes the fact that he's fundamentally miscast. Yet his focus and intensity come close to justifying rebel Ray's insistence on casting him against type. Wilde's Stephano is on another plane entirely, bulling ahead with crude vitality, convincing us that he'd make a terrible successor to his able older brother. Crashing crudely through the role, he's headstrong, heedless, warped by sibling rivalry issues, a creature of the moment, utterly devoid of the skill set and shrewdness it takes to steer the gypsy community through an unwelcoming environment determined to marginalize them. This would seem to be rich psychic turf for Ray, with his innate sympathy for -- and identification with -- marginalized outsiders in They Live by Night (1948), Knock on Any Door (1949) and In a Lonely Place (1950) before Rebel. Wilde even gets a speech denouncing stereotyped views designed to keep gypsies disenfranchised.

But the thorough research of Jean Evans into gypsy life as a submerged subculture in Manhattan was jettisoned except for accurate depictions of wedding and other ceremonial scenes. We are not talking Tony Gatlif and Latcho Drom (1993) here, or even King of the Gypsies (1978). But we could have been. Still, it was the film's Vincente Minnelli-like embrace of studio artifice that the French New Wave picked up on and celebrated. Jean-Luc Godard lauded its gaudy colors. Francois Truffaut praised its devil-may-care vitality, soft-pedaling the fact that the vitality is mostly visual. In place of veracity and conviction, it offers exuberance and visual extravagance, with the less said the better about cameraman Ray June's pan from Russell's face to her ample bosom – where the camera remains for a few more than telltale seconds.

Russell is the reason the film was pushed through. Ever since she stole The Outlaw (1943) from Pat Garrett, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday with a roll in a haystack that caused the Howard Hughes film to be banned and make oodles of money, Russell was America's pre-Marilyn Monroe sex goddess. But Hot Blood was her fifth film in thirteen months. She had produced and starred in a demanding musical made in Europe, Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, quickly segued to The Tall Men, and was, by her own admission, exhausted, spending her lunch hours in restorative steam baths. She liked working with Ray when he took over for fired director Josef von Sternberg in Macao in 1952, but in her autobiography says she didn't give him or Wilde much.

Her fondest memory connected to the movie had to do with getting small parts for her brothers. Jamie played her brother in Hot Blood. Wally played the gypsy king's right-hand man. Still, she's fiery when she has to be, which is most of the time, starting with her entrance, when she's bailed out of jail by the gypsy king who has arranged her wedding to his brother. She throws the desk sergeant the first of her many smoldering glances and snaps, in spitfire fashion, "Just one little fortune I told in Peoria!" Nor does she bat an eye in what we now would cringingly dismiss as unacceptable brutality during a whip dance with Wilde and other bits of I'm-the-king-of-the-gypsies-and-I'm-the-king-of-you sexism. She delivers more spark than she perhaps realized.

In a role without shadings, Wilde delivers nothing but vitality. As a young fencer good enough to make the US Olympic team, the New Yorker of Czech-Hungarian ancestry switched to acting, was discovered on Broadway as Laurence Olivier's Tybalt (and fencing instructor) in Romeo and Juliet, and enjoyed a successful film career as a swashbuckler and in crime melodramas. Ironically, his command of body language as a fencer didn't translate to the dance numbers, where choreographer Matt Mattox served as his dance double. Other piquant bits of casting include Russian diva and vocal coach Nina Koshetz as a gypsy stalwart and, to give you an idea of the music's detour from original gypsy sources, it was supplied by easy-listening king Percy Faith, with songs by Armenian composer Ross Bagdasarian, famous for his hit, "Come on'a My House" (recorded by Rosemary Clooney among others). Both were rewarded with small roles, as gas station attendants. Speaking of which, Wilde has a snazzy entrance, too – in an aquamarine Thunderbird convertible accessorized with a blonde behind the wheel. Jacques Demy would have died for it. Hot Blood suffers from an identity crisis indicated by its succession of prior titles – No Return, Tambourine, Bad Blood. But it never suffers from tired blood. For all its problems, it's easy to succumb to its wacky non-stop verve.

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: 3

not coming to a theater near you review Andrew Schenker

Movements in Abstraction: "Hot Blood" and "Bitter Victory" on ... - Mubi Evan Davis also reviews BITTER VICTORY

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The Boston Phoenix (Gerald Peary) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

BIGGER THAN LIFE

USA (95 mi) 1956 ‘Scope

A year after directing Rebel Without a Cause (1955), rebel filmmaker Nicholas Ray came back with Bigger Than Life (1956). Based on a real-life New Yorker article, the movie repelled those who saw it, and it bombed at the box office.

Many decades later, this strange, anti–American Dream film is a cult classic. Ed Avery (James Mason) plays a downtrodden, underpaid high-school teacher resigned to his dull life and his inflamed arteries. Then he takes the "miracle drug" cortisone and turns into a Nietzschean monster.

He sneers at his students, mocks the stupidity of his bourgeois wife (Barbara Rush), and bullies and threatens his son (Christopher Olsen), going so far as to have visions of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Ed's vision is demented and distorted, and yet, Ray insinuates, doesn't his protagonist, in an odd way, see through the smug mediocrity that is 1950s America? As for Ed's downfall through drugs, it's eerily prophetic of Ray's own self-destructive final years as he drowned in barbiturates and alcohol.

Nicholas Ray's 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life,” review : The New ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker

The wonders of modern medicine and the comforts of middle-class consumerism provide fuel for the hectic furies of Nicholas Ray’s 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life” (Criterion). Based on an article by Berton Roueché that appeared in this magazine, it depicts a family man and schoolteacher, Ed Avery (James Mason), who, afflicted with a normally fatal vascular inflammation, is saved by the new “miracle drug,” cortisone, but suffers from serious side effects: mental disturbances that grow from depression to full-blown psychosis.

Under the medicine’s influence, the warm and witty teacher becomes what his best friend (Walter Matthau) calls a “big shot.” Convinced of his intellectual superiority and moral vision, he turns harsh and judgmental at school and becomes contemptuous of his wife (Barbara Rush) and an oppressive disciplinarian to his young son (Christopher Olsen), whom he confronts with a righteous yet deadly rage. From a domesticated teacher who moonlights as a taxi dispatcher, Avery is transformed, in his own mind, into a swaggering aristocrat of means, taste, vision, and power—a Nietzschean superman whose refinement is matched by his cruelty. The highly charged angles, frenzied symbolism (a kitchen knife brandished, in a loving embrace, like a murder weapon), and overheated color palette evoke, from the calm façades of suburban respectability, a horde of violent impulses expressing a will to do more than survive—to live large as never before.

Bigger Than Life BFI Screen Online (link lost)

It's hard to think of another Hollywood picture that has more to say about the sheer awfulness of 'normal' American family life during the 50s.
—Jonathan Rosenbaum

Bigger Than Life is one of the greatest American films of the 50s, and a highpoint in the careers both of lead actor James Mason, who also served as producer, and of director Nicholas Ray.

Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote: "Nicholas Ray is the cinema". And Bigger Than Life - even more than his earlier In a Lonely Place and Rebel Without a Cause - may be seen as Ray's real masterpiece.

Mason gives a towering performance as Ed Avery, a happily married middle-class teacher who is suddenly put on a strict regime of the 'miracle drug' Cortisone when it's discovered that his arteries are inflamed. Physically, he soon recovers, but abuse of his medication produces nightmarish side-effects that bring to the fore all of Ed's long repressed frustrations with his life, and the scene is set for tragedy.

Mason's support is exceptional: Barbara Rush as Ed's devoted wife, Christopher Olsen as his cruelly punished son and Walter Matthau as his faithful colleague.

One of the cinema's most persuasive portraits of psychological turmoil, the film also succeeds magnificently as searing melodrama and subversive social critique, with Ray, his scriptwriters (who included Clifford Odets and Gavin Lambert) and cinematographer Joe MacDonald achieving a perfect balance between emotional realism and expressionist allegory. Which other Hollywood film of the era ever had the audacity to suggest that God might possibly be wrong?

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Nicholas Ray’s little-seen “social drama” about the ills of cortisone abuse has been voted by critics as one of the top-twenty best films unavailable on video in the United States. Much like Ray’s classic teen-angst drama Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life provides a scathing, thinly veiled commentary on middle-class mores in 1950s America while ostensibly dealing with a different subject altogether.

James Mason (who also produced) plays a man torn between familial duties and a desire for less pedestrian pursuits. As the film opens, we watch him leaving his day-job as a teacher and leaving to work surreptitiously as an operator for a taxi company. His wife has no idea that he’s moonlighting to supplement their comfortable middle-class lifestyle, instead suspecting him of an affair. But when he doubles over in acute pain, blacks out, and must be rushed to the hospital, she learns (with ironic relief) the truth about his stressful situation. Ed’s prognosis isn’t good, but with the help of a steady dose of cortisone – the new “wonder drug” of the day — he’s able to manage his pain and quickly return back to his regular life.

Unfortunately, this seeming “happy ending” merely signals the onset of an increasingly nightmarish existence for the Averys, as Ed discovers that cortisone provides him with a new kind of strength and virility which he had been sorely lacking before. He can’t seem to help himself from taking more than the prescribed dosage of his medication, and soon becomes a frightening figure of irrational authority in his household, demanding more and more control over his wife and son’s every move. The story quickly goes beyond the audience’s comfort zone, showing us the “hidden” impulses and thoughts which emerge when Ed is no longer constrained by petty concerns such as earning an income and maintaining a modicum of social propriety.

Ultimately, then, Bigger Than Life shows us a prototypical 1950s family man who secretly longs to transcend his cloistered existence (posters and maps of far-away countries – places he can’t afford to visit — line the walls of his house), but who is torn by a sense of guilty responsibility to his family. His wife (played with firm resolve by Barbara Rush) is similarly stuck in a vision of 1950s propriety: she’s afraid to send Ed to a psychiatrist because of what this would imply about his sanity, and unable to stand up to her husband even in the face of extreme danger to herself and her son. While the film ends on an unrealistically upbeat, pro-family note (perhaps demanded by audiences of the day), fortunately this doesn’t erase the impact of the gripping psychological horror that has come before.

Bigger Than Life (1956) - The Criterion Collection

Film Comment magazine recently chose Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life as one of the 20 greatest films not available on video. Martin Scorsese included a clip of it in his great documentary A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. Jonathan Rosenbaum recently chose it as one of the 100 greatest American films of all time, and Jean-Luc Godard chose it as one of the ten greatest American films of all time during his Cahiers du Cinema days.

Fortunately for me and about 100 other people, the Castro Theater recently had a screening of this incredibly rare, widescreen, Technicolor marvel. And I have to add my praise to those respectable folks listed above.

James Mason (who also produced) stars as Ed Avery, a schoolteacher and taxi-cab dispatcher who finds he's suffering from a rare disease that will kill him inside of a year if he doesn't start taking Cortisone. His wife Lou (Barbara Rush, from It Came from Outer Space and When Worlds Collide) struggles to keep everything on track, but finds life more and more difficult as the drugs begin to affect Ed very strangely. He takes to playing football in the house with their son Richie (Christopher Olsen, also in The Man Who Knew Too Much), and to berating him when he can't catch a pass.

Ed and Lou's best friend Wally Gibbs (a young and handsome Walter Matthau) tries to help too, but Ed suspects him of fooling around with his wife. Eventually, Ed gets the idea to sacrifice his son just like Abraham did in the Bible. When Lou reminds Ed that God stopped Abraham, Ed roars, "God was wrong!"

Director Ray, along with his contemporaries Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, was a master of the widescreen melodrama. When Cinemascope was first invented, directors used it most naturally for spectacles and epics. But Ray and the others realized that its empty spaces could be used just as potently.

Most of Bigger Than Life's action takes place within the Avery's home, which is decorated with posters and maps from the world's most exotic countries -- further underlining the fact that the Averys are trapped in middle America with all its bland realities. Ray makes the most of the ordinary household staples -- the symbolic football on the mantelpiece, Ed following his wife around and turning off the lights, and the even more symbolic staircase, which like Ed, goes both "up" and "down." Ray also includes one of the first and most effective uses of a cracked mirror.

Indeed, the house perfectly reflects and strains against Mason's masterful performance as the good-natured man turned bad as he begins to concoct ways of getting more and more Cortisone to feed his ever-growing habit. He's either flying high and in a great mood, or he turns dark and murderous. The best scene has him giving math lessons to young Richie, poised over the back of the chair like a hawk -- and his shadow even bigger and more sinister perched on the wall behind them like a vulture.

According to the Psychotronic Video Guide, Bigger Than Life got away with more than it should have at the time. Its violent nature (along with that of The Man With the Golden Arm a year earlier) caused censors to tighten their grip on movies of the 1950s. But it should be noted that Ray demonstrated his cautionary tale without use of overt violence or preaching of any kind. Instead he used his definitive brand of cinematic poetry, which is as it should be.

Review: Bigger than Life - Film Comment Paul Brunick, November/December 2008

Half a century before Daniel Day-Lewis drank Paul Dano’s milkshake, fellow Brit James Mason—playing another American megalomaniac in Bigger Than Life—served up some equally memorable moments of milk-inspired madness.

It starts with an unprovoked explosion at the deliveryman. “You’ve gone out of your way to annoy me,” Mason snaps when the drippy old man, decked out in a clownish Good Humor outfit, arrives with his clinking glass bottles. “You jingle-jangle in and you jingle-jangle out. Don’t lie to me, it’s deliberate!” The dumbstruck milkman tries to defend himself. “You folks and me, we’re real friendly. Why some mornings I even take your boy with me on my rounds, just ask him!”

Ah yes, the boy (Christopher Olsen). James Mason hasn’t forgotten. The boy shall not get any milk or supper until every last one of his math problems are completed. James Mason doesn’t care if it takes all night. It’s for the boy’s own good. But the boy’s mother (Barbara Rush)—always sneaking around behind Mason’s back! always undermining his best laid plans!—covertly smuggles some creamy contraband to her traumatized child, unleashing a second wave of dairy derangement:

Sitting in frozen silence before the endlessly delayed dinner, wife and son look on in terror as their domestic dictator carefully pours his milk back into the frosty pitcher. That another glass remains unaccounted for is clear from the high-water mark. Their treason is apparent to all. “Did you really think that you were clever enough to outsmart me?” Mason asks, his voice both seething with rage yet frighteningly calm.

Clearly, they weren’t all happy days in Eisenhower’s America. Released in the summer of 1956, director Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life represents one polar extreme on a truly schizophrenic slate of Hollywood fare. The year’s box-office was dominated, on the one hand, by a cycle of globetrotting spectaculars that eagerly exploited the era’s new widescreen technologies: The Ten Commandments, Seven Wonders of the World and Around the World in 80 Days comprised three of the top five grossing pictures. Visually sensational but dramatically saccharine, this mid-century cinema of attractions exudes a logic not unlike the “least objectionable programming” mantra that was the implicit (and soon to be official) philosophy of the burgeoning television industry: in the pursuit of the broadest audience possible, everything remotely provocative, salacious, or morally complex has been carefully excised in advance, reducing these films to the level of lowest-common-denominator inoffensiveness.

Head a little further down the box-office charts, however, and you’ll start to feel like you’ve slipped into the country’s collective unconscious. In addition to aggressively marketing candy-colored hokum to the family-values crowd, studios also took advantage of a liberalizing production code to produce more “adult” material. As with Mason’s turn in Bigger Than Life, films like The Man Who Knew Too Much, Seven Men From Now, and The Searchers allowed the good old boys of Hollywood’s golden age—Jimmy Stewart, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne—to give free reign to their usually suppressed psychoses. In these pictures, which the trade papers euphemistically referred to as “psychological,” a shocking criminal act (kidnapping, murder, or both) opens up a Pandora’s box of primal emotions and antisocial desire, confronting audiences with the darker dimensions of Hollywood heroism. In their intricate imbrications of star text, iconic Americana, and insinuating directorial commentary, these dark and disturbing films systematically subverted the reassuring conventions of classical Hollywood. It’s as if one of the American-dream factory technicians broke the Emergency Use Only glass and flipped the red switch to “nightmare.”

Bigger Than Life begins somewhat differently from its peers, set in the sanitized suburbs of a Father Knows Best sitcom rather than the brutally Hobbesian universe of the Western or international spy thriller. Mason’s Ed Avery is the very image of middle-class normality, just your average-hardworking-American: faculty head of the PTA, former soldier, and churchgoing football dad. Although he is a senior staff member at an elementary school, Ed also works part time in the evenings—takes the last bus home, god bless ‘em—in order to provide for his lovely wife and angelic son (played by Christopher Olsen, the child actor of late 50s Hollywood and the older brother of Susan Olsen, aka Cindy Brady of The Brady Bunch). Ed Avery’s life is almost a cliché. It’s as if he were a stock character from an October stump speech—just call him Ed the Schoolteacher.

But when tragedy strikes in the form of an unforeseeable illness, this superficial patina of domestic bliss and financial prosperity is quickly shattered, and the darker reality so neurotically concealed by an outwardly “perfect” existence is laid bare in all its Grand Guignol grotesquerie. The premise (along with the title) was lifted from the 1956 New Yorker article “Ten Feet Tall,” which narrated in clinical detail the case history of “Robert Laurence,” a schoolteacher and family man. Diagnosed with periarteritis nervosa, a debilitatingly painful and ultimately fatal inflammation of the arteries, Laurence was placed on a high-dosage program of Cortisone supplements, a medication that was then in its experimental stage. Within a matter of days, Laurence’s symptoms disappeared and his pain faded away. He felt like a new man. No, even better: he felt like a superman: “I felt as bright as a button—capable of anything. It was really extraordinary. It was almost as though I’d never been fully awake before.”

The only problem was that Laurence’s hormonal supplements had a few unexpected side effects: manic-depression, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur. He began to have some peculiar ideas, most of which revolved around his suddenly obsessive preoccupation with time management—both his and his family’s: “With my wife, there is a desire to impress upon her the rightness of my views, to mold her and to change her until she conforms completely to the artificial pattern I am setting up for her.”

As this scenario is retooled in Bigger Than Life, the central thematic question becomes one of causality: does the cortisone treatment create the psychotic impulses that transform Mason’s Ed Avery from a mild-mannered schoolteacher to a petty Fascist? Or does it merely amplify the psychic force of a mindset that’s deeply ingrained before the first pill is popped? While the film ostensibly allows the viewer to accept the “easier” explanation—reading the narrative as a literal-minded docudrama about a dangerous new drug—the carefully structured screenplay (crafted by a number of writers, including an un-credited Clifford Odets) establishes the foundation for every psychotic symptom in the first act of the film, that is before Mason is prescribed the controversial drug.

After the opening credits roll, the first image we see is an insert of a pocket watch. A hand reaches into the frame to pick it up when (with a jarringly dissonant orchestral cue) it suddenly contorts in pain. A series of wider shots reveal that Mason—momentarily racked with the headaches and dizzy spells that will quickly escalate as the film progresses—is holding a young student after school until he can successfully name America’s five great lakes. The examination reveals an educational paradigm that’s less concerned with inculcating creativity or independent thinking than with forcing students to systematically reproduce prescribed (and personally meaningless) bodies of knowledge. (In a later scene that’s played for sardonic laughs, Mason dismissively refers to the finger paintings of the preschool class as “grotesque daubs”: if it’s supposed to be a picture of a cow, then “Why does it have five legs?”) Yet because Mason starts out so temperamentally good-natured, this initial classroom interaction seems benign—when the boy offers up a tentative “Lake Huron?”, Mason smiles and lets him go.

But Mason is now running late for his second job. (That pocket watch keeps tick-tick-ticking.) He places a quick call to his wife who, small caveat, has no idea that her husband is moonlighting in the evenings. (Avery’s job, as a dispatcher at a cab company, provokes his class anxieties: “She’ll think it’s beneath me.”) He won’t be home until later, he explains, because he has an “emergency school board meeting.” “Another?” she asks in quiet disbelief. Logically enough Ms. Avery assumes that her husband is having an affair, yet she is unable to confront him about it directly. She merely reminds him that they are hosting a dinner party later that evening and to hurry home before then.

Mason’s stiff-upper-lip inflappability notwithstanding, the psychic stress created by his overscheduled existence manifests itself in subtle ways. In the first twenty odd minutes of the film (which span a single evening in the story) we see Mason repeatedly taking off his bow-tie only to be wearing it again in the very next scene—it’s as if he’s being literally suffocated by his professional obligations, subconsciously desperate for an escape yet consciously forcing himself to remain disciplined. “Wouldn’t it be great for us to really get away one of these days?” he later remarks to his wife, in a house lined with travel posters and maps of distant cities he likely has never been to and can’t now afford to visit. And yet, these obligations are also self-imposed. At the dinner party that same evening Mason waxes nostalgic with a fellow schoolteacher: “Do you remember the days when we used to dread vacations because they interrupted our work?”

And so all of the problems are there from the beginning: the reassuring authority and steady-handed discipline of the Great Lakes quiz foreshadows the domestic despotism and iron-fisted sadism of the math “problems”; the underlying alienation of husband and wife blossoms into full-blown paranoia; Ed’s yo-yoing desires to work even harder and yet escape completely explodes into the extremes of manic-depression.

So is this whole social set-up rotten to the core? Or does the Cortisone treatment simply exacerbate small problems that can be reasonably dealt with under normal circumstances? Hovering between these two explanatory frameworks, the film presents viewers with an ambiguity that’s almost Brechtian in its political implications. (Indeed, one could trace a straight line from this film to Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and Martha.) In transforming this topical expose into a more metaphorical critique of the nuclear family, consumer society, and the social (mis)education of children, the film resonates with ideological implications that still have the power to unsettle.

In our mass mediated imagination, “the 1950s” have become a latter-day Victorian era. The historical shorthand of contemporary pop culture characterizes the decade as socially repressive and laughably naïve, a “pre-enlightenment” period that’s downright quaint from our ultra-modern perspective. But the issues presented in Bigger Than Life—the need to hold down multiple jobs just to get by; the inability of hard-working families to pay for their skyrocketing medical bills; the pervasive obsession with social status that encourages individuals to go deeper into debt merely to maintain a certain level of conspicuous consumption; and how all of these everyday pressures can explode into shocking acts of unexpected violence (“How could it happen here?”)—all of these problems are unsettlingly familiar to contemporary viewers.

Bigger Than Life may have been marketed as a social problem picture in 1956, but in 2008 it looks like nothing less than an out-and-out horror film. See it and I guarantee that you’ll never be able to look at a frosty glass of milk the same way again.

Cinema Scope | Interviews | Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life: A ... Jim Healy interviews writer Jonathan Lethem about Ray’s Bigger Than Life, from Cinema Scope, February, 2008

At the beginning of Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), Ed Avery (James Mason), a middle-class grammar school teacher moonlighting as a taxi dispatcher to make ends meet, finds himself suffering from a mystery ailment that cripples him with pain. After multiple hospital tests, doctors diagnose the illness and prescribe the miracle drug cortisone, which cures Ed’s pain, but begins to cause severe delusions of grandeur and manic episodes. Increasingly addicted to the drug, Ed becomes a tyrant in his own home, frightening his wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and bullying their son, Ritchie (Christopher Olsen). In the shocking climax, Ed, inspired by the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, declares “God was wrong” and almost murders Ritchie but he’s thwarted by his best friend, gym teacher Wally (Walter Matthau). Hospitalized once more, Ed emerges from sedation apparently cured of his addiction and mania and the family unit is seemingly restored…

One of America’s finest contemporary writers, Jonathan Lethem’s obsessions with pop culture, especially cinema, are familiar to anyone who has sampled his short stories and novels. Gun, With Occasional Music (1994) and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the 1999 National Book Critic’s Circle Award for fiction, both utilize the classic noir detective story template. 1998’s Girl In Landscape matches the frontier western with a story of interplanetary travel and his 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude features two young characters for whom music, comic books and movies are more important than their ability to fly. Some of Lethem’s most engaging writing appears in a collection of essays entitled The Disappointment Artist, which tackles such diverse cinematic subjects as Philip K. Dick, The Searchers, John Cassavetes, and Star Wars.

A master of “speculative fiction” (particularly evidenced in The Fortress of Solitude and his spare and fascinating 1997 novel As She Climbed Across the Table), Lethem’s work shares one great affinity with Bigger Than Life: the imposition of a scientific abnormality onto the everyday lives of his characters. Lethem has been a longtime admirer of Ray’s film, and in February 2008 he visited George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY to present Bigger Than Life and participate in a post-film discussion with myself and our viewing audience.

JONATHAN LETHEM: Bigger Than Life is a movie that excites me a lot. It borders on a lot of things I’ve pursued in my own work. I advertised this film to a friend of mine as “Douglas Sirk meets Oliver Sacks” and I suppose that if you had to do a Madison Avenue tagline for the movie that really might be a fair one.

CINEMA SCOPE: It’s interesting that you mention Oliver Sacks because the screenplay was based on a story that Nicholas Ray found in a New Yorker magazine by a man named Burton Roueche—do you know anything about him?

LETHEM: Burton Roueche, yes: he was in a sense Oliver Sacks’ predecessor at the New Yorker, and a medical writer specializing in case studies. The most famous of Roueche’s books—I’m not sure whether the article that inspired Bigger Than Life appears in it or not—is called The Medical Detectives. It’s a series of profiles of cases where life and medicine intersected. Few deal with the kind of neurological studies we’re accustomed to from Sacks, and of which Bigger Than Life is also an example; more often Roueche writes on subjects of surgery or other kinds of physical illness. It’s Sacks who begins more specifically doing case studies of the mind.

Bigger Than Life prefigures a wide interest in contemporary culture in this area: the crossroads of emotional or psychological life and neurology, or pharmacology. You encounter this in fiction like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime (2003) or Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), and I suppose I contributed as well with the Tourette’s Syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn. These perspectives offer rival ways of describing human experience—rivals to the traditional psychological perspectives available in the majority of 20th century narrative. And, just as in the treatment profession, there’s been a trend of neurological or neurochemical or pharmacological paradigms winning out over traditional psychological or psychotherapeutic models of human life. This film is a very early signal of what has become a trend. James Mason’s difficulties, the issues in his relationship to his family and to society and even to himself—his philosophical or existential plight—are all suddenly reframed as a pure overdose of cortisone.

SCOPE: Yes, this is something I think the film shares with your brand of speculative fiction. Ray is less interested in the disease, the cure, and all the side effects than he is in what these things reveal about Ed’s daily life and what it was like before he became sick.

LETHEM: What I love about the film is the way Ray, in preparing us for this intrusion into daily life, is so scrupulous about creating a real world. For instance, financial pressures are very much a part of the film. It‘s a film about class shame, amongst other things; the tension in Ed’s life as a taxi cab dispatcher, for instance—and though we only glimpse the world of the taxi drivers, it’s a rich social milieu. This family dwells in a very normal town, and they’re a perfect nuclear family, and yet there are so many pressure points, so many fault lines. Another example is the undercurrent of gender discomfort with Mason being a school teacher, as well as the fact that it is obviously not completely comfortable for the male teachers working alongside a beautiful single female teacher. The opening of the film could easily turn into four or five different kinds of melodrama in the Douglas Sirk fashion. The characters rest uneasily on their bed of normality to begin with—and then you lay on top the fantastic intrusion of the medical crisis.

I love thinking about what’s going on in the culture contemporaneously with the events of this film. If you think of the novels being written by Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer, and the fact that rock n’ roll was basically being invented at this moment—we’re not that far, of course, from Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—and yet there’s no subculture anywhere evident in this film. There’s no critique of the American reality from the outside, only pressure on it from within.

SCOPE: Well, there’s no hint of escape in their lives except for the travel posters, which are all for Italy.

LETHEM: Sure—no hint of escape from their lives, except that James Mason has this unexplained and faintly sinister accent. Consider what James Mason signified as a Hollywood actor in the postwar era, in everything from Lolita (1962) to the vaguely bisexual villain in North by Northwest (1959) to Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). He represents a sort of trans-Atlantic sophistication that’s threatening, that brings with it implications of the Old World and European fascism and all the aristocratic anti-American richness of his persona. So, to just throw him into this pure American milieu is troubling to begin with. Then, as you say, there are these travel posters all over the house. Also, in Ray, architecture is so important. That house is fighting so hard to be a middle class house of the ‘50s, but that water heater is naked in the kitchen. The interior of the house strains for a‘50s-style luxury, but then the camera backs out and you see how the other houses are wedged right against it, and the guy who lives inside has to work as a cab dispatcher. The degree of precision about those social details, the precariousness of the life they’re trying to put across, is really thrillingly precise.

SCOPE: It’s an increasingly menacing film until it becomes almost suffocating.

LETHEM: Yes. There are moments where Ray uses shadows and the score to make you wonder if this is a horror movie about a guy who forgot to take his slippers to the hospital. It’s very Hitchcockian in those gestures, making certain everyday objects seem so problematic. The empty football holder or the milk; the way the milk pitcher reveals that missing inch, that’s amazing stuff.

SCOPE: The way Ray mounts Mason’s increasing mania reminds me a lot of James Stewart in the second half of Vertigo (1958).

LETHEM: Yeah and there’s a scene where he dresses his wife up in expensive clothes, very uncomfortable, very close to Vertigo! What’s the first symptom of the breakdown of this American family? Dad goes on this careening consumer binge and dresses his wife up in ways that he can’t afford. Again, class anxiety: what if we behaved improperly in the marketplace? Even the idea that there’s a shop in town that their family is afraid to enter makes such a powerful statement about the impossible fiction of an egalitarian middle class, a fiction within which these characters are trying to reside. The fact that they can simply jump into a car and go to this neurotically intimidating store! This is a version of the argument that other films in the ‘50s were making about American life, but more usually from the outside: The Wild One (1953) or Rebel Without a Cause or Strangers On A Train (1951) or My Son John (1952). Usually there’s some sort of invader.

SCOPE: This is, I think, a reflection of Ray because he came from a normal family but always felt an outsider. He was bisexual and an artist and someone who never felt comfortable in Wisconsin and then finally found his way East and then to Hollywood. His films are usually about underdogs and outsiders.

LETHEM: Another frame to put around the film is that it’s a nightmare self-portrait of an artist, one who lives in an society that doesn’t want to consider the elitist implications of declaring oneself an artist. I was discussing There Will Be Blood (2007) with some friends who felt that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a total monster, and I thought, “Well, yeah, but he’s also kind of a creator.” He’s trying to bring something possible into existence. And that pits him against everything. It does make him a monster.

SCOPE: I’m reminded of Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) where Bogart is, on the one hand, creative, and, on the other hand he’s a psycho.

LETHEM: Well, there’s a version of the fundamental paradox of ‘50s America. It’s alluded to in the film: the Cold War fears and the bomb, also McCarthyism. The whole incredible self-loathing paradox embedded in this apparently simple idea that “our enemy is trying to destroy our free American way of life.” The Communist enemy is like a race of insects. A faceless horde. Whereas in America, you’re allowed to be free and do anything you want, but any sign of disturbing behavior means you might be a Red, so we have to conform to one another, in order to prove that we are not the faceless horde—so we’re undergoing this constant self-scrutiny for difference. This describes a decade that contains both Allen Ginsberg and J. Edgar Hoover.

SCOPE: And this runs throughout Ray’s work, especially in Johnny Guitar (1954), with its McCarthy allegories. What is normal? What does it mean to conform? How difficult it is to be like everyone else, especially in Rebel Without a Cause.

LETHEM: In the 50s, the idea of postwar American conformity is so new that it’s so fragile. So monolithic, but so barely tenable.

SCOPE: Some of our great contemporary novelists who emerged in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s like John Updike and Richard Yates, who dealt to a certain extent with suburban living, contemporary mores and relationships between men and women, have seen very few successful adaptations of their work. But there’s an interesting sub-genre of films from this time that, in many cases, precedes Updike’s Rabbit Run (1960) and Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1962). There’s Bigger Than Life and Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (1957); I’m also reminded of Walter Matthau and Barbara Rush in another film, Richard Quine’s Strangers When We Meet (1960), which was written by the novelist Evan Hunter. Have you ever seen it?

LETHEM: I’ve never seen it.

SCOPE: Matthau’s a far less sympathetic character in that film than he is in Bigger Than Life. Barbara Rush is married to Kirk Douglas and Matthau makes the moves on her in that film.

LETHEM: It’s interesting to think of this in terms of Richard Yates. His main characters have a kind of underlying depressive grandiosity that persistently wrecks their participation in family life. Of course, by comparison to a novel, while there’s so much social context that’s precise in Bigger Than Life, there’s also a lot that’s left out. You don’t know, for instance, whether James Mason fought in WWII—a really big question for any man in the United States in that age group. In fact, there was a brief period when American film talked a lot about the shell-shocked veterans. They were almost a kind of commonplace, in a film noir like The Blue Dahlia (1946) or in Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero (1944): the veteran who comes back changed, and everyone jokes nervously that he took a few too many bomb blasts near his head. In a sense, mental disorder was briefly a part of American life; then it gets buttoned back down and it’s not okay. If ten years earlier a figure like Mason had been trying to function as part of American middle-class suburban life and they were falling apart at the seams, it would probably be that he was a returning veteran.

AUDIENCE: Mason’s fascistic rants against the school system stand strongly outside conventional ‘50s thinking. I wondered whether the actors were representing the viewpoints of the screenwriters or Nicholas Ray?

LETHEM: During the screening, my friend Sean leaned over to me and whispered “Mike Huckabee” at one point, because we’d just this morning watched a speech that Huckabee was giving to a conservative convention. It was a “let’s go back to morality,” “let’s roll back all cultural relativism” monologue. There’s some of that in Mason’s rants, but there’s also a will to subvert the placid surface of life, a Nietszchean element to his ravings. It reminds me of Werner Erhard, the founder of EST, or any of the great populist paragons of “selfishness.” That super self-actualizing impulse is very problematic in terms of the double-bind of wanting to prove you’re a good American in the ‘50s. On the one hand you have to be normal and fair and a good citizen, but on the other hand to prove you’re an American you also have to be thinking positively, in a Death of a Salesman kind of way: “I’m going to win. I’m going to transform myself into something better.” Self-improvement turns this corner very easily into wanting to rise above the crowd, wanting to excel, become exceptional, fabulously wealthy. Perhaps Thomas Alva Edison would be the American ideal: invent miraculous things and become rich. But the flipside is that it’s suddenly very anti-egalitarian. The same things that people mocked in the Me decade, that fascist undercurrent of the New Age, are surfacing in some of Mason’s rants. Another point of reference that came up in my head just now was the great moral visionary psychotic rants that were written for the Tom Wilkinson character in Michael Clayton (2007). He gets a couple of moments where he ruptures the surface of this movie with these disastrously sweeping moral lectures that just can’t be coped with. They can’t be accounted for within the actions of the film. He says, “Sometimes we say more than we mean.”

SCOPE: One of Bigger Than Life’s screenwriters is Richard Maibaum, who later wrote a lot of the James Bond films, which might be viewed as having right-wing or fascist tendencies, but Ray had his partner and assistant at the time, Gavin Lambert, were rewriting a lot of the film as they went along. One of their touchstones was a line from Death of a Salesman which is escaping me right now…

LETHEM: “Attention must be paid”

SCOPE: “Attention must be paid.” Thank you.

LETHEM: Funny, I made that connection with Death of a Salesman without having any notion that Ray and Lambert had it in mind.

SCOPE: There were also two key scenes that were completely written by Clifford Odets, including the last scene where Ed wakes up in the room and remembers what he’s done when he sees the image of Abraham Lincoln. Bringing Lincoln into it was Odets’ invention.

LETHEM: At first it seems like they are going to go off on some strange new tangent that’s really embarrassing or awkward, or that’s going to break out of the movie, like Mason imagining that he’s Napoleon or something. But then it ends up being perfect. Well, here’s to Clifford Odets.

Another thing that has to be mentioned is the incredible scene, one of my favourite in all of cinema, when Mason is delaying dinner, and working on the math problem, and disputing with his son over the milk, the wife’s race to get him the full glass of milk, and wipe his mouth, and then there’s…that shadow. I said rock n’ roll was excluded from this film, but that shadow’s shape looks like Elvis Presley or James Brown; it’s this giant hulking thing with a pompadour. And it’s so weird. It’s so pointed and deliberate—in fact, when Barbara Rush enters the room she gets a shadow too and it’s a third the size of his shadow. What an amazing piece of expressionism. It just stands there lurking through the whole shot.

SCOPE: Another cultural reference is The Night of the Hunter (1955). When Mason goes to church he wears all black and he comes home and he’s thumping the Bible and chasing the kid around just like Robert Mitchum.

LETHEM: Bigger Than Life also offers an assembly kit for making The Shining (1980), at that moment when suddenly Rush gets locked in the closet and the film becomes just a pure thriller for a second. Of course, Jack Nicholson’s casting is as ominous as Mason’s casting: What kind of family are you trying to pass off on me here?

SCOPE: Have you seen the short film on the making of The Shining?

LETHEM: Yeah.

SCOPE: One of the visitors to the set is James Mason, who, of course, worked with Kubrick on Lolita.

LETHEM: Oh, I remember that. That’s great.

AUDIENCE: Well, first I’d like to remind you that John Kennedy had Addison’s disease and was on cortisone. Second, it strikes me, as it struck you, that, in many ways, the main characters played by James Mason and Barbara Rush are very one-dimensional; there’s nothing you can infer from them about their history. And it’s so strange that this occurs in the ‘50s and there’s nothing about WWII and what preceded it. It’s almost like Kabuki theatre to me.

LETHEM: I agree. I just think that it says something so poignant about both American life in the mid ‘50s and American film. ‘50s culture seemed so monolithic to the people who wanted to rebel against it: say, a blacklisted writer or a homosexual kid in a small town. But at the same time it’s so fragile. It has so many fissures in it to begin with, it’s such a scant invention. Part of that has to do with the need to pretend that our great wealth and our world dominance and our way of life didn’t just land on us as a weird accident of winning WWII but was somehow the American legacy and we’ve always had it and the war was just an interruption and now we’re back to it.

AUDIENCE: It seems that with the happy little ending of the film, audiences were meant to interpret that the psychosis was being created by the cortisone itself and not in any way coming from James Mason’s character.

LETHEM: It’s a non-ending ending on a certain level. Almost like the ending of Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), where all you’re given is the feeling of resolution but there’s no information in the film to dictate that their crisis won’t resume later that day. Obviously I don’t have any privileged information about either the reality of these characters—because they’re just characters—or the filmmaker’s intentions. But you certainly feel that after the weight of the film and the complexities of the film, the happy ending can’t possibly be sustained. Of course, that’s true of so many great films in Hollywood’s history, where the ending is simpler than the implications of the film seems to demand.

SCOPE: Ray was unable to fight the studio’s demand that they keep the mention of cortisone in the film. It’s very specifically mentioned in the Roueche story but Ray wanted to…

LETHEM: Generalize it?

SCOPE: Yes, to make no reference to any specific drug.

LETHEM: Interesting. Obviously for Ray the most important thing was the opportunity to open up this fissure, to explore this existential crisis erupting inside the space of such a normal family and a normal town. It’s very interesting that he tried to take the reference to cortisone out. For comparison, the key and defining change he made between the source material of In A Lonely Place and the film is that in the original novel Humphrey Bogart was the murderer. It’s such a signal kind of shift in material when you take away the fundamental motive or reason for being. I would say this originates with Hamlet. What makes Hamlet such an incredibly layered, complex, ambiguous thing is that Hamlet waits, and we’re unsure why. In an ordinary crime story the reason would be that he didn’t know who did it, or at least wasn’t sure, and needed to prove it. But Shakespeare deepens that story by telling you and telling the character right up front that Claudius committed the crime and that action is demanded. And then the character waits anyway as if he’s trying to figure out something that he already knows. That kind of shift is very profound. If you can imagine Bigger Than Life being filmed without an explanation for Mason’s illness then you’ve shifted into the area of something like Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995). In that film there can be no ending to the existential challenges of everyday existence.

SCOPE: It’s interesting what you say about In a Lonely Place. It doesn’t matter that Bogart’s not the killer in the end; the damage is done and he’s still a seriously deranged person.

LETHEM: Questions of whether someone is guilty or innocent, or crazy or sane; Ray is interested in rising above such simple binaries.

AUDIENCE: I think the film shares a lot in common with your fiction, especially Motherless Brooklyn, in the way that an apparently damaged character is able to tell some sort of truth because of that damage, that we wouldn’t otherwise get access to. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that James Mason is telling us and it’s striking to me that it starts with the school, then the church, and there’s also an implicit critique of the hospital as well, so we have three areas of an ideological state apparatus all being slammed by this movie. Leaving aside the fascist overtones, it’s very interesting to try to think about this as, potentially, a very radical film.

LETHEM: Yes. I was thinking about how the staircase is so important in so many great American films, from Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) to the way Hitchcock places staircases in the centre of so many of his problematic homes. In this symbolic structure the downstairs is the social world, the institutional world, and upstairs is a more intimate, separate zone. It seems to me there are two levels at which James Mason and his wife and his kid have to function. One is just among themselves, and that’s why that ending is so beautiful, and terrifying too. The doctors leave that room and the room becomes like a bedroom all of a sudden, and it’s the three of them trying to be this intimate, above-the-stairs bedroom version of American life. When Mason makes that great remark that “the name for teacher and doctor are the same”, what he’s trying to do is replace intimacy with the absolutes of his teaching life. He’s going to become some super home-schooling force. Then he switches to the Bible, as if he can replace the overwhelming possibilities and uncertainties of family life with an ideology pulled out of the Bible story.

SCOPE: He finally rejects that too. “God was wrong!”

LETHEM: Yes. There’s a question of where success is going to be negotiated—in Ray this question is partly architectural, it’s a design question. What room is a sanctum? I think the word “sanctum” is even used in the film at one point. The way the parents sit down in those chairs when he’s lecturing them is satirical, but it’s very disturbing too, because it’s as though they’re suddenly eligible to be totally reformatted like “oh wait maybe we’re all patients or maybe we’re all a congregation, maybe we’re all your students. Maybe this furniture is going to tell us who we are and what we’re supposed to do.”

AUDIENCE: I think the film almost confirmed conformity and would have been quite well received by a lot of Americans that were making it in that upper middle class environment. How was the movie received when it was released in the ‘50s?

SCOPE: It was not a box office success, and an official voice of record, The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, said, “To ask a paying audience to sit through a painfully slow routine of becoming intoxicated by too much cortisone is adding the tax of tedium to the price of admission.” Most contemporary cinephiles will tell you that if Crowther gave a movie a negative review it was a good reason to see it. Today I think it’s generally regarded as one of the more important films of its time. Martin Scorsese included it in his Personal Journey Through American Movies and cites it as one of the most important and expressive films of its time. I’ve always seen it as a warning against conformity but not a movie that gives you any easy answers about how to escape that. The scene in the classroom where a lot of the parents sit down to listen to Ed’s rants—a few of them also say, “You’re nuts,” and walk out. That’s for me the most hopeful moment in the whole movie. That there are enough people to speak their minds; maybe not the majority, but a few anyway.

LETHEM: It has so many layers, and quite an embracing surface in certain ways. There aren’t a lot of formal ruptures in it so I’m sure it could have been taken at face value, but it would have aroused a lot of discomfort right underneath that response, I’d think.

SCOPE: I can’t think of a single good Ray film that’s not hard to watch, that doesn’t get under your skin. In a Lonely Place is devastating, this film is devastating, Rebel Without a Cause is really powerful. His own widow, Susan Ray, said that every time she discovered one of his films for the first time it was a painful experience and apparently it was painful for him to make several of his films too. He brought a lot of himself to his movies.

Bigger Than Life seems to me also very similar to the horror films of the ‘50s in that instead of a full moon turning someone into a werewolf it’s what you put inside your body that does it. There’s also an interesting rhyming effect with the milky substance Mason drinks before his X-ray and the scene with the boy and the milk later on. Milk becomes an increasingly menacing substance as the film goes on. The ‘50s was also the era of the Salk vaccine, so there was a hope, in a certain sense, that all diseases can be cured.

LETHEM: I think that’s right. There are many moments that are played like a horror film or a suspense film. It breaks into it openly when Barbara Rush is locked in the closet. In the ending, there’s a throb of fear. Why are the doctors willing to leave that room? It seems irresponsible.

AUDIENCE: Do you think this could be considered a science-fiction film?

LETHEM: There are times I’ve been obsessed with the taxonomy of genres and now I think I’ve worn through that interest. It seems mostly a way of just expressing a categorical imperative, like getting a file system for everything. Sure, if you want to call it science fiction, absolutely, but then you start to call into question what the definition means. Bigger Than Life’s not set in the future, but it is about a kind of scientific intrusion on the everyday, and so it functions that way a bit. But I think it’s closer, in its soul, to horror. Its affinities are closer in two ways. It is, in a sense, a very upscale version of the kind of film that Hollywood was constantly making in that same era, with werewolves and their like intruding into blandly normal suburban life. But it is also horror in the sense that it relates, in a mild way, to things like the writings of someone like H.P. Lovecraft: ontological or philosophical horror. It’s about the outbreak of evil into the surface of everyday life. What if I had a thought that made me monstrous?

AUDIENCE: I was interested in Lou (Barbara Rush) and her characterization as either a hero or a victim or an enabler.

LETHEM: This film reverses a motif that you see in the ‘50s a lot. I’m thinking of examples from Hitchcock right now: the way James Stewart patronizes Doris Day and tries to settle her down in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the much more troubling and open-ended issues between Henry Fonda and Vera Miles in The Wrong Man (1956). In these, the husband is the one saying let’s keep these emotions, this despair, shut tight within the functional boundaries of our home and our daily life, let’s not talk about that. Or, take a sedative, relax. We’ll wake up tomorrow and we’ll be fine.

But what’s so poignant, in that scene when Barbara Rush refuses Walter Matthau’s querying, and he ends up saying, “I put my foot in my mouth,” is the underlying financial panic. Again, that’s the one level at which the film is overtly subverting the placid, conformist surface that it might otherwise be seen as reinforcing. They are always running out of money. He puts down the phone because he looks at the bill. The problem is almost solved a third of the way through the movie, and then he looks at the bill and doesn’t talk to his doctor! And Barbara Rush suffers in this terrible dilemma of financial pressures balanced against pressure from her husband, but also social pressures, not to resume her career. Her options are so narrow. There’s a really beautiful complexity to the scene where she persuades her son to play along through the weekend which doesn’t end up working out. Sunday was even worse than Saturday but she does a beautiful job in that moment. You feel how much trust she’s earned with him, how terrific a mom she’s been. It’s the wrong choice she makes, ultimately, when you know what’s coming, but it’s also such a horrible burden she puts on the boy at that moment. “Whatever Dad’s got going on we’ll just accommodate it inside this container of our house.” It’s heartbreaking. That stuff doesn’t seem ironic or satirical about her to me at all. It just seems totally tormenting and sad.

SCOPE: Lou also starts to display Ed’s manic qualities after he is hospitalized at the end when she’s yelling at the doctor and she almost takes on his ranting persona.

LETHEM: Yes, that’s such a funny detail. But that scene also offers a little bit of the Clifford Odets socialist element: to have such an odd moment late in the film like the bumping into Lou and her son with a vacuum cleaner and the kid says, “I guess some people just work really late.” You’re being reminded again of the economic disparities that unsettle the whole thing.

AUDIENCE: One of the students in one of the classroom scenes, the one who’s angry with his Mom and drawing a dark picture, is the Beaver, Jerry Mathers.

LETHEM: Was it?

SCOPE: Yes, Bigger Than Life came out the year after he appeared in Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry. Could there be a more emblematic figure of late ‘50s/early ‘60s “normal” America than the Beaver? And here he is, presented as a disturbed figure!

LETHEM: It’s amazing how many things slip into the frame in this film. You could make a whole movie about that unmarried teacher. You know…why was she late that day? And are they all covering for her partying nightlife? These little areas of displaced energies and stuff really make it such a rich film to watch.

SCOPE: Speaking of cameos by famous people, I read a very interesting piece about the movie which indicated there was supposed to be a dream sequence reflecting Ed’s state of delusion. Nicholas Ray called on his friend Marilyn Monroe to play a nurse who comes to him in the dream sequence. She shot the scene, but was confused on the set as to what she was doing. 20th Century Fox didn’t want her to think that this was a film under her contract so they cut the scene out of the movie. I don’t know if it exists somewhere still today.

LETHEM: I wonder if this film would have benefited from a dream sequence. I’m not sure it needs one.

Transcription by Dinah Holtzman

Bigger Than Life: Somewhere in Suburbia Criterion essay by B. Kite, March 18, 2010

Press Notes: Bigger Than Life Criterion, April 1, 2010

Bigger Than Life: Nicholas Ray in the Life of the Gray Flannel ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2010

“God was wrong”: Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life • Senses of Cinema Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, March 10, 2009

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (Part II) page 1 - The Pink Smoke

Bigger Than Life - Features - Reverse Shot Leo Goldsmith, June 19, 2013

Symposiums - Reverse Shot Power Mad, by Nicolas Rapold, May 6, 2006

Bigger Than Life (1956) and Its Influence on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) Tony Dayoub, March 29, 2010, also seen here: Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Bigger Than Life | The New Yorker December 31, 2008

Bigger Than Life (Ray, 1956) - Patheos Kenneth R. Morefield, July 18, 2009, also seen here: Bigger Than Life (Ray, 1956) - 1More Film Blog

CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]

Slant Magazine (DVD) Eric Henderson

not coming to a theater near you (Evan Kindley) review

Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale]

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker] March 21, 2010, also seen here: seanax.com » Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life – A Masterpiece ...

Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review

Film Intuition: Criterion Collection DVD [Jen Johans]

PopMatters (Jeff Carter) review

Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review [9/10]

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]

Unexamined Essentials [Jaime N. Christley]

DVD Talk (Casey Burchby) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] [Criterion Edition]

DVD Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection]

DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Criterion Blu-Ray

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, Criterion Blu-Ray

High-Def Digest [Drew Taylor] Criterion Blu-Ray

Dave's Blog About Movies and Such [Dave Enkosky]

Paste Magazine (Andy Beta) dvd review

Deja View Becky

Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life – Criterion Collection #507 [Blu ... James McCormick from The Criterion Cast, March 14, 2010

Floatation Suite (Bradford Film Festival report - Sheila Seacroft)

Essential Cinema: Two by Nicholas Ray - Chicagoist Rob Christopher from The Chicagoist, February 25, 2009

Popdose [Robert Cashill] June 17, 2010

Bigger than life (1956) - Nicholas Ray drama with James Mason and ... Only Old Movies, September 22, 2010

NICHOLAS RAY'S BIGGER THAN LIFE returning to Film Forum in New ... Film Forum

All Movie Guide [Mark Deming]

Ali Nihat Eken Blog Study Guide

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/5]

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review August 3, 1956, also seen here: Screen: Tax of Tedium; 'Bigger Than Life' Has Debut at Victoria

THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES

USA (92 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

No more true than the others, but a better story than most. Nicholas Ray directed this 1957 feature as an extension of his Rebel Without a Cause, with Robert Wagner as an alienated Jesse wandering the American wasteland. Ray is one of the great natural filmmakers, a master of moral ambiguity and jittery mise-en-scene. 92 min.

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [3/5]

Nick Ray takes the Jesse James legend and turns it around his own feelings of disenchantment. Freely adapting the original (1939) Nunnally Johnson script (which initiated the long line of motifs still recognisable in The Long Riders), he transmutes Jesse into one of his familiar outsiders ('the spokesman for everyone whose life is quietly desperate'): an adolescent who turns to outlawry from a disaffection with adult values, rather than Civil War rivalries. This outlaw, like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, entertains dreams of the good life (along the lines of teen-dream romance), but it's never more than a gesture of hope in a surrounding gone rotten. A fine Western, the only regret being Robert Wagner. Imagining Dean in the central role makes it one of the great might-have-beens.

Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby

Disillusioned with Hollywood, by 1957 Nicholas Ray was ready to head to Europe where he would go on to make the brilliant Bitter Victory. But before he could leave America behind, he had to make one more film for 20th Century Fox. The studio suggested a remake of Henry King’s Jesse James (1939).

The ‘True Story’ of the title is less a statement of historical accuracy than one of narrative form – the biopic. The life of Jesse James (Robert Wagner) is told in flashback (signified by clouds of pink smoke added by the studio against Ray’s wishes) with multiple points of view. The disastrous Northfield Minnesota raid is shown twice, once from the point of view of the townsfolk and later from the James Gang’s. Every character, it seems, has an opinion. A newspaperman, in a scene reminiscent of Citizen Kane, wonders what could be the ‘key’ to Jesse James. In the eyes of his dying mother and his wife Zee Jesse can do no wrong. To others he is simply a robber and a murderer. In the dime novel gang member Cole Younger reads aloud, he is a folk hero, a Robin Hood. That book inspires Jesse’s famous moment of philanthropy: he gives $600 to a poor woman, only to steal it back from her bailiff. The ‘true story’ is a deliberately muddled one with Ray refusing to iron out any ambiguities.

The ‘key’ to Jesse James in this film is perhaps that he is ‘the Nicholas Ray hero’. A character that is pretty much the same (often thought to be based on Ray himself) whether he is Jim Stark (Rebel Without a Cause), Jesse James or Jesus Christ (King of Kings was famously nicknamed ‘I was a Teenage Jesus’). The cult of James Dean is perhaps really the cult of the Ray hero (it owes little to his great performance as the balding oil baron in Giant). Had Robert Wagner died in a car crash and James Dean gone on to make Hart to Hart many a teenage bedroom wall may have featured a different face. Jim Stark’s adolescent anguish is shared by the young Jesse even though, unlike the typical Ray hero, Jesse is surrounded by a loving family, his wife, his Ma and most importantly his brother Frank. The legendary outlaw is of course a doomed character – his death is a famous one waiting to happen. Pictures hang on the wall ominously. He destroys the possibility of an amnesty with a revenge killing and eventually even pushes his brother away. It is only when this death-wish subsides that he renounces his life of crime and hands his guns to Bob and Charlie Ford – the consequences of which are sung in the folk ballad at the end. Through these characters Ray explores the great American conflict between individualism and a conformist society. It is Jesse’s entrepreneurial spirit that makes him and destroys him.

The film bears all the hallmarks of a classic 50s Western – De-Luxe color, Cinemascope, day-for-night filters and Brylcreem quiffs. Although the studio interference caused the director to dismiss the film, it is a worthy addition to the Ray canon, reinforcing his reputation as a Hollywood auteur who turned any studio assignment into a thoughtful and personal work of art.

not coming to a theater near you review Thomas Scalzo

Studies in Cinema [Jeremy Carr] July 3, 2010

History on Film

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

BITTER VICTORY

USA France (102 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

Reel Movie Critic [Shelley Cameron]

The title tells all. Though Jürgens and Burton lead a successful World War II assault on Rommel's desert headquarters (for which Jürgens is undeservedly decorated), in the course of the raid both men are broken. Jürgens falls prey to indecision and cowardice brought on by his envy of the seeming ease with which Burton handles both the military situation and his personal affairs (including a past liaison with Jürgens' wife), while Burton's romantic veneer is shattered by the conflicting emotions he discovers within himself. The resulting personal anguish, summed up in Burton's blank delivery of the line 'I kill the living and save the dead', seeps into the very grain of Ray's magisterial black-and-white 'Scope set-ups.

One of the offerings in the series of war films now playing in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is a pristine print of "Bitter Victory." In this restored British version, longer by 20 minutes than the original trimmed American release in 1957, much of the drama takes place away from the battlefield and explores the vagaries of war and wartime on men's minds. Largely overlooked in the United States, one of the last great films of masterful director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place), this offbeat war film pits Richard Burton as Captain Leith against fellow officer Major Brand (Curt Jurgens) in the African dessert. On a perilous mission to obtain critical German army documents from an outpost in Libya, the two officers, in love with the same woman, couldn't be more unalike. Brand is a career military man who has managed to stay safely out of the action. Burton is an enlisted officer and civilian archeologist who stays safely away from emotional relationships. He left Jane Brand (Ruth Roman), now the Major’s wife, at the altar several years earlier.

When the two men are chosen to carry out the hazardous task, underlying emotional rivalries rise to fever pitch. Their fatal flaws, unleashed by the unnatural atmosphere of war, bring a bitter victory indeed to their success. When Brand is threatened by the bold recklessness and raw masculinity of Burton's Leith, the war between the two men is played out in the terrible and powerful expanse of the desert as they make their way across it with a small band of survivors.

The vast unbroken waves of sand and dazzling black and white cinematography are showcased on the widescreen and remind us of how a movie can look at its best. This film evokes the mood of Anthony Mann’s western "The Naked Spur," and repeats the theme of another film in the series, Robert Aldrich's "Attack." "Bitter Victory" fleshes out the straight story of how some men end up with a chest full of medals and others go home in a pine box, their real stories untold. A taut suspense scene of the assault on the Nazi outpost notwithstanding, this view of war, removed from the trenches, provides insight into how war movies shape and/or distort our willingness to support military actions and at what cost. The two men are in the same army but their interpersonal dynamics make them adversaries of a different sort. Tension builds with the help of a restrained musical score that is unleashed at precisely the right instant and drives home with intensity the consequences of cowardice, fear, fearlessness, and injustice.

Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson

It's unsurprising that a film as understated and linear as Bitter Victory (recently restored to its original cut of 102 minutes) has almost become eclipsed by the thunder of Jean-Luc Godard's infamously rapturous tribute in the pages of Cahiers (courtesy Tom Milne's translation in Godard on Godard): "There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Even in supplying the quotation, I've probably sabotaged any impending observations that follow, but Godard's superlatives were meant not to puff opium up Bitter Victory's ass or kick Renoir and Murnau to the curb, but rather strip away all that is futile and inadequate about film criticism in the face of "pure cinema." Which is also how Bitter Victory, the tale of a British Army platoon sent to intercept and confiscate Nazi paperwork in a Libyan desert, operates: it's a simmering brew of human folly and psychological disarray masked under a guise of pulp war novel love triangles and ethnographic diasporal (as when a desert scorpion ludicrously becomes as potent a threat to the safety of our military protagonists as retaliatory Nazi gunfire).

Wearing its blowhard maxims on the measures of men (in and out of uniform) on its proverbial sleeve and interrupting its own plotline mid-film in favor of a languorously extended, vaguely metaphysical capital-S Search (a few years before L'Avventura brilliantly used the narrativus interruptus structure as a testament to dispassionate times), Bitter Victory is, as Godard mentioned, far more than the sum of its images, though one can certainly understand the desire to gape. Ray's unique knack for inverting the extreme expanses of the CineScope frame in on themselves was still astonishing. Most directors would use the 2.35:1 aspect ratio with an emphasis on the former digit of the proportion and stressing everything on the horizontal axis (i.e. snakes and funerals). Ray, a canny Hollywood auteur-as-smuggler, also recognized the importance of the second digit and defined many of his rectangular shots by their consequent lack of a vertical axis. Ray's characters are almost always finding themselves hunched over, dwarfed by the girth of their surroundings, and otherwise fighting an unspoken psychological constriction that manifests itself in Ray's letter-pressed compositions.

If Ray's use of claustrophobic cinematography bespeaks of Bitter Victory's repressed emotions, then the release can be found in its subtle but insistent surrealism. There's a lengthy exposition sequence in which Ray establishes the yin-yanging tandem of the story's two army captains: Leith (Richard Burton, whose simpering kazoo vocals always seem to gloriously sabotage the screenplay's attempts to validate his own self-righteous heroism) and Brand (Curt Jürgens, a German actor seemingly cast as a British combatant to throw suspicion onto his allegiances—at one point Burton accuses him of trying to impress their Nazi prisoner). Stunt casting aside, the film's opening sequence also takes place on a night that, like something out of a Buñuel film, insists on restarting itself once again after even the umpteenth utterance of "Good night," as Leith, Brand, and Brand's wife (and Leith's ex-lover) Jane (Ruth Roman) jockey for position in their tango of deception while awaiting word on which of them will be given the assignment to retrieve the documents.

Both are assigned and, almost as though the mission represents their romantic competition, take opposing roles of authority almost immediately upon arriving at the Nazi site until the stress of their struggle expands to mythical proportions in the sandstorms of the Sahara (even as Ray's tight framing emphasizes the isolation of the desert as opposed to its Lawrence of Arabia expanses). And, ultimately, it's fascinating to see how Ray manages to direct a war film in which (with one exception during and after the raid of the Nazi headquarters) all warfare is staged not by actual gunfire and heavy artillery but through game-like suggestions of combat, be they the stuffed combat training dummies hanging from the base gym's ceiling, or the energetic hand puppetry of one soldier at a local canteen attempting to recreate one of his previous battles (a truly hypnotic throwaway bit that reaches its comical punchline, of sorts, when one "puppet" throws a grenade behind the bar and everyone's eyes follow its imaginary trajectory). With apologies to Godard's bit about "watching the stars," the oddly narrow-focus of Bitter Victory, playing against testosterone melodrama, is as perverse as it is pure. And the emphatic irony of its haunting final shot economically conveys the dissolution that comes from realizing that heroism is a concept that exists separate from human worth. And if Burton's character winds up as the film's overt "hero," it's because his character embraces this contradiction, musing at one point (after accidentally killing one of the wounded soldiers he was supposed to protect), "I kill the living and I save the dead."

Prisoners of War | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 18, 2004

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (part IV) page 1 - The Pink Smoke and Page 2

Bitter Victory - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

PopMatters (Michael Healey) dvd review

not coming to a theater near you review Andrew Schenker

Movements in Abstraction: "Hot Blood" and "Bitter Victory" on ... - Mubi Evan Davis also reviews HOT BLOOD

DVD Savant Review: Bitter Victory - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson

DVD Verdict (Jesse Ataide) dvd review

Bitter Victory (1958) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

Bitter Victory - The New Yorker

Variety (Jordan Mintzer) review

User reviews from imdb Author: Goodbye_Ruby_Tuesday from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: Van Roberts (zardoz@bellsouth.net) from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: carvalheiro from Portugal

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES

USA (93 mi) 1958

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

One of Ray's most beautifully bizarre projects (though he never fitted easily into the restrictions of genre), merging Western conventions with ecological and philosophical concerns as, in Florida at the end of the 1890s, teacher-turned-game warden Plummer takes on a gang of unruly, primitive poachers led by the awesomely charismatic Burl Ives, who are killing off the local rare birds for their fashionable, valuable plumage. With an often poetic script by Budd Schulberg and Joseph Brun's glistening location photography (in ravishing Technicolor), it effortlessly combines artifice with realism, and besides offering a strong argument in favour of conservation, also develops into an oblique meditation on the relativity of good and evil. Ives may spit in the face of God to win his hard-earned money through killing and commerce, but Ray makes no bones about his being closer to nature than Plummer.

A kind of litmus test for auteurists, this philosophical adventure story set in turn-of-the-century Florida (1958, 93 min.) was Nicholas Ray's penultimate Hollywood assignment, though he was fired before the end of shooting and barred from the final editing by screenwriter Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), who produced the film with his brother Stuart. (In his introduction to the published screenplay, Schulberg barely mentions Ray.) An ecological parable, it pits an earnest schoolteacher turned game warden (Christopher Plummer) against a savage poacher of wild birds (Burl Ives) heading a grungy gang in the swamps. Ray's masterful use of color and mystical sense of equality between the antagonists (also evident in Rebel Without a Cause and Bitter Victory) are made all the more piquant here by his feeling for folklore and outlaw ethics as well as his cadenced mise en scene. The result is somewhat choppy (one gets a sense of subplots being truncated), yet the film builds to a powerful encounter between Plummer and Ives, and Ray's personal touches are unmistakable. (There's even an upside-down point-of-view shot, similar to the ones in Rebel and Hot Blood.) The performances are quite striking, especially Chana Eden's as the female lead—not to mention cameos by Gypsy Rose Lee, author MacKinlay Kantor, and Peter Falk (in his film debut).

Tativille: Nicholas Ray's Least Seen Signature Features: Wind ... Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, July 31, 2010 (excerpt)

Is there another American director of a stature comparable to Nicholas Ray whose major films are as intermittently available in the United States? Given that Ray may have been the key figure of 1950s Hollywood, reinterpreting and renewing nearly every genre he touched while providing one of the boldest challenges to the decade's decisive consensus, the answer would seem almost certainly to be no. Not that the director's partial neglect is entirely inexplicable: the estimable Rebel Without a Cause (1955) aside, virtually none of Ray's films manifest those qualities that might make his work more AFI-ready. Rather, the virtues of Ray, and in particular those major works currently seen least in the US, center most on making resistance and the libidinal palpable, within a mise-en-scène that alternates between poetical landscape photography, attractive high-50's artifice and utter indifference. Ray does very little to make his films "good," while so often producing something great, whether across the totality of a work or more modestly in a single sequence.

Representing the latter case, Wind Across the Everglades (1958), scripted by On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) scribe Budd Schulberg, who apocryphal account has it took over direction for the heroin-abusing filmmaker, represents the absolute apex of Ray's drive toward contradiction. In visual terms, the director's elegant mobile framings of the South Florida landscape stand side-by-side with perfunctory multi-figure set-ups and degraded second-unit style inserts of the area wildlife. The last of these, especially in the frequent inclusions of alligators submerging and emerging from the Everglade swamps, assures the film's connection to the recent Hollywood cycle of the safari picture, popularized by King Solomon's Mine (Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, 1950), with its human subjects sutured into an often dangerous wilderness. While Wind Across the Everglades provides for a similar fauna-based spectacle, it remains less the source of adventure that it is in the purer safari iterations than a signifier of the Everglades status as wilderness. Indeed, the Everglades are here, in this turn-of-the-century set narrative, a Western-style frontier with the Law contending against the Lawless (plume-hunting poachers), who claim as their watchword, the very un-50s notion of "protest."

In Ray's hands, there is sympathy for both, with each located comfortably outside of a cultural hegemony that the opening, kitschy (at least from our present perspective) voice-over establishes - namely the craze for plumes in ladies' hats. Christopher Plummer's Audubon Society hero Walt Murdock fights against the consumerist-inspired environmental destruction wrought by this trend, with outlaw poacher Cottonmouth (Burl Ives) and his libertine cohorts the principle source of his quest. The latter faction, however, promotes the pleasures of the flesh that one senses quite clearly Ray himself endorses - busty women, swamp game cooked over an open flame, homemade liquor - while taking the freedom of the individual to his logical conclusion: "eat or be et." (Their ultimate spirit-addled confrontation with Murdock on Cottonmouth Key represents the aforementioned great moment.) They are, in other words, the perfect 1950s dissidents, while Walt is a strident opponent to the unassailable value of commerce, which is to say he is the perfect 1950s dissident. Whatever the role that Schulberg played in Wind Across the Everglades, the film manages to fully embody Ray's cinema.

The Pink Smoke [Christopher Funderburg] also seen here: page 4

Wind Across the Everglades Clydefro Film Journal, August 2, 2009

Transformations in the Swamp: "Wind Across the Everglades" - Mubi Evan Davis

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) capsule review

PARTY GIRL

USA (99 mi) 1958 ‘Scope

Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review

Or the optimistic version of Johnny Guitar, set in Prohibition Chicago. Robert Taylor has the limp, Cyd Charisse is the dancer, and both are prostitutes of a kind (he a gangster's lawyer, she a party girl) who use each other as emotional crutches before achieving mutual independence and trust. Although the script is poor, Ray's handling of colour and scope is as masterful as ever. Too often consigned to the 'fabulous but flawed' bin, Party Girl is far better than that. As in all Ray's films, ideas and emotions are transformed into stunning visuals, as when Lee J Cobb's gangster shoots up a portrait of Jean Harlow after he discovers that she's recently got married.

Tativille: Nicholas Ray's Least Seen Signature Features: Wind ... Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, July 31, 2010 (excerpt)

Party Girl (1958) is a Nick Ray film of quite a different sort. While Wind Across the Everglades invents a new form in the matrixed combination of safari picture, Western and topical film, Party Girl reinvents the dormant form of the 1930s gangster picture within the director's melodramatic mode (displayed in Rebel Without a Cause and his supreme masterpiece, Bigger Than Life, 1956, among others). In looking to this earlier source, prohibited by the same Production Code to which Ray's films uniformly applied stress, aiding in its ultimate collapse a decade later, Ray also finds a politics to challenge 1950s consensus thinking: an advocacy for the little guy that promoted physically impaired attorney Tommy Farrell's (Robert Taylor) original association with gangster Rico (Lee J. Cobb). In the narrative's present, Tommy has become an advocate for the guilty, adroitly manipulating juries to acquit the clearly criminal. His comfort with this arrangement, however, decreases after he meets the eponymous 'lady of leisure' and dance hall girl Vicki Gaye (Cyd Charisse), with whom he eventually becomes conjugally involved, in spite of the fact that he is still supporting a wife at the time of the original meeting. In short, Party Girl revives pre-code subject matter as much as it does the gangster genre itself.

Moreover, Party Girl pushes the limits of what is permissible on screen: Charisse, who is subsequently glimpsed nude briefly behind a semi-opaque screen, engages in a striptease - the same year as Julie London's infamous Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958) strip - amid a series of on-camera dance set-pieces that collectively mark the film as a work of mixed cinema. Ray notably shoots these sequences in Cinemascope, from a variety of angles that include overheads with Charisse staring directly into the camera, thereby highlight the picture's decisive artifice. Then again, Party Girl contains none of the cheapness apparent elsewhere in the director's work (as for instance in The Savage Innocents, discussed below): Party Girl's set designs are often intricately constructed and its color palette immaculately chosen, as for instance in Ray's inspired layering of Charisse's red dress on a differently toned red couch. Throughout, Ray and director of photography Robert Bronner's cinematography is characteristically sinuous, fluidly registering the film's memorable interiors much the same as Howard Hawks's and Lee Garmes's mobile camera work achieved a similar effect in the definitive Scarface (1932). And as the film's earlier source, Ray's remaking of the gangster genre even includes a machine-gun montage.

Breathing Together: The Author in Search of Investors • Senses of ... James Leahy from Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003

Party Girl Clydefro Film Journal, August 9, 2009, also seen here: DVD Times review [clydefro jones]

Time Magazine Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 10, 1958, from Time magazine, November 10, 1958

Party Girl - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold

not coming to a theater near you (Evan Kindley) review

TCM Tomorrow: Nicholas Ray's PARTY GIRL (1958) - Bright Lights ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 11, 2010

The Lumière Reader Tim Wong

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Party Girl (1958 film) - Wikipedia

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review October 29, 1958, also seen here: Screen: Old-Hat Gunplay; ' Party Girl' Stars Cyd Charisse and Taylor

THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS

France Italy Great Britain (110 mi) 1960 ‘Scope

The New York Times (Eugene Archer) review

Victimized by a rather insensitive reception at the time of its release (1959), Nicholas Ray's epic film about Eskimo life and its remoteness from “civilized” values represents his first—and, in many ways, most ambitious—attempt to break free from the Hollywood studios and forge an independent route. Scripted by Ray himself, and shot on location and in studios in several different countries, the film contains one of the few bearable performances of Anthony Quinn; the Japanese actress Yoko Tani plays his wife, and a dubbed Peter O'Toole plays a government official. Couched in the form of a parable, this is one of Ray's most powerful films about honor and alien folkways, and the icy landscapes are hauntingly beautiful. 109 min.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Though scuppered by problems worse than those usually associated with international coproductions, this is nonetheless rather more than just another engaging oddity from Ray. Further evidence of his ethnological interest in 'outsider' societies, it charts the hardships suffered by Quinn the Eskimo as he struggles to survive not only against the harsh conditions of life in the Artic, but - more lethally - against the invasion of Western 'civilisation', embodied by Christianity, capitalism and rock'n'roll. Much of the story is episodic and semi-documentary in tone, illustraing Eskimo hunting habits, marital rituals, and so forth, while the misguidedly 'poetic' dialogue is stilted and unconvincing. But, as ever, Ray's deployment of the 'Scope frame throws up images of an often startling, even surreal beauty: polar bears diving from the ice-flows become a rhapsody in blinding whites and br illiant blues, and the sound of a juke box screaming out over the empty, snowy wastes is a withering, wicked symbol of man's destructive influence on nature.

Tativille: Nicholas Ray's Least Seen Signature Features: Wind ... Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, July 31, 2010 (excerpt)

The director's European-financed The Savage Innocents (1960) synthesizes Wind Across the Everglades's predilection for poetical, aquatic-dominated landscapes, here often approaching a surreal beauty, with Party Girl's highly constructed spaces, here conveyed through the film's igloo interior and matte-painted Arctic snow-scape sets. (This striking convergence of the real-world and studio aesthetics corrobrates Jean-Luc Godard's suggestion that the whole of the cinema could be exumed from Ray, along of course with its combination of sex and violence.) Ray pairs these spaces with a Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)-brand electronic score that combines to make The Savage Innocents an apogee of both the director's distinguishing artifice and his taste for the palpably odd. Then again, the film's subject insures the film's strangeness far more than its expressly unreal sets: an Eskimo Anthony Quinn finds a salve to loneliness in "laughing" with a comely native girl, whom he then exchanges for her more attractive sister, Asiak (Yoko Tani), after becoming jealous of the latter's "husband," and his principal rival. With Asiak in tow, Quinn's Inuk encounters white traders and discovers that his in-born ability to hunt fox could mean the chance to buy a fire arm or "thunder stick" (the director's ecological concern returns in the film's suggestion of the practice of over-hunting). Here, Ray combines the primitive and modern in this place to startling effect, with its juke box, Elvis-look-a-like native and the aforesaid pelts all introduced in a single setting, wherein Asiak, moreover, performs one of the silver screen's most memorably bizarre dances. Nevertheless, the young Eskimo woman remains skeptical of the white man, who "doesn't approve of naked people," and who in one later instance refuses Inuk's generous invitation to 'laugh' with his wife.

In this latter regard, The Savage Innocents appears to prefigure the sexual emancipation that would emerge subsequently in the nascent 1960s, and allies with that period's broader challenge to bourgeois Judeo-Christian values. In The Savage Innocents, itself an extreme form of the Western according to film scholar Lisa K. Broad, sympathy is purely on the side of the uncivilized, on the side of those who pursue the pleasures of the flesh without succumbing to the temptations of greed. For them, a woman is new every time she reenters the igloo, whether or not she has 'laughed' with another. As always, Ray's film is about sex. However, the imperatives of civilization, whose laws are stronger than any individual, and therefore flawed according to Ray's way of thinking, will demand that Inuk experience punishment for acting according to his own, anti-Western ethical, free-love code.

The Savage Innocents is the ultimate Nicholas Ray film. Perhaps it is only fitting that it should initiate a decade (from outside the US) that would move toward Ray's own worldview, rather than occurring in a second that found him at odds with the America around him, which he may have defined, but in negative.

The Savage Innocents | Film at The Digital Fix Mike Sutton

DVD Outsider Slarek

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Variety review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

KING OF KINGS

USA (168 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Despite being churlishly described at the time as 'I Was a Teenage Jesus' (in reference to the youth rebellion of Rebel Without a Cause), this is one of the most interesting screen versions of the Gospels. As so often in the work of script-writer Philip Yordan, the central conflict is seen in terms of political struggle and betrayal; detailing the Jews' rebellion against the oppressive power of Rome, it elevates Barabbas in particular to the status of an almost proto-Zionist nationalist leader, and the dynamics of the narrative are presented as the consequence of wide-ranging historical movements rather than the whims of charismatic individuals. As a result, some of the performances appear to lack depth, but one can't deny the effectiveness of Miklós Rózsa's fine score, and of Ray's simple but elegant visuals which achieve a stirring dramatic power untainted by pompous bombast. Despite producer Samuel Bronston's meddlesome editing, in fact, it's an intelligent, imaginative movie devoid of conventional Hollywood pieties.

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

Back in the early Sixties, playwright and prolific screenwriter Philip Yordan had been experiencing contractual challenges at Columbia, and accepted an offer from colleague Nicholas Ray to work on the script for what ultimately became "King Of Kings;" Samuel Bronston's attempt to cash in on the Epic Biblical craze after "Spartacus," while distributor MGM must have felt the project would make an interesting adjunct to their own mega-success "Ben-Hur" - a hope certainly evident in the "Kings" graphic poster design.

Yordan ignored the original script draft (then titled "Son of Man"), which consisted of excerpts from the Bible, and allegedly using a team of writers, helped fashion a script for "Kings" within six weeks, making more sense from the original draft's structure, and arguably adding a sexual subtext that elevated Christ's disciples to enraptured, spiritually engorged, doe-eyed fanboys.

With the massive "El Cid" also on the go, Bronston was still able to pull off the kind of grand spectacle which audiences had come to expect at the time. Like "Solomon and Sheba" and "Spartacus," "King of Kings" was photographed in Super Technirama 70, Technicolor's own widescreen system that employed a spherical lens to unsqueeze the image to a scope ratio, and Warner Bros.' new DVD transfer is just plain gorgeous. The film's key cinematographers exploited Spanish locations, particularly vast hills, mountainous terrain, and beautiful set decor.

Though lacking the massive sets of "Ben-Hur" and "Fall of the Roman Empire," "Kings" is successful in expressing a kind of intimate grandeur; a suitable approach for what's arguably the story of a hippie who bucks the establishment and is killed to prevent any further rumblings against a military occupation. Nicholas Ray, then in need of a good job, took a stab at Christ's life, and frequently experimented with an early diopter lens that permits two sharp focal points - an extreme facial close-up, and far distant position to remain in focus simultaneously. Frank Thring as the murderous Herod Antipas has several high-kitsch scenes that benefit immensely from Ray's oddball camera positions (including a wild overhead angle), and Christ's crucifixion is heightened by a POV shot that must have been quite trippy on the big screen.

Bronston furthered composer Miklos Rozsa's Biblical career phase - spanning "Quo Vadis" and "Ben-Hur" - by requesting another grand choral score, and while less thematically diverse than "Ben-Hur," Rozsa's stirring themes boom though the surround speakers. "King of Kings" also has a weird sound mix - whether affected by budget constraints, mediocre location sound, or an attempt to stylize the film's intimate storyline, the actors' dubbing comes from dampened sound booths, giving the dialogue channel a rather unreal quality. Sound effects are rather limited, though the final storm after Christ's crucifixion rumbles through most of the discreet channels.

The DVD's extras include "The Camera's Window Of The World" - a grainy black & white promo shot during a day's shooting for Christ's sermon on the mount (a complex sequence involving giant Technirama cameras maintaining artful compositions and vistas, while Christ wanders through 7,000 extras to answer queries and criticisms) - and two promos covering the dual premieres in New York and Los Angeles. The first one follows key above-the-line participants as they arrive all pretty (including Carroll Baker and a youthful Nicholas Ray), while the second lacks original sound, and has a score cut playing, as the film's stars (including Jeffrey Hunter) arrive, along with several celebrities (Yvette Mimieux, Jayne Mansfield, David Janssen, and uber-buxom Sabrina, from the sleaze classic "Satan In High Heels").

A clean anamorphic trailer combines still paintings with scenes from the mountain sermon, with the usual screen text superlatives.

Parallax View [Pierre Greenfield] Parallax View, June 24, 2010, originally published in Movietone News, February 1979

King of Kings (1961) - TCM.com Jay S. Steinberg

King of Kings (1961) - Ferdy on Films Marilyn Ferdinand

Time Magazine Cinema: $ign of the Cross, October 27, 1961

Teleport City Cinematics (Keith Allison) review

not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review

Poffy The Cucumber's Movie Mania Jesus: The Man, The Myth, The Model, by Jon Dunmore, June 24, 2006

The Film Atheist

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

DVD Net (Jules Faber) dvd review [Region 4]

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [54/100]

MonsterHunter

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing IN A LONELY PLACE

King of Kings (1961) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Lang Thompson on the film’s musical soundtrack

DVDBeaver dvd review Mark Balsan

55 DAYS AT PEKING

USA (154 mi) 1963 ‘Scope

Nicholas Ray's last commercial film and second blockbuster for Samuel Bronston (after King of Kings) effectively ended his career as a Hollywood director, and the unwieldiness of this spectacular about the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 Peking helps in part to explain why. Not really a personal film, compared with the works that preceded it, although Ray himself puts in a fleeting appearance as an ambassador in a wheelchair. Scripted by Philip Yordan and Bernard Gordon, scored (bombastically) by Dmitri Tiomkin, and starring Charlton Heston, David Niven, Ava Gardner, and Flora Robson.

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review

From its marvellous opening - in the Legation compound at Peking, the troops of eight foreign powers raise their national flags to the accompaniment of a cacophony of national anthems - to the final relief of the diplomats to whom the Boxers have laid siege in the compound, Ray almost transcends the spectacular world of international co-production film deals. He carefully orchestrates the big action sequences (the sine qua non of the Epic) so that they form a mere background to the unfolding drama of the awkward love affair between Heston and Gardner. The result, Ray's farewell to Hollywood, is admittedly a broken-backed movie - producer Samuel Bronston re-cut it - but one full of delicious moments as Ray's camera cranes and swoops around his protagonists, almost taking us back to the nervous grandeur of Johnny Guitar on occasion. A magnificent failure.

55 Days at Peking - TCM.com David Sterritt

Hollywood filmmaking took a turn in 1953, when Twentieth Century-Fox released The Robe, its first CinemaScope picture. Historical epics had been popular since silent-movie days, but the enormous size and scale offered by innovative wide-screen technology seemed made to order for an industry now in hot competition with television. Before long everyone from Douglas Sirk (Sign of the Pagan, 1954) to Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus, 1960) was working on an eye-filling spectacle with a historical theme, and producer Samuel Bronston made them his personal mission, building a studio complex in Spain that was sprawling enough to accommodate the gazillions of stars, extras, and technicians the genre required. Bronston produced five historical epics during the early 1960s, starting with King of Kings and El Cid in 1961 and ending with The Fall of the Roman Empire and Circus World three years later. None brought more problems to its makers than the 1963 production 55 Days at Peking, directed by Nicholas Ray in Super-Technirama 70 with Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven in the leads.

The story takes place during the Boxer Rebellion, which shook China at the turn of the twentieth century. Angry about foreign powers, imperialist land grabs, and Christian evangelists posing threats to traditional Chinese culture, the ultraconservative Boxers persuaded the ruling Qing Dynasty to drive out the countries responsible for these influences. In the year 1900 a multitude of Boxers swarmed into Peking, as Beijing was then known by Westerners, and drove the foreigners and Chinese Christians living there into a single small area, aided by an influx of government troops. The besieged diplomats, soldiers, and citizens held off their attackers for fifty-five days, until fighters sent by an alliance of eight nations came to the rescue – arriving in the nick of time like cavalries in an old-fashioned western, according to the movie's version of these harrowing events.

55 Days at Peking focuses on three main characters. Heston plays Matt Lewis, the tough-as-nails American major who takes command of a 500-man defense unit inside the diplomatic compound. Niven plays Sir Arthur Robertson, the good-natured British ambassador who votes to stay in Peking when all the other diplomats are eager to pack their things and go. Gardner plays Natalie Ivanoff, a fading Russian baroness with a checkered past – her infidelity drove her husband to kill himself – and a newfound capacity for sacrifice. The most compelling secondary characters are Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi (Flora Robson), the reigning monarch whose support is crucial to the Boxers' campaign, and Prince Tuan (Robert Helpmann), a schemer who's more interested in power than in the dynasty's long-term wellbeing. Also on hand are Sgt. Harry (John Ireland), who serves Lewis as a sort of conscience, Dr. Steinfeldt (Paul Lukas), a seasoned physician trying to keep the wounded Westerners alive, and Teresa (Lynne Sue Moon), a Chinese-American child orphaned by the conflict.

The screenplay for 55 Days at Peking came from Bernard Gordon, whose credits included such unhistorical fare as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and The Day of the Triffids (1962), and the remarkable Philip Yordan, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who had penned such minor classics as The Man from Laramie (1955) and The Harder They Fall (1956), and had been the front for blacklisted writer Ben Maddow on Ray's legendary western Johnny Guitar in 1954. Yordan's enthusiasm for the project was less than wholehearted, however. "What interested me in 55 Days at Peking was [the salary of] 400,000 dollars," he remarked, according to Bernard Eisenschitz's biography of Ray. "The Boxer Rebellion, big sets, suspenseful, colorful...it was a commercial manufacture job." Gordon also had serious doubts, especially when he found Ray to be "totally lost and frightened to death about the problems of making a large spectacle film." Ray was a gifted director, with such superb achievements as Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Bigger Than Life (1956) to his credit, as well as Bronston's recent epic King of Kings. But here he found himself without a proper script – the stars often received their dialogue shortly before the camera rolled, or simply made their lines up – and his shaky health was deteriorating because of stress, alcohol, and medications. The outlook was as grim for the project as for the besieged characters in their compound.

The wheels of the production were spinning, though, and there was no way to stop them. A sizable chunk of historic Peking was built near Madrid, much of it in concrete, more to impress visiting VIPs than to enhance the set's effectiveness on screen; according to Heston, the crew "never turned a camera on two-thirds of this incredible city." Since the picture was presold to distributors around the world, Bronston's agents tried to hire a roster of international stars for secondary roles – Michel Simon and Tom Courtenay were among those announced to the press – but Eisenschitz reports that none of them materialized, leaving Ray to do the best he could with third or fourth choices. Gardner and Heston showed up as promised but took an instant dislike to each other, and Gardner spent so much time drinking in her dressing room that Yordan claims a stand-in was used for many over-the-shoulder shots. Ray eventually collapsed under the strain, so Heston's friend Guy Green came in to direct the remaining scenes while second-unit coordinator Andrew Marton proceeded with the battle sequences. Filming was completed in a rush, with two units shooting night and day, since Heston and Niven were well past the leave dates in their contracts. Charles Higham summed up the results in his biography of Gardner, saying the picture "helped to destroy Bronston's career, severely damaged Ava's, and virtually finished Nicholas Ray's."

Despite this avalanche of troubles, 55 Days at Peking drew respectful comments from a number of influential critics. Judith Crist wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that while many scenes are "pretty trite stuff – very pretty and very trite...there's a lusty vigor and infectious excitement" in the battle scenes. New York Times critic A.H. Weiler called the film "rousing, sometimes exciting, action fare that should keep the customers alert and entertained even if their intellects are confused" by the "foggy" handling of the characters and their motivations. Variety admired the picture's "uncommon visual excitement" and Jack Hildyard's "excellent" photography, commended Heston and Niven for acting "with conviction," and applauded Robson for making the Dowager Empress "strikingly authentic." Time noted the film's lavish production values – the $9 million budget, the 6,500 extras, the high cost of replicating Peking and then blowing it all up – and praised the pictorially "magnificent" end product.

Auteur critics have generally failed to detect any of Ray's creative personality in the film, but Geoff Andrew of TimeOut points to "many details which echo moments in his earlier work" and calls the movie "an unusually ambitious and intelligent example of the epic genre." It's hard to deny that 55 Days in Peking is short on psychological depth and historical accuracy, and the dialogue contains the kind of insensitive racial comments that have become mercifully rare today. Still, the visuals are as arresting as ever – it's no wonder that reviewer after reviewer has praised the spectacular fireworks, especially at the climax – and the movie vividly represents a bygone age of international spectaculars that made up in extravagance what they sometimes lacked in coherence and common sense.

George Chabot's Review of 55 Days at Peking

Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2/4]

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

USA (90 mi) 1976

A Brief Introduction to Satyajit Ray :: SatyajitRay.org

Nicholas Ray ended his Hollywood career with his most expensive production, 55 Days in Peking (1963), and followed it ten years later with his least expensive, an experimental and politically radical independent feature made with his film students. Each movie is a shambles, though if I had to choose between them I'd probably opt for this one, which is certainly the more original. Ray and his students play themselves in docudrama situations that culminate in Ray's (fictional) suicide, and often he combines several images into crowded frescoes. The film reeks of countercultural alienation and anguish, and when it premiered at Cannes in 1973, Ray spoke of trying to make “what in our minds is a Guernica” out of such materials as “a broken-down Bolex” and “a Mitchell that costs $25 out of navy surplus.” He tinkered with the film for years, and the 1976 date commonly assigned to it refers to a second unfinished version, which, lamentably, is unavailable. It's upsetting in many ways, but as a document of its time there's nothing remotely like it. 90 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: Howard_B_Eale from Braintree, MA

Nicholas Ray cut two different versions of this film over the course of almost a decade, and unfortunately only the earlier cut, considered the inferior one, survives. Nonetheless, this is a mind-boggling film made with his students at SUNY Binghamton, a film which challenges most cinematic conventions of narrative (and technique) without coming off as merely "an experiment". The final "shooting" of the film alone is worthy of an essay: instead of optically printing and collaging the material, which was shot on various formats (35mm, 16mm, video), Ray and his dedicated crew actually rented a soundstage, set up a series of different projectors, and literally _performed_ the film live on a screen surrounded by an intermittently changing photographic "frame". The result completely prefigures the emergence of "film performance" artists in the decades to follow and surely makes WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN the only feature film by a major director to be constructed in such a fashion.

Furthermore, as a time capsule of late-1960s/early-1970s politics, sexual dynamics and freedom from convention, it's essential. Partially improvised and partially scripted, it can come off as a glorious mess at times, shot through with madness, but the overall effect is devastating. A very real-life electricity informs nearly every sequence; it's almost painful at times. WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN would be the final statement of a brilliant, neglected director, but more importantly, it's one of the most audacious features to be made by a director of films such as REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. A masterpiece.

not coming to a theater near you review Cullen Gallagher

Ray, Satyajit

Ray, Satyajit Art and Culture

The story of Satyajit Ray is intertwined with the story of a nation and begins with his birth into a political reformist family in Calcutta in 1921. His father was a satirist, his grandfather a writer and publisher; however, Ray’s career began in advertising. Ray's growing reputation as an illustrator during the ‘50s coincided with India's push to define itself as a nation after declaring independence from British colonial rule in 1950. During this time, Ray watched both American and European films and co-founded the Calcutta Film Society. After viewing De Sica's now-legendary "The Bicycle Thief," the young ad man regrouped and decided to embark on a film career that would eventually make his name synonymous with Indian regionalist cinema.

Ray’s admiration for De Sica showed itself in his embrace of Neo-Realism as a mode of representation. Like the Italian Neo-Realists, he eschewed the artificiality of the studio in favor of location shooting and the use of available light. This slice-of-life aesthetic was grafted onto his first film, "Pather Panchali" (1955), and was used to create a post-Independence rewriting of Indian history. With the approval of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of future political leader Indira Gandhi, Ray followed his first feature with two sequels that rounded out what came to be called the "Apu Trilogy."

Ray went on to engage India’s past, particularly the Bengal history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- the height of colonial rule -- in many of his best-known 1960s films. These include films such as "Devi" (1960), "Teen Kanya" (1961), and "Charulata" (1964), which Ray and many others considered his finest. The 1970s brought a new brand of civil strife to India, one that was marked by unprecedented corruption and pervasive unemployment. During this period, Ray produced his "Calcutta Trilogy" -- "Pratidwandi" in 1970, "Seemabaddha" in 1971, and "Jana Aranya" in 1975 -- which criticized the ruling elite while lamenting the dissipation of traditional values. A few years earlier, Ray had made a commercially viable children's film, "Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne," based on the fictional characters, Goopy and Bagha, that had been created by his grandfather. Sequels to this film would later serve as a critique of Indira Gandhi’s political policy and would mark Ray’s eventual retreat into other non-political children’s narratives. Other than a few television series and the publication of a book of short fiction, Ray remained in self-imposed retirement until his death in 1992.

Satyajit Ray - Director - Films as Director and Scriptwriter:, Publications Satti Khanna from Film Reference, also seen here: Film Reference

From the beginning of his career as a filmmaker, Satyajit Ray was interested in finding ways to reveal the mind and thoughts of his characters. Because the range of his sympathy was wide, he has been accused of softening the presence of evil in his cinematic world. But a director who aims to represent the currents and cross-currents of feeling within people is likely to disclose to viewers the humanness even in reprehensible figures. In any case, from the first films of his early period, Ray devised strategies for rendering inner lives; he simplified the surface action of the film so that the viewer's attention travels to (1) the reaction of people to one another, or to their environments, (2) the mood expressed by natural scenery or objects, and (3) music as a clue to the state of mind of a character. In the Apu Trilogy the camera often stays with one of two characters after the other character exits the frame to see their silent response. Or else, after some significant event in the narrative, Ray presents correlatives of that event in the natural world. When the impoverished wife in Pather Panchali receives a postcard bearing happy news from her husband, the scene dissolves to water skates dancing on a pond. As for music, in his films Ray commissioned compositions from India's best classical musicians—Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar Khan—but after Teen Kanya composed his own music and progressed towards quieter indication through music of the emotional experience of his characters.

Ray's work can be divided into three periods on the basis of his cinematic practice: the early period, 1955–66, from Pather Panchali through Nayak ; the middle period, 1969–1977, from Googy Gyne Bagha Byne through Shatranj Ke Khilari ; and the final period, from Joy Baba Felunath and through his final film Agantuk , in 1991. The early period is characterized by thoroughgoing realism: the mise-enscène are rendered in deep focus; long takes and slow camera movements prevail. The editing is subtle, following shifts of narrative interest and cutting on action in the Hollywood style. Ray's emphasis in the early period on capturing reality is obvious in Kanchanjangha , in which 100 minutes in the lives of characters are rendered in 100 minutes of film time. The Apu Trilogy, Parash Pather, Jalsaghar , and Devi all exemplify what Ray had learned from Hollywood's studio era, from Renoir's mise-en-scène, and from the use of classical music in Indian cinema. Charulata affords the archetypal example of Ray's early style, with the decor, the music, the long takes, the activation of various planes of depth within a composition, and the reaction shots all contributing significantly to a representation of the lonely wife's inner conflicts. The power of Ray's early films comes from his ability to suggest deep feeling by arranging the surface elements of his films unemphatically.

Ray's middle period is characterized by increasing complexity of style; to his skills at understatement Ray adds a sharp use of montage. The difference in effect between an early film and a middle film becomes apparent if one compares the early Mahanagar with the middle Jana Aranya , both films pertaining to life in Calcutta. In Mahanagar , the protagonist chooses to resign her job in order to protest the unjust dismissal of a colleague. The film affirms the rightness of her decision. In the closing sequence, the protagonist looks up at the tall towers of Calcutta and says to her husband so that we believe her, "What a big city! Full of jobs! There must be something somewhere for one of us!" Ten years later, in Jana Aranya , it is clear that there are no jobs and that there is precious little room to worry about niceties of justice and injustice. The darkness running under the pleasant facade of many of the middle films seems to derive from the turn in Indian politics after the death of Nehru. Within Bengal, many ardent young people joined a Maoist movement to destroy existing institutions, and more were themselves destroyed by a ruthless police force. Across India, politicians abandoned Nehru's commitment to a socialist democracy in favor of a scramble for personal power. In Seemabaddha or Aranyer Din Ratri Ray's editing is sharp but not startling. In Shatranj Ke Khilari , on the other hand, Ray's irony is barely restrained: he cuts from the blue haze of a Nawab's music room to a gambling scene in the city. In harsh daylight, commoners lay bets on fighting rams, as intent on their gambling as the Nawab was on his music.

Audiences in India who responded warmly to Ray's early films have sometimes been troubled by the complexity of his middle films. A film like Shatranj Ke Khilari was expected by many viewers to reconstruct the splendors of Moghul India as the early Jalsaghar had reconstructed the sensitivity of Bengali feudal landlords and Charulata the decency of upper class Victorian Bengal. What the audience found instead was a stern examination of the sources of Indian decadence. According to Ray, the British seemed less to blame for their role than the Indians who demeaned themselves by colluding with the British or by ignoring the public good and plunging into private pleasures. Ray's point of view in Shatranj was not popular with distributors and so his first Hindi film was denied fair exhibition in many cities in India.

Ray's concluding style, most evident in the short features Pikoo and Sadgati , pays less attention than earlier to building a stable geography and a firm time scheme. The exposition of characters and situations is swift: the effect is of great concision. In Pikoo , a young boy is sent outside to sketch flowers so that his mother and her lover can pursue their affair indoors. The lover has brought along a drawing pad and colored pens to divert the boy. The boy has twelve colored pens in his packet with which he must represent on paper the wealth of colors in nature. In a key scene (lasting ten seconds) the boy looks at a flower, then down at his packet for a matching color. Through that action of the boy's looking to match the world with his means, Ray suggests the striving in his own work to render the depth and range of human experience.

In focussing on inner lives and on human relations as the ground of social and political systems, Ray continued the humanist tradition of Rabindranath Tagore. Ray studied at Santiniketan, the university founded by Tagore, and was close to the poet during his last years. Ray once acknowledged his debt in a lyrical documentary about Tagore, and through the Tagore stories on which he based his films Teen Kanya, Charulata , and Ghare Bahire. As the poet Tagore was his example, Ray has become an example to important younger filmmakers (such as Shyam Benegal, M. S. Sathyu, G. Aravindan), who have learned from him how to reveal in small domestic situations the working of larger political and cultural forces.

Master of the House: Satyajit Ray - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold from Film Comment, March/April 2009

Before he hit the ground running in 1955 with Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray made his living designing tea-biscuit wrappers and bookjackets. When he turned to filmmaking, he also fashioned his own posters, but his general knack for prefatory visuals shined in his eloquent credit sequences. The best—a prologue in miniature—precedes The Music Room (58), a study in noble folly about a fading zamindar in Thirties Bengal. A slow zoom takes in a lustrous chandelier suspended in a void, accompanied on the soundtrack by a virtuosic instrumental drone. Eye and ear are mesmerized, yet the lush baroque texture evokes decay—the perfect overture to the film’s spectacle of an aristocrat bankrupting himself through his overindulgence in private chamber concerts.

The Music Room came as a necessary deep breath after the success of Pather Panchali (aka Song of the Little Road). Ray had first encountered Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s Apu novels when he was assigned them to design in the Forties, and the result was an almost cosmically timely debut. Echoing the éclat of Rashomon a few years earlier, Pather Panchali represented the triumphant discovery of another cinema and with its rural village setting, another world. Critics agreed: here was India’s Renoir and Bengal’s neorealist counterpart. In retrospect, as a cinephile and a well-developed independent talent with no professional apprenticeship, he even seemed to anticipate the French New Wave. Tags were affixed—“humanist” above all, “lyrical,” “Chekhovian”—and another giant was bagged for the canon. (“The kind of statement you come across is: Satyajit Ray is Chekhovian. Nothing more than that, there’s no actual elaborating on that statement,” Ray sighed in a 1972 interview.)

Per one Indian critic, writing shortly after Ray’s death in 1992, the wide-eyed praise evinced a bit of “orientalist phantasy,” especially given Pather Panchali’s unreconstructed village setting. It could be forgotten that Apu and his sister were played by Calcutta students, that the brokebacked toothless Auntie was a veteran stage actress, or that the film’s sense of authenticity derived from Banerjee’s firsthand experiences, not Ray’s. If any standard rap—or wrapper—on Ray has obscured the work itself, it might be the claim of universalism, as if Apu were simply Antoine Doinel avant la lettre. Yet, for one thing, as others have also observed, the domestic dramas that dominate his oeuvre are rooted in the specific struggles of the middle class at various stages in post-Independence India’s development. And, moreover, countless cultural details, especially in Ray’s often exacting production design and profuse textual quotation, are lost on most Western viewers. (A panchali, for example, is a genre of popular scripture, read musically by rural women not unlike Apu’s mother; as for the credits of Pather, they imitate ancient calligraphic script, handwritten by Ray on coarse paper.)

But beyond that, a pattern emerges that’s as stark as the qualities that have led to the now clichéd label of humanism: in film after film he presents a series of contemplative intellectuals and aesthetes who stubbornly follow a different path, or simply waver. Their behavior often clashes with practical realities, and Ray is invested in observing the tensions caused by their ideals as well as the pleasures they afford. The tendency starts with Apu’s father, a poor brahmin who’s cheerfully insouciant about pressing a local landowner for his wages, even as his wife frets about money and maintaining a modicum of self-respect. “Who cares? I’m a poet and a playwright,” he says with a smile. He schools young Apu in reading and writing, and the guava does not fall far from the tree: in Aparajito (56), the boy’s smarts land him a scholarship in Calcutta after his father dies, and at the start of The World of Apu (59), our hero—well-educated, unemployed, and writing a novel—is sidetracking his landlord with bon mots. Later, like a character written into a new plot, the rootless Apu unexpectedly marries a friend’s cousin (Sharmila Tagore) when her intended groom proves to be insane. When she dies in childbirth, Apu exiles himself and leaves the child to relatives. Only later, after an almost mystical scene in which he scatters the pages of his autobiographical novel into a ravine, does he work his way around to accepting fatherhood and life in general.

The little detail of Apu’s learning to read from his father must have held special charm for Ray, himself the descendant of a line of versatile artists. His father was a beloved writer of nonsense rhymes, an illustrator, and innovative printer; he died when Ray was two. Equally gifted, his grandfather wrote music, and launched a printing press and a children’s magazine, Sandesh, which Ray would revive in 1961. In that same year, the filmmaker started composing his own scores. The overwhelming majority of his scripts were literary adaptations, many of them from works by Rabindranath Tagore. The multitalented Ray family, like the influential Tagore clan, was in the spirit of the 19th-century Bengali renaissance, a period of East-West cultural ferment spurred by the emergence of a burgeoning educated class.

One of Ray’s best films, Charulata (64), is set during this era, circa 1880, in a well-appointed house (featuring a printing press under the same roof, as in Ray’s childhood home). In an atmosphere of oppressive languor, young literary-minded Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) idles away without children, her affectionate husband nonetheless occupied with publishing a political newspaper downstairs. (Credit sequence: Charu embroidering in close-up, stitch by painstaking stitch.) The husband invites his poet younger cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee, who played the adult Apu) to stay, and Ray sets into motion a volatile pair-up: the mutual attraction of two like-minded restless spirits, one bound by marriage and gender, the other sympathetic but feeling the guilt of a devoted relative.

Ray’s feel for domestic spaces creates a housebound lyricism. Charu languishes in the grand bedroom, down a portico, and in the garden out back, agonizing over the to-and-froing Amal, who playfully recites poetry. A game of cards with another in-law, lazing on a great Victorian four-poster, trails away in torpor. All Ray’s films bear the sensitive ear of a composer; his indoor scenes are usually filled out by the living color of someone chanting outside or the sound of traffic. Here, Charu keenly attends to the sound of drumming in the street, then picks out its source with her opera glasses. On the structural level, Ray’s comment to Georges Sadoul—“I thought endlessly of Mozart while making the film”—underlines the alchemical, shifting movement between Charu and Amal’s literary and amorous passions. In a final series of freeze-frames, husband and wife are transfixed on the brink of joining hands and reconciling, as the Bengali script of the words “The Broken Nest”—the title of Rabindranath Tagore’s source novel—appears on screen.

Ray worked repeatedly with certain actors, and partly attributed his annual output in the Sixties to a desire to keep his crew together. Although Mukherjee worked for Ray less frequently than Tagore, all her performances are memorable. In The Big City (63), as a Calcutta housewife who starts selling appliances door to door to support her cozy, thrifty household, Mukherjee contributes another portrait of a woman finding fulfillment outside traditional roles (and outside the house), with the intriguing foil of a mixed-race co-worker who is snubbed by their Bengali boss. The wife’s newfound avidity (“I don’t feel tired even after working all day!”) ruffles her clerk husband, but Ray closes on a note of optimism for this modern, urban family who are making do in novel ways.

That forward-looking conclusion is a characteristic strength of Ray’s best dramas: impasses become plausible opportunities for reinvention. But it’s by no means the rule, and he can wring just as much impact out of endings that leave characters one note short of resolution. In “The Postmaster,” the first tale in his triptych Teen Kanya (61), a Calcuttan (Anil Chatterjee) becomes the one-man post office in a village and idly takes his wispy servant girl under his wing, but after a bout of malaria, hurriedly resigns. Hurt, the girl walks on by when he offers her cash as he departs, to his crestfallen surprise. Likewise, in The Coward (65), yet another urbanite (a screenwriter no less, played by Soumitra Chatterjee) crashes with a tea planter when his car breaks down—only to learn that the loudmouth’s wife is his ex-girlfriend (Mukherjee). This twist on Ray’s wandering outsider motif—the commitment-averse artist losing his university sweetheart to a businessman—spirals into flashback-ridden obsessive regret and ends with the protagonist receiving a parting passive-aggressive jab from her at the train station.

Against the backdrop of a nation maturing after the zero hour of independence in 1947, generational tensions are another concern of Ray’s. Two minor characters in The Big City respectively embody forward-looking self-sufficiency and the burden of historical debt: Mukherjee’s studious, spunky daughter will no doubt follow her mother’s lead with gusto, whereas her lottery-playing grandfather is a retired schoolteacher who cadges freebies from his former students, now doctors and lawyers. Ray also refracted his sociopolitical surroundings through the viewpoints of young, capable men finding their feet. The big city revisited, The Middleman (75) presents curdled dreams of success to convey Ray’s disgust with corruption (the film opened the same year Prime Minister Indira Gandhi exercised new powers by decree under the State of Emergency). A fresh graduate—the only one in an opening examination sequence who isn’t flagrantly cheating—gives up on further study to enter the shady trade of brokering goods. The story spirals queasily down streets plastered with signs and graffiti, as the beginner businessman is ensnared by a sleazy middleman/procurer, leading to one of Ray’s strangest tableaus: a kindly mother pimping for her daughters in a living room overlooked by a huge photo of puppies.

In The Adversary (70), Ray’s predilection for stalled intellectuals leads to a familiar-feeling portrait of restive alienation. The discontent of young, brooding-browed Siddhartha (Dhritiman Chatterjee), who quits med school when his father dies, supplies the impetus for this partly subjective, dilatory film, which is punctuated with flashbacks to an idealized childhood. The father’s death, which opens the film, is visualized in negative; at the end, an infernal wait for a job interview triggers a fantasy of the room lined with skeletons. Ray is less persuasive, perhaps less comfortable here, but Siddhartha’s nostalgic leanings and protectiveness toward his liberated sister and bomb-thrower brother do suggest the director’s attachment to prerogatives and tradition at a time of personal and political strife. True to his classicist cast, Ray mainly reaches for obtrusive flourishes to convey psychological distress, with often schematic results. The Hero (66) gave a cresting movie star (played by big-name Bengali actor Uttam Kumar) similar flashbacks and even a skeleton vision, but to less effect than, say, the resourceful mise en scène of Days and Nights in the Forest (69), about a country jaunt by four young cityfolk.

Engagé critics wished that Ray would adopt more “committed” politics, presumably implying that he wasn’t filming enough Marxist ferment, but he did not avoid difficult subjects. Distant Thunder (73), part of a loose political trilogy with The Adversary and Company Limited (71), revisited the village setting of the Apu saga under grim wartime circumstances: the Bengal famine of 1943 amidst food rationing by the British Army. Here the domestic struggles and diminished status of Ray’s rural brahmin protagonist are used to underline the social upheaval that comes in the wake of catastrophe. Nature’s beauty—trees, lilies, butterflies, filmed in robust color—becomes jarring; the lake where his vivacious wife formerly delighted in swimming is now trawled for pond snails by desperate villagers. Marred by a subplot about a scarred kiln owner offering sex in exchange for rice, the film ends on a rousing, magazine-ready picture of the Indian nation as a united family, framed in silhouette against the horizon.

But in some ways Ray’s boldest work came much earlier, in the full flush of his new prestige, with the uncanny Devi (60), set in 1860 and far ahead of its own time. Thirteen-year-old Sharmila Tagore (Apu’s wife one year earlier) plays Doyamoyee, a girl whose father decides she is the incarnation of Kali. Almost overnight her role switches from happily doting daughter to an idol mobbed by worshippers, beset by the clamor of bells and chanting. Ray lays bare a practice of hysterical religious veneration, and focuses on Tagore’s dismal, demure expressions, capturing her alarm over this attention and her panic at effectively “disappearing” as a human being. (He gets at similar feelings of entrapment in the tomboy married off in “Samapti” from the Teen Kanya tales.) With prolonged close-ups Ray also subtly questions the metaphysics of apprehending the divine. As for Doyamoyee, she goes mad, fleeing her recently returned university-educated husband (and everyone else) and vanishing into the misty countryside, traversing the frame diagonally in one of Ray’s most striking shots.

The glorious color production The Chess Players (77), the director’s most expensive and his first in Hindi and Urdu, is also set in the mid-19th century, but Ray brings a kinder eye to the obsessions on display. Two tales run in gently ironic parallel: British General Outram (Richard Attenborough) schemes to annex the kingdom of terminal aesthete Wajid Ali Shah (Amjad Khan); meanwhile, two Lucknowi landowners (Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey) become addicted to chess. Rejected by many Indian distributors, this strange affair, like an Oliveira elegy on civilization, grants the full nobility and blithe aestheticism of the cultured, effeminate Wajid, with cutaways to the charmingly single-minded chess players, who strategize in microcosm as their society changes around them. At a moment when he preferred disengagement from the present, Ray followed up with The Elephant God (78), a playful mystery featuring the hero of a series of detective novels he had written since 1965. (Ray was also beloved as a children’s author and illustrator in India, and his 1968 musical adventure The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, replete with multitiered dance routines, enjoyed great popularity.)

Thirty-five years after Pather Panchali, Ray made his final film, The Stranger (91), about a forgotten uncle who reappears after 35 years of travels in the West. He is enigmatic and playfully polemical, and his niece’s husband suspects he is a fraud; in their conversation he defends his open-minded, world-embracing views and his admiration for unmodernized “tribals.” At the end, when the matter of a family inheritance comes to a head, it emerges that it is the family that is being tested, not the prodigal uncle. Somewhere between a stock eccentric in a children’s book and a walking artistic valediction, here is Ray’s perennial thoughtful protagonist allowed to live his entire life without the hard turn toward practicality. Rather than becoming a man set adrift, he perhaps embodies Ray’s own serene perception: “You don’t have to show many things in a film,” Ray once said, quoted his critical touchstone Renoir, “but you have to be very careful to show only the right things.” More often than not, Ray did just that.

Satyajit Ray Org official website

Biography - Satyajit Ray Org biography

Books Written by Satyajit Ray :: SatyajitRay.org

Satyajit Ray World of Ray website, also seen here: Official Website of Satyajit Ray World: Archive

Ray Family - Satyajit Ray World of Ray website

Satyajit Ray > Biography - AllMovie Hal Erickson biography from All Movie Guide, November 11, 2010

Satyajit Ray | Indian film director | Britannica.com biography

Satyajit Ray - Upperstall.com Karan Bali profile

Satyajit Ray • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Helen Goritsas director profile from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002

Manas: Culture, Indian Cinema- Satyajit Ray biographic profile from Manas: Culture, Indian Cinema, also more here: New Indian Cinema]

Biography of Satyajit Ray - Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, UCSC biography by Dilip Basu from Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection

Satyajit Ray: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article biography from Absolute Astronomy

Calcutta Web Profile also seen here: Biography at Calcuttaweb.com

Satyajit Ray: Biography from Answers.com

An "Oscar" Novelty – Satyajit Ray biography by Anirban Ray Choudhury from Buzzle.com

Indian Director, Satyajit Ray :: IndiaXroads.com biography and filmography

Satyajit Ray Tribute Windows Into the Soul of Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray: Profile of The Indian Auteur - Culture Trip Pratiek Sparsh Samantara

Satyajit Ray Biography - Indian Filmmaker Satyajit Ray History ... biography from I Love India

A Short Biography of Satyajit Ray: A Reverential Personality of ... A Short Biography of Satyajit Ray: A Reverential Personality of Indian Cinema, from Factoidz

Satyajit Ray Bio 1 World Films

Satyajit Ray brief bio from Bangali Net

Satyajit Ray - Indias Legendary Film Producer brief bio from Deva Vision

Satyajit Ray - Filmbug brief bio and filmography

Satyajit Ray brief bio and filmography from Cinema of Malayalam

SPIRITUAL LESSONS IN THE EARLY CINEMA OF SATYAJIT RAY Gregory and Maria Pearse from Cinemaseekers

Satyajit Ray Mubi

Satyajit Ray, his strange neglect, auteurism and American taste Mubi film discussion forum

Satyajit Ray [1921-92] Page at Magic Lantern Video & Book Store biography, and available videos and books

Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, UCSC Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection

'Life, Films & Film-Making of Satyajit Ray' fansite Filmography with brief comments from the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection

India Today on Ray 100 People Who Shaped India, by Sumit Mitra from India Today

Ray's Films film comments from The RDB Organization

Satyajit Ray Foundation

Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute

Main Site of Views Reviews Interviews - An ezine on Understanding ... various books and periodicals available

Satyajit Ray Deshi Boi, more books by Ray

Strictly Film School Acquarello reviews 10 films and related readings

Satyajit Ray Collection Vol.1 DVD release from Artificial Eye

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Satyajit Ray Collection – Volume 1 Noel Megahey

DVD Outsider: The Satyajit Ray Collection, Vol. 1 review by Slarek

Satyajit Ray Collection Vol.2 DVD release from Artificial Eye

Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Satyajit Ray Collection - Volume 2 Noel Megahey

DVD Outsider: The Satyajit Ray Collection, Volume 2 DVD review review by Slarek

The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol.3 DVD release from Artificial Eye

Realism in film history - Realism - actor, children, movie ... origins of realism in cinema, from Film Reference

Films of Satyajit Ray: Getting Started Dilip Basu from The India Post, reprinted at Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection (Undated)

Mastering the Language of Cinema Dilip Basu from The India Post, reprinted at Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection (Undated)

From Fiction to Film Dilip Basu from The India Post, reprinted at Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection (Undated)

Experiencing Ray's "The Apu Trilogy" Raj Karamchedu from Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection (Undated)

IndiaStar: Satyajit Ray's "Charulata" and Tagore's "Nashtanir" by ... Our Culture, Their Culture: Indian-ness in Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore explored through their works ‘Charulata’ and ‘Nashtanir,’ by Kaustuv Sen (Undated)

Writing on the Screen: Satyajit Ray's Adaptation of Tagore Moinak Biswas essay (Undated)

"Ordeals of the Alien" The Unmade Ray, from The Satyajit Ray World, December 1967

greg.org: the making of: Satyajit Ray In Film India, c.1981 brief excerpt of a 1981 interview between Ray and the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, posted at Greg.org, November 2, 2008

The Last Bengali Renaissance Man Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books, November 19, 1987 (partial essay), including an accompanying drawing of Ray here: Satyajit Ray by David Levine | The New York Review of Books

FILM; Satyajit Ray Gives Ibsen A Bengali Spin Barbara Crossette from The New York Times, May 7, 1989

Salman Rushdie reviews 'Satyajit Ray' by Andrew Robinson · LRB 8 ... Salman Rushdie book review, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson (412 pages), London Review of Books, March 8, 1990 (partial essay)

"Awards and Tributes: Satyajit Ray" San Francisco Film Festival, 1992

Satyajit Ray, 70, Cinematic Poet, Dies - NYTimes.com Peter B. Flint from The New York Times, April 24, 1992

Home Video Peter M. Nichols from The New York Times, April 30, 1992

559 Partha Chatterjee, Ray's home, Ray's world: Calcutta Partha Chatterjee from India Seminar, reproduced from Cinemaya, Summer 1993

"An Art Wedded to Truth" Michael Sragow from The Atlantic Monthly, 1994, printed at Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection

"THE 'WORLD' OF SATYAJIT RAY: LEGACY OF INDIA'S PREMIER FILM MAKER ON DISPLAY" Dave Kehr from The Daily News, May 5, 1995

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) 'Satyajit Ray (1921-1992),' by Vijay Mishra, from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Film: Matters of Style, edited by Adrian Martin, December 7, 1995

"IndiaStar book review: Satyajit Ray by Surabhi Banerjee" C.J. Wallia book review from IndiaStar of Satyajit Ray: Beyond the Frame (220 pages), by Surabhi Banerjee, 1996

Satyajit Ray and the Art of Universalism: Our Culture, Their Culture Amartya Sen from The New Republic, April 1, 1996, reprinted at the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection

Sen Satyajit Ray - Our Culture, Their Culture Amartya Sen from The New Republic, April 1, 1996, pages 27 – 34 (pdf format)

India x 2 – Offscreen Donato Totaro from Offscreen, September 1997

FILM; For the Tapes of a Master, It's Worth the Wait Peter M. Nichols from The New York Times, October 19, 1997

Letters from Satish Bahadur On ‘Derridean Deconstruction of Pather Panchali,’ from Postmodernism issue of Views Reviews Interviews, an exchange of letters took place between Professor Satish Bahadur and Dr. Arup Ratan Ghosh, December 19, 1997

The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition ... The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity, by Darius Cooper (278 pages), 2000 (pdf format) also seen here: The cinema of Satyajit Ray: between tradition and modernity - Google Books Result

The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity 14-page essay by Darius Cooper, 2000 (pdf format)

Translating Between Media: Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray Clinton B. Seely, Keynote Address delivered at the Twelth Annual Tagore Festival, October 21, 2000

"Art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards" Richard Phillips from The World Socialist Website, August 2, 2001

"Satyajit Ray Collection receives Packard grant and lecture endowment" John Newman from UC Santa Cruz Currents, September 17, 2001

University of California - UC Newsroom | Satyajit Ray Collection ... University of California, September 18, 2001

"The universe in his backyard" Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, May 2, 2002

A Film-Maker Filmed T.S. Satyan from Frontline, June 8 – 21, 2002

Kanchanjangha : A Summer Place by Satyajit Ray reviewed by Kumud Biswas June 16, 2002

"A Slanted Canon" Kevin Lee from Asian American Film, September 5, 2002

kamera.co.uk - book review - Satyajit Ray - The Inner Eye by ... Antonio Pasolini book review of Satyajit Ray – The Inner Eye (420 pages), by Andrew Robinson, from kamera.co.uk, 2003

Metroactive Movies | Satyajit Ray Screen Goddess, by Richard Von Busack, also an interview with actress Sharmila Tagore from Metroactive, October 16 – 22, 2003

Satyajit Ray: the inner eye : the biography of a master film-maker - Google Books Result by Andrew Robinson (452 pages), 2004

Satyajit Ray – The Inner Eye Antonio Pasolini book review of Andrew Robinson’s biography from Kamera, April 1, 2004

Satyajit Ray - Doon Online - Amitav Ghosh Amitav Ghosh from Doon Online, June 2004

The Hindu : Path-breaking PATHER Path-Breaking Pather, by Deepa Ganesh from The Hindu, September 4, 2004

Harvard Film Archive comments from the Ray retrospective from the Harvard Film Archive, November 5 – 23, 2004

"Western Influences on Satyajit Ray" Abhijit Sen from Parabas, February 15, 2005

Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players and Post Colonial Film Theory ... capsule review of a book by Reena Dube (272 pages), May 2005

"Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema" Andrew Robinson from The British Council, August 2005

"Remembering Ray, frame by frame" Waheeda Rehman from The Telegraph, May 2, 2006

"Sacred Ray" Subhash K. Jha from The Telegraph, June 9, 2006

A tribute to Satyajit Ray and his films | Satyajit ray | Bengali ... Debasmita Chanda from Living One India, June 26, 2006

Desicritics.org: Satyajit Ray and Luis Bunuel - Our Films, Their Films Aaman Lamba from Desicritics, June 26, 2006

Film Fest Journal: Our Films, Their Films by Satyajit Ray Aquarello book review from Strictly Film School, December 3, 2006

Satyajit Ray: interviews - Google Books Result by Bert Cardullo (226 pages), 2007

The Kerala Articles: Detective Stories of Satyajit Ray Souvik Chatterji from The Kerala Articles, July 16, 2007

Edward Copeland on Film: The Ray Memorial 100 September 19, 2007

"Returning to the classics of Ray" Madhur Tankha from The Hindu, December 1, 2007

"The Ray show goes on" Sudipta Datta from The Financial Express, January 20, 2008

• View topic - Satyajit Ray Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, November 13, 2008

Film - Pather Panchali: Satyajit Ray's Classic Movie About a Poor ... Michelle Strozykowski from Suite 101, April 2, 2009

Satyajit Ray’s World of Restless Watchfulness and Nuance Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, April 9, 2009, also including a slide show seen here: The World of Satyajit Ray

SAJAforum: FILM: Satyajit Ray's films at Lincoln Center SAJA Forum, April 12, 2009

Why we admire Satyajit Ray so much - Rediff.com Movies Arthur J. Pais from Rediff, April 14, 2009

First Light: Satyajit Ray From the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy Nick Pinkerton from The Village Voice, April 15, 2009

Satyajit Ray - Film Society of Lincoln Center First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy, April 15 – 30, 2009

A new lens on Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest « the ... Video essay by Kevin Lee from Film Society of Lincoln Center, April 23, 2009

Pakistan Times! » Legendary Bengali Filmaker Satyajit Ray Ambarish Pandey from The Pakistan Times, May 2, 2009

Fiddler on the Roof Shades of Ray: On the Heart of the Monstrous City, by Diya from Fiddler on the Roof, May 7, 2009

Perceptions - ::: Star Weekend Magazine ::: Satyajit Ray and The Alien! by Obaidur Rahman from The Daily Star, May 22, 2009

Satyajit Ray – Auteur Extraordinaire (Part 1) | culturazzi.org Shubhajit Lahiri from Culturazzi, June 3, 2009

Satyajit Ray – Auteur Extraordinaire (Part 2) | culturazzi.org Shubhajit Lahiri from Culturazzi, June 5, 2009

Satyajit Ray – Auteur Extraordinaire (Part 3) | culturazzi.org Shubhajit Lahiri from Culturazzi, June 8, 2009

Through the lens: Satyajit Ray's genius - bollywood news ... Brinda Dasgupta from Glamsham, June 23, 2009

The Humanists: Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy (1955-1959 - 3quarksdaily Colin Marshall from 3 Quarks Daily, August 24, 2009

Satyajit Ray Andrew Robinson from Dulwich On View, November 3, 2009

Satayajit Ray -part 2 Andrew Robinson from Dulwich On View, November 6, 2009

Satyajit Ray, Ray's Films and Ray-Movie Ashish Rajadhyaksha from Indian Auteur, November 9, 2009

Happy Birthday Satyajit Ray - India Real Time - WSJ Subhadip Sircar from India Real Time, April 30, 2010

Satyajit Ray fest to mark 89th birth anniversary Thaindian News, May 1, 2010

BBC News - Ban on Satyajit Ray film lifted Subir Bhaumik from The BBC News, September 17, 2010

No one in India has Satyajit Ray's 'Sikkim' print: Son Thaindian News, September 17, 2010

No one in India has Satyajit Ray's 'Sikkim' print: Son | TopNews Supreet Sharma from Top News, September 18, 2010

Book Of A Lifetime: Our Films Their Films, By Satyajit Ray | The ... book review by Andrew Robinson from The Independent, September 23, 2010

Book of a lifetime: ‘Our Films Their Films’ by Satyajit Ray Andrew Robinson reposts the original September 23^rd article from The Independent for Dulwich On View, November 2, 2010

Apu in Venice Andrew Robinson from Dulwich On View, November 5, 2010

Court stops screening of Satyajit Ray's 'Sikkim' Thaindian News, November 11, 2010

'Shooting with Satyajit Ray was a lifetime experience' Thaindian News, November 11, 2010

Banned Satyajit Ray Sikkim film screened in Kolkata lands in copyright row Thaindian News, November 12, 2010

Banned Satyajit Ray Sikkim film screened in Kolkata lands in ... News Track India, November 12, 2010

Ban on Satyajit Ray film reimposed - Entertainment - DNA Soumyadipta Banerjee from Daily News & Analysis, November 13, 2010

Satyajit Ray: a retrospective - Financial Times Amit Chaudhuri, August 9, 2013

Satyajit Ray: the godfather of Indian cinema - Telegraph Sameer Rahim, August 11, 2013

10 Satyajit Ray films that should be re-released - Rediff.com Movies August 27, 2013

A clearer view of overwhelming India and of Satyajit Ray - latimes Peter Rainer, October 5, 2013

Why the Best American Filmmakers Owe a Debt to Satyajit Ray ... Fariha Roisin from indieWIRE, August 18, 2014

The Miraculous Apu Trilogy | The New Yorker Richard Brody, May 6, 2015

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy: Restoration and re-release of Pather ... Dana Stevens from Slate, May 21, 2015

6 Filmmaking Tips from Satyajit Ray - Film School Rejects Landon Palmer, September 1, 2015

The Dramatic Story Behind Satyajit Ray's 50s Masterpiece 'The Apu ... Anne Thompson from indieWIRE, September 2, 2015

Remembering Satyajit Ray, India's most renowned filmmaker - Livemint Sandipan Deb, September 27, 2015

Satyajit Ray: five essential films | BFI Samuel Wigley, September 29, 2015

The 10 Best Satyajit Ray Movies, Ranked – The Cinemaholic Sunayan Bhattacharjee, January 5, 2017

When Satyajit Ray Came to Hollywood | Hazlitt Abhrajyoti Chakraborty, May 2, 2017

Where to begin with Satyajit Ray | BFI Sarah Jilani, May 3, 2017

Satyajit Ray Archives – The Paris Review | The Paris Review Dan Piepenbring, May 3, 2017

Parash Pathar: The most criminally underrated film of Satyajit Ray's ... Bhaskar Chattopadhyay from First Post, June 25, 2017

TSPDT - Satyajit Ray

Ray on Ray :: SatyajitRay.org Ray on Ray, interview from Cineaste magazine, excerpted from the book edited by Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein, The Cineaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema (1982) from Satyajit Ray.org

Meetings with the master: A 30-yr-old conversation with Satyajit Ray ... Rinki Bhattacharya interview from Forbes India, originally posted in 1984-85

Bright Lights Film Journal | Interview with Satyajit Ray - Archive.is Bert Cardullo interview from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2005

Satyajit Ray: a moral attitude | Sight & Sound | BFI Interview compiled from a long series of conversations with his biographer Andrew Robinson, first published September 2013

Autograph: Satyajit Ray

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Satyajit Ray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray, Satyajit New World Encyclopedia

Satyajit Ray Pictures

Watch Documentary / Short films : Satyajit Ray Negatives by Bo Van ... Satyajit Ray Negatives, a documentary by Bo Van der Werf, 2005 (51:46)

Rabindranath Tagore by Satyajit Ray on Vimeo entire film on YouTube (51:48)

"Rabindranath Tagore," by Satyajit Ray - Roger Ebert's Journal

PATHER PANCHALI (Song of the Road)

India (115 mi) 1955

Pather Panchali | Jonathan Rosenbaum

In 1955, the year Satyajit Ray's beautiful first feature, Pather Panchali, won the grand prix at Cannes, no less a humanist than Francois Truffaut walked out of a screening declaring, "I don't want to see a film about Indian peasants." Time and critical opinion have been much kinder to this family melodrama--derived, like its successors in the Apu trilogy, Aparajito and The World of Apu, from a 30s novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee--than to Truffaut's remark. Yet there's no question that Ray's contemplative treatment of a poor Brahmin family in a Bengali village, made on a small budget and accompanied by the mesmerizing music of Ravi Shankar, is a triumph of mood and character rather than an exercise in brisk Western storytelling. This new print launches an exciting retrospective of Ray's important, long-unavailable work, perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely "classical" and novelistic oeuvre in the Indian cinema.

Pather Panchali Matthew Wilder from City Pages

Most movies, even the greatest ones, are born out of a combination of fear, haste, and rage. It's so rare to see one born out of tenderness that one feels positively awestruck in the first minutes of Pather Panchali. The opening credits, which seem to be palimpsests of long-faded texts (combined with the music by Ravi Shankar), envelop you in a warm, cocoonlike field of mixed but potent emotions. There are moments when director Satyajit Ray seems to be pitching his Bengali family--sweet-hearted, crone-faced "auntie"; severe, pragmatic mom; dreamy-artist dad; and wide-eyed Apu--as a sort of Universal Family of Man for the Euro-American audience. But if there's a drop or two of cynical calculation, there also exists a wealth of wisdom gleaned by Ray at Jean Renoir's knee as the latter shot The River in India. I can't think of a Renoir movie that contains the emotionally plangent quality of Pather Panchali: To see faces photographed with such affection, one generally has to encounter a director in love with his leading lady. Ray's ability to wring drama out of seemingly minute events--finding suspense in the ice-cream man passing two kids with no spare change, for example--returns you gratefully to feelings you had as a small child and forgot even existed. Though the Ray canon already has an unfortunate medicinal aura, his pictures ought to be required viewing in American high schools: No other filmmaker takes Western audiences so profoundly into the hearts of people so superficially unlike themselves.

Cine-File Chicago: Liam Neff

Perhaps the most acclaimed Bengali film, Satyajit Ray's first film PATHER PANCHALI has acquired an additional mythic status due to the difficulties of its production. The story of a Brahmin family living in intense poverty, PATHER PANCHALI ("Song of the Little Road") was shot over the course of five years with a cast of non-actors, a crew with almost no film experience, and with Ray in an almost constant struggle to find funding. The film follows the family's children, sister Durga and little brother Apu, who live out the episodes of their childhood in wide-eyed innocence. Together they chase after the candyman and imitate the extravagances of a traveling theater company. The film's atmosphere becomes increasingly claustrophobic, however, and much of this is owed to the cinematography of first-timer Subrata Mitra. As the family struggles to find income, the jungle creeps in on all sides into their decaying rural manor. The images are bleak but profoundly beautiful. Despite his struggles, Ray was desperate not to compromise the film: for the exhilarating sequence when Apu and Durga discover a train, perhaps the film's most famous image, Ray believed he could only shoot in a week-long sliver of spring when the region's white flax flowers were in bloom. PANCHALI has been a cited as a considerable influence by later directors such as Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami and Wes Anderson (remember the overhead shot of a baby swinging in its cradle in THE DARJEELING LIMITED? Ripped straight out of Satyajit Ray). A classic story of loss and renewal in bitter circumstances, PATHER PANCHALI remains a landmark of international (and for the matter, independently produced) cinema.

Cine-File Chicago: Camden G. Bauchner

In 1993 Satyajit Ray requested that several of the original negatives of his films be shipped to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles for storage in their vaults. En route they stopped at Henderson Laboratories in London where a tragic nitrate fire burnt and warped, if not destroyed, nearly all the negatives, including the acclaimed Apu Trilogy (not to mention treasured Ealing Studio Comedies). Fortunately the Academy decided to proceed with shipment and the negatives continued on to LA where they would remain untouched for nearly 20 years. After a protracted negotiation for the rights to the Apu Trilogy and multiple unsuccessful efforts to locate usable material for digitization the Criterion Collection unearthed these negatives and in conjunction with the L'Immagine Ritrovata and the Academy Archive began an extensive restoration effort in 2013. It is ironic that such a complicated undertaking including a successful rehydration, a combination of fine-grain masters and dupe negatives, the successful removal of glue and wax (used for storage in India and burned in the fire) and almost a thousand hours of meticulous hand labor, would be performed for films of such clear-eyed simplicity. Among these three the most direct and lucid (and the one whose negative was most badly damaged) is PATHER PANCHALI the inaugural chapter in a rural Bengali bildungsroman centered on the inquisitive and sprightly Apu Roy. Influenced by a conversation with Jean Renoir (in India shooting THE RIVER) and a viewing of Vittorio De Sica's BICYCLE THIEVES in London, Ray's film transplants a neorealist style onto Bibhuti Bhushan's novel. While not inaccurate, the complete placement of Ray's film within the neorealist canon threatens to undermine his truly revolutionary banishment of traditional dramatic structure. While both Ray and De Sica find interest in small, innocuous events, choosing to reveal their characters through gestures and attitudes and thereby dispensing with preconceived notions of plot and character, Ray takes it a step further. The impetus in BICYCLE THIEVES is to find the bicycle; the impetus in PATHER PANCHALI is simply to live. Time, as it is felt in Ray's film, expands and contracts not with breaks but rather a gummy elasticity that reveals both the sufferings caused by the ceaseless march of time and the perpetual chance for rebirth and renewal. Ray's characters, trapped by their economic conditions, brutally compound this effect. In the beginning of her review of L'AVVENTURA Pauline Kael wrote, "It had begun to look as though only those with a fresh eye--working in poverty and inexperience...discovering the medium for themselves--could do anything new and important (like the Apu Trilogy)" It still kind of does.

Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review [10/10]

The camerawork isn't perfect and the acting is occasionally mediocre, but Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali is nevertheless a compelling and surprisingly moving tale of a poor family trying to get by. Though Ray made his debut with this movie, his ability behind the camera is unmistakable.

Ray, who also wrote the script, funded the majority of Pather Panchali with his own money and cast his family and friends in pivotal roles. Set in a Bengali village, this uncomplicated story revolves around a family of four - mom Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), dad Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), daughter Durga (Uma Das Gupta), and son Apu (Subir Bannerjee). Harihar is a struggling poet/playwright who's barely making ends meet by working odd jobs, while Sarbojaya has her hands full keeping their household running smoothly. Durga and Apu spend the majority of their time playing, though Durga's penchant for petty theft causes friction among their neighbors.

Pather Panchali moves at an incredibly slow pace, but the film never becomes boring - although Ray might've been well advised to cut down the running time (at over two hours, there are a number of sequences that go on longer than necessary). Still, the simplicity with which Ray tells this tale gives it a feeling of universality; by stripping away superfluous elements, we come to really care about this family. It's interesting that the film is known as the first part of Ray's Apu trilogy, as Apu's participation in the story is minimal. The heart of the movie is the relationship between Sarbojaya and Durga, which is - as one might expect - ridden with conflict.

It's clear that Sarbojaya loves her daughter, but intensely disapproves of her rebellious ways. Durga wants to do her own things, while Sarbojaya is more interested in preparing her for a life of domesticity. Ray does a fantastic job of turning these two characters into more than just stereotypes, to the extent that their relationship remains intriguing even when both women are behaving stubbornly. Periphery characters, such as a mean and gossipy lady from the village, are surprisingly well developed and avoid the danger of becoming caricatures.

Ray proves to be a natural filmmaker, and his use of black and white photography (along with cinematographer Subrata Mitra) is often incredibly effective. Ravi Shankar's score perfectly accompanies Ray's images, turning simple shots of dirty ponds and kittens playing into moments of high art. It's in the pacing that the movie finally fails, as Ray's love for his material seems to have prevented him from administering some much-needed editorial adjustments. Still, it's a small complaint for a film that is otherwise so impressive.

Although nobody has yet said so, I get the feeling that Pather Panchali (translation: Song of the Little Road) is one of those foreign classics which is treated respectfully but fearfully by most who've even heard of it. After, many once-praised, anointed "landmarks" have grown to seem, to some, not nearly as artistic as it once seemed (e.g., Rossellini's Paisan). And, because Satyajit Ray is one of a very very small group of internationally known Indian directors, he's evidently approached with some trepidation precisely because of how different he might be from what you're used to.

Such fears are understandable but unfortunate. Hey, I confess that I too viewed the prospect of renting a 2-hour flick about poverty in India with a bit of fear; I wondered whether Pather Panchali's halo has silently tarnished over the years. Far from it. Satyajit Ray's incredible debut is still a classic and landmark of humanist filmmaking. The film is an experience that connects deeply with the viewer, and is equally enjoyable.

Pather Panchali is the first part in a trilogy that follows Apu from birth to his mid-30s. This isn't immediately evident until the end of this film, which concentrates more on the rest of the family than young Apu. Dad (Kanu Banerjee) is a scholar and not very aggressive; after many financial misfortunes, he goes off to find a job elsewheres. Mom (Karuna Banerjee, the wife of an executive) worries constantly about where the money will come from and about son Apu. Indira (Chunibala Devi; she was retired for 30 years, but was lured out with fees to pay for her narcotics) is the elderly aunt who drains the family's resources. At the center of all this is sister Durga (the marvelous debut of Uma Das Gupta, who's not credited for anything else on IMDB) and, somewhat, her relationship with brother Apu.

It's not immediately evident that Durga and her influence on Apu are the central focus. Ray devotes an equal amount of time to all the characters, and shows enough of the family's ghastly surroundings to give the unperceptive the chance to label the film as merely a crusading one about poverty. Unfolding through vignettes, the film accumulates a gradual power (please note, though, that some find the film too distant and unaffecting). Like a good humanist, Ray respects all his characters, and places a large emphasis on the role of nature in daily life (though in black-and-white, and some of it shot on 16mm, this isn't your typically lovely cinematography; it's beautiful and graceful, but a bit distanced, since Ray never wants you to forget the poverty at the heart of this landscape).

Ray learned all about film while making this movie; he really had no experience previously. A rough cut was seen by John Huston, who brought this movie to the attention of America, and the film rapidly was internationally acclaimed (though the Cannes jury thought it a bit crude). Miraculously, the film hasn't aged a bit; it's a magnificent piece of work that is very easy to watch. An essential classic, followed by Aparjito and The World of Apu.

Satyajit Ray - Explore - The Criterion Collection

[3.5/4.0] (dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film, with the English title "Song of the Little Road", is the first component of Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy".

The story begins with the introduction of the Roy family. The anchor of the Roy family is Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee). Because her husband Hari (Kanu Bannerjee) is often out of work, she has the difficult duty of managing all the daily needs of the family with meager resources. Hari is not overly concerned with the family's plight because he more concerned with spiritual needs than with material needs. He works odd jobs as a priest and a clerk so that they scrape by, and he spends his free time composing his literature. Hari's general view is that "whatever God does is for the best." Although their most basic needs are met, Sarbojaya knows that they live a precarious existence. Their house is in disrepair, their daughter Durga (Runki Banerjee as the small child, Uma Das Gupta as the adolescent) is acquiring a bad reputation by stealing fruit from a neighbor's orchard, and it is sometimes a struggle to make sure everyone has enough to eat. Hari's elderly aunt, Indir (Chunibala Devi) also lives with the Roys, but Sarbojaya dislikes how she spoils Durga. Sarbojaya, who is pregnant as the story opens, eventually gives birth to a son, Apu (Subir Bannerjee). Because Hari is often away working, Sarbojaya is the backbone holding the family together.

The family's poverty is no drag on the spirits of the children. Durga and Apu make their own world adventurous and carefree. Even though they miss treats like being able to buy sweets from the traveling candy man, they enrich their lives with the multitude of simple pleasures available to them. From the joy of getting drenched by the monsoon, to the thrill of traveling across the countryside to see a train, Durga and Apu do not miss any pleasures of childhood. It is only the responsibilities of the adult world that gnaw at the spirit of the individuals. It is perhaps this specter that keeps Durga from maturing. Her mother tells her that she should be more helpful in the household, but Durga's only interest is in playing. As Durga watches one of her friends get married, she gazes forlornly knowing that it is difficult for a poor girl to get a marriage arranged. It is as if she knows impending adulthood cannot be avoided. If she could choose, she would probably want to spend her entire life as a child.

Although the trilogy is centered around his character, Apu himself has a diminished role in this story. He is only a young boy through all the events. The primary characters are really the women, and they symbolize the major stages of life. The irrepressible Durga represents the carefree nature of childhood, when dependence on parents allows the spirit to be free. The somber Sarbojaya represents the heavy responsibilities of adulthood, when life is a serious matter and the needs of self and others are a constant struggle. The fragile Indir represents the precariousness of old age, when the return to dependence can become a shackle if one is restricted by poverty.

Perhaps the only aspect that indicates that this film was made decades ago is the quality of the print. In all other aspects, it displays a remarkable moderness. Although the story is set in the 1920's, the issues that it deals with are timeless. Only the absence of technological advances (motorized vehicles, electric light, etc) and the style of clothing indicate the time period. All the acting performances are flawless. This is no small feat considering the depth to which each character is explored. In terms of cinematography, it is almost difficult to believe that this was Satyajit Ray's first feature film. He displays a virtuoso mastery of the medium on par with any filmmaker, regardless of era. The main narrative is interspersed with simple and evocative scenes of nature, like water bugs skimming back and forth over the surface of a pond. These images, along with the languid pace of the story, serve to underscore the individual's insignificant presence in the greater universe. Whatever the fate of the Roy family, the world continues in its eternal rhythms unperturbed.

With this, his first film, Ray immediately established himself as a master of Indian and international cinema. Although all aspects of the story are characteristically Indian, he brings out concerns and struggles shared by people in every corner of the world. This film deservedly won several international film awards, including the appropriately named "Best Human Document" at the Cannes Film Festival.

Highly recommended. This is an absorbing and moving drama. Ray is able to portray the vagaries of the human condition in a simple, poignant story.

Interview: Satyajit Ray - Film Comment James Blue interview, Summer 1968

This interview with Satyajit Ray was tape-recorded by Blue as preparation for his book on the directing of the non-actor in film. This special research has been sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Blue, at the time of the interview, was visiting India while directing A Few Notes on Our Food Problem, a color, 35mm, 40-minute U.S. Information Agency film on the world food and population problem, shot by Stevan Larner. Sailen Dutt, assistant to Ray on most of his films, assisted with the recording. Ray was at work then on a film that he described as a commercial “adventure story with big name stars.” Blue describes Ray as “a tall man, over six-feet-one, enormous for an Indian, whose deep and resonant voice surprises more than his height, because of his ability to manage—as a patrician might—the niceties of English speech.”

Earlier Blue interview-articles on the directing of the non-actor, exclusive to FILM COMMENT, have dealt with Jean Rouch, Peter Watkins, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Richard Leacock, and the Maysles brothers.

SATYAJIT RAY: I have the whole thing in my head at all times. The whole sweep of the film. I know what it’s going to look like when cut. I’m absolutely sure of that, and so I don’t cover the scene from every possible angle—close, medium, long. There’s hardly anything left on the cutting-room floor after the cutting. It’s all cut in the camera.

For example, the mother-daughter fight scene in Pather Panchali—that was all in my head and I merely told my editor to join this strip, now that, now this…. And the strong scene where Durga dies—lots of shots there and the editor just didn’t know what he was doing. I had all the strips in my hand and then I popped them one after the other, now a bit of this, a bit of that. The editor just came in to help, you see, because we had to catch a deadline.

I understand that in many of your films you have been at the camera yourself.

Ever since The Big City, which I shot in 1962, 1963, I have been operating the camera. All the shots, everything. It’s wonderful to direct through the Arriflex because that’s the only position to tell you where the actors are, in exact relations to each other. Sitting by or standing by is no good for a director.

I find that I am not able to both direct and shoot.

I find it easier, because the actors are not conscious of me watching, because I’m behind the lens. I’m behind the viewer and with a black cloth over my head, so I’m almost not there, you see. I find it easier because they’re freer, and particularly if you’re using a zoom. I am doing things with the zoom constantly, improvising constantly.

When you work with a cameraman, however, he is always saying—“Let’s have one more take.” I generally say—“Why? Tell me why?” He’s never able to specify exactly “why”—he is not sure, you see. Whereas, I am sure. Only the director can know when the technical operation needs to be all-important, you see. Whereas in certain shots maybe it’s not the operation that is all-important but it is something else that is really vital. So even if the panning is a little this way [making a jerky movement], it doesn’t matter. And the question of re-takes comes up also when you are working with very limited raw stock, you see. It’s mainly because of that that I have started operating the camera myself.

Then you operate the camera during the rehearsals also?

Yes, otherwise it’s pointless. Except there is a first rehearsal where I’m not behind the camera, where I’m just watching the whole thing for all the details of acting, you see. And just before the take, if it’s complicated, I have at least two rehearsals when I’m on the camera, to see whether I can actually do it, whether my limbs will permit it, you see. Because sometimes you’re in the most terrible position, lying down or half-reclining, and I take off the panning handle, I grab hold of the other sort of thing that sticks out and I grab hold of the whole camera and turn it like that, on its pivot.

Personally, I think that Subrata Mitra’s camera work is better than Raoul Coutard’s, but Gianni Di Venanzo I admire tremendously. 8½ is something extraordinary, I mean the daring things that Di Venanzo does there and pulls off. Largely, of course, it’s the director, too; it can’t be just the cameraman who is devising all that, all those over-exposed shots and everything that comes off.

Sometimes cameramen do this kind of thing for no reason at all, and that I don’t like. I mean, just tricks for tricks sake, which quite a number of these New Wave directors do. I mean Godard does it all the time, hand-held for no reason and you can see it going all the time. A long scene with Belmondo in Une Femme Est Une Femme, sitting in a bar or somewhere, talking, talking, and you have the camera hand-held, and you watch the edge of the screen and can see it wobbling all the time [Laughs]. And you tend to watch that not the action within the frame. You become interested in how well the chap was able to steady his camera.

Well, Godard’s is another style altogether, you see, where you use all kinds of things completely amateurish, completely improvised, and it all sort of hangs together as a kind of collage. Good, bad, indifferent. But that’s another category of films, I think.

I haven’t seen any cinéma vérité except for Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous, which he shot in Africa, a rather horrifying film but very impressive, very strong, I must say. And all a single man’s effort. It’s just one man, Rouch, doing everything. I met Richard Leacock at the Flaherty Seminar in 1958, but I don’t know his cinéma vérité work, nor do I know Chris Marker in France.

Although I don’t know cinéma vérité, I can see that it can be very interesting, and valid, in a way. But again, a different category, you see. I think that Frances Flaherty was slightly disappointed in my method of work, because she had thought that in Pather Panchali they were all actual villagers. But it doesn’t really matter whom you use, because it’s the ultimate effect that counts, you see. In all art it is like that.

I use the Arriflex. Because you can do very small zooms that are not noticeable, you can get your emphasis all the time with a zoom, and it’s lovely with that. And sometimes you don’t even notice that. You are not supposed to, most of the time. It’s not zoom-zoom, like that, it’s just a little bit. Sometimes combining with a tracking shot you can zoom in. I love the zoom. I think it’s wonderful, particularly now. For example, for a certain insert . . . what you can do is a little zoom.

How do you direct dialogue?

All actors are afraid of pauses because they can’t judge their weight. So with Sharmila Tagore in The World of Apu, I would say—“Well, you stop at this point and then resume when I tell you to resume.” So she would just stop and look at a certain point that had been previously indicated, and then I’d say—“Yes, now go on,” and she would resume. So the pauses would be there as I would need them. Otherwise, actors are terribly afraid of pauses, and it’s only the greatest professionals who know the real strength, the power, of pauses. For all non-actors and for inferior professionals, they just can’t judge pauses at all. For me, pauses are very important: something happening, waiting for the words, and when the words come you have that weight. So the pauses have to be worked out constantly.

Once he has memorized the line, it’s the hardest thing for an actor to make it sound as if he is thinking and talking rather than just mouthing lines. Sometimes there are certain words that don’t come easily. You must have the pause before a certain word. Not everybody is a linguist with a great command of vocabulary, so you have to vary it with actors, and those pauses are very significant. Sometimes you just can’t think of a word so you just hesitate, you see, and somebody else supplies it for you. So my dialogue is written like that, with a very plastic quality, which has its own filmic character, which is not stage dialogue, not literary dialogue. But it’s as lifelike as possible, with all the hems and haws and stuttering and stammering.

But you would not call it natural speech?

No, it’s not naturalistic but let’s call it “realistic.” It’s not as if it’s off a tape recorder, because then you would be wasting precious footage. You have to strike a mean between naturalism and a certain thing which is artistic, which is selective, you see. If you get the right balance, then you have this strange feeling of being lifelike, everything looking very lifelike and natural. But if you were to photograph candidly a domestic scene it wouldn’t be art at all. I mean, it could be interesting for certain revelations, but it wouldn’t itself be a work of art—a scene, whatever scene, unless you cut it. That’s being creative, you see. By being selective in your framing, in your cutting, in your choice of words, you are creating something artistic.

I think the cinema is the only medium that challenges you to be naturalistic, be realistic and yet be artistic at the same time. Because in the cutting is the creation, you see.

You shot Pather Panchali in sync sound?

Yes, absolutely, because it would be impossible to dub with a non-actor. Absolute disaster. I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work.

How do you dub? Do you use the French system?

No system. We devise our own system. I don’t even know what the French system is. Look, I don’t like dubbing because it’s too mechanical. I have devised a system of notation—I mean, you have to have a kind of guide-track . . . Sailen Dutt, my assistant, and several others, take notes or a code on the exact scanning of each word. Even if we do have a tape recorder, even if there is a guide-track, you need to do that. I play back and then make my own special notations for it, and then I work it from my notes, you see. Because you have got to have control yourself of how the lines are spoken. So that it sounds right, it conforms to the original speech. You have got to memorize it; you must know your lines.

When you go into the sound studio to dub the final cut, do you try to reproduce exactly what the actor has said in the picture?

Absolutely. But sometimes I try to improve. Most of my dubbing so far has involved, fortunately, professionals who have been able to do it with me. But somehow with Pather Panchali we had usable sound all the way through, more or less. Not much dialogue, and no crowds watching, because even whispering would create an enormous noise that ruins your track.

Yesterday we shot a scene in the village where you made Pather Panchali.

Did you? It’s unrecognizable now. It’s no longer pure. It’s spoiled. It was once very nice, indeed, with long areas of no huts, no refugee huts . . . [Note: the Pather Panchali village, like many others in Bengal, now contains refugees from East Pakistan as a result of Partition.]

Were people of that village cooperative when you began that first film of the Apu Trilogy?

Not in the early stage. No, they were fairly hostile people there. But we got to be friendly, and finally—because we were there for two years off and on—we got to be very friendly with them. They really missed us when we left. You can manage only by being polite with them, you see, sitting down and talking. They’re essentially nice people, but suspicious. To them all business has certain rather unpleasant associations. We were completely newcomers, nobody knew us, and today we wouldn’t have any trouble, except from people coming to watch.

For example, we have begun shooting our new film in Baraset, and the crowd has been increasing, and for the last two or three days we have had something like two thousand women and children watching. A wall was constructed around the compound, and outside the wall they would stand, looking over. And all the trees were full of people. And some of the branches gave way and a dozen people fell and collapsed, and one was seriously injured. Fortunately, we had a doctor in the cast, among the actors, and he gave first aid and sent them all to the hospital.

We found yesterday on location in your Pather Panchali village that we had almost 150 people around us—everybody excited and . . .

Yes, but at the time we made Pather Panchali, there was almost nobody watching. There were some during the first few days, of course, but then they lost interest in the actual work, so we could continue uninterrupted, absolutely. And nobody knew us, everyone was new, we had no stars. But this new film we are making has a big star, and he is the main draw of crowds, I think. But apart from that, nowadays shooting in a city street is almost impossible unless you do it with concealed cameras or dummy cameras or things like that. If you don’t use these means, then the shooting becomes too expensive. I shoot on a four-to-one ratio, you see.

Did you make Pather Panchali on a four-to-one ratio?

No, that’s the only film where I had scenes that eventually didn’t go into the film. Some scenes were not finished. And then I wasn’t sure of my cutting, so some of the stuff had just to be thrown away. The first two or three days work wouldn’t cut at all. Then later I sort of disciplined myself. You learn while you work. You learn quite quickly, in fact. We were forced to be economical, as you must when you have a ceiling to everything.

Of course, you have said that during Pather Panchali you did not have crowds disturbing the shooting and causing your actors to freeze up—but still, with so few takes, how did you manage to get relaxed behavior from non-professionals?

Sometimes it’s easier with non-professionals. I have no definite system. I use different methods with different actors. You have to modify your technique all the time. But you have to get to know the person you are working with, know his moods and his abilities and his intelligence. Sometimes I use them as puppets complete, and I do not tell them anything about motivation at all. I just try to get particular effects.

For example, the boy who played Apu in Pather Panchali—he was treated all along as a puppet. Completely. He didn’t know the story, only the vaguest outline. And it is really not a children’s story. It’s an adult thing with all the subtleties, really emotional.

Does this mean that you dictated his gestures?

Absolutely, down to the head movement—“Do this and that.” The first day I had some trouble.

It was a very simple shot of him walking, looking for Durga, his sister, in that field of flowers. Remember that? And that walk was so difficult to get right. So I put little obstacles in his way, which he had to cross, and it became natural immediately. Otherwise, he just walks like that [stiffening his body]. I had to put objects in his path and say—“you cross this piece of straw and then the next one”—not really large obstacles but things he had to be conscious of, to give him a purpose. That’s the most difficult thing to do—just walking, looking for somebody. Every turn of his head was dictated—“Now look this way!” I put three assistants at certain points, and A would call the boy and then B would call and then C. So the boy would walk, look, then hear a call, then walk again. It was like that. It’s the only thing to do. At first I didn’t work this way, but I immediately felt that something was wrong. So I sat down and thought it out and did it.

I hardly ever do more than three takes. It’s generally two. If the second one is not better than the first, then there’s a third take. I’ve never taken more than five or six, except for one shot in Pather Panchali involving synchronization with a dog. You see, when the confectioner comes the children run and follow him, and in the same shot you have a dog who is also supposed to run at a certain point. But this is not a trained dog, you see! The dog would be called, but it would just sit there and look up and not do anything. So that took eleven takes. I remember that very well because I had never had eleven takes to a shot.

One professional actor who let us down several times was the man who played the father in Pather Panchali. He was a professional of long standing, and he was muffing lines constantly because he was asked to do certain things along with speaking—combining action with speech—which I use very frequently, which I think is very important, which gives it that relaxed thing, you see. It’s both in work and talking.

You find actions to accompany speech constantly?

Yes, unless it is a scene that demands absolutely no action at all. In the second film of the Apu Trilogy, Aparajito, there is a scene towards the end where the mother is dead and the boy sits and cries on the little verandah, and there’s the old uncle smoking the hookah, and he sort of consoles Apu by saying—“You know, man is not immortal. Everybody has to die sooner or later, so don’t cry.” Now, that old man was a complete amateur. (He died the other day.) We found him in Benares on the grass. He had never seen a film, because he was living a retired life in Benares for thirty years with his wife, you know. I mean you find people like that. He seemed to be the right type, so we went up to him—we hadn’t cast that particular part yet—and I asked him whether he would be willing to act in the film. Immediately he said yes, why not? And then in this scene, the only scene where he needed to speak for a certain length of time, I couldn’t possibly cut because it needed to be a single set-up all the way through, to suggest that kind of gloom and, you know, hopelessness. I split up the dialogue into parts; between sentences he was asked to smoke, just take a pull at the hookah. Then stop for a certain length of time, then I would say go on. Well, he knew where to smoke, where to take a pull at the hookah, but he didn’t know where to resume speaking, and that I would dictate.

I understand De Sica uses quite a bit this method of handling actors as puppets, you see, telling them exactly what to do at every point. I felt that in Bicycle Thief; not with the boy so much as with the father. The boy was amazing, absolutely incredibly good. Particularly the last scene where he walks down and holds the father’s hand, where he’s crying.

I asked De Sica how he got that scene. He replied that he poked fun at the poverty of the boy’s family and made him cry. De Sica said—“I was so ashamed of myself when I got that scene . . . it was so shameful of me.” He said—“My little boy was so very proud and he lived in such poor conditions in the same room with his mother and father and his other brothers and sisters, and they all slept in the same bed, and yet he was terribly proud. And he didn’t want anyone to make fun of that, and so I made fun of it. And it made him mad and he cried and he cried and he cried,” said De Sica, “and then I got my picture.” And De Sica ended by saying—“Afterward I grabbed him and kissed him.”

It’s typical, yes. You use such methods, you always have to. Otherwise you can’t expect a child of five or six to be so brilliant in faking emotions, you see.

De Sica and his writer, Zavattini, both told me that their problems were to develop concrete actions within a scene so that, in the final analysis, the people were doing relatively simple things—picking up a coffee pot, closing a door, and so forth. The attempt to juxtapose all of these elements in the film made the person seem to be performing. Is there something of this approach in the way you construct scenes?

Very similar, yes indeed. In the domestic scenes of The Big City it’s all like that. Everyone is doing something and speaking at the same time, and the story is advancing and the drama developing and the relationships. It’s like that all the way through. Every scene has some sort of domestic action being performed all the time, and the time of day is being very strongly established in the lighting.

How did you handle the gradual changes of daylight in that film?

With Subrata Mitra and his assistant—who is now doing my camera work—we have devised a system of lighting whereby in a studio we can simulate daylight to a fantastic degree. It fools everybody, the best professionals. It’s a boost sort of light we use. If it’s a day-scene, we try to imitate available light by not using any direct lights; instead, we use bounce lights all the way through. Particularly if you saw Charulata—it’s my best film from many points of view. And in The World of Apu, his little room, that had a very convincing actual location atmosphere due to our lighting. Yet it’s a studio set. The lighting we use through the windows and also from the side of the camera is all bounce light, you see, and it’s very carefully graded for various times of the days. We may use a white card at various positions—here, there, like blackboards. Different greys, so that it’s one kind of lighting for a cloudy day, one for sun, one for mid-day, one for early morning—it’s all varied. In The World of Apu the matching of light is exceptional, and of course matching is not just a matter of lighting but it’s also the soundtrack, which is being matched all the time, because you’re carrying over sound from shot to shot, you see.

I read in American Cinematographer an article by Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s cameraman—they had just finished shooting Through a Glass Darkly—and Nykvist goes to great lengths describing the wonderful system that they have devised with bounce lights. Which we had been using for the last twelve years.

As I said, the Benares house where Apu lives is a studio set. We had a cloth stretched overhead, you see, for the light from above. Our lighting gives you a kind of dark eye-socket effect, but it doesn’t matter really, because it’s not a question of beautifying everybody. Ultimately it pays off, because you are sticking to a realistic mood.

But even on location, what we’ve been doing, instead of using those tinfoils and silver-paper reflectors—of course, you have to use those—but for all our close shots we have this enormous white cloth stretched so that you get that soft bounce. In Kanchenjungha, a color film, we had interior shots in the hotel, but we had no lights for color, so what we did was to use two or three large mirrors, about four feet square. We reflected the sunlight into the room onto stretched cloth, and that was just wonderful. You have to have sunlight, of course, to be able to do that; if it’s a cloudy day you’re finished. But if you have sun and you have mirrors, you reflect the sunlight into the room through the window. It’s worth it for the quality you get. You don’t feel the presence of lights around at all. They are not reflected in all sorts of little glistening props and things.

The Apu Trilogy: Every Common Sight Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty, November 17, 2015

The Apu Trilogy: Behind the Universal Criterion essaty by Girish Shambu, November 19, 2015

UpperStall Karan Bali

moviediva [Laura Boyes]

"The Hunger Artist" by J. Hoberman - Reocities J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, April 11, 1995

My Years With Apu a memoir by Satyajit Ray, a book review by Acquarello

Indian film pioneer Vijaya Mulay looks back on her career: Pather panchali (the story of the road) Vijaya Mulay from Jump Cut, Fall 2002

From Fiction to Film Dilip Basu from The India Post, reprinted at Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection (Undated)

The Hindu : Path-breaking PATHER Path-Breaking Pather, by Deepa Ganesh from The Hindu, September 4, 2004

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road): A film by Satyajit Ray ... SatyajitRay.org

The Miraculous Apu Trilogy | The New Yorker Richard Brody, May 6, 2015

Satyajit Ray: a retrospective - Financial Times Amit Chaudhuri, August 9, 2013

Parash Pathar: The most criminally underrated film of Satyajit Ray's ... Bhaskar Chattopadhyay from First Post, June 25, 2017

Pather Panchali and the Poetry of the Particular | Oklahoma City ... Michael J. Anderson from the Oklahoma City Museum of Art

Pather Panchali | Film at The Digital Fix Mark Boydell

DVD Verdict (Bryan Byun) dvd review

DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [1/5]

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover, also reviewing THE WORLD OF APU

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray

DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion Blu-Ray

The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw- Criterion Blu-Ray]

The Apu Trilogy (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Neil Lumbard, Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole] Criterion Blu-Ray

LetterBoxd [Edgar Cochran] reviews the Apu Trilogy, July 4, 2013

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy Honors Film's Power to ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 6, 2015

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy Restored | The Hudson Review Erick Neher reviews the Apu Trilogy, August 2015

The Apu Trilogy on Notebook | MUBI Greg Gerke reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 11, 2015

With three films — the landmark Apu Trilogy — the Indian filmmaker ... Bilge Ebiri reviews the Apu Trilogy from The Nashville Scene, July 16, 2015

The Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West reviews the Apu Trilogy, November 17, 2015

Apu Trilogy: Revived from Flames | Moving Image Archive News Peter Monaghan, December 28, 2015

"Art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards" Richard Phillips reviews the Apu Trilogy from The World Socialist Website, August 2, 2001, also seen here: World Socialist Web Site

The Humanists: Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy (1955-1959 - 3quarksdaily Colin Marshall reviews the Apu Trilogy from 3 Quarks Daily, August 24, 2009

PopOptiq (Jeremy Carr) reviews the Apu Trilogy, November 24, 2015

The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959) Richard Corliss reviews the Apu Trilogy from Time magazine, February 12, 2005, which links his original review here: TIME Magazine, Sep. 26, 1960 >>

“THE APU TRILOGY” (Directed by Satyajit Ray, 1955/1956/1959) (The ... Raymond Benson reviews the Apu Trilogy from Cinema Retro, November 27, 2015

In Review (Adam Suraf) review reviews the Apu Trilogy

2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 (Voted #17) Darren Hughes reviews the Apu Trilogy

About.com Home - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine] reviews the Apu Trilogy

The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 07, 2015

The L Magazine: Jessica Loudis reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 06, 2015

official Apu Trilogy webpage SatyajitRay.org

The L Magazine: Joseph Jon Lanthier

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson July 08, 2015

Steve Rhodes retrospective [2/4]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A+]

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also seen here: Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

"A Slanted Canon" Kevin Lee from Asian American Film, September 5, 2002

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955) at Doc Films | The University ... capsule review

Time Out London: Geoff Andrew

BBC Films review Tom Dawson

"The universe in his backyard" Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, May 2, 2002

Pather Panchali Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, May 3, 2002

The Apu Trilogy Rob Mackie from The Guardian, March 21, 2003

Pather Panchali: No 12 best arthouse film of all time Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, October 20, 2010

"Filmi Funda Pather Panchali (1955)" The Telegraph, April 20, 2005

South china Morning Post [Matthew Scott]

The Apu Trilogy Movie Review & Film Summary (1959) | Roger Ebert

Cinematic Poetry: The Restoration of "The Apu Trilogy" | Balder and ... Steven Boone and Brian Tallerico from the Ebert site, May 11, 2015

Critic's Choice/Film; Indian Classic of 1955 Restored and Reissued Stephen Holden from The New York Times, April 7, 1995

HOLIDAY MOVIES/DVD'S; The World of Satyajit Ray S.Z. from The New York Times, November 2, 2003

Restored Apu Trilogy Returns Satyajit Ray's Humane Work to Theaters ... The New York Times, May 7, 2015

Apu Trilogy entry at Wikipedia

DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze] also seen here: The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray - Satyajit Ray - DVD Beaver

The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic capsule review of book written by Andrew Robinson, from I.B. Tauris

APARAJITO (The Unvanquished)

India (110 mi) 1956

Aparajito Joshua Rothkopf from City Pages

Satyajit Ray was once regularly included with Jean Renoir and Vittorio De Sica as being among the cinema's greatest humanists working in miniature. I say once because the passing of time has not only shown Ray to be a blip on the monolithically populist landscape of Indian film, but an artist deceptively isolated from his subject, creating works that were warmly received by the West while remaining intellectually removed from Bengali culture. (In that sense, the stronger comparison may be to Luchino Visconti.) In any case, Ray's Apu trilogy is a major achievement: The films create an uncommonly rich universe, though, as that praise might imply, it's a universe unto itself. (No wonder Ray's model wasn't vigorously extended by others.) Aparajito (1956) is the best of the three, following young Apu's departure for school and eventual loss of his mother and his bearings. Perhaps in the interest of expediently preserving Ray's stature, some critics have made the case that the middle installment stands up well on its own--and it does. Still, its devastating emotional wallop requires one's experience of the boy's adventures in Pather Panchali; there's no reason not to begin there. As in all three films, the real star is Subrata Mitra's camera: always at the perfect distance, innovatively marshalling available light to showcase the inner workings of a natural world and the heartbreaking urges of adolescence alike.

DVD Times Mark Boydell

Following on from Pather Panchali which left the weary family leaving their ancestral village for Benares, we find them living in relative poverty though Apu is enjoying the pleasure of being able to roam around the sprawling town. His father is continuing to work as a priest by the river Ganges though the money he gets from it never seems to be enough... The mother though happy to have left the village is a bit overwhelmed by the living conditions that leave little privacy from the neighbours...

Using the same actors from Pather Panchali, Ray's second film is sylistically more mature (though many directors would kill to ever exhibit the style displayed in his début) but also slightly more disjointed plot-wise. The film does cover a much larger timespan and changes the lead actor halfway through making it slightly more complex to keep a unity of tone from the performances. That said the film explores with great tenderness and insight the invisible ties that bind a family together and the external pressures that can tear it apart.

Ray's use of symbolism harks back to the first film in the trilogy and many of the allusions will be missed on the casual viewer but attention to detail is always rewarded in Ray's films. The theme of the train, for example, appears in all three films - a symbol of modernisation, a source of seperation and, for some, unwanted changes to old traditions. The image composition is obviously well thought out but manages to avoid being too artificial or over-technical. Though not much actually happens plotwise - one could summarise the movie on the back of a matchbox - the emotional journey portrayed by Ray is complex, dense and compelling making the film a classic of Indian cinema.

Satyajit Ray - Explore - The Criterion Collection

[3.5/4.0] (dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film, with the English title "The Unvanquished", is the second installment of Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy".

Although it is can be coherent story when viewed by itself, it definitely builds upon the context provided in "Pather Panchali". That narrative concluded with the Roy family leaving the ancestral village to seek a better existence in Benares, the holy city on the Ganga (Ganges). This film picks up at that point, and we see that the Roys' fortunes have improved. Although they live in a shared house, Hari's (Kanu Bannerjee) regular work as a priest brings in a steady income and Apu (Pinaki Sengupta as the child, Smaran Ghosal as the adolescent) has made new friends and he is thriving. Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee) still worries, but they have found the stability she had been seeking. However, this all changes when Hari dies of a sudden illness. With the death of her daughter (which occurred in the previous film) and her husband, Sarbojaya now only has Apu. She decides to move them to the countryside, and there Apu is able to learn priestly duties from his grand-uncle. However, Apu aspires to go to school, and with determination and their meager savings, he is able to attend. At school he becomes an outstanding student, and earns the opportunity for further studies in Calcutta on scholarship. Going away to school has opened a new world for Apu, but it has also separated him from Sarbojaya.

Once again, Satyajit Ray has sculpted a masterpiece. It continues the saga of the trilogy, but it also explores somewhat different themes. "Pather Panchali" dealt with the road of life, this film focuses more narrowly on the dynamics of an individual relationship, namely that of Sarbojaya and Apu. As a result, the pace of this film is more crisp, with limited use of interspersed cinematic flourishes which would slow the narrative. The issues of commitment and dependence are explored. Sarbojaya displays the strength of her spirit by not being broken from the hardships that have befallen her. The soberness of the story is tempered with small nuggets of simple humor. As in the previous film, this film is backed with the delightful and appropriate music of Ravi Shankar.

The acting performances are outstanding, although few characters are given exposure besides Sarbojaya and Apu. Kanu Bannerjee is again exceptional, as she handles the character's evolution into a world- weary but resolved and loving mother. Smaran Ghosal does a fantastic job as the adolescent Apu. The character is naive, and often self- absorbed, from simple childish immaturity. Although he does not intend to be uncaring, his determination blinds him to the requirements of responsibility. This is a multifaceted character and Ghosal is able to combine all the parts into a credible whole.

As Apu discovers a passion for learning, he immerses himself in that world, which unwittingly separates him from his mother. Apu proudly recounts what he has learned to Sarbojaya, and she shows her happiness in seeing her son doing well as something he loves, a success which eluded his father. However, in these scenes, like Apu describing the positions of the sun, earth and moon to Sarbojaya, it is obvious that this is a foreign world to her. Eventually, his passion takes him to another city, and essentially away from Sarbojaya. It is wrenching to see the conflicts involved with Apu's decision to study away in Calcutta. Apu's intoxication with knowledge is so endearing and his drive to succeed is so overriding that it is wholely understandable that he does not see how his departure would affect his mother. Sarbojaya's desire for Apu to stay with her is also understandable because she desperately wants to keep her last remaining treasure with her, not because she wants to restrict Apu in any way. She shows her tremendous strength of character by not being possessive of Apu. Eventually fate unrolls the results of the decisions the individuals make.

Highly recommended. Ray has crafted another masterpiece which captures the drama of the human condition in a simple story. The story is engaging and moving. It can be watched on its own, but for full appreciation, it should be viewed after "Pather Panchali."

The Apu Trilogy: Every Common Sight Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty, November 17, 2015

The Apu Trilogy: Behind the Universal Criterion essaty by Girish Shambu, November 19, 2015

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

he New Yorker: Richard Brody May 06, 2015

Aparajito | Film at The Digital Fix Mark Boydell

DVD Verdict Bryan Byun

Aparajito Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Criterion Blu-Ray

The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Apu Trilogy | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jake Cole, Criterion Blu-Ray

“THE APU TRILOGY” (Directed by Satyajit Ray, 1955/1956/1959) (The ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray

LetterBoxd [Edgar Cochran] reviews the Apu Trilogy, July 4, 2013

The Village Voice: Stephanie Zacharek May 05, 2015, Stephanie Zacharek reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 6, 2015

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy Restored | The Hudson Review Erick Neher reviews the Apu Trilogy, August 2015

The Apu Trilogy on Notebook | MUBI Greg Gerke reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 11, 2015

With three films — the landmark Apu Trilogy — the Indian filmmaker ... Bilge Ebiri reviews the Apu Trilogy from The Nashville Scene, July 16, 2015

The Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West reviews the Apu Trilogy, November 17, 2015

Apu Trilogy: Revived from Flames | Moving Image Archive News Peter Monaghan, December 28, 2015

"Art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards" Richard Phillips reviews the Apu Trilogy from The World Socialist Website, August 2, 2001, also seen here: World Socialist Web Site

The Humanists: Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy (1955-1959 - 3quarksdaily Colin Marshall reviews the Apu Trilogy from 3 Quarks Daily, August 24, 2009

PopOptiq (Jeremy Carr) reviews the Apu Trilogy, November 24, 2015

The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959) Richard Corliss reviews the Apu Trilogy from Time magazine, February 12, 2005, which links his original review here: TIME Magazine, Sep. 26, 1960 >>

In Review (Adam Suraf) review reviews the Apu Trilogy

2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 (Voted #17) Darren Hughes reviews the Apu Trilogy

About.com Home - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine] reviews the Apu Trilogy

The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 07, 2015

The L Magazine: Jessica Loudis reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 06, 2015

official Apu Trilogy webpage SatyajitRay.org

The L Magazine: Jessica Loudis May 06, 2015

Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson July 08, 2015

Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon

Aparajito Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also here: Strictly Film School: Acquarello

Aparajito | Chicago Reader

The Apu Trilogy Movie Review & Film Summary (1959) | Roger Ebert

Cinematic Poetry: The Restoration of "The Apu Trilogy" | Balder and ... Steven Boone and Brian Tallerico from the Ebert site, May 11, 2015

The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray - Satyajit Ray - DVD Beaver

JALSAGHAR (The Music Room)

India (100 mi) 1958

Time Out review Tom Milne

Ray's fourth film, a wonderfully evocative anecdote about an elderly aristocrat, slowly dying amid the crumbling splendours of the past, who decides to defy the egalitarian age that is encroaching. For all the rough edges, there is something of Welles here as the ageing aristocrat sits alone in his Xanadu, like Mr Clay in The Immortal Story, dreaming amid the remnants of past magnificence while the bulldozers of modern civilisation hum outside the walls. Something, too, of Chekhov's tender irony as he rebels in a gesture of glorious folly, bankrupting himself to hire the best classical musicians around, dust off the vast chandelier, and bring his ancestral music room to glittering life once more for just one last regal extravaganza. Slow, rapt and hypnotic, it is - given some appreciation of Indian music - a remarkable experience.

Murali Krishnan retrospective [3.0/4.0]

[3.0/4.0] (dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film also has the English title "The Music Room".

Indian culture is thousands of years old and has undergone changes at different times. This film symbolically deals with a recent change, the decline of the landed gentry. Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) spends his time idly occupying his large, empty palace. Except for a few loyal servants, he is alone. The meager remains of a large fortune are just enough to support the decrepit household. Spurred by the sound of distant music, he reviews his past in flashback.

At one time he is a rich and respected zamindar (landowner). Although it is clear that his fortune is slipping, due to the nearby river which is slowly swallowing his lands, he remains unconcerned with the details of managing his estate. His main focus of interest is in music, and he makes his jalsaghar the inner sanctum of his splendid palace. There he gives frequent concerts, employing the finest musicians. One of his tenants, Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), is accumulating wealth by serving as a moneylender. Although Ganguly's fortune is waxing as Roy's is waning, Ganguly always defers to Roy and pays him the courtesy and respect that all tenants accord the zamindar.

The main conflict in the story is not between individuals, but between the ways of life disturbed by the inevitable forces of change. Roy represents the ideals of the past when prestige was passed through bloodlines, while Ganguly represents the modern ideals of earned status. The two men are not antagonists but in a way, they are rivals. Roy contemptuously dismisses Ganguly's profession as undignified. Ganguly is annoyed that people still submissively esteem the bankrupt landlord, but do not fully respect him because he is "a self-made man, no pedigree." It is implied that it is fate, not necessarily the actions of the men, that is behind the shifting fortunes of Roy and Ganguly. Although Roy was generally irresponsible, there was not much he could have done to save his lands. As for Ganguly, had he existed at an earlier time, he would not have had the opportunity to rise above the level of his birth. Change is inescapable, and although it helps some, it destroys others.

Satyajit Ray based the screenplay on the novel by Tarashankar Banerjee. The cinematography is evocative as Ray attempts to extract layers of meaning from the visuals. Ray intends to immerse the viewer in an ocean of music and images to fully experience the beauty and loss of the old order. Although Ganguly actually appears infrequently, Basu is able to define the character's lack of culture without making him exaggerated. The rest of the character is excellently drawn by inference, with the distant sound of his electric generator, by servants informing Roy that sahibs are visiting him. Biswas occupies the bulk of the screen time, and effectively defines the character with restraint. Roy speaks very little, so Biswas is able to communicate much of the character's emotion simply through facial and physical expression. The story builds the character to a crescendo at the final concert and symbolically at the dawn of the new day. The main difficulty with the film is its pacing and length. The extended musical numbers already prolong the story, and an almost plodding pace is employed. The theme, although familiar, is presented meaningfully.

Recommended. This film is not without flaw, but it is still a powerful story. It feels too long for its material, but viewers who appreciate classical Indian music and dance are rewarded with extended performances.

India x 2 – Offscreen Donato Totaro from Offscreen, September 1997

The Music Room is a film led to greatness by Satyajit Ray’s devotion to a single mood: elegiac. Ray isn’t alone in sculpting this great piece. The acting by Chabi Biswas as the crumbling aristocrat Huzur Biswambhar Roy, cinematography by Subrata Mitra and music direction by Ustad Vilayat Khan all contribute immensely. Set in the 1930’s with the emerging nouveau riche, Roy is the last in a long of rich patriarchs, stumbling as his estate diminishes but clinging till the end to his refined means. Roy lives in a mansion in the middle of a desert, a symbol of his isolation from encroaching destitute. Roy is frequently filmed alone, as are other subjects (his dog, horse, elephant). The film begins with the elderly Huzur sitting alone, staring blankly in his back garden overlooking a once proud space. He is served by one of his two humble and loyal servants. The story flashes back some 15-20 years to a more glorious time when the younger Huzur, with his young son Khoka and wife Padma (the realist/pragmatist to Huzur’s idealism) was the class of his region, hosting luxurious concerts in his home. Huzur’s centerpiece, his ivory tower and final refuge from the external reality/realism is the titular music room. The room reflects Huzur, his pride, his heirloom, his inner soul. Ray draws us in spatially, in concentric circles, from the outer oasis, to the backyard pool/yard, to the mansion, to the music room and further yet, the music room’s stage. Likewise Mitra’s camera often, and nearly always in relation to Roy, dollies inwards toward Roy. The movement not only serves to honor the character and make us feel more empathy toward him, but counterpoints the film’s maze-like construction.

Many of the film’s best moments take place in the music room. For example, the first concert during the flashback, in which the camera encircles Roy surrounded by his guests and cuts into the long takes only to underscore Roy’s sense of tranquillity and contentment; the concert which is interrupted by the tragic news of his son and wife’s drowning; and the final concert, Roy’s swan song which leads to his psychological break from reality into momentary insanity (he imagines the candles in the room extinguishing themselves one by one). In each of the concerts the music varies. In the first we have more of an ensemble piece; in the second the singer dominates with his emotive voicing; and a phenomenal dancer highlights the third. The final concert occurs years after Roy, saddened by the double deaths of his wife and son and his failing estate, has closed the music room and remained living on the mansion’s second floor. With all his gold, silver, and jewellery gone all that remains is a little money. He uses it to stage one final concert. Roy’s continued carelessness toward his economic state can be read in several ways. If we read it critically, it becomes a sign of his selfishness and disregard for his families well-being. In another sense his gesture can be seen as an act of defiance against the upstart moneylender who is out to show Roy up, and a romantic tribute to the “class of class.” A third meaning, psychological, can see the acts as a reflection of how deeply ingrained the caste system and colonialism are in India.

When the drunken Roy explains to his servant why he is different from Tulsi, the estate manager, he speaks in English and refers to his “blood,” and then points to the three portraits of his ancestral forefathers (father, grandfather, great grandfather) that hang around the music room’s huge mirror. Ray’s genius is in balancing these three readings so that our emotional relation to the character is complex and in a sense more critical and involved. The film ends with the drunken-maddened Roy, against the wishes of his servants (servile to the end), riding his horse for one last jaunt through the desert. The final moments are reminiscent of Kenji Mizoguchi, especially Sansho the Bailiff (camera movement that moves away from the center action; set in an arid zone). Roy is thrown violently off his horse. The servants run to their fatally hurt, bleeding master. With the earlier death of his son and now himself, his rich, aristocratic lineage has come to an end. In this touching moment Ray has the camera track away (left) from the body to stop at his fallen headgear. This image dissolves to the final shot: that of the darkened chandelier swinging aimlessly in the darkened music room.

The Music Room: Distant Music Criterion essay by Philip Kemp, July 19, 2011

The Music Room (1958) - The Criterion Collection

The Music Room (1958 Satyajit Ray) Bent Clouds

Jalsaghar Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

Screencrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

Epinions DVD review [Ricardo Ramos]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

Guardian UK - Derek Malcolm's 100 Favourite FIlms Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, January 14, 1999, also seen here: "Satyajit Ray: The Music Room" and here: Hell of a party

Nashville Scene (Rob Nelson) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]

The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum

APUR SANSAR (The World of Apu)

India (105 mi) 1959

The final and weakest part of Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy (begun with Pather Panchali and continued with Aparajito), this 1959 feature follows Apu through an arranged marriage that unexpectedly blossoms and then ends tragically, followed by a dark period and eventual spiritual regeneration. Though the rhythm of the storytelling is choppy and Apu himself seems incompletely realized, the first appearance of the remarkable Sharmila Tagore as his well-to-do bride uplifts the film's middle section, and the final scene between the title hero and the son he's never known certainly carries a charge. In Bengali with subtitles.

City Pages [Jim Ridley]

In the wondrous details of his "Apu trilogy," director Satyajit Ray managed to locate the universal in the individual, asserting the irreducible humanity of all his characters--right down to the lowliest walk-on part. The aspiring writer Apu comes of age in 1957's Aparajito, the trilogy's wrenching middle chapter. But he doesn't grow up until this incandescent concluding installment (1959), a testament to the cycles of life that scrupulously avoids triumph-of-the-spirit clichés, particularly the old adage that tragedy is ennobling. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee), now a parentless, penniless bachelor, pursues his writing career from a roach-ridden Calcutta tenement; fate, a friend's wedding invitation, and a selfless gesture land him a well-born bride, Aparna, played by 14-year-old Shamila Tagore in a luminous debut. Practical and adaptable where Apu is impulsive and brooding, Aparna accepts even the poverty of their surroundings, and they prepare for their first child. As in the previous films, however, great happiness will be tempered by equal, if not greater, despair. Simple but never simplistic, anchored in almost journalistic specifics of location and character, Ray's trilogy would seem the link between the Italian neorealism of the 1940s (the filmmaker's avowed inspiration was Bicycle Thieves) and the deeply humanist Iranian strain of the 1990s. And yet few directors' films resist categorization so stubbornly as Ray's. The world outside is inspiration enough, as Ray insists in one of the most poetic dissolves in all of cinema: the fantasy in a Calcutta moviehouse morphing into the window of Apu's taxi, its crude special effects yielding to blurred city lights that seem even stranger and more magical. The paucity of means that produced Ray's original Apu film, Pather Panchali, has been amply documented. Compared to the richness that resulted, however, it is our own current cinema that appears impoverished.

Murali Krishnan retrospective [2.5/4.0]

[2.5/4.0] (dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film, with the English title "The World of Apu", is the final episode of Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy".

At the end of the narrative of "Aparajito", Apu is left alone in the world. At the beginning of this story, a few years have passed, but his fortunes have not much improved. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is forced to leave college due to the lack of money. Still, his spirit is not broken. Apu accepts that his life is destined to have hardship, but that his only recourse is to live it as fully as he can. It is difficult for him to find a job, so he does private tutoring and spends the rest of his time working on a novel. He decides to join a friend, Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee), on a trip to the countryside to attend the wedding of Pulu's cousin, Aparna (Sarmila Tagore). In a strange twist of fate, the bridegroom is struck insane so the wedding must be scrapped. The only way to salvage Aparna's honor is to find a replacement bridegroom so the wedding can take place. Apu does the noble thing and marries Aparna. He is not sure that she can be happy going from a life without need with her parents to a life of poverty with him, but Aparna makes the best of her fate and thrives in her new life. Apu is a new man now that he is focussed on married life and he and Aparna fall deeply in love. Once again, tragedy befalls Apu when Aparna dies in childbirth. This leave Apu a broken man. Apu then abandons all parts of his life, including his new son, Kajal, and embarks on a journey of introspection, hoping to find peace.

Whereas the first two chapters of the trilogy succeed because they build drama from subtlety, this film is disappointing in its rejection of that technique. Instead it opts to use melodramatic turns to drive the story, and force the narrative through wrenching contortions. The idea that a stranger would step in and rescue an abandoned bride at her wedding is a standard plot device of Indian cinema. It is slightly unfair to penalize this film for the years of formulaic overuse in films that followed it, but still this is a jarring departure from the simple universal truths of the human condition that the first two films dealt with. The change in style is so unsettling that the character of Apu presented here seems a stranger, disconnected from the character from the previous films.

The pace of the film is exceptionally slow, and while this worked well in "Pather Panchali", it is a detriment in this film. Obviously the intent was to show the depths of mourning and levels of introspection that Apu goes through, but the consequence is the assertion that Apu grieves over his latest tragedy on a scale that dwarfs the previous tragedies he had experienced. Perhaps the message being made is that the dependence on romantic love is far greater than on familial love. Perhaps it is that tragedies affect adults more than they can affect children. Neither statement feels credible. One would have expected that the hardships of his early life would have given Apu some amount of inoculation for the difficulties of adulthood. Apu actually appears self indulgent when his reaction to tragedy is compared to how his mother reacted to similar, if not greater, tragedy.

The wonderful music that backed the other films is surprisingly absent in this one, outside of a few scenes of Apu playing the flute (a talent Apu apparently picked up between the previous installment of the story and this one). Another disappointment is the performance of Soumitra Chatterjee, which is often overdone, and does not smoothly communicate the transformations undergone by the character. No other characters are given much examination.

To be fair, this is a very ambitious film that attempts to deal with the heavy topics of human emotions. The visual imagery is beautiful and evocative. It is unlucky in that it is judged by the high standards set by the masterpieces that preceded it.

Moderately recommended. Although this is not such a bad film on its own, it is definitely a disappointment after the first two magnificent parts of the trilogy. The poignancy of those films is replaced here with melodrama, sometimes overwrought. In fact, nothing from the first two films needs to be known to understand this one, so it might be best to see this one first, and then subsequently enjoy the brilliance of the others.

The Apu Trilogy: Every Common Sight Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty, November 17, 2015

The Apu Trilogy: Behind the Universal Criterion essaty by Girish Shambu, November 19, 2015

Satyajit Ray - Explore - The Criterion Collection

AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [A]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

The World of Apu | Film at The Digital Fix Mark Boydell

DVD Verdict (Bryan Byun) dvd review

Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover, also reviewing PATHER PANCHALI

The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Criterion Blu-Ray

The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Apu Trilogy (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Neil Lumbard, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Apu Trilogy | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jake Cole, Criterion Blu-Ray

“THE APU TRILOGY” (Directed by Satyajit Ray, 1955/1956/1959) (The ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro, Criterion Blu-Ray

LetterBoxd [Edgar Cochran] reviews the Apu Trilogy, July 4, 2013

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy Honors Film's Power to ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 6, 2015

Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy Restored | The Hudson Review Erick Neher reviews the Apu Trilogy, August 2015

The Apu Trilogy on Notebook | MUBI Greg Gerke reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 11, 2015

With three films — the landmark Apu Trilogy — the Indian filmmaker ... Bilge Ebiri reviews the Apu Trilogy from The Nashville Scene, July 16, 2015

The Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West reviews the Apu Trilogy, November 17, 2015

Apu Trilogy: Revived from Flames | Moving Image Archive News Peter Monaghan, December 28, 2015

"Art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards" Richard Phillips reviews the Apu Trilogy from The World Socialist Website, August 2, 2001, also seen here: World Socialist Web Site

The Humanists: Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy (1955-1959 - 3quarksdaily Colin Marshall reviews the Apu Trilogy from 3 Quarks Daily, August 24, 2009

PopOptiq (Jeremy Carr) reviews the Apu Trilogy, November 24, 2015

The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959) Richard Corliss reviews the Apu Trilogy from Time magazine, February 12, 2005, which links his original review here: TIME Magazine, Sep. 26, 1960 >>

In Review (Adam Suraf) review reviews the Apu Trilogy

2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 (Voted #17) Darren Hughes reviews the Apu Trilogy

About.com Home - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine] reviews the Apu Trilogy

The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 07, 2015

The L Magazine: Jessica Loudis reviews the Apu Trilogy, May 06, 2015

official Apu Trilogy webpage SatyajitRay.org

Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson July 08, 2015

Apur Sansar Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School: Acquarello

Edinburgh U Film Society (Neil Chue Hong) review

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

The Apu Trilogy Movie Review & Film Summary (1959) | Roger Ebert

Cinematic Poetry: The Restoration of "The Apu Trilogy" | Balder and ... Steven Boone and Brian Tallerico from the Ebert site, May 11, 2015

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Pascal Acquarello]

The Apu Trilogy Blu-ray - Satyajit Ray - DVD Beaver

DEVI (The Goddess)

India (93 mi) 1960

Murali Krishnan retrospective [2.5/4.0]

One of Satyajit Ray's greatest early films (1962), full of sensuality and ironic undertones, Devi is sufficiently critical of Hindu superstition that it was banned from foreign distribution until Nehru interceded. The plot concerns a wealthy and devout landowner in the 19th century who believes his daughter-in-law (Sharmila Tagore) is the reincarnation of the goddess Kali and convinces her that he's right. With Soumitra Chatterji and Chhabi Biswas. In Bengali with subtitles. 93 min.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Less obviously a work of humanist realism than the Apu trilogy, Ray's film is nevertheless a carefully nuanced study in religious obsession, with Biswas convinced that his daughter-in-law (Tagore) is in fact the goddess Kali reincarnated. Comparatively baroque and melodramatic in terms of its images and story, it manages to mount a lucid, finally very moving argument against the destructive nature of fanaticism and superstition, with Tagore gradually losing all sense of her own individuality. Without a doubt, it is impressive film making; but whether its very Indian concerns are of widespread interest remains a moot point.

[2.5/4.0]

(Dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film is also known by the English title "The Goddess".

Religious devotion can be a double-edged sword. Kalikinkar (Chhabi Biswas) is a widower whose two sons and their families live with him. His younger son, Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee), is away at college, but Umaprasad's young wife, Doyamoyee (Sharmila Tagore), remains at home. Doyamoyee is well liked by everyone, especially Kalikinkar, who appreciates the efforts she goes through to attend to his needs. Kalikinkar has spent years in fervent devotion to the mother goddess Kali, and it is his main solace in his old age. The balance of the household is disturbed when Kalikinkar suddenly receives a vision that his daughter-in-law is an incarnation of Kali. Kalikinkar replaces the stone idol in the prayer room with Doyamoyee, and she spends practically the entire day sitting as the object of extended worship sessions which attract people from the local area who also start believing Kalikinkar's vision.

Not everyone is convinced of Doyamoyee's holiness. The rational Umaprasad is horrified when he discovers what has happened, because he know that Doyamoyee will not protest the wishes of his father and will allow herself to be imprisoned by her respected elders. Umaprasad's older brother, Taraprasad (Purnendu Mukherjee), goes along mainly because he always agrees with his father. Taraprasad's wife, Harasundari (Karuna Bannerjee), is not educated like Umaprasad, but like him she does not understand how people can come to such a fantastic conclusion based on the whim of one man.

This story by Prabhat Mukherjee deals with a topic that is universal to the human condition. It describes events that occur in India, as well as in other parts of the world within different faiths. Strong faith, which can be a crutch to the weak, has the danger of being destructive when it eclipses rationality. Human beings, in the grip of devotion, will often see reality as they want to see it. They will interpret coincidences as convenient proofs of their delusional charade. Although they may be well-intentioned, their actions can trigger grave consequences.

Satyajit Ray effectively presents the goddess in her duality. On one hand she is a benevolent mother figure depicted as the smiling, fair-skinned Durga who brings comfort to her followers. On the other, she is a fierce and destructive force, depicted as the pitch black Kali wearing a necklace of skulls, which can destroy those who come too close to her. By mixing the various images of the goddess with the cautionary story, Ray is able to show the thin line between security and obsessiveness that is straddled by faith.

Although the film is well crafted and the story is meaningful, the main criticism is that the point made is obvious and is not quite enough to sustain a full feature film. The problem is not that the film does anything wrong, but rather, it does not cover enough ground. The main assertion of the story is of the dangers of blind faith, how it will consume those who are obsessed, and how it will be mitigated by rationality. In taking such an patent stance, the film misses making a salient statement.

Tagore gives an excellent performance as Doyamoyee, who is the only character with depth. Because she is exceptionally loving and generous as the young bride, it is easy to understand why she is so adored. She is bewildered but compliant as the object of worship. She is initially doubtful of her holiness, but she wishes to go along with what is asked of her, so her young mind is willing to accept the indulgence. Although Chatterjee and Biswas give believable performances as Umaprasad and Kalikinkar, those characters are narrowly drawn and never progress beyond the expected character types.

Recommended. This film tells a powerful story, but it is simple in ocus. It is well crafted and engrossingly intense, but the direction in which it travels is never beyond what would be expected.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Devi Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School

MyReviewer.com [Curtis Owen] also reviewing THREE DAUGHTERS

User reviews from imdb Author: Edi_Drums from London city (UK)

User reviews from imdb Author: Rex Michael Dillon (misterdillon@yahoo.com) from San Jose, CA

User reviews from imdb Author: Daniel Yates from Montreal, Canada

"Rabindranath Tagore," by Satyajit Ray - Roger Ebert's Journal

The New York Times

RABINRANATH TAGORE

India (54 mi) 1961

Rabindranath Tagore by Satyajit Ray on Vimeo entire film on YouTube (51:48)

TEEN KANYA

aka: Three Daughters

aka: Two Daughters

India (173 mi) 1961

Two Daughters | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr from the Reader

Based on two short stories by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (a third episode was cut from the film by its American distributor), Satyajit Ray's 1961 film displays his customary limpid realism and penetrating sense of character. The first tale is a tragedy about a village girl who falls in love with the postmaster temporarily stationed in her town; the second is a comedy, in which a peasant girl rebels against her parents' plans for her life on the eve of her arranged wedding.

Time Out review Tom Milne

The title should translate as Three Daughters, since the film originally comprised a trio of Tagore stories, all touching on the problems of emancipation through women of contrasting classes. In the export version, one episode was cut for reasons of length: a ghost story about a woman obsessed by her jewellery, this is comparatively weak (though extremely striking visually). But the other two are Ray at his best, particularly the tale of a young university graduate who rejects the bride his mother has selected for him, but offers to marry the village tomboy (who has caught his eye but piqued his pride by her mockery of his pretensions). A marriage is duly arranged, despite the tomboy's furious protests, and what follows is a variation on The Taming of the Shrew, wonderfully funny and tender, and played to perfection by Soumitra Chatterjee and Aparna Das Gupta. But a bitterly ironic undertone lingers despite the happy end (love prevails): too emancipated to agree to a marriage with a girl he does not love, the hero never for a moment realises that he is denying the same privilege to the girl of his choice.

KONANGAL: 21st Sept 2014; Satyajit Ray's TEEN KANYA

[3.5/4.0] (dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film, with the English title "Three Daughters", was originally composed of three segments, but only two ("The Postmaster" and "Samapti") were screened because the third story ("Monihara") is still in the process of restoration. Because of this, the film is sometimes distributed under the title "Two Daughters." All the segments are based on short stories by Rabindranath Tagore.

The Postmaster

Nandal (Anil Chatterjee) is a postal worker, who after having lived his entire life in the city, receives an assignment to be the postmaster of a rural village. The back room of the tiny post office is his living quarters, and all the household duties are tended to by the orphan servant girl, Ratan (Chandana Banerjee). Nandal has a hard time adjusting to village life which he finds difficult and monotonous. Besides the lack of urban comforts, such as professional music recitals, there is also the serious threat of malaria. Nandal becomes attached to Ratan because of her sweetness and eagerness to please him, so he begins to teach her to read and write.

Nandal contemplates requesting a transfer because rural life is difficult for him and he misses the city. Ratan does not have such options, her desires are much more simple, and although her station in life does not offer much, it is all she requires and she does not even consider that she could be anywhere else.

The success of the story is due to its restraint. Although Ratan is a sympathetic character, it would have been too easy to make her pitiful. She is unfortunate in that fate has placed her in a position of restriction, but she is not portrayed as abused or exploited in an attempt to force her character into a sorrowful state. Instead it is the simplicity and purity of her spirit that make her endearing, and the viewer cannot help but embracing her. Her innocence, dedication, and warmth make her a bright star piercing the darkness.

The story shows that the overt events in life, while melodramatic, are not necessarily the most significant. A loss through ignorance is often more devastating than a loss through death. The story is moving as it shows that the most precious things are sometimes taken for granted because they are also not obvious. This is a story about duty, commitment, loyalty, and attachment. These are serious topics and the film perfectly combines its pieces into the simple story without any wasted effort. It is not too long or too short, and it conveys its message.

Samapti

According to his mother, it is time for Amulya (Soumitra Chatterjee) to get married. He has come home on vacation from his studies and just wants to rest, but his mother has found a girl that she would like him to marry. Amulya is not at all interested, but to appease his mother he goes to see her. He has confirmed his mother's lack of judgement in such matters, but she is persistent that he should get married. The only girl of any interest to him is Mrinmoyee (Aparna Sen), nicknamed Puglee ("Crazy"), because she is a tomboy with no sense of feminine dignity. She spends her time playing with boys, running around, climbing trees, and the like. Although no one would see her as a suitable wife, Amulya sees a fiery spirit that is increased in attractiveness in comparison to the qualities that his mother finds desirable.

The story deals with desire and expectation, and how individuals are laced in positions where they must evaluate their roles. What Amulya is attracted to in the single girl is not possible to have in a wife. When one sees the beauty of a wild animal and desires to capture that beauty by keeping it as a pet, the creature is broken, and the beauty of its spirit is lost by its imprisonment. In a way, Amulya is attempting to tame the wild creature, but that may be a selfish act.

The main flaw with the film is that it runs too long. It starts well but drags with slow progress towards the end. The cinematography has less of the visual symbolism often used by Satyajit Ray, but is adequate as this story has a mostly straight-forward narrative.

Highly recommended. "The Postmaster" is a perfect vignette. "Samapti" is not as good in comparison, but still a solid effort. Satyajit Ray superbly directs the film which is based on the powerful short stories of Rabindranath Tagore.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Teen Kanya Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

MyReviewer.com [Curtis Owen] also reviewing DEVI

User reviews from imdb Author: Bryan Siegfried (drsiegfried@hotmail.com) from Indianapolis, USA

User reviews from imdb Author: mazumdar from Arlington County, Virginia

User reviews from imdb Author: Ven-3 from California

Channel 4 Film capsule review also seen here: Channel 4 Film capsule review

Murali Krishnan retrospective [4.0/4.0]

KANCHENJUNGHA

India (102 mi) 1962

Time Out review Tom Milne

Set in the beautiful hill station of Darjeeling - a point suspended in time between modern India and the past - Ray's first colour film would have delighted Henry James with its sense of the past and concern for the future. While on holiday with his downtrodden family, whose lives he has unconsciously ruined by benevolently but firmly bending them to his will, an ageing industrial tycoon finds his values shattered by a chance meeting with a young man who refuses to be ruled. As the characters converse on the circling terraces of Observatory Hill in a strictly formalised pattern of walks whose musical structure is underlined by recurring images (the paths crossed and recrossed in different circumstances; a little girl eternally circling on her pony), the themes begin to harmonise contrapuntally and subtly shape all these lives into new configurations. And over it all broods Kanchenjungha, a majestic, inscrutable éminence rose...

User reviews from imdb Author: kunalsen_7684 from India

This Ray film is fraught with imagery, symbolism, metaphors and weaves in a few independent stories together to culminate into an understanding of the human psyche. Ray comes out of the black and white neo real phase of his career and Kanchenjunga would mark the nascent stages in the second phase of his career- a career that had so brilliantly taken off with the bona fide masterpiece that is Pather Panchali. Coming to Kanchenjunga (the name belongs to the world's third tallest mountain peak which is said to be elusive to human eye as it's perennially clouded due to fog), the film follows a group of tourists on vacation in Darjeeling, a hill station - the first thing that comes to your mind is just how fraught the film is with metaphors- linking the human mind and attitudes to nature's marvels- thereby the dense fog which prevents our protagonist (played mesmerisingly by Chabi Biswas) from seeing Kanchenjunga clearly is symbolic of his myopic opinions and it is lifted in the last scene where after stripping himself away from all his erstwhile prejudices, he is able to view Kanchejunga for the first time. But, in the end, Kanchenjunga remains a film about human emotions which also talks about the socio- economic divide and dwells into the complex inflexible minds of some of us.

User reviews from imdb Author: Kolkatar Jeeshu from USA

Ray's first Color film, a cinematic masterpiece, filmic experiment at its height and incidentally my most favorite. For some reasons, this movie is least understood among the Bengali speaking people and abroad as well and hence remains least appreciated.

The single most noteworthy feature about this movie is the equivalence of real time (total time of the day being depicted in movie) and movie time (total screening time). At least among the Indian movie makers, Ray is the first one who had done such experiment and of course, he succeeded comprehensively.

In order to understand the screenplay of 'Kanchanjangha', I would recommend every non-Bengali speaking people, for the first time at least, to look for a good and authentic translation of the script and then only they should sit for watching this movie. You have to keep one thing in mind; Ray's screenplay is extremely dependent on the usage of dialogue and silence and they are, in this case, written in Bengali Language and set into Bengali context. Unlike Kieslowski, Kurosawa and Bergman, Ray's imagery lacks the dramatic element. So, in order to understand 'the drama' it's recommended to understand his language to the extent possible.

User reviews from imdb Author: Shahbaz Nazrul from San Diego, CA

This movie is Ray's first

1. Colored movie 2. Movie whose script is written by Ray himself 3. Movie whose story duration is only one day.

After Kanchenjungha Ray made a number of B/W movies until 1973 when he made second colored movie "The Distant Thunder." In most of his career Ray used to make movies out of novels and stories written by famous BENGALI writers. E.g. his best known works of APU TRILOGY (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar) are actually movie version of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novels. In the same way he made movies out of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's stories and novels (e.g. Three Daughters, Charulata and Ghare-Baire). But this is one of the three movies whose writing credits fully goes to Ray himself (other 2 are Nayak and Agantuk). In all these three movies he in someway tries to speak about his own thoughts and philosophies of life via the characters of these movies. And of course all of these 3 movies are great works of Ray.

Indranath Choudhury (Chhabi Bishwas) along with his whole family goes to the beautiful hilly city of Darjeeling to spend vacation. Members of his family and some other characters of the movie start reacting differently influenced by the immense beauty and power of Kanchenjungha (Highest pick of India, also it is one peak of the mighty Himalayas). Anima (daughter of Indranath) confesses her secret love affair to her husband and assures him to amend the relationship for the betterment of Tuklu (their daughter). Labyanya Roy Choudhury (w/o Indranath) becomes worried for her husband's plan of giving their daughter Monisha's marriage to a more materialistic guy (Banarjee). Ashok, a tormented poor young man also refuses to accept any job offer from Indranath. In fact the mesmerizing effect of Kanchenjungha on the characters of this film is done with incredible perfection. On my judgement, Kanchenjungha along with Nayak are the best movies made by Ray. I also rate those films as two great movies ever made in film history.

[4.0/4.0]

(Dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

The purpose of a vacation is often to forget the details of daily life, using the fresh surroundings to cleanse the mind and to reflect upon some aspects of life from a different perspective. The Choudhuri family is spending a some time at the beautiful hill station of Darjeeling doing just that, and as the story opens, they are nearing the end of their trip. The majestic peak of Kanchenjungha has been obscured by clouds, and likewise, some of the individuals are symbolically having difficulty seeing with clarity what they want in their own lives. The patriarch, Indranath (Chhabi Biswas) has no problem understanding what has made him a powerful and successful industrialist -- adopting the values of the system. His main concern at the present time is the impending marriage of his youngest daughter, Monisha (Alaknanda Roy). She is at a good age to marry, but she has not completed her studies, and is unsure of what she wants for herself. Indranath approves of the good match they have found in Bannerjee (N. Viswanathan), who is a rising professional with a bright future. However, Monisha fears he would make a dull, although secure, husband.

Ashoke (Arun Mukherjee) is a struggling young man, on holiday with his uncle, who had tutored Indranath's son Anil when he was a little boy. By coincidence, they run into Indranath, and it seems to be good fortune that they may be able to use this connection to land Ashoke a job that he desperately needs. The meeting also offers an introduction to Monisha who sees in Ashoke some characteristic that she finds more appealing than Banerjee. Also with the family is Monisha's older sister, Anima (Anubha Gupta), and her husband Shankar (Subrata Sen Sharma), and it is clear that their relationship has become strained.

Satyajit Ray displays the full force of his talent in this film. In addition to producing and directing it, he wrote the original screenplay and composed the original music. This was also Ray's first color film, and the use of color is important because it displays the natural beauty of Darjeeling as an integral component of the film. (Ray returns to black and white for his next few films.) All the characters are enchanted by the natural beauty, which fills them with a sense of idealism and allows them to evaluate themselves. Ray effectively communicates this through the visual imagery and through the charming music.

The writing is exceptionally poignant in its decision to remain understated. Although characters reach decisions at their turning points, it is always clear that it was done in the intoxication of idealism. The possibility that they may think differently when they return to their mundane city lives is never expressed explicitly, but it is an obvious possibility. The dilemma faced by Monisha is usually not a dilemma in formulaic stories; often a woman is being forced to marry a despicable man she dislikes while desiring a virtuous man she cannot have. That is not the case here. Both men are decent, likable men. Bannerjee is noticeably older than Monisha and as a result he represents to her the selling of youthful idealism for safe, drab existence. Her dilemma is not that she trying to escape this path, but that she is not sure if it is what she wants. When she comes to a decision, this will be a possibility.

The story contains many parallel subplots. As characters stroll through the scenic hill station, they chance upon the other characters and establish the many interconnected components of the story as a whole. The viewer remains a detached observer, just like the native villagers who are going about their daily lives as the outsiders are on vacation.

The subplot of Anima and Shankar does not contribute as much as the other component stories, but its inclusion adds a more dire dimension that the other threads In contrast, the character of Monisha's brother Anil (Anil Chatterjee) appears briefly, mostly for comic relief. However, he also represents how some people have the luxury of being light-hearted when dealing with issues that are much more serious to others.

The acting in the film is uniformly superb, with the standout performance being that of Indranath by Chhabi Biswas. Indranath is a much deeper character than he may initially appear. Being that the story takes place not long after Indian independence, his admiration of all things British represents his knowledge of how to work within the system. In the course of his stroll with Ashoke, he delivers a long speech of his beliefs, which basically is a demonstration of how he has sold out at every step and how he reaped the rewards. He has been a complete success and "his lordship" usually gets what he wants, but it is real concern and not selfishness that guides him. This time, when the mist clears and characters see the elusive Kanchenjungha, he may or may not get what he wants.

Highly recommended. This one of Ray's more obscure films, but it is a masterpiece. It interweaves several story lines into a rich tapestry, and uses multiple layers of symbolism. Ray exercised total creative input into the film and executed it flawlessly.

Kanchanjangha : A Summer Place by Satyajit Ray reviewed by Kumud Biswas June 16, 2002

OSR [John Nesbit]

ABHIJAAN (The Expedition)

India (150 mi) 1962

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review

Producer Bijoy Chatterjee planned to direct his friend Ray's adaptation of a novel by Tarashankar Banerjee himself, but got cold feet when shooting began, and left it to Ray. As a result, its story of taxi driver Soumitra Chatterjee (not ideally cast) making a new start in rural Bengal, but falling under the influence of a local opium runner, is not altogether characteristic Ray, tending as it does towards slightly rough-hewn melodrama. Even so, the gradual build-up of tension is expertly controlled, Bollywood star Waheeda Rehman is affecting as a village girl kidnapped into prostitution, and there's deft use of local landscape with the imposing Shyamnagar rocks a metaphor for the guilt carried by the protagonist as he becomes increasingly aware of his waywardness. Not major Ray, but effective and accessible enough to register his greatest success at the Bengali box office.

DVD Times Noel Magahey

Disillusioned that his wife has ran away on him and embittered that, despite the noble warrior blood of his ancestors running through his veins he can only get employment as a taxi driver, Narsingh's increasingly drunk and reckless behaviour even gets him sacked from that lowly job. Travelling to Shyamnagar in his beloved 1930s Chrysler however, Singhji (Soumitra Chatterjee – Apu in Ray’s The World of Apu) meets a wealthy businessman Sukhanram (Charuprakash Ghosh) on the road, his cart overturned. Sukhanram offers Singhji money and influence, knowing that not only can the town can make good use of a taxi service, but it will come in useful for his own various legal and illegal business transactions.

The decision to take up work with Sukhanram is a difficult one for Singhji, who has very strong ideas on mixing with people with lower castes, on transporting women in his taxi, of consorting with those who have converted to Christianity. He appears to have no strong religious beliefs of his own, but is rather more guided by his notions about his own position – wishing to rise above his humble employment into the warrior role that is his family’s past. His principles then are easily swayed, particularly when, having been fired from his job and having no friends in the new village, he needs to regain some money and status.

Singhji consequently accepts the hospitality of the businessman while he also make friends with Josef (Gyanesh Mukherjee), a former neighbour from his home village, a lower caste family who have since converted to Christianity. In this way, and through a number of similar parallels in Abhijan (‘The Expedition’), Satyajit Ray, as a measure of his great artistry as a director, takes a storyline that is little more than a simple morality tale and makes it into something much more complex. The most obvious example is the use of the “Uncle and Nephew” stones that stand outside the village, which people believe represent the weight of sin on man, and where a number of key scenes in the film take place. There is also some more conventional and obvious use of objects in the gleaming cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun that Singhji accepts from Sukhanram, and of course in the tin of ghee which holds a weighty significance. But much more is also expressed in the characters.

First of all, Ray draws a complex, yet illuminating contrast between the two women he comes into contact with in each of these places. Josef’s sister Neeli (Ruma Guha Thakurta) teaches him English and also the Christian belief that it is behaviour, not caste and blood, that determines whether a person is inferior or not. At Sukhanram’s house he encounters Gulabi (the famous Bollywood actress Waheeda Rehman – extraordinarily good here and stunningly beautiful), one of the women bought into prostitution by the businessman, whose activities even stretch to women trafficking. She is the fallen woman, who places temptation in his way to treat her as other men do, or to behave with greater respect and dignity. As well as having a social point to make about the respective circumstances of each of the women, they also represent the internal emotional conflict that is warring within Singhji’s mind

That struggle is also reflected in the range between the businessman Sukhanram and Singhji’s servant and sidekick Rama (Robi Ghosh). Sukhanram represents Singhji’s ambitions, to regain the wealth, position and influence that he believes his ancestry merits. In order to achieve this however, he must give up everything he really is, represented in Rama, and even more so in the Chrysler. When he decides to accept the businessman’s offer of partnership and transport opium for him in a tin of ghee, Rama reminds him of his humble position as a taxi driver and what he has to give up. And it is the Chrysler that is the symbol of everything he has - his freewill, his integrity, his link to his past, his conscience – everything that he must give this up if he is to rise in status. Crucially, this conscience that is the Chrysler, starts to trouble him just as he is on the point of making a decision from which there is no turning back.

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Masters of Cinema Series]

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Cylon from Fraggle Rock

THE BIG CITY (Mahanagar)

India (131 mi) 1963

Murali Krishnan retrospective [2.5/4.0]

A funny and ambiguously ironic account of a young woman's progress from subdued, traditional housewife to wage earner, finally achieving equality when she resigns her job - a gesture of solidarity for a sacked friend - and joins her husband among the ranks of the lower middle class urban unemployed. Set in 1955 in a bank crash-ridden Calcutta, Ray's Ozu-like comedy about anglicised Indians who sprinkle their conversation with English phrases marks a step forward from the famous pastorales which made his name in the West.

[2.5/4.0]

(Dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film is also known by the English title "The Big City".

In most ways, the Mazumdar family is a typical, traditional Indian family. Subrata (Anil Chatterjee) is the head of the family and the breadwinner, while his wife Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) keeps everything in order at home. Besides their two children, Subrata's parents also live with them. That make quite a few people to support on a single income, and Subrata's job as a bank clerk does not always provide everything the extended family needs. Because they live in Calcutta, a large modern city, they have the option of getting a second income if Arati was to also join the workforce. This choice is too tempting, so that is what they decide.

The Mazumdars live in a place and time where it is becoming acceptable for women to work, but the idea does not sit well with everyone. Initially, only Subrata is in favor of Arati working because he know how badly the family needs the money. Subrata's father, Priyogopal (Haren Chatterjee), is especially opposed to Arati pursuing a career. The retired school headmaster thinks it is undignified for women to work, yet he hypocritically visits his successful students and begs favors from them.

Arati is initially unsure of the new world she has entered, and she must learn how to be a door-to-door sales representative. Her dedication and determination pay off as she becomes rather successful, and a favorite of her boss. The extra money she brings the family noticeably boosts their standard of living. The family members are more accepting of her career now that they have access to material comforts that they previously did without.

The story is set (and was filmed) in a time when it was still uncommon for women to work outside the home. The practice was just becoming acceptable in modern urban India. What may seem commonplace by the standards of today, was more exceptional at the time the film was made.

With this film, Satyajit Ray has crafted another good film. The story is engaging and the viewer gets closely involved in the story of the Mazumdar family. However, it does not reach the high standards set by many of his other works. The problem is not that the film is flawed in what it attempts, but rather it does not make much of a statement beyond the narrative. The plot tells a story in a single dimension, and does not contain much symbolism or allegory. It is an enjoyable film, but it is not engaging.

Recommended. This is a well-made and realistic film. However, it does not deliver much more than the surface level story, and as a result is not as profound as other Satyajit Ray works.

The Big City (1963) - The Criterion Collection

Beautiful and restrained, Madhabi Mukherjee powerfully highlights Mahanagar (The Big City) as a traditional Bengali housewife who transforms into a modern working woman in 1960's Calcutta. She is an incredible actress, who effectively communicates through her eyes, facial expressions, and pitch perfect body language. This is the first of three Satyajit Ray films that she carries—Charulata (The Lonely Wife) and Kapurush (The Coward) follow. Mukherjee precisely matches Ray's intentions; no director has ever presented traditional or contemporary Indian family life as intimately or realistically.

Although shot on location in Calcutta, most of Mahanagar's scenes take place inside close quarters. Subrata Mazumdar (Anil Chatterjee) and his extended family live in a small apartment, but doesn't earn enough to adequately support his father (Haren Chatterjee), mother (Sefalike Devi), sister (Jaya Bhaduri), wife Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), and young son (Prasenjit Sarkar). At this time traditional extended Bengali families lived simply with one primary breadwinner. A retired teacher, Subrata's father poignantly explains the mixed pride and frustration of seeing his former students go on to lucrative careers in medicine, law, and business while he continues a life of abject poverty. He realizes that unfair distribution of wealth is inherently unfair; however, he steadfastly declares that he and his wife are entitled to their son's support.

Upon hearing that a friend's wife is working as a tutor, Arati decides to take a job as a salesgirl to relieve the financial burden. Talk about "culture shock," Arati's boss (Haradhan Bannerjee) explains how the new hires will sell knitting machines door-to-door among the wealthier residents of the city. Ray shows Arati's initial tentative attempts—she abruptly bolts when an aggressive looking man answers the door and hesitates during her second call, but she adjusts amazingly well. Befriending Anglo-Indian co-worker Edith (Vicky Redwood), Arati learns to wear lipstick, sunglasses, and speak more boldly to contacts, as she eventually becomes the firm's bests salesgirl.

Arati clearly models herself after Edith, recognizing that her assertive westernized manner is the key to success in this new profession. Edith is selected as the leader for the five salesgirls, and she negotiates better pay for them. This doesn't please the boss, who would much rather deal with the more demure Arati. This will eventually lead to a crucial confrontation that illustrates Arati's growth and liberation.

Her success isn't taken so well at home. Subrata's parents especially object to Arati defying custom—her father-in-law going so far as to declare a silent "cold war." Subrata initially goes along with Arati's plan, but we see him weaken proportionally as Arati grows in strength. Just as he's about to secure a secondary part time job and insist that his wife terminate her job, his bank closes. He further declines and contrasts with his wife even more; he appears far more immature and less able to cope with urban life than Arati; however, the two maintain a strong love for each other that carries them. Although the ending is left somewhat ambiguous, it's evident that this Bengali family is going to survive the big city.

Ray frequently paints visual portraits of transition—how traditional people cope in contemporary India. Never concentrating on plot, he focuses on character and family life the same way that Ozu illustrates post-war Japanese life. Despite its quiet and contemplative subject matter, Mahanagar remains compelling—educating westerners about the radical changes that have taken place in modern India and some exceptionally fine acting that comes across more like a documentary than fiction. Fortunately, this is now available on DVD in the U.S. through Netflix

The Big City: A Woman’s Place Criterion essay by Chandak Sengoopta, August 19, 2013

CriterionCast.com [David Blakeslee]

Popmatters [David Maine]

Yellow Barrel: Thoughts on Film [Jon Cvack]

Satyajit Ray Collection – Volume 1 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Cine Outsider [Slarek] The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 1

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw] Criterion Blu-Ray

Bluray.highdefdighest.com [Brian Kluger] Criterion Blu-Ray

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray

DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Matt Hinrichs] Criterion Blu-Ray

IONCINEMA [Nicholas Bell] Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant Magazine (Blu-ray) [Chris Cabin] Criterion Blu-Ray

Mahanagar Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

The Cineholic [Chris Horn]

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Cylon from Fraggle Rock

User reviews from imdb Author: Peter Young from Australia

The Guardian [Philip French]

TimeOut [Dave Calhoun]

Telegraph.co.uk [Tim Robey]

Irish Times [Tara Brady]

Austin Film Society [Chale Nafus]

San Francisco Chronicle [Leah Garchik]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

CHARULATA (The Lonely Wife)

India (117 mi) 1964

Time Out review Tom Milne

A wonderfully Jamesian study of Victorian India in which a neglected wife, on the point of breaking through to self-awareness, begins to perceive male dominion as a hollow façade of beards, braces and boredom. Immensely funny (with the dialogue peppered by solemn anglicisms and toasts to Gladstone and the Liberals), but also elegant and gracefully moving as the heroine flirts with romance and domestic tragedy on her way to becoming the New Woman. Certainly one of Ray's best films, with a superb music score of his own composition.

Slant Magazine [Jay Antani]

[3.5/4.0]

(Dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film is also known by the English title "The Lonely Wife".

Ambition can be blinding. Bhupati Dutta (Shailen Mukherjee) is a wealthy man who pours all his efforts into running his political newspaper in colonial India of the 1870's. He is an intelligent, trusting, and gentle man, but the total immersion in his work has isolated him from his beloved wife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee). Charulata loves Bhupati, so she does not attempt to pry him away from his newspaper. As a result, she endures a lonely existence in their large Calcutta house. When Bhupathi finds that his young cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) is floundering in his studies, Bhupathi invites him to join them, and perhaps help with the paper and gain some focus. Amal arrives (symbolically, along with a storm), and it is immediately apparent that the two men are very different. Bhupathi is serious and dismisses sentimental literature for the stolid political discussion of his paper. The mercurial Amal cannot be tied down with responsibility. Bhupathi asks Amal to pay Charulata the attention that he himself has been neglecting to give her, perhaps even encouraging her to write. Bhupathi is unaware of the potential danger of mixing a new dynamic into a strained relationship. Inevitably, Charulata will be drawn to the attention she craves.

Satyajit Ray takes this simple, straight-forward story and makes it a rich, complete film by interweaving many layers of symbolism. >From the initial scene, where we see the cloistered Charulata embroidering a handkerchief for her absentee husband and observing the outside world through viewing glasses, it is apparent that every component of the film is telling a story. When Charulata tellingly peers at Bhupati, who is pacing and lost in thought, that single action immediately gives a snapshot of their relationship with not a word spoken.

This story, by Rabindranath Tagore, is simple and familiar, but because of its many nuances, it becomes fresh and engaging. It is no surprise that Charulata becomes attached to Amal. What is engrossing is how the relationships are represented on multiple levels. Bhupati is not a bad person. His failing is that he is living in a sphere that cannot be shared with his wife. He feels that the only meaningful writings are the sober political opinions that he espouses in his newspaper, in English. Charulata is also educated, but does not have any interest in the serious writing of her husband. Her interests lay in Bengali literature, in emotional writing which is dismissed by Bhupati. When Amal writes a poetic story that he shares with Charulata, it is a deep meaningful gesture. It is an act of sharing and inclusion that the emotionally hungry Charulata is longing for.

Class plays an interesting role in the nature of the characters. Bhupati comes from a wealthy family, so he is free to spend his time in pursuit of his avocation. As a man of high standing, he is able to take a daring political stand and speak out on issues in Britain that affect colonial India. Charulata, on the other hand, is almost a prisoner. Although they live in a large comfortable house with a beautiful garden, it is her whole world because she never goes outside. It is actually very lonely for her and the only company she has is her younger, immature sister-in-law. All these factors escape Bhupati, and he is not aware that Charulata only needs a small piece of him. He is so self-absorbed that he does not even try to construct a world in which both he and his wife can live.

The story is neither sentimental nor cathartic. It simply attempts to put a relationship under a microscope to view it in full depth. The explored themes are universal.

Highly recommended. Satyajit Ray is a the height of his talent in crafting this film. It is a complex, multilayered story, but the presentation is kept simple and compelling.

In an interview with Cineaste magazine, Satyajit Ray praised Charulata, saying, "[It's] a film that I would make the same way if I had to do it again." The film affords a dazzling view of Ray's mastery of the medium and gives vital proof of his ability to explore universal themes without compromising his uniquely Bengali sensibilities. Charulata's single setting allowed him a chance to work in an entirely controlled environment—a far cry from the jungly countryside of Pather Panchali, the clamorous ghats of Aparajito, and the urban milieus of many of his subsequent films. Charulata was also the filmmaker's second adaptation of a Rabindranath Tagore work (after 1961's Teen Kanya) and, indeed, one senses a close affinity between Ray's cinema and Tagore's literature. Like his literary idol's, Ray's narratives are alive with the textures of nature, the rhythms of native Bengali life, and the nuances of human gesture and behavior.

Ray uses his setting, meticulously designed by Bansi Chandragupta, to underscore one woman's listless, privileged imprisonment. The beautiful Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) idles her life away in the gilded cage of an opulent Victorian mansion, circa 1880, Calcutta. Her husband, Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), isn't some insensitive cad, as one might expect, who neglects his wife in favor of whiskey and other women. Rather, he's a sincere and upstanding Bengali citizen. He loves Charu and he might make an ideal husband were it not for his newspaper. Bhupati is an armchair revolutionary, who rails against England's colonial yoke, and, as the newspaper's editor, he has no qualms about venting his rhetoric in his columns.

A drifting camera, following Charu around the mansion's breezy corridors and apartments, opens the film. At one point, we see her flitting from window to window, peeking through her lorgnettes at the humdrum of street life below. Otherwise, she thumbs through old novels by Bengali romantics or plays cards with Manda (Gitali Roy), her earthier, saucier sister-in-law. Ray's décor may be divertingly lovely, but he makes sure to include hints of Charu's inner reality: The iron bars on the window and the birdcage poised in the corridor, for example, suggest all is not well. Suddenly, the light in the room darkens and the winds pick up, threatening the home's blasé tranquility. The storm heralds the arrival of Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), Charu's brother-in-law, an idealist-poet with whom she will fall in love. True to Tagore, Ray marshals nature's tantrums to foreshadow or punctuate turning points in his characters' lives, and this is a particularly poignant moment because no one, least of all the happy-go-lucky Amal nor the dutiful Charu, expect the emotional storms to come.

Done with college, Amal settles into Bhupati and Charu's home, eager to venture into his literary career. He spends his days chatting with the women, Charu and Manda, as they bemusedly humor and flirt with him. The bearded-and-gartered Bhupati, however, frowns at Amal's literary dreams, at art and literature in general, believing them to be irrelevant distractions from the real issues. "Politics is different," he says to Amal, "Politics is life." In any case, concerned about his wife's loneliness, he enlists the reluctant Amal into keeping her company and to find out if Charu truly has the creative talent that she fancies through her books. In truth, Bhupati is just as much a dreamer as Amal. He toils day after day in his newspaper office, holding aloft the torch of patriotism and the collective spirit of "Young Bengal," but he never suspects the villain close at hand. For Umapada (Shyamal Ghoshal), Charu's brother and Manda's husband, has been slowly siphoning money from the newspaper. The fate that Bhupati suffers in the course of the film is arguably far worse than Charu's, owing to his naïve civic and marital trust.

Amal and Bhupati are both dreamers and full of contradictions. In one pivotal, wonderfully played out scene, Bhupati urges Amal to give up poetry and accept a marriage proposal that could send him to London to study law. As Bhupati spins his gossamer visions of snowy London and fabled Europe, Amal is, for a moment, taken in. It's striking that Bhupati, a passionate revolutionary and Bengali stalwart, would be so enamored of Europe, the realm of his colonialist captors. Equally striking is that Amal, so easily swept away by visions of the Mediterranean, would so readily reject Bhupati's offer. For all his poetic flights of fancy, Amal is rooted in the soil of Bengal, its literature and music. Observing this exchange in silence stands Charu, nursing her own conflicted feelings of love and bitterness, both over Amal, emotions that first surfaced in the film's previous and most famous scene.

That scene, played out in the garden, is significant not only for what it reveals of Charu's heart, but as a microcosm of Ray's artistry. Pivoting the scene on Charu, he deliberately, even playfully, follows her observations, tracing the slow emergence of feelings she knows are forbidden. As she arcs back and forth on the swing, Ray switches from intimate close-ups of Charu singing her signature tune to her point-of-view, showing the reposed Amal flitting in and out of her view. The effect is of a chipping away, of Charu realizing that the walls that have heretofore kept her feelings at bay are being intruded upon and expressed visually by Amal's jutting in and out of her point-of-view. This becomes devastatingly clear moments later—with Ray again using the optical point-of-view tactic—when she spies a mother and child through her lorgnettes and then turns her gaze to a preoccupied Amal. Ray cuts to a protracted close-up of Charo as the tides of regret—over her childless life, her yearning for romance—sweep across her face followed by a wave of sudden panic as her love for Amal dawns on her. It's a quintessential Ray moment of slow, patient observation leading to an emotional wallop of a climax.

Ray's script then gracefully follows the maturing of Charu's artistic and feminine identity. When her story is published in a literary magazine, much to Amal's awe and amazement, the bond between her and Amal strengthens into mutual admiration; that is, until Amal begins to feel uncomfortable. Blind to all but his own ideals, Bhupati is left to weather the fate of his business and his marriage. Charulata's storylines weave and tighten all the way to its final seconds when Ray brings it to an abrupt and startling halt. In conveying in filmic terms Tagore's closing message that Charu and Bhupati's marriage is suspended forever in doubt, he brilliantly opts for a series of tableaus. The music, rising in crescendo, is strangled. The figures of Charu and Bhupati stand frozen across a series of still frames. She is reaching her hand out to him, pleadingly. He, tentatively, appears to want to take it. But, in spite of the lamp a servant is bringing, the corridor—the home, at large—looks haunted now by the spectre of marital discord. The appearance of the title, "The Broken Nest," in Charulata's final shot underscores this. It's Tagore's original title for the story and, by placing it at the film's end, Ray shrewdly endows it with a portentous quality.

This is only one reading of Charulata. Like any great work of art, it reveals more to the spectator each time it's experienced. Charu's grief, for instance, may seem at first born out of unrequited love, but it's deeper than that. She is a symbol of all intelligent women who arrive at a place of self-discovery, only to be rebuffed by the strictures of tradition. Her cries transcend Amal and touch on the plight of anyone condemned to a place prescribed to them by an age-old patriarchy. The world is rigid but feelings are organic, and only a filmmaker tapped into the emotionally revealing possibilities of the medium could have told Charulata in such a masterfully nuanced manner. Aided by flawless performances from Madhabi Mukherjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, and Sailen Mukherjee, a script (written by Ray) that delicately turns and builds on itself, music (composed by Ray), layered in motifs across the film, and, of course, Subrata Mitra's heaven-lit cinematography, the film becomes a profoundly enriching experience. Though Charulata has been obscured in the Ray canon by a certain trilogy made at the outset of his career, it remains a singularly accomplished song to love, idealism, heartbreak and disillusionment.

Charulata: “Calm Without, Fire Within” Criterion essay by Philip Kemp, August 20, 2013

Charulata (1964) - The Criterion Collection

Charulata: The Intimacies of a Broken Nest • Senses of Cinema Neel Chaudhuri, April 2004

The Film Sufi: “Charulata” - Satyajit Ray (1964)

UpperStall Karan Bali

Writing on the Screen: Satyajit Ray's Adaptation of Tagore Moinak Biswas essay (Undated)

Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]

Cinema Talk [Jake Savage]

Satyajit Ray Collection – Volume 1 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Cine Outsider [Slarek] The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 1

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel] Artificial Eye Blu-Ray

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray

Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw] Criterion Blu-Ray

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole] Criterion Blu-Ray

Row Three [Leslie Byron Pitt] Criterion Blu-Ray

Charulata Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

theartsdesk.com [Tom Birchenough]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A+]

User reviews from imdb Author: Spleen from Canberra, Australia

User reviews from imdb Author: Himadri Chatterjee (himadri_c@yahoo.co.uk) from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: David (davidals@msn.com) from Chapel Hill, NC, USA

User reviews from imdb Author: ioana-marinescu (ioana.marinescu@gmail.com) from Cambridge, MA

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

MAHAPURUSH (The Holy Man)

aka: The Good Man

India (65 mi) 1965

User reviews from imdb Author: Magic Lamp from Bangalore

This is one of Ray's short stories. It lacks the intensity of his full-length features. Its a satire which appropriately captures the post-independence Indian zeitgeist. Its a sweet tale of how a charlatan is exposed with help from basic science and motivation from a lover boy in distress. Be it a short story or not, in every one of his movies, Ray has been a beacon by conveying his socially progressive ideas. He's a master at exposing the fault lines in the Indian society and delivering his wisdom packaged in a entertaining manner. I saw the movie in a combination pack with another one of his shorts - Kapurush. Kapurush is an emotion-packed drama. It captures the anxiety and rekindling of emotions of a chance meeting between two estranged lovers.

Satyajit Ray Collection - Volume 2 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

The second part of the Kapurush/Mahapurush pairing also certainly has elements of social observation, seen this time in the context of religious charlatanism versus science and rationality, but the story is very much presented in the form of an entertainment with a more overt comic touch and a short running time that prevents any serious examination of the issues.

Returning from Nasik on a train, the lawyer Gurupodo (Prasad Mukherjee) finds himself in the thrall of a seemingly wise Holy Man, Birinchi Baba (Charuprakash Ghosh), with whom he is sharing a carriage. Troubled and lost since the death of his wife a year ago, Gurupodo is looking for direction and believes he has found it when he witnesses the “miracle” of the Holy Man’s ability to make the sun rise …at dawn. He installs the wise man in his house and not only becomes a disciple, he also intends to induct his daughter Buchki (Gitali Roy) into the priesthood. This causes rather a problem for Satta (Satindra Bhattacharya) who, in a roundabout way, was intending to ask Buchki to marry him. As the Holy Man makes claims that over his long lifetime he has been a teacher of Plato, Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein, as well as being on to be on first name terms with Buddha and having witnessed the Crucifixion of the Christ, Satto hopes he can convince his learned group of scientific and intellectual friends to expose him for the fraud he clearly is, and perhaps impress Buchki with his brilliance in the process.

Mahapurush is a relatively minor work from Satyajit Ray that clearly doesn’t take its subject all that seriously. The director however is clearly aware that even played as a comedy, a film can just as effectively raise relevant issues that challenge credulity, superstition and reverence for those who claim to have worldly or otherworldly influence, opposing it with rational and scientific thought. The manner in which the film is delivered corresponds with this change of tone, Ray adding playful visual elements like a family tree and freezing of the frame and the narrative to explain the relationships between the various characters who appear, as well as having fun with references (many of which will go over the modern western viewer’s head) and the nonsense dialogues of the Babaji (although the subtitles may add to this on occasion such as when his ‘o tempora, o mores’ pronouncement is somewhat amusingly rendered here as ‘oh tempora, oh Boris’, perhaps in a topical allusion to the current mayor of London).

Mahapurush doesn’t quite have the depth, insight and characterisation of the Satyajit Ray’s best work, but it is quite funny while showing another aspect of society and extending the director’s range, showing him to be adept in a variety of styles and subjects. The only lasting impression the film is likely to have however is that it’s guaranteed to have you attempting to spin your fingers in opposite directions, which at least testifies to the power of symbolism over rationality.

DVD Outsider Slarek, The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 2

KAPURUSH (The Coward)

aka: The Bad Man

India (74 mi) 1965

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Cylon from Fraggle Rock

Satyajit Ray's 'Kapurush' is a film that is set one night till the next. A writer Amitabha Roy (Soumitra Chatterjee) is waiting for his train but that's a very long wait. He meets a gentleman, Bimal Gupta (Haradhan Bannerjee), who offers him an invitation to spend the night at his place instead of waiting in the station all night. After arrival at Gupta's residence, Roy is surprised to see Mrs. Gupta. She happens to be his ex-lover.

Ray tells the story in a very concise way. It is very much a character centred piece. Chatterjee gives a brilliantly underplayed performance as the younger lover and the desperate man hoping to win back his one time girlfriend. Madhabi Mukherjee does very well as she keeps her emotions balanced and Haradhan Bannerjee is good too.

I was surprised to see that it was such a short feature film. The plot is quite simple, as it proceeds with Roy remembering the old days with Karuna, his rejection of her and now he wants her back. He's desperate to believe that Karuna is unhappy and that she will come back to him. The ending is beautifully shot and it makes one wonder whether she actually came to the station. A great movie for a rainy day.

Chicago Reader (Pat Graham) capsule review

Filmed immediately after Charulata (The Lonely Wife), Satyajit Ray's Kapurush (The Coward) unfolds like a brief reprise with the same unhappy love triangle scenario, only with more emphasis on the male third wheel. Ray even recasts two actors from Charulata to repeat their unfulfilled lover roles: Soumitra Chatterjee as screenwriter Amitabha Roy and Madhabi Mukherjee as Karuna Gupta. Based on Premendra Mitra's short story, not all that much happens during the short 74-minute narrative nor do the characters undergo any significant changes, but Ray sketches a memorable character portrait—especially of enigmatic Karuna, who resolutely refuses to reveal her unspoken secrets.

The story is set up when Amitabha's car breaks down in a remote area, and boorish Bimal Gupta (Haradhan Bannerjee) invites him to spend the night at his tea plantation bungalow. An ambitious hedonist who prides himself on his economic prowess, Bimal worked hard to establish his successful tea business, yet he remains unsatisfied. He's married to beautiful, supportive, independent Karuna, but he tells Amitabha that he's lonely due to the caste system prohibitions about associating with his hired workers. Bimal also talks excessively, drinks too much, and snores loudly when he inevitably passes out.

As soon as Amitabha enters the bungalow, we realize that he has a history with Karuna. She does her best to remain formal, carefully guarding her familiarity when they initially sit for tea—her husband acting as a screen between the two former lovers here and in every frame that they share throughout the film. Bimal remains blithely ignorant about their past relationship.

Obviously troubled, Amitabha persistently attempts to connect with Karuna, but she continues to treat him indifferently, no matter what inner turmoil she in turn may feel. The tension increases as Bimal gets drunker and more loutish, and even Karuna objects when her husband begins talking critically of Bengalis with their guest (both Amitabha and Karuna are Bengali). When they retire for bed, Amitabha anxiously awaits, hoping for a sign of recognition and a chance to talk more intimately with Karuna, but she remains cold and distant.

An opportune time for a flashback, and Ray delivers a well-conceived snippet when they were students in Calcutta, to a critical day in their life journey. This is where the English name for the film comes to play, as Amitabha has a chance to marry Karuna before she must leave with her uncle—a "love" test that requires immediate reaction. Amitabha freezes with fears—he's just starting work, has no resources, Calcutta is such a huge city, etc. So Karuna walks out of his life, until now. Will he have the courage this time, or will she even be willing to leave her situation? Just what does her silence mean?

Despite playing out predictably, Kapurush has a great deal of charm, most notably in the wordless acting prowess demonstrated by the two lead characters. Through their subtle eye movements and small body gestures, we are able to discern their unspoken turmoil. Just like real life, the emotional issues remain a constant undercurrent are not overplayed. Ray also displays visual cues in this area—take his juxtaposition shots pairing Karuna's tender hand gesture towards Amitabha (in flashback) with the jeep ride where Karuna's hand gently touches her husband's shoulder, and the immediate reaction shot of Amitabha's eyes. That moment alone communicates the heartbreaking pain of a lost opportunity, and the short film features a number of other examples.

Not nearly as strong a portrait drawn in Charulata, this film ends unsatisfactorily—far too abrupt and arbitrary. But that's often how a love story ends in real life; the rewards along the way make this a worthy Netflix rental.

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

Satyajit Ray Collection - Volume 2 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

DVD Outsider Slarek, The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 2

Kapurush-o-Mahapurush Acquarello from Strictly Film School

User reviews from imdb Author: fuzon from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Soujatya Dasgupta from United States

NAYAK (The Hero)

India (120 mi) 1966

Satyajit Ray's 1966 feature comes at the tail end of his early realist period, which included most of the films (the Apu trilogy, Devi, Charulata) that won him his reputation in the West. A popular actor reveals his life to a woman journalist, whose initial cynicism turns to sympathy as she comes to understand the young man's celebrity entrapment. With Uttam Kumar and the flowering perennial of Ray's major work, Sharmila Tagore. In Begali with subtitles. 120 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Cylon from Fraggle Rock

'Nayak' starts with two news headlines about movie star Arindham (Uttam Kumar). One headline states that Arindham got involved in a brawl and the other states his nomination for a prestigious award. While travelling to Delhi by train (in order to receive the award) he comes across various people including a young simple but modern journalist Aditi (Sharmila Tagore) to whom he confides his inner thoughts. In the process, the actor further discovers himself and his fear. Aditi too is moved as her prejudice against the cocky pompous movie star changes while she discovers the man behind the name.

Ray cleverly tells Arindham's story about how he made it to stardom, his sacrifice of his art, loss of friends leading to isolation, fear of failure, seeking comfort in alcohol, his inner conflict...He weaves it all into a screenplay that takes place during a train trip from Calcutta to Delhi. A lot of it is shown in flashback mode. The dream sequences are another example of fine writing and execution. We're also given a brief view of the corrupt world of cinema, how art is long lost and how it's become all about money, fame and name...very relevant and applicable to today's Indian film industry.

Uttan Kumar, being the biggest star in Bengali Cinema perfectly fits the part. One wonders how much of the character resembles Kumar in real life. Though Ray is known to cast Soumitra Chatterjee (who happened to be Kumar's arch rival) in most of his films, he made the correct decision by casting Kumar for I cannot imagine anyone else play the part. Sharmila Tagore is wonderful. The actress has an amazing presence and with her grace, simplicity and sincerity, she shines. 'Loved her scenes with Uttam.

Like most of Ray's powerful work, 'Nayak' is a rather less known but remarkable film. One of my favorites!

User reviews from imdb Author: Nandini Gupta from India

Ray's 'Nayak' is undoubtedly one of the best films ever made in history of Indian cinema. The story about an actor, Arnidam Mukherji, who is hailed as some sort of a demigod in the country, unfolds during a train journey and is told through several interesting narrative techniques : His life is presented in the form of a disjunctive montage, several pieces of which he supplies himself - mainly through the candid interviews given to his co-passenger, a freelancing journalist and the archetypal "modern woman" Aditi, and through his dreams, which reveal his innermost fears and the ghosts of his past. To his fellow passengers, and to most of his fans and audience, he is a charming, larger than life superstar, and the twin reports of his receiving an award in Delhi and getting involved in a brawl in a club, invite the same amount of speculation and curiosity from them. Arindam the superstar and Arindam the man with a conscience are constantly at conflict. His awareness of the superficiality of an actor's life clash with his concerns about the box-office and of becoming a forgotten hero - a fate bestowed upon many of the actors he had known personally. He desperately needs a person who will listen, and in a drunken stupor he tries to tell Aditi the truth about the reported brawl and the deception of Promila, his co-actor and flame. Aditi doesn't want any explanations, but she understands his turmoil - her prejudice against the brash, cocky film star is formidably shaken as she glimpses the real man behind the actor - someone vulnerable, broken and anguished, who has become a puppet in the hands of the film industry and the "public" as he puts it. Life goes on as usual, despite both Arindam and Aditi achieving a kind of epiphany during the train journey. The film for me is remarkable not just because of its story or symbols or technical finesse, but because of the brilliant acting and dialogs. 'Nayak', if I'm not mistaken is Uttam Kumar's (incidentally a huge superstar himself) first ever film with Ray. The sensitivity with which he has portrayed the character, almost makes us believe that, this is really his own life story that is being played out before our eyes. One of the smartest and slickest Ray films ever, this one gets a 10 from me. A must watch.

User reviews from imdb Author: Shahbaz Nazrul from San Diego, CA

A least seen movie of Satyajit. Satyajit is one of the very few great directors who worked outside Hollywood circle and gave a lot to the film history. He is mostly know to the movie lovers as the creator of great APU TRILOGY. I feel that Ray's works are severely under-represented in USA, although most of his works are masterpiece or near-masterpiece. Thanks to Ishmael Marchent for arranging a retrospective on Ray's works at USA in 1996, I guess. But again in that retrospective, I didn't see the names of some of his great works, like NAYAK, KUNCHENJUNGHA, SEEMABADHYA, ARANYER DIN RATRI or SONAR KELLA. Names of the films that I always see in a Satyajit Festival are the APU TRILOGY, JALSHAGHAR, CHARULATA, GHARE-BAIRE ... etc. No doubt that all of those are great works of Ray, but indeed one cannot know the power of his filmmaking unless he sees some of his other less known works (some of which I mentioned).

Nayak is a simple story of the most popular Film Actor of India, acted with all perfection by great Indian Actor Uttam Kumar, who goes to the capital city Delhi to receive an award of his achievement via a train. On the train he meets Shormila Tagore (Another favorite actress of Satyajit whom he casted in several other movies like, Apur Sansar, Devi, Aranyer Din Ratri, Seemabadhya ... etc.) and some other characters of the story. The story progresses when Uttam discusses with different aspects of his life and career with others (especially with Shormila). In depth thoughts and feelings of UTTAM sprung out as time goes by and Shormila discovers the very lonely man in Uttam hidden behind his day to day charismatic lifestyle.

On my judgement, NAYAK is the greatest creation of RAY. UTTAM's acting can challenge anyone in the motion picture history. The high abstratness and philosophical bent of the movie is comparable to that of CITIZEN KANE (according to me, better than CITIZEN KANE) and the mutual conversations among the characters or the screenplay in other words, can beat those of MINDWALK, VANYA ON 42nD STREET, RED or CASABLANCA. A must see film for all great movie lovers. A 10+ out of 10.

DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 1

DVD Outsider Slarek, The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 1

Edinburgh U Film Society (David Khune Jr) review

Movie Review - - Film:'Nayak-The Hero' The New York Times

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (Aranyer Din Ratri)

India (115 mi) 1969

Time Out review Tom Milne

Ray's most overtly Renoir-ish film, this might almost be a remake of Une Partie de Campagne, transposed to another time and place and through another sensibility. Instead of the French bourgeois family setting off for a picnic, four young men leave Calcutta for a few days in the country, trailing their westernised careerist attitudes, a middle class indifference to the lower orders, a self-satisfaction that leaves them closed to experience. Out of a series of delightfully funny mishaps as the visitors eagerly try to pursue acquaintance with their two promisingly attractive neighbours, Ray gradually distils a magical world of absolute stasis: a shimmering summer's day, a tranquil forest clearing, the two women strolling in a shady avenue, wistful yearnings as love and the need for love echo plangently. Elsewhere jobs have to be won or lost, problems faced and solved, but not here; an illusion of course, revealed as time lifts its suspension but leaves one of the quartet a changed man, the other three assailed by tiny waves of self-doubt. Beautifully shot and acted, it's probably Ray's masterpiece.

Alongside the USA, India produces the highest number of films in the world. Satyajit Ray is one of the best known and most critically acclaimed of India's directors. Days and Nights in The Forest is arguably his best film, and, because of various western influences, perhaps his most accessible. It has a European feel at times, and is cinematically, especially close to the work of Renoir.

Four successful young men from Calcutta decide to take a break in the countryside of Bengal. While there, three of them form relationships with women, experiencing feelings that the self-satisfied, middle-class environment of the city had denied them.

Ultimately about the way such lives can isolate us from ourselves, from all about us and from clear-cut moral sensibilties; Ray manages by methods both joyful and tragic to draw attention to the nature of his characters. The female characters are morally superior to the males, which might be considered one of the flaws of the film's make-up.

The second part of the Apu trilogy is stunning in its evocation of the rural and emotional spaces explored by Ray's characters. Its delightfully realised themes are offset by the technical mastediness of the director and wonderful performances from the cast. The multi-talented Ray also composed the score.

[3.5/4.0]

(Dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film is also known by the English title "Days and Nights in the Forest".

Trying to escape the pressures of their daily lives, four young men embark on a vacation to the rural forest. They are unsure what to expect, but they are eager to be able to focus on their adventure into the unknown. The leader of the group is Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee). Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee) is a docile office worker who rarely stands up or takes risks. It is not that he is a coward, but rather he always plays it safe. The ill-tempered Hari (Samit Bhanja) was recently jilted by his girlfriend, and as a result has some open issues to resolve. Finally, there is Shekhar (Robi Ghosh) who is self-confident and earnest, but often so much so that he is comical. The journey into the unknown of the forest unintentionally becomes a journey of self-discovery, as the decisions they make and the lessons they learn will change them.

The first decision they must make is in their accommodations. Being carefree young men, they have neglected to make any plans. The come across a rest house that suits their needs, but since they have not made reservations, they must bribe the caretaker in order to stay there. The caretaker knows he is risking his job, but his wife is ill and so he is in desperate need of the money. At the rural tavern, they stop for a drink, and encounter some of the people of the forest. They particularly notice the women who have no taboos about drinking in public like the women of the city would. Hari in particular is drawn to one of them, Duli (Simi Garewal), whose untamed quality enhances her appeal. The other men are more interested in the two obviously civilized women they chance to see walking near their bungalow one day. After following them to their cottage, they find that the women are also visitors to the forest. Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) is a strong, self-assured young woman who is staying in the vacation house with her father and widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose). What begins as casual social interaction between the men and the women eventually becomes more serious as they come to understand each other better. Although the men's interests often lead to funny, awkward situations, there are serious issues just beneath the surface.

Although it might appear to be a familiar premise, Satyajit Ray takes the story (written by Sunil Ganguli) and fashions an engrossing film. It is obvious that as the men enter the unknown surroundings and encounter new people, their reactions will be reflections of their own character. This is not a new approach, but what makes the story powerful is the unpredictability of the narrative, and the development of the characters. None of the characters are be slotted into a stereotype for easy digestion, and the eventual turn of events are not telegraphed. From an early point, the viewer gets immersed in the characters. Just as the characters stumble around to make sense of their situations, the viewer closely follows their actions. The most engaging episodes are when the men interact with the women, and the contortions they go through in their potentially romantic pursuits. Since a primary component of the story is this interaction, and because there is not a matching number (four men versus three women), it is clear that the story progression will not be a simplistic pairing off into couples.

The situations presented to the men are varied, and as the story progresses they become more serious and dramatic. However, the narrative keeps from becoming overly tense by the timely and effective use of humor. One particular scene involves the men being caught in an embarrassing position when the women unexpected drop by while they are bathing at a well. The structure of the comedy is simple and pure, and although the setup may sound stereotypical, the flawless execution makes it a particularly hilarious moment.

Of the four young men, Shekhar is the only character whose inner self is not examined. His heightened earnestness makes him a comic character, but Ghosh plays him perfectly so he does not become glaringly exaggerated. Striking this balance make it the standout performance. The other characters have differing degrees of complexity, but they are all handled well.

Highly recommended. This is both a powerful and entertaining film. There is both intense drama and light comedy. The story focuses on the many characters and develops them fully.

not coming to a theater near you review Ben Ewing

A new lens on Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest « the ... Video essay by Kevin Lee from FilmLinc, April 23, 2009

Un-kvlt Site [Suresh S]

User reviews from imdb Author: Paul Arthur (pnarthur@msn.com) from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Ravenus from India

User reviews from imdb Author: The_Cylon from Fraggle Rock

User reviews from imdb Author: Aparna Gangopadhyay from India

Channel 4 Film capsule review also seen here: Channel 4 Film capsule review

BBC Films review Jamie Russell

The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review

SEEMABADDHA (Company Limited)

India (110 mi) 1971

In this one Chanda is the businessman who wants to have it all. He is forced to re-examine a life based on the pleasures money and privilege bring when a sister-in-law who is not so impressed with earthly matters pays a visit. Typically astute, Ray's humorous examination of those who lack the courage to pause and look at their place in the world is wonderfully observed and often surprisingly funny. If ultimately it is not a patch on his best work, Company Limited is still a good introduction to the great man's oeuvre.

Moviemuser.co.uk DVD [Sean Wilson]

Against a background of neo-imperialist India, and set in Calcutta, a city of severe unemployment and unrest, Ray creates a finely judged satire about the gradual compromise that is the price of ambition. His complacent, but not unlikeable, central character works as a sales manager and possesses sufficient ambition to override any doubts about accepting the privileges remaining from colonial days and the rewards of Westernised industry. But two things undermine his smugness: his provincial but astute sister-in-law pays a visit; and a crisis in the export department forces him to resort to political manipulation in order to further his career. Both events leave him a wiser but lesser man. It's basically an old-fashioned film, but none the worse for that.

Released in 1971, three quarters of the way through a distinguished career, Satyajit Ray’s Company Limited (or Seemabaddha, adapted from ‘Sankar’s’ novel) is the second of Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy (following The Adversary and coming before The Middle Man) exploring the lives of India’s educated youth. Shot through with the almost brazen economy that marked much of the director’s work, the clarity of Ray’s imagery, plus the deceptively straightforward plotting, puts many of his contemporaries to shame: after all, why waste 10 minutes when 2 will do? Hollywood, take note.

In a marvel of concise exposition, the film’s ‘prologue’ of sorts is communicated almost entirely through voiceover: after graduating with a degree in English from university, Shyamalendu (Barun Chanda) is accepted for a job as marketing manager at a British-owned firm, Hindustan-Peters, selling fans. Married, with a studio flat in Calcutta and a young son at boarding school, Shyamalendu’s life is snug, smug and complacent… Until, that is, his lower class sister-in-law turns up, casting a darker, outsider’s perspective on his vacuous, shallow set-up. Is Shyamal’s goal of being company director the be-all and end-all of life, or is he sacrificing an essential part of himself?

Ray is interested in both the personal and political development of his beloved home country. Shyamal is the embodiment of (then) modern India, enjoying the fringe benefits of recent independence - all sleek modern offices and burgeoning wealth. Yet it’s a country still rife with contradiction: Shyamal remains subservient to his richer British bosses, yet he threatens his own tea-boy with docked wages should he leave his personal fan on in the office. His sister-in-law, Tutul (Sharmila Tagore), feels uncomfortable at the leering attention foisted on her by Shayamal’s employers; but he takes it in his stride.

This is until a consignment of ceiling fans due for Iraq are hit with a defect, and Shyamal’s cosy existence threatens to fall apart. Rather than confide in his wife who is perfectly secure with her plush apartment and country club appointments, he chooses to confess his anxieties instead to Tutul, the outsider who pierces right to the heart of the businessman. Chadha gives a nicely understated performance as a confident young man with a quivering top lip, casting a few meaningful glances in the direction of the luminous Tutul himself.

The complexity of Ray’s images, coupled with the clarity of their presentation, is startling. A track-in towards a coiled phone wire as Shyamal concocts a convoluted scheme to escape his jam; the venn diagram-style breakdown of his position in the company; or the ever-present ceiling fans themselves, hovering over the sweating characters like a sinister demi-god. They all carry potent messages but their simple delivery apes the style of a classic thriller.

Indeed, it is the very image of the seemingly bog-standard fan looming over the corrupted Shyamal in the finale that resonates the most – a successful modern man but also a tainted one. What does that imply for India as a whole? Ray, sensibly, leaves us to judge the answer.

Company Limited Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

Eye for Film (James Benefield) review [4/5]

User reviews from imdb Author: fuzon from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: paul2001sw-1 (paul2001sw@yahoo.co.uk) from Saffron Walden, UK

MyReviewer.com [Curtis Owen] also reviewing THE STRANGER

PRATIDWANDI (The Adversary)

aka: Siddharta and the City

India (110 mi) 1972

Ray attempts to paint a picture of Calcutta that takes in the city in almost all its detail. He covers the poverty, Imperial past, British Raj, emerging communism, hippies arriving to fill the spiritual voids in their lives and the bleak future that was confronting young Indians in the late 60s. He hangs all this on the story of a student who had to leave university when his father died and is desperate to find a job. Once you get to grips with the frustration and determination of the film's hero, the points Ray is making about society become increasingly accessible. It's a major piece of work

CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]

This opens and closes with the same scene: an unemployed ex-student waiting for a job interview with some 50 others in a crowded corridor. In between, Ray takes us on a lightning excursion through the preoccupations of disenchanted urban Indian youth. Taking in concern for the underprivileged, distaste for rich hippies, hangovers of the old puritanical morality, emergent Marxism, the ground he tries to cover is almost too much; and when the hero marches into the interview room in the final scene to attack the complacent officials, it's more a dramatic device than a resolution of his conflicts. Even so, Ray's observation of human behaviour is as acute as ever, with the young man's hang-ups constantly emphasised by the gap between his actions and his dreams.

Opening with negative black and white photography to signal a dreamlike sequence, Satyajit Ray signals that Pratidwandi (The Adversary) will differ from his previous work. Better known for his films about rural India (The Apu Trilogy) and for period pieces (The Music Room and Charulata), he tackles Calcutta's contemporary 1970's social and political issues directly with this film. Despite the subject matter and snippets of Buñuel-like surrealism, you can still identify Ray's signature temperament and style as the film reaches its final reel.

Protagonist Siddhartha Chadhuri (Dhritiman Chatterjee) faces a situation very commonly found in India and other Third World countries striving to enter western style commercialism. After completing two years of medical school, Siddhartha drops out after the death of his father and seeks employment in the city. Early on we see the youth in a bizarre job interview, which not only checks his credentials and asks about his goals, but quizzes him on trivia to test his general knowledge and then gets into his political views after he maintains that the Vietnam War was more significant than the moon landing. They certainly don't want any potential labor disputes, so Siddhartha blows the interview by indicating a sympathetic ear for Marxist philosophy. We get the feeling that Siddhartha has experienced numerous other interviews like this—it's an employer's market with many desperate applicants for each position.

The young idealist lives in crowded conditions with his widowed mother, his sister Sutapa (Krishna Bose), and brother Tunu (Debraj Roy). Perpetually the man in the middle who sees both sides to every issue, he contrasts with his siblings. While strongly feels he should be supporting his family by working, he's not willing to do whatever it takes like his beautiful sister. She may be sleeping with her boss to get ahead, so Siddhartha goes to him to stand up for her only to find that he's incapable of confrontation—he fantasizes about killing him, but discovers that he becomes tongue-tied when coming face to face with him. Ray emphasizes this aspect of his conflicted character immediately afterwards when a Mercedes driver injures a pedestrian to draw the wrath of a mob—initially inspired to join the fracas, Siddhartha freezes when observing the terrified look of a female passenger in the car.

Tunu doesn't get stressed over such matters. A committed revolutionary, he fanatically makes bombs and belittled Siddhartha for not doing anything. Tunu knows that his brother shares many of the same ideals and returns a biography of Che Guevara that Siddhartha had given him (a cue for some commendable cinematic blending of Siddhartha's face with Guevara's in another brief fantasy). A parallel contrast is drawn with classmate Adinath (Kalyan Chowdhury), who sees himself as a “doer” while Siddhartha is a “thinker.” Adinath attempts to corrupt his friend by treating Siddhartha to an expensive meal, followed by a visit to a prostitute, but the protagonist runs out before anything happens, and sets up the conclusion.

Frustrated by his inability to find work in Calcutta, Siddhartha is tempted to leave the city behind for more peaceful rural life, but now he finds motivation to remain in Calcutta. He runs into another classmate, who calls for him to help with a blown fuse. This is Keya (Jayshree Roy), and the two begin a very friendly, chaste relationship that appears destined for love. Siddhartha has another interview coming on Tuesday; there are four positions open with some 72 candidates crammed in the sweatshop style waiting area. Perhaps this will be Siddhartha's answer—an interview that the keenly intelligent youth won't blow since he now has strong motivation to find work in the big city. Humorous touches accompany this extended scene with tense job candidates worrying about that sharp looking confident guy in the business suit that must be 6 feet tall (never mind that he is perpetually pacing the floor) or surrounding exiting interviewees to find out what kind of questions are being asked. Ray again experiments with more dream sequences that effectively illustrate the contrasts between the privileged and the underclass.

This scene ends with a surprising climax that clearly delineates Siddhartha's destiny, and it fits Satyajit Ray's own temperament perfectly. India's finest director clearly relates to his protagonist—a thinking man well aware of his political surroundings, but never to the point of sacrificing his artistic vision or humanity to transient causes. We can all be thankful for that since we have Ray's vast body of work to offer glimpses into Indian life. With some diligent searching, you can find The Adversary available on DVD—something that is sadly lacking with most of Ray's films.

DVD Times Noel Megahey

The Adversary Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

User reviews from imdb Author: BoFi from India

Movie Review - The Adversary - An Indian 'Adversary':Satyajit Ray ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 9, 1972

ASHANI SANKET (Distant Thunder)

India (101 mi) 1973

A curiously unmoving social document from Indian director Satyajit Ray, very earnest but painfully subtle. Soumitra Chatterji (who played Apu in Ray's famous trilogy) is the only educated man in a village faced with famine, trying to cope with the ignorance of the peasants and his own sense of helplessness.

Had it had the courage of its convictions, this might have been a thoughtful and moving study of the plight of Vietnam veterans in America. Lithgow gives an atypically restrained performance as the former serviceman who returns after 10 years in the wilderness to try and reconnect with his 19-year-old son (Macchio). So far so good, but then a ridiculous and wholly unnecessary action sub-plot is introduced in which the two are taken hostage by a group of renegade vets and have to blast their way free. It's as if the final reel belongs to a completely different film.

Time Out Capsule Review Tom Milne

Middle period Ray in that its political theme is powerfully evident, yet remains filtered through a prime concern with the characters. The setting is Bengal in 1942, with millions threatened by man-made famine (food is diverted for military use; prices rise; profiteers profit). Against this background, Ray delicately sketches the coming of age of a young Brahmin (an endearingly funny and tender performance by Soumitra Chatterjee); from a caste traditionally acting as priest, teacher and doctor, supported by his village as a mark of respect, the Brahmin first has to learn - mainly through the agency of his strong-minded and sensitive wife (Babita) - not only just what he is supposed to be preaching, teaching and prescribing, but how to earn the respect he is accorded. The crux for these two good people comes when, faced by their own hunger as well as the starving beggars by now omnipresent, an untouchable dies outside their house. The Brahmin's decision (tacitly approved by his wife) to break taboo by touching the body (to bury it, safe from the jackals) rings out in Indian terms as a call to revolution. Distant thunder, indeed; a superb film.

As noted by Peary, this “lovely, underrated film by Satyajit Ray” (which was inexplicably panned by some critics — see the Chicago Reader review link below) — possesses “breathtaking” cinematography by Soumendu Ray, and “many moments that will stay with you.” It tells the heartbreaking yet fascinating tale of a tragic moment in Indian history when, as summarized in the closing subtitles, “Over five million died of starvation and epidemics in Bengal in what has come to be known as the man-made famine of 1943.” Due to the British government cornering civilian food supplies in order to feed its armies, villagers were unable to secure even a subsistence-level amount of rice, and it was soon unavailable at any price.

Despite the enormity of the subject matter, Ray characteristically takes a deeply personal approach, focusing primarily on the character arc of the main protagonist (Gangacharan), who gradually learns that, when it comes to survival in times of war, caste matters not at all. Equally compelling, however, are the subplots about Gangacharan’s wife Ananga (Babita) and her friends, who do what they can to bring food to their households — for Ananga, this means lowering herself enough to help mill rice, while her married friend Chutki (Sandhya Roy) sleeps with a disfigured man (Noni Ganguly) in exchange for some of his precious supply. Ultimately, Ray shows both the worst and the best sides of humanity in his film, as each character discovers what he or she is willing to compromise for his own survival — and for the survival of others.

Distant Thunder Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School

User reviews from imdb Author: Himadri Chatterjee (himadri_c@yahoo.co.uk) from London, England

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User reviews from imdb Author: Dilip Barman (barman@jhu.edu) from Durham, NC (USA)

SONAR KELLA (The Golden Fortress)

India (120 mi) 1974

User reviews from imdb Author: shanfloyd from India

First of all, I think I'll add a short introduction to Feluda stories. Among over two-hundred novels and stories Ray had written especially for teenagers, the detective stories of Feluda are by far the most popular. With calculated amounts of wit, suspense, action and humor, the stories are considered classics of modern Bengali literature. So it was not surprising that he would make one of them for the screen.

As a book, "Sonar Kella" is one of the all-time bestsellers. Now I have seen the film about ten times and what fascinated me is how Ray changed the whole structure of the book while making this film. The novel is a fantastic detection story with sharp plot twists. But Ray thought the concept of detection as a theme in this film will not make the viewers see it more than once. So he makes it more like a modern thriller -- he showed the crime and criminals at first and now the theme becomes how Feluda unfolds it. That's why crime and detection is not the only theme of this film. There is plenty of humor and excellent visionary of Rajasthan too. Ray primarily directed the film to his readers but also made sure it satisfies all kinds of audience.

Another point I want to make: if the viewer doesn't know Bengali and relies on subtitles, he/she misses a good percentage of its fun. That part lies on its extremely witty screenplay where often Ray literally played with the words. Among the actors, Soumitra Chatterjee is quite good as Feluda, at least he was the best for this part in that time. Santosh Dutta virtually created the character of Jatayu. It became his trademark role. And one must mention the flamboyant and passionate performance of Kamu Mukherjee as the villain Mandar Bose.

The film features all of Ray's trademark styles -- in artwork, in script, in the camera angles and original music. And it remains an all-time family classic in the history of Indian cinema.

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JANA ARANYA (The Middleman)

aka: The Masses’ Music

India (131 mi) 1976

A moving story about a sincere college graduate (Pradip Mukherjee) in Calcutta who gradually enters a life of corruption, made by Satyajit Ray in 1975 and adapted by Ray from Sankar's novel Jana Aranya. It has the best performances of any Ray film I've seen and a milieu that may remind you of both Billy Wilder's The Apartment and John Cassavetes's Faces. With Satya Banerjee, Dipankar Dey, and Rabi Ghosh; the effective score is by Ray himself.

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Although Ray's later films saw him moving away from his early gentle humanism towards something more concerned with the political and economic problems facing modern India, they remain primarily descriptive rather than works of intense political commitment. Here he deals with a university graduate forced to enter the world of commerce: his confidence eroded by the experience of being interviewed for jobs for which there are literally thousands of applicants, he eventually sets himself up as someone who buys and sells anything. Meanwhile he finds himself reduced to compromising his ideals more and more. Beautifully performed, blessed with Ray's customary sense of balance, and wittily satirising the absurdity of bureaucracy run riot, it makes absording viewing.

San Francisco Chronicle (Leah Garchik) review

[3.5/4.0]

(Dialog in Bengali, English subtitles)

This film is also known by the English title "The Middleman".

The business world can be harsh and corrupt. This subculture is unraveled in this story, which shows a young man's difficult initiation into the life of a middleman. Somnath (Pradip Mukherjee) is a recent college graduate who becomes a victim of fate when his paper is improperly evaluated, simply because the grader did not having the proper glasses. The result is that Somnath receives passing marks, but does not achieve the honors level he should have earned. This is no trifling error, because the job market is lean, and Somnath's prospects are grim without an exceptional academic record. This setup shows a harsh world, where opportunities are scarce and people must often do whatever they can to survive. Desperation breeds corruption, and nice guys finish last.

Somnath fights an uphill battle trying to enter the corporate world. He mails off a multitude of job applications and receives very few, unsuccessful interviews. The absurdity in some of the interview questions (like "what is the weight of the moon?") reflect the futility of his struggle. Each day he fights this impossible battle and returns home to face his morose father (Satya Bandyopadhyay) and cynical elder brother. Only his sister-in-law Kamala (Lily Chakravarty) keeps a positive attitude about Somnath's ability to eventually establish himself.

One day as Somnath is out in his hopeless job search, he runs into Bhombol (Dipankar Dey) who tells him about an alternative to landing a job -- joining the business world. Somnath has misgivings, but out of alternatives, decides to give it a try. Bhombol gets Somnath started on how to operate as a dalal, or middleman. The basics are to buy one man's surplus on the cheap and sell to another man's need, and to ply favors. Somnath gets set up with a desk and support staff, and with some tips, he sets off into the business world. He initially makes a successful transaction but learns a lesson about playing his cards close.

Somnath has some successes and failures along the way, but he is able to work some connections with his friends to set up a potential sale to a chemical company. If the deal goes through, he stands to make a handsome profit, but more than that, he needs it to establish himself, otherwise he might not last much longer in the business world. Somnath enlists the help of an associate, Mr. Mitter (Robi Ghosh), who is a "public relations" expert. Somnath learns of the incredible depth of corruption that must be indulged, and the seediness of the business world. He also understands the other meaning of dalal, pimp.

The world as represented in this story is extreme and bleak, but Satyajit Ray has crafted a film that remains believable because it is based in reality. The depiction of corruption in this story is so pervasive that at times it feels exaggerated. However, all of the events still appear plausible. Somnath is presented as an innocent thrust into a foreign world of difficult choices. The decisions he makes are a mixture of his own nature and the influence of the forces around him.

He is obviously a man of principle, but he cannot ignore the desperation of his situation. The opening scene of the film showed a classroom of students writing their final college exam, and the majority are cheating in one way or another, but not Somnath. Somnath sees that he has never been rewarded for adhering to principle, but his nature makes it difficult to do otherwise. Somnath sees that his classmate Sukumar remains principled, but without opportunities, Sukumar and his family live a life of poverty and misery.

The acting performances are all outstanding. Mukherjee effectively conveys all the emotions that Somnath experiences. He expresses Somnath's anguish through expression and body language as well as manner of speech. Ghosh is exceptional as the sleazy Mr. Mitter, striking a balance between comic absurdity, and the distasteful pragmatism in being part of a corrupt system.

The story is perfectly paced as it slowly builds to a wrenching climax. Although it is apparent early that Somnath will be descending into a world without morals, his progression is so moderated and gradual that it is gripping. Somnath begins as a naive young man, and when his journey culminates, he stands staring at his reflection in a man he despises. He sees that Mr. Mitter lives at peace with who he is. In Mitter's personal life he is an ordinary family man, while his professional life necessitates swimming in sleaze. Somnath cannot detach himself so easily. The fact that his is a principled person in a world without scruples causes him agony, but is it worse than an uncertain future for both him and his family? It is easy to talk about the shallowness of the pursuit of money when one has it, but a life without means can be truly horrible. Somnath has a exceptionally difficult decision to make.

Highly recommended. The film does feel extreme in its portrayal of underbelly of the business world, but everything it depicts also has a believable foundation. It is a gripping story about the way in which desperation can breed corruption.

The Middleman Acquarello from Strictly Film School, also seen here: Strictly Film School review

User reviews from imdb Author: David (davidals@msn.com) from Chapel Hill, NC, USA

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THE CHESS PLAYERS

India (129 mi) 1977

Slant Magazine [Jay Antani]

The short-story irony of two nawabs playing interminable games of chess while their domestic domains crumble, and of a king wrapped up in his aesthetic pursuits while his territory is threatened by British expansionism, is decked out opulently enough (notably a lavish recreation of 1856 Lucknow); but it pales beside that of Ray's inability to distinguish a historical film from a mere costume drama. This has its moments as a gentle comedy, with Saeed Jaffrey in good form, but its nudging metaphors on queens and pawns provide a facile analysis of colonial politics.

Satyajit Ray's gently satiric parable The Chess Players reminds us that, in the days before America's machinations in Iraq, we had the British East India Company running roughshod in much same way in India. Ray opens his movie with a documentary-style recap of the Company's mid-19th century wheeling-dealing in Oudh, a wealthy province in northeastern India. The Company had Oudh's king, Wajid Ali Shah, by the balls: If the king agreed to finance the Company's regional ambitions, and even supply it with necessary troops, it wouldn't meddle in or usurp the king's power. By 1856, though, the British, eager to fatten their imperial coffers, broke their détente with King Wajid, and instructed their local operative, General Outram, to do whatever it takes to roll into Oudh and take charge.

The Chess Players was something of a departure for Ray: Aside from its large budget—at least by Ray's standards—and use of popular Bombay actors, it was also his first and only foray into a culture and language outside his native Bengal, namely the Mogul, Urdu-speaking enclave of Lucknow, the capitol of Oudh. Yet, for all its challenges, Ray's adaptation feels as easy and assured as anything he ever made. And, while The Chess Players isn't as rich or provocative a character study as Ray's greatest works, it's a pleasurable showcase of his comic and dramatic sensibilities.

Mirza (Sanjeev Kumar) and Meer (Saeed Jaffrey), two Lucknow noblemen, are so enamored of chess playing that they're oblivious to the political and domestic upheavals around them. While Mirza's wife wiles away in her bedroom, cross and neglected, Meer uses her husband's all-day devotion to chess playing as an opportunity for some cuckolding. These guys are too tuned-out, however, too buffoonish to pick up on these clues. Likewise, they blissfully shrug off rumors of the East India Company's troops imminently laying siege to their pleasure haven and deposing their king.

In adapting Prem Chand's short story, Ray cleverly juxtaposes the chess players' quotidian pleasures of pompous banter and hookah smoking, all the while hunched over their ivory chess pieces, with scenes of General Outram (played with oily conviction by Richard Attenborough), as he deliberates with King Wajid (Amjad Khan), anxious to plant the Union Jack atop his palace, and expand the Queen's empire. While Ray stays true to King Wajid's reputation as a harem-happy sybarite, he also punches up his more sympathetic qualities: namely, that he's observantly religious, and a devout patron of dance, poetry, and music. With his mournful eyes and humble delivery, Amjad Khan ably appeals to our hearts, not least because we share his moral puzzlement over Outram's insidious maneuverings.

The Chess Players takes its time to play out, but it gracefully holds our attention. Ray's camera may be purely functional, but it's not without a certain slyness that winks at the viewer every now and then: When Mirza leaves their chess game to tend to his distraught wife, warning Meer not to alter the position of the pieces, the camera watches as Meer's impatiently waits for his return. Finally, after checking for eavesdroppers in the hallway, he reaches in and does exactly what Mirza suspected he would. Mirza misses the act, but Ray's camera does not: Panning with him back into the parlor, the camera catches Meer from behind a slit in the drapery to spy his hand in flagrante. Those amusing touches, along with sharply observed gestures pointing to class differences and domestic disquiet, let us know that Ray's movies live between the lines, in those offhand but brilliantly revealing nuances of human behavior.

Jaffrey's whimsical and doting Meer perfectly offsets Kumar's proud, boastful Mirza, and, as the political temperature of the story rises and their attempts to keep playing their game borders on the desperate and bungling, there's an antic glee to Ray's telling. The mannered goofiness of The Chess Players echoes the pastoral comedy of Days and Nights In the Forest while the Raj-era dancing-girl trappings recall the decidedly grim The Music Room. Finally, as their worlds as well as their friendship hang in the balance, we find ourselves wistful for Mirza and Meer's futures. For we realize that it's not ignorance but pure terror that keeps them from admitting their crumbling realities to themselves and clinging to a game, to a state of suspended denial. To a war that's only pretend.

not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review

Rediff Raja Sen

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [4/5]

dandyspoke [Mike Hawkins]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

WearetheMovies.com [John Murdoch]

The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] An Incisive Dissection of Culture Shock, May 30, 2006

User reviews from imdb Author: Jonathan Dore (jd@jonathandore.com) from Cambridge

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Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players and Post Colonial Film Theory ... capsule review of a book by Reena Dube (272 pages), May 2005

BBC Films (Sandi Chaitram) review

DVDBeaver dvd review Per-Olof Strandberg

JOI BABA FELUNATH (The Elephant God)

India (112 mi) 1978

User reviews from imdb Author: samratrc1417 from Oman

Feluda, The Bengali Sherlock Holmes comes alive on screen again in this highly entertaining film. Based on the book and characters written by Ray himself he did a great job in creating a good follow up to the highly successful and intriguing 'Sonar Kella – The Golden fort '. Just like in the previous movie this one also contains a bunch of colorful characters played by the Crème de la crème of Bengali cinema most notably Mr. Utpal Dutta who plays a shady businessman involved in smuggling antiquities. This one is about a theft of a very valuable antique gold statue. So in comes Feluda accompanied by his faithful Topshe and the very hilarious Jatayu (Santosh Dutta at his comic best) and he is asked to investigate the theft by the owner and if possible retrieve the invaluable statue. The entire movie is set in the holy city of Varanasi and we get to witness a lot of the religious ceremonies associated with Hinduism and how the crime has intertwined itself with it. A lot of suspense and some very funny segments(especially the one with Jatayu and the knife thrower) make this movie totally worth the watch. It may not be a Sonar Kella but it definitely is in a class of its own. I recommend this film very highly. You will not be disappointed.

The second of Satyajit Ray's detective Felunada films, Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God) shares a number of motifs in common with Sherlock Holmes—witty repartee with partner, an evil Moriarty type villain, plot twists and complications that eliminate obvious suspects, life endangerment, use of disguise to foil the criminal, and heavy reliance on deductive reasoning to resolve the mystery. It's also highly entertaining. Unfortunately the DVD copy currently available in the U.S. (Netflix rental) has a number of subtitle flaws—the most glaring being a number of out of sync dialog sequences.

Soumitra Chatterjee (lead character in The World of Apu) reprises his role as detective Felunada expertly. Ray reinforces his detective "artistry" throughout the film with parallel references to other artists—an elderly man painting a goddess Durga statue for a coming ceremony, a dedicated body builder preparing for a show, a circus knife thrower who demonstrates a sharp eye despite his shaky body, and Felunath's friend Lalmohan Ganguly (Santosh Dutta) who crafts top detective novels.

Felunada, his younger cousin Tapesh (Siddharta Chatterjee), and Ganguly have arrived in the holy city of Benares (Varanasi) to vacation. But almost immediately Felunada is commissioned to solve the theft of a precious gold statue of Ganesha (the traditional Hindu Elephant God), a family heirloom handed down from a former king of Nepal. Detective Felu incorporates both Holmesian logic and Indian mysticism to solve the crime; thus, he's very much like Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee characters—policemen who incorporate both western procedures and traditional Navajo wisdom in their detectective work.

Always keenly observant, detective Felu early on senses that a popular mystic is a phony; he's just not sure what the point of his deception is. Upon learning about the theft, he cleverly befriends young Riku, a boy who is very absorbed in childhood fantasies like Captain Spark. He speaks the same coded language of the boy and then explains his own "super powers" of having X-ray vision by using his keen intellect and observation skills. In the process, Riku reveals vital clues that lead to the resolution.

One of the more intense scenes takes place inside the villain's residence. A gun is pointed at Felu and his two partners throughout, as the detective refuses Maganal's bribe to drop the case. With such an unscrupulous adversary, can they really trust that the served tea isn't poisoned. And especially dangerous is the sequence where the villain insists that Ganguly serve as target practice for his wobbly circus knife tosser. Our Dr. Watson stand-in, Gangly sees no way out other than buck up his courage and endure the experience. As such, he contrasts with their body building roommate at the hotel, who instantly wants to flee when he misinterprets a handwritten warning.

A few holes exist in the plot; most puzzling to me was trying to figure out who Felu tracks through the streets when pursuing the stolen statue, but that all fits together as the plot evolves. Overall, Joi Baba Felunath is very enjoyable and well constructed. For Satyajit Ray fans, its a welcome sight to see him return to the banks of the Ganges—the same location so prominent in Aparajito. Even more so with the final frame of the film: a burst of pigeons that visually pay homage to his earlier classic.

Satyajit Ray Collection - Volume 2 | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

DVD Outsider Slarek, The Satyajit Ray Collection Vol. 2

PIKOOR DIARY – made for TV

aka: Pikoo’s Day

India (26 mi) 1980

User reviews from imdb Author: sbansban from Washington, DC, USA

This movie is not easily available, so I am not surprised there are (as of now) no other comments. But this is an absolute stunner. Smooth as silk, Ray brings us an unforgettable vignette of upper-middle class life in Kolkata around the 70's. It is one of his relatively few movies in color, and is only 26 minutes long, but is profoundly and wryly philosophical without for a moment being "heavy". Playful Pikoo and his bed-ridden grandfather steal the show in style. The background score and imagery left me mesmerized. Human warmth, love, relationships, betrayal, life and death, and the transience, twists and implied associations therein, "Pikoo" packs it all in in these 26 minutes. I can honestly say that after watching this, I view life a little differently. I consider this one of his top efforts, but unfortunately, it remains relatively unknown.

GHARE-BAIRE (The Home and the World)

India (140 mi) 1984

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

Based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore and set in 1908 Bengal, this tells of a woman who, after being persuaded by her wealthy but liberal husband to break with the tradition of female seclusion, falls not only for his old friend but also for the latter's revolutionary ideals, intended to unite Bengalis against the British colonial policy of 'divide and rule' regarding Hindus and Moslems. Although it becomes clear where Ray's political sympathies lie, his customary sense of balance and generosity towards his characters prevents him from tipping the scales in facile fashion, while motivations and issues are presented with great clarity. One could accuse the film of being talky and static, but the formal elegance, sure sense of pace, and uniformly excellent performances guarantee a moving experience.

The Home and the World (1984) - The Criterion Collection

Set in East Bengal in 1908, Satyajit Ray's 1984 film tells of a liberal-minded landowner (Victor Bannerjee, of A Passage to India) who encourages his long-sequestered wife (Swatilekha Chatterjee) to violate purdah and meet one of his friends, a political activist (Soumitra Chatterjee) involved in the protests against the British plans to divide the district into separate Hindu and Muslim zones. Overcome by her first encounter with the outside world, and deeply impressed by the politician's energy and commitment, she falls in love with him, and even steals money from her husband to give to his cause. The film is slow, studied, and observed with a fanatic attention to the smallest gestures and glances, which helps to fill out the somewhat schematic structure Ray has inherited from his source (a novel by Rabindranath Tagore). Ray soft-pedals the ironies (the politician is, of course, a bounder), while bringing out the full emotional sweep of the young woman's awakening, suggesting that the violent demonstrations that rock the streets are the product of a similar repression.

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

Images: Film appears to be lit entirely by source lighting. Interiors are often very dark, reflecting the isolation and confinement within the inner sanctum of the estate. Memorable images include: profiles of faces lit by candlelight; Bimala pressed against the wall, staring ahead motionless (followed by dissolve into widow's whites); crowds of young nationalists, lifting their fists and chanting, "Hail Motherland!"

In 1907, British rulers of India have partitioned Bengal, dividing the Muslims from the Hindus and silencing their collective political voice in the process. In response, Swadeshi, a burgeoning nationalist movement, demands a boycott of all British goods. We experience Swadeshi through the eyes of Bimala Choudhury (Swatilekha Chatterjee), a modern woman (she has been educated) married to a modern man. Nikhilesh (Victor Banerjee) is a wealthy land-owner who was educated in the West and who objects to the repressive treatment of Indian women. He allows Bimala unprecedented freedom, including freedom of movement around their estate, opportunities to meet other men, and English lessons. Against this modern relationship, Ray contrasts Bimala's more traditional sister-in-law, a woman whose husband was unable to even recognize her face on his deathbed.

The first man Bimala meets is Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee), a charismatic leader of Swadeshi and former classmate of Nikhilesh. Sandip has arrived in hopes of turning his old friend toward his cause, but Nikhilesh steadfastly refuses, much to his wife's disfavor. Bimala is instantly taken by Sandip, a man of superficial passion. She is so moved by his zealous rhetoric that she becomes the first female member of Swadeshi. The two begin to meet privately, eventually striking up an affair. Nikhilesh is aware of their relationship, but refuses to intervene, preferring instead that his wife's love be granted freely, even if to another man.

Bimala strikes me as an Indian equivalent of Lily Bart. Like Edith Wharton's famous heroine, Bimala is allowed the freedoms of a modern woman, but lacks the experience and social context necessary to use it effectively. After spending the first decade of her marriage in isolation, forbidden from even seeing a man other than her husband, she is ill equipped to read Sandip's hypocrisy. She mistakes his performed speeches for genuine passion, and suffers the consequences for her failing. For Ray, there are no simple solutions for the "woman problem": the fate of Bimala's sister-in-law is clearly not acceptable, but neither is Bimala's.

In The Home and the World there are also no simple solutions to the complex legacy of British imperialism. Ray forces us to listen to several of Sandip's speeches from start to finish. It's an effective move, for his words resonate with some truth: by becoming dependent upon British goods, the people of India have surrendered economic clout and filled the pockets of Western manufacturers and importers. In so doing, they have also taken a significant step toward assimilation, internalizing a Western value system that diminishes their own cultural accomplishments and beliefs. Sandip's chant, "Hail Motherland" (even with its frightening echoes of mid-century European nationalism) sent a chill down my spine like it did Bimala's.

But we also see the other side of the issue through Nikhilesh, who refuses to support Swadeshi because of its untold economic consequences on the poor of Bengal. British goods are not only of better quality, but are cheaper; remove them from the local economy and the poor will be forced to buy less for their families and sell less in their markets. Like the manufactured goods sold (or burned) in Bengal's markets, other British imports — including democracy, education, and greater freedom for women — must be acknowledged for the good and harm they have brought to the people of India.

Eclipse Series 40: Late Ray Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, January 07, 2014

Satyajit Ray's The Home and the World - CriterionCast.com

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Blu-Ray, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com

DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant Magazine DVD [Jordan Cronk] Criterion Blu-Ray

Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review

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User reviews from imdb Author: The_Cylon from Fraggle Rock

User reviews from imdb Author: kunalsen_7684 from India

DVDBeaver - Eclipde [Gary Tooze]

DVDBeaver dvd review Brian Montgomery

GANASHATRU (An Enemy of the People)

India (99 mi) 1990

Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review

The first thing to bear in mind when going to see Ganashatru is that its masterful maker, Satyajit Ray, was obliged to shoot the feature while packing a pacemaker in his chest. That this film is more stagy and set-bound than anything else attempted by the director of the world-famous Apu Trilogy owes less to its source material (Henrik Ibsen's 1882 social drama An Enemy of the People) than it does to the two doctors who doggedly followed Ray around the studio, making sure their charge did not overexert himself.

Without this knowledge it would be extremely easy to regard Ganashatru as grossly inferior to The Home and the World, the extremely moving historical chamber-drama whose shooting almost cost the director his life (The Home and the World can be seen at 9:30 p.m. each night, following the screening of Ganashatru).

Still, if Ray's first film after his near-fatal heart attack was imposed canned theatre, it is canned theatre nonetheless, with all the shortcomings endemic to the form. On the other hand, Ray has always been better at directing intimate moments that reveal hidden insights into human nature than he has been at orchestrating gargantuan set pieces, so Ganashatru is not without interest, despite its uncharacteristic stiffness.

What is perhaps most fascinating in comparing the Ray version to the Ibsen original are the ways in which this adaptation underscores the social differences between East and West. Whereas the great Norwegian playwright's Dr. Stockmann was in no way loath to assume the mantle of a Nietzschean superman, Dr. Ashok Gupta (Soumitra Chatterji) only wants to serve his tainted home town of Chandipur as inconspicuously as he can. Similarly, the straight municipal self-seeking of the Scandinavian physician's mayor/brother Peter is, in Ganashatru, given an additional twist by the addition of Hindu piety to pride and avarice in the corresponding character Nishith. Ray himself, scion of a liberal Hindu family, harvested much grief on account of his own agnosticism, a reality echoed in the experience of the fictional Dr. Gupta.

While the film is extremely provocative for an Indian audience–Ray sides unambiguously with the scientific modernists and young progressives who want to shut down a popular temple whose polluted "holy water" is making people sick–for Westerners it is the tussle between polar opposite brothers and the too-familiar techniques by which the powerful silence dissidents that carry the most impact. By the time Ray gets around to staging the climactic and clamorous face-off between Ashok and Nashith, one momentarily feels in the hands of a true cinematic master. Even if Ganashatru is a minor Satyajit Ray film (which, unfortunately, it is), it still belongs in the canon.

An Enemy of the People (1989) - The Criterion Collection

An upstate couple in the second row at the Museum of Modern Art’s Titus 2 Theatre admitted to having fallen asleep, separately and “only for a little.” They needn’t have added the exculpation, for Satyajit Ray’s An Enemy of the People/Ganashatru is three minutes shorter but even more soporifically stage-bound than Steve McQueen’s long-shelved, barely distributed, embarrassingly earnest labor of love of the same story and title. From an earlier Arthur Miller television adaptation, that latter 1979 filming of giant Henrik Ibsen’s social-themed play, failed to impart life.

Why, ten years later, the famous Indian economist-art director-book illustrator-turned director should, as usual, attempt his own script and music with the drama, is of more interest than the result itself. The blame primarily falls on precarious health. In his early sixties, the director had been forced by the most severe of several heart attacks, to relinquish The Home of the World to filmmaker son Sandip and remain inactive for four years. On doctors’ orders, his return to work had to be limited to studio shooting, hence the unadventurous wordy nature of this sad second-from-last production before his death.

In a mix of traditional and Western clothing designed by Ray himself -- brother Nishit Gupta (Dhritiman Chatterjee) is criticized for his affected British ascot -- the actors sit around in easy chairs and talk the issues in Dr. Ashoke K. Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) and wife Maya’s (Ruma Guha Takurta) rented sitting room and the newspaper offices of editor Haridas Bagghi’s (Dipankar Dey) Janavarta/People’s Voice, or on telephones or, intercut here and there with pilgrims’ clay jars being filled with piped water (perhaps the same footage repeated), on a stage in a bare lecture hall. There are no transitions, no camera movement, not even any people walking and only a very few standing.

What we do have is a hundred minutes of debate, once in a while a brow rubbed to convey inner conflict, in subtitled Bengali with an occasional jarring phrase in English. These misplaced nineteenth-century dramatics lead to a silly deus-ex-machina resolution in which daughter Indrani’s (Mamata Shankar) intended, fledgling Moshal/Torch journalist Ronen Haldar (Vishwa Guha Takurta), and indignant ex-Janavarta assistant Biresh (Subhendu Chatterjee) miraculously gather an offscreen chorus of supporters to chant, “Long live Dr. Gupta!”

Goals and technique are sincere but so unembellished and melodramatic as to be cinematically painful. Both Norwegian playwright and Indian filmmaker take square aim at concerns as relevant today as in 1882: political and social hypocrisy, cronyism, bottom-line mentality, and, less overtly, the ignorance and pliability of the masses. Gadfly Ibsen placed his drama in a would-be spa on Norway’s south coast, and MoMA has chosen to include this rarely seen West Bengal cinema version among others based on writings by contemporaries of the subject of its successful Edvard Munch exhibition.

The Indian’s plot follows the Norwegian’s closely, though the character of his hero is weaker. Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann is naïve but with enough backbone to exclaim that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.” Dr. Gupta is meant to be admirable but comes across as simpering. Since way before their marriage twenty years ago, Maya has seen through younger brother-in-law Nishit and his reasons, as three-term Chairman of the Municipality, for securing older Ashoke a comfortable hospital position. On his own initiative, the disinterested doctor investigates a rise in gastrointestinal complaints and deaths, the cause of which analysis traces to contaminated holy water at the temple on which Chandipur town pins its tourist-trade hopes. With mystical tulsi leaves, “holy water can never be polluted” is the response, and slow costly replacement of underground pipes in the densely populated area would hurt business and affect a nearby rice mill.

Moneyed and political interests conspire to squash any attempt to sound alarms about typhoid, cholera and jaundice. Indrani is pushed from her new teaching post, the doctor’s job and safety are threatened, and though his roving eye is at the moment fixed on Indrani, Haridas is pressured into pulling in his paper’s pseudo-liberal horns. The townspeople hoodwinked and manipulated into shouting down a public meeting set for 15 January, 1989, the hero who does not consider himself a hero is, instead, accused of anti-Hindu sentiments and about to be forced to leave.

Until the unconvincingly righted resolution, Ashoke has “lost, no more fight left in me.” “Is this a meeting, or a farce?” he whines. Disappointingly, the film is the latter, of interest for who made it though hardly for what his failing powers were able to make of it.

Eclipse Series 40: Late Ray Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, January 07, 2014

Satyajit Ray's An Enemy of the People - CriterionCast.com David Blakeslee

Enemy Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Jeffrey Kauffman, Criterion Blu-Ray

CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Blu-Ray

DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant: Jordan Cronk Criterion Blu-Ray

DVDBeaver.com [Brian Montgomery]

User reviews from imdb Author: nobody3110 from India

DVDBeaver - Eclipse [Gary Tooze]

SHAKHA PROSHAKHA (Branches of a Tree)

India France Great Britain (130 mi)

A sombre family drama occasioned by the heart attack of a venerable businessman and philanthropist, who lives with his senile father and mentally disturbed son, but derives hope and a measure of satisfaction from his other three sons, successful men instilled with his principles of hard work and integrity. The family dutifully gathers at his bedside and awaits some sign of recovery; but old resentments cloud the air as first one son, then another, admit that their father's values are no longer tenable in a modern society where corruption distinguishes winners from losers. Ray stressed that the scenario for this, his second film since his serious coronary problems, was written 25 years ago and should not be taken as autobiographical. For all that, it is evidently an old man's film. With a single principal setting, and long passages of unwieldy exposition or earnest sermonising, the script might have been intended for the stage; and although it reclaims some of the ground lost in An Enemy of the People, Ray's functional, inelegant mise en scène provides little embellishment.

User reviews from imdb Author: samratrc1417 from Oman

This is one of Satyajit Ray's movies shot and released just before he died. Starring Ray regulars who I can say are the Brandos and Pacinos of Bengali cinema this film is one of a kind – Deep and intellectual. It is a story of a family who was hastily assembled together in a colonial mansion by the deathbed of its patriarch who has suffered from a heart attack. The father is an idealist who was a freedom fighter and still is active in politics hoping that something could be done to correct the path the country (India) has taken (post independence) and stem the rot that had set in society. Gathered by his side are his sons who have all carved a distinct path through the maze we call society. Yes! They are successful. But his sense of failure comes from the fact his ideals and values have not seeped into the conscience of his off springs. The film shows the audience why and how that happened. Ultimately it's all about the rot that has set in the moral fabric of his family and his feeling how can he correct the society if he can't instill the same values in his family? This ultimately contributes to his sorrow, frustration and finally his death.

Had this film been a Hollywood project helmed by a A listed director and starring A listed actors this surely would have dominated the Oscars that year. The development of the story is brilliant and so is the direction (its Ray for crissakes) but people who don't like slow moving artsy movies won't share my sentiments. That's for sure. But for connoisseurs of Ray it's a classy picture. Do yourself a favor. Watch it!

Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review

AGANTUK (The Stranger)

aka: The Visitor

India France (120 mi) 1991

"Agantuk" ("The Stranger") was Satyajit Ray's last film, and it shows all the virtues of a master artist in full maturity.

With the simplicity that comes with complete command of his medium, Ray begins his story with a letter. The recipient, Anila (Mamata Shankar), is a typical middle-class housewife living with her husband, Sudhindra (Deepankar De), and son in Calcutta; the letter writer is an uncle who left India 35 years ago, following his wanderlust to the far corners of the globe. Or at least that's who he claims to be. Anila hasn't actually seen her uncle since she was a baby, a fact that the uncle makes note of. Nevertheless, he calls on the family's sense of "traditional Indian hospitality" and asks to be taken in until he takes up his travels once more.

In laying out these details, Ray―by far India's most renowned director―works in the unhurried, observant style that made him one of the cinema's most respected filmmakers. His focus, as always, is the human elements. But he is also interested in ideas, and in that sense, "Agantuk" is more conceptual, more Shavian and less naturalistic than most of his earlier work.

His prime subject of exploration here reflects the interests of his protagonist―namely, the contrast between civilized and primitive, or so-called "savage," cultures. The uncle has been welcomed without hesitation into the homes and villages of native people around the world. By the time he arrives at his niece's house, however, the family is already deeply suspicious. Though he seems to be exactly who he says he is, they are obsessed with verifying their guest's true indentity―as if in doing so they might guarantee that their hospitality isn't bestowed under false pretenses.

In the process, the uncle (played with sagacious charm by Utpal Dutt) turns out to be a wise and worldly man whose experiences call many of the family's bourgeois assumptions into question.

Completed only months before Ray's death, "Agantuk" is small and concentrated. It doesn't traffic in melodrama or come to any grand resolutions. But as the uncle watches his niece dance with a group of native women in the movie's final scene, we feel the film's thematic pieces all falling into place. It's a beautiful film, and a fitting swan song.

Moviemuser.co.uk DVD [Sean Wilson]

The final film of a particularly distinguished and glorious career, The Stranger (Agantuk), perhaps appropriately, finishes Satyajit Ray’s life in film on a note of unburdened optimism. Subtle in scope and emotion - as is usual with Ray - he is probing more issues than is first apparent.

Adapted from his short story, The Guest, it’s a deceptively simple tale of a comfortably middle class family – Anila (Mamata Shankar), Sudhindra (Deepankar de) and their son – whose world is rocked by the return of a man, Manomohan (Utpal Dutt), who claims to be Anila’s long estranged uncle. Is he who he says he is? Although Manomohan is outwardly charming, having ‘leapfrogged’ (in his own words) from country to country over the past 20 years, Sudhindra is deeply suspicious, eventually tainting his wife’s outlook as well.

Ray’s film is a seamless meld of Hitchcock’s suspenseful ambiguity, a sharply observed comedy of manners and an intellectual summation of his home country. Oh and there’s a terrifically funny interlude involving a deaf elderly lawyer, who may hold the answers to the mystery (who says old people and hearing aids can’t be funny? Ray certainly thought so). At one point Anila, at the height of paranoid incredulity, even takes unwitting inspiration from an Agatha Christie story she’s reading: has Manomohan returned to claim his share of a property inheritance?

Throughout the film there is a lightness of touch that is quite delightful, so that even the deeply intellectual conversations about India’s civilization and primal barbarity fizz and pop like a classic screwball comedy. At one point the family invite a friend and lawyer over to question the guest, only for it to turn into a full blown inquisition. One senses Ray is interrogating the very essence of his home country through the ambiguous character of Manomohan, an individual who, due to his extensive experience with other cultures, is able to see India from an outsider’s perspective.

Not that any of this is on the surface; instead it bubbles away under the façade of plush living rooms, bedrooms and hallways. When the action is opens up in the finale to an outdoor arena – the insulted Manomohan having retreated to a tribal village – there is a sense Ray is celebrating the simple things in life. It is a return to the India of old, away from politics, conflict and colonialism. A cloud is lifted from Anila and Sudhindra’s empty existence and a ray of happiness shines through – much as it does on the whole of this wonderful closing chapter of Ray’s career.

Sri Rajeev review

The Stranger Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Critic Picks [Alex Udvary]

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]

MyReviewer.com [Curtis Owen] also reviewing COMPANY LIMITED

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San Francisco Chronicle (Leah Garchik) review

Eye for Film (David Stanners) review [4/5]

Raymont, Peter

A PROMISE TO THE DEAD B 87

aka: A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman

Canada Netherlands Sweden Australia (92 mi) 2006

Partially based on his own book, Heading South, Looking North, the film is a portrait of Ariel Dorfman, the social activist, writer, and cultural attaché to Chilean President Salvador Allende, a man without a country since September 11, 1973 when with the backing of the American CIA, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup in Chile disposing of the democratically elected socialist President, installing himself as President after murdering the entire Allende leadership, leaving no trace of their bodies, forever known as the desaparecidos (the disappeared). Dorfman was not among the Allende followers summoned to the presidential palace that day, all of whom were killed, most likely so that he might live to bear witness to the events that occurred on that day. Since then, not only was he tracked down by Pinochet’s forces, eventually finding safe asylum in the Argentine embassy while hiding in the trunk of a car, but he’s been wracked by guilt and haunted by the unspoken voices of the tortured and the dead ever since, eventually writing Death and the Maiden about a tortured political prisoner who years later runs into her torturer, releasing anguish that has been suppressed for decades, which won the 1992 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.

This film has a diary-like intimacy as Dorfman recalls his memoirs on camera. However this film proves that no man is above history, as concentrating so much of the film on one man’s recollections sadly leaves out much of the badly needed historical context. History is a struggle between opposing forces, but in this film we are restricted to only one. It’s not that Dorfman doesn’t eloquently present his views, it’s that exclusively sticking to his point of view leaves out all others. Easily one of the most interesting moments in the film is his return to Chile decades later waiting outside the hospital where Pinochet has had a heart attack when a total stranger calls him a “dirty communist,” a point of view that begs for an explanation. Dorfman allows that 30% of the country remains steadfastly in support of Pinochet, irrespective of his alleged crimes against humanity, whose trials were continuously delayed due to health reasons and was never prosecuted, but never delves into the mystery of why. Instead, despite offering his sympathies to his mourners after Pinochet dies, he does so only with the understanding that he continues to mourn for the entire group of Allende dead that Pinochet murdered, which even if true comes across with an air of self-righteousness. Dorfman has mixed feelings about Pinochet’s death, as it means the person who is singularly responsible for the atrocities he’s spent his entire life obsessively driven to expose will never face justice, except perhaps in the detached manuscripts of history. The new Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet, who was herself imprisoned at the age of 23, and whose father was tortured, eventually dying in military prison, has no interest in going after the Pinochet regime.

The film is a moving and compassionate look at his near perpetually exiled life, born into a communist family in Argentina where his grandmother was Trotsky’s interpreter and had to flee Soviet persecution of the Jews and where his father eventually escaped the Argentine military junta, finding refuge in the upper echelons of New York City until the Red Scare of the McCarthy era rooted out communists from all corners of America and led to his family’s deportation to their choice of either Chile or Thailand. The film remains silent on how he got involved with Allende or how the socialists came to power in Chile, glaring omissions if you ask me, along with why the U.S., a country “of Jefferson and Lincoln,” wanted Allende out of power badly enough to have him murdered. Rather than offer even newsreel accounts of Chilean history, instead we see archival footage of a few parades with chants in support of Allende as years later Dorfman reunites with many of his former friends and examines personal photographs pointing out who’s still living and who’s dead. Much of this delves into the psychological state of mind of having to deal with someone who’s disappeared without a trace, where there are women in both Argentina and Chile who routinely demonstrate in front of their governments asking where are their loved ones, wearing pictures of who’s missing on their chests. Dorfman elicits much of the same mood from families after 9/11, with families frantically searching for the missing who also have simply disappeared. It’s something of a milestone in his family when his own granddaughter reaches her 7^th birthday, as that’s the longest anyone has lived without going into exile. Dorfman leads a comfortable life in the United States as a professor at Duke University, but his writings, giving voice to the ghosts of the past, offer an unusual political stance, something closely resembling Kieslowski’s NO END (1985) or BLUE (1993).

Eye Weekly [Adam Nayman]

Shake Hands With the Devil director Peter Raymont chronicles another wrenching return in A Promise to the Dead. This intelligently diffuse doc finds internationally renowned author and poet – and former Salvador Allende attaché – Ariel Dorfman wandering through Chilé 30 years after he fled General Pinochet's military coup. It's not his first homecoming, but it proves to be a fateful one. Pinochet suffers a heart attack during the shoot and Dorfman, whose writing (especially Death and the Maiden) bears the scars of his trauma, gets pressed into service on the talk show circuit.

Chicago Reader JR Jones

Ariel Dorfman, cultural minister to Chilean president Salvador Allende, was on a list of people to be summoned to the presidential palace in the event of a coup, but when the military moved against Allende on September 11, 1973, the call never came. As Dorfman explains, he was spared so that he could bear witness, and so he has, in his writings (most notably his 1991 play Death and the Maiden) and in this 2006 Canadian documentary by Peter Raymont. The coup and the crimes of Allende’s successor, General Augusto Pinochet, are hardly news at this point, but Raymont finds fresher material in the years since, as the general’s death in December 2006, before he could be brought to justice, tears open old wounds in Santiago. Time has also provided the movie with an awful coda in the second September 11, when Dorfman, then a professor at Duke University, saw the grieving people of New York City searching for their own disappeared. 92 min.

The 7th Annual HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH TRAVELING FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

"... my first September 11th had been in 1973, when terror was also inflicted on the innocent, when death also rained down from the sky, sending me into exile, making me into the man I have now become..." -Ariel Dorfman

On September 11, 1973, Chile's military attacked its government. As the coup took hold, the democratically elected president Salvador Allende called government members to the presidential palace to stand against their attackers, facing certain death. Ariel Dorfman was Allende's cultural advisor, and should have been called too; he later discovered his name had been struck from the list so he could live to tell what happened that day. Three decades later, Dorfman is an internationally respected writer and human rights activist, winner of the Sir Laurence Olivier Award for the play Death and the Maiden. Filmmaker Peter Raymont travels to Chile with Dorfman in late 2006, at the time when Augusto Pinochet, Allende's overthrower and Dorfman's long-time nemesis, is dying. Raymont follows Dorfman through emotional reunions with his friends and fellow resistors, to personal landmarks that are powerful both emotionally and historically. During the journey they explore exile, memory and the search for justice. Directed by Peter Raymont, Canada, 2006, 92 mins. In English and Spanish with English subtitles.

Exclaim! [Allan Tong]

In September, 1973, the C.I.A. sponsored General Pinochet’s coup to violently oust Chilean Socialist President Salvador Allende. Ariel Dorfman, Allende’s cultural attaché, was one of the lucky few in his Cabinet to escape with his life. Now teaching in America, Dorfman recounts those idealistic three years when Allende ruled and remembers the bloody persecution that followed.

Peter Raymont’s latest documentary pays as much tribute to Allende’s Chile as it does to writer and intellectual Dorfman. The strength of the film lies in Dorfman returning to Santiago and recalling in vivid detail how he escaped from the soldiers and hid in the Argentinean embassy that Chilean snipers were watching day and night. Rare archival footage is skilfully blended with Dorfman’s recent homecoming. There are of course, tributes paid to the thousands of mothers of the disappeared, who Pinochet’s secret police murdered without a trace.

Based in part on Dorfman’s memoir and co-produced by his son, A Promise To The Dead is a walk through Chile’s dark history, guided by a key eyewitness. No doubt Chileans will feel a sense of closure from seeing this film, while others will be moved. However, the film needs a few more voices to challenge, as well as uphold, Dorfman’s telling of history. A smaller complaint is that Dorfman fails to convincingly link the World Trade Center attacks with the Pinochet coup, which both happened on different September 11s.

While Dorfman feels morally obligated to tell the story of 1973, he doesn’t undergo a transformation like the tormented General Romeo Dellaire in Raymont’s excellent Shake Hands With The Devil. Dorfman remains more of a detached witness with seemingly no psychic scars to heal but a wealth of memories that this film succeeds in capturing.

User comments from imdb Author: cookie_on_fire from Slovenia

Thank you, Ariel Dorfman, for being able to speak for the Dead. I am sure they would be proud and honored by Dorfman's voice in this movie. It has been several hours since I've seen this documentary, but it just doesn't let go of my thoughts. Not only Dorfman is a witness, a story teller, an intellectual in an exile, he also provides a humble, yet interesting criticism of his own survival of the coup: "Maybe I should have gone there, expose myself and get killed. But I was a coward." He made his self-preservation fear justified by his work and testimony.

But this story is beyond accusation of the political injustice and violent regime. It is also beyond history. Dorfman doesn't need to point a finger, although the story has to be told for the Death he is representing, for the people that "vanished", for the dead bodies, that have been, by making them disappear for their family, "deprived of their own death". The death has been unofficial for them. So was the story of his grandma - Dorfman has to face the guilt of being abroad and the pain of being "deprived" of her death. I also love the fact Death and the Maiden, his most renown work (besides this movie?) is included, because this work is ubiquitous and timeless. You can apply it to any crisis, any abuse of human rights and - any country in the world.

Nemo propheta in patria: Dorfman admits the exile has given him many multicultural dimensions, provided a different perspective for him. He visits his homeland to later return in the USA. A friend of him explains why this is needed, both for the USA and for Chile: his voice needs to be out in the world.

Another turning point in the documentary: in a spirit of true democracy, Dorfman would fight for the rights of Pinochet fans to express their opinion. Puzzled and shocked by Pinochet's heart attack, Dorfman explores the temptations of revengeful feelings, only to reject them instantly: "I don't want anybody's death, not even my worst enemies'. I want him to be prosecuted." Similarities with Milosevic, anyone? Am I the only one who sees the man is a Nobel prize material?! I LOVE IT and am looking forward to see it again at least twice. The messages in it are too strong to be neglected and overlooked. Furthermore, you will not be bored for a single moment. This is emotionally loaded, well timed movie. I did not rate it 10 just because I empathize politically, I strongly believe this is an excellent made masterpiece.

The House Next Door [Lauren Wissot]

Peter Raymont’s documentary A Promise to the Dead: The Journey of Ariel Dorfman, while not my top pick at the Human Rights Watch festival for mesmerizing subject matter (that would be Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North), nor for formal artistry (see Maria Ramos’ Juizo (Behave)), does have something these other films lack—a famous North/South American, writer/exile (the film is partially based on Dorfman’s best-selling memoir Heading South, Looking North) whose Death and the Maiden catapulted him to fame. Think Salman Rushdie with a picture deal instead of a fatwa.

Now I’m not knocking the animated, somewhat Woody Allen-ish Dorfman, who comes across as absolutely sincere in his “promise to the dead,” the commitment he made to his murdered Chilean comrades, and to all his fellow countrymen who were “disappeared” under the Pinochet regime, that he would tell their tale. Indeed, Dorfman believes this is the sole reason that he, Cultural Adviser to the Chief of Staff under socialist president Salvador Allende at the time of the Pinochet coup on September 11th, 1973, was allowed to live. On the list to be called to La Moneda that fateful day (to be subsequently tortured and executed), Dorfman’s name was crossed off at the last minute—somebody had to bear witness, the man responsible for the action later explained. Dorfman, still haunted by not having martyred himself, spent three weeks in safe houses, eventually making his way to the Argentine embassy in the trunk of a car (Raymont lets us glimpse the beautiful, immaculately gardened grounds now as Dorfman describes how packed to the rafters with desperate people the building was in ‘73) before being allowed to escape to Buenos Aires, his wife and young son safely with him. I believe Dorfman when he says that the freedom to live and speak out is not just a freedom—it’s a responsibility. I just question Raymont’s decision to trust solely in the viewpoint of a writer, whose suffering was mostly secondhand, to delve into the complicated depths of Chile’s 9/11.

For Dorfman, though an exile with not a trace of accent in either English or Spanish, has lived a remarkably blessed life compared to those he finds when he travels back to Chile with Raymont and his crew. The film begins with a photomontage of the missing, the words, “Donde estan? (Where are they?)” emerging on the screen to the soulful sound of a strumming guitar. Cutting between archival footage of Santiago in 1973 and present day, talking head interviews with the writer (who says that being part of history keeps him “jubilantly alive”), and Dorfman's heartfelt reunions with his fellow revolutionaries, A Promise to the Dead is really a travelogue through time, one in which a gap between the still idealistic Dorfman (forever scribbling about the past) and his older, wiser, more pragmatic comrades who stayed behind is glaringly apparent. Writer exiles have to leave to write, but spend their lives pining to go back, Dorfman says, and yes, it is he who takes great pride in reenacting the glory days of Allende’s short-lived reign, who wants to face the photos of friends murdered, who wants to march in the streets enthusiastically singing the anthems. Dorfman’s friends seem happy to see him, though they’ve seen too much to share his youthful joy.

“Exile is like a journey into death—where you lose everything that gives meaning to your life,” Dorfman says, adding that leaving his buddies was as bad as losing both the revolution and Allende, a statement that strikes me as quite shallow in light of the near-genocide Pinochet inflicted, but at least he’s honest. Dorfman says that 9/11 brought back his own 9/11, the “missing” photos of the workers at the Twin Towers like a déjà vu of the “disappeared” in Chile. He felt compelled to return to Santiago “to see if there are lessons to be learned.”

I was at home in NYC on 9/11, though I never lost any friends. And even if I had, it would be quite presumptuous of me to claim that my experience of 9/11 was the same experience as that of my friend John who lost his older brother at the Trade Center. In essence, this is what Dorfman is doing by holding onto pain that doesn’t belong to him. It’s why Death and the Maiden, whose central conceit is the tortured living beside their torturers, became a hit everywhere—except in Chile where it was met with scathing reviews. A Chilean actress explains the reaction as “he put his finger in the wound,” struck a nerve in a country that wasn’t ready to deal with the past quite yet. That could very well be. But it could also be that Dorfman, who never endured life under the Pinochet regime firsthand, who left soon after the coup, hadn’t earned the right to be that finger.

In fact, Dorfman’s childhood was filled with secondhand tragedy. Though his grandmother from Odessa was Trotsky’s interpreter, his grandparents came to Buenos Aires to escape anti-Semitism. His professor father had to leave for the U.S. after Argentina’s unfriendly regime change, with Dorfman, his mom and sis soon to follow him to NYC. But McCarthyism once again put the family in danger (his parents were friendly with people in the Rosenberg circle, i.e., secondhand pals of Ethel and Julius) so they fled to Chile. The boy who had been “seduced by American media culture,” putting him at odds with his left-wing father, grew up to become the young man heady with the nonviolent, socialist, democratically-elected Allende revolution. Indeed, Dorfman’s first literary success was co-writing a scathing deconstruction called How To Read Donald Duck, which became an instant hit in Chile, even attracting the attention of Walt Disney himself, who offered to buy the worldwide rights (so he could suppress it, of course!) “We scared our adversaries—and our allies,” with radicalism Dorfman admits. He claims the violence that put Pinochet in power was a result of the Allende government being too tired to govern, the adversaries too exhausted to overthrow, resulting in a dangerous tension that led to the strongman’s coup. (As Dorfman and one of his friends recount this dark history in sunny Santiago, Raymont nicely cuts back and forth to the actual images they are recollecting.)

When Dorfman and his son Rodrigo visit his grandmother’s gravesite in Buenos Aires for the first time, a journey the writer had been avoiding all those years as he traveled the world organizing a “cultural resistance” to Pinochet, I wondered if perhaps the exile’s obsession with a past he never fully experienced was a way of evading his own real personal past. “Exile took all my shelters away from me,” Dorfman says, referring to this as a positive development. It made him a deeper writer and human being. But it also says volumes about the sheltered life he’d been living, always fleeing just before the storm’s damage could be absorbed.

Which is why it also bothered me to hear Dorfman say that the only center of resistance to Pinochet in Chile took hold at the sole institution with some degree of autonomy, the church (where people documented the missing)—then go on to describe himself as the place where the living and the dead could meet, another poetic way of saying he began to write when he “listened to the voices of the disappeared.” Their lives were taken from them—but so were their deaths! “Disappearing” someone is tantamount to erasing the meaning of his or her life.

O.K., but weren’t those at the church acting as “the place where the living and the dead could meet” doing all along what Dorfman says he himself was doing, albeit in their own less colorful way? Why does Dorfman single himself out as a “chosen one” when there were loads of “chosen ones” living under Pinochet? It reminds me of Reagan taking credit (from the outside) for the fall of the Soviet Union when those on the inside did all the work. Even more confounding is Dorfman’s visit to his friend Susana who put her own life and that of her daughter in danger by providing safe haven when he was on the run—but who stayed in Chile and became a militant. Dorfman offers that it was the little things like Susana’s act, and not the grand gestures, that knocked Pinochet out of power. Perhaps Raymont should have focused his lens on Susana for ninety minutes.

When Dorfman finally visits the Pinochet headquarters, sees the extent of the wiretapping (one wire equaling 300 phones), then notes that most of the Pinochet underlings are still walking around free (much like the Stasi and the KGB, adds talking head Juliet Stevenson, who starred in the play of Death and the Maiden), and that a good 30% of Chileans still viewed Pinochet as their leader right up until his death, it’s all too much. Dorfman’s reaction, that is. After being called a “dirty Communist” by a woman as he tries to visit the military hospital where Pinochet was taken after his heart attack, he tells her he mourned Allende—so he empathizes with her mourning Pinochet. A lovely sentiment wiped away when he later explains that he views all Pinochet supporters as accomplices to murder, creating a culture of fear so they could turn the other way. Later he testifies on behalf of the daughter of a friend who disappeared. Waiting outside the government building with the young son who she can’t answer when he asks, “What happened to my grandfather?” she collapses into tears, her life changed forever by wounds that never heal.

“The death of Pinochet is like an X-ray of Chile,” Dorfman pronounces after the passing of the dictator whose shadow still looms large in Chile. The new president, Michelle Bachelet, is a woman whose father was tortured and murdered by the vicious regime—yet she refuses to go after the many human rights violators residing side by side with the likes of Dorfman’s friend’s daughter. Dorfman can’t understand how she (of all people!) can turn a blind eye. But then how could he? For Dorfman never was a witness in the first place, only as ghostly a presence as the disappeared whose stories he tells.

Critical Mass Film House [Deborah Dearth] including an interview, January 2008: Read the interview with director Peter Raymont.

Cinematical (Monika Bartyzel) review

Variety (Robert Koehler) review

Film - Courage to Bear Witness to Man's Infinite Cruelties ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times, June 13, 2008

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN - Review - Theater - New York Times Frank Rich from The New York Times, March 18, 1992

Remember-Chile - Declarations - Association of Relatives of the ... March 23, 1999

BBC News | AMERICAS | Finding Chile's disappeared James Reynolds from the BBC News, January 10, 2001

BW Online | February 12, 2001 | Chile's Disappeared: Will the ... Louise Egan from Business Week, February 12, 2001

Speaking for the Dead Maya Jaggi from The Guardian, June 14, 2003

BBC NEWS | Americas | The woman taking Chile's top job January 16, 2006

Are We Really So Fearful? - washingtonpost.com Ariel Dorfman from The Washington Post, September 24, 2006

Michelle Bachelet - Chile - Latin America - Politics - Women ... David Rieff from The New York Times, November 18, 2007

Ariel Dorfman: "A Promise to the Dead" of Pinochet's Chile | Salon ... Ariel Dorfman from Salon, June 11, 2008

Ariel Dorfman - The World That Harold Pinter Unlocked ... Ariel Dorfman from The Washington Times, December 27, 2008

Ariel Dorfman | guardian.co.uk profile page, including article links, from The Guardian

Ariel Dorfman personal website

Ariel Dorfman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An Ariel Dorfman e-Resource Page

Death and the Maiden (play) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Death and the Maiden Summary & Study Guide - Ariel Dorfman ...

Project Disappeared: Chile

Michelle Bachelet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michelle Bachelet - The 2008 TIME 100 - TIME

Rebella, Juan Pablo and Pablo Stroll

WHISKY B 86

Uruguay Argentina Germany (95 mi) 2004

An amusing, very low-key film from Uruguay that is dominated by the theme of droll miserablism, featuring an elderly man who runs a sock factory, who knows only one state of mind - being miserable. Deciding to impress his more outgoing visiting brother from Argentina who bores the pants off of him, and also runs a sock factory, he pretends to be married with his long-standing floor manager, a stodgy woman who knows nothing but loyal dedication to him and her work, all in a ruse to appear happier and more successful than his brother. Using deadpan, Buster Keaton-like set-ups, and an extremely slow pace, much of the time the film shows not much happening at all, or something completely absurd, all designed to bore his brother to death so he’ll go back home. Nothing major ever happens, as this is a tender character study with only small, subtle surprises in store for us, with some terrific music playing over the end credits.

Recha, Marc

AUGUST DAYS

Spain (93 mi) 2006

August Days Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

NYFF explain. This is the first of Recha's features I've seen, and there's no denying, the fellow has a great eye. His patient treatment of the Catalan landscape is remarkable, often using just slightly oblique angles to make a seemingly placid natural space ambiguously forbidding. At the same time, Recha's use of natural light suffuses the entire film with a golden glow that I have never really seen in any other film I can think of. The problems arise when the voiceover begins. We're introduced to brothers Marc and David through the words of their unseen sister, and through bizarre images of fraternal tenderness that verge on the incestuous. (These are the weirdest familial images since Sokurov's Father and Son.) Their road trip is accompanied by cloying Windham Hill guitar music, still photographs presented in slide-show format, and the narrator's increasingly tortured poetic reverie. This is not a good film, but it is one of a kind. It's galling, though, that this New Age fraternal weepie gets festival play, whereas the far superior features of James Benning get shunted aside as too avant-garde. Mostly, though, I spent the screening chuckling to myself about its NYFF inclusion, since that means Mike D'Angelo will have to watch it. [ADDENDUM: He sort of didn't mind it. Color me shocked, etc.]

Redford, Robert

ORDINARY PEOPLE A 95

USA (124 mi) 1980

It’s hard to make an audience care about elitist people growing up in the rich, lily white suburbs who seemingly have all the advantages, an immense, luxurious estate, a steady stream of maid service, vacations in Europe, exclusive schools, college to the school of their kid’s choice, no matter how expensive, parents invited to all the important social gatherings, where it’s hard for them to discover that emotionally, they’re still people, just like anyone else. When they’re cut, they bleed. This film shows that no matter what advantages they’ve had, and whatever therapy they can afford, they’re still unprepared to deal with the grief of losing a child. It’s simply an indescribable horror that would bring any family to their knees. This film is about that day of reckoning, and begins months after the event when the older, more favored son drowned in a boating accident, while the younger son survived, but it led to a suicide attempt, followed by four months in a psychiatric hospital. All this happens prior to the beginning of the film, when the son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) has quietly returned to high school and rejoined his former place on the swim team and in the school chorus. Life goes on. But Conrad is still haunted by the incident, feeling guilty that he survived when his brother didn’t, and it seems to have taken all the air out of him, where his strength has simply disappeared. He’s not pleased with his performance on the swim team, his father (Donald Sutherland) seems to be hovering over his every move, while his mother (Mary Tyler Moore) has never felt more distant.

It’s interesting that Moore and Sutherland are playing against type, as usually Sutherland is remarkably adept at playing demented characters living on the other edge of sanity, see Don't Look Now (1973) or Bertolucci’s 5-hour historical epic 1900 (1976), while Mary Tyler Moore is the picture perfect image of a contented housewife from all those years on the Dick Van Dyke Show (1961 – 1966) and the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970 – 1977), both huge successes which established her wonderful combination of warmth and comic timing, where if anything, her character always exhibited signs of good common sense. Not so here, as her way of dealing with the family’s grief is to continually change the subject, even with her own family members. It’s gotten so bad that Conrad can’t even speak to her anymore, as there’s little else he feels like talking about. Her idea of “dealing with it” is putting it in the past and moving on, suggesting she and her husband Christmas in London this year, that it would be good for them while Conrad can sit home and attend therapy sessions with his new therapist (Judd Hirsch). They end up going on a golfing vacation instead, which is her way of dealing with potentially losing yet another son, this time from emotional neglect. Moore is something of a monster in this film, as she believes it’s her role as a good upstanding socialite wife to put up a good appearance and brave her way through her family’s difficulties, claiming it’s no one else’s business, reminiscent of how the Kennedy clan handled the aftermath of the Presidential assassination, also including bouts with alcohol treatment, mental illness, as well as Chappaquiddick. The upper crust elite establishment are bred to believe they should always show a façade, a prime example being the Queen of England or Winston Churchill during the war, putting up a stiff upper lip and demonstrate courage under fire. They’re raised to believe showing feelings is a weakness.

The problem here is that Conrad is crumbling under that weakness, as other than his therapist, he has no one else to talk to. Things aren’t as bad as they seem, as he does have a friend from the hospital, but she seems to be recovering more successfully than he is, and there is a girl in the chorus who has taken a special interest in him, Elizabeth McGovern in her first movie role, who couldn’t be more naturalistically open and honest with him, exactly what the doctor ordered, but he’s in too much of a funk to see. Sutherland is an easy going, get-along kind of guy who tries to befriend everyone, who’s never said an unkind word about anyone, and who probably thought at one time in his life that he was the luckiest guy in the world. But after they lost their son, the one his wife bestowed all her love and affections upon, there seems to be nothing left now for anyone else. The well has run dry. Now it’s all about keeping up appearances. There is, of course, dramatic heft to this ultimately moving piece, as the actors demonstrate a familiarity with this frigid, emotionally empty territory, and everyone involved has powerful scenes. One outstanding personal moment shows Conrad after quitting the swim team, which takes some courage, by the way, and meets up with the former teammates after they’ve lost a meet. After getting into a senseless fight with the air-headed Alpha male of the group (Adam Baldwin), which proves nothing, a friend steps into his car and tries to be a friend, saying he misses his brother as much as anyone, as the three of them used to pal around all the time, but Conrad can’t handle his friendship as it causes him too much pain, and then drives off alone into his own existential fog of endless anguish. This pretty much describes the dark mood of the entire film, where there isn’t an ending or a solution so much as there is a quiet release.

What this film is known for is winning the Academy Award for Best Picture over one of Martin Scorsese’s best films, RAGING BULL (1980), which has easily surpassed this film in terms of cinematic significance, while Redford directing his first picture won Best Director as well, which was a real crime, as Scorsese’s film is brilliantly inventive throughout. Family dysfunction was not openly discussed when this film was released, so it was an eye opener at the time, and while the film continues to pack a punch, still touting exquisite dramatic performances, Redford’s direction is sufficiently solid but unspectacular. This is a fairly straightforward chamber drama that is unfortunately broken down into a black and white world of good and bad characters, not nearly as memorable as, say Mike Nichols direction of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). It does bear some resemblance to Ingmar Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972), an exquisitely directed chamber drama about another wealthy family’s inability to love and show affection to a dying sibling, as the filthy rich were raised so that they never had to actually do anything in their lives except pay to have others perform whatever services they need. In that case, it’s the family nurse that holds and cuddles and actually caresses the dying sister until her death while the others pretty much stand around looking like wallpaper. So cinema had certainly taken up this subject before, but not so in American films apparently, especially when there are no easy answers at the end, no happy ending, no easy road to recovery. The film suggests there will be plenty more sleepless nights, which by itself makes this a genuinely honest and candid look at the trauma of clinical depression and the havoc it plays in our lives. Families of returning soldiers, dead, maimed, or psychologically altered, deal with this kind of thing all the time but the public rarely sees it, even when it’s the family living next door or across the street.

Any movie starring the all-American dream mum Mary Tyler Moore as a neurotic, domineering mother, papering over the cracks as her husband and son go to pieces, should get ten out of ten. Unfortunately, Robert Redford's super-tasteful movie (from the novel by Judith Guest) uses her pixie grin as its only effective irony. For the rest, it's a scrupulously observed affluent American psychodrama that wishes it was Chekhov: tinged with autumn leaves, and following the cocktail party, the golfing holiday, the school swimming race, it peels away the happy smile of these 'ordinary people', plunged into misery after the death of one son and the breakdown of another. An actors' movie and an advert for therapy, extremely bitter, but handsomely directed in its elegant pretentiousness, it leaves you the impression that Redford is, despite it all, as cuddly as a teddy-bear.

User reviews from imdb Author: dataconflossmoor from United States

The setting for this movie is seemingly appropriate for characterizing frustrations...The North Shore!!...Chicago's sequestered citadel of professional and avaricious elitism...A three million dollar home, trips to Europe, your kids going off to the most expensive colleges in the country, remodeling your kitchen every couple of years and your work-less socially active wife being a permanent fixture at Marshall Fields!! All of these trademarks of success are taken for granted and merely expectations for the ultimate definition of a quiet bedroom community!! Acquisition of status is no longer excitement, it is in fact a given...The only devastating misconception to all of this is that people living in the North Shore are not superhuman, they are merely overburdened, socially, financially, physically, mentally and as this film so brilliantly depicts, EMOTIONALLY!! There is a prevailing mentality of a mandated and bothersome agenda that all of the characters in this movie must adhere to!!...The Jarretts (Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton) are a family who are shattered by perpetual tragedy and isolation, each one of them does not know what to do about the fact that the other son, Buck, has died, and Conrad (Timothy Hutton) has attempted to commit suicide!! So much of this film deals with how the misunderstanding of each other is the monster that will win out!!.. Perseverence is something that the mother thinks she can handle, but cannot!! The son lacks social stamina for such a task, and the father needs facts to gather in order for him to attain this!!..This catastrophic dilemma is answered with social gatherings, vacations, an inordinate preoccupation with moral facades and expensive therapy!!.. The bottom line is that a tragic undermining to every critical situation continuously prevails, and that Conrad and his parents need more time than the movie allows to heel all wounds even on a superficial level...Director Robert Redford has an incredible insight in this movie, and many white collar executive households share the exacerbations and misgivings of financial competition that this Lake Forest household had to endure!!...Ordinary People won for best picture in 1980 and it is no wonder...The despondence the Jarretts face is a horror story that could teach Stephen King a couple of tricks... The Mother feels as though she must create an illusion of contentment to the outside world even if it is at the risk of neglecting her family's needs...Pretenses become her self-centered priority...The father, while well intentioned, is meager and adolescent in his approach to coping with the household's consternation..It is if he expects a resolution to his family's problems to be put in his stocking on Christmas morning...The son, Conrad, just resigns himself to misery and arctic desolation!! The overall predicament in this film has a frightening simplicity... The Jarret's aggregate plight is that they are alone, unhappy and confused!! Judd Hirsch is terrific as the shrink who feels sorry for a high school kid who is compelled to see him, but has to go through procedure to actually help him...The greatest help he can offer Conrad, is that his problems can only be solved one step at a time, and not by uttering some miracle mumble jumble like Conrad's father expects!! Ordinary People is about ordinary well to do upper middle class people, these are people who constantly torment themselves for making mistakes!! They perennially imitate wealthy people, which means they are continuously fighting a losing battle, and genuine problems such as a son attempting suicide have to take a back seat to status games and social advancement!!.. Just another $250,000.00 a year household...ho hum!!...What is bothering you? "everything!!" "did we say that"..."we mean nothing at all"....The purpose of a two acre piece of property is not to be a voice in the wilderness.. Apocalyptic human pitfalls rest on apathetic shaky grounds in Chicago's North Shore Suburbia, and are indiscriminately shelved off in callous anonymity!! Calvin Jarrett is plagued by the shattering realization of just how pitiful it is to have to attend your own son's funeral!! Tragedy fights dirty pool when it will not even allow the Jarretts to know exactly what the unanswered questions are!! The situational dilemma manifests itself by pointing out that people who seem alright may not be, household upheaval and family hardships will go quite awhile before they are even mollified!! and the beautiful cinematography of Lake Forrest represents a polar opposite of what emotional ugliness lurks in the Jarrett's domicile!! This movie concludes at a glimmer of hope for Conrad, which symbolizes a demoralizingly rudimentary progress for the entire Jarrett Family, YES!! this is very very very DEPRESSING!!! How realistic can you get!! Outstanding movie for many many reasons.. Mostly for the fact that it illustrates how clinical depression cannot be instantly cured just because there are only 18 minutes left to the movie!! I give it five stars out of five stars!!!

Ordinary People - TCM.com Scott McGee

Robert Redford was off to a good start in 1980-81. In May 1980, Redford announced that he would set up the Sundance Film Institute in Utah to foster the making of independent films. On September 19, 1980, Redford made his directorial debut with the sobering drama, Ordinary People. Then on March 31, 1981, the film won Academy Awards for Best Director, Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Timothy Hutton, in his film debut), Best Writing, Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium (Alvin Sargent), and nominations for Best Actress (Mary Tyler Moore) and Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch, in a role that was once filled by Gene Hackman).

Though one of the biggest box office winners of his day, Redford never came close to winning an Oscar for acting. His lone nomination for The Sting (1973) lost out to Jack Lemmon's win for Best Actor in Save the Tiger (1973). Redford decided to turn to directing because of an overall feeling of becoming "a glamour figure of cartoon proportions" in his acting career. Paramount wanted to cast Redford himself as Calvin Jarrett, the role eventually played by Donald Sutherland, who was originally slated for Judd Hirsch's shrink role. Redford became only the third man (and the first actor) to win Best Director on his debut. The others were Delbert Mann (Marty, 1955) and Jerome Robbins (co-director on West Side Story, 1961). Redford would soon be joined by James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, 1983) and Kevin Costner (Dances With Wolves, 1990).

This film marks the start of what would be a continuing theme in director Redford's oeuvre - family bonds. Redford would explore this same theme in A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), and The Horse Whisperer (1998). Ordinary People won its Oscars over Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), the masterpiece often voted the best film of the 1980s. As a result, Ordinary People has often been critically ignored despite its many outstanding qualities.

"The liberal notion seems to be that you're not making anything worthwhile unless it's about the poor," Redford said, explaining why he was adapting a story about upper class WASPs in Chicago. "It's about the status quo and whether it's worth the trouble it takes to maintain it." One remarkable quality of the film is its excellent cast. Redford purposely cast against type, choosing Donald Sutherland, "about as off-center as you can get," to play the straitlaced father. For the emotionally volatile mother, Redford said he sought to bring out "the dark side of Mary Tyler Moore" and that he wouldn't let her use the familiar affectations of her characters from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). Moore's dramatic performance was indeed startling, coming from a well-known fixture of television situation comedy. After the highly successful run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended in 1977, Moore tried a different form of television, that of a comedy/variety hour format, as exemplified by The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1979). But both of these shows, Mary (1978) and The Mary Tyler Moore Hour (1979), bombed with the era's couch potatoes. Moore promised to step up to the sitcom plate again in 1980 with another try at CBS. But instead, she tried her hand at Broadway, starring in the play Whose Life Is It, Anyway?, for which she won a special Tony Award in 1980. This led to leading roles in feature films and plenty of accolades for her blistering dramatic turn in Ordinary People. With the role of the neurotic Beth Jarrett, a role once earmarked for Lee Remick, Moore effectively subverted her lovable image for good, proving her mettle with dramatic material. Unfortunately, Moore had several real-life crises that undoubtedly added to her performance. Moore permanently separated from noted producer Grant Tinker, her husband of seventeen years, during the filming of Ordinary People. And in a cruel irony, Moore's only child, 24-year-old Ritchie Moore, committed suicide that same year prior to the production of Ordinary People.

Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers

Parallax View [Robert C. Cumbow]

Elizabeth McGovern Webpage -- Review of ORDINARY PEOPLE

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review

DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson

A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Apollo Guide (Ryan Cracknell) review [91/100]

Walter Frith retrospective

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [97/100]

Gone with the Twins (Mike Massie) review [10/10]

FilmJudge (David Mercier) review [4/5]

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]

Big Picture Big Sound (David Kempler) review [1.5/4]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]

The House Next Door [Jamie Dunn]

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP C 74

USA (125 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site

This is the movie equivalent of Bill Clinton proclaiming he smoked pot in his youth, but never inhaled. Here Robert Redford stars as a man with a connection to the Weather Underground, but he was never involved with any actual killings. In both cases, these are sanctimoniously moral men used to having it both ways. In real life, this rarely works, as people find it incredulous and far too inconceivable to believe. This is the kind of film that gives liberals a bad name, as they appear to be morally superior and above judging themselves as part of history, which is exactly how Redford is portrayed in this film. He was part of the problem without actually being part of the problem, remaining a valiant white knight who fought against the Vietnam War but remains innocent and squeaky clean against any pending legal charges. It would be quite a different story had he actually taken responsibility for his involvement, as did Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, married activists when in 1980 they turned themselves in, as both were leaders of the Weather Underground and participated in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago in October 1969, as well as the bombing of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, going underground in early 1970, living under fictitious identities for a decade. Charges were dropped against Ayers when it was revealed that undercover FBI agents were also involved in the bombings, while Dohrn received probation. Despite passing both the New York and Illinois bar exams, she was turned down by the Illinois ethics committee because of her criminal record. Nonetheless, both Ayers and Dohrn taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Northwestern University School of Law respectively, where Dohrn was the founder and director of the Children and Family Justice Center. After they vacated their outstanding legal troubles, both adopted Chesa Boudin, the child of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two former members of the Weather Underground who were sentenced to murder in 1984 for their roles in an armored car robbery, serving nearly 20 years. This brief bit of history contrasts against such a tame movie version that refuses to take a stand, as these are real people leading real lives, never regretting or showing remorse for their radical activism of the 60’s and 70’s, as the U.S. government has never apologized to the Vietnamese or those dead or injured Americans who lost their lives under the ruse of fighting the spread of communism in Asia.

Based on the conservative political climate that exists today, the real political story could never be told in Hollywood movies, evidenced by Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar (2011), as the production company would be perceived as endorsing or advocating the events shown, even though it happened forty years ago when the majority of the country was actually against the war in Vietnam, yet the government persisted, using illegal and unethical FBI tactics under the COINTELPRO operation to infiltrate the civil rights and anti-war movements as subversive and potentially terrorist operations. So what we get instead is this watered down liberal mix of a feel good movie that pats the writers on the back for attempting to deal with such a hot button issue in the nation’s history, without ever actually dealing with it at all. Unlike much better films, Billy Ray’s SHATTERED GLASS (2003) or BREACH (2007), more intelligent stories about investigative journalism and trading government secrets that actually generate some tension and suspense, this film plays fast and loose with the details and specifics, filling in the blanks about who the Weather Underground were in a brief thirty second news report from the era, told in broad generalizations, never even mentioning the accumulating opposition against the war expressed through anti-war demonstrations and through dissenting 1968 Democratic Presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy (before he was assassinated). While we do get the FBI’s point of view that this was considered an armed and dangerous terrorist group, never seen in any historical context, the actual members can’t even agree among themselves what they stood for, even after decades in time. This muddled view of the American past is something of an embarrassment both to the right and to the left and to all viewers, as it doesn’t tell the truth, but finds a way to continually talk around what happened, using generalities in the absence of facts. What this film does have going for it is a killer cast, featuring significant players even in small roles, but whose presence overall is a huge plus for the movie. Shia LeBeouf is excellent as Ben Shepard, a dogged reporter from Albany, New York, whose persistence in digging up the past is what makes the film and gives it a narrative shape, especially the way he can’t play by the rules if he actually wants the story, where following valuable leads will always exceed narrow budget restraints, especially when it takes you on a circuitous path across the nation.

When Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a vanished member of the Weather Underground from the 60’s, gets caught by the FBI, ironically it was on the way to turn herself in, where rather than living a life defined by fleeing from the FBI, it’s possible to have a second chance at life. But her arrest stirs up the kettle, as it affects all the others who remain under secret identities across the country. One of the first to understand the ramifications is liberal small town lawyer Jim Grant (Robert Redford), who has a 9-year old daughter whose mother died in a car crash a year ago. For her sake, Grant, who is really Nick Sloan, still on the FBI most wanted list, disappears, leaving his daughter with his brother while he eludes the police and goes on the run. Shepard got in a few early questions before he disappeared, writing an incriminating exposé, which gets the wheels in motion. Solarz will only talk to Shepard in prison, giving him another exclusive, but which puts him at odds with the FBI who see him in collusion with the radical 60’s groups. The rest of the film is a chase between several of the major players of the past, which include Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, who have somehow retained some semblance of their former lives, and Julie Christie, elusive as ever, still on the lam. While there are various other connections to boot, where Ana Kendricks plays an FBI mole, Brendan Gleeson plays a retired police commissioner who handled a notorious Weather Underground bank robbery case where someone got killed, and Brit Marling is his well educated daughter. Terrence Howard as the FBI agent in charge is the weakest link, as he is little more than a stereotype, adding no characterization whatsoever, while all the others feel like plausible people we might know that could conceivably be wrapped up in a circumstance like this. While it’s seen as a race against time, there’s never much doubt about what will eventually happen, given a sketchy Cliff Notes history lesson of the era, told using the broadest strokes possible, where the important lesson of the day is to not make quick judgments, but we never hear what separated these radical few from the countless others who demonstrated peacefully, where the film doesn’t even attempt to bridge this gap. In other words, it’s just another Hollywood movie where Redford’s character is a noble hero and the viewer is left to stand and admire. By the end of the film, the character he is memorializing is so whitewashed and stripped of politics that he could just as easily be the reclusive Unabomber. How far he has fallen from his own days of rage as the Condor in Sydney Pollack’s riveting THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), certainly one of the better fear and paranoia conspiracy films of the 70’s, where the moody synthesizer score from Cliff Martinez pays proper tribute.

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

Call it The Expendables of the self-righteous, forgettable drama set. Call it the dour, humourless, didactic cousin of RED. Outside of glib cinematic references, call it, "boring, hackneyed grandstanding" and you'll be right on the mark.

Robert Redford directs, stars and assembles a cast that mixes creaky Hollywood royalty — Nick Nolte (who sounds like he's gargling a toad every time he speaks), Julie Christie (resembling Leatherface's aunt these days) and the director (looking unintentionally comical in jogging apparel) with aging character actors such as Sam Elliot, Chris Cooper, Susan Sarandon, Richard Jenkins, Brendan Gleeson and Stanley Tucci, and a couple young stars of disparate ability: the over-utilized Shia LaBeouf and under-utilized Anna Kendrick (50/50).

I'm forced to admit that LaBeouf is once again (after Lawless) trying his ass off, this time as greasy, smug, manipulative reporter Ben Shepard, but the seams of his efforts are glaring — subtlety is not his strong suit, nor is it Redford's.

Rather than engage in any thought-provoking discourse on violent '70s protest group the Weather Underground's political or moral goals, The Company You Keep is content to merely show off Redford's Rolodex (yes, I presume he still uses archaic physical data storage) and treat the whole affair as nothing more than a slight investigative thriller built upon plodding chase scenes where everybody gets around to doing the right thing as soon as their personal goals are at odds with the film's redemptive narrative ambitions.

Sure, as Redford's Jim Grant goes on the run to clear his name of domestic terrorism charges when he's outed by Shepard after 30 years living under a false identify, he confronts the arrogance of youthful idealism through conversations with his former compatriots, but it does little more than criticise the obvious limitations of living in the Never, Neverland of extreme activism.

Crapping on myopic political romanticism is nowhere near substantial enough to warrant even a passing recommendation of this indulgent, plausibility-challenged snoozer.

What very good company Robert Redford keeps indeed. The 76-year-old stuffs more left-leaning talent into this man-on-the-run thriller than President Obama could fit on stage at a Democratic rally. Here's a rundown of the embarrassment of acting riches cameoing as former anti-Vietnam militants: Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, Stephen Root, and Brendan Gleeson. The Company You Keep certainly needs the star wattage to help it sparkle, as there isn't much in the way of invention when it comes to its workmanlike direction, which leans too much on a typically stellar synth score by Cliff Martinez.

Redford plays Jim Grant, an upstanding civil rights lawyer who's recently become a widower and is bringing up his young daughter. But there's no time to observe how he's coping as a single dad. A two-bit reporter, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), from a local rag has uncovered that Jim is actually Nick Sloan, a key member of the Weatherman Underground, a radical leftwing movement of the '60s and '70s, who's been on the FBI's most-wanted list since the murder of a security guard during a botch bank robbery in 1971. Nick's comrade, Sharon (Sarandon), is already in the custody of FBI Agent Cornelius (Terrence Howard), who's heading up the manhunt, but is unwilling to talk. It's an intriguing setup that could have made for some interesting twists and turns if Redford and screenwriter Lem Dobbs (The Limey, Dark City) weren't so quick to reassure the audience that Nick is no killer. It's a move that makes this liberal actor/director look oh so conservative. Early in the film, Nick's daughter asks him point blank, "Did you kill that man?" "Of course not," he replies incredulously. Mr. Sundance doesn't do shades of gray, as his golden locks testify.

The film opens with a montage of grainy early-'70s news footage, but any warm feeling toward the counterculture is tainted by an air of smugness, like tear gas wafting through a peace rally. While on the run, Nick stops in on Jed (Jenkins), a fellow '60s radical who's now a college professor teaching classes on Frantz Fanon, in order to get some information that will help clear his name, but these baby boomers seem more interested in having potshots at Generation Y. "They listen and clap, and then they update their Facebook pages," says Jed when Nick asked about his students' political convictions—a slap in the face to any young protester currently occupying Wall Street. There's something hypocritical, too, about the way Mimi (Christie), Nick's former lover, and for whom he took the fall back in '71, has a pop at capitalists when she seems to be doing pretty nicely for herself selling bricks of weed smuggled into the States on her luxury yacht. Even the film's title sounds like a lecture.

It's left to Sarandon to add both steel and emotion to the proceedings. When Shepard asks her if she regrets her terrorist past she fires back, she says, "We made mistakes, but we were right." Her electric face-off with LaBeouf's shallow reporter recalls similar questions of culpability in 1988's Running on Empty: Can antiwar terrorism ever be justified if it prevents imperialist genocide? The Company You Keep isn't interested in any of the complex ideas at play in Sidney Lumet's masterful drama, although, coincidently, its title makes for a pithy review of Redford's effort.

Slant Magazine [Chris Cabin]

Though helmed by Robert Redford and scripted by the same hand behind Haywire, the best thing about The Company You Keep is the casting. Redford himself stars as Jim Grant, an upstate New York attorney who's startled by the news that a fellow erstwhile anti-Vietnam activist and Weather Underground member, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), had been arrested on long-gestating murder charges surrounding a 1971 Michigan bank heist, having lived under an assumed identity for some 40-plus years. And she's not the only one who's been hiding from the government, as Ben Shepard (Shia LeBeouf), a low-level journalist, uncovers that Grant is, in reality, Nick Sloan, one of Solarz's suspected accomplices in the shooting. Soon enough, Sloan is on the run from the FBI, represented here by Anna Kendrick and Terrence Howard, and the film becomes something of a quest, allowing Redford to enjoy encounters with fellow luminaries like Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Sam Elliott, and Chris Cooper.

It's an intensely promising setup, marked by a melancholic self-reflexivity, as many of these actors were, at one point or another, purveyors of very public, and largely leftist, political opinions. The casting of such familiar and distinct performers gives the film a comfy, worn-in tone, and for many viewers, their time-ravaged visages and voices recall expansive cinematic and social histories. There are moments, such as the back and forth between Sloan and Jenkins's Jed, a philosophy professor, and Nolte's far-too-brief appearance, where the inherent reflectiveness of the material shines through, but Redford too often allows Lem Dobbs's leisurely script to lead the charge.

Indeed, the drama becomes excessively detoured and is overrun by a stunningly impersonal political sentiment, complicated by a tensionless mystery element involving just how involved Sloan was with the Michigan robbery. Sloan's attempts to locate old flame Mimi (Christie) takes precedence, which begets both a corruption plot involving a local police honcho, Henry Osborne (Brendan Gleeson), and a romance between Shepard and Osborne's daughter, Rebecca (Brit Marling). In these instances, one feels as if Redford may be handing off the proverbial baton to a younger generation of performers and public figures, but if so, the director certainly doesn't back it up with detail or any unique ideas.

The story ends up overriding the minor personal elements Redford has to offer, that of his reputation, his professionalism, and his friendship. A little under 20 years after Quiz Show, Redford's masterpiece and one of the defining works of the '90s, the act of watching The Company You Keep feels tantamount to reading an impressive résumé, littered with top-tier references and impeccable past employment. So, Redford implies that his legacy will not be built on wisdom, but on the hopeful diligence of political ideals. On this count, Redford's politics are more indebted to nostalgia than the now.

Admirably shot by Adriano Goldman, who brought a similar gloomy glow to his work with Cary Fukunuga, and accompanied by a reliably moody synth score by Cliff Martinez, Redford's latest is disengaged in a very fashionable way: By further canonizing the activism of the 1960s and '70s, including that of his generation of film icons, he slyly pleads ignorant, or simply ambivalent, to modern political activism and modern Hollywood. The Company You Keep is a lamb in lion's clothing, a would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.

Old radicals never die, they just clear their names

Robert Redford's new feature The Company You Keep is a fictional and crabwise look back at violent anti-war activism of the Vietnam War era from the point of view of some of its aging veterans formerly connected with the Weather Underground, still being hunted by the FBI. Redford stars in his own picture again, with an impressive array of supporting players; he's well connected. Susan Sarandon plays Sharon Solarz, long hiding in plain sight under a different identity, who gets arrested by the FBI and is accused of involvement in a failed Weathermen bank robbery in the early 1970's in which a guard was killed. This sets off the FBI searching for Jim Grant, real name Nick Sloan (Redford), who's been living for decades under an assumed identity and practicing as a lawyer in Albany, New York. Grant, his true identity ferreted out by aggressive and ambitious young Albany newspaper reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBoeuf), goes on the run to try to prove his innocence of involvement in the killing by finding former lover and cohort Mimi (Julie Christie). This film doesn't even try to capture what it is like for a family of radicals in perpetual hiding as does the touching and memorable Running on Empty, which contains one of River Phoenix's most memorable performances. The Company You Keep is partly a series of vignettes of people Grant meets with in his search to clear his name. Nick Nolte is a sort of drugged-out hippy, now a businessman. Richard Jenkins is a college professor, something like Bill Ayers, husband of Bernadette Dorn. Mimi, who has changed her identity six times, is still a revolutionary leftist, looking for a new radical cause. Chris Cooper isn't a radical but Redford's younger brother Daniel, who helps him hide and cares for Redford's young daughter Isabel (Jacqueline Evancho) while he does so. The director Redford has unlimited access to good actors, and so there's also Stanley Tucci, Anna Kendrick -- and Brendan Gleeson impressive in a key role.

If this is a history lesson for young people, it may not work too well, given how many of the characters are senior citizens and how tame the action is by contemporary standards. But the action here is more precipitous and lively than Redford's previous two liberal political lectures, Lions for Lambs and Conspiracy, which were talky and slow. The screenplay by Lem Dobbs from the novel by Neil Gordon juggles a suspenseful three-way storyline. The primary thread is of Grant, the former Weatherman on the run seeking to clear his name (Redford). In tandem with this is the journalistic procedural conducted by Ben Shepard, the eager young reporter looking for a big story and hard on the heels of Jim Grant. Third, the motor pushing all the other action is the FBI manhunt run by hotshot Special Agent Cornelius (Terrence Howard). The narrative ultimately revolves around the younger generation. Jim Grant wants to clear his name primarily for his young daughter Isabel. And there's another young woman called Rebecca (Brit Marling) whom Ben Shepard is interested in in more ways than one and whose role will emerge dramatically.

Is that the only reason these old events matter -- the need to clear one's slate for the good of one's children? Let me remind you that there are two good documentary films about the Weather Underground, the classic 1976 one in which Emile de Antonnio extensively interviews members who were even then hiding from the FBI, and the 2002 one by Sam Green, Bill Siegel and Carrie Lozano. As these will show, the actual facts and people are more fascinating and colorful than anything reported on in this movie. This movie takes a softhearted liberal and seemingly forgiving attitude to these radicals, without deeply enlightening us about their motives and actions. It doesn't menton that the Weatherman group did bombings, not bank robberies (that was the Symbionese Liberation Army). But this is another chance to see the legendary Julie Christie in a brief but memorable role, and gives LaBoeuf a chance at something more serious than Transformers or the young Wall Streeter who competes with Gordon Gekko. LaBoeuf is small, ferret-like, and a little bit generic, but he has a directness and energy that work for an ambitious reporter (who must spar with his boss, Stanley Tucci's editor). Redford becomes a brave loner revisiting his past. His role embodies his, and the movie's, desire to have it both ways, to be both radical and safe, because he has been one of the Weathermen, and yet we're to believe that not only is his slate clean, but his passing by a false identity is okay.

Ben is the sharp instrument, the FBI the blunt one. "Come on, people!" exhorts Agent Cornelius to his sluggish staff -- just like Chris Cooper as the CIA boss yelling at his Langley crew in the much more exciting exploration of government, lawlessness, and identity, the first Bourne movie. It's Ben who figures out that Grant's not going into deep cover but just hiding while he searches for something. Ben guides the audience along. Otherwise the action would be aimless and crude. He conveys the message that though print journalism may be fading, investigative reporting isn't. It's nice to think so. LaBoeuf's big spectacles link him with Hayden Christensen in Shattered Glass. He can't match the charisma of Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac or that film's epic investigative intensity. But I like the way LaBoeuf loops his specs over the lower buttonhole of his perpetual raincoat. He has some fun with his role and brings life to the film. The story's implication is that Ben will somehow be changed by his brush with radicalism, drawn to its charisma. By the end Ben is no longer so much watching Grant from he outside as rooting for him.

Accusations that Redford is over the hill and can't play this role are unfair. He jogs around manfully, appearing in excellent shape for a 76-year-old, though in truth the former Weathermen of today are younger than Redford by as much as a decade.

The Company You Keep is a mild and soulful sort of all star political thriller depicting a fading network that was once intense and strong. It explores old loyalties and the softening of radiclism, but has nothing definite to say about all that an doesn't really explore such issues as the virtues of nonviolent vs. violent protest. As an exploration of Baby Boomer political history it's a creditable effort, but what its revisiting of the Weather Underground, with the fudged details, adds up to is hard to sa. Ultimately, as noted, it's more a chain of pretty good scenes and brief turns by good actors than a strong movie.

The Company You Keep Review: A Tidy Political Thriller for ... - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke from Pajiba

'The Company You Keep': Robert Redford Plays a Man ... - PopMatters Jesse Hassenger

Review: Redfords The Company You Keep hangs with the ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

Review: Robert Redford's 'The Company You Keep' Is An ... Brent Simon from the indieWIRE Playlist

The Company You Keep | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin

Robert Redford Keeps Revolutionary'Company' Mark Jenkins from NPR

Paste Magazine [Tyler Chase]

Film.com [Laremy Legel]

Robert Redford's The Company You Keep - Entertainment - TIME.com Mary Corliss

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]

The Company You Keep Movie Review 3 : Shockya.com Brent Simon

ShockYa.com [Harvey Karten] also seen here: CompuServe [Harvey Karten]

FilmFracture [Kathryn Schroeder]

The Company You Keep - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland

JWR [S. James Wegg]

The Company You Keep | Review Jesse Klein from Ioncinema

Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]

The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]

Variety [Leslie Felperin]

The Company You Keep Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Richard Roeper

The Company You Keep (Movie);Company You Keep, The Stephen Holden from The New York Times

Redmon, David

MARDI GRAS: MADE IN CHINA

USA (72 mi) 2005

Mardi Gras: Made in China Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

The 5/10 grade is almost accidental, because despite Redmon's assumptions about his subjects, they manage to be surprisingly frank and humane before the camera. So Mardi Gras: Made in China ends up being educational and worthwhile in ways that have little to do with Redmon's intent. In most other ways, this film is precisely what you'd expect, and possibly even a less accomplished version of said 'what.' Redmon contrasts drunken revelers at Mardi Gras with the abused, underpaid Chinese factory workers who toil to make all those gaudy plastic beads that, back in Nawlins, are (were?) "exchanged" for bare boobies. Redmon's persona is that of a curious fellow with a camera, a shtick he lifted from Michael Moore or even Nick Broomfield; the piece feels like something Moore would've done in a ten-minute "TV Nation" segment, padded out to feature length. If there's a single major problem, it's tonal. Despite his folksy demeanor behind the camera, Redmon pretty much embodies the humorless, hectoring leftist. Why Mardi Gras? Well, what could be more exemplary of American waste, gluttony, and causal sexism? (One slo-mo sequence showing a young woman doffing her top for the chintzy beads is depicted the way Resnais depicted Auschwitz, as the absolute nadir of humanity.) I mean, sure, he has a point, but his cheap-shot approach (complete with "Jay-Walking" style drunk-asshole-in-the-street interviews) made me reflexively sympathize with the frat kids. And even within the do-gooder framework from which Redmon is operating, his disgust with Mardi Gras and the people who populate it detracts from his larger point about globalization and the circulation of cheap commodities. Think about it. If he'd documented the shelling of cashews, he'd have to grapple with the fact that they're food, and therefore potentially nourishing to the consumer. If he'd documented the molding of latex dildos, he'd be forced to treat this "subversive" commodity with a degree of subcultural respect. But the beads are the symbol of useless wasted crap for Redmon, which misses some key elements in this scheme. For one, he could have examined them as a token in multiple economies, including the sexual economy of Mardi Gras. How do worthless objects become invested with fiat power? He also could have deepened his analysis, and justified his anger, by considering the process of Mardi Gras's commodification, its lurch from subversive carnivale to beer-and-tits marketing event. (Again, Mardi Gras as Redmon depicts it is mostly white and collegiate, and the black interviewees display considerably more social concern than their white counterparts. Would Redmon have been as free to, say, critique Freaknik?) Anyhow, one a technical level, Redmon errs, making his villains (Roger the Chinese factory owner) and dupes (Pearl, the leathery "bead whore") more interesting and individuated than his victim-heroes. (What do we learn about the factory girls, other than they are sending money home and don't like being punished for work infractions?) And, as if the final edit of MG:MiC weren't enough of a stacked deck, reports from Sundance 2005 indicate that an earlier edit profiled an artist who make sculptures from the beads. No! They are worthless garbage, made by exploited Chinese labor, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a tool of Global Capital. That I am in almost 100% agreement with Mr. Redmon's politics and still found his film objectionably forced and easy, not to mention sadly under-theorized, is a mark of its failure. Final thought: Could the polarity MG:MiC sets up between Chinese work and American play maybe be a bit more complicated? From a Deleuzian standpoint, the Americans' drunken shenanigans are just as much "labor" as the Chinese girls' beadwork, since the consumption end of the cycle is every bit as important to the circulation model. In fact, we might say that the partiers' labor is even more alienated, since what they do (consume for the good of the system of exploitation) has been sold to them as fun. But this takes matters in another direction entirely.

KAMP KATRINA D 56

USA (73 mi) 2007 co-director: Ashley Sabin

You may feel like taking a shower or checking into a good detox program after seeing this film, as nearly everyone in the film has substance abuse issues which clearly was the most prevalent disaster in their lives “prior to” Katrina, and remained so afterwards. In the devastating aftermath of Katrina, one married couple, David and Ms. Pearl, both New Orleans Ninth Ward fixtures who still had a home, offered their back yard for anyone needing a place to stay, turning it into a temporary tent city for homeless people. Initially setting down a set of rules that included no drugs or alcohol, also mandatory work with David clearing the debris and rebuilding some of the lost homes in the area, it soon becomes evident that they have a back yard of alcoholics and drug abusers, including a pregnant woman who continues to smoke crack with her abusive boy friend. While the pregnant woman initially plays the sympathy card for all it’s worth, playing innocent and blaming everything on the boy friend, it’s clear it’s really a scam all along as they are simply taking advantage of the hospitality offered, as there’s a crack house across the street and the only surviving businesses in the area are a convenience store and a liquor store. No one was ever interested in seeking employment, and what was initially temporary becomes a permanent thing. Life in the back yard is another kind of human disaster drowning in its own dysfunctional abuse. Ms. Pearl ends up hating going into the back yard at all as it is filled with derelicts whose lives are filled with nothing but misery and trouble.

Ms. Pearl is a character herself, dressing up in beads and wild costumes, who believes continuing to spread the spirit of life in New Orleans is one of her missions in life, as she refuses to accept her city is dying. But easily the most effecting moment in the film is when she breaks down as she describes the smell of death all around, how months after the storm it still never goes away, that each and every morning, you awake to that same odor of death which simply suffocates any breath of fresh air. She sympathizes with her homesteaders, as she and her husband are both recovering addicts themselves, and she realizes drug and alcohol use is an attempt to numb the pain and the stench of death, but eventually, when several items from their home are stolen and found stowed in the back yard tents, they are forced to start the process of eviction. The problem here isn’t the story itself, but the people telling the story, those tent people in front of the camera who are drunkenly slurring their speech, forcing us to listen to a bunch of low-lifes who have nothing better to do than drink themselves into misery and complete destitution. While David drives through the streets of New Orleans, we see the dilapidated ruins of where homes used to be, which have become an endless stream of vacant lots that have been turned into garbage dumps.

While it’s true, most of the building structure from this area has been demolished beyond recognition, where any resemblance of life still surviving will have to seek shelter elsewhere, this toothless group of tent city rejects don’t really stand for anything at all except their own pitiless futility. This is a Katrina film about people who were homeless drunks, addicts, and fuck ups “before” Katrina, whose lives weren’t changed in any way whatsoever by the hurricane. Therein lies the real problem with this film, as experiencing the nightmarish landscape of neverending destruction from Katrina is one thing, but bearing witness to this VIRIDIANA-like parade of fools, always with a camera in their face, is another. The texture of the video itself is empty and flat, creating an even harsher surface feel throughout the film, offering a somewhat artificialized rendering of a social context submerged in realism. My mind couldn’t help but wander to the ultimate disaster scenario fast forwarding to what is expected to be the only surviving life form after the radiation from a nuclear fallout destroys everything else, leaving behind in its aftermath a dead world where only cockroaches are expected to survive.

Kamp Katrina Fred Camper from the Reader

In post-Katrina New Orleans, a married couple let the homeless camp in their yard after Mayor Nagin unaccountably closes a park facility. Ashley Sabin and David Redmon's gently observational videography and editing let the story emerge without any controlling structure or narration; the action seems to flow naturally from the characters, which makes it all the more troubling. One man thinks he's in touch with Joan of Arc, the hosts suspect someone is stealing from them, a pregnant woman who smokes crack gives birth to an addicted baby--and it's not clear that any of this was caused by the hurricane. 73 min.

Tip of the Week Ray Pride from New City

Expanding on an acquaintance with a woman who appears in their startling documentary, "Mardi Gras: Made in China," David Redmon and Ashley Sabin capture months in the lives of an impromptu tent community that is assembled by Upper Ninth Ward fixture, the Native American Ms. Pearl. Redmon and Sabin had begun following her before the hurricane and stayed as more than a dozen of the newly homeless move in. Drama and class conflict ensue with all the cussed character you could hope for. "A lot of that sparkle and makeup is covering real pain," Ms. Pearl says of New Orleans. As observant as their economic trail of beads and bangles in "MG: MIC," Redmon and Sabin capture obstinacy, community and hope as well as all kinds of destruction that follow the aftermath of hell and high water, including the city’s resistance to residents’ efforts. Gripping, painful, sometimes beautiful stuff. 74m.

Kamp Katrina (2007) Hank Sartin from Time Out Chicago

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians Ms. Pearl and David turned their backyard into a tent village and gave their new tenants construction jobs. Among those they help is Kelley, who was a month pregnant when the hurricane hit. In the sanitized Dateline version, David and Ms. Pearl would be neighborhood saints presented for our edification, and the birth of Kelley’s baby would give a nice, hopeful ending to the story. This ain’t Dateline. David and Ms. Pearl have good intentions but they’ve also got rough edges and foul mouths. And due to Kelley’s regular crack usage, her baby is born addicted to cocaine.

David and Ms. Pearl are not paper heroes, and the people they help soon fall into drinking, drugs, squabbling and theft. Redmon and Sabin display all of this without comment, and simply showing without telling conveys far more complexity than any preachy narration. These people aren’t perfect, but they’ve had their lives taken away from them. Redmon and Sabin remind us of how good we have it and force us to ask if we’d do any better in similar circumstances.

Think of this as a supplement to Spike Lee’s miniseries When the Levees Broke, which offers a panoramic take on Katrina. Redmon and Sabin stay closer to the ground, capturing the struggles of a few people, warts and all. It isn’t pretty, but it’s a necessary and compelling piece of reportage.

Facets Multi Media - FILM PROGRAM ARCHIVE -> August 2007 -> Kamp ...

Kamp Katrina, a verité documentary set in post-Katrina New Orleans, follows Ms. Pearl and her husband, both Upper Ninth Ward residents, over the course of six months. During this time, their yard is transformed into a tent community for people who have lost their homes. Confronted with limited resources and no governmental support, the couple attempts to create a support network for the residents of Kamp Katrina while they employ the boarders to rebuild homes and businesses destroyed by the storm. In the tradition of Luis Buñuel's Viridiana, Kamp Katrina is packed with idyllic intentions gone awry, where the very people targeted for help eventually turn against each other due to the wear and tear of living in tents. Surrounded by apocalyptic destruction and drunken revelry, Kamp Katrina is more realistic than "The Real World" as it brings the audience to a Lynchian world of 14 dispossessed strangers who all share awkward companionship. The mixture of personal troubles and social problems eventually pull them down paths of disturbing violence, as the makeshift community struggles to survive the personal problems and issues brought about by their hopeless situation. Directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, 2007. U.S.A., BetaSP, 73 mins.

Kamp Katrina Nathan Lee from the Village Voice

INTIMIDAD C 73

USA (72 mi) 2008 co-director: Ashley Sabin

Using a variety of video stock and 16 mm film, the color appears enhanced initially, as if colorized, enriching the look of the film into something dreamier than it really is . This is the kind of well meaning film usually initiated by the receipt of a federal grant of some kind, as it was four years in the making and the contents are minimal. Since much of this was shot by the target family themselves, like making a home movie, one can only surmise there was very little actual footage shot in the making of this film. With almost a complete absence of discord or negativity, much of it feels like a certain optimism always played to the camera. One might also believe this could be released under religious auspices playing in churches around the world, not due to any hint of religious content, but due to the completely conservative, family values examined. Using the Michael Apted formula, these filmmakers find a couple with a one-year old child, where both parents are living and working in a border town close to the USA called Reynosa, while the wife’s family is taking care of the baby in Santa Maria, a good distance away. As they walk together holding hands scanning an empty field as far as the eye can see, they speak of building their dream home on this exact spot. Over the course of several years, the camera follows this couple to see what progress they are making.

Initially Cecy and Camilo are working long hours in Reynosa, where he adds daily overtime to his work at a factory that constructs fire hydrants, earning about $260/mo, while she sews together bras at a Victoria Secret plant, earning 18 cents for every bra she makes, potentially earning another $230/mo. These appear to be the two best employers in the region, but they end up spending all day in the factories and rarely have any time together. As Cecy misses her baby, they visit her family over Christmas holiday and the two parents have to re-introduce themselves to their own baby, as they are strangers to her. So they spoil her by buying things and taking her to amusement rides, all of which adds a new dimension to their plan, as Cecy doesn’t wish to part with her baby again. Since there’s no work available in Santa Maria, Camilo doesn’t see this as a viable option, having to return to Reynosa to earn money. But he returns alone, as Cecy stays with her baby, and also helps her mother take care of her elderly father whose health is deteriorating. Interesting that this discussion takes place on camera, but it’s clear it was all decided before the cameras rolled, as both had their minds already made up.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so in one another’s absence, both the husband and wife reaffirm in their hearts that they married the right person, so over time their pain away from one another continues to grow. A year later they try again, Camilo at the same job working the same overtime hours while Cecy now makes homemade jewelry that she sells on the street, which she can do with her daughter present, where she’s free to establish her own hours as well as take care of household chores, like shopping and making the meals. This arrangement works much better, while Camilo also obtains a weekend job selling ice cream on the street, so he’s literally working 7 days a week. After a hurricane leaves their home submerged underwater, they get more serious about making that initial down payment for a new home. What they can afford is simply a plot of land in an undeveloped region, but they have to build their own home from scrap pieces of plywood used to transport heavy materials that have been thrown out by Camilo’s company. Both are ecstatic about the realization of their dream, basically a one room box in the middle of nowhere, but one wonders what will happen when the first storm hits?

INTIMIDAD features a notable musical score with Eric Taxier providing a DEAD MAN, Neil Young-like electric guitar riff while also depicting a father, Camilo, who takes to his baby right away, is a hands on dad who loves to hold her and carry her, and is one of the more positive fathers depicted in films of late. The hopeful ending, however, doesn’t begin to address all the problems they would likely encounter in this new housing tract, like it was apparent they weren't going to receive paved roads, water, and electricity within the first year, as promised in their contract, if ever. So they appear to be eager victims of some housing scam. After their daughter claims to be happy because they could walk to the store, Camilo then walks 3 miles one way just to pick up a plastic jug of water, using the container to hold paint as he paints his new home. We also never see the results of a rainstorm in their new home, as they claim it won't flood, but there didn't appear to be anything preventing their new home from ending up in the middle of an unanticipated lake. However, hope springs eternal.

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

I haven’t seen David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s first film, Mardi Gras: Made in China, but I’m impressed by the way the filmmakers, across second and third features Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, have begun to establish a voice not just through subject matter, but through a distinct visual style. There are few trademarks that you can now expect from a Sabin/Redmon production: eerie video, shot at night on a low shutter speed; an exceedingly intimate access to subject; and a mounting sense of dread as the realization hits that when the crisis inevitably comes down, the camera is going to put us right in the middle of the shit. In Intimidad, the crises seen on screen are mostly emotional and confined to a single family, but they’re spawned by the kind of larger crises of economic disparity and the hopelessness it engenders that propelled Kamp Katrina. The title literally translates to “Privacy”, and there’s a double connotation there: it’s a film about a couple’s struggle to maintain familial intimacy whilst battling a seemingly impossible economic system in the quest for private property.

Cecy and Camilo are 21 year-old parents of a two-year-old daughter, who they’re forced to leave with her grandmother in Santa Maria while they’re working factory jobs jut south of the US/Texas border. In the town where Cecy and Camilo work, horse-drawn wagons squeeze through streets between parked 70s Chevys, and running water and electricity are luxuries. Cecy and Camilo work so many hours that they barely see each other, and they go a year without being able to visit their daughter, but they’re still a long way off from saving the small amount of money that will subsidize their dream of buying a small plot of land on which they can build a home.

Sabin and Redmon followed Cecy and Camilo’s story for four years, for a time leaving cameras with their subjects, and that long-term building of trust shows in the finished product. At times, when Cecy and especially Camilo crumble under the stress of their situation, Intimidad, offers moments of genuine emotion that are miles removed from the score-saturated tear-jerking money shots that mark generic issue docs. The filmmakers have also added dreamy, small-guage film to their arsenal of visual tricks, which offers a respite from the intensity of the hyper-verite material shot on video.

By allowing elements of visual style to carry over from film to film, Redmon and Sabin allow us to understand that across wildly different locations and situations films, we’re watching the same story. This is a running narrative about the bottom rungs of world-wide class stratification, the poor people who have no personal stake in globalization, even as their labor supports it. And yet, their films never feel didactic, because they’re focused on the micro-politics of the personal. Intimidad is only about the economic and global issues that inform it insofar as those issues directly impact the emotional state of people. We’re always aware that a happy ending for Cecy and Camilio would not be a reflection of a changed world, but simply one family’s triumph over conditions and restraints that, for most of us, would seem insurmountable. In a marketplace where so many documentaries seem to lose focus in their determination to say it all and show too much, the personal stories that are forming Redmon and Sabin’s body of work seem to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

not coming to a theater near you review Victoria Large

Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin began production on Intimidad with a particular idea of what it would be, and ended up with a different film entirely. They meant to expose the exploitive business practices of the Rey Mex factory in the Mexican border town of Reynosa, where women earn roughly eighteen cents for every Victoria’s Secret brassiere that they sew and aren’t allowed to speak to their coworkers. But the family that they found in Reynosa and ultimately worked with for five years had a different story to tell, one of quiet resilience rather than victimization.

We’re introduced to Cecy, a young mother living in Reynosa and working at Rey Mex, when the film begins, and her husband Camilo, also employed in a factory that manufactures products for American consumption. They are working constantly and saving any money that they can in order to buy a modest piece of land and make a home for themselves and their young daughter, Loida. In the meantime, Loida is placed in the care of Cecy’s family in Santa Maria, Puebla, where she is spared some of the harshest realities of Camilo and Cecy’s daily existence, but also where her parents can rarely afford to visit. The film follows the family through reunions and separations, small triumphs and not-so-small setbacks. This narrative is focused and very personal (the title appropriately translates to “Intimacy”). Yet while it may appear to eschew global-scale muck racking in favor of a simpler tale, the piece pointedly retains its social conscience.

Redmon and Sabin are under no illusions that the systems in place – those creating situations like that of Camilo, Cecy, and Loida – are anything but grossly and deeply flawed. But that does not prevent them from recognizing and celebrating the family for the tough, loving, and mature people that they emerge as throughout the picture. Camilo and Cecy are not simply prey to the corporate machine, suffering stoically at the hands of wealthier individuals and nations; they are people dealing with poverty in a matter-of-fact way, striving to live the best lives that they can and refusing to allow themselves to be destroyed. Thus, it is inspiring when Cecy quits Rey Mex to do business on her own terms, selling her homemade jewelry outside of the factory where she used to spend the bulk of her time. There is no single solution for Cecy and Camilo’s problems, but they are always searching for the next steps toward improvement.

Yet as serious-minded as Intimidad and its subjects are, it is a warm film and quite entertaining. One of its great joys is in seeing Loida grow from a quiet, wide-eyed toddler to an energetic, intelligent, and charmingly articulate little girl eagerly awaiting her first day of kindergarten. There are also moments of striking beauty that contrast with the grainy, disturbing factory footage or the devastating images of the flooding that is common in Reynosa. Long after the film ended I found myself coming back to some of these delicate, spellbinding moments: Loida taking handfuls of cut flowers and replanting them in the mud; the family gathering outside to make shadow puppets on their hard-won walls. Redmon and Sabin provided Camilo and Cecy with their own cameras, and surely some of the most memorable footage is the subjects’ own. The technique of allowing the subjects to help author their own story feels appropriate to Intimidad, not only because it allows for the intimacy of the title, but also because it reflects one of the most striking things about the film: that it is about those who take action and are not merely acted upon.

Film Threat [Felix Vasquez Jr.]

Joe Leydon Variety

Chicago Tribune (Maureen M. Hart) review

Reed, Carol

Reed, Carol Art and Culture

Sometimes an artist's greatest works arise out of a short whirlwind of creative activity, a kind of concentrated period of labor. For example, Faulkner produced his most acclaimed novels in the short span of eight years. Carol Reed is another prime example -- between 1947 and 1952, this director made "Odd Man Out," "The Fallen Idol," "The Third Man," "Outcast of the Islands," and "The Man Between." This deluge of films established Reed as one of the top directors to emerge out of Britain.

"The Third Man," in particular, is a contender for the title of greatest suspense film of all time. Locale is perhaps the most forcefully drawn character in the film: the inky, labyrinthine world of crumbling, post-war Vienna. Running through Vienna's dark, endless alleyways, a pulp writer peels away layer after layer of fact and fiction from this modern-day Inferno in a desperate attempt to discover the truth about a friend's death. Based on a novella by Graham Greene (who also collaborated with Reed on "The Fallen Idol"), "The Third Man" is a tour de force of intrigue and filmic technique. Reed's tight camera work creates a visual dialogue around the problematics of identity and Cold War politics.

Reed's films are marked by a combination of sympathetic character treatment and sensitivity to political issues. "Odd Man Out," one of the hallmarks of post-war British cinema, follows a wounded IRA gunman on the run in Belfast. Encountering a cross-section of Belfast society -- each of whom may just as easily hinder as help him -- this character slides across the wet, murky streets in a constant state of insecurity and doubt. From this place of fear, the film expands into an allegory of redemption: the IRA gunman, who commits murder in the film's first minutes, becomes a conduit of goodness. While operating on a broad political level -- exploring the relationship between a member of the IRA and his war-torn country -- the film mines the human spirit and posits inherent tendencies towards altruism and community.

Reed explores characters on the fringe, or in the midst, of a world always already in a state of alienation. His characters tread the in-between space, never able to capture one identity or another. For Reed, identity is ultimately a false state of mind rather than a steadfast quality. We are all third men, trapped in a hall of mirrors; our only recourse is to tap into those universal human qualities that will lift us above the world's confusingly warped dimensions.

Carol Reed - Director - Films as Director:, Other Film ... - Film Reference Gene D. Phillips from Film Reference

Carol Reed came to films from the theater, where he worked as an assistant to Edgar Wallace. He served his apprenticeship in the film industry first as a dialogue director, and then graduated to the director's chair via a series of low-budget second features.

Reed's early films, such as Midshipman Easy , are not remarkable, but few British films before World War II were. In the 1920s and 1930s British distributors were more interested in importing films from abroad, especially from America, than in encouraging film production at home. As a result British films were, with rare exceptions, bargain-basement imitations of Hollywood movies. In 1938, however, the British government stipulated that producers must allocate sufficient funds for the making of domestic films in order to allow an adequate amount of time for preproduction preparation, shooting, and the final shaping of each picture. Directors like Carol Reed took advantage of this increased support of British production to produce films which, though still modestly made by Hollywood standards, demonstrated the artistry of which British filmmakers were capable. By the late 1930s, then, Reed had graduated to making films of considerable substance, like Night Train to Munich. "For the first time," Arthur Knight has written, "there were English pictures which spoke of the British character, British institutions—even social problems such as unemployment and nationalization—with unexpected frankness and awareness." An outstanding example of this new trend in British film making was Reed's The Stars Look Down , an uncompromising picture of life in a mining community that brought the director serious critical attention on both sides of the Atlantic.

Reed went on to work on some of the best documentaries to come out of the war, such as the Academy Award-winning The True Glory. He also directed the documentary-like theatrical feature The Way Ahead , an unvarnished depiction of army life. The experience gained by Reed in making wartime documentaries not only influenced his direction of The Way Ahead , but also was reflected in his post-war cinematic style, enabling him to develop further in films like Odd Man Out the strong sense of realism which had first appeared in The Stars Look Down. The documentary approach that Reed used to tell the story of Odd Man Out , which concerns a group of anti-British insurgents in Northern Ireland, was one to which audiences were ready to respond. Wartime films, both documentary and fictional, had conditioned moviegoers in Britain and elsewhere to expect a greater degree of realism in post-war cinema, and Reed provided it.

The more enterprising British producers believed that films should be made to appeal primarily to the home market rather than to the elusive American market. Yet the films that Carol Reed and some others were creating in the post-war years—films which were wholly British in character and situation—were the first such movies to win wide popularity in the United States. Among these, of course, was Odd Man Out , the first film which Reed both produced and directed, a factor which guaranteed him a greater degree of creative freedom than he had enjoyed before the war.

For the first time, too, the theme that was to appear so often in Reed's work was perceptible in Odd Man Out. In depicting for us in this and other films a hunted, lonely hero caught in the middle of a crisis usually not of his own making, Reed implies that man can achieve maturity and self-mastery only by accepting the challenges that life puts in his way and by struggling with them as best he can.

The Fallen Idol was the first of a trio of masterful films which he made in collaboration with novelist-screenwriter Graham Greene, one of the most significant creative associations between a writer and a director in the history of film. The team followed The Fallen Idol with The Third Man , which dealt with the black market in post-war Vienna, and, a decade later, Our Man in Havana. Commenting on his collaboration with the director, Greene has written that the success of these films was due to Reed, "the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling for the right face for the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not the least important, the power of sympathizing with an author's worries and an ability to guide him."

Because most of the films which Reed directed in the next decade or so were not comparable to the post-war films mentioned above, it was thought that he had passed his peak for good. Oliver! in fact proved that Reed was back in top form. In her New Yorker review of the film, Pauline Kael paid Reed a tribute that sums up his entire career in the cinema: "I applaud the commercial heroism of a director who can steer a huge production and keep his sanity and perspective and decent human feelings as beautifully intact as they are in Oliver! "

A genuinely self-effacing man, Reed was never impressed by the awards and honors he garnered throughout his career (he was knighted in 1952). Summarizing his own approach to filmmaking some time before his death at age sixty-nine in 1976, he said simply, "I give the public what I like, and hope they will like it too." More often than not, they did.

BFI Screenonline: Reed, Carol (1906-1976) Biography Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors, by Philip Kemp, from BFI Screen Online

Carol Reed: Biography from Answers.com

Carol Reed | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography by Bruce Eder from All Movie Guide

Carol Reed • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Deirdre Feehan profile from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2003

cineCollage :: Carol Reed biography

Sir Carol Reed | British director | Britannica.com biography

Carol Reed | Biography (1906-1976) biography and filmography from Lenin Imports

British Cinema Greats | Sir Carol Reed - | His Films | Movies ... biography

Britmovie bio and filmography, also seen here: Carol Reed | Britmovie | Home of British Films and here: Carol Reed

Carol Reed profile and filmography from NNDB

Carol Reed bio from Mubi

Carol Reed - Definition mini bio from Word IQ

British Cinema - AllMovie Alexandra Kelle reviews British cinema from 1896 to 2000

Carol Reed - Director by Film Rank Films 101

Carol Reed Filming Locations

Manny Farber on Third Man originally from The Nation, April 1, 1950, also seen here: The Nation: Manny Farber, and here: Ehsan Khoshbakht's notes on cinematograph [Manny Farber]

Sir Carol Reed, Film Director, Is Dead - The New York Times April 27, 1976

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Vienna Project Peter Wollen from Sight and Sound, July 1999

The Third Man • Senses of Cinema Chris Justice, February 2006

Carol Reed: The Third Man | Features | guardian.co.uk Film Derek Malcolm’s Century of Films from The Guardian, March 16, 2000

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Power And The Glory Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2006

Michael Wood reviews the films of Carol Reed · LRB 19 October 2006 Michael Wood looks at the films of Carol Reed from The London Review of Books, October 19, 2006

Edward Copeland on Film: Centennial Tributes: Carol Reed December 30, 2006

Richard Misek The Third Man - Rouge Wrong Geometries in The Third Man, July 2007

The Third Man (1949) – Deep Focus Review – Movie Reviews, Critical ... Brian Eggert, August 20, 2007

Carol Reed Retrospective - Film and digital media - Arts and ... British Council site listing films and comments from the Thessaloniki Festival Retrospective, September 13 – 26, 2007

ACHTENBLOG: Lesser Known Greats - Carol Reed January 2008

A Great Reed: A Carol Reed Profile (Part 1) | Flickering Myth ... Trevor Hogg from Flickering Myth, October 21, 2009

A Great Reed: A Carol Reed Profile (Part 2) | Flickering Myth ... Trevor Hogg from Flickering Myth, October 28, 2009

Killer French-Brit Noir Series Packs Heat Next Month at Belcourt ... Jim Ridley from The Nashville Scene, January 20, 2010

'Men in Black 3′ Producer Remaking Carol Reed's 'The Fallen Idol ... Russ Fischer from Slash Film, May 27, 2010

Walter Parkes To Remake Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol « The ... Joshua Brunsting from The Criterion Cast, May 28, 2010

Carol Reed: Director of "The Third Man" and "Oliver!" John Roberts from Associated Content, June 29, 2010

The 6 Essential Films Of Carol Reed | IndieWire Jessica Kiang, April 15, 2015

Orson Welles at 100: The Third Man (1949) Jake Hinkson from Criminal Element, May 20, 2015

The Trouble With Harry: The Third Man (1949), Part 1 – Offscreen Elaine Lennon, December 2016

The Trouble With Harry: The Third Man (1949), Part 2 – Offscreen Elaine Lennon, December 2016

TSPDT - Carol Reed

Carol Reed on directing Orson Welles in THE THIRD MAN - Wellesnet Martin Bigham Criterion essay, and a 1972 interview by Charles Thomas Samuels from Wellesnet, May 29, 2007

Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Sir Carol Reed (1906 - 1976) - Find A Grave Memorial

Carol Reed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE STARS LOOK DOWN

Grest Britain (110 mi) 1940

Some two decades before the Kitchen Sink cinema of the British New Wave, Carol Reed made this serious, committed film about life in a northern mining community, co-scripted by AJ Cronin from his own novel. The central romance, though by no means all roses, dates the picture (Redgrave, an idealistic miner's son, goes to university, and temporarily forgets his political resolve when he marries Margaret Lockwood); but the mining sequences have a degree of authenticity (above-ground sequences were shot at Workington, in Northumberland), and the film ends with a rousing call for nationalisation of the industry, to 'purge the old greeds'.

Harvey's Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review

The Stars Look Down is an adaptation of A.J. Cronin's 1935 novel of the same name, the film required an expensive production that, apart from Korda's opuses, was uncommon in England at the time. Isidore Goldsmith, an independent producer, was able to raise the then enormous sum of £100 000, and the project went forward under the aegis of Grafton, a small production company. The financing was sufficient to permit six days of shooting at a real coal mine, St Helens Siddick Colliery at Workington in Cumberland, a coal-rich section of north-east England. Then came seven weeks of shooting at Twickenham Studios in London, where an elaborate mine-head was simulated. Later the set was moved to Shepperton Studios for an additional week of shooting. The original set of the mine-head was used to make up a huge composite set of 40,000 square yards - claimed to be the largest exterior set constructed for a British film. The set consisted of an exact replica of the Workington mine where the location work had been done; a pit-head complete with cage, ramp, outer buildings, and rows of miners' cottages. Using three camera crews, shooting on this set lasted for a week. To guarantee reality pit ponies from the Cumberland mines were used and the miners' costumes were clothes purchased from colliery workers.

Cronin's novel is divided into three parts and covers a broad expanse of time and subject matter. The idealistic young David Fenwick's rise from his lowly beginnings in the Sleescale colliery to a university education and a career in public life; his election to Parliament. The parallel rise of unscrupulous Joe Gowlan, who eventually replaces Fenwick in office, the problems of mine owner Barras, one of the more progressive captains of industry, whose son becomes a conscientious objector in the First World War; the love triangle of Fenwick, Jenny and Joe. Clearly the chief appeal of the Cronin work for Reed was its naturalism, a tendency which he had been carefully nurturing in his own work. Stars is most impressive when it concentrates on the lives of the poor mining folk. The opening sequence, a deftly edited montage of Sleescale, a typical mining town, is practically a miniature essay in itself. A few judiciously selected shots tell all - the look of the colliery; the dirty 'residential' streets of the community; the grim monotony of' the miners' homes, as grey and regular and joyless as a collection of tiny blockhouses.

A brief confrontation between Burras, the mineowner (Allan Jeayes) and Robert Fenwick (Edwin Rigby), the unofficial leader of the miners and father of the movie's hero, establishes the film's basic conflict with true cinematic economy. The workers refuse to work without adequate safeguards in the potentially rich section of the mine known as Scupper Flats, which Fenwick knows to be vulnerable to flooding. During the strike that follows, Reed enhances our understanding of the inhabitants of Sleescale by focusing on the Fenwick family. In a necessary simplification of the novel, the siblings are reduced from three to two, David (Michael Redgrave), the young scholar and idealist, and Hughie (Demston Tester), the buoyant, good natured football star. Under Reed's hand, the two are as sharply and unmistakably distinguished as this description would suggest. The parents, Robert and Martha (Nancy Price), are set off in subtler opposition. Each values his dignity, but measures it by a different yardstick. For Fenwick the greatest degradation is being shamed before his co-workers or bowing to the yoke of the bosses. For Martha, it is being unable to feed her family and seeing her credit rudely rejected by the local merchants. The expression on her proud, weather-beaten face when Ramage, the butcher (Edmund Willard), brusquely dismisses her is a wonderful portrait of sublimated pain.

After David, in a remarkable coincidence, meets his old boyhood friend Joe Gowlan (Ernlyn Williams) and his unwanted mistress Jenny Sunley (Margaret Lockwood) in Tynecastle, there is nothing for the audience to do but watch the story run through its well-worn grooves. Joe's abandonment of Jenny; her subsequent seduction of David; their hasty marriage and unhappy life together back in Sleescale, where David must accept a demeaning teaching job to support his frivolous, self-indulgent bride. When Joe also returns to Sleescale, it is only a matter of time before David's domestic woes are compounded by his wife's infidelity.

It is this final calamity, which Reed sensibly shifted from the early portion of Cronin's story to the end that redeems the movie, restoring it to the sharp-eyed realism of the first scenes. Although the catastrophe is far too inevitable for its own good, Reed stages it splendidly. The on rushing tides invade every passageway and corridor, savagely devouring men and machines alike. The melding of excitement and terror as the men rush frantically for safety is cinematic action at its best. The desperate rescue attempts, intercut with bits of dialogue among the doomed miners, are handled with a delicacy and restraint that has no, the miners' morale, fairly high at first, droops little by little each time the camera rediscovers them. The death of a small boy who was making his first trip into the mine is followed by an impromptu funeral chant ('I am the light of the world . . .'). Knowing), he is missing the football game that might have changed his life, Hughie feverishly beats a rescue signal against the wall with a rock, as scenes of the game are superimposed. Up above, the rescue teams descend into the mine and emerge, while tense wives and children wait silently for news. Reed's editing and direction invest the disaster with the sad glow of real tragedy.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [3.5/5]

Talking Pictures [Steven Russell] also reviews BRIEF ENCOUNTER

The New York Times review T.S.

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH

Great Britain (90 mi) 1940

Time Out review Geoff Andrew

In terms of cast, plot and scriptwriters (Launder and Gilliat), this bears a deliberate resemblance to Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes as it merges comedy and thrills with propaganda in its tale of a Czech scientist's daughter escaping from a concentration camp, only belatedly to discover that she's been allowed to get away to reveal the whereabouts of her father. And though the action bats along at a furious pace, especially during the train scenes and the cable-car climax, the film only serves to show the importance of the director in the film-making process; the cast and script are fine, but Reed fatally lacks Hitchcock's light, witty touch and his effortless ability to create suspense out of ordinary circumstances.

There's no point hoping that Guns N' Roses is going to play "Night Train," as the musical masterpiece post-dated this cinematic effort by more than 45 years. So the best hope is gone, right out the window, and me right with it. I refused to watch. Just kidding, I really watched anyway. The British clearly understood that the Germans were on the brink of behaving very badly again, and there's a perverse humour in their presentation. Of course no one had much clue about the worst of it in 1940 (the fathers of John F. Kennedy and George H. Bush being among those urging caution and relaxation) but, you know, when you rally the troops you really do have to present them with something . So the Germans are presented as a race that not only doesn't kiss the asses of aristocrats, but on more than one occasion veer recklessly across that invisible line into actual rudeness! Well, well, anything to stop that then! Rex Harrison and Margaret Lockwood give a Swiss cheese script what they can, but the world will be forever grateful that the boys at the front took a bit more than that.

Night Train to Munich (1940) - The Criterion Collection

Carol Reed established himself as an exponent of social realism with The Stars Look Down - and one with the technique to back up his humanism - Reed doggedly refused to entrench himself in this area, or even to explore it further. Instead, he shot off mercurially in another direction with Night Train to Munich (1940), a Hitchcockian foray into political intrigue which was made at the 20th Century-Fox studios in England.

Two years earlier, Launder and Gilliat had provided the scenario for one of the year's biggest hits, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. The mixture of wit and excitement, threaded into a relentlessly underplayed spy melodrama, had struck audiences and reviewers of the time as inimitably smooth and self-assured. Now Launder and Gilliat sought to duplicate their achievement with a script that incorporated many of the same ingredients and a director who was not too proud or individualistic to follow in the footsteps of an illustrious predecessor. Perhaps the moment seemed quintessentially right for a successor, since Hitchcock had just vacated his throne in the British film world to try his luck in Hollywood. Night Train to Munich was released in England in the spring of 1940. Though it was immediately identified as an imitation of The Lady Vanishes, there was general agreement that it was quite a good imitation. It was praised as an outstanding thriller, a good genre film, and no one plumbed it for hidden political significance.

The film begins inauspiciously, with an opening that one is tempted to call pseudo rather than semi-documentary. In his inner chambers, amidst bootlicking subordinates, Hitler rants (in German) over a map of Europe, pounding his fists on the areas he plans to annex - the Sudatenland, the Polish corridor and so forth. The actor is not identified in the credits, perhaps because he is so strangely unconvincing as the Fuhrer. The next sequence is only a little more acceptable. A group of high government officials in Czechoslovakia, closeted with one of their top scientists, Axel Bomasch (James Harcourt), stand around like corpses, delivering a hasty exposition. A revolutionary form of armour plating must not fall into Nazi hands; arrangements have been made for Bomasch and his daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood) to flee to England; and so on. These urgent promptings are underscored by the opportune arrival of a swarm of German warplanes. Then, in two short and poorly executed sequences, Anna is arrested while Bomasch makes a narrow escape.

Once this plot machinery is set in motion, however, Night Train to Munich quickly becomes exactly what Reed aimed for, a stylish melodrama. Within the framework of the competent Gilliat-Launder screenplay, Reed rings numerous enjoyable changes on the basic flight-and-pursuit motif. The first flight takes Bomasch, and later Anna, to England; the second is a kidnapping in which they are spirited to Germany; later, yet another escape is engineered for them by a British agent, Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison), who infiltrates the German high command. As trains, boats and cars hurtle back and forth across Europe; Reed takes on the aura of a master dispatcher, presiding expertly over an exciting series of arrivals and departure.

When Anna is imprisoned in a concentration camp a fellow prisoner befriends her, an apparently heroic Czech patriot named Karl Marsen (Paul von Hernreid, soon to reappear as Paul Heinreid). Reed maintains the counterfeit sincerity of the Marsen character so expertly that we root him on as he denounces his Nazi captors and plots an escape for him and Anna. Thus, it is a nastily effective shock when, shortly after the successful prison break, he and a friend, another refugee, greet each other with 'Heil Hitler!' There is a more agreeable shock at an English resort where Anna has been sent to find Bennett, who is supposed to guide her to her father. Bennett is abruptly revealed as a small-time sidewalk entertainer, singing and dancing for the crowd. Looking like a man without a cloak and dagger to his name, he feigns complete bafflement at Anna's insistence that he must know the whereabouts of her father. 'Is this a gag?’ he inquires jauntily. Later, when he has the girl totally off guard, he casually points out that her father is standing nearby. Little tricks like this pour out of Reed's bag for the remainder of the film, culminating in an 'impossible' escape in a cable car high in the Swiss Alps.

Notes on Night Train to Munich Criterion essay by Monte Hellman, June 17, 2010

Night Train to Munich: A Last Laugh Criterion essay by Philip Kemp, June 23, 2010

Slant Magazine (Simon Abrams) dvd review

CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [3/5]

Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

Jay's Movie Blog

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, also seen here: Night Train (1940) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion Collection

Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Luke Bonanno, also seen here: DVDizzy.com - Criterion Collection DVD with Pictures

DVD Talk (Casey Burchby) dvd review [2/5] [Criterion Collection] [Criterion Edition]

DVD Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

Night Train to Munich Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Night Train to Munich Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Matthew Hartman, Criterion Blu-Ray

Night Train to Munich: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review ... Randy Miller III, Criterion Blu-Ray

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Home Video Hove: Night Train to Munich, by Tyler Smith | Battleship ... Tyler Smith from Battleship Pretension, Criterion Blu-Ray

night train to munich Lenin Imports

Decent Films - Faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]

Movie Mirror Sanderson Beck

Night Train to Munich Blu-ray - Margaret Lockwood - DVD Beaver

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Night Train to Munich - Wikipedia

ODD MAN OUT

Great Britain (115 mi) 1947

Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Townsend) review

Director Carol Reed's most ambitious and accomplished film, Odd Man Out stars James Mason as Johnny McQueen, leader of an IRA gang forced into taking on a bank raid in order to raise funds for the organisation. It's a tense time and it shows: the hold-up doesn't exactly go as planned. Unable to cope with the demands of the situation, McQueen kills a man and then falls from the speeding getaway car. Badly wounded, he manages to scramble into hiding and we are invited to follow his desperate progress as he clings to life.

Imaginatively photographed and sharply edited, the action (especially the first half) moves at a brisk pace and is perfectly complemented by some atmospheric music. The whole cast deserves praise for its accomplished acting but special mention must be made of James Mason's hypnotic portrayal. Without question, his performance must go down as one of the most sensitive ever produced by a British screen actor.

Penetrated throughout by a warm humanism, Odd Man Out makes an engrossing and exciting movie. It firmly established Reed as a major director, a reputation which he was to consolidate with his next two features, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man.

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review

The telling opening preamble to ‘Odd Man Out’ – Carol Reed’s first great postwar film – stresses that it’s the ‘conflict in the hearts of the people’ that most concerns the director – and not the specifics of the ‘struggle between the law and an illegal organisation’. Which is just as well, as barely any mention is made throughout this fantastic, thoughtful and stunningly photographed thriller of the exact beliefs and motives of James Mason’s fugitive IRA chief Johnny McQueen and the various characters he meets during one dark night of the soul on the run from the police in Belfast. Ultimately, the IRA element is but a catalyst for a subtle, near-metaphysical portrait of a proud man slipping ever deeper into oblivion as the imposing night-time city threatens to engulf him.

McQueen is a character in crisis. Six months after escaping from jail, he dares to venture outside again – against all advice. His first foray outdoors is to take part in a robbery that goes wrong, leaving him with the threat of a murder charge and abandoned, alone in the city and wounded from a bullet in his shoulder. He hides out in bomb shelters; takes refuge in the back of a cab; and is smuggled into the snug of a rowdy, imposing pub. McQueen becomes more and more passive as a merry dance escalates around him, with more and more characters taking interest (or not) in his fate, until we reach a dilapidated house of fools on the edge of the city – inhabited by a shabby birdman and a bullish painter. This is a delusional McQueen’s last supper, and by now we’re far away from the thriller tendencies of the film’s opening and instead deep into more personal, contemplative, purgatorial territory. A fascinating supporting cast, from McQueen’s worried comrades and girlfriend to two caring former ARP wardens, and a rousing score by William Alwyn add brio to Mason’s fascinating performance. Well worth visiting, not least for its similarities to ‘The Third Man’.

BFI Screenonline: Odd Man Out (1947) Sergio Angelini

Carol Reed chose to adapt F.L. Green's 1945 novel Odd Man Out for its quasi-religious undertones, the opportunity it provided for a number of strong character scenes and for the seriousness with which it dealt with its tragic story of the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, although in the film Belfast is not mentioned by name and the IRA referred to only as 'The Organisation'.

James Mason is brilliantly cast as the almost mythic anti-hero Johnny McQueen, dominating every scene that he is in. Mason is introduced in clever fashion by having us first hear his velvety voice, still distinctive with a mild Irish lilt, before we actually see his face. A star of Mason's stature was required because although his is the central role, Johnny is on-screen for a comparatively small proportion of the film.

The narrative consists of a series of practically self-contained scenes, such as the darkly comic sequences when Dennis (Robert Beatty) is besieged by young kids or when he tries to escape the police by boarding an over-crowded tram. Others are almost Hitchcockian in their suspense, from the naturalistic, almost matter-of-fact robbery at the beginning, to the later scene in which Granny (Kitty Kirwan) and Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan) try to hide a gun and bandages while the police search their home.

Odd Man Out is shaped like a Greek tragedy, with events developing from a single early mistake. This fatalism finds symbolic echoes throughout, with Johnny breaking his shoelace at the opening and Shell breaking his at the end; the recurring references to time and the Albert clock; the steps where Johnny was shot and where he killed a man; the shots of the Harland and Wolff shipyards which open and close the film.

The film features a dizzying array of fine supporting performances, with W.G. Fay standing out for the humanity, grace and humour he displays as Father Tom. The latter part of the film is dominated by Shell (F.J. McCormick), who tries to 'sell' Johnny to turn a profit, in an example of scene-stealing that one critic likened to "grand larceny".

Odd Man Out is a feast for the eyes, with Robert Krasker's sumptuous high-contrast photography and Roger Furse and Ralph Binton's production design providing the vivid, realistic and yet clearly very controlled, 'poetic' feel that Reed was striving for and which anticipates his subsequent films, Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).

Odd Man Out - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications John Hill from Film Reference

Odd Man Out was Carol Reed's first postwar feature and the first of a quartet of films, including The Fallen Idol , The Third Man , and Outcast of the Islands , which were to mark the highpoint of a lengthy film-making career. Based on F. L. Green's novel of the same name, the film was partly shot in Belfast with a predominantly Irish cast, including many Abbey Theatre regulars. Robert Krasker, the cameraman on Brief Encounter , was responsible for the film's striking photography, and William Alwyn contributed a memorable musical score, incorporating individual leitmotifs for three of the central characters. On its release, the film was met by almost unanimous praise ("the best film that has ever been made in Britain" according to the Daily Express ) and received the British Film Academy's award for the Best British Motion Picture of 1947.

Unlike much of the British cinema's wartime output, the film has little truck with social realism. Formally, the film is heavily indebted to both German Expressionism and French poetic realism—indeed, its ending is practically a copy of Julien Duvivier's Pepé le Moko (1936)—and has much in common with its similarly stylised postwar US counterpart, the film noir. This is evident in the film's approach to both plot and visual presentation. Like classical tragedy, the film's story is concerned with the irreversible consequences of an initial error. Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is shot following an illadvised, and armed, mill robbery and is left to wander the city at night. Despite the efforts of others to save him, his fate is already sealed and, in a moving climax, Johnny meets his death in the arms of the woman he loves, while his last remaining hope of escape, the ship, is seen to sail off without him.

This aura of doom is reinforced by the film's iconography (the recurring appearance of the Albert Clock, the deteriorating weather) as well as its distinctive visual style. As in film noir, both lighting and composition are used to striking effect. Lighting is predominantly low-key, creating strong chiaroscuro contrasts and vivid patterns of light and shadow. Compositions tend to be imbalanced and claustrophobic, with characters either cramped into enclosed interiors (as at Granny's) or rendered small by their surrounding environment (as in many of the night scenes). The use of a tilted camera (almost a Reed trademark), acute angles, and wide-angle lenses adds to these effects, especially in the chase sequences involving Dennis (Robert Beatty) as he races down long and imprisoning alley-ways or clambers his way through a maze of scaffolding. While such scenes as these, with their imaginative combination of real locations and expressive visual design, have retained an air of freshness, the film's resort to full-blooded expressionism in its subjective sequences has worn less well. Although much admired at the time, the attempts to visualize Johnny's hallucinations by superimposing faces onto beer bubbles or by putting paintings into flight now seem simply belaboured (and, no doubt, represent the type of device which led Andrew Sarris to include Reed, somewhat unkindly, in his category of "less than meets the eye").

Debate over the merit of Reed's technique, however, has also tended to discourage too close an inspection of the meanings which the film projects (although the documentarist Edgar Anstey did attack the film at the time of its release for apparently importing French existentialism). For while the film's opening title disclaims any specific connection to the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the film itself studiously avoids referring to either Belfast or the IRA by name, it is also quite clear from the film that it is dealing with a recognisable setting and situation. Indeed, critics have, at various times, praised the film for both its distinctive Irish flavour and the enduring relevance of one of its apparent messages (the futility of violence). What the film does, in this respect, is not so much dispense with local details as deprive them of their social and political dimension. For, by employing the conventions of expressionism, and introducing an element of religious allegory, the film's interpretation of events is inevitably metaphysical rather than social. It is not history and politics which can explain the characters' motivations and actions, only an inexorable fate or destiny. In doing so, it also reinforces a view of the Northern Ireland situation as fundamentally irrational. As Tom Nairn has noted (in The Break-up of Britain ), it has become quite common to account for the "troubles" in terms of what he labels "the myth of atavism." It is only "a special historical curse, a luckless and predetermined fate," he observes, "which can account for the war." And it is this viewpoint which is effectively reinforced by Odd Man Out . For Johnny too is "cursed," by virtue of his adoption of violence, and becomes, in his turn, the victim of an apparently "luckless and predetermined fate."

Odd Man Out: Death and the City Criterion essay by Imogen Sara Smith, April 14, 2015

Three Reasons: Odd Man Out - From the Current - The Criterion ... Video (1:50)

Odd Man Out (1947) - The Criterion Collection

Michael Wood reviews the films of Carol Reed · LRB 19 October 2006 Michael Wood looks at the films of Carol Reed from The London Review of Books, October 19, 2006

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Power And The Glory Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2006

Odd Man Out - TCM.com Paul Tatara

Film Noir of the Week Hard-Boiled Rick, September 26, 2010

Harvey's Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [3.5/5]

Odd Man Out | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Odd Man Out Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Odd Man Out Blu-ray Review (The Criterion Collection) - DVDizzy.com Luke Bonanno, Criterion Blu-Ray

Odd Man Out Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest David Krauss, Criterion Blu-Ray

Joshua Reviews Carol Reed's Odd Man Out [Blu-ray Review] Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast, Criterion Blu-Ray

Criterion Blu-ray review: Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) | Cagey ... Kenneth George Godwin, Criterion Blu-Ray

Odd Man Out: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the ... Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

Odd Man Out, 1947, Carol Reed | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West, Criterion Blu-Ray

Odd Man Out | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jordan Cronk, Criterion Blu-Ray

Old Masters Redux Armond White from the NY Press, September 2, 2009

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [4/5]

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]

Odd Man Out Blu-ray - James Mason - DVD Beaver

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE FALLEN IDOL

Great Britain (94 mi) 1948

BBCi - Films Thomas Dawson

One of the gems of 40s British cinema, The Fallen Idol was the first collaboration between director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene, who went on to make superb film noir The Third Man.

Skilfully adapted from Greene's novella The Basement Room, The Fallen Idol is the story of lonely eight-year-old Phillipe (Bobby Henrey), caught up in a bewildering world of grown-up deceptions. The son of the French ambassador to London, Felipe is neglected by his parents and hero-worships the embassy butler Baines (Ralph Richardson), who tells him fabulous stories about big-game hunting in Africa.

But when Phillipe stumbles upon an affair between his hero and secretary Julie (Michèle Morgan), he comes to believe that Baines has murdered his hectoring wife (Sonia Dresdel).

Reed orchestrates several gripping set pieces including a game of hide and seek played out against a thunderstorm and a pyjama-clad Phillipe fleeing through the rain-slicked London streets at night.

Cinematographer Georges Perinal's monochrome photography elegantly shows the gulf in perceptions between adults and children, and sexual symbolism abounds, not least in the fate of Felipe's pet snake, despatched by the malevolent surrogate-mother figure of Mrs Baines.

In the end, though, the film rests on an impressively understated and affecting central performance from Richardson.

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review

The first of Carol Reed’s three collaborations with Graham Greene and the first volley in the NFT’s two-month celebration of the director’s work, ‘The Fallen Idol’ is a superb London film marked by outstanding performances from Ralph Richardson – then in his forties – and youngster Bobby Henrey. Richardson is Baines, the quite decent butler of the French embassy in London who, one weekend and along with his spiky wife, Mrs Baines (Sonia Dresdel) is left in charge of the palatial residence and the ambassador’s blonde, chirpy eight-year-old son, Felipe (Henrey). Felipe idolises upright, kind Baines, but loathes his wife, not least because she nags him and threatens to dispose of his secret pet snake, Macgregor. Such childish alliances and animosities take on an increasingly perverse and claustrophobic significance when, one afternoon, Felipe merrily follows Baines to a local tea-house and disturbs a tryst between the butler and his lover, fellow embassy worker Julie (Michèle Morgan), who Baines introduces to the boy as his ‘niece’ while at the same time imploring Felipe to keep their illicit meeting a secret. ‘Some lies are just kindness,’ offers Baines, while only later does Baines’ moral hiccup and ‘white lie’ trigger tragic events that embroil Felipe in an adult web of deceit that almost sinks his hero.

Lies and secrecy dominate ‘The Fallen Idol’, which handles themes of guilt and deception, responsibility and disappointment, with precision, cleverly reflecting these adult ideas off an innocent child. The economy, clarity and completeness of Greene’s script is repeated in Reed’s direction, which increasingly engulfs Felipe in the clutches of the embassy, the city and the police. Londoners will particularly savour a night-time dash through the shadowy streets and alleys of the city, cloaked in a child’s eye view of the metropolis.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

A witty tale of intrigue told from a child's perspective, The Fallen Idol brilliantly evokes the transition from childhood to adolescence. Carol Reed's noted rapport with child actors drew a remarkable performance from eight-year-old Bobby Henrey as Felipe, the son of a foreign ambassador, left in the care of embassy butler Baines (Ralph Richardson) and his venomous wife (Sonia Dresdel). The lonely and sensitive child hero-worships Baines as much as he dislikes and fears the shrewish Mrs Baines. One afternoon, Felipe follows his friend as he leaves the house, only to discover him in a teashop with his mistress Julie (Michèle Morgan). Accepting the butler's explanation that Julie is his niece, Felipe gradually becomes embroiled in a dark, complex world of adult deceptions.

This is the great London film of a director celebrated for his atmospheric evocation of cities such as Belfast, Berlin, and Vienna – urban labyrinths in which secrets lurk around every corner. Shot by the great French cinematographer Georges Périnal, it vividly captures the city's sunlit squares and shadowy night-time streets, as well as the cold, cavernous interiors of the embassy residence.

The critics of the time, wearied by "a flood of second rate sagas", greeted The Fallen Idol with relief, bestowing particular praise on the amazingly natural performance of Bobby Henrey (acclaimed by The Sunday Chronicle as "the greatest Kid since Coogan") and Richardson’s beautifully understated interpretation of his role. Looking back today, the film is also notable for a wickedly funny cameo from Dora Bryan (in just her second film appearance) as the tart with a heart who encounters the runaway Felipe in a police station.

Graham Greene's script, adapted from his novella 'The Basement Room' (1935) about a young boy who unwittingly betrays his friend to the police, was to win him an Oscar nomination as well as the award for Best Screenplay at Venice. Preferred by Greene to The Third Man (his next collaboration with Reed), The Fallen Idol is a work of exceptional psychological subtlety and an acute portrayal of the separate realities inhabited by adults and children, with their conflicting interpretations of the world around them.

BFI Screenonline: Fallen Idol, The (1948) Sergio Angelini, Show full synopsis

The young son of a foreign ambassador becomes convinced that his best friend, the family butler, has murdered his wife, and unsuccessfully tries to protect him from the police.

The Fallen Idol (d. Carol Reed, 1948) brilliantly evokes the transition from pre-pubescent childhood to adolescence. Graham Greene based his script on 'The Basement Room', his 1935 story of a young boy who inadvertently betrays his best friend to the police. Greene and Carol Reed reshaped the narrative to emphasise the young protagonist's growing pains and the sense of loss that comes from leaving childish things behind.

Felipe (Bobby Henrey), the son of a foreign diplomat, is cared for by Baines (Ralph Richardson), the butler. The boy's mother has been convalescing back home for the last eight months and his only maternal figure is Baines' austere and unsympathetic wife (Sonia Dresdel).

Richardson gives a magnificently understated performance, while Henrey is a revelation in a complex role with strong Oedipal overtones. Felipe has a troubled relationship with his mother substitute and, in a sad yet chilling moment, admits to Baines that he can't even remember his real mother. The Freudian elements of the story are further emphasised in the subplot regarding Mrs Baines' dislike of Felipe's beloved pet snake. He keeps it in a secret hiding place but she eventually finds it and disposes of it in the furnace. These psychological elements climax in a brilliantly photographed game of hide and seek, in which Baines and his mistress (Michèle Morgan) chase Felipe all over the embassy before retiring to spend their first night together.

For its first half, the film rigidly maintains Felipe's point of view. This subtly alters after Mrs Baines, unhinged by the discovery of her husband's love affair, dies in an accident. After Felipe flees the embassy in shock, we begin to have access to scenes to which he does not. This strategy marginalizes the boy who has hitherto been the central focus, emphasising his distance from, and struggle to comprehend, the adult world.

The ambiguous sexual undertones of the story get a humorous outlet in the police station scene in which an unrepentant prostitute (Dora Bryan), trying to comfort Felipe, finds only those ready-made phrases she uses with her customers. An exasperated desk sergeant, unable to complain about the plain meaning of the words, asks if she "can't do it without the smile?"

Preferred by many, including Greene, to The Third Man (d. Reed, 1949), the film's rich texture has kept it fresh over the years, allowing for a variety of critical interpretations.

Fuse Film Review: “The Fallen Idol” — Through the Eyes of a Child ... Gerald Peary from The Arts Fuse, while an altogether different review may be seen here: Fallen Idol

The Fallen Idol is one of the best achieved examples in cinema of seeing the world through the eyes of a child.

It amazes me how often people pass on this wisdom, so patently untrue, that good movies are made invariably from bad fiction. To offer an obvious rejoinder to this shaky thesis: the many successful adaptations, often Hollywood productions, forged from the distinguished writings of Graham Greene, from This Gun for Hire (1942) through The Quiet American (2002). Greene had a particularly fertile period after World War II, an informal trilogy of Brighton Rock (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), all made in his native England.

I caught the rarely screened Brighton Rock on TCM the other night, a prime British noir which holds its place against far better-known American classics. The Third Man? An enduring masterpiece, and probably my favorite British film of all time. The Fallen Idol, digitally restored and a welcome revival from Rialto Pictures, is also an exemplary work, at least for its first two thirds. It’s based on a grim 1935 short story, “The Basement Room,” and Greene was correct to worry when he agreed to pen the adapted screenplay for filmmaker Carol Reed: “It seemed to me that the subject matter was ultimately unfilmable-a murder committed by the most sympathetic character and an unhappy ending.” Reed, not concerned, instructed Greene to make some upbeat changes, and these changes, including a strained positive conclusion, are what keep The Fallen Idol from greatness.

The good part: The Fallen Idol is one of the best achieved examples in cinema of seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Our hero, Philip, played beautifully by 7-year-old Bobby Henrey, is the lonely, needy son of a foreign ambassador in London. His father, seen briefly and mostly in extreme long shot, is always on the run, and exits the movie in its first ten minutes. His mother, who lives on the continent, is totally absent from Philip’s life. He can barely remember her. The embassy, with its huge rooms and ceilings to the sky and sweeping staircases and curved banisters seems as big as a castle with a tiny boy in short pants in its midst. We are there at his level as he races about with a child’s exuberance, and we share his secret, that he keeps a tame snake behind a loose brick in a wall. And we are party also to his boy crush.

Philip (and the camera) only have eyes for a friendly manservant, Baines (an eloquent performance by Ralph Richardson), a clear father substitute. Baines finds time in his workday to play games with Philip and also to tell the boy Kiplingesque tall stories about when he was ostensibly in Africa, shooting an occasional giraffe and using his gun against the self-appointed king of “the darkies.” He had to come home to England to marry. There were many women in Africa, “ but they weren’t white.” Philip glows whenever his special servant strolls by. “BAINES!” he bellows, demanding his older friend’s attention, the way youngster Brandon De Wilde later would shout out, “SHANE!”, for his cowboy love.

But all is not fine in Philip’s kingdom. The kindly Baines has a wicked witch of a wife, played by Sonia Dresdel with the classic coldness of Agnes Moorehead’s Mrs. Kane and Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. She is always sending Philip to his room for disobedience and, being totally malevolent, she kills his pet snake, chucking it into an incinerator. Likewise, she’s a bitchy, wearying, unloving spouse, which explains why good-guy Baines has fallen hard for someone else. She’s a French woman, Julie (Michèle Morgan), blonde, young, and pretty, who has worked seven months in the embassy.

On the day that the story takes place, Julie tells the forlorn Baines that she can’t take their secret romance any more, that, though he begs her to stay on, she is returning to France. And this is the most arresting section of the movie: their intense, heartbreaking exchanges take place within eyesight and hearing range of Philip. They try to disguise their plight, pretending that Julie is Baines’s niece, that the relationship being discussed is really that of Julie’s friend. How does Philip react to all this adult melodrama? He shifts by the second from deep curiosity to total distraction, from intuiting all to not caring an iota about this weighty, gooey stuff. Just what a precocious child would do.

At 45 minutes into The Fallen Idol, the exact midway point, Philip leaves his adult friends just long enough for suffering Baines and Julie at last to have a passionate kiss. Hooray for them! If Philip doesn’t quite understand, the audience wants this couple to get together. We like and trust them, if for no other reason than their sincere kindness to the boy. They willingly join Philip in a rousing game of hide-and-seek. But good things will end: Mrs. Baines catches them all.

Does the rule for spoilers apply to a 68-year-old movie? Because I assume you’ve never seen this somewhat obscure work, I keep my critic’s lips zipped about the gory details of what happens next. Someone dies. Perhaps it’s accidental. Perhaps it’s a murder. Police are brought in, and I can say that The Fallen Idol becomes far less interesting, suddenly a standard whodunit. As I indicated earlier, Greene softens the deep pessimism of the ending of his short story. The finish of the movie is probably more palatable for an audience but it feels constructed and untrue.

There are some shots in The Fallen Idol—the camera tipped, wet streets with shadowy figures — which anticipate the showy expressionism of The Third Man, also directed by Carol Reed with a Greene screenplay. Better, the maddeningly overstated score of Victor Alwyn for The Fallen Idol gives way to Anton Karas’s wonderful orchestration for The Third Man. Sweet memory. I once owned the ‘78 record, with the zither featured on both sides, “The Third Man Theme” and, ah, “The Café Mozart Waltz”!

The Fallen Idol Criterion essay by Howard A. Rodman, December 22, 1992

The Fallen Idol: Through a Child’s Eye, Darkly Criterion essay by Geoffrey O’Brien, November 06, 2006

The Fallen Idol (1948) - The Criterion Collection

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Power And The Glory Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2006

Past Perfect: Criterion Classics - The Fallen Idol (1948) | PopMatters Bill Gibron, March 20, 2007

The Fallen Idol (1948) - #357 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee

Blueprint: Review [David Brook]

THE FALLEN IDOL d: Carol Reed Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide, January 10, 2008, also seen here: Alternative Film Guide [Dan Schneider]

The Fallen Idol - TCM.com Sean Axmaker

The Fallen Idol (1948) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Michael Atkinson on Sir Ralph Richardson’s performance

Idol Worship | Village Voice J. Hoberman, January 31, 2006

70 Years on, Carol Reed's 'The Fallen Idol' Is ... - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl, May 25, 2016

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1949 [Erik Beck]

stylusmagazine.com (Paolo Cabrelli) review

Britmovie [Mary Haberstroh] November 24, 2008

Culture Wars [Tara McCormack]

The audacious Odd Man Out turns Britain's biggest star into furniture in ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, February 18, 2013

DVD Times Noel Megahey

DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]

DVD Savant Review: The Fallen Idol - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, Criterion

DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion

DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]

Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Region 2

MDFallenIdol Movie Diva, also seen here: moviediva

The Fallen Idol (1948) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary

Old Hollywood Films: The Fallen Idol Amanda Garrett

eFilmCritic.com (Elaine Perrone)

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Movie Mirror [Sanderson Beck]

The Aisle Seat [Andy Dursin]

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [5/5]

What Bobby saw | Film | The Guardian - guardian.co.uk Claire Armistead from The Guardian, December 15, 2001

carol-reed The Fallen Idol - The Telegraph Stuart Kemp

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr

Baltimore City Paper (Bret McCabe) review

The Seattle Times (Jeff Shannon) review

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

An overlooked classic, 'The Fallen Idol' gets a triumphant rerelease ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, May 26, 2016

The Fallen Idol Blu-ray - Ralph Richardson - DVD Beaver

David Lodge on The Fallen Idol | Books | The Guardian book review, November 4, 2006

THE THIRD MAN

Great Britain (104 mi) 1949

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Candace Wirt

Carol Reed and Graham Greene's THE THIRD MAN stars Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins, an American writer of "cheap novelettes" such as Oklahoma Kid and The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. In 1949, Martins goes to Vienna to visit his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) and soon finds out that he is dead. In an international zone designated for police at the center of the city, the British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and his officers investigate Lime's recent death and his role in selling diluted penicillin on the black market. Martins also begins to look into whether the death was an accident or murder only to inadvertently discover that Lime is alive and hiding out in the Russian sector. (Although Welles spends very little time onscreen, Harry Lime is his most celebrated performance after Charles Foster Kane; in fact, Andre Bazin said that the role made Welles into a myth.) Similar to Vittorio De Sica's THE BICYCLE THIEF (1948) and Jean Cocteau's ORPHEUS (1950) in its semi-documentary quality, THE THIRD MAN captures Europe in ruins after the second war to end all wars. Following the February 1948 coup that brought the Communists to power in Czechoslovakia, the film's producer Alexander Korda asked Greene to go to Vienna and write a screenplay on the city's occupation by the Americans, Russians, British, and French. According to Lime's associate "Baron" Kurtz (a reference to the corrupt ivory trader in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), all of the Viennese are now at the mercy of the black market. Robert Krasker's camera often catches their faces in close-up as they watch what happens on the city's streets; they rarely, if ever, make the mistake of speaking about it. Toward the end of the film, Martins meets Lime at an empty carnival in Prater Park. While going around on the Ferris wheel, Lime reveals to his friend, "You're just a little mixed up about things in general. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I." THE THIRD MAN is one of the great works of British film noir that considers what, if anything, is left of morality for those who were spared by the Second World War.

Time Out London: Ben Walters

Re-released as part of the NFT’s Carol Reed season, ‘The Third Man’ continued the director’s collaboration with Graham Greene and, like ‘The Fallen Idol’, it’s about secrets, lies and the tension between naiveté and loyalty. The location, however, has shifted from London. Summoned to occupied post-war Vienna by his schoolfriend Harry Lime, brash American pulp writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives to find his old chum being widely mourned, especially by the actress Anna (Alida Valli), though less so by British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). In this quartered, ruined, double-talking city, however, it’s as well to take nothing at face value…

A considerably more harmonious collaborative effort than Allied powersharing, ‘The Third Man’ remains among the most consummate of British thrillers: Reed and Greene’s sardonic vision of smiling corruption is deliciously realised with superb location work, a roster of seasoned Viennese performers and the raised eyebrow of Anton Karas’ jaunty zither score.

Although his screen time is famously scanty, Orson Welles’ Harry haunts each scene: everywhere and invisible, he’s a smirking Cheshire cat of a villain, a superb case study in shameless charisma as poisonous contagion. Audiences, like many of the characters, have tended to fall for his charms, fondly recalling the privilege of being taken into his confidence rather than the rotten core it conceals. The film, however, is less charitable, pursuing the performer backstage into the sewers, sick bowels of the city he lords it over. Playing American heroics against British pragmatism, elements of noir against horror (the empty grave, the burning torches), ‘The Third Man’ is suffused with irony yet ultimately serious-minded: without personal responsibility, it says, there is no hope for civilisation – however charming the smirk.

BFI Screenonline: Third Man, The (1949) Rob White

Many people consider The Third Man (1949) the Greatest British Film Ever Made, though its Britishness is complicated. It's one of the few British films that deserves to stand alongside the great classics of international cinema. It's a reminder that British cinema flourished in the years immediately after World War II. Never before or since has there been such a glut of high-quality, commercially successful movies produced in this country. Between 1944 and 1949, British-made films included Henry V (1944), Brief Encounter (1945), A Matter of Life and Death, Great Expectations (both 1946), Brighton Rock (1947), The Red Shoes, Hamlet, Oliver Twist, The Fallen Idol (all 1948) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). This was the UK's one and only cinematic 'golden age'.

What's striking is how many of these famous and accomplished films were associated with literary prestige. Alongside the adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens were films written, or based on stories by, rising literary stars - Noël Coward in the case of Brief Encounter, Graham Greene in the case of Brighton Rock, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. But, unlike many literary adaptations today, so often dewy-eyed and technically unadventurous ventures in 'heritage', these films are cinematically accomplished too. They're also edgy and complex in tone, reflecting all the flux and uncertainty of a country recovering from war and adjusting to a new era.

The Third Man is a case in point. Set in post-war Vienna, it's a thriller about black marketeering and murder, whose lightness and wit combines with a sense of existential crisis brought on by the horrors of the conflict. Its richness comes from this combination - it's both a popular entertainment and a profound exploration of moral choice.

It's great cinema too, built on the rock-solid foundation of Graham Greene's world-weary script. Directed by Carol Reed, at the time regarded as one of the two or three greatest film-makers in the world, The Third Man is one of those films that's fixed in the collective imagination. It would be difficult to find someone who didn't recognise the film's atmospheric, sinister vision of Vienna and its zither music. And it has one of the most famous scenes in cinema - when the anti-hero Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, who is believed to be dead, appears without warning in a doorway, late at night.

Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [10/10]

The key word in film noirs is atmosphere. Atmosphere is what creates the tension; atmosphere is what focuses the story; atmosphere, in essence, is the very definition of a film-noir. And Carol Reed's unconventional, daring The Third Man gets atmosphere best.

The real star in The Third Man isn't Joseph Cotten, nor any of the other characters or actors. It isn't even the story. It's the setting. Filmed entirely on location in post-war Vienna, the film uses this grim, torn, almost surreal place and time to a stunning extent. Torn buildings, shadowed alleys, dark, ominous sewers, and ancient, gothically imposing buildings imprint every scene with an almost surreal sense of atmosphere.

The story is also classic film noir. Penned by the great Graham Greene, it follows Holly Martins, an American pulp-novel writer out of a job, who comes to post-war Vienna in order to work for a childhood friend, Harry Lime. However, as soon as he arrives, he learns that Lime is dead, killed in a seeming accident. However, as any film-noir fan knows, things are never as they

seem, and as Martins probes deeper into his friend's dealing and death, he crosses swords with a variety of interesting characters, who change allegiances and uncover new sides in every scene. The script itself is brilliant - it has character, it has depth, it has charm, and it adresses the issues of loyalty, love, and friendship in interesting and perceptive ways.

The acting is superlative, also. Joseph Cotten gives a great performance as Holly Martins, and supporting players such as Alida Valley and Trevor Howard are excellent. However, the best performance in the film comes from the inimitable Orson Welles, who creates in Harry Lime a bristling and magnetic man who is at once charismatic and vile.

Praise must also be given to Robert Krasker's stunning cinematography. The film's visuals not only integrate the setting of Vienna perfectly, but they do so in a totally unconventional way. Krasker uses tilted shots to a stunning extent; there must be more tilted shots than normal ones in the film, and they produce a skewed, almost surreal perspective. Also, the use of light and shadow is amazing; as characters walk down the dark alleys of Vienna, they create enormous shadows on the walls. These images are also perfectly complimented by Anton Karas' excellent cithar music, and together, they are one of the most successful combinations of image and sound I've seen.

In the end, though, for any film-noir, it all comes down to the atmosphere, and that is The Third Man's greatest strength. All the individual elements in the film come together to create an atmospheric, thematically complex film that haunts the viewer long after the masterful final frame has faded.

The Third Man - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Leland Poague from Film Reference

Carol Reed's The Third Man is a remarkably enigmatic film in many respects, drawing on a range of talents and traditions so broad as to raise the question of authorship in a particularly acute form. The film owes debts to the Grierson/Rotha tradition of British documentary film, as well as to the post-war neo-realism of Rossellini's Roma Città Aperta and DeSica's Ladri di Biciclette ; like its Italian predecessors, The Third Man studies the effects of post-war economic and social corruption within the context of a once grand though now rubble-strewn European capital (Rome for the neo-realists, Vienna for Reed). And debts are also owed to the moralistic detective fiction of Graham Greene (who wrote the original screenplay), as well as to the similarly Catholic tradition of Hitchcock's pre-war British thrillers (e.g., The 39 Steps ). But overshadowing all of these influences is the presence of Orson Welles in the role of Harry Lime. Welles wrote much of his own dialogue; as in Citizen Kane he is once again paired with Joseph Cotten, who plays his boyhood friend Holly Martins; even the film's overtly stylized use of camera angles, of expressionist lighting, of stairways, owes much to the Wellesian style. Indeed, The Third Man is very much a film about authorship, or about art more generally, and the issue raised is very much one of artistic ethics. Thus the film's three major characters are all artists of one sort or another— and the range of their actions and motives helps to define our sense of the film's theme.

Holly Martins, for instance, is a Western novelist (when asked about artistic influences he cites Zane Grey) whose initial interest in the investigation of the "death" of Harry Lime involves his conviction that Harry was a victim of "the sheriff" (i.e., the British military police) whose death Holly ("the lone rider") must avenge. Later he even says he is planning a new novel, based on fact, to be called "The Third Man." Likewise Anna—Harry's girlfriend (whom he betrays to the Russians)—is an actress; and her willingness to betray Harry involves both ignorance (she doesn't know he betrayed her) and a melodramatic sense of her role as the doomed man's mistress (she even sleeps in Harry's pajamas).

But clearly the film's central figure, its central artist, is Harry Lime himself. The complex relationship of money and art is a primary theme of the Wellesian cinema—and in The Third Man it finds vivid expression in the use Lime makes of art, to throw the occupation authorities off his trail and to further his traffic in black market drugs (diluted penicillin especially). Hence Lime plans and stage-manages his own death, even playing a part as "the third man" who helps to carry the body (actually, that of an implicated associate) from the street where it was run down by a truck; and he calls his boyhood friend, Holly Martins, to Vienna to serve as his stand in. The connection of art and corruption is confirmed in Harry's famous "cuckoo clock" speech wherein the political intrigues of the Borgias are correlated with the aesthetic triumphs of Michelangelo and da Vinci. There is something remarkably childish and self-indulgent about Lime's perspective—as evidenced by the fact that he utters the line at an amusement park. But Holly gets another view of childhood, when Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) takes him to the hospital ward populated by Lime's victims, all children; and "The Third Man," as Holly eventually "rewrites" the story, becomes a parable of social responsibility. It is Holly who finally pulls the trigger and puts the wounded Lime out of his cynical misery.

The Third Man: The One and Only . . . Criterion essay by Luc Sante, May 21, 2007

Behind The Third Man Criterion essay by Charles Drazin, May 21, 2007

The Third Man: Seeing Greene Criterion essay by Philip Kerr, May 21, 2007

The Third Man Criterion essay by Michael Wilmington, November 8, 1999

The Third Man (1949) - The Criterion Collection

Manny Farber on Third Man originally from The Nation, April 1, 1950, also seen here: The Nation: Manny Farber, and here: Ehsan Khoshbakht's notes on cinematograph [Manny Farber]

Orson Welles at 100: The Third Man (1949) Jake Hinkson from Criminal Element

The Third Man (1949) – Deep Focus Review – Movie Reviews, Critical ... Brian Eggert

Richard Misek The Third Man - Rouge Wrong Geometries in The Third Man, July 2007

The Trouble With Harry: The Third Man (1949), Part 1 – Offscreen Elaine Lennon, December 2016

The Trouble With Harry: The Third Man (1949), Part 2 – Offscreen Elaine Lennon, December 2016

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Vienna Project Peter Wollen from Sight and Sound, July 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | The Power And The Glory Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2006

The Third Man • Senses of Cinema Chris Justice, February 2006

The Third Man | FilmNav also seen in another variation here: The Third Man - HowlingPixel

BFI Screenonline: Homosexuality and The Third Man Rob White

BFI Screenonline: Adapting The Third Man Rob White

BFI Screenonline: Producing The Third Man Rob White

BFI Screenonline: The Third Man - Critical Reception Rob White

BFI Screenonline: The Third Man music Rob White

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

The Spinning Image (Dan Schneider) review also seen here: Dan Schneider on The Third Man

Essay comparing The Third Man to Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey Taking 5: Needing Something To Say, by Dan Schneider from Retort magazine, 2004, also link here: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/21323/20060304-0000/www.retortmagazine.com/content/12.04/id_literature_schneider.htm

Dark City | Village Voice J. Hoberman, May 4, 1999

'The Third Man' Returns, Looming Larger and Grander ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek, June 23, 2015

Welles in the Lime Light | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 30, 1999

Screen Writing: "The Third Man" | Movie Mezzanine Asher Gelzer-Govatos, April 26, 2016

Thriller of the Century: The Third Man | Observer Ron Rosenbaum, January 17, 2000

World Cinema Review: Carol Reed | The Third Man Douglas Messerli

Carol Reed's The Third Man on Criterion - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, January 1, 2000, also seen here: Good Golly, Mr. Holly

Orson Welles' Subversive Genius: 'The Third Man', Film Noir and the ... Jonah Raskin from Pop Matters, October 15, 2013

Sunset Gun: The Number One Third Man Kim Morgan from Sunset Gun, October 3, 2009

A Great New Movie, An Overrated Old One | The New Yorker Richard Brody, June 26, 2015

Architecture and Film Noir: The Third Man – KSA MA Architectural ... March 22, 2016

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem] January 15, 2007

The Third Man - TCM.com Paul Tatara

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Tom Block

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A]

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]

The Third Man | Pajiba - Scathing Reviews Drew Morton

Edward Copeland on Film (Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.) February 2, 2010

Classic Film Freak review Greg Orypeck, September 8, 2010

The New York Sun (Gary Giddins) review Who Is Harry Lime? May 22, 2007

Film Noir of the Week Bill Hare, September 19, 2008

The Third Man (1949) - Articles - TCM.com John Miller

The second coming of The Third Man | The Arts Desk Graham Fuller

“The Third Man”: Why this masterful 1949 Euro-noir about the ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir, June 25, 2015

Dragan Antulov retrospective [10/10]

homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) recommendation

James Sanford retrospective

Slant: Matt Noller

Images (Gary Morris) review

the third man Lenin Imports

A Review of Carol Reed's “The Third Man” « The Schleicher Spin David H. Schleicher, April 1, 2008

» The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) Mat Viola from Notes of a Film Fanatic, July 26, 2008

The Spinning Image (Steve Langton) review

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Two-Disc Criterion Collection]

Unnecessary Subtitles in The Third Man on Netflix – Robert Kroll July 27, 2017

The Third Man: DVD Review – Offscreen Donato Totaro, September 2002, Criterion Collection, 2 discs

Turner Classic Movies dvd review Sean Axmaker, Criterion Collection, 2 discs

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2 discs

The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan, 2 discs

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection] Criterion Collection, 2 discs, also seen here: Criterion Confessions

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion Collection, 2 discs

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2 discs

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2 discs

DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel, Criterion Collection, 2 discs

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson, Criterion Collection, 2 discs

The Third Man Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov

The Third Man Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Jeffrey Kauffman

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Blu-Ray

DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Town (Christopher Long & John J. Puccio) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Blu-Ray

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection]

High-Def Digest [Nate Boss] Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, also here: our review of the StudioCanal release of 'The Third Man.'

DVD Town (Ranjan Pruthee & John J. Puccio) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Studio Canal Collection

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel] Studio Canal Collection

Lars Lindahl retrospective [4/4]

Film Monthly (John Kessler) review

Cinescape dvd review Andrew Hershberger

The Making of THE THIRD MAN and other interesting information Film Forum

Masterpieces of World Cinema: The Third Man (1950 - Welcome to ... Emanuel Levy

Film Lounge: Neil Young

The Third Man (1949) - Little White Lies David Jenkins

The Third Man (1949) Brit Movie

Plume Noire review Fred Thom

The Village Voice [Benjamin Strong]

Shadowing the Third Man - TCM.com Shadowing the Third Man, a 60 minute documentary on the making of the film

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The Third Man - Salon.com Laura Miller, March 21, 1997

Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [94/100]

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [96.2/100]

Cheng-Jih Chen retrospective

Steve Rhodes retrospective [4/4]

Edinburgh U Film Society (Jonathan M. Caryl) review

eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]

TotalFilm capsule dvd review [Special Edition] Jamie Graham

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Newsweek (David Ansen) review

All Movie Guide [Bruce Eder]

Third Man, The (1949) Classic Film Guide (capsule)

DVD Verdict- 10 Years Of Rialto Pictures: Criterion Collection [Dan Mancini] Blu-Ray

The Cinematheque - The Top 5 Project -- Week #37 / British Films The Top 5 British Films from Cinematheque

Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN - 60th Anniversary previously at Film ... Film Forum

Soundtrack.net soundtrack review Andrew Granade

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]

Carol Reed on directing Orson Welles in THE THIRD MAN - Wellesnet Martin Bigham Criterion essay, and a 1972 interview by Charles Thomas Samuels from Wellesnet, May 29, 2007

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Carol Reed: The Third Man | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm’s Century of Films, March 16, 2000

The Third Man review – a near-perfect work | Film | The Guardian Philip French

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [5/5]

Leonardo DiCaprio's Third Man remake is a cuckoo-clock idea David Thomson from The Guardian, October 27, 2009

Martin Scorsese on 'The Third Man': The best revelation in all cinema ... Martin Scorsese from The Independent, June 23, 2015

Must-have movies: The Third Man (1949) - Telegraph Alan Stanbrook

Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review

San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] December 8, 1996

RogerEbert.com: Matt Zoller Seitz

The Third Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'The Third Man' as a Story and a Film - The New York Times February 20, 2000

The Third Man Blu-ray - Orson Welles - DVD Beaver Gary W. Tooze, compares 2 Criterion releases, Criterion Blu-Ray, and Studio Canal Blu-Ray

Filming Location: The Third Man

The Third Man locations.

The Third Man Museum

The Third Man tour.

OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS

Great Britain (102 mi) 1952

One of Monte Hellman’s favorite films

Time Out review Tom Milne

With all its faults, still one of the cinema's sharpest stabs at Conrad. Chief problem is the script, which tends to turn the whole thing towards picaresque tropical adventure by introducing character after character without ever quite pinning down the moral conflicts illuminated by their interaction. The recurring Conrad theme (clash between noble and ignoble) was probably doomed anyway, since Richardson gives a bizarrely stilted performance as Lingard, thereby depriving Willems (superbly played by Howard) of the sounding-board that measures his descent into moral degradation. A pity, since individual scenes have a power rare in Reed's work, and the last shot - of Aissa, the sultry beauty who both destroys and is destroyed by Willems, squatting balefully in the rain and seeming to melt back into the earth - perfectly encapsulates Conrad's ambivalent view of the man who is hopelessly wrong in all his actions yet represents a bold gesture towards life.

User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States

Carol Reed's "An Outcast Of The Islands" is generally conceded to be the finest film ever made of Joseph Conrad's tales. To be fair "Nostromo", "Under Western Eyes", and "Chance" never have been filmed. Hitchcock's "Sabotage" (based on "The Secret Agent") is a good Hitchcock film, but the story is modernized and changed. The later film version of the novel was politely received and then forgotten. "Victory" was made into a serviceable love and adventure story with Fredric March and Cedric Hardwicke, but the irony and allegory of the story was lost. "Lord Jim" was better recalled for the severe drubbing critics gave it - concluding with a Mad Magazine spoof called "Lord Jump". There is "Apocalypse Now" which is a fine attempt at "Heart of Darkness", but it changes the site of the story from the Belgium Congo of Leopold II to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. "An Outcast" stuck to the basic story of Willems and his betrayal of Almayer and Captain Lingard for a beautiful native girl. Trevor Howard gave many memorable, delicate performances in his life (best, perhaps, for "Brief Encounter"), but this performance as a man who was poor enough material to begin with but goes to seed is possibly better. The supporting cast is great, with Robert Morley playing his most despicable character, and Ralph Richardson as the decent Lingard. George Coulouris is properly Machiavellian as the sly Babalatchi, and Wendy Hiller is tragic as that human dishrag Mrs. Almayer. The only problem a purist may have is that Willems is killed at the end of the novel accidentally (and quite memorably). Not so in the film. But his punishment of living as a monument to failure and hopelessness may be even more fitting - I leave to the reader/viewer.

The success of The Third Man propelled Carol Reed to the peak of his career, making him a director of international importance whose movies accomplished the rare merger of commerce and art; they earned praise from the reviewers and sold plenty of tickets as well. His decision to strike off in a new artistic direction rather than cautiously husbanding the profitable aptitude for thrillers he had displayed was courageous. Weighing up a number of different potential film assignments, he settled on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's second novel, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), a work which Korda - a Conrad enthusiast - had been urging him to film. The endeavour would require a large and convincing cast and a Far Eastern locale, most of the movie was shot on location in the region where the story was actually set: Ceylon, Borneo and the Malayas.

The plot of Outcast is soundly constructed, yet the story is largely psychological in emphasis, and it is the passions of the characters which determine the events rather than the other way around. The boredom and restlessness from which Willems suffers in Sambir leaves him vulnerable to temptation and, since there is no money to steal, lust replaces greed, insatiable lust for Aissa (Kerima), the beautiful daughter of the blind chieftain Badavi (A. V. Bramble). The girl's tribesmen, allies of Lingard's rival Ali (Dharma Emmanuel), are thus able to blackmail Willems into revealing the treacherous route into Sambir, which the old captain has incautiously shown his young protégé.

From Willems' first sight of the hypnotic Aissa to his final realisation that she is his doom, Reed's camera follows the course of his swelling passion with silent eloquence. Although Kerima has no dialogue, she is all that one could hope for in an Aissa - a dark-eyed beauty who moves about with regal but savage pride and communicates great emotional intensity. As the agent of Willems' downfall, she is completely persuasive. In the case of Almayer, Reed is entirely faithful to Conrad's depiction of the trader as a self-important prig. The epitome of a respectable burgher, Almayer has felt compelled to transport his stuffy bourgeois life all the way to Malaya, with every bit of pietism, hypocrisy and smugness intact. His cosy domestic environment is made to seem airless and numbing, a miniature Kensington inhabited by his well-corseted, tea-bearing wife and his shrill daughter Nina (Annabel Morley, Robert Morley's daughter). The scapegrace Willems is repelled by the pompous proprieties of Almayer's home -having abandoned his own in Singapore - and the rancorous scenes between the two men, which are among the strongest in the movie, leave the audience more sympathetic to the sneering Willems.

Reed follows Conrad in establishing Almayer's stance towards Willems as one of outraged respectability throughout and in unmasking Almayer as the embodiment of self-interest and heartlessness. His loathing for Willems is fuelled more by anxious fears that Willems may supplant him with Lingard and become a partner than by disgust over Willems' deterioration. Our loyalties gravitate decisively towards Willems when the latter comes to Almayer to beg for a chance to set up his own trading post (presumably as an alternative to betraying Lingard). His physical and emotional condition is pitiable, but Almayer turns him away ruthlessly. When the vengeful Willems returns at the head of the Badavi tribe - following the safe passage into the lagoon - we are not unhappy to see Almayer sewn up in his hammock and swung to and fro over a fire by the sadistic natives.

Outcast is easily the least appreciated of Reed's major movies. Yet the Far Eastern milieu is as lush and reverberant as we could possibly have hoped it would be, and the story is almost never vitiated or debased by commercialism. Other than the softening of Lingard, there is not a single artistic compromise of significance in the movie. Beyond its other laudable attributes, it stands as one of the most powerful evocations of human degradation ever to reach an audience through a commercial medium like film. Its moods are all potent because Reed's direction and Wilcox's camerawork are supplemented by Conrad's dialogue, which Fairchild sensibly and skilfully interpolated into his script. By transcribing Conrad's dialogue so faithfully, Reed and Fairchild have also preserved the distinctive rhythms and intonations of each player in the drama.

Outcast of the Islands - TCM.com Rob Nixon

Carol Reed's OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS - TCM.com Steven Mears

User reviews from imdb Author: jandesimpson from Hastings, U.K.

Outcast of the Islands - Wikipedia

THE MAN BETWEEN

Great Britain (100 mi) 1953

Very much a return to the world of Harry Lime, with the ruins of edgy, divided Berlin standing in for the sewers of Vienna. The drab, snow-clad city finds its human counterpart in Mason's sardonic, disreputable double agent, who stalks and then succumbs to the provocatively virginal Bloom. Cold war dogmatism is refreshingly muted, with free world heroes and Stalinist heavies merely a backcloth to the complexly ambiguous relations centred on Mason. The film's rambling, ramshackle construction drew unfavourable comparisons with The Third Man, but despite thematic similarities, it is more fruitfully seen as a forerunner to the down-at-heel spy stories of John Le Carré.

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review

With The Man Between (1953), Carol Reed seemed to be trying to pull in his horns. In The Man Between, he retreated to his biggest hit, The Third Man, to rummage about for new ideas, to see what could be recycled. Some scholars characterise the script as an original screenplay (by Walter Ebert and Harry Kurnitz), others as Kurnitz's adaptation of a novel by Ebert, Susanne in Berlin. Whatever the case, neither man could be expected to equal Greene's achievement. Reed's attempt at creative backtracking led him to a setting ravaged post-war Berlin - that unmistakably paralleled the decadent Viennese locale of The Third Man. Like so many of Reed's movies, the exteriors for The Man Between were shot on location. A meticulously realistic backdrop was always one of Reed's goals, and he filmed some scenes a mere ten minutes from the East German Volkspolizei, who constitute an important feature of the movie.

As in The Third Man, the city is an integral part of the drama, a recognisable force, as well as a symbol of the lives it encapsulates. The demoralisation of life in a defeated and pillaged nation is suggested vividly by Desmond Dickinson's camera, which dispassionately surveys the decay of bombed-out buildings, the vacant lots and the omnipresent rubble of Berlin. The citizens are a desperate breed, with moods ranging from desolate to cynical to agitated. Naturally corruption is as intrinsic a feature of life in Berlin as in Vienna. The plot deals with political factions who traffic in human life, which is presented as one manifestation of the frenzied intrigues between East and West, whose trench-coated agents kidnap people from one another's zones. The point of view through which all this is perceived is that of Suzanne (Bloom), an impulsive but demure English girl whose arrival in Britain to visit her brother Martin (Geoffrey Toone) and his German wife Bettina (Neff) sets the story in motion. Through her eyes we see the squalor of the city, as the camera, casually inspecting the airport on Suzanne's arrival, discovers a boy picking through garbage and a malevolent looking clown. The heroine is -picked up by Bettina, who soon establishes herself as another victim of the city; she alternates between states of depression and nervousness, though we aren't told why. Perhaps the teenage boy (Dieter Kraus) whom Suzanne notices spying on her house has something to do with it.

On the movie's melodramatic level, all these displays of tension and decay function as portents, informing the moviegoer that something is up. Berlin, like Vienna, is too dangerous a city to be merely a giant municipal ward for battle-scarred Germans. As The Third Man had its enigmatic Harry Lime, so The Man Between has a shadowy figure named Ivo (Mason). He is acquainted with Bettina, who is afraid of him for reasons that are not explained for quite some time, and he is highly attentive to Suzanne, again for reasons that are unclear. In The Third Man, Lime had three sinister confederates; here they are compressed into one bulky Berliner, Halendar (Aribert Waescher), who typifies the sleaziness of his city. He is involved in racketeering, eventually we learn that Halendar is blackmailing Ivo, who has a criminal past, and is forcing him to aid in a kidnapping attempt on Kastner (Ernest Schroeder), whose success at spiriting refugees out of East Berlin has outraged the Communist authorities. To do his part, Ivo has his own blackmail victim, Bettina, who was once Ivo's wife and is legally still married to him.

As in earlier Reed films, there is a naïf at the centre, or near the centre, of the action in The Man Between - Suzanne, whose ingenuous, school-girl approach to misery and evil seems incongruous in post-war Berlin. She is attracted to the suave, cosmopolitan Ivo and the two engage in a number of dialogues in which youthful idealism, on the one side, and mature scepticism on the other clash again and again. Suzanne is the product of a victorious nation, one that was not even invaded, while Ivo, a former lawyer who is now a minor criminal, is the disenchanted son of a brutally defeated people. At great personal risk Ivo helps Suzanne escape from Halendar's lair after she has been mistaken for Bettina and kidnapped. The latter part of the film is a familiar drama of flight as the two - now lovers, more or less - try frantically to avoid capture by the East Germans as they slip in and out of a number of grimy refuges on their way to West Berlin and freedom. In a very uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality, Reed turns his hero inside out in order to have him lay down his life to save Suzanne.

This failure of nerve and imagination in the handling of Ivo is all too typical of The Man Between, which seems like a sketch for a good movie, a decent first draft. Unhappily, the scenario mainly serves to reveal the extent to which Reed was dependent on the quality of the script he was given, regardless of his own sometimes enormous creative input. After a decade or so of increasingly impressive films, movies that displayed a skilful entertainer as well as a man of great sensibility, Reed had directed a film in which, despite creative control, he had delivered an unfulfilling work. Kurnitz simply did not have the sensitivity, the flair and the sneaky wit of Graham Greene. A screenwriter with twenty years' experience, he had also written detective novels under the name Marco Page. As a scenarist, however, his talent was most abundant in comedy and mystery-comedy, not in the sort of hard-nosed thrillers which depend on firmness of construction and a powerful sense of ambience.

The Man Between - TCM.com Sean Axmaker

Movie Mirror [Sanderson Beck]

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Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

OUR MAN IN HAVANA

Great Britain (111 mi) 1959 ‘Scope

This 1960 Carol Reed satire adapted by Graham Greene from his own novel always seems to be verging on high comedy but never quite makes it. Still, there are some gentle laughs in this story of a British vacuum cleaner salesman (Alec Guinness), recruited by British intelligence to spy on the (pre-Castro) regime in Cuba, who finds he never has anything to report to London and so begins fabricating information. Guinness is in above-average form, and Ernie Kovacs is wonderful as the callous but charming government official with a soft spot for Guinness's daughter. With Noel Coward, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, and Ralph Richardson. 111 min.

A real 'winds of change' film, with traditional values crumbling in the heat of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Guinness is wonderful. Discovering an unexpected ability to recognise the real in the game of make-believe, he emerges as master of the situation through the boldness of his fantasies. This mad world, where fictional characters die real deaths and even the Clean-Easy man can't be trusted, has little in common with Le Carré's Circus, but as Guinness' vacuum-cleaner salesman/spy sheds his innocence, he becomes dimly recognisable as an early incarnation of mole-catcher Smiley. Graham Greene's 'entertainment' is only gently macabre and the threats never quite materialise, but the film cleverly captures the confusion of optimism, cynicism and money-grubbing greed of the 'never had it so good' years.

Our Man in Havana - TCM.com Frank Miller

Because it's not available on DVD, the 1959 espionage comedy Our Man in Havana is one of the least known of Carol Reed's films. Yet its high-octane cast -- including Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, Noel Coward, Ernie Kovacs and Maureen O'Hara -- and witty Graham Greene script make it a standout, well worth rediscovery and re-evaluation.

Greene based the story on his own experiences in espionage during World War II. While serving in Portugal near the war's end, he had met some German spies who were sending invented reports back to their dying fatherland in order to keep collecting their paychecks. His first idea was to write a screenplay about an Englishman who does the same thing in pre-war Estonia in order to keep his greedy wife happy. But when the outline was presented to the British film censors it was rejected as derogatory to the British Secret Service. Realizing that he'd have a hard time winning audience sympathy for a character who betrayed England on the eve of World War II, he re-set the story in '50s Havana, changed the wife into a daughter and published it as a novel.

With its exotic setting and comic take on espionage, Our Man in Havana was a natural for the movies. Among the filmmakers vying for the rights was Alfred Hitchcock. When he refused to meet Greene's asking price of 50,000 pounds, however, Greene sold them to his friend and frequent associate Carol Reed for much less, figuring that if he were going to take less than he wanted, he could at least sell the rights to someone he knew would remain faithful to the novel.

Reed and Greene had scored a pair of international hits with The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). With Reed's career in a slump in the late '50s, this seemed the perfect project to revive his cinematic fortunes. They had little problem selling the project to Columbia Pictures and moved to a hotel in the British resort town Brighton to work on the screenplay.

Columbia asked them to put some U.S. marquee names in the film, so Reed cast American stars like Ernie Kovacs and recent-Oscar®-winner Burl Ives in juicy supporting roles. To star as the vacuum cleaner turned secret agent, he turned to Alec Guinness, a U.S. favorite from such classic '50s comedies as The Ladykillers (1955) and his Oscar®-winning performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Another American favorite, Noel Coward, took the role of the agent who recruits Guinness. Coward had lost out on the role of Harry Lime in The Third Man a decade earlier, so the new film was something of a consolation prize. The studio wanted Lauren Bacall for the female lead, but when she proved unavailable, they turned to O'Hara, whom they already had under contract. Jean Seberg decided to make a little French film called Breathless (1960) rather than play Guinness' daughter, so Reed cast another Columbia contractee, Jo Morrow. To play Coward's boss, he cast Ralph Richardson, who had risen to international stardom in his The Fallen Idol.

Shooting was set for Cuba in early 1959. Then Fidel Castro's communist revolution overthrew the U.S.-supported government of Fulgencio Batista. Columbia's executives were concerned about sending a film company into the unstable country, but Greene assured them that his friendship with Castro would guarantee their safety. When they submitted the script to the new Cuba's Labor Department for work permits, however, they were asked to make changes until they reassured the bureaucrats that the depiction of a corrupt Cuban government would clearly be set during the Batista regime. They even included a written prologue to explain "This film is set in Cuba before the recent revolution."

When filming started, more censorship arrived in the person of the Ministry of Interior, which demanded to inspect the script. They demanded a few minor line changes, insisted that a shoe-shine boy change from rags to nice pants and required Kovacs to shave the beard he had grown for his role as a corrupt police chief (modeled on the head of Batista's police repression squad). By that time, Cubans associated beards with the rebel leaders, so it wouldn't do for a villainous representative of the overthrown government to wear one. When the company moved to the Tropicana to re-create the island's legendary strip club, there was even a censor among the extras, who would rise up and protest whenever one of the women showed too much skin.

Early in the filming, Castro invited Reed, Greene, Coward and Guinness to visit him. When they arrived at his bungalow, however, he was embroiled in a meeting. After waiting 90 minutes, they left. Weeks later, however, the new premier showed up for an impromptu set visit during which he assured Reed there would be no censorship problems. Contrary to rumor, much of it invented by Columbia's PR department, he did not ask O'Hara for a date or try to romance Morrow.

O'Hara had her own brush with the revolution when she met freedom fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevara at the hotel where the company was staying. She was impressed by his knowledge of Irish history and the nation's rebellions against the British, particularly when he explained that he had learned it all at the knee of his Irish grandmother. She would later state in her memoirs that the famed Che Guevara cap, worn by students and political dissidents around the world, was really an Irish rebels cap.

After seven weeks of location shooting, the company moved to London for studio work and one day of location work at Parliament Square. They also found it necessary to post-dub all of the Cuban street footage because of problems controlling crowd noises during the shoot. Each day that they shot exteriors, locals would surround the set. Though they provided inexpensive extras for the film, they also became vocally involved in the action, hissing whenever an actor dressed in the blue uniforms of Batista's police force appeared on set.

For most, Our Man in Havana was a congenial experience. Kovacs was delighted that Guinness and Coward "got" his sense of humor (Guinness would call him the funniest man he had ever met), while O'Hara was delighted by Guinness' professionalism and warmed by his praise of the British accent she assumed for her role as a Secret Service secretary. Guinness, however, had not enjoyed his experience working with Reed. Early on Reed had surprised him by stating that Guinness' character was really less important than the events happening around him, so there would be few close-ups of the star. When Guinness showed up on the set with ideas for playing the character as an untidy, fussy little man, Reed told him, "We don't want any of your character acting. Play it straight. Don't act." Not knowing what to do with a direction like that, Guinness delivered an undistinguished performance, allowing Coward and Kovacs to steal the film.

Our Man in Havana (1959) Brit Movie

Our Man in Havana Archives - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, also seen here in a slightly shorter version: Parallax View [Sean Axmaker]

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Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

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The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [4/4]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The Year in Film: 1960 [Erik Beck] a historical composite of cinema in the year 1960

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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

THE RUNNING MAN

aka: The Ballad of the Running Man

Great Britain (103 mi) 1963 ‘Scope

Alas, this is no Panavision and colour version of The Third Man, despite the teaming of Reed and ace cameraman Robert Krasker. Scripted by John Mortimer (from a novel by Shelley Smith), it's an extremely routine thriller about an insurance swindle, with Harvey as the ne'er-do-well, Remick as his soon disenchanted wife, and Bates as the man from the Pru who smells a rat while on holiday in travel brochure Spain. The scenery takes first place, and you almost expect the dire Anne Gregg to pop up to show Harvey how to buy an orange in the market.

The Running Man (1963) Brit Movie

Carol Reed’s The Running Man came from Shelley Smith’s crime novel The Ballad of the Running Man, the title of which was shortened. Two cherished members of Reed’s professional family were with him again, Krasker and Alwyn. John Mortimer, a respected novelist and playwright with a flair for well-made courtroom stories, was hired to write the screenplay. An established star, Laurence Harvey, and two performers whose careers were quickly ascending, Alan Bates and Lee Remick, were hired for the lead roles, and Columbia provided a large enough budget for location shooting in Spain, where most of the story is set.

The film’s plot is set in motion when Black (Harvey) crashes his plane in the ocean and dissembles his own death so as to be able to collect the insurance. After first adopting the mask of Charles Erskine, a shoe salesman, he heads quickly for Malaga; there he soon finds himself at a bar with a drunken Australian named Jim Jerome (John Meillon), who conveniently forgets his passport. Presto! Rex has a new identity. After his wife Stella (Remick) joins him, the two are agitated by the appearance of Stephen Maddox. ‘What a coincidence’, he remarks. The rest of the movie is built on the razor-edge quandary of whether he is telling the truth or is spying on the guilty couple for the insurance company.

Having thus wrenched the course of events in an improbable direction to create suspense, the film-makers use equally contrived situations to create an ironic conclusion. Fleeing the Spanish police after an unsuccessful attempt at killing Stephen, Rex happens to pass an airport, finds an idle plane with the keys in it and takes it aloft. Short of gas, he goes down over the ocean and dies muttering about life insurance policies. Since the film began with Rex’s ‘funeral’ after faking his death in the first accident, his ultimate fate has the look of a contrived framing device. Still, if one can accept the awkward scaffolding of The Running Man, there is a good deal of fine detail and workmanship to admire in the plot; an ingratiating mix of wit, suspense and pungent dialogue; and several piquant surprises.

The Running Man (1963) - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco

It seems that filming The Running Man (1963), a tale of insurance fraud based on Shelley Smith's novel The Ballad of the Running Man, was not a happy experience for anyone involved. Director Carol Reed had recently been fired from Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and although those who worked on the film thought it unfair and blamed Marlon Brando, the experience had shaken Reed's confidence badly.

Star Laurence Harvey was generally unhappy about the state of his career and the type of projects he felt forced to do. As he wrote to his parents during the shooting of The Running Man, "As one continues to work in this profession one finds it increasingly difficult as the whole economy and structure of the motion picture has, and is continually changing. The people who run the companies today are not longer interested in films, but only in greed, lining their pockets and destroying what was once a great field of entertainment and sometimes even an art. In order to survive one had to be continually fighting their negativity and stupidity. Where one time we could spend all our efforts and energies on performance, we now have to watch every other aspect of the business. After all these years of intensive hard work and concentrated labors, I find myself no better off financially than I was ten or fifteen years ago, and one wonders whether it's all worth it. Unfortunately I am stuck with this business and know no other, so am forced to continue in this rat race hoping for survival."

Harvey's spending habits and the high tax rate in Britain made it necessary for him to stay out of England, Scotland and Wales. As Nicholas Wapshott wrote in his book Carol Reed: A Biography, "[Harvey] therefore placed in his contract a clause which said that all filming should take place outside Britain. At first Reed had planned to begin shooting in Barcelona, Spain, then work up toward the mountains of Andorra, but he switched to taking the company south, with the film's grand finale a spectacular crash into the Rock of Gibraltar, not only a recognizable location but, to fit in with the ironies of the plot, the symbol of the Prudential Insurance company. Reed took the cast and crew off for a ten-week location schedule in Málaga, Algeciras, San Roque and La Línea on the Costa del Sol. There were a few distractions from the work. Harvey thought that the film was a nonstarter, Lee Remick remained icy throughout and only Alan Bates emerges with credit. The plot twisted and turned, but Reed found few ways of heightening the tension. There was a painful reminder of his lost ability to keep an audience on edge when an open-air showing of Odd Man Out (1947) was screened in his honor at the bullring at San Roque." Remick's iciness was attributed to her dislike of Harvey, who was known for his abrasive personality.

Friction between cast members was only one of the troubles: in September 1962 one of the stunt pilots and a cameraman were seriously injured when they crashed into the ocean in Gibraltar while filming. When production was moved to Ardmore Studios in Bray, Ireland, the temperature change from sunny Gibraltar and Spain caused several of the cast and crew to get sick. As Harvey wrote to his parents, "every member of the cast and crew seemed to have come down with a bad cold and sinus trouble, but the principal sufferer is me."

Reed, meanwhile, was seriously overweight and felt ill during most of the production. Nicholas Wapshott wrote that "[Reed] was losing his hearing and his concentration...[He] hugged the security of an old working friendship by once again joining forces with his favorite cinematographer, Robert Krasker, and his old editor, Bert Bates...During the period of editing, Bates found Reed's dithering increasingly irritating and attempted to force him to be decisive. What had previously been a genuine appeal for a second opinion had become a fundamental lack of confidence in his own decisions. Bates would say to him, 'Well, I haven't got all day. I've got some roses to prune,' and would leave the cutting room to tend his rose garden. Reed was still paying the terrible toll brought on by Brando's humiliation of him during Mutiny. The Running Man was universally dismissed by the critics when it was released in London in August 1963. The [London] Times found the whole thing rather old-fashioned and obvious. It was universally thought that Reed was in terminal decline. In France the decline was stressed by the insensitivity of a switch in the film's title to Le Deuxieme Homme."

Reed's greatest film was, arguably, The Third Man (1949). The translation of the French title for The Running Man is "The Second Man."

A Tense Neo-Noir: Carol Reed's (1963) "The Running Man ... Stephen Murray from Associated Content, August 29, 2010

Alan Bates - Britmovie Anthony Hayward on Sir Alan Bates

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Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

OLIVER!

Great Britain (146 mi) 1968 ‘Scope

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael

Oliver! won five out of 12 Oscar nominations in 1968, including Best Director for Carol Reed. He put a rousing musical spin on Charles Dickens' dark tale of an orphan (played by Mark Lester) seeking his fortune in ye olde London, and its popularity endures almost 40 years later. Who could forget Ron Moody crooning Pick A Pocket as Fagin, looking a bit like Bruce Forsyth after a night on the tiles.

Moody looks back on his defining role (first played in a stage production) in Meet Fagin and credits, not Bruce Forsyth, but the late comedian Tommy Cooper with providing creative inspiration. Fagin wasn't just an old miser in Moody's eyes, but "a clown" who used humour to engage impressionable young children.

He says too that working with the recently departed Oliver Reed (in the role of scary Bill Sikes) was "just like working with any of the other children..." It was the owl that proved to be most troublesome though, as Moody tells it, constantly upstaging him by spinning its head 180 degrees at the call of 'action!'

Even though he's all grown up now, Mark Lester still remembers Oliver Reed with a little quiver in his voice in Meet Oliver. He reflects too on his friendship with Jack Wild who sadly passed away in 2006. According to Lester, he was "like a big brother" with their offscreen antics very much mirroring the relationship between Oliver and The Artful Dodger onscreen. By the late stages of production though, (which lasted almost a year) Lester was almost as tall as Wild so the latter was forced to wear lifts in his shoes! That might have impaired his dancing ability, but Lester maintains he was one of the worst hoofers on set.

All of those famous musical sequences, like Pick A Pocket, Food Glorious Food and Consider Yourself, can be viewed separately with dance instruction and sing-a-long subtitles. Three trivia games, an interactive map of 19th century London and a timeline of Charles Dickens' life are thrown in too. Of course Oliver! is a proven crowd pleaser, but it's a shame there isn't a more comprehensive look at the making of this epic film. Indeed we'd venture as far as to say, this Special Edition might leave some children begging for more...

BFI Screenonline: Oliver! (1968) David Parker

Carol Reed gained an international reputation as a director on the basis of three post-war films that took as their focus the problematic lives of orphans and outcasts - Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). But by the time Carol Reed came to direct Oliver! (1968) he was considered by many to be "a talent in irreversible decline". So it is perhaps fitting that this narrative, also concerned with an orphaned boy, resulted in an Oscar.

As Oliver, eight-year-old Mark Lester delivers an understated, natural pathos well suited to the role. Reed partners this raw performance with Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger, and while his professional performance has more of the stage school about it, this somehow seems appropriate for a young felon with such street-smarts.

Carol Reed's nephew, Oliver Reed, was cast as Bill Sikes. Although Reed's portrayal is rather lightweight when compared with the dark and permanently scowling Robert Newton in the David Lean version of Oliver Twist (1948), it can still shock at times, especially when he brutally murders Nancy (Shani Wallis) in the shadow of London Bridge. Reed, legendary for his off-screen lifestyle, successfully conveys a Sikes who is decisive, brutal and yet plagued by a faint sense of guilt which seems to dilute his misanthropy.

In fact, the director pulled together a quality ensemble cast, bypassing the pressure from the studio to include a star. Peter Sellers, who had wanted to play Fagin, had committed to other projects by the time production began and so Ron Moody, who had played the role on stage, reprised his performance. What is created from Reed's crafted direction and Moody's magician-like performance is a broadly enjoyable, burlesque version of the famous villain. The hard edges of Fagin, which are felt more keenly in Dickens' novel, are rounded off somewhat. Moody's interpretation makes Fagin as much a clown as a hardened criminal.

While the songs could easily prevent an audience from suspending disbelief, Reed manages to keep the artificiality in check just enough to maintain a human interest to the story. The slums and streets of London are a little too picture-book to be convincing, but the essential theatricality of this musical mean that the exuberance and brightness of the sets seems entirely in keeping with the spirit of the original stage-show.

Oliver! (1968) Brit Movie

In Hollywood, where the director is always to blame – never the star, the property or the studio – Reed was widely regarded as a talent in irreversible decline. Few offers came his way, and when at last, after three years, he was hired again, it was by Romulus, an English house which had acquired the rights to Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, one of the few English musicals ever to find favour with American audiences. The cleverly titled production firm – its founders were the brothers John and James Woolf (sons of C. M. Woolf) – sought American funding for Oliver!, but the money was hard to come by even with Peter Sellers committed to the Fagin role, American producers balked. At last Columbia agreed to gamble on the project, and regardless of the fact that Reed had only directed a few musicals. Reed was not straitened by the requirements of the star system and his carefully selected players, many of them veterans of the stage production, are perfectly matched with their roles. Sellers had long since moved on to more secure offers, so the role of Fagin went to the man who originated it on the stage, Ron Moody, a gifted performer who was equally adept at singing, dancing and acting. From this dextrous blend emerges a thoroughly infectious music-hall permutation of the famous villain. Softened considerably from the Fagin of Dickens’s novel, Moody’s rendering leaves the old man’s feloniousness, cunning and unction intact, adding as well a colourful, roguish quality. This Fagin is a loveable scallywag. Under Reed’s expert supervision, Moody consistently maintains a perfect harmony among the various traits of his characterisation.

Since Reed had an extensive background as an interpreter of children’s problems, it is less surprising that he handled the children in the show as well as Fagin. Eight-year-old Mark Lester, who had impressed critics in Jack Clayton‘s Our Father’s House, was chosen as Oliver. Lester’s accent is improbably upper class, but in most other respects he gives Reed all that any director could hope for sweetness without glucose; pathos without mawkishness; spirit without heroics. Everything about him is unforced and natural; in neither his acting nor his song and dance numbers is there anything of the fabricated prodigy that makes so many child stars in insufferable. His dramatic sense always attuned to complements, Reed shapes this performance as a foil for Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild), a wised-up street kid whose premature shrewdness is contrasted with Oliver’s innocence and expressed in the Dodger’s polished performing skills as well as his acting.

In a happy moment of nepotism, Reed’s nephew, Oliver Reed, was cast as Bill Sikes, and the younger Reed gave his uncle exactly the right degree of slouching, scowling villainy. If this Bill Sikes is less menacing than Robert Newton‘s in the David Lean version of Oliver Twist, it is surely attributable to the discrepancy between a straight drama and a musical. Sikes is partnered with an admirable Nancy, Shani Wallis, who is as good in her ballads as in her up-tempo numbers.

To insure a Hollywood-calibre gloss on the songs, songwriter-arranger Johnny Green was hired as musical director. With his assistance, Reed was able to package the songs with maximum dramatic impact. ‘As Long As He Needs Me’, Nancy’s ode to Sikes, her lover, is the exception; a less pile driving, dead-on presentation of this inane ballad would have served it better. But in his two big music-hall turns, ‘You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket Or Two’ and ‘Considering the Situation’, Moody is properly sly, exuberant and comically contemptuous, with a fine portfolio of raffish mannerisms and inflections. The major production numbers in the first half of the film, ‘Food, Glorious Food’ and ‘Consider Yourself at Home’ are choreographed with abundant, old-fashioned Broadway-style energy by Oona White. Here, as in all the musical interludes, Reed’s fusion of song and story is peerless, the transition from dialogue to words and music, plus dancing, could not be smoother. By almost universal agreement, the high point of Oliver! is ‘Who Will Buy?’ the beautiful motley of street songs that opens the second half of the film. From the first a cappella, pure-soprano statement of the man theme by the flower girl in the deserted Bloomsbury Square, the music builds gracefully into an oratorio of the ordinary. The other peddlers arrive gradually, sounding the variations and secondary motifs, and are eventually joined by policemen, maids, lords and ladies. Finally the now-sunlit square is flooded with a river of humanity. There is no denying that the song itself is a derivative of Gershwin’s street songs from Porgy and Bess and the treatment is hardly original. But originality isn’t the only virtue in art. Bart’s imitation is an excellent one, while the tried-and-true staging is superbly suited to the material.

The songs and production numbers automatically distance us from the real world and make the characters’ problems a matter of artifice. Understandably, Reed keeps the energy level of his show as high as he can, but never allows more than an engagingly synthetic form of reality to break through; even the slum settings, which Dickens conceived as a conscience-rousing appeal for economic and social reform, have a story-book ambience. Although the novel achieves a weight and power that is, of course, missing from Oliver!, the maudlin melodrama that runs through the centre of the work is vastly more palatable in Reed’s stylised interpretation.

Reed’s work on Oliver! is splendidly seconded at the technical end by the extraordinarily sumptuous, painterly effects of Oswald Morris’s photography, Terence Marsh’s art direction and John Box’s sets, which spread before us the full, bursting microcosm of nineteenth-century London. Naturalistically detailed, yet bathed in a romantic aura, the sets give us the smoky and decrepit atmosphere of the pickpockets’ lair, the quaint Victorian bookshops and stores, the thronging, carriage-crowded streets, the patrician reserve of semicircular Bloomsbury Square. With effects like these, enriching every level of Oliver!, Reed and his marvellous team of craftsman leave the audience in a mood to ask, ‘Please sir, can I have some more.’

The Many Faces of Oliver - Movie Habit Marty Mapes

Oliver! - TCM.com Sarah Heiman

Time Magazine December 13, 1968

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1968 [Erik Beck]

filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]

DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review

DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]

The Digital Bits dvd review Bill Hunt

digitallyObsessed - 2005 re-release DVD Review Nate Meyers

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [30th Anniversary Tribute Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Columbia Best Pictures Collection] Colin Jacobson

ReelTalk (Geoff Roberts) review

Variety (Rich Gold) review

Oliver! (1968) Classic Film Guide

Turner Classic Movies review The Many Faces of Oliver, by Marty Mapes Turner Classic Movies review

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Reed, Kimberly

PRODIGAL SONS C- 67

USA (86 mi) 2008 Official site

A provocative but ultimately self-serving and insulting film, despite the critical acclaim this movie has received, as in my view it should never have been made, and the fact that it was suggests one should at least question the filmmaker’s personal as well as artistic motives. Kimberly Reed is already recognized as the first transgender feature filmmaker, also the editor of DV magazine, and the winner of a Special Jury Prize for “bravery in storytelling” from the Nashville Film festival, but this is a troubling film, not due to any revelations in the material, some of which seems surreal, but due to the potentially harmful effects caused by the filmmaker herself, as at least in my view, she may have contributed to the worsening of her brother’s deeply troubling medical condition, which was certainly not enhanced by the constant presence of the camera, or the filmmaker behind the camera. While I accept any and all accusations of double standard, as I adamantly supported Jonathan Caouette’s incendiary autobiographical documentary TARNATION (2003), where many thought he exploited his mother’s mental illness, continuing to roll the camera well beyond the uncomfortable mark, yet I’ve always contended that Caouette’s film is an open love letter to his mother, as he embraces her even in her exhibition of mental illness, and has remained close to her even after the film, becoming her primary caretaker, assuming responsibility for taking care of her in his own life, which simply doesn’t suggest exploitation. Everything points to acts of love, which is why I adore that film. It helped the filmmaker develop a deeper appreciation for his mother and her limited mental status, accepting her the way she is, both the good and the bad.

But I don’t detect the same motives here in this film, nor do I detect the same family embrace. Instead, this film has only exposed a psychotic rupture and further isolated a family member, the filmmaker’s adopted older brother, who was living with a wife and child, whose wife was willing to recall their first date, where she found it unusual for a man to provide family photos, pointing out the importance of each and every person in his life. But in order to come to terms with the filmmaker’s own identity issues, which include a transgender change in her mid twenties, she was perfectly willing to expose her brother’s mental breakdown, all the while reflecting how it affects her, but never once considering how her actions might affect the behavior of her brother. As she brings her family together, presumably to reconnect with each of them as a new woman, her brother occasionally grew agitated with her, where sometimes it appeared quite clear to me that the filmmaker simply needed to leave the room and stop shooting, as her presence provoked violent actions that might not otherwise be there. This is not to suggest that troubles weren’t inherently present, but the sister’s presence only made matters worse, as she was the object of his anger, so his medical condition was never enhanced but appeared worsened by her decision to stay and keep the cameras rolling. At some point in time, in the interest of her brother’s mental health, she should have discontinued that element of her own story and concentrated on getting him the medical help he so obviously needed. Instead, the filmmaker minimizes her own story and makes her brother’s instability the lead focus of the film, something which I find inexcusable. I do not call this “bravery in storytelling,” but exploiting the very serious nature of her brother’s unusual medical condition, which may include a personality disorder. In coming to terms with her own gender issues, when her brother found her lesbian relationship so offensive and against God and the Bible, did she need to insist that he accept it anyway? Was it that important that she use her brother’s limited mental capacity to expose the social prejudice that she perceives? Couldn’t she give him a little space and time with his family to figure it all out? Did she have to force it down his throat, and ours? She was literally bullying her brother on camera. I don’t find that bravery, but misguided intentions that border on the offensive.

While the director expected to receive a cold shoulder when the high school quarterback from Helena, Montana returned home as a gender changed young woman, she was surprised by the community’s acceptance. But rather than embrace the positive, which would be of relatively minor interest, the director instead provokes the vulnerability of her afflicted brother, who grows violent each time she insists on bringing the entire family together in the interests of promoting the filmmaker’s agenda of family harmony, without regard to his potential outbursts. At one point (off his medication) he does grow threatening, where they call the cops and have him committed to a psychiatric hospital, where no one but the filmmaker and her camera are willing to come see him or even talk to him. It’s apparent he’s absolutely disgusted at seeing her instead of his wife or his mother, as he seems to have little interest in her primary need for reconciliation. What’s missing in this movie, probably for good reason, as they have the good sense to remain out of the picture and confidential, is any medical opinion, as it’s clear the brother had serious mental health issues long before any sex change operation. But no doctors or nurses appear anywhere in this film, so instead we’re subjected to the rambling monologue of the director who continually returns the focus of attention to herself. While there is mention of some sibling rivalry, where the afflicted brother objected to the constant attention and accolades his older brother continued to receive, apparently at his expense, issues which got in the way of the filmmaker’s objective to re-establish family ties, issues that she initially wanted to sweep away as she was no longer that person, believing old rivalries shouldn’t matter, but the brother never forgot or forgave his subservient position. Much of his deep-seeded resentment was formed in those early years, so the problem was not really about a reconciliating sister making her movie, the problem was how she continued to steal the limelight away from him at his expense, just as he always did when he was a brother. I kept wondering what his young daughter would think of this movie when she grows older, as it certainly appears the filmmaking aunt chose to portray her father as something of a freak show in order to persuade the general public that she’s not a freak. Bravery? Cowardly is more like it.

Official site

Kimberly Reed, a magazine editor, goes home to Helena, Montana for her 20-year high-school reunion and a fence-mending mission with her resentful adopted brother Marc. I’d tell you what follows, but that would ruin one of the chief pleasure of Reed’s astounding family memoir—that of never having a clue what might come next. The twists and turns of her story, from gender bending to ancestral history, are flabbergasting but never exploitative: instead of a Tarnation-style look-at-me geekshow, she uses her candid, sometimes bruising footage with scrupulous concern for all, treating everyone as people first and material second. Still, I’d love to be at every screening the moment we learn who Marc’s grandparents are. (The title font is a clue.) Reed will attend, in what should be the Q&A of the festival.

—Jim Ridley, Managing Editor, Nashville Scene

Kimberly Reed was born Paul McKerrow in Helena, Montana, the middle of three sons who was the high school quarterback and voted Most Likely to Succeed. Returning to Big Sky Country in 2005 for her 20th high school reunion, Reed finds most of her classmates unfazed by her new gender; the real conflict is between the blonde, willowy filmmaker and her adopted older brother, Marc—fat, balding, and prone to paroxysms of rage brought on by a head injury at age 21. As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation. Despite a fascinating midpoint revelation—seeking information about his biological parents, Marc discovers he's the grandson of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles (Marc most resembles Welles's Touch of Evil character Hank Quinlan)—Reed spends too much time capturing her sibling's terrifying outbursts, devoting the film's final act almost exclusively to his increasingly abject circumstances. "I felt like Marc would have given anything to be the man I would have given anything not to be," Reed says at one point—an intriguing line of inquiry that remains underexplored in lieu of shattered glass, chokeholds, 911 calls, and prison visits.

Time Out New York review [2/5] Kevin Lee

A Montana high-school football stud grows up to be a stunning transgender lesbian named Kim; her adopted brother harbors a lifelong grudge against his popular sibling. Suddenly, the “slighted” sibling discovers that he’s the biological grandchild of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Welcome to an outrageous plot twist worthy of a Pedro Almodóvar melodrama, but to paraphrase the title of an aborted Welles film: It’s all true.

Prodigal Sons is also a first-person testimonial, as documentarian Kimberly Reed films every uncomfortable moment with her brother Marc McKerrow, who won’t relinquish their fraternal rivalry even though she’s no longer a man. Welles’s longtime partner Oja Kodar invites them to an idyllic reunion in Croatia, which gives McKerrow a chance to recast his troubled existence and embrace his newfound ancestral fame. Instead, he immediately shames Reed by showing photos of her male past, offering a fascinating glimpse into how self-defining narratives inevitably ensure familial conflict.

But instead of pushing deeper into any psychological dilemmas, this dirty-laundry doc gets lost in a sensationalistic flurry driven by a serious emotional unraveling. One particularly violent scene depicts McKerrow’s instability to an extent that robs him of any dignity, with Reed’s narration crowding out his voice. Even when cinematically attempting to heal old wounds, the filmmaker can’t help but have the last word.

Slant Andrew Schenker

Like a Tarnation without the bold low-fi aesthetic, Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons combines a look at the filmmaker's relationship with a troubled, mentally ill family member and an investigation into her gender and sexual identity. Partaking of the same uncomfortably confessional mode that marked Jonathan Caouette's 2003 doc as one of the more striking left-field debuts of the decade, Reed's own first effort mines similarly fraught emotional territory, hitting gut punching highs that move past even Tarnation's eye-opening exposures, even as it lacks the earlier film's cinematic inventiveness.

Returning to her home town of Helena, Montana for the first time in 10 years, Reed, who in the interval has transitioned gender, hopes to reconnect with her old classmates and especially her estranged brother Marc who, having had part of his brain removed after a car crash, is prone to dangerous emotional swings. While her old school friends have no trouble accepting her gender change (they last knew her as Paul, the high school football team's star quarterback), she finds far more difficulty in reestablishing a relationship with Marc as the two quickly fall into their old patterns of guarded hostility. After the adopted Marc discovers that his birth mother was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and he flies to Croatia for a tearful meeting with Welles's muse Oja Kodar, he seems to forge a new, more secure identity for himself which allows for a temporary understanding with his sister, but it's not long before he forgets Welles altogether and falls back into his old instability.

A testament to film's documentary function to record moments of queasy immediacy as well as to Reed's thoughtful self-analysis, Prodigal Sons alternates the director's reflections on her own gender-flipped past with intermittently terrifying footage of Marc, who increasingly begins to occupy the film's center. In his more stable moments, a man capable of great emotional generosity and who seems to accept both his sister (as well as his other, gay brother) without bias, he can just as quickly turn monstrous. In a scene of ghastly potency, Marc breaks up a Christmas family reunion by viciously deriding his siblings' sexual practices, putting his brother in a chokehold and grabbing a knife from the kitchen before he's subdued by the arriving police. If there's a lingering sense that these too-personal moments perhaps ought not to be paraded around on screen for the world to see, it's somewhat negated by Marc's own filmed endorsement of the project, but Reed's lack of interest in addressing the issue seems like a weakness, a failure of her otherwise well-developed instinct for self-consciousness.

For the filmmaker, a trip home is a fraught reunion with a world long rejected, but, prodded by Marc, she's encouraged to investigate her now fractured sense of identity. In her current life in New York, Reed remains largely closeted as a transgendered person, preferring to make a clean break with her past, but throughout the film she confronts herself with forgotten images and memories, watching tapes of her old football games (in which she no longer recognizes herself) and visiting the city (San Francisco) where she transitioned and where she once lived in an in-between state, appearing as a man to some friends and as a woman to others. Investigating her personal history, she inevitably comes to Marc, but while those two aspects of her past (her male identity, her relationship with her brother) are obviously very closely linked in her mind, she often stretches too far to make the connection. Besides drawing somewhat heavily on cliché ("It looks like a fairy-tale child, but looks can be deceiving"), her narration too often tries to fit the circumstances of her story into a readily digestible schema. But even if her forced thematic links occasionally reduce the complexity of her (and especially Mark's) experience, they still serve to give shape to a messy store of material, and more importantly, they finally do little to overshadow Reed's thoughtful, bracing treatment of what amounts to some seriously heavy shit.

At some point in "Prodigal Sons", likely a different point for everybody, one has to wonder about the making of it. I don't mean that parts of this documentary feel staged - that's not the case - but it seems odd nobody ever seems to demand the camera be turned off during a family argument. When you consider that the filmmaker is also one of the main subjects, it's hard to imagine the camera not affecting the action, but if it does, nobody gives any sign of it.

Consider what seems to be the original thrust of the documentary, filmmaker Kim Reed returning to her home town of Helena, Montana, for the first time in years to attend her 20-year class reunion. This is a big deal because she was born Paul McKerrow, and had in fact been a football star as a teen, before leaving for San Francisco, transition, and New York. Everybody seems to be pretty cool with it, certainly far more accepting than Kim had feared. It feels good to watch, and we don't really have time to wonder if the folks Kim shows are on their best behavior for the cameras or the subset that was even willing to be on camera, because the focus soon begins to fall on Kim's brother Marc.

Marc was adopted when Kim's parents Carl and Loren McKerrow believed they could not have children, only to conceive Paul soon after. Held back a year in pre-school, Marc would wind up in the same class as Paul, creating a certain amount of tension between the two, and an automobile accident at the age of twenty-one left him with a cranial injury necessitating the removal of part of his brain. It's left him prone to mood swings and even violence. Soon after the reunion, he learns the identity of his biological mother just in time to go to her funeral. And as if his life was not already surreal enough, that mother was Rebecca Welles - daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.

The contrast between Marc and Kim is at the heart of the film, and as much as a story about a post-op transgendered person returning home would have been interesting on its own, the revelations about Marc make for fascinating parallels. Every shot of their faces is an invitation to search for someone else (Paul in Kim's case, Orson in Marc's) that we might not have seen otherwise. Even when Ms. Reed doesn't spell things out - perhaps especially when she doesn't spell things out - there's an intriguing narrative to the opposite ways they deal with their identity crises, their envy of each other's DNA, and how each points at certain actions and says "that's not the real me".

Unfortunately, real life doesn't often give us the neat, perfectly parallel narratives that a fictional film would, especially where brain trauma is concerned, as the last third or so of Prodigal Sons demonstrates. Marc does some terrible things, and the last act of the movie becomes "how do we deal with him?" This is interesting in its own way, certainly - it is an extraordinarily raw look at how terrifying the loss of control can be - but it pushes the complexity of Marc and Kim backward. Now Kim is mostly the dutiful child, with Marc the problem sibling to be pitied as much as feared, because he can't help his brain chemistry. As a filmmaker, Reed tries to keep that thread alive, noting that in a strictly clinical sense, she would be considered just as mentally ill as her brother. But as visceral and personal as this is (too personal, perhaps; this is about where I can't help but wonder why one would tape this and then share the footage with the world), it's not quite the same sort of food for thought as the middle section of the film.

Is it a fatal weakness? Not at all; it's just life not working by a script. It does seem a little self-serving; we see Marc at his worst and Kim at her best, and it's only natural to wonder about that given that Kim Reed is the director, producer, and editor of the film, even though in those capacities she would easily be able to say that the final third is too powerful to leave on the cutting room floor. Still, the film is at its best in the middle, when Reed-the-filmmaker seems to allow a measure of doubt about the actions of Kim-the-subject, and that's the part that makes "Prodigal Sons" worth a look.

filmsoundoff.com [alex roberts]

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Noel Murray

NPR

Film Journal Doris Toumarkine

Big Picture Big Sound (David Kempler) review [3.5/4]

User reviews from imdb Author: hnballet (hnballet@aol.com) from Texas

User reviews from imdb Author: harryandtonto from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: r0der1ck from Durham, NC

PRODIGAL SONS Facets Multi Media

Filmsweep [Persona]

Cinebanter [MichaelVox and Tassoula]

The Village Voice [Ed Gonzalez]

Chicago Reader JR Jones

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

Director interview (Village Voice) Michael Musto interview from The Village Voice, February 23, 2010

Director interview (Filmmaker Magazine Damon Smith interview from Filmmaker magazine, February 24, 2010

The Hollywood Reporter review Frank Scheck

Guardian UK David Thompson

The Boston Phoenix (Gerald Peary) review

Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review

San Francisco Chronicle [David Wiegand]

Chicago Sun-Times Bill Stamets

New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis

Reed, Payton

DOWN WITH LOVE B 89

USA Germany (101 mi) 2003 ‘Scope

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]

Entertaining, affectionate, pointless, camp-as-Christmas spoof of Rock-n-Doris-style romantic comedies (i.e. Pillow Talk, 1959; Lover Come Back, 1961;) Surprisingly saucy visual and verbal double-entendres abound in script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake. Irresistible candy-coloured movieland version of 1962 Manhattan courtesy of Daniel Orlandi (costumes), Andrew Laws (production design), Martin Whist (art direction), Don Whist (set decoration), Jeff Cronenweth (cinematography), Reed.

Up-for-it performances from Renee Zellweger (sweet as proto-feminist author Barbara Novack; gets one amazingly long, static-camera, single-take monologue late-on), Ewan McGregor (disarming as man-about-town Catcher Block [!], doesn’t bother to hide Scots accent nice touch), David Hyde Pierce (his prissy pal), Sarah Paulson (her sassy gal-pal… wheres she been hiding all these years?) Nightmarishly twisty plot impossible to follow, but its fun trying. Approx 20 mins too long, even so.

Tony Randall's droll comic turns in late '50s/early '60s romantic comedies such as Let's Make Love and Pillow Talk were often an acid test. His sharp tongue gave welcome edge to the fluffy sex wars. Now in his 80s, he has a cameo in this self-conscious and zestless period makeover as the unattractive, bullying boss of a swish NYC publishing house, and there's something about the uninflected coarsening of his role that characterises the movie as a whole. Zellweger plays ambitious boondocks author Barbara Novak, whose 'sensation' on what gals of the post-Pill generation really want propels her into the twirling headlines. McGregor is tuxedo'd Casanova and celeb journalist Catcher Block who, for a dastardly scoop, disguises himself into her affections in a titillating game of emotional double bluff. If Todd Haynes' incisive melodrama Far from Heaven proved that imitation can be the sincerest form of flattery, this, for all its meticulous period reconstruction, saturated 'Scope camerwork, split screens, gauzed diamante close-ups and musical inserts, suggests that mere mechanical copying can produce a pretty unconvincing forgery.

Village Voice (Laura Sinagra) review Esprit Décor, May 13, 2003

Madison Avenue go-getter Doris Day, competing with adman lothario Rock Hudson in 1961's Lover Come Back, predicts victory for whoever's firm shows the would-be client "the most attractive can." Zoom in on a can of wax—cut to burlesque rumba-bunny booty. You say fromage, I say homage! Or somebody did anyway, before recruiting meta-musical charm farmers Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor to assay this fashion-packed comedy-of-virginity pageant. Like Trading Spaces fantasy campers, Down With Love's designers deliver a Technicolor 1962 NYC to backdrop the spar between Barbara Novak, author of a pink-jacket primer on sexual realpolitik, and Catcher Block, a suave journo-Heff bent on taking this love-shunning female phenom down.

Sitcom writers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake get the office-tipple banter flying pronto, and the visuals consistently crack wise—window views encompass equal-scale Empire State, Chrysler Building, and Lady Liberty (get it, girls?). Most gags stay true to their antecedents' tone—Novak primps to Astrud Gilberto's version of "Fly Me to the Moon," Catcher to Sinatra's; women in "China" furtively trade "red" books for pink. But there are too few aught-era swipes at '50s repression. The best bits verge on satire, like editor Sarah Paulson's marriage-mad assurance to neurotic magazine owner David Hyde Pierce, "So you're a homosexual hopelessly in love with Catcher—I don't see why that should prevent us from getting married!" And the central opposites only attract when trapped in pomo devices: A split-screen phone chat flips pantingly horizontal. Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume. Her trademark squint and complete-me bewilderment dissolve her considerable stylized armor and scan as sad, table-scrap hunger. All the proto-feminist twisting (and wit-shimmy theme music) that follows can't put her back in the catbird seat.

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A]

Zipping past "Ban The Bomb" protesters to ultra-modern offices, swanky nightclubs, and gadget-filled, skyline-kissed apartments, the cast of Down With Love inhabits a world that's less a throwback to the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s than one left vacuum-sealed for future use. In the film's version of 1962, New York City wears Technicolor and moves to a bossa nova beat, fueled by cocktails and driven by sex. Or at least the talk of it: As in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies that inspired it, Down With Love concentrates on the build-up and leaves the release for an undetermined later point, presumably seconds after the screen flashes "The End." The film's re-creation of a bygone, hornier era of romantic comedies–from the production design through Bring It On director Peyton Reed's spot-on mimicry of period style–counts as achievement enough. Yet Down With Love not only makes those conventions work, but also makes them look as if they never went out of style. Like Far From Heaven, the film doesn't send up its inspiration so much as reboot it. It may be hard to believe that the formula still has life left in it (or that Rock Hudson movies could serve as the secret font for two memorable films in a year's time), but such thoughts become merely theoretical from the moment the eye-catching credits hit the title song. "Down With Love," a Harold Arlen standard, also lends its name to the scandalous book written by Down With Love heroine Reneé Zellweger, a first-time author with an easy plan to normalize relations between the sexes: Women should keep sex casual, focus on their careers, and, most importantly, never fall in love. In spite of the best efforts of her chain-smoking editor (wittily played by relative unknown Sarah Paulson), the book meets with initial apathy when its publishers neglect to promote it and a profile by Pulitzer-winning cad-about-town journalist Ewan McGregor fails to materialize. Too busy attending to an endless parade of stewardesses and showgirls, he begins to regret his decision when, through some savvy cross-marketing, Zellweger's book becomes an influential bestseller from Cleveland to Chongqing. Encouraging McGregor's second thoughts is the lovelorn David Hyde Pierce, perfectly slotted into the fey-sidekick role filled by Tony Randall in so many Hudson comedies. (In a casting coup, Randall himself shows up like a patron saint in a funny bit part as Zellweger's publisher.) After McGregor disguises himself as a naïve astronaut, he and Zellweger begin a continuously delayed romance carried out via Broadway balconies and cross-town phone conversations, the most memorable of which finds a use for split-screen effects more salacious than anything Brian De Palma has tried. As it did for Hudson and Day, that split-screen functions as an emblem of the search for equal partnership. The equality plays out on the screen, as well; Zellweger's smart vulnerability is well-matched by McGregor's too-suave-for-the-world performance. The script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake (best known, if at all, for working on The Nanny) invests the relationship with wit and even some insight, as a reminder that romantic comedies can actually say something as they go about the roundelays of courtship. Down With Love may register most immediately as a snappy whirl of visual gags, double entendres, overheated romance, and comically oversized living quarters, but beneath the exuberance of this fond counterfeit is a heartbeat as powerful as that of any film anchored in the present.

hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka

We’ve had weeks now to contemplate Ms. Zellweger’s simper and Mr. McGregor’s smirk, on cutouts in theater lobbies across the land. Now, at last, we get to see what’s putting the sparkle in their eyes. Down With Love, set in the 1962 NYC of Doris Day-Rock Hudson sex comedies, is a fond tribute to those meringues, in a bald, obvious, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more way.

Novak (Zellweger), a Vermont librarian, takes the New York publishing world by storm with her manifesto, Down With Love, which advises women to just say no to romance and yes to careers and no-strings-attached sex. Hearing of this heresy, writer Catcher Block (McGregor), “man’s man, ladies’ man, man about town,” makes it his business to capture Novak’s heart while denying her, uh, his essence. It’s a fun and funny flip on those Doris Day comedies, where male characters’ job was to chase sex, and the females’ job was to remain intact.

Writers Ahlert and Drake also toss in a pinch of Sex And The Single Girl. Down With Love’s Barbara Novak, like the Helen Gurley Brown character, has written a bombshell of a book, with a premise that may not necessarily reflect how she actually lives her life.

Playing off such familiar source material allows the writers to plunge straight into the stylized, cotton-candy world of a early sixties romantic comedy, complete with high-school level double entendres. Apparently the writers, big fans of the Day-Hudson oeuvre, specified quite a bit of the look and feel of the movie in their script. The result is swinging jazz, split-screen action, big, bright colors, obvious backdrops, and process shots galore. The letter-perfect sets (Profiles In Courage on the bookshelves) and costumes (which may create a world shortage in pink) are as much fun to look at as the actors, who are all mostly on their very campy game. For my money, McGregor channels a bit more Cary than Rock. Remember, McGregor is a scrawny guy; a large part of Hudson’s impact was his towering physique. How to put this? Rock was male, but Cary—he was A Man. Anyway, Catcher has the best suits, the most willing babes, and a space-age bachelor pad a bit like the Kiss Me Deadly apartment, all modcons.

McGregor clearly has fun with his role, though he does a really dreadful Texas accent. But hey, recall that cornpone Texas accent Rock affected in Pillow Talk? Think like a ‘60s guy. It’s not supposed to be good enough to fool a three-year-old child, just a blonde woman. It’s hard to imagine who else could have been cast as Novak. Zellweger captures the Doris Day grin, but Day’s wonderfully funny way with outrage eludes her. A frantic David Hyde Pierce has the traditional Tony Randall role as Catcher’s boss and best pal, David McMannus. He’s smitten with Vicki Hiller (an excellent Poulson), Barbara’s editor and second, but unlike Catcher, McMannus is no player. In fact, he’s the anti-player. Pierce often is cast as these hapless romantic losers, probably because he’s the best at making audiences care about the insecure, tic-laden guy they’re laughing at.

Down With Love reminds me of another recent homage to late ‘50s/early ‘60s Technicolor movies, 8 Women, in that both employ intelligent storytelling in the service of wacky tales of very little consequence. Both, I suspect, will become cult favorites. Recommended.

"Down with Love" text version Nina K. Martin from Jump Cut, Spring 2007

Are Rock and Doris Hollywood's strangest romantic team? Need a Light, Cowboy? Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 1999, also seen here: "Need a Light, Cowboy?" Tony & Rock Go Down on Doris in Pillow Talk

Up/Down with Retro: Three Recent Hits — Down with Love, Ocean’s Eleven, Catch Me If You Can — Retrofit the Sixties Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31, 2003

Down with Underrated Masterpieces! Looney Tunes: Back in Action ... Alan Jacobson from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2004

Brilliant Inaccuracies [DOWN WITH LOVE & DRACULA: PAGES ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, July 11, 2003

Walk Away, Renée - Slate Magazine David Edelstein from Slate, May 16, 2003

The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] Ribald Retro Case File #146: Down With Love, September 16, 2009

The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

DVD Times Bex

Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Wenkai Tay

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery) review

sneersnipe (David Perilli) review

filmcritic.com (Kevin Smokler) review [3.5/5]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review

Film Freak Central dvd review [Widescreen Version] Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers

3BlackChicks Review Rose “Bams” Cooper

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/4]

DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) review [3/5]

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review

DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review

DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [2/5] [Widescreen Edition]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Dindrane

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Rees, Dee

PARIAH B 88

USA (86 mi) 2011

This is a smart film where the nicely edited, loosely structured realism continually feels believable, set in a naturally stylized impressionism where several of the characters prominently emerge as fully developed, but in order to make a film that is accepted by the mainstream the director appears to be holding back relevant interior information, as this teenage, coming of age story is also about coming out as gay, where you finally admit to your friends and family what you’ve been holding back for years, where the latter gets shortchanged somewhat in order for the subject to remain clouded in mystery. Winner as a 27 minute short film in 2007 of the Best Narrative Short at the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the director has cast the same lead, Adepero Oduye in the role of 17-year old Alike, an extremely shy, straight A student with conflicting feelings about her sexual identity, leaving her without any real friends except one, the openly gay Laura (Pernell Walker), who her overly protective mother (Kim Wayans) despises and treats with contempt, believing she’s a bad influence on her daughter. Alike’s father (Charles Parnell) is a police officer who likely has an affair going on the side, and despite his wife’s concern about Alike’s dress and overall boyish manner, he refuses to even discuss the matter with his daughter, though it’s apparent he has his own issues, as the director feeds a steady stream of derogatory comments directed towards lesbian characters from his male friends and acquaintances. Never once does he intervene. Unlike other black lesbian writers, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, or Alice Mabry, Dee Rees doesn’t go overboard in her contempt of black men, who are otherwise absent in this film, allowing the previously mentioned foul comments to speak for themselves. By contrast, Alike has an extremely supportive black female AP English teacher, one who takes seriously her mentor role, as she’s one of the few characters in the film that encourages free expression, encouraging Alike to dig even deeper. The performances are uniformly excellent, as is Bradford Young’s hand-held cinematography shot largely in Brooklyn, which elevates the seriousness of the subject matter, as the characters gain our interest alongside the provocative opening, where the lyrics of the opening song Khia - Lick My Neck My Back on YouTube (3:36) leave little to the imagination.

Oduye has a natural presence before the camera, even as she continually drifts along with low self-esteem, becoming easily defeated, isolating herself beyond reason, where her sad, adolescent journey through her friends, family, and school leaves her continually feeling exiled and alone. When she goes out to all girl clubs with Laura, she clings to her, afraid of what would happen if she lets go, and while she talks about being interested in other girls, she remains a virgin and has never acted upon her sexual inclinations. One has to wonder why a subject as topical as teen sexuality has to feature someone as young and innocent as Alike, who more realistically would have been exploring her sexual feelings much earlier. The idea of an outwardly gay friend leading her into this seemingly more exotic world than the one she knows feels overly contrived, as does the fact that academically she’s perfect, as often people have literally no one to talk to, where nothing makes any sense, and more often they’re routinely taunted and picked on, ostracized from any acceptable social world. Black culture, in particular, due to the heavy influence of the church, has shown a disgraceful intolerance for gays or gay marriage, where perhaps going to college or joining the military is the first place of common acceptance. Following this lead, Laura has been kicked out of her home by her mother, who refuses to even talk to her, while Alike’s mother has similar religious leanings, where in her view, The Bible does not acknowledge a place for God’s imperfections, so she feels there’s a sense of urgency to somehow persuasively “change” or pray away the gay.

Ironically, it’s at the encouragement of her own mother that she meets another smart and quietly aloof girl at her school, Bina (Aasha Davis), hoping this will cure her of her tendency to fall under Laura’s influence. Bina is the kind of girl that will try anything if she thinks it’s cool, who boldly asserts herself, as she does here, initiating sexual interest, which takes Alike by surprise, not knowing what to make of it. The interplay between Alike and Bina, both with a foot still in the straight world, and through her friend Laura, who is one of the more grounded characters seen in any film recently, really adds a unique dimension not normally associated with teen adolescence, which contrasts beautifully with the more typically entrenched sexually intolerant views of her parents, whose own marriage is not exactly the picture of stability. While there are moments of quiet devastation, what feels real in the film is that nothing comes easy, that feeling battered and bruised is a fairly common teenage experience. The all-female musical soundtrack typically sounds like P.J. Harvey, especially the slow build up from acoustic to rock rage, drawing from local hip hop and Afro-punk talent, which does offer another distinctive voice in the film, much like a Greek chorus, but one that accentuates self-discovery and emotional release, which is a common theme of the film. The story feels timid in its efforts to dig deeper, however, showing the harsh societal rejection, but failing to delve into that internal psychological turmoil of gay admittance, leaving out any sense of real acceptance of identification, leaving the future clouded by an unknown state of ambivalence, which due to her academic intellect is assumed to be bright. But in the end, which may be a cop out, nothing feels resolved or finalized, where there’s not really an ending, but simply a clean break from her past, from that suffocating stranglehold that kept Alike from breathing, always feeling like she was living on borrowed time, continually feeding off of others, never yet herself, always becoming, remaining less of a mystery, but still young and impressionable.

Time Out New York [David Fear]

You can glean a lot about Alike (Oduye), the protagonist of Dee Rees’s Sundance-award-winning debut, before she utters a single word. Decked out in a butch B-boy uniform in a sapphic underground club in Brooklyn, this wide-eyed closeted teen soaks in a lesbian subculture that’s both liberating and scary to her; as a stripper approaches Alike, the younger woman shyly turns tail and flees. When our heroine finally speaks, she’s pleading with her best friend (Walker) to get off the dance floor and hit the road. The twosome talk chummy trash about how many phone numbers Alike didn't get, and once her cohort takes off, our heroine changes into her “feminine” clothes on the bus before sneaking home, where she lives under the watchful eyes of her religious, suspicious mom (Wayans).

Establishing character, conflict and environment with astounding economy in the film’s first ten minutes, Rees demonstrates the sort of filmmaking chops and personal storytelling (the director claims she drew on her own coming-out experience) that suggests the low-key epiphanies of Amerindie cinema at its best. But as clunky subplots and soap operatics start to nudge their way into the mix, the filmmaker seems unable to maintain that early tone and focus; you don’t doubt the film’s authenticity regarding interfamilial pressures and homophobia in African-American communities, or the heartbreak of mistaking a crush’s same-sex experimentation for romance. When the representations of these things are handled so clumsily and with such heavy-handed melodramatics, however, you wish the subtlety of those early scenes hadn’t been relegated to its own outsider status.

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

In writer/director Dee Rees's genuinely felt feature debut, her teenage heroine is so hidden from the world that she can't even find herself. The film opens in a smoky, neon-streaked nightclub where a stripper undulates on a stage to the shouts and flung dollar bills of the women watching. Although Alike (Adepero Oduye) is ostensibly there to express herself in a way that she can't at school or in front of her church-going mother, she seems no more comfortable there than she does bottled up at the family dinner table. Rees's point isn't hard to cipher -- Alike's being closeted is about much more than her sexuality -- but she parses it with intelligent, feeling complexity in a film that could have covered itself in cliché.

Taking the bus back from the club with her tough, very out friend Laura (Pernell Walker, quietly amazing), Alike grows more tense the closer she gets to home. Changing from her baseball cap and jersey to a girlier outfit, she looks stuck, as though unable to decide which version of herself she prefers. At home, it's obvious that the daughter her mother (Kim Wayans) wants to have doesn't exist, and can't be shouted or made over into existence. Alike's flinty policeman father (Charles Parnell) is less harsh on her, but that's more likely because he's got secrets of his own and nits to pick with his controlling wife; he doesn't seem to want to be bothered to be a parent or a husband. Compared to this battlefield, high school for Alike seems to be a cinch.

Rees shoots Alike in reflections, pensive, head tucked down in a defensive crouch. Alike is so tied up in secrets and fright that even when a romantic opportunity is dropped into her lap, she's too petrified to respond. There's a similar stillness to the film as a whole, shot as it is in a sleepy, half-awake tone of out-of-focus backgrounds, lusty dreamscape reds, and dark shadows. There's a color scheme here that's a little too obvious for its own good, with Alike's home looking as though the light bill hasn't been paid, and her time with Laura being similarly light-challenged. Set against that darkness are the scenes where Alike and Bina (Aasha Davis) -- the seemingly goodie-goodie daughter of her mother's church friend that Alike's been forced to hang out with in order to straighten her out -- hang out, with sunlight all around. It's a romantic's conception, much like Alike's poetry.

This is Brooklyn, but Rees doesn't make a big point of it, letting the bright brownstone-lined streets speak for themselves. (Though geography does provide the film's best line, when a man is mocked for never having left a two-mile radius of where he was born, he snaps back, "Hey man, I been to Poughkeepsie!") Rarely for an American film set in a black neighborhood, Pariah doesn't tie up the screen with crime and drug pathology. This doesn't seem to be a papering over of realities (the economic chasm between Alike's solidly middle-class family and the more streetwise Laura's rough, nearly orphaned existence is made clear), rather it's Rees wanting to tell her story on the characters' own terms. She doesn't want to swamp them in misery that's been forced on them by outside entities; just being honest to themselves is hard enough. There are shadows behind the shadows in Rees's film, and no guarantee that just being able to see through them will make things any clearer.

NPR [Ella Taylor]

From its opening scenes, Pariah, a vital first feature worked up from a short film by director Dee Rees, draws you into a world largely untapped in American black cinema. The setting is a nightclub where AG's — "Aggressive Lesbians," members of a subculture marginalized within their own black community, let alone the rest of the world — can frolic with joy and humor, acting out a raucous, good-natured belligerence denied them in their everyday lives.

Yet the movie is anything but combative. Pariah is a tender, sporadically goofy, yet candid examination of emergent identity, a film whose lack of attitude sets it apart from much of the hard-bitten, thug-life storytelling that's dominated African-American cinema for decades. If anything, its source genre is the coming-of-age movie, and though the universe its freshly hatched lesbian inhabits is all black, Rees is blessedly unwilling to confine herself in any kind of ghetto, whether racial, sexual or aesthetic.

Beautifully played by Adepero Oduye, the movie's heroine, Alike (Ah-lee-kay), is a shy, open-faced teenager, a straight-A student and aspiring poet from a stable family. Though she has no doubt about her sexual orientation, Alike has yet to explore her identity, never mind come out to her folks. She feels closer to her father (Charles Parnell), a handsome police detective, than to her overprotective mother (Kim Wayans). Distracted by their own floundering marriage and by a barely articulated homophobia, both parents seem determined not to know what they undoubtedly do.

The only port in the quiet storm of Alike's life is her best friend, Laura (a very good Pernell Walker), who is out to the world and getting on with life as best she can, given that her own mother has frozen her out for good. Unsure that Laura's AG crowd is for her, Alike fumbles her way into a romantic encounter with vivacious, seemingly assured Bina (Aasha Davis), the daughter of her mother's colleague.

Like most earnest newcomers to love and sex, Alike may be expecting more than the night can deliver. I can't tell you whether her tryst with Bina is love or a hookup, but it's accomplished with such delicate eros that it seems like a benediction any parent might wish for their child.

Rees is an NYU film-school alumna and a protege of Spike Lee, who's one of the film's executive producers, and Pariah is as fresh in its theme and execution as Lee's 1986 first feature, She's Gotta Have It. Meanwhile, the striking palette, shot in Brooklyn in gorgeous deep reds and blues by the talented cinematographer Bradford Young, surely draws inspiration from Lee's 1989 Do the Right Thing.

Yet the movie's expressionist lyricism and wistful mood recall Charles Burnett's 1979 masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, while the hypnotically incantatory dialogue and sympathetic focus on a family saddled with unexpressed anger and sorrow carry echoes of Burnett's quiet 1990 domestic drama To Sleep With Anger.

A hit at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Pariah is the finest coming-of-age movie I've seen in years, the work of a fledgling artist who fully deserves the support she received from the Sundance Institute and other indie promoters of a new generation of black filmmakers.

Yet it's worrying that Rees' distributor, Focus Features, is trying to position the film as a long-shot Oscar winner. Rees needs time and space to grow her abundant talent slowly, and instant fame has rarely been good for a filmmaker as contemplative as she is. Announcing an important decision to her chastened father, Alike tells him quietly, "I'm not running — I'm choosing." Sounds like a plan.

Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]

In Pariah, life outside the club looks a lot like it does inside. The only thing, it seems, that separates both realms is the music: Inside you get to hear Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)," while outside the watered-down Baduizms of Sapphic-friendly singer-songwriters reigns supreme. Bradford Young, who won a Sundance prize for his cinematography, seems to have manipulated his images in-camera and during the digital-immediate phase to give the film the same gritty-glossy, sometimes antiseptic, look of 25th Hour (Spike Lee, it should be noted, is one of the film's executive producers). When the film's main character, Alike (Adepero Oduye), bonds with her sister, Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse), in bed while their parents fight downstairs, you wonder if the digital numbers on the adjacent alarm clock are radioactive given the redness that subsumes the frame, or if the girls happen to be crashing in Hype William's pad. Striking, yes, but also bogus.

Like Ballast before it, Pariah suggests and suffers from the influence of the Dardenne brothers. In both films, the post-doc, jarringly realistic tenor of the Dardennes' signature aesthetic is, with all sorts of color correction, distorted into something less casual, more canned—a borrowed-then-trumped-up style that becomes especially problematic when you consider how it's been applied to stories about present-day African American experience. In Pariah, the effect is also an easy one: Alike, a 17-year-old girl who isn't out to her parents, is often shot from a distance, through cracks in doors, or from the side, so only part of her face is visible to us at any time. It would seem that the camera, like Alike, also lives in the closet.

It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story. The look of the film is practically fantastical: A character refers to an old apartment "way out in Queens," while another mentions a pier—Christopher, perhaps?—where young gays hang out, but you'll know for sure that we're in New York by the writing on Alike's father's police badge and the sight of what is the Brooklyn Bridge, conveyed only as a string of blurry lights in the background behind Alike in one scene. Director Dee Ree's choice to have Young almost literally evaporate the story's sense of place gives Pariah a distinctly universal feel, but even this one good effect always registers as such: an effect.

Like its self-conscious imagery, Pariah's screenplay is, well, overblown. Ree gets how a child's closeted life can lead to contentiousness in the home, wrecking relations between children and their parents, husbands and their wives, and throughout scenes that recall the best of Xavier Dolan's I Killed My Mother and Fox's Glee, scenes so truthful they could only have been based on real incidents from Ree's past, the film intimately, painfully depicts that seemingly irrational view parents have of their children's homosexuality, the way they're torn between protecting their offspring to death and casting them out. But for every achingly sketched moment of a closeted life wanting to scream its truth, you get two nuance-sucking articulations of how tough it still is to be gay—not to mention gay and nonwhite—in America today.

Hilariously, Alike's mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), in an attempt to keep her daughter away from her bull-dyke best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), hooks her up with a church friend's daughter, Bina (Aasha Davis), who gladly gives Alike her first kiss. Happily ever after, it would seem, but though Bina willingly beds Alike, she wakes up skeeved, and Davis fails to make credible her character's absurd mood swing. In the end, the girl is no less a type than Audrey, who obsesses over Alike's personal upkeep as if the girl's sexuality were her full-time job. It doesn't help that Wayans overplays her character's defensiveness, but to be fair, Dee doesn't give the actress the same room to breathe that she lavishes on Charles Parnell as Alike's father, Arthur. If his character's highly conflicted relationship to his daughter's lesbianism feels more richly realized, it's because we see how his honor, like his shame, is tested at work among colleagues and friends, and how his guilt over his behavior destructively spills over into his personal life.

But I'll take Pariah's heavy-handed butterfly metaphor and the bluntness with which the vocabulary words (e.g. "clandestine") Laura studies for her GED annoyingly coincide with her lesbianism. I'll even take the film's music-video chic, because that means also having Oduye's great performance. She makes poignant, without sentimentalizing, the sad daily ritual of Alike dyking herself down on the bus ride from school to home, the unspokenness with which she and Laura acknowledge the rules of their friendship after a dramatically undramatic tiff, and the way a moment of tenderness between siblings opens the door for a sister, in her own language, to tell the other that she accepts her lifestyle—without either of them saying what exactly is being accepted. It's a smart, tough performance that's full of range and never feels self-serving. It's in her tears but it's also in her smile, as in a scene where Arthur teaches Alike how to park a car and she pleads to drive the car home. It's a rare moment of happiness for these two characters, and it's one that Oduye understands as the kind of fuel a gay kid like Alike, or like Ree once was, needs in order to remind themselves that things do get better.

Edward Champion

Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]

Movieline [Alison Willmore]

Time [Mary Pols]

Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]

The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

Review: 'Pariah' Is So Much More Than Just This Year's 'Precious ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist

Review of "Pariah" | Movie Reviews, Celebrity ... - AfterEllen.com Grace Chu

Pariah | Swastika | It's About You | Pariah ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]

The A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]

Sundance review: 'Pariah' is a step forward for LGBT cinema ... Ryan Kearney from TBD Arts, January 27, 2011

Boxoffice Magazine [Sara Maria Vizcarrondo]

The MacGuffin [Allen Almachar]

DCist [Ian Buckwalter]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]

GordonandtheWhale.com [Allison Loring]

exclaim! [Bjorn Olson]

Her, you and me Alike – Pariah (2011) by Dee Rees In the Words of Katarina

Lost in Reviews [Sarah Ksiazek]

Cinematical [Eric D. Snider]

Pariah - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Pariah : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jason Bailey

Aisle Seat [Mike McGranaghan]

WeLiveFilm.com [Matt - The Movie Analyst]

We Got This Covered [Kristal Cooper]

The Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]

Spectrum Culture [Danny Djeljosevic]

JWR [S. James Wegg]

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde]

Interview with Dee Rees, Director of Pariah - Page 1 ... - Village Voice Ernest Hardy interview with the director, December 28, 2011

Pariah Review | Movie Reviews and News ... - Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]

Variety [Andrew Barker]

Why the Oscars should cast out The Help and welcome in Pariah Mychal Denzel Smith from The Guardian, January 18, 2012

Pariah: A fresh take on the coming-of-age theme - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen

No outcasts among 'Pariah' cast - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

Review: Pariah - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Critic Review for Pariah on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

San Francisco Chronicle [Amy Biancolli]

Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey] also seen here: Movie Review: 'Pariah'

The New York Times [Stephen Holden] also seen here: A Brooklyn Girl Who's Not Just Frilly

Reeves, Jennifer Todd

THE TIME WE KILLED B 86

USA (94 mi) 2004

A highly personal, diary-like film essay on love and war, sounding at times like a female HOWL, raging against the war in Iraq, hating the world outside, refusing the leave her New York City apartment for months at a time. Using an abstract, experimental style with quickly moving kinetic imagery, using overly bleached black and white digital film mixed with optically manipulated 16mm, she uses her own soft-spoken narrative, weaving in and out of dreams, sexual fantasy, poems, personal experiences, including a suicide attempt at 17 and her subsequent struggle to remember anything before that. Filled with analytical self- pity and continued suicidal ideations, we’re perhaps overly deluged with emotional self-obsessed observations, both internally and externally, but then out of nowhere, moments of rare power and complete lucidity would follow, such is the nature of this expressionist art form, getting to the root of the rage.

The Time We Killed Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

This is the sort of film that I take no pleasure in disliking, and not just because its maker is a noted experimentalist working with extremely limited means. I always hope that more feature films will succeed in bridging the gap between purely visual non-narrative filmmaking and the more adventurous fringes of narrative cinema. But it seems more and more as though the only way for filmmakers to "succeed" on this front -- i.e., garner critical attention, festival berths, even the smallest-scale commercial distribution -- is to treat experimentation with film form as a kind of window dressing, a surface affectation that may be jarring or unique for the majority of filmgoers but registers only as "style." The deeper roots of avant-garde practice, however, demand the rigorous application of challenging formal models which communicate on their own terms, and not solely as a dazzling husk for the transmission of a semi-independent kernel of content. Popularization in itself is often misperceived as an enemy to certain cultural elites, when the real issue is the terms on which that popularization will occur. The innovations of Kenneth Anger, for example, lead to both Blue Velvet and Tarnation, but identity politics or a glance over production budgets won't accurately indicate which film is the rightful heir. Jennifer Reeves' avant-garde credentials are beyond question, which makes it all the more frustrating that The Time We Killed sacrifices the complexity of its sources and inspirations in order to explore coherent storytelling. The film is a portrait of Robin (Lisa Jarnot), an agoraphobic writer in New York City who fears her days of direct engagement with the world are behind her. This results in a series of ruminations about past lovers (some living, some dead) and their continuing impact on her life in the present. As the subject for an art film, this exploration of private memory could evoke work as disparate as that of Resnais, Ruiz, or Varda. But the character's passivity serves as an excuse for leaving her underwritten, and her poetic reveries seldom rise above doggerel. Jarnot wrote the prose-poems "in character," and they sound as though they are intended to operate in the vein of the feminist "language" poetry of Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, or Rae Armantrout. But while those writers problematize autobiography and the construction of "voice" through language, Jarnot relies on repetition and stasis to convey the stuckness of a troubled mind. As objective correlatives go, it's all rather obvious. Jarnot herself is a published poet whose other work I am unfamiliar with, but her writing for The Time We Killed so literalizes the inner world of Robin that there is little work left for either the film or the viewer. And whereas Jarnot and her writing construct Robin in too linear a fashion, Reeves' imagery strives for an intuitive, poetic condensation but doesn't really achieve it. Small moments of carefully crafted non-narrative filmwork are present in The Time We Killed. (Several slowly accumulating montages of birds and fire escapes out Robin's tenement window recall early Ken Jacobs; stark close-ups of sweating radiator pipes evoke fever-dreams of tense beauty.) But there is little overall structure within which those sequences can generate an internal, formal sense. More often, Reeves' succession of images feels lazy and random, as though she is relying on the film's narrative thrust to create a contrapuntal meaning for passages of free-associative editing. Generally, though, it doesn't work. The Time We Killed immediately calls to mind the films of Su Friedrich and Leslie Thornton (especially the Peggy and Fred films), but it lacks those filmmakers' formal assurance. Thornton's incorporation of found footage with original dramatic material works because her films are in part about how viewers forge cognitive connections across time, and Friedrich commits to certain visual motifs so that we can observe how their significance shifts across the body of the film. By contrast, Reeves seems to want The Time We Killed to evoke anxiety and dislocation, which isn't very hard to do when no single image has a reason to exist alongside any other. So, as a hybrid work, Reeves' film produces a stalemate. What The Time We Killed cannot convey through filmic means is spelled out through narration, and while this makes it an easier film to parse than other, more difficult avant-garde films, it also diminishes its potential richness.

SOME WOMEN Taubin TXT - Jennifer Reeves Some Women, by Amy Taubin, 2004 (pdf)

Damaged goods! Jennifer Reeves's The Time We Killed and Peggy Ahwesh and Bobby Abate's Certain Women summon up the old-fashioned misogynist metaphor and also set in motion its deconstruction.

These are grim, unsparing little movies about women who have been betrayed and/or brutalized by men, other women, and/or society at large. The female protagonists are damaged all right, but the filmmakers have endowed each of them with a complicated subjectivity, making it difficult to dismiss them as "goods." Their pain resonates with the temper of the times, but that's not to say it's seductive.

Although Reeves and Ahwesh, both avant-garde film veterans, have turned to narrative feature filmmaking, no one could accuse them of crossing over or harboring commercial aspirations. In The Time We Killed, Lisa Jarnot plays Robyn, an agoraphobic writer who finds it almost impossible to leave her Brooklyn apartment. Except for the occasional visitor, Robyn is alone onscreen for almost the entire film. Jarnot, a third-generation New York School/Beat poet, collaborated with Reeves on the associative monologue that runs as a voiceover throughout. The high-contrast, expressionistic black-and-white visuals are a mix of digital video and 16mm. Reeves used video for the scenes that take place in the apartment or during Robyn's brief forays into the outside world and 16mm to evoke Robyn's memories-of childhood, old lovers, travels, past happiness, and past traumas-working over the film material on an optical printer. The resulting ghostly fragments are the correlative of the stream-of-consciousness voiceover. Robyn's phobia confines her to her apartment, but the film explores another kind of interior-that of her mind.

The Time We Killed is a 9/11 film. Robyn has a history of psychological breakdowns, but the fear that keeps her trapped in her apartment is not entirely irrational. She hears the couple next door fighting every night-their rage culminates, we're told, in a murder and a suicide. When the Twin Towers fall, she ventures into the street, just to be with other New Yorkers, but their "blood lust" and desire for revenge sends her back to her refuge, where the cries for war continue to emanate from the TV. "Terrorism got me out of the house, but the war on terrorism drove me back in," she explains succinctly. Memories of lost childhood and lost love mingle with the sanctimonious pronouncements of Bush II and his cohorts. Eventually, personal examination and political commitment come to together in a faintly happy ending. Robyn packs up and leaves her apartment-and America, it is implied, as well. (The Time We Killed won the international critics prize at the Berlin Film Festival, where its anger at addlebrained American imperialism worked to its advantage, and it had its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.)

Robyn is a composite heroine, created from a combination of Reeves's own home movies and diaristic footage collected over years of avant-garde filmmaking and Jarnot's partially improvised text. In one sense, the titular "We" refers to this composite. But it also has the effect (as does Jarnot's rough-edged, confiding voice) of drawing us in and making us aware of our complicity with the screen character. It's not so much that we identify with her as that we feel some kind of solidarity-a shared responsibility for "The Time We Killed."

Stylistically, Certain Women is far removed from The Time We Killed, but they share the common theme of women who feel-or have been made to feel-like criminals simply because they were born female.

And, not incidentally, the most affirmative element in both films is the image of a woman leaving town. A collaboration between Ahwesh, who teaches at Bard College, and Abate, who was one of her graduate students, Certain Women is based on Erskine Caldwell's 1957 novel Some Women. Caldwell's novels functioned as soft-core porn for middle-class suburban women in the years after World War II, and the film captures the novel's seedy atmosphere and prurient effect. It was made with the apparently enthusiastic cooperation of Bard's film faculty and student body, who make up much of the cast and crew. There's an outstandingly creepy turn by Adolfas Mekas as an abusive farmer who wants his daughter to bring home the bacon by becoming a prostitute.

Ahwesh and Abate shot in small towns near Bard, about 90 miles north of New York City, where gentrification hasn't completely taken hold. As in David Lynch's films, the mise-en-scène is anachronistic, suggesting that nothing much has changed in America in the past 50 years and that the aught decade has more in common with the Fifties (particularly in relation to power dynamics between the sexes) than we like to think. With its intercut story lines about teary-eyed, big-breasted girls-in-jep, its cheap motels, roadhouses, crumbling Catskill palaces, and a not-so-secret whorehouse where the working girls and their customers act out seamy S & M scenarios, Certain Women owes as much to Twin Peaks as it does to Caldwell. Ahwesh and Abate's approach is less romantic than Lynch's, however, both in terms of what they depict and how they depict it. The filmmaking is as blunt as in the Doris Wishman exploitation pictures Ahwesh cherishes and as filled with heartfelt fakery as Cindy Sherman's black-and-white movie stills. (Certain Women premiered in the New York Underground Film Festival. Midnight-movie programmers couldn't ask for more classy trash.)

Women-damaged, depressed, deranged, and dangerous-are also the subject of a more mainstream recent project, Monster, the Aileen Wuornos biopic directed by Patty Jenkins and starring, as if you needed to be told, Charlize Theron, whose larded-up body and fright-mask makeup convinced enough people that she had given a great performance to win her an Academy Award. I've written elsewhere ( www.citypages.com ) about my mistrust, to put it politely, of the film's portrait of Wuornos-its lack of politics, its class condescension, and the transparent Oscar calculations involved in every choice made by the director and the actress. And Theron's performance at the Oscars as well as her and Jenkins's addresses at the IFP Spirit Awards proved my suspicions were founded. Having vampirized Wuornos, Theron and Jenkins failed to mention her in any of their acceptance speeches. I'm sure there was enormous pressure on them by their Hollywood handlers (most of whom Theron thanked profusely as the cameras ate up her retoned body and golden fake tan) to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their source material. And while it's true that Wuornos is not an easy subject to reference in a two-minute speech, some mention of her and of the social welfare and justice systems that neglected, abused, and finally executed her might have been in order. Without Aileen Wuornos, Theron wouldn't be able to price her services at $10 million (and her handlers wouldn't be looking forward to bounteous commissions). Wuornos was executed in 2002. This year, the Academy Awards were held on February 29, which was also her birthday.

pdf Homeland Insecurity: Jennifer Reeves on The Time We Killed, Brent Kite interviews the director from Cinema Scope, Fall 2004 (pdf)

From One Red Balloon to the Next: The 2007 AFI Fest/American Film ... Bérénice Reynaud from Senses of Cinema, March 16, 2008

The Insider: Facing Homeland Insecurity in a Blue State | Village Voice Ed Halter

Field Reports: Toronto Film Festival #7 (Stults) | Wexner Center for ... Chris Stults

The Time We Killed - Interview with Filmmaker Jennifer Reeves ... Catherine MacLennan interview from The Lamp, October 2004

Reeves, Matt

CLOVERFIELD B 86

USA (85 mi) 2008

GODZILLA meets BLAIR WITCH. This was much better than I thought it would be, as despite the reverse psychology scheme, basically let’s terrorize those New York City bastards one more time, much of this was hilarious, not the least of which was the preposterous nature of how it was filmed. Opening in a hotel room where the young lovers take turns pointing a camera in the other’s face, this shortly expands to a going away party, as the young man is leaving for Japan as part of a business promotion and his brother surprises him with the party. Filled with people no one is interested in, the very blandness of the personalities takes hold, all captured on a hand-held camcorder where one dolt is commandeered into taping miniature portraits or testimonials, all of which is so insipid you may want to bolt from the theater early on. But no, this suspense film came with plenty of advance hype and an unforgettable photo (which was not used in the film) of a headless Statue of Liberty, so viewers remained on alert despite the fact nearly one quarter of the film’s already short running time is spent meeting the Fockers. As it turns out, this wasn’t a bad idea, as our familiarity with the characters, however feeble, makes this film a much more personal experience. Once the building shakes and people run outside to see what’s causing the commotion, where off in the distance sections of the city are blacked out as buildings in Manhattan are falling and in flames, Liberty’s head falls from out of the sky and lands right across the street, and sheer panic sets in, all amateurishly captured on dizzyingly shaky film by our nerdy travel guide who leads us through the entire journey, some of it hilariously stupid, other parts grotesque and terrifying, especially when what’s causing the panic remains unseen. But when the guest of honor’s girl friend leaves him a cell phone message that she’s in terrible trouble, mind you, they slept together one night, fire and panic in the streets couldn’t stop him from ransacking an electronics store to pick up needed batteries for his dying cell phone. It is there our cameraman’s interest turns to the multiple news broadcasts on giant TV screens which reveal views for the first time from helicopter shots. When it turns out to be a giant creature about 30 stories tall, a mammoth Godzilla-like monstrosity, they don’t have a clue what to think.

What distinguishes this feature is the amateurish way it depicts what’s going on, where sometimes the camera is left on the ground, or at an angle, or pointing in the wrong direction, always accompanied by the dumstruck views of the nitwit recorder who faithfully follows his friend into the heart of the firestorm in order to rescue the fair damsel in distress. Despite the obvious use of computer graphics, the film feels surprisingly real, giving us a pulsatingly intense, on-the-scene glimpse of a day in the life. The sense of real danger becomes evident when their search and rescue party diminishes considerably due to casualties, as this monster leaves a gruesome trail of the dead, destroying nearly all of Manhattan. But at every turn in the road, they have to make a decision about what to do next, and these lamebrains never fail to head straight for more danger, even entering a street firefight on the front lines where the military is making a valiant effort to put up a fight, where bombs, artillery, building pieces and other falling debris are dropping out of the sky and this party just wanders right in and fails to be deterred by anything they see. When they realize the skyscraper they’re searching for where they believe the girl lives has been hit and is leaning precariously on an angle onto the next building, they envision an improbable rescue operation which sounds too stupid for words the moment we hear it and hightail off into the distance without a thought for their own peril. It never occurs to this group to seek safety, which is simply mindboggling, where instead they have this pack mentality of following the leader, despite the fact they’re dropping off like flies. This curious bit of humor saves the film and earns some well deserved laughter, as it’s a healthy balance to the nerve-wracking death and rampant destruction mode, as once the military gets involved, they are laying waste to the city, causing much more destruction than the monster who probably feels startled and surprised to be there. Quoting Manohla Dargis from the snarky New York Time’s headline: “We’re All Gonna Die! Grab Your Video Camera!”

featuring her final thoughts: “Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm,”

There’s an element of Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES (1997) to this film, playing headgames with the audience, as several times he teases us with the possibilities of safety, including the relieved commentary of the would be survivors, where in the blink of an eye their roller coaster emotions swing from elation back to horror again as they are back in the grips of the terror. One would be well advised to sit as far back in the theater as you can, as this film tests the limits of one’s endurance to withstand motion sickness the closer you sit, where the dizzying effects of the swinging camera movements are a prominent part of the film, which comes to rest only at the beginning and end of the film, where what we’ve witnessed is being labeled by the military as found footage somewhere in the not too distant future.

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

The shocks come from nowhere, interrupting an evening previously distinguished only by garden-variety personal drama. Due to leave for a job in Japan, Michael Stahl-David spends one last night with his friends, thanks to a surprise party thrown by his brother (Mike Vogel) and his brother's girlfriend (Jessica Lucas). When another friend (Odette Yustman) shows up with a date in tow, news ripples through the crowd that she and Stahl-David, friends since college, recently slept together, only to declare the relationship a non-starter because of his imminent departure. It's all captured for posterity by T.J. Miller, a guest charged with using a video camera to film testimonials for the guest of honor. Then comes the boom, the fire, and the sound of the world crumbling.

The secret-shrouded brainchild of producer J.J. Abrams, writer Drew Goddard, and director Matt Reeves, Cloverfield owes its first-person approach to 1999's shaky-cam horror classic The Blair Witch Project, a debt it repays by taking the technique places Blair Witch could never go. If anything, it's a wonder that more films haven't borrowed the Blair Witch approach in the years since, particularly since the you-are-there immediacy speaks so directly to a decade in which camera phones and YouTube have take the middleman out of video.

Cloverfield taps into the spirit of the age in other, more unsettling ways as well. Its horror is devastating and citywide. Baffled news anchors report it breathlessly, inspiring panic in characters who realize that the violence that only happens elsewhere has found its way home. The monstrous source of the violence maintains an unerring concentration on destruction, and spawns other, smaller monsters with the same focus. It leaves terror, broken buildings, and clouds of dust behind. The best efforts of conventional warfare can't bring it down.

The filmmakers have gone to great lengths to keep the nature of the threat a secret, so let's just say that it couldn't have existed without H.P. Lovecraft, H.R. Giger, or Ishirô Honda, the director who gave Japan an embodiment of its then-recent nuclear attacks with Godzilla. Also, it's absolutely terrifying, and it's all the more effective for the way it lets viewers spend time getting to know the terrified stars, and the emotions and regrets behind their seemingly futile efforts to survive. It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Hype - specifically the viral, Internet marketing kind - has been under the gun recently, thanks in part to the failure in 2006 of Snakes on a Plane. Pimped and overplayed by fans who felt the title alone indicated a pure kitsch confection, the resulting benign b-movie was very good. But compared to the web-based blitzkrieg that came before, excitement and expectations were bound to clash and then be dashed. The failure forced studios to reexamine its information superhighway strategies. It didn’t stop Lost legend J.J. Abrams from embracing the concept for his latest production - the monster destroys Manhattan home movie Cloverfield. Now, after months of speculation and backwards ballyhoo, the novel genre effort has arrived - and it definitely lives up to the propaganda.

Young Rob Hawkins is leaving New York for a new job opportunity in Tokyo. On the night before his departure, younger brother Jason, best friend Hud, and various friends and family have gathered to celebrate. They include Jason’s fiancé Lily and the object of Hud’s obsessive affection, Marlena. The only person missing is Beth, Rob’s long time gal pal and secret love interest. Confused by something that happened between them weeks before, the trip to Japan has both questioning their commitment. During the festivities, an earthquake - or something like it - hits the city. Suddenly, the power goes out. In the panic, the partygoers head for the building’s roof. There, they see something horrifying. A section of Manhattan explodes into a massive fireball. Then there is a scream. It’s something big. It’s something angry. It’s something ready to destroy New York, block by block.

Cloverfield is the first great film of 2008. It defies or exceeds the potential inherent in the premise and the approach. Those who believe they are in for another Burkittsville romp will be stunned by the surprising scope here. Somehow, within the POV ideal, TV director Matt Reeves has found a way to make events play out as epic and beyond our comprehension. There are sequences of silent terror. There are moments of big budget action set piecing. Buried in the middle is a believable story about post-modern kids, cameras and cellphones in hand, trying to make sense of some undeniably Earth shattering events. This is so much more than a mere Blair Witch Godzilla. This is a film about perspective, about how we view our world through the media’s mighty lens.

Like Cannibal Holocaust, which used torture and reprehensible atrocities to take on the glaring, unforgiving eye of the filmmaker, Reeves reinvents the giant creature category of horror to question our perverse POV fixation. During the initial chaos, when fireballs and skyscrapers are falling to the ground, one of the characters asks Hud why he’s still filming (he was assigned the job of getting taped testimonials during the party). His answer is matter of fact - “People are gonna want to see this. They’re gonna want to know how it went down.” That’s 2008 in a nutshell, a social conceit that doesn’t believe anything as reported unless there’s accompanying footage taken from an up close and personal perspective. There’s another telling moment when a band of looters pauses to watch a TV report on the attack. Though the events are happening right outside the shop, they are transfixed by how the small screen editorializes and distances them from the fray.

Much of Cloverfield functions this way. Through the lens of a handheld camcorder, the impressive beast (and the astonishing special effects used to create it) comes across as totally believable and unnerving. Even with the shaky, optically disorienting aesthetic used in both the composition and narrative construction helps sell the concept. Full on, what we see here might appear fake or forced. But captured in glimpses, viewed out of the corner of the frame or in the distance as part of another scene’s backdrop, the rampage is a revelation. Those who get queasy from such a Blair/Bourne ideal may want to pack a little Dramamine before they head to the Cineplex. But there is no cure for the impact and power the visual element brings to the standard scare tactics.

Certainly, there are references and homages everywhere. A jaunt down a dark, foreboding subway tunnel recalls Stephen King’s The Stand and moments from James Cameron’s Aliens. The battle between the military and the monster resemble any number of Kaiju experiences from the past, while the makeshift medical lab hints at other world-ending virus tales. What we don’t expect is the Brooklyn Bridge destroying melee, as well as the scramble across a pair of damaged apartment towers. Some of this material may seem sensationalized, presented for the pure art of action. And character motive is sketchy at best. But Reeves, along with Lost scribe Drew Goddard, are relying on our post-9/11 instinct of survival at any cost, and our need for familial connections, to explain the contradictions.

Indeed, the obvious references to the World Trade Center attack (massive debris clouds consuming the streets, victims covered in soot roaming aimlessly through the chaos) is a wonderful - and wise - choice. Because that was a media driven disaster, something 90% of us experienced via our television set and nothing else, it helps sell such a stylized design. Even better, the first person POV that made The Blair Witch Project such a noted novelty works much better here. Of course, this could be because Cloverfield has an actual plot. It’s not a Candid Camera “gotcha” like indie experiment. While comparisons are fair, they’re far from direct. Witch definitely wastes its haunted woods potential. This amazing movie makes the most of the caught as it happens dynamic.

It will be interesting to see how this film eventually plays on the small screen. Since it’s the kind of entertainment that requires the display of a theater to sell its scale, a move to DVD may diminish much or all of its power. But there is still enough awe-inspiring imagery and dread-building suspense here to keep fright fans happy, while those looking for something to salvage an already awful cinematic January should jump for joy. There will be split sentiments - typically along already established genre love/hate lines - over the effectiveness of this gloriously gimmicky exercise in storytelling. The best advice? Ignore the hype and experience Cloverfield for yourself. It’s the only way to gauge how valuable the pre-release You Tubing of the title actually was. Besides, you’ll get a chance to see one of the year’s biggest surprises in the process.

Review: 'Cloverfield' the 'Blair Witch Reject' Richard Corliss from Time magazine

An explosion shakes the earth. Flames spark through the night sky like fireworks. It's either July 4th or Sept. 11th. More like the latter, because devastation and hysteria have engulfed lower Manhattan. Then, in flash glimpses, we see the cause of the carnage. A scaly tail, long as a city block and wide as a boulevard. A furtive figure 25 stories big. Whatever the thing is, it's alien, it's odd-looking and it's royally pissed.

Most horror and monster stories follow a simple format: "What if [insert worst thing you can imagine]...?" In the junky, fitfully frightening, virally marketed new movie Cloverfield, the "if" is the worst thing you can remember. To wit: What if a previously unknown agent of evil were to destroy a world-famous New York City edifice? Not the World Trade Center, this time, but the Statue of Liberty — the Lady's head is tossed like a used beer can onto a lower Manhattan street. And the Statue decapitator is not a team of al-Qaeda operatives but a scaly, 300-ft. monster, an American Godzilla.

Instantly you have a million questions. By which I mean: three. 1) Where did the creature come from? (The Hudson River? Or the Arctic, thawed out by climate change and sent south on tidal currents? Possibly Hoboken?) 2) What event roused it from a snooze that may date back to the dinosaur era? (Godzilla's rampage across Japan, you'll recall, was the spawn of atomic bombs dropped there.) 3) What, exactly, the heck is it?

Can't say, since the movie — written by Drew Goddard, from an idea by producer J.J. Abrams, and directed by Matt Reeves — purports to be a video document "retrieved at an incident site formerly known as Central Park" (now known as U.S. 447), and is told exclusively from the point of view of a few twentysomethings. We know only what they know, see what the videocamera sees. I.e., not much.

They gather at a surprise going-away party for young Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David): his gal pal Lily (Jessica Lucas), his would-be girlfriend Beth (Odette Yustman), his best bud Hud (T.J. Miller) and a pretty stray named Marlena Diamond (Lizzy Caplan). Early on, Hud is given the job of documenting the event with a video camera. The movie spends its first 20 mins. introducing you to a bunch of people, most of whom will be dead by min. 30. All you have to know: Rob had a brief affair with Beth and wants to get back to her; Lily, although nobody hits on her, is a definite hottie; Lizzy is the disposable outsider; and Hud is the kind of guy who'll tag along to anything, including Armageddon. (Still, you have to give Hud credit. He may be running for his life for the 10 hrs. of the plot, but he never drops the camera or forgets to point it at the creatures that are ready to kill him. The guy's a trouper.)

They're all meant to be cool, attractive, upmarket young professionals — Rob has just been promoted to vice president of some company that's sending him off to be in charge of Japan — but their behavior is, tops, adolescent. The men in attendance clumsily hit on pretty girls they don't know; they mope about an old love (Beth) showing up with a new guy; they frantically pass along gossip about who's been sleeping with whom. A suspicion forms in viewers' minds that Cloverfield has been rated PG-13 "for the emotional age of the characters."

But their behavior is Noel Coward-sophisticate compared to what happens when the monster strikes. A horror/sf/disaster movie loses points every time you're forced to ask yourself, "Why are they doing something so stupid?", and the answer is, "Because they're in a horror/sf/disaster movie." And if you thought that Abrams — the creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost, and the writer-director of the spiffy if underperforming Mission: Impossible III — would produce a horror movie that was not just high-concept but high-IQ — you misjudge his faithfulness to a genre requiring that, in extremis, people act in a manner that's way below their intelligence levels.

Susan Sontag described horror and science fiction as "the imagination of disaster." The innovation is in thinking the unthinkable, not creating rounded or even plausible characters. In fact, human idiocy is a crucial aspect of a genre that trades in mortal threat. If the characters holed themselves away in some safe place, they'd never meet the monster. They have to be at risk in order to escape, or get trampled, and for us to get a cheap but essential movie thrill.

Once the monster surfaces in Cloverfield, mobs of Manhattanites run for their lives across a bridge out of the borough. They. Are. Stupid! They, and you the viewer, are supposed to believe that this huge creature — whose stride spans several city blocks, and who could get across the East River in about three steps — is some sort of snob who wouldn't be caught dead in Brooklyn. (But his victims would. That tail whips out of the water and snaps the Brooklyn Bridge in two.)

Of course, in movies like this, stupidity can also be read as movie heroism. In The Day After Tomorrow, with the northern half of the U.S. population dead from a sudden attack of Global Freezing, Dennis Quaid decides he has to go on an Iditarod race from Washington, D.C., to the 42nd Street Library in New York to save his stranded son, Jake Gyllenhaal. Tom Cruise went on a similar suicide mission to reconnect with his family in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Here in Cloverfield Rob decides he absolutely must save Beth, trapped in her midtown highrise, even though she's a four-mile trudge away, the rest of the town is being smashed, trashed or eaten alive by crazy creatures, they have no access to food or water, and Lily's wearing high heels.

Apocalyptic pessimism may be the theme of these movies, but the hero is driven by a desperate optimism: the world's ending, so I have to go on an impossible journey to save someone dear to me. The idea is that you'll forget about the tens of millions who died elsewhere and concentrate on the people you've come to know and have a rooting interest for. This elitism applies to virtually any movie set in cataclysmic times, whether it's the Civil War of Gone With the Wind or New-York-under-siege fantasies like Cloverfield. The leading characters become emblems of survival, and the movie proceeds under the theory that, in such a crazy world, the problems of a few little people really do amount to a hill of beans.

So Rob and his posse head into the subway tunnels, hoping to elude Cloverzilla and get uptown alive. Here's where the movie's one inspiration kicks in. Earlier, we saw the monster shedding parasites that had attached themselves to its hide like barnacles. These dog-size, cricket-faced, crablike creatures can bound like kangaroos, stick to ceilings and attack people without so much as a "Boo!"

Just about every other plot and effects element in Cloverfield is familiar. The movie is basically the 1954 Godzilla (itself a gloss on Ray Harryhausen's 1953 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which a prehistoric beast is roused by atomic tests to terrorize New York City) told in the style of, and with the characters from, The Blair Witch Project (but with a lot less internal cohesion; this could be called "The Blair Witch Reject"). The State of Liberty head comes from the poster for John Carpenter's Escape from New York (though that shot is not in the film). The little crab creatures are like the toy meanies in Gremlins. And when the main monster opens its mouth, you pretty much know there'll be a second, Alien-like set of teeth.

In its broader contours, Cloverfield evokes real-life horror. The Wall Street area already had its monster mash, on 9/11. So there's no way you can watch downtown panic and crumbling towers without it seeming a bit... familiar. Naturally the director says, he didn't want to diminish or exploit the residue of grief from 9/11. And, as the press notes inform us, "The visual effects teams even took care that the collapsing buildings in the film were older-looking structures that did not evoke the style of the structures that were attacked six years earlier." You're right, visual effects team. It doesn't bother a New Yorker to see a gorgeous landmark like the Woolworth or Empire State Building destroyed. Those things are too old anyway.

Mind you, I don't begrudge the creators of even a junk-food movie like Cloverfield the fun they had demolishing New York one more time. The city is as irresistible to filmmakers as it is to terrorists, and for the same reason: it's an amazingly dense and compact symbol of power. Harryhausen, Carpenter, Abrams and the I Am Legend team, among many others, see a city ready to explode from its own ambitions and animosities, from all that compressed energy; they'll just give it a push into catastrophe. But I have to agree with my wife, who, when I told her about Cloverfield, sighed and said, "Couldn't somebody, just once, pick Chicago?"

The original version of this story contained several mistakes. It stated that the incident site in the movie Cloverfield was called Cloverfield, when it fact it was referred to as U.S. 447. The character of Beth was described as the "on-and-off" girlfriend of the character Rob, when she is more accurately described as his "would-be girlfriend." And the story incorrectly stated that one character was "a pretty stray named Lizzy (Marlene Diamond)." In fact, the character's name is Marlena Diamond, and the actress who played her is named Lizzy Caplan.

Classic Horror Nate Yapp

It took nine years for the cinematic seeds planted by The Blair Witch Project in 1999 to come to full fruition as Cloverfield. In that near-decade, there have been very few films made that really took the revolutionary filmmaking that Blair Witch proposed – putting the camera into the hands of the characters – and ran with it. Given the low budgetary needs of such a venture and the insane profits reaped by Blair Witch, this fact is somewhat surprising. Perhaps we needed YouTube, and the rise in self-documentation that came with it, for the milieu to be right for another high-profile attempt at the genre. Perhaps we needed a national catastrophe like 9/11 to suggest the right story. Perhaps we needed both. I think we’re just lucky that one day while doing a promotional tour in Japan, Cloverfield producer JJ Abrams wandered into a toy store that was stuffed to the gills with Godzilla swag and wandered back out with a desire to do his own monster movie, because that monster movie rocks.

Usually I take some time to relay the plot here, but I’d rather relate a conversation that Classic-Horror’s own Julia Merriam had with a co-worker:

JULIA: I’m probably going to see Cloverfield tonight.

CO-WORKER: Oh I’ve heard of that. What’s it about?

JULIA: A giant monster attacks New York.

CO-WORKER: And?

JULIA: What else do you need?

Indeed, what else do you need? I love “giant monster on the rampage” films more than is reasonable. Most of them, however, take a high-level view of the proceedings, following the monster as a main character, as well as a few select humans who will be somehow instrumental to the monster’s eventual defeat. The real victims are seen fleetingly from above, running through the streets and looking very much like ants ready for squishing. Being a person who has squished an ant or two in my lifetime, I can’t say that I don’t sympathize a little with the monster in these movies when he takes the opportunity. This particular narrative perspective isn’t a liability of the format, but one of its primary pleasures. Still, it has a tendency to reduce the human factor, negating the emotional bonds formed with the victims. As such, most colossal creature carnage-fests remain firmly in the realm of science fiction/fantasy rather than horror.

Not so with Cloverfield, which brings wanton destruction back to the streets, so to speak. The details of how good-natured, slightly dim schlub Hud (T.J. Miller) ends up video-recording his friends’ attempt to flee the chaos after a giant “thing” attacks Manhattan aren’t really important (although the film spends a good chunk of time with him before the monster shows, but it’s a clever ploy to build anticipation and familiarize us with the characters). What’s important is that his camera is always on and we get to see how the “normal” people react to getting squished. Suddenly, every moment of monster movie glee that we had during moments of property destruction is flipped on its head. That bridge had somebody’s brother on it. Someone’s best friend lives in that building that was smacked to one side. The ants have lives. The ants have mothers who need to be called and informed. To borrow a trite action movie line, “This s**t just got real.”

Well, mostly real, anyway. Unlike Blair Witch, where the actors really did all the filming, Cloverfield has a credited camera operator, Robert Reed Altman, a veteran of such action-packed television shows as “Alias” and “Lost”. Altman, incidentally, is the son of the late director Robert Altman, who might have been amused (or possibly horrified) to see that his own fly-on-the-wall approach to filmmaking had mutated into an exercise in ants-on-the-ground. That a professional is merely simulating the work of an amateur is to the benefit of the film. In this way, director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Michael Bonvillain can more closely control the impact of each shot, bringing in the right visual at the right time. It is to their credit that Cloverfield never loses the thrilling promise of its premise, and it’s to Altman’s credit that the shots are always framed just incorrectly enough that we never doubt that fumbling, fictional Hud is the man behind the camera.

I do my best to keep other criticism out of my reviews – I’m reviewing the movie, not other reviews of the movie – but I have to politely disagree with some of the negativity being directed at Drew Goddard’s script. Some people find the dialogue trite and the characters too frequently taking idiotic risks. Certainly our leads have a tendency to repeat themselves (“What was that thing?” “Oh my god oh my god”) and they don’t think things through, but these are pretty ordinary people, all things considered, and generally not prepared for extraordinary circumstances. They panic. They freak out. They do the wrong thing and they say the stupid thing while doing it. They’re not the heroes of this tale – they’re the collateral damage. I can think of another film featuring a similar group of survivors – Night of the Living Dead¹. That film worked – and so does this one. Our protagonists even manage some wit towards the end, once they’ve become somewhat inured to their predicament (I laughed out loud as Hud described the “thing” to a new member of the group in simple but accurate terms). What Goddard sacrifices in terms of cleverness and hipness is worth it for the raw, riveting “now-ness” of the experience.

Ah, but what of the monster? While the approach that Cloverfield takes would probably allow the film to skimp by on a fairly generic Godzilla clone, Abrams and company are having none of that. Their monster, a massive quadraped with a scaly back and an angry, fish-shaped head, seems to take its inspiration from HP Lovecraft’s Deep Ones², although the similarities end with its appearance and possible oceanic origins. Lovecraft’s creatures were articulate, and more concerned with worship and cross-species breeding (as seen in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”) than municipal devastation. Still, it’s an impressive creature all the same, with some equally impressive CGI (by Tippett Studio) behind it. Reeves and Goddard are careful to reveal the behemoth in stages – a fleeting, incoherent shape here, a tail there – eventually building up to its full majesty, which is pretty damned majestic in a horrifying sort of way.

There are also smaller, equally menacing terrors along the way. In one particularly memorable sequence, our heroes are beset by dog-sized parasites that have fallen off the larger monster. Hud and his friends are making their way down a dark subway tunnel to try to circumvent the destruction on the surface. A weak spotlight on the camcorder allows us to see the characters, but not much else. One of the characters lets out a cry of disgust – all the rats in the tunnel are scampering in a unified direction. Realizing that it’s never a good thing when the rats are on the run, the group peers into the darkness behind them. While they can hear clicking noises emanate from some undetermined distance, the camcorder light isn’t powerful enough to give them any clue as to the source. Rob (the camera’s owner, played by Michael Stahl-David) helps Hud find the night vision, and not a moment too soon, because the parasites are right there. It’s a beautiful moment of suspense that uses the first-person perspective to unite the characters’ unease with our own while using our separation from the events to allow us to figure out enough to establish the necessary dramatic irony (we figure out that the clicking noises are probably the parasites – which we’ve seen before – but the characters are too tired and freaked out to make the connection).

Unfortunately, the well-developed suspense in the subway tunnel is undercut by the fact that the attack itself is somewhat incomprehensible, ironically due to the film’s single-camera approach. Hud is understandably freaked out and the camera whips around frantically before he is finally knocked down by one of the parasites. This is great to relay Hud’s own emotional state but it doesn’t manage to tell us much about what’s actually going on, which is something similar sequences in other parts of the film are actually pretty good about. It almost makes one think the whole “parasite” concept is a wash, except that later they provide a couple really great moments (which you’ll have to see the movie to discover).

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to watch a giant monster trash a major metropolitan area again without thinking about the plight of Hud and his friends, caught in the midst of a terrible battle they didn’t ask for or deserve. That’s the kind of movie Cloverfield is. Where its cinematographic predecessor Blair Witch Project promised a revolution in how we make horror movies, Cloverfield actually delivers one over how we view them. Let me tell you – a change of mind never felt so awesome.

1. Coincidentally (or not), George A. Romero's next Dead film also uses the first-person camera perspective to follow a group attempting to survive the very beginning of the zombie outbreak.

2. Cloverfield's viral marketing (which almost deserves a review of its own) includes a website for a beverage called Slusho, which is reportedly manufactured from an ingredient found deep at the bottom of the ocean. Other viral websites suggest the method by which the creature might have been awoken. Poke around online and you'll find enough evidence to formulate your own crazed theory about the origins of Cloverfield's unnamed beastie.

The Stranger Song [Rob Humanick] comparing the film to BLAIR WITCH

Fangoria.com Don Kaye

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek)

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

The New Yorker (Anthony Lane)

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity)

BeyondHollywood.com Gopal

ScreenDaily [Brent Simon]

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)

House of Horror (Dave Dreher)

Best-Horror-Movies.com Horror Queen

Twitch (Grady Hendrix)

The New York Sun (Grady Hendrix)

Movie-Vault.com (Yorgo Douramacos)

Add Manohla Dargis to the List with Todd McCarthy | Features ... Brad Brevet from Rope of Silicon, offering his DVD review: Get The Review Here!

UPDATE: Here's the 'Cloverfield' Monster's Water Landing more from Brad Brevet, shown in slo mo video here: Page 2

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Crust]

LET ME IN B- 81

USA (115 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

The American remake of Tomas Alfredson's Swedish vampire film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) feels almost like a shot for shot copy of the original, yet there are small differences, enough for director Reeves to claim co-writing rights with original novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist, which may seem completely undeserved, as the original is far more subtle and vastly superior, especially experiencing it for the first time. Watching a film that you feel you’ve already seen means there’s no surprises and no suspense, as every single sequence is telegraphed, as the viewer knows exactly what’s about to happen, and my complaint about the American version is that it’s over-explained, that it shows too much, losing much of the subtlety of the original which was more of an art film. Nonetheless, it’s a decent Hollywood effort, and to its credit, the film is amazingly quiet, where the Michael Giacchino score superbly maintains that hushed atmosphere. The strong suit here is in the casting, Kodi Smit-McPhee especially, from THE ROAD (2009), as Owen has an androgynous look about him, very effeminate, so when he is bulled and called a girl, this is completely within character, while Chloë Grace Moretz as Abby is clearly female, and she’s not nearly as odd or unusual, occasionally wearing coats and boots in the winter, for instance, a departure from the Swedish film where another androgynous character is more masculine, which is in line with the book, as the 12 year old girl is actually a centuries old castrated vampire boy.

The relationship with Abby’s caretaker (Richard Jenkins) is much more openly defined here, actually showing photographs of them when he was a younger man, where they are unmistakenly in love, yet he grew older, old enough to be considered her father, but she stays the same age. In the Swedish film, the relationship has no explanation and is left poetically ambiguous. And finally, they add a few extra scenes with Abby’s caretaker as his modus operandi to obtain fresh blood for her fails miserably, and to avoid exposure he’s involved in an extended car crash sequence and ends up in the hospital, where special effects allow the viewers to see his mutilated face, a sequence which is shot in different time exposures. This version eliminates an entire storyline about nosy neighbors in the building, also a memorable cat sequence, and instead Owen spies on his neighbors through a telescope in his room, which is the only way we identify them, one of whom ends up getting bitten right in front of her boyfriend. The pacing in each is slow and somber, Reeves version is perhaps a little bloodier, where Abby actually transforms into a monster, and relies on CGI effects while no such thing occurs in the Swedish version which instead features some uncannily exquisite photography and pays more attention to smaller details, but other than that the storylines are amazingly similar.

Without having seen the original, this version would probably carry plenty of suspense, but it’s not as complex a story and there are fewer surprises. The final swimming pool sequence from the original is a masterclass in the use of offscreen sound, where the audience is visibly shaken by the abrupt nature of the events, as the scene is simply shocking and mindblowing. Here it’s well done, but there’s no shock to it, which at least in my eyes defeats the entire purpose of remaking the film, much like Soderbergh’s SOLARIS (2002), as neither were improvements, and both lacked the poetry of the originals, which remain classic art films. Trying to mainstream art films really doesn’t work, though Michael Haneke gave it a shot by Americanizing his own film FUNNY GAMES (2007), a completely non-commercial venture which was a shot for shot remake using an American cast. If Americans are going to simply ignore films made elsewhere, then their film acumen will be reduced to indie films, DVD rentals, and Hollywood makeovers, as original film ideas are occurring elsewhere, as various countries continue to have New Wave renaissances, such as the Romanians and even Great Britain of late, but Americans simply aren’t interested enough to see for themselves unless the films come to our shores with big raving reviews, in which case a minute few may have a look.

The repeated presence of Reagan on TV also adds nothing, as attempting to politicize the mood, or use it as a metaphor for Owen’s isolation or the nation’s 1980’s mood when The Cosby Show, the rise of multinational corporations, Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), Tianamen Square and the end of the Cold War were all in vogue, is never established by the filmmaker, so its use is puzzling. Among the better conceived sequences are the intimate moments between the two 12-year olds, where Owen takes Abby to his secret room in the basement, or offers her one of her mother’s dresses when she comes out of the shower, where their mannerisms, nodding their heads to the music of Blue Oyster Cult, seems to perfectly convey their awkwardness and the excitement of young love, which succeeds brilliantly largely due to how well it is underplayed. And while the emptiness with his separated parents is suggested, no clear pictures develops of the growing terror within. While Owen is bullied in both versions, what’s missing here is the sense that those troubles feel insurmountable, where Owen is so desperate that his reality is the worst nightmare in the film. That is simply not the case in the remake while it’s quite evident in the original, where he sleeps with a knife under his pillow and couldn’t feel more isolated, helpless, and alone, an unimaginably cruel fate where his worst fears are miraculously answered.

Matt Reeves' controversial remake of Tomas Alfredson's brilliant Let the Right One In, Let Me In follows a bullied young boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee's Owen) as he befriends a mysterious young girl (Chloe Moretz's Abby) - with complications inevitably ensuing as it becomes clear that Abby is, in fact, a vampire. Reeves has mimicked Alfredson's incredibly distinctive sense of style to such an extent that Let Me In's very existence quickly becomes a question mark, as the filmmaker's stubborn refusal to take the material in a new or innovative direction ultimately lends the proceedings a distinctly superfluous sort of vibe (ie why watch this when you could just watch or rewatch the vastly superior original). Having said that, Let Me In is nevertheless a very strong piece of work that generally succeeds in all the ways that its predecessor succeeded - with Moretz's consistently enthralling turn as Abby undoubtedly matching (or even exceeding) Lina Leandersson's stellar performance in Alfredson's 2008 original. And although the strength of the movie's positive attributes are generally hindered by a pace that's often excessively slow (ie the movie somehow feels slower than the original), Let Me In comes off as a respectable remake that ultimately loses points for omitting its predecessor's most memorable and flat-out compelling sequence (ie the "cat" interlude).

Time Out New York review [4/5] Joshua Rothkopf

Vampire movies aren’t going away anytime soon, and Sweden’s Let the Right One In, a more-elegant-than-not tale of teenage alienation (and bloodsucking), has made the resurgence that much easier to stomach. So let’s hear it for the oldest succubi in the book: Hollywood remakers. You’d think these parasites would have turned this intimate foreign property into a gory mess. But the new Let Me In does more than merely preserve the original’s mood; it actually improves on it.

Mainly, this is a function of superior performances. The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee seems born to solicit sympathies in scorched-earth environments; here, he plays Owen, a wide-eyed 12-year-old kicking around a depressed Los Alamos, a victim of bullying. A new neighbor his age draws his attention, the kind of sad, slightly creepy loner girl that worked like catnip on boys in a Culture Club–saturated 1983, when the film is set. (If you saw Chloë Grace Moretz happily slicing her way through Kick-Ass, forget it; this is a total U-turn.) “Would you like me even if I wasn’t a girl?” Abby gently asks her new playground companion; the uncertain bloom that follows owes as much to Spielberg’s suburban fantasies as to any toothy tale of horror.

Can this subtle, attentive quasiromance really have come from the guy who gave us Cloverfield? Matt Reeves, shrewdly directing and adapting, is smart enough to keep everything that worked the first time (including that doozy of a pool scene), while trimming some unnecessary special effects and flourishes. The question will invariably be asked: Was an English-language version even needed? One might have challenged wunderkind 1920s producer Carl Laemmle Jr. on the same grounds after he saw Murnau’s Nosferatu; he savored the details and made Dracula.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B-] Scott Tobias

What was once in Swedish is now available in English. For those unfamiliar with the moody cult vampire movie Let The Right One In—many of whom likely refuse to be familiar with it, for fear of subtitles—Matt Reeves’ uncanny remake Let Me In may well be a revelation. It’s a faithful adaptation, honoring the story nearly to the letter and retaining the slow, methodical tone (and bursts of ultra-violence) that sets it apart from Twilight, or the shock-filled horror films of the day. And it will surely see more eyes this time around, impressing many with its intelligent, gratifyingly ambiguous twist on the genre. Yet Let The Right One In still exists. There are prints in circulation, the negative is presumably intact, and it’s readily available on DVD, albeit with questionable subtitling in early pressings. The Americanized version is a nice parlor trick, and will satisfy those who believe fidelity is the principal virtue of a good adaptation, but what’s the point?

Nevertheless, a horror movie as singularly offbeat as Let The Right One In doesn’t translate easily, and Reeves starts with perfect casting. As a lonely, picked-on New Mexico middle-schooler, Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road) is an improvement on his Swedish counterpart: disturbed, yet accessible and sympathetic. Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass) is equally good as his new neighbor, an eternally teenage vampire who befriends him, and ace character actor Richard Jenkins brings enormous feeling to the role of Moretz’s keeper/companion, who does much of the dirty work necessary to keep her going. As Smit-McPhee continues to get bullied relentlessly, Moretz advises him to fight back hard, leading to a series of events that deepen their bond, but have serious consequences.

Let Me In replicates the Swedish film’s spare, haunted, wintry palette, and gets the rest of it more or less right, but mostly less: One fairly silly segment involving cats has been smartly excised, but the two key scenes—the climax and the scene that gives the film its title—are significantly less effective. Though it’s a better facsimile than, say, The Vanishing or Nightwatch, Let Me In doesn’t have the thematic justification of other shot-for-shot(ish) American remakes like Funny Games or even Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, which at least counts as some screwy postmodern experiment. Let Me In is a beautiful redundancy.

Fangoria.com [Michael Gingold]

Kudos to Matt Reeves. He and the producers took a lot of slack when it was announced the critical fave and international genre hit Let the Right One In was going to be remade in Hollywood. Cries afoul be silenced. Reeves achieves a rarity of a remake being, hell yeah, I’ll say it, better than the original. And for the record, it's not really 'Hollywood', the production company in the recently revived Hammer Films, the same British B-Movie stalwarts of old.

The story is almost exactly the same with only a few minor tweeks, but tweeks significant enough to improve on the former and offer a deeper, even more penetrating cinematic experience of genre horror.

Of course, we all know the story, a young boy (named Owen here) child to a single absent-minded mother in a small remote snowcapped town befriends his new female neighbour, a young vampire named Abby. The relationship grows from curiosity into a strange pre-pubescent love affair which fosters the boy’s self confidence to stand up to the bullies in school. And for Abby, a new companionship with a mortal and replacing her former life long paternal figure, played by Richard Jenkins..

Tonally Reeves hits the same mark as Tomas Alfredson’s masterful treatment of his version of the story - and remember it was a book first and so the Swedish version isn’t technically an original either. Michael Giacchino’s glorious music score (the best he’s ever done) sets the pace, simple piano melodies and string arrangements conveying a sense of sad melancholy.

Such is the existence of Abby, who seems to have lived the life as a 12 year old girl for hundred or so years. It takes just a little tweek in revealing her backstory to open deeper more complex layers to her character. Specifically her relationship with ‘father figure‘ (Richard Jenkins), which is given more attention than the original. Reeves moves the film in a direction even the Swedes wouldn't go - that is, a tender and possibly sexual relationship between father and daughter. It’s handled ever so delicately, nothing shocking or disturbing, but a connection between the two which is genuine and heartbreaking.

Reeves amplifies the horror for a more satisfying genre experience. More blood, more suspense and bigger bloody payoffs still manage to fit in and stay true to the poetic and melancholic nature of the story. But it’s child stars Moretz and Smit-McPhee who are simply marvelous which put the icing on the cake. Neither actor trumps the other, an equal match for both - arguably two Oscar-worthy performances. And wouldn’t that be a story? Two child actors from the same movie in contention. But let‘s not get ahead of ourselves. Let Me In couldn’t have been any better than it is. A remarkable achievement considering the extraordinarily high expectations.

Not since THE RING have I approached a remake with as much trepidation as I did LET ME IN. Both movies were inspired by standout foreign features I first caught at early festival screenings, which added the thrill of discovery to the excitement generated by the films themselves. Unlike RINGU, however, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN has had plenty of Stateside exposure prior to its redux’s release (October 1 from Overture Films, with a premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival and an opening-night screening at Austin, TX’s Fantastic Fest later this month), meaning that for U.S. audiences, writer/director Matt Reeves has a lot to live up to.

The good news is that, for the most part, Reeves has crafted an honorable and often moving Americanization of Tomas Alfredson and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s standout Swedish vampire drama, which functions as much as a dark coming-of-age story as a horror film. There are the inevitable concessions to Hollywood expectations and conventions, beginning with the very beginning: Where Alfredson and John Ajvide Lindqvist gently and quietly eased us into the story, Reeves opens with one of the Big Scenes to grab the audience’s attention, then flashes back to show how events led to that point.

The basic plot has been largely and wisely unchanged from the original: Owen (THE ROAD’s Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a lonely and somewhat disturbed 12-year-old living in a snowy mountain suburb, dealing with an often-absent single mom at home and vicious bullies at school. He’s given to acting out revenge fantasies at night in the courtyard of his apartment complex, and that’s where he is one evening when he first meets Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz), a newcomer to the apartment next door who’s also 12…“more or less,” as she puts it. At first resistant to befriending Owen, Abby also seems odd—she smells kind of funny and walks barefoot in the snow, and Owen overhears strange sounds and violent arguments from the other side of their common bedroom wall.

But a bond slowly forms between the two—and between them and the audience, thanks to the remarkable performances by the young leads. Owen could be seen as a budding sociopath, but Smit-McPhee invests him with a sensitivity and depth of feeling that make it clear his emotional disturbance is a product of his environment, rendering Owen both a tragic and sympathetic figure. Moretz’s Abby is tragic too, but in a different way—as we soon learn, she needs to feed on blood to survive, and depends on a middle-aged man she lives with to provide it for her. Played very well by Richard Jenkins, he’s billed as The Father, and that’s at first who he appears to be…but anyone who saw the Swedish film knows that his and Abby’s relationship is more complicated than that.

While keeping things from becoming prurient or inappropriate given the protagonists’ ages, Reeves explores the story’s undercurrents of sexuality in a little more depth than Alfredson and Lindqvist did in their film (although certainly not to the extent that the latter did in his original novel). Owen’s pre-adolescent curiosity about sex, tied in with his voyeuristic spying on his neighbors, has replaced Oskar’s fascination with serial killers in the previous movie, and a new moment between Abby and The Father (who expresses jealousy over her friendship with Owen) strongly suggests a closer relationship in their distant past.

A quick shot explicitly revealing the gender identity of Eli, the vampire girl in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, is unsurprisingly not reprised in LET ME IN. And while Moretz’s Abby is more conventionally pretty, lacking Eli’s otherworldly visage, the young actress (a world away from her KICK-ASS characterization) fully invests her with both sorrow about her existence and the hope that Owen might let a bit of light into it. She’s also very convincing when Abby plays the predator, albeit a reluctant one—which makes it a tad disappointing that Reeves felt the need to trick up her attack and bloodlust scenes with obvious CGI acrobatics and white-eyed ghoul contact lenses.

Elsewhere, there are shots and lines of dialogue that unnecessarily underline points that already speak for themselves just fine, and the score by gifted composer Michael Giacchino, while quite good in and of itself, is laid over a few of Abby and Owen’s quieter moments together that don’t need the accompaniment. At many other times, however, Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser’s imagemaking is quite evocative—the way they use focus to isolate Owen and Abby in their environments, and frame Owen’s mom (Cara Buono) half out of shots. They also catch rich, bleak atmosphere on the New Mexico locations, and Reeves doesn’t flinch when it comes to presenting the bloodshed wrought by Abby and The Father.

And speaking of violence, anyone who saw and loved LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is sure to be wondering if That Shot is recreated in the new film. (If you’re a RIGHT ONE fan, you know the one I’m talking about.) Without giving too much away, it can be said that the scene is still present, and staged in a similar way, but presented differently. Pretty effectively too, and it’s probably for the best that Reeves didn’t simply ape Alfredson’s long-take version. Besides, the director stages his own fresh single-shot scene of mayhem earlier in LET ME IN, and it packs a helluva visceral punch.

Personally, the bit I miss the most from RIGHT ONE is the cat scene (fans will remember that one too), part of a lengthy subplot involving a group of suspicious locals that is nowhere to be seen in LET ME IN; instead, it’s a solo cop (Elias Koteas) who looks into the dead bodies left in Abby’s wake. Again, it’s more Hollywood-conventional than in the previous picture, but again, Reeves makes it work. Those who love LET THE RIGHT ONE IN will appreciate how, for all the cosmetic changes, Reeves has kept its beating and bloody heart intact, while newcomers to this story will simply enjoy a horror film with a lot more integrity and guts than most coming out of the mainstream these days.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film review: Let Me In (2010) Kim Newman, December 2010

Movieline (Stephanie Zacharek) review [8.5/10]

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [2/5]

Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review

FANTASIA: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Review - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown

DEAD CHANNELS 2008—Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma ... Michael Guillen from Screen Anarchy

Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)

More Vampire YA in Let Me In Nick Pinkerton from The Village Voice, September 29, 2010

Slant Magazine (Ed Gonzalez) review

eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]

TIME Magazine review Mary Pols

Cinema Blend [Keith Canon]

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

Sound On Sight Justine Smith

FEARnet [Scott Weinberg]

About.com [Mark Harris]

Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Dave Campbell]

Cinematical (Peter Hall) review

KillerReviews.com [Greg Roberts]

Cinema Blend [Katey Rich]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]

DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review [4/5]

The Parallax Review [Mark Dujsik]

BrutalAsHell.com [Britt Hayes]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]

RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [C]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [3/5] also seen here: DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf]

Let the Right One In: a Vampire Movie About Alienation ... - Village Voice Elena Oumano

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]

The Film Reel [Will Brownridge]

Dread Central [Serena Whitney]

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

FirstShowing.net [Alex Billington]

Arrow in the Head ("The Arrow") review [3.5/4]

MontrealGazette.com [Al Kratina]

Boxoffice Magazine (Pete Hammond) review [4/5]

The Hollywood Reporter review Michael Rechtshaffen

Entertainment Weekly review Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Peter Debruge) review

The Independent (Kaleem Aftab) review [4/5]

The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review

Philadelphia Inquirer (Steven Rea) review [3.5/4]

Austin Chronicle review [4/5] Marc Savlov

Tulsa TV Memories [Gary Chew]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]

The New York Times review A.O. Scott

Refn, Nicholas Winding

PUSHER

Denmark (105 mi) 1996

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

This is the worst week in Frank's life - and very possibly the last. Deep in debt, he fixes up a complicated heroin deal involving his skinhead pal Tony and Balkan dealer Milo. The exchange is a bust, and Frank loses both the money and the merchandise. By Thursday, Tony's out of the picture and Milo's putting on the squeeze. By Friday, Saturday might never happen. Using available light, spasmodic handheld camerawork, and improvised dialogue, write/director Refn goes out of his way (in his first feature) to create an everyday world of extraordinary circumstance - then piles on a pounding thrash guitar score and punchy editing to create a kind of electric realism. Scorsese is a touchstone, but it's a long time since he achieved this kind of blistering intensity. It's a rough ride, for sure: Tony's idea of small talk scorches the ear; the music's loud enough to feel; and a series of violent confrontations are so near-the-knuckle it's a relief not to come out bleeding. Yet this is much more than an assault on the senses. As Frank, Bodnia's baleful tough guy stoicism masks an emotional constipation which even precludes physical contact with his hooker girlfriend (Drasbæk). Wheeling and dealing for all he's worth, he can only conclude that he's not worth much; and if Copenhagen comes to resemble hell on earth, it's definitely a hell of Frank's own making.

Pusher Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but in this grimly predictable Danish drama—a surprise hit on its home turf three years ago that's only now receiving a U.S. release—all it has bred is a sort of patient exasperation. First-time director Nicolas Winding Refn, who dropped out of film school when the financing for this movie unexpectedly came through, has a way with actors and low-budget panache, but if you've seen this kind of movie fewer than a dozen times in the past five years or so, you simply haven't been getting out enough.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with the template itself, which is basically that of The Loser Who Gets In Way the Hell Over His Head. Frank (Bodnia), a small-time Copenhagen drug dealer who's already 50 grand in debt to a local kingpin (Buric), talks Mr. Big into lending him a huge quantity of heroin for a lucrative deal with a mysterious Swede. Naturally, the plan goes awry, leaving Frank with neither the cash nor the merchandise, in possession only of an IOU that's suddenly ballooned from $50K to $230K. The rest of the film sees the poor guy doing everything he can think of to raise the money before the boss's goons start testing the efficacy of various household tools on his personal anatomy.

Pusher was reportedly expanded from a short film, and that's easy to believe, given the way that it meanders. Because the story line is so commonplace—Bad Lieutenant is its most recent and memorable antecedent—it's imperative that a sense of urgency be established double-quick; instead, the movie ambles casually from scene to scene (literally: most of the camerawork is handheld), following a protagonist who often seems utterly oblivious to the danger lurking around the next corner. Dramatic opportunities abound but are routinely wasted. When Frank tries to hit up his estranged mother for funds, you expect Refn to ratchet up the emotional grotesquerie—think of Michael Keaton in Clean and Sober, desperately trying to talk his folks into coughing up his inheritance now—yet nothing of consequence happens. What Pusher pushes most effectively is the button in your brain marked "déjà vu."

Raw Deals | Village Voice Michael Atkinson reviews the Pusher Trilogy, August 8, 2006

Your first impression of this five-hour-plus underworld trilogy is that director Nicolas Winding Refn is an engineer of epic scale and structural ambition, and that the tiny kingdom of Denmark is apparently a snake pit of narcotic squalor and homicidal chaos. (Distributor Magnolia is displaying no shortage of chutzpah itself in releasing all three simultaneously, a market-defying stunt it pulled in 2004 with Lucas Belvaux's weave-world saga The Trilogy.) But the Pusher movies play less like features than like the nastiest hit TV series HBO never made, and a stateside cable remake does seem plausible. Shot handheld, dramatically focused not on large narrative arcs but vile criminal minutiae, and inhabited completely by scumbags dumbly searching for redemption they can't put a name to, Refn's films aren't freestanding once their serial-ness becomes their defining character—just as with The Sopranos, the narrative's forward motion is aiming at a vanishing point, not at closure. (Refn has said there may be more Pushers to come.)

Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh. Drug lords cook for parties, hit men dream about becoming restaurateurs. In the first Pusher (1996), first released here in 1999, the hero is Frank (Kim Bodnia—half Stanley Tucci, half Tom Sizemore), a mid-level dope dealer (apparently, "pusher" in Danish has different connotations: No one ever needs to "push") who is successful and hardcore enough to live his days in a fast, fun-loving tear. Accompanied by his bullet-headed buddy/enforcer Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), Frank spends the movie's first half-hour bopping from deal to whore to bar, cagily living it up. Bad news arrives, of course, in the offhand form of a score finagled with local kingpin Milo (Zlatko Buric) on credit, despite Frank's looming debt. When the cops show up, Frank dives into a lake, taking the drugs with him. Now his debt to Milo is unmanageably huge, and as the thugs come looking for him, he begins a frantic, frustrated search for cash. Refn's film—his first-—is alive with details: the conversations that you think will provide exposition but instead get completely sidetracked; the live-wire torture scene that ends, abruptly, when the lights go out; the way Frank, as the clock slowly runs out of time, becomes less expressive, not more.

Picking up this spare thread eight years later, after himself getting married and fathering a child, Refn focuses each subsequent film, perhaps perversely, on the one character from the previous entry you have no interest in learning more about. We don't revisit exiled Frank in Pusher II (2004), but the irredeemably dim Tonny, last seen bludgeoned by Frank for leaking to the pigs, and now fresh from prison. Re-immersing himself in a daily cesspool of coke, dope deals, car thieving, and whores (the early scene in which Tonny argues with his own unresponsive penis as two disinterested working girls obey his frustrated commands is rankly funny), Tonny also tries to ingratiate himself with his recalcitrant father (Leif Sylvester Petersen), who can hardly trust him with a gopher job at his chop shop. The back-breaking straw is the appearance of a baby that Tonny's old non-girlfriend (Anne Sorensen) claims is his; as the bitterness, betrayals, and wholesale fuckups snowball, Tonny begins (slowly, silently) to wonder if he should rewrite his life, and the fate of the neglected infant.

Pusher III (2005) trains in on Milo, the Balkan scag kingpin and Frank's biggest problem from the first film. Here, he's in Narcotics Anonymous and truly interested only in cooking a massive birthday feast for his 25-year-old daughter (Marinela Dekic). Meanwhile, an errant shipment of Ecstasy and a handful of Albanian and Polish crooks are perpetually mucking up the works, until bodies start dropping and Milo (Buric may be the unhealthiest-looking actor on earth), succumbing to a smack high, endures a hair-raising night's journey into corpse disposal the meat-market-scrap likes of which we haven't seen since Herschell G. " 2,000 Maniacs" Lewis retired. Truly, Refn could keep going; there may be no limit to the fuzzy-underbelly-ness behind Copenhagen's semi-industrial storefronts, even if you're given reason to wonder, after many hours, if these buzz-seeking losers ever eat a square meal, feel any social remorse, or get any sleep.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Natural Selection Jonathan Romney reviews the Pusher Trilogy from Sight and Sound, March 2006

Desperate Measures Dennis Lim from The Village Voice, May 4, 1999

TIFF Report: Pusher Review - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown

Draxblog Movie Reviews Dragan Antulov

Eye for Film (Tim Bryant) review [4/5]

Monsters At Play (Star C. Foster) review

Cinematical [Martha Fischer]

DVD Talk (G. Noel Gross) dvd review [3/5] [Special Edition]

Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy | Film | The New Cult Canon ... Scott Tobias essay on the Pusher Trilogy from The Onion A.V. Club

The Pusher Trilogy « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist reviews the Pusher Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Creative Loafing Atlanta [Felicia Feaster] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Bina007 Movie Reviews reviews the Pusher Trilogy

REVIEW: PUSHER TRILOGY, THE Russ Fischer from CHUD reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir interviews the director while reviewing the Pusher Trilogy, August 17, 2006

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review Something's Rotten in Denmark, reviewing the Pusher Trilogy, August 18, 2006

The New York Times (Nathan Lee) review reviews the Pusher Trilogy

DVD Review: Nicolas Winding Refn's PUSHER Trilogy - ScreenAnarchy Kwenton Bellette

Pusher Trilogy : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Ian Jane

Pusher Trilogy · Film Review Pusher Trilogy · Movie Review · The A.V. ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club

The Pusher Trilogy - ComingSoon.net Edward Douglas

The 'Pusher' trilogy: A desperate trip into Copenhagen's neon lit ... - SBS Clint Caward

Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]

Variety (Gunnar Rehlin) review

Boston Globe review [3/4] Ethan Gilsdorf

Los Angeles Times (Robert Abele) review

The New York Times (Anita Gates) review

The Pusher Trilogy - Review - Movies - The New York Times

Pusher trilogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PUSHER 2

aka: With Blood on My Hands

Denmark (100 mi) 2004

Time Out London review

‘I don’t have any interest in crime or drugs whatsoever,’ says Refn. ‘Pusher II’ is full of guns, knives, car chases, fisticuffs and narcotics, but watching it you see exactly what he means. For the interesting thing about this sequel to his impressive 1996 debut is what’s going on behind the eyes of dopey lead character Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen, a supporting player in the first movie). Just out of jail, he’s keen to impress his crimelord father, but he just can’t stop messing up, a fact of which everyone loves to make him aware. Tall, muscular, shaven-headed and heavily tattooed, Tonny’s an intimidating sight, but as the fuck-ups, mental bullying and new paternal responsibilities rack up, initial cockiness is soon displaced by doubt, bemusement, vulnerability and despair. Mikkelsen puts in a skilfully taciturn performance, while Refn’s direction is no less controlled; with ‘Pusher III’ imminent and a second English-language film (after 2002’s ‘Fear X’) apparently in the pipeline, he’s gradually cementing a reputation as a prolific and intriguing talent.

Empire Magazine [UK] review [4/5] Patrick Peters

Released from prison, a drug-dealing skinhead (with the word `Respect’ tattooed on the back of his skull) returns to his Copenhagen manor, where each well-meaning, but ill-conceived attempt to ingratiate himself with his disapproving mobster father and the self-serving hooker mother of his new-born child lands him in ever-deeper trouble.

Following a mixed reception for Bleeder and Fear X, Dane Nicolas Winding Refn returns to the simmering tensions of the Vesterbro underworld for this uncompromising sequel that is more than a match for any recent Britcrime offering. Tonny was only a secondary character in 1996’s Pusher, which recalled the neighbourhood dramas of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese with its insistent intensity and handheld realism. But here he becomes the story, as he tries to prove that he has what its takes to become a `made man'.

As before, the breakneck pace, the seething sense of menace and the unflinching attitude to sex, drugs and violence coagulate into a nastily authentic take on the seediness and venality of modern villainy. But while the car thefts and scag deals give the action some gangsterly guts, this is very much a psychological study of a serial loser's bid to gain respect from both his hoodlum father (Lief Sylvester Petersen) and the coke-snorting mother of his baby (Anne Sorensen), with Mads Mikkelsen giving another compelling performance, as Tonny veers between imbecilic naiveté, harmless affability and latent brutality, as he seeks to find a niche in a world he fetishises, but never understands.

TIFF Report: Pusher II With Blood On My Hands ... - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown

Say you've been hailed as Denmark's next great hope. You burst on to the scene with a dazzling debut. You followed that up with an equally acclaimed sophomore film (Bleeder) then went overseas to try your luck in North America (Fear X). What do you do next? If you're Nicolas Winding Refn you go back to what made you famous in the first place and you do it even better. In late 2004 Refn released Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands, a sequel to his acclaimed '96 debut, and as dazzling as the original Pusher was this is unquestionably better.

Pusher II tells the story of Tonny, the heavily tattooed small time hood who was Frank's sidekick and betrayer in the original film. His selection as the subject of the sequel is a fascinating choice and one that exposes a lot of Refn's purpose behind the films. Tonny is not one of the glamor crooks, not by a long shot. He's one of those bumbling, small time sycophants who you always find bouncing around the lower ranks, the kind who will never advance because they are simply incompetent or, in Tonny's case, simply far too soft to stomach what is necessary to advance. But Tonny's low status doesn't deter him. He loves this lifestyle and wants to stay. But why? Is he caught up in the glamor of the higher ups or is their something else going on?

The film opens with Tonny finishing up a stint in jail, being lectured by a major hood he owes money to, one who challenges him to conquer his own fear and reminds him that his jail debts have been let slide only because of Tonny's father, a man known only as the Duke. On his eventual release Tonny, needing to pay off his debts, immediately visits the Duke looking for work but is met only by scorn and derision. Tonny is clearly not a favored son, not because he is a criminal but because he is not good enough at it. The Duke, on the other hand, is the feared and respected head of a complicated car theft ring and Tonny manages to beg his way into a low level spot in the gang.

Now, as much as this is a crime film - and it is a graphic and violent one replete with stacks of sex and violence and a simply obscene aount of cocaine snorted - the crime is really a disguise for Refn's true intentions. This is a film about families, broken ones, and the impact family has across generations. Tonny's entire life has obviously been spent on only one thing: trying to gain the approval of his father. And not only that he learns on his release that he is very likely the father of a baby boy, one so scorned by its mother that it hasn't even been given a name yet. Throw into the mix a best friend who is engaged to be married and a fiance drinking and coking away constantly despite being pregnant and Refn is painting a vivid picture of a toxic childhood.

The Refn style is again in full effect but this film belongs purely and simply to Mikkelsen. He is absolutely stunning, flawlessly embodying the insecurities and desire that drives this man. He makes Tonny into an everyman, a stark reminder of the lasting effect our actions can have on future generations. The film's ending is positively devastating - though for an entirely different reason that the first Pusher's also compelling conclusion - and I don't mind saying that this is one that brought me to tears. Not only the best film of the trilogy but easily one of the very best films of the year and one of the best crime films ever made, period. It is not for the squeamish but Pusher II gets my absolute highest possible recommendation.

Cinematical [Martha Fischer]

BFI | Sight & Sound | Natural Selection Jonathan Romney reviews the Pusher Trilogy from Sight and Sound, March 2006

Raw Deals | Village Voice Michael Atkinson reviews the Pusher Trilogy, August 8, 2006

Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy | Film | The New Cult Canon ... Scott Tobias essay on the Pusher Trilogy from The Onion A.V. Club

The Pusher Trilogy « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist reviews the Pusher Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Creative Loafing Atlanta [Felicia Feaster] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Bina007 Movie Reviews reviews the Pusher Trilogy

REVIEW: PUSHER TRILOGY, THE Russ Fischer from CHUD reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir interviews the director while reviewing the Pusher Trilogy, August 17, 2006

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review Something's Rotten in Denmark, reviewing the Pusher Trilogy, August 18, 2006

The New York Times (Nathan Lee) review reviews the Pusher Trilogy

DVD Review: Nicolas Winding Refn's PUSHER Trilogy - ScreenAnarchy Kwenton Bellette

Pusher Trilogy : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Ian Jane

Pusher Trilogy · Film Review Pusher Trilogy · Movie Review · The A.V. ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club

The Pusher Trilogy - ComingSoon.net Edward Douglas

The 'Pusher' trilogy: A desperate trip into Copenhagen's neon lit ... - SBS Clint Caward

Siffblog Review [Kathy Fennessy]

Variety (Deborah Young) review

The Pusher Trilogy - Review - Movies - The New York Times

Pride & Prejudice (U) With Blood on my Hands (18) - Reviews ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, September 18, 2005

New York Times (registration req'd) Nathan Lee

Pusher trilogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PUSHER 3

aka: I’m the Angel of Death

Denmark (90 mi) 2005

Time Out London (Nick Funnell) review

As the third part of the ‘Pusher’ trilogy arrives and demonstrates no let-up in quality, you begin to appreciate just how much of an achievement this batch of Danish crime drama represents. Began in 1996 and resuscitated in 2004 (after the director’s American misadventure ‘Fear X’ in 2002), Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Pusher’ series manacles us to a different crim from its Copenhagen underworld each time, then – with calculated sadism – starts cranking up the pressure to see what they can stand. In the first ‘Pusher’, it’s drug dealer Frank (Kim Bodnia) scrambling for his life to pay a debt, while in ‘Pusher II’ (2004) his friend Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) bungles job after job as his crime lord father and others taunt him about his uselessness. These are movies that make your stomach turn and your head pound, and with their accent on character and the everydayness of gangster life they’re not unlike a downbeat European version of ‘The Sopranos’.

‘Pusher 3’ (full title: ‘I’m the Angel of Death AKA Pusher 3’) offers more of the same, pulling tight focus on Serbian drug kingpin Milo (Zlatko Buric), the chillingly affable hood who Frank owed in I and cameoed in a pivotal scene in II. He cuts a less commanding figure here, however, as the stresses stack up. Over the course of a day we see him simultaneously grappling with kicking heroin, a misdelivered batch of ecstasy tablets, henchmen who are literally shitting their pants, vicious Albanian gangsters, not to mention cooking for his beloved daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday party.

It’s occasionally over-contrived, but you rarely notice as scenes segue so slickly together, tangling Milo in a web from which it’s impossible to escape. Like a hungry vulture, Refn’s handheld camera circles him as he flounders, awaiting the inevitable breakdown. And when it comes, it’s unspeakably gruesome: suffice to say there’s a series of scenes that takes the films’ stripping of humanity to its horribly logical conclusion. ‘Pusher’ couldn’t be a more apt title. By pushing his characters to breaking point, Refn exposes the fear, exertion and dismalness at the heart of their gangster lives. For the ageing Milo, it’s a daily battle to maintain his authority and the rewards barely seem worth the effort. There are no fast cars, big houses or gorgeous girls here (even guns are conspicuous by their absence), only a not-so-comfortable middle-class existence.

A clockwork determinism makes the ‘Pusher’ series work so well – events pinball, taking you off on imaginary tangents and giving the films a life beyond themselves. Each entry glides to an ending of profound uncertainty: when Milo gets home from his night of hell in ‘Pusher 3’, you know there can only be awful consequences to what he’s done but, for now in the dawn light, all is eerily calm. You’re left deeply uneasy, yet longing for more. Roll on ‘Pusher 4’.

TIFF Report: Pusher III, I'm The Angel of Death ... - ScreenAnarchy Todd Brown

Shot immediately after Pusher II and released less than a year behind the sophomore film of the trilogy Pusher III - aka I'm The Angel of Death - has some very, very large shoes to fill. That it fails to completely do so in no way implies that this is a poor film - by any other standard it is stellar - but it definitely marks a slight dip from the first two films, one made more evident by viewing it immediately after the second film as it has been programmed here. Pusher III is centered on Milo, the Serbian drug lord who supplied Frank in the first film and made a brief appearance in part two, and is very definitely NOT for those who had difficulty with the use of hand tools in Oldboy. The finale of this one may lack some of the emotional punch of the first two but it's certainly not shy on graphic and shocking imagery ...

While the first film spread over a week and the second over what appeared to be months this final installment is packed into a single day of Milo's life. A single very packed, very conflicted day. A long time drug abuser Milo is attempting to go on the wagon and hitting multiple NA meetings around the city to help himself quit, something of an irony for a major drug lord. He is also feeling the squeeze from a group of younger, more aggressive Turkish drug dealers and somehow manages to get himself caught up in a Polish flesh trading ring. To top it off it is also his very spoiled daughter's twenty fifth birthday and he has promised to cater her birthday party himself, which means cooking for fifty people while also running his business. And the cooking's not going so well as his entire gang - struck down by food poisoning - can attest.

The most purely genre film of the lot Pusher III seems intent to entertain more than illuminate. The character based work is still there, but it is not given the same time or care as in the first two and this is where the film suffers. The characters are still engaging and the thing still crackles and pops but after the rich layers of complexity in the first two installments and the possibilities offered by this character Refn seems largely content to play turnabout with Milo - putting him in a strikingly similar situation to what Milo himself put Frank through in the first film - and leave it at that.

The performances are uniformly strong once again and it is once again fascinating to see Refn put further layers onto bit players from the other films as they turn up here in large roles. Trhough the course of the trilogy Refn has created a remarkable, self contained world where all of the characters live and interact and it gives you the chance to see them all from different angles, in different lights and it makes the entire experience more rewarding. So, while Pusher III may be the weakest of the lot it is still a remarkable film and one well worth seeing. Evidently an off day from Refn is still ten times better than what most directors manage. Catch these films while you can because God only knows when they might see an English subtitled release ...

Cinematical [Martha Fischer]

Digital Retribution dvd review Mr. Intolerance

Letterboxd: Jesse Cataldo

BFI | Sight & Sound | Natural Selection Jonathan Romney reviews the Pusher Trilogy from Sight and Sound, March 2006

Raw Deals | Village Voice Michael Atkinson reviews the Pusher Trilogy, August 8, 2006

Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy | Film | The New Cult Canon ... Scott Tobias essay on the Pusher Trilogy from The Onion A.V. Club

The Pusher Trilogy « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist reviews the Pusher Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Creative Loafing Atlanta [Felicia Feaster] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Bina007 Movie Reviews reviews the Pusher Trilogy

REVIEW: PUSHER TRILOGY, THE Russ Fischer from CHUD reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews the Pusher Trilogy

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir interviews the director while reviewing the Pusher Trilogy, August 17, 2006

The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review Something's Rotten in Denmark, reviewing the Pusher Trilogy, August 18, 2006

The New York Times (Nathan Lee) review reviews the Pusher Trilogy

DVD Review: Nicolas Winding Refn's PUSHER Trilogy - ScreenAnarchy Kwenton Bellette

Pusher Trilogy : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Ian Jane

Pusher Trilogy · Film Review Pusher Trilogy · Movie Review · The A.V. ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club

The Pusher Trilogy - ComingSoon.net Edward Douglas

The 'Pusher' trilogy: A desperate trip into Copenhagen's neon lit ... - SBS Clint Caward

Variety (Eddie Cockrell) review

Pusher 3 (18) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar ... Anthony Quinn from The Independent, June 9, 2006

The New York Times (Nathan Lee) review

The Pusher Trilogy - Review - Movies - The New York Times

Pusher trilogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DRIVE B+ 92

USA (100 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, winner of Best Director for this film at Cannes, takes a break from his more violently exotic PUSHER Trilogy (1996 – 2005) and takes a stab at an American mixture of commercial and art motif with this homage to the existential car films of the 1970’s like VANISHING POINT and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (both 1971), or Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER (1978), where what each have in common with this film are the extraordinary specialized skills of the mechanic and guy behind the wheel, where the open road seen ahead is the only freedom he’ll ever know. It’s also impossible not to think of Steve McQueen in BULLIT (1968), the personification of cool behind the wheel, transplanted to Ryan Gosling here (originally slated for Hugh Jackman), known only as the Driver, a wordless guy with steely nerves, a Zen calmness, but also a capability for savage violence. The love affair with the automobile is established right away as the Driver gets a couple of crooks out of a tough jam, evading the police with an eerie kind of expertise, a brilliant sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the movie, opening a window into his world, luring the audience into a fascination with his profession. The real film this resembles, however, is TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA (1985), as both show a seethingly corrupt film noir underworld in the city of Angels, both expertly establish a high throttle tension throughout, both straddle the line between law abiding and law breaking, and both have inspired musical soundtracks, where Cliff Martinez creates a Tangerine Dream-style synth score, featuring a wall to wall, techno-pop, sound effect of angelic romantic choruses that couldn’t be more hypnotically appealing. The artistic design of the film has a sleek, classical elegance, where the constantly moving digital cameras from cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel offer the viewer a roller coaster ride, where the pauses allow you a chance to look around for a moment before they start rolling again. The mounting tension is unsurpassed in any other recent film, creating a palm sweating, edge-of-your-seat visceral experience that is nothing less than superb. That said, the storyline by Hossein Amini adapting the James Sallis novella here, who also wrote the superb Thomas Hardy gut-wrenching movie adaptation of Michael Winterbottom’s JUDE (1996), feels very sleight in comparison.

Gosling’s Driver establishes the interior tone behind the wheel, a MAD MAX (1979) style lone wolf on the prowl in the wasteland of an urban jungle, a guy that doesn’t set his heights too high, but his expertise as a professional stunt driver for the movies is so noteworthy that it’s impossible for others not to notice. He moonlights as a driver for hire, an escape artist, no questions asked, no talking to the cops, just a guy who excels behind the wheel. “I drive. That’s all I do.” The titillated novelty here is the barebones thread of a budding romance with one of his neighbors, Carey Mulligan as Irene, a single mom raising her young son alone while his dad is in prison. Their first date is a return road trip to the cement canal dry riverbed waterways of a chase sequence in TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA, this time seen through a much softer, romantic prism, a gentle and poetic moment that feels like an oasis in the desert, as much of the rest of the film is filled with bloodlust and revenge. Despite the hyper violent edge, the actual moments of screen time violence are far less than most all Hollywood thrillers, amounting to just a few minutes of the entire film, but the extreme stylization is so enigmatic that the effect is more memorable and long-lasting. This is an inevitable heist gone wrong film, where the Driver just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the people he’s mixed up with don’t realize they’re stealing the mob’s money, which means there’s hell to pay. The vicious turn of events are brilliantly executed, where Gosling is mesmerizing with his cool demeanor, rising above his double-crossing cohorts with minimal sweat, or so it seems, able to stare death in the face even as he’s being targeted. The quick decisive action of the mob is alarming, showing extreme brutality, but Gosling keeps his wits about him, where one wonders just what kind of trouble he may have faced before, questions that remain unanswered.

When did Albert Brooks, creator of his own strange and quirky comedies of the 80’s and 90’s and the voice of Nemo’s neurotic Dad in Disney’s FINDING NEMO (2003), become a gangland boss? Did we miss something? Here’s a guy that cast Debbie Reynolds as his own mom in MOTHER (1996), for Christ’s sake, so when did this transition occur? Was it the slimy character he played in Soderbergh’s OUT OF SIGHT (1998), the guy that risked his girl friend’s life rather than give up the hidden diamonds? Was it his role as a Dick Cheney-style government bureaucrat gone mad in THE SIMPSON’S MOVIE (2007)? Whatever happened from his days at Saturday Night Live, the guy now plays a terrific heavy, as he’s the face of the mob boss here, given some highly colorful, profanity laden dialogue that seems to resurrect his memory as a once proficient hit man rising up the ranks, where the guy loves to be warm and fuzzy, but can’t afford mistakes or any loose ends in his line of business, which makes his end of it very personal. The film is very much style over substance, despite the terrific performances all around, as there’s little to no social commentary and an ambiguous moral dilemma that has little to do with anyone’s life. It’s the love element that tips the audience in favor of the Driver, as he’s cool and collected but falls for the girl, even as her life gets exasperatingly complicated when her husband is released from prison. Still, the inevitable showdown is between two guys outside the reach of the law, both brutally efficient, where no one can really call either one a winner, as there’s too much psychological baggage to carry. Refn uses a very compact, highly constricted style that energizes his work, creating an extremely taut and gripping drama, something one movie executive character ironically describes in the Sallis book as: “Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases.”

Andy's Film Blog [Andy Kaiser]

A part-time mechanic, part-time movie stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver becomes involved with a married mother whose husband is in prison. Upon his release, the driver offers to act as the wheelman in a robbery needed to pay off a prison protection debt. However, the job goes terribly wrong and the driver finds himself as well as the girl and her son the targets of a ruthless crime syndicate. The opening scenes remind us of "Diva" and "To Live and Die in L.A.", two 80s films with famous chase sequences, and thus we have a film with a distinct 80s feel containing two brilliantly executed chase sequences. "Drive" is a brutal neonoir from director Nicolas Winding Refn that features an icy cool performance from Ryan Gosling as he navigates the twisty terrain of the plot. Carey Mulligan is effective as the vulnerable love interest and we get really fine work from Bryan Cranston as Gosling's mechanic mentor and Ron Perlman as an uncouth and ruthless gangster. The scene stealer here though is Albert Brooks as Perlman's equally malevolent partner whom both Gosling and Cranston are into for a lot. I felt the triangle between Gosling, Mulligan, and Oscar Isaac who plays the ex-con husband didn't ring true, but that is besides the point as it is only the springboard for the sinister plot. "Drive" is a brilliantly directed film where you can never anticipate its sudden bursts of violence or what menacing lies around the next bend.

Exclaim! [J.M. McNab]

Drive feels like a '70s loner film filtered through '80s action movie sensibilities, but set in the present day. If Michael Mann were to remake Taxi Driver in 2011, it would closely resemble this work. Aesthetically, Drive is littered, with '80s styles, jean jackets, synth-pop and smoking in restaurants, but the tone is distinctly rooted in '70s American neo-noir.

The unnamed protagonist, simply referred to as "the Driver" (played by Ryan Gosling), is a stunt driver for movies by day and a getaway driver for criminals by night. His quiet stoicism is, at times, endearing and at others, threatening. When he gets involved in a heist that's sabotaged, his lust for revenge conjures his repressed violent nature (yes, the title has a double meaning), which threatens his budding romance with a neighbour (Carey Mulligan) and his relationship with her young son.

In addition to the strengths of the two leads, the supporting cast may be the coolest of the year: Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, wonderfully playing against type as a mobster.

Drive was directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson), who creates a rich, dreamlike atmosphere for the characters to inhabit. He gives as much attention to moments of silent contemplation as he does to slick car chases. Even the instances of grizzly, graphic violence are always tempered by more sensitive moments and moral reflexivity.

Drive rides the line between minimalistic and viscerally arresting, just as the character of the Driver struggles with his own duality. This is a revenge movie with a soul, and it's one of the best films of the year so far.

Drive Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club

“I’m a driver,” says Ryan Gosling in Drive, and he doesn’t need to say another word. With that simple utterance, Nicolas Winding Refn’s minimalist thriller defines its aesthetic—lean, efficient, and sharpened to the finest point. At a time when action films routinely pass off freneticness as excitement, Drive is a reminder of how powerful the genre can be when every shot and every line of dialogue has a purpose, deployed for maximum impact. Owing a debt to the Zen-like simplicity and nocturnal L.A. ambience of Walter Hill’s The Driver—which, in turn, took a page from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï—the film is little more than an exercise in style, but it’s dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat.

Based on a crime novel by James Sallis, a disciple of pulp writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis, Drive squares nicely with Refn’s previous work, particularly the Pusher trilogy, which is about tough, low-level hoods who scrap their way through a narrowing set of choices. A man with no name, Gosling makes his skills apparent in the gripping opening sequence, in which he calmly navigates a getaway car through a dense web of cop cars and police helicopters. An all-purpose wheelman, Gosling also works as a Hollywood stuntman, a grease monkey, and a would-be stock-car racer, and his talent attracts the interest of a vicious local mob boss—played, in an inspired piece of casting, by Albert Brooks. When Gosling’s attraction to a young mother (Carey Mulligan) leads him to assist her ex-con husband in a heist, he runs afoul of the wrong people, and struggles to stay ahead of them.

Timed to the pulse of a Cliff Martinez score that recalls the Tangerine Dream soundtracks of the ’80s, Drive casts Gosling as a quiet, inscrutable mystery man whose actions do all the talking for him. Refn sees him as the consummate professional in the mold of a Michael Mann hero, but Sallis’ story, adapted by Hossein Amini, throws him into a situation where his dexterity and talent are met by overwhelming force and plain bad luck. The plotting involved in this titanic confrontation is dense, but made to seem elementary, and the major setpieces rip through the moody atmosphere like a thunderclap. It’s retro genre heaven.

Row Three [Jandy Stone]

The Los Angeles in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a real place geographically – the garage on Reseda Blvd, the apartment building in Echo Park, the car chases through downtown and the canyon roads, the exit off Cahuenga past the Hollywood Bowl – these are all places I more or less recognize. On the other hand, the almost wall-to-wall techno music (reminiscent of Run Lola Run in its quieter moments), the arty slow-motion and slow-burn pacing of much of the film, and the enigmatic characterization of the main character, known only as “The Driver,” lend a surreal feel to the city I know. And that feeling is mirrored by the film itself. Drive both is and isn’t something familiar, weaving brutally realistic violence in with lyrical beauty, switching back and forth with rapid unexpectedness.

The otherwise unnamed Driver moves laconically between fixing cars at a garage in the Valley, doing driving stunts for the movies, and being a wheelman for robberies. He has simple rules for the latter – he’s there at a certain time and takes responsibility for five minutes of robbery and getaway. After that, the crooks are on their own. The opening sequence (which is excerpted for the Cannes clip so far acting as trailer) is one such job, and it is utter perfection as a self-contained sequence and as a teaser for the film. It balances patience and speed in the chase itself, while also showing with essentially zero dialogue exactly how good a driver this man is, both in terms of actual pedal-to-the-metal precision and street smarts of when to hang back and when to go for it. He drives methodically, but knows the right time to strike.

His boss at the garage (who is also a liaison for the movie stuntwork, having been a stuntman himself in the ’80s) wants to mold the Driver’s potential into the racing circuit, a proposal he brings to some investor buddies of his currently running a pizza shop in Hollywood. Bryan Cranston of AMC’s Breaking Bad plays boss Shannon as a good guy who can’t seem to catch a break, just the world-weary sort of guy who forms the backbone of noir – a genre that Drive plays on the edges of. This plot is interrupted, however, when the Driver starts hanging out with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son. Most of the lyrical quality comes in here, as their relationship plays out in long takes, glances, smiles, and impromptu trips down to the source of the Los Angeles River.

But reality crashes back in when her husband Standard returns from jail, and needs the Driver’s help doing one last job to get him out of debt to the crime lords in town. What could’ve been a conventional love triangle becomes a more interesting web of relationships that ultimately include Shannon and his financiers as well. For this LA is also surreal in how very small it is – at first it seems like coincidence that the Driver happens to come upon a beat-up Standard in a parking garage, and coincidence that everything in the story connects to the same group of six or seven people. And perhaps it is, and perhaps you could claim that as a fault. But in the heightened reality that Drive ultimately portrays, it feels inevitable. Playing around in the sandbox of film noir, ’70s chase movies, ’80s crime movies, and not a little Two-Lane Blacktop carries its own set of conventions, which Drive honors while also staying quite true to Refn’s own aesthetic from the Pusher films.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a cast as strong as this one, with Ryan Gosling channeling Brando again (perhaps a softer, gentler Brando, but with a streak of violence that practically smashes through the screen at times), mumbling charmingly through his scenes with Carey Mulligan and not letting anyone else get away with anything. Mulligan is not perhaps given enough to do, but does well with what she has. The not-quite-love story is perhaps the weak part of the film, and tends to overuse the slow-motion a bit for less of a purpose than I’d like, but it does contrast so nicely with the more brutal parts of the film that I kind of give it a pass. Christina Hendricks is also underused but makes her mark. Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks are both fantastic in their parts, blending a facade of light-hearted banter with the menace they ultimately represent perfectly – and doing it all with a small but well-used amount of screen time. Even though the film really only has about eight people in it, the cast manages to walk that line between individuals and archetypes quite well, lending an epic quality to what is a relatively simple double-crossing story. I’m guessing the blending of tones won’t work for everyone, but in a summer of event-driven comic book movies, Drive‘s slow-burn approach and attention to detail is more than welcome.

FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]

Director Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive's main character does not have a name, he is simply known as the "Driver" (Ryan Gosling). A stuntman by trade, as well as a mechanic, Driver moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals. The opening of the film highlights such, as Driver is on the phone with a new client explaining the methods in which he works. He gives you a five-minute window, within this five-minute window he is yours, any time after or before and you are on your own. It is in your best interest then to get the job done in five minutes or less because there is no better getaway driver than Driver.

Drive is not actually a film about driving, or the reckless pursuits of a moonlighting criminal getaway driver. At the heart of the story is a romance, between Driver and a married mother, Irene (Carey Mulligan), whose husband has recently been released from prison. Refn does not fall towards the melodramatic side of this romance, he avoids such a pitfall. Instead Drive is a film motivated by love wrapped up in a tension filled thriller that never ceases to grab the viewer by the throat at every turn of the wheel, passionate kiss in an elevator, or blast of a shotgun.

Drive is every part a tragic romance, but do not let that have you believing the movie is soft. The film is incredibly rough and raw. The edges are frayed, morals questionable, and through creative filmmaking devices it is brilliant in its depravity. The performances by Gosling and Mulligan are exceptional, and even the overabundance of Gosling's forlorn staring and furrowed brow do not make the film tread towards b-movie acting campiness. Drive is incredibly serious, even when it makes you giggle at just how serious it makes itself out to be. It even includes an homage to Michael Myers near the end, and Gosling splattered with blood without ever having flinched. Drive is not a movie you watch, it is a movie you experience.

In a film with very little dialogue between the main characters Director Nicolas Winding Refn manages to convey every ounce of emotion through his incredible direction of the actors, as well as his hand in the vision of the film on screen via cinematography, editing, and the soundtrack.

Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Irene (Carey Mulligan) are neighbors who become friends out of an unlikely circumstance. As a certified loner Driver is not one for company, or conversation. When he meets Irene and her son his silent demeanor does not change but the amount of chemistry between the two characters and depth of emotion they portray on screen when together, in silence, says more than any line of dialogue ever could. Refn's direction of these fine actors elevates the dialogue lacking scenes to exponential heights as every movement of their hands, look in their eyes, glance at one another or away, gives off an illumination of conflicting passion and forbidden entanglements. Combining this with a soundtrack that exemplifies the anxiety, the fear of love, and emotional highs and lows of their situation makes every scene between the two in Drive a lesson in creating magnetism on screen.

When Refn handles the "other" part of the film, the gritty violence of a robbery gone wrong he does so with panache. The driving sequences use cinematography to the fullest extent, emphasizing the cool and calm movements of Driver behind the wheel as chaos erupts around him. When violent episodes strike the viewer, more often than not out of nowhere, it is a visual assault through the framing of the lens or sound effects. Never has watching someone get their head kicked in, to the point of the skull shattering, been so exhilarating and offensive at the same time--and the action takes place off-screen. Nicolas Winding Refn has found his stride with Drive after previous films such as Valhalla Rising and Bronson fell too far to the artistic, avante-garde, or self-absorbed. Drive balances the artistic with mainstream appeal leaving a viewer anticipating what this visionary director will create next.

For a film titled Drive there is not a great deal of driving that goes on in terms of the action. Driver (Ryan Gosling) does drive, and drive very well, to the point of leaving the viewer breathless from the tension created when the stakes of the getaway are high. Drive is more about the impact of the few, then the onslaught of many action scenes. The first half of the film is the build-up, where the romantic entanglements bloom and the pieces are laid out for what will erupt into a violent spectacle between Driver and the local mobsters Nino (Ron Perlman) and Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks). As well as a not-to-be-forgotten scene with Christina Hendricks' Blanche that will shock you out of your seat with its gratuitousness. Drive is a thrill to watch, and as the momentum grows with every minute at a tepid pace it only makes the payoff greater when action explodes on the screen; especially when you do not see it coming.

Review: Drive | Clothes on Film Simon Kinnear

Drive Review: I'm Going Where the Road Won't Dare | Pajiba ... Daniel Carlson

CANNES REVIEW: Ryan Gosling Owns the Road in Drive Stephanie Zacharek at Cannes from Movieline, May 20, 2011, also seen here: Movieline [Stephanie Zacharek]

Drive : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jamie S. Rich

Review : Drive Matthew Thrift from Cinephile

Drive reviewed: Ryan Gosling's minimalist car-chase movie is - Slate Dana Stevens

Drive | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jaime N. Christley

Ryan Gosling at the Wheel in the Retro Thrill Ride ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Movie Buzzers [Alex DiGiovanna]

Screen Rant [Kofi Outlaw]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Cannes

Moving Pictures Magazine [Aaron Hillis] at Cannes

Fourth Row Center: Film Writings by Jason Bailey: In Theaters: "Drive"

HeyUGuys [Emma Thrower]

Gordon and the Whale [Chase Whale] at Cannes

Drive | Happy, Happy | I Don't Know How She ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]

Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron

DRIVE - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]

David Edelstein on 'Drive' and 'I Don't Know ... - New York Magazine David Edelstein

Drive Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily, May 20, 2011

Twitch [Scott Weinberg]

Drive (2011) : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster

Cinema Blend [Eric Eisenberg]

advancescreenings.com [Matthew Fong]

EricDSnider.com [Eric D. Snider]

CANNES REVIEW | With “Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn Puts Ryan Gosling in the Fast Lane Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 20, 2011

Cannes '11, day nine: The two most entertaining films in Competition, and neither one is directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 20, 2011

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 19, 2011

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day 10 – Drive, The Day He Arrives, & This Must Be the Place Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 20, 2011, aklso here: The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]

Virtual Neon [Damon Wise]

The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]

Twitch [Ryland Aldrich]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]

Critics At Large: Out of Gas: Drive Shlomo Schwartzberg

The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]

8th-Circuit [Musashi Schroeder]

Boxoffice Magazine [Pete Hammond]

Jeffrey M. Anderson: Quick Review: Drive

the m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]

Digital Spy [Simon Reynolds - Cannes 2011]

Quickflix [Simon Miraudo]

SBS Film [Fiona Williams] at Cannes

Cannes Film Festival 2011 – Day 9: Drive Alex Billington at Cannes from First Showing, May 20, 2011, also seen here: FirstShowing.net Cannes 2011 [Alex Billington]

Cannes Film Festival 2011 – Day 9: Drive Adam Woodward at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 20, 2011

Melissa Anderson on day ten of the 64th Cannes Film Festival ArtForum, May 20, 2011

Simon Abrams at Cannes from L magazine, May 20, 2011

Sean Penn Leads a Fast Five Films for Friday Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 20, 2011

Cannes 2011. Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 20, 2011

Nicolas Winding Refn: 'Film-making is a fetish' Catherine Shoard interviews the director from The Guardian, September 8, 2011

Tonight at the Movies [John C. Clark] also an interview by Morgan Rojas September 13, 2011: Read our interview with Ryan Gosling

Nicolas Winding Refn Scott Tobias interview from The Onion A.V. Club, September 15, 2011

Ryan Gosling Chris Kompanek interview from The Onion A.V. Club, September 16, 2011

Drive: Cannes 2011 Review Todd McCarthy at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2011, including a brief interview with the director by Gregg Kilday here: CANNES 2011 Q&A: 'Drive' Director Nicolas Winding Refn

Peter Debruge at Cannes from Variety, also seen here: Variety [Peter Debruge]

Drive Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London

Cannes 2011 review: Drive Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 20, 2011, also seen here: The Guardian at Cannes 2011 (Xan Brooks)

Drive's supporting actors grab the whee Danny Leigh from The Guardian, September 16, 2011

The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

Drive - Boston.com Wesley Morris from The Boston Phoenix

Critic Review for Drive on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday

Drive - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

'Drive' Movie review by Kenneth Turan. -- latimes.com

James Sallis' noir outlook in 'The Killer Is Dying' and 'Drive' - latimes ... Scott Martell from The LA Times, August 7, 2011

Drive :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

'Drive,' With Ryan Gosling - Review - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott, September 15, 2011

ArtsBeat Blog: Cannes Q. and A.: Driving in a Noir L.A. Dennis Lim interviews Refn and Gosling at Cannes from The New York Times, May 22, 2011

A Heartthrob Finds His Tough-Guy Side Dennis Lim interviews Ryan Gosling from The New York Times, September 14, 2011

Johnny Jewel on mixing the soundtrack for 'Drive' Ryan Adams from Awards Daily, September 19, 2011

Bookslut | Drive by James Sallis Book review by Brian M. Dunn from Bookslut, November 2006

Mystery Ink: Sallis, James - Drive (2005) David J. Montgomery book review from Mystery Ink

James Sallis : Drive : Book Review Mary Whipple book review from Mostly Fiction

The Best Reviews: James Sallis, Drive Review Harriet Klausner book review from The Best Reviews

The James Sallis Web Pages

James Sallis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ONLY GOD FORGIVES C+ 79

Denmark France Thailand USA Sweden (90 mi) 2013 Official site [France]

An overly somber style over substance film, where except for the excessively violent subject matter, one might think this is a Wong Kar-wai film, as the lush visuals combined with the highly eclectic musical soundtrack written by Cliff Martinez add a hypnotic, near surreal color palette. Stylishly impressive, set in the dreamy underworld of Bangkok, Thailand, but the characters all feel like they’re sleepwalking through their roles, not unlike Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2009), a director singled out in the credits by Refn, stuck in a netherworld purgatory waiting to be judged by a martial arts policeman named Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), dressed out of uniform in loosely fitting and comfortable clothing, who like a spaghetti western Avenging Angel or God, restores order through brutal punishments, bordering on torture porn, but his judgment comes swift and decisive instead of inflicting prolonged agony. Afterwards, in perhaps the most surreal moments in the film, Chang sings karaoke while his fellow cops sit around in uniform to listen. While the surface effects can be near spectacular, as the composition of each shot couldn’t be more remarkable, along with an edgy use of lighting and a dazzling color scheme, shot by cinematographer Larry Smith who worked on three Kubrick films, recreating the spooky element of surprise in the long hallways shots of the Overlook Hotel, but there’s little to no interior involvement, where the viewer is never connected emotionally to anything onscreen. The dialogue is so campy during some of the most violent showdowns that it borders on the ridiculous, adding an element of the absurd to the already over-the-top visualizations, making this a midnight run cult film at the time of its initial release. Refn also dedicates this film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a cult figure whose films depict picturesque horrors and humiliations, where Peter Schjedahl in his New York Times review calls EL TOPO (1970) “a violent surreal fantasy, a work of fabulous but probably deranged imagination.” Jodorowski himself is quoted as saying, “Everyday life is surrealistic, made of miracles, weird and inexplicable events. There is no borderline between reality and magic.” All of which means this was meant to be a head-scratcher, something of a mindfuck of a movie, where the Argento-like atmosphere of menacing doom defines the film.

Ryan Gosling is Julian, who along with his brother Billy (Tom Burke), run a Thai kickboxing club, which we learn later is just a front for a major drug operation. Julian’s demeanor is so calm and understated that he barely utters more than a sentence or two throughout the entire film, where he doesn’t act so much as sulk, but like Chang, he’s more of a presence than an actual character. When his brother inexplicably goes berserk, raping and killing an underage prostitute, leaving her lying in a pool of her own blood, the sickening aspect is so acute that the regular cops turn to Chang, something of a specialized expert only called upon in the most hideous crimes, where his unique method renders immediate judgment, with no arrest, no trial, and no imprisonment, as if he’s not really a part of the human condition, but an elevated force to contend with, seemingly drawing upon supernatural powers. Except for his lightning quick martial arts strikes, he does everything else in a Zen-like calm, in near slow motion, as if he’s hovering over the consciousness of these criminal suspects with their fates in his hands, outraged at hearing their pathetic, self-justifying defenses, demanding that they admit to their crimes, enacting a savagely vicious arm mutilation when they don’t answer swiftly enough. In this way, the act of justice is decisively rendered and remains permanent, not some idealized concept. When Chang allows the girl’s father to take his revenge upon Billy, it’s as if the world turns upside down. Kristin Scott Thomas arrives on the scene in an outrageously over-the-top performance as the diabolical mother mourning the death of her firstborn, still fuming and in a state of rage that Julian hasn’t exacted revenge for his brother’s murder, re-establishing her iron-like control over the drug operations, and ordering Julian around as if he was still an insolent child. The scene of the film is a formal dinner sequence between mother and son, where Julian is joined by Mai (Rhatha Phongam), a prostitute pretending to be his steady girlfriend, where the vile flamboyance of the mother turns this into a classic scene and one of the memorable highlights of the year, a uniquely horrific and thoroughly embarrassing moment where Scott Thomas becomes a dragon lady that turns belittling and malicious humiliation of her son and his hooker girlfriend into an artform, initiating an assault of crude language so debasing that she’s a contender for the most evil mother in screen history, something of a parallel to the Albert Brooks character in Refn’s previous film Drive (2011).

Thematically, a film this very much resembles is Taxi Driver (1976), another avenging angel film where Chang has to literally clean up the scum and garbage on the streets, holding the same contempt for moral rot and decay as Travis Bickle, using many of the same unorthodox methods as well, creating an eternal bloodbath as human salvation. But Scorsese’s film is deeply rooted in an incendiary, character driven performance, something altogether missing here, as outside of the commanding performance of Scott Thomas, the rest may as well be zombies or the walking dead. With each successive shot so perfectly rendered, Refn uses the photograph-like composition to advance each scene, where except for the violent action sequences, much of this film is a picture of stillness, an induced calm, like an oasis on the horizon, but something of an illusion covering up the internal turmoil hidden within. The sins of the world are covered in a kind of toxic moral laziness, while Chang’s job is to root out each rotting soul one by one. Scott Thomas blames Chang for allowing her son to be murdered, completely overlooking Billy’s own wretched acts, and sets into motion a series of blistering assaults on the police designed to remove Chang from the picture, but it’s as if he’s from a different realm, inscrutable and untouchable, surviving every attempt, until ultimately Chang finds Julian. In exaggerated spaghetti western fashion, the two head for the ultimate showdown playing out in Julian’s own boxing ring, now nearly deserted except for a few miscellaneous cops, Mai, and Julian’s mother. In the emptiness of the room, Julian proves no match, as his opponent is a phantom, a demented godlike figure with a bloodthirsty appetite for inflicting pain, literally pulverizing his victims before walking away unscathed, leaving behind a grim and overly solemn world that resembles a morgue. The film lacks the energy and entertaining appeal of any Bruce Lee movie, but overwhelms with its superb production design, ultimately feeling like an empty experience that is all surface visuals with little more to offer. Lacking the well-crafted characterization of Sergio Leone, this feels more like a cartoonish homage to the macho revenge genre, where the Tarantino-ish, overly stylish bloodletting continues, but it all feels so meaningless after awhile, becoming a one note film that only grows more tiresome.

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

If nothing else, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn is a master of lighting, or at least he employs someone that is a master of lighting. Though his composition has no consideration for the bigger picture or trajectory, existing as fragmented portraitures constituting a desultory and shallow hodgepodge of commercial images, each shot has a distinct mood, whether saturated in deep shadows or blood reds, distinguishing planes and considers the entire backdrop, much like a spread in Vanity Fair.

This aesthetic focus in his latest, and most unintentionally hilarious, bout of male posturing, Only God Forgives, is the only distinction or visual indicator of progression since his similarly indulgent and childish Valhalla Rising, wherein a bunch of men painted themselves red and grunted in a swamp for two hours. It's very much like watching a protracted perfume commercial, with Ryan Gosling embodying the image of a pouty, apathetic model with perfect aplomb, standing around sulking in rural Thai locales, boxing rings and, more often, purgatory, as fashioned by Gucci.

This deep red, paisley underworld is posited as his psychological prison. Julian (Gosling) stares blankly at walls, contemplating the death of his child rapist/murderer brother, Billy (Thom Burke). He, unlike everyone else in the movie, doesn't act on vengeful impulses, realizing that the man who killed his brother did so as a logical response to the brutal slaughter of his underage daughter. Julian's drug-dealing criminal mastermind mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), doesn't have the same degree of empathy, suggesting that her son is a bit of a pussy, noting that his inferior penis size is the likely culprit.

This conversation, wherein Julian's mother calls his hooker girlfriend a "cum-dumpster" and makes visible O-faces when talking about her son's peen, is the only interesting thing going on in the movie. For the majority, it's little more than extended, overly padded slow motion takes of various characters modeling for the camera while smoking or awaiting torture. Intermittently, Thai karaoke arises after someone is dismembered, or nailed to a chair and stabbed in the eye, but the duration of the runtime is spent on hollow, well-lit images that signify nothing, leaving a great deal of time to look at Gosling's necklace or the props sitting in the background of various sets.

The puerile rendering of vengeance as a logical progression of the human experience, along with the amusingly on-the-nose handling of oedipal impulses — something made ridiculously literal when Julian finally returns to his conceptual origin — leave little to contemplate. Refn's self-important drama, scoring everything with a rumbling severity while Gosling sulks about the set, doing the same try-hard, stoic wanker routine he crapped out for Drive, is so desperate for a meaning that doesn't exist that it's hard not to wonder if this entire ordeal isn't just an elaborate joke.

Worse is that after the flimsy narrative and pretentious handling of youthful male angst plays out with the requisite explicit violence and inherent misogyny implicit in works like this, Refn throws up a title card referencing Alejandro Jodorowsky, essentially revelling in his own smug satisfaction, suggesting that western esotericism somehow influenced this work. On the surface, it may have, which is likely the only reason the poster for this film doesn't feature a perfume bottle and the title, "Anguish" by Refn.

Sadly, this wasteful work of desperate affectedness has all the depth of a photo shoot on America's Next Top Model. The title spells out exactly what the film has to offer and any contemplation beyond that runs only as deep as Gosling's anguished glare.

If only he'd learned how to smize from Tyra Banks, this could have been brilliant.

Slant Magagazine [Jesse Cataldo]

After scoring an unlikely success with 2011’s “Drive,” director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Ryan Gosling delve even deeper into the darkness of cinema with “Only God Forgives,” an eye-crossingly violent mood piece on the futility of revenge. Considering the relative mass appeal of their previous work, “Only God Forgives” is decidedly specialized filmmaking for adventurous audiences blessed with paint-drying patience. It’s monumentally rough stuff with a glacial pace, though its surreal execution grows quite interesting the longer Refn sticks to the unknown and the absurd, making the effort more performance art in design than aggressively genre-minded.

In Bangkok, drug-dealing lowlife Billy (Tom Burke) has raped and killed a 16-year-old prostitute, disgusting icy police captain Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), who demands the father of the girl murder Billy as atonement. Instead of stopping the violence, Billy’s death spurs brother Julian (Ryan Gosling) into action, take time away from his underworld pursuits and kickboxing gym duties to plan out revenge. Flying into town is Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), Billy and Julian’s monster of a mother, who demands bloodshed for the loss of her favorite son. However, as plans are made to wipe out those responsible, Chang transforms himself into a vicious weapon, tracking Julian’s progress and defending himself from crude assassination attempts. Growing aware that this situation won’t be resolved peacefully, Julian seeks comfort in the company of Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam), a young dancer who tempts the bruiser in his dreams, symbolizing the stability he will never possess.

“Only God Forgives” is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky (though music cues from David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” could easily match the footage), the famed helmer of “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” and a filmmaker once committed to making avant-garde pictures of strange beauty and disturbing horror. The influence on Refn is unmistakable, with “Only God Forgives” moving mysteriously from start to finish, bathed in style and subconscious submission, making a viewing less about decoding puzzles and more about survival, keeping up with the director’s impressive concentration on surrealism. It’s a movie of insanity, but executed in manner that lulls the viewer into the folds of madness, studying horrors and poses one beat at a time, supported by a sublime synth score from Cliff Martinez, which gifts the film a crisp pulse of tension when Refn would rather stare off into the distance, enjoying the protracted view.

Events take their time to unfold here, as much of “Only God Forgives” is left to linger, attempting to hypnotize the audience with nuclear shades of red and uncommon visions. The picture extends into dreamscape territory as well, with Julian imagining sexualized experiences with Mai that he doesn’t participate in, while Chang’s sword-wielding path of Thai justice is photographed with an eye toward abstraction, blurring the line of reality as the lead character comes to realize the emptiness of his soul. This is vivid, uncompromising work, more in tune with Refn’s bizarre LSD tab “Valhalla Rising” than the comforting L.A. noir of “Drive,” requiring colossal patience from the viewer to navigate the helmer’s interests, which also include Chang’s cleansing visits to a karaoke bar, where the stone-faced one pours his heart into song, emphasizing more of a Lynchian curve to the effort than a Jodorowsky thumbprint.

Performances aren’t the primary focus of the picture, with Gosling a vague figure here, not a character. With only a handful of lines to learn, the actor delivers a convincing spaced-out quality with mournful undertones, keeping Julian open for interpretation without the benefit of verbal communication. Pansringarm also keeps to a poker face, though Chang is more machine than man, prowling around the frame in a ceremonial fashion before he kills and maims in a most vivid manner. The red meat of “Only God Forgives” is found with Thomas, who plays an absolutely vicious woman. Dressed as a Real Housewife, Crystal is a manipulative, profane mother with incestual interests and a drug empire to run. Thomas is broad but necessarily so, adding flavor to a movie that’s more consumed with staring contests than traditional drama. She’s spunky and ghoulish and most welcome in a film that needs the toxicity.

I’m writing positive words about “Only God Forgives,” but don’t consider this a recommendation. To even approach the picture requires a special headspace that allows for directorial indulgence and unspeakable visions of violence (arms are chopped off, eyes are sliced, and bodies are pummeled), including one that finds Julian testing the comfort of the womb again 30+ years after his birth. It’s raw yet reserved, gorgeous to watch, and bizarre in a mostly satisfying manner. Don’t even consider a view unless you’re fully relaxed, prepared to allow Refn’s stylish, surreal vision wash over the screen. Any hesitation will immediately trigger disgust and disbelief.

Only God Forgives | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Water

Back in 2011, Drive’s (TMT Review) appropriation of sleek 80s textures and tropes made Nicolas Winding Refn an exponent of cinematic proto-vaporwave. OK I’m reaching — but he is at least the progeny of 1980s European, big-clean-style-plus-violence filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven. Only God Forgives is, then, arguably his Showgirls, if you just scrape off the arty veneer. It’s got a steady stream of hilariously arch lines, and its archetypal megabitch Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) — a telenovela/Donatella Versace/Baby Jane Hudson hybrid — could inspire a generation of drag queens to start their engines.

“I wanna fuck a fourteen-year-old.”

Drug dealing is the family business and Crystal’s older son has just been murdered in Bangkok — after raping and murdering a teenage prostitute himself — by the prostitute’s dad. Ryan Gosling brings on the pecs and nostrils as Julian, Crystal’s other son, reprising his silent-type-with-a-violent-temper persona from Drive. Crystal liked her dead son way better, but that doesn’t stop her from hugging Julian inappropriately around the buttocks and running an appreciative finger down his tricep. Gosling/Julian looks like the kind of guy that might recommend the hazelnut-encrusted halibut with snap peas special at Lucques; in actuality he is a badass, as evidenced by the small scar in his eyebrow. Mom tasks him with icing the guy that killed his brother, but deep down Julian is a good person and kind of thinks that’s not cool.

“He killed and raped a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“I’m sure he had his reasons.”

Meanwhile Chang, a plainclothes policeman with mystery Asian powers, has somehow gotten involved. He carries a sword on his back and is in the habit of punishing evildoers by chopping off their arms. He, in fact, amputates the beautiful Gosling/Julian arm early on, but it turns out it’s only a dream. Chang is meant to be some kind of God figure, but his sense of justice has all the sensitivity and nuance of a vice-principal in a red state high school.

Indeed, for a film ostensibly about… an awakening to ethical principles (!?), Only God Forgives has little to say beyond “bad people are bad and should be punished,” whether on a character level or in terms of any kind of discourse. It indulges in the banal equation of childhood and innocence: Changs’s daughter specifically is fetishized for her childness, frozen and tiresomely protected in a world of homework and teddy bears. Refn denies children the dignity of an actual identity, of being the selfish, manipulative creatures God intended them to be.

These concerns would be minor if we were dealing with, say, a utilitarian Hong Kong action movie, but Only God Forgives in its presentation and pacing poses as an important-thoughts arthouse-auteur film.

“I’m an entertainer”
“How many cocks have you entertained in that cum dumpster of yours?”

Refn has made a point, in speaking of this film, of saying that good taste is the enemy of creativity, but the film never loses its slight whiff of IKEA. The dialog, as mentioned, is deliciously vulgar and Refn has his characters violate the usual social taboos and do the usual unthinkably bad things (incest — check; raping a minor — check; using the word white people should never use for African Americans — check). But true bad taste takes a personal stand and doesn’t give a shit. Refn just gets a bourgeois kick out of caricaturing the underclass.

Let us compare, for example, the final act of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, in which he indulges in baldly melodramatic devices to make us cry. That was bad taste used with intention — to stupidly manipulate our emotions — using the specifically American taste for bad taste to drive home the stupidity of our taste for the death penalty and our simplistic ideas of right and wrong. If von Trier’s bad taste had a trace of quotation marks around it, it was at least wielded in the first person. You could also argue that early John Waters movies did the kind of caricaturing Refn does here, but Waters’s characters were rooted in a genuine outsider consciousness; his desire to shock came from a snarling disdain for the middle class and the middlebrow. Refn’s characters feel calculated to shock; they invite ridicule; they feel built from the outside in.

“I’ll take care of the yellow nigger. Now get up and kiss your mother.”

In terms of visual style, this is an impressive film. The production design by Beth Mickle is on the whole wonderfully baroque, if at times it trawls too close to Bond-movie asiaphilia. A nightclub with a huge, framed picture of Michelangelo’s David is particularly inspired. The cinematography by Kubrick collaborator Larry Smith is elegant and polished, favoring Chinese reds, blacks, frosty blues, and greens (it’s Asia, remember?).

The performances are also quite good. Gosling dusts off the menacing stare from Drive, but actually takes it further; at times he’s genuinely terrifying. Visaya Pansringarm as Chang is fine in a profoundly silly role, and shows off some mad martial arts skills. Kristin Scott Thomas, perhaps wisely, makes no attempt to craft a plausible character: Crystal’s dialogue, as written, is cranked up to 10 throughout, so she just lets it rip. She’s too good an actress to fully believe what she’s saying, and sometimes that reads in her eyes, but she knows Refn has handed her line after line of grindhouse movie gold and she puts some scary cougar fangs into her delivery.

Funniest line in the movie: in an earnest, romantic moment, Julian tells the prostitute he’s kind of in love with, “I want you to meet my mother.” You have to wonder what Only God Forgives would have looked like if it were allowed to be the demented comedy it wants to be. Instead, Refn tries very hard to generate gravitas, with all the fanfare of a butler lifting the domed cover of a silver platter to reveal a bowl of Spicy Nacho Doritos.

Jessica Kiang at Cannes from The Playlist

Cannes: Ryan Gosling's new movie draws the boo-birds - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Only God Forgives: Gosling and Refn Re-Team for ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Alt Film Guide [Timothy Cogshell]

Wesley Morris at Cannes from Grantland

Cannes 2013. Hollow Cinema: Nicolas Winding Refn's "Only God Forgives" Adam Cook from Mubi

Sluggish Days at Cannes Richard Porton at Cannes from The Daily Beast

Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from Press Play

Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hit Fix

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"Only God Forgives" Review: Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan - Pajiba Caspar Salmon

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Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE

Only God Forgives Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily

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Cannes Roundtable Two | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln ... Film Comment

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Anthony Lane: “Pacific Rim,” “Only God Forgives ... - The New Yorker Grim Tidings, by Anthony Lane

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Ryland Aldrich at Cannes from Twitch

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Domenico La Porta at Cannes from Cineuropa

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Wendy Mitchell interviews Refn from Screendaily, May 13, 2013

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Only God Forgives's Nicolas Winding Refn and Vithaya Pansringarm: 'I don't like anything that hurts' - video interview Henry Barnes video interview at Cannes, May 23, 2013 (2:56)

Only God Forgives Director Nicolas Winding Refn on Getting Booed at Cannes Jada Yuan interviews Refn from The Vulture, May 24, 2013, also seen here: Jada Yuan

Nicolas Winding Refn: I am a pornographer Andrew Anthony interview from The Observer, July 13, 2013

Owen Gleiberman at Cannes from Entertainment Weekly

Only God Forgives Review - Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

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Ryan Gosling: Only God Forgives, but why does the whole world still worship? The Guardian, April 19, 2013

Cannes 2013: Only God Forgives – first look review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 22, 2013, also seen here: Peter Bradshaw

Only God Forgives: Kristin Scott Thomas and other big-screen Barbies from hell Anne Billson from The Guardian, May 30, 2013

Robbie Collin at Cannes from The Telegraph

JapanCinema.net

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Movie review: 'Only God Forgives' needs to be saved from itself ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

'Only God Forgives' roughed up in reviews Oliver Gettell from The LA Times

Steven Zeitchik Cannes: 6 Things to know about Ryan Gosling's 'Only God Forgives,' by Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times

Am I Blue?: Cannes Report, May 22 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres

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Only God Forgives - Movies - The New York Times Stephen Holden

THE NEON DEMON

France Denmark USA (118 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site

PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]

Since gaining critical acclaim with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn seems to have given up telling stories, preferring to focus on images and music, rather than stories. While developing haunting visuals and atmospheres have always been his forte, as the glorious and mystical Valhalla Rising can attest, his previous movie Only God forgives didn’t have much to offer, besides glossy images and gratuitous violence. With The Neon Demon, he follows this trend but shows that a movie’s apparent superficiality can be used to reflect the theme it tackles – in this case, portraying cruelty in the Fashion industry.

Supported by Cliff Martinez’s dark electro soundtrack, The Neon Demon delivers a series of conceptual sequences that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern art museum. The glossy cinematography mirrors the look of luxurious fashion images, creating a surreal environment close to Mr Winding Refn’s own fashion commercials. With the director being familiar with this world, we could have expected something more than this critique of Fashion’s well-known superficiality. Models are depicted as competitive and ferocious dehumanized beings, the script throwing vampirism and cannibalism as easy metaphors to symbolize this. The movie follows a young and innocent model’s journey in Los Angeles, her rise leading to her demise. This is another opportunity for Mr. Winding Refn to indulge in what he does best, creating beautiful, disturbing and almost grotesque violent sequences.

Whether is a genius author or just a pretentious and narcissistic filmmaker, Mr. Winding Refn’s creates a blurry work that can either be seen as a daring artistic experiment or as a vain effort. And this ambivalence is what makes it worth a trip to the movie theater: both fascinating and repulsive, The Neon Demon is a guilty pleasure that you can’t resist.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kian Bergstrom

The demongod Zagreus (Elle Fanning) appears one day in Los Angeles. She is the child of the king of the gods and the wife of death and glows infectiously with a strange and terrible witchcraft. The queen of the gods (Christina Hendricks) immediately recognizes that Zagreus has been chosen as the heir of Zeus and sets out first to control her, then to orchestrate her destruction. To protect the cosmic order, she dispatches three Titans in disguise as Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist, and Gigi (Bella Heathote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), a pair of fashion models. Together the three attempt first to manipulate, then to defeat, and finally to possess Zagreus' power, but find themselves falling deeper under her contagious influence, growing more desperate for her presence, more covetous of her beauty, more ravenous for her body. Lost within her aura, the world begins to swirl out of control, intoxicated by her, haunted by her impossible desirability. Animals invade the land in search of her. The dead grapple halfway back to life. The living begin to waste away into vampirism. But while the Titans have lost themselves, they have not lost their mission. They know the only force that can contain Zagreus' wizardry is her own reflection and so they build a cage of silver and glass around her. Shards cut her. Her face is thrown back at her again and again. She grows disoriented, confused, and her magic falters for a moment, allowing the Titans to strike. Some Orphic myths tell us that Zagreus was seized by the Titans under Hera's command and dismembered, that the Titans consumed every part of the god but the heart. They tell us that Zeus took revenge upon the Titans by burning them alive with his mighty thunderbolt, that he took his child's heart and placed it inside the womb of Semele, that there it took seed and, nourished by her human body, came back to life, and that when she gave birth to the resurrected god Zeus renamed him Dionysus. Refn's version gives us a darker variation on that ending, for his Neon Demon, a god of communicated frenzy, of painful ecstasies, of beauties to excess that drive us wild, is a malevolence within the world that can never be cleansed away, that like an addiction will alter everyone who comes within its horizon, will place them under its thrall. One of the master stylists of today's post-filmic motion pictures, Refn's images are as clean as his characters are fetid, are as sterile as his material is filthy, creating a world of internal contradiction, a world exploding in replication, in falseness, in artificial poses, artificial clothing, and artificial relationships that is destroyed by the bloodshed and omophagia his teenage monster unleashes into it. With ONLY GOD FORGIVES and DRIVE, Refn began exploring the continued relevance of mythological narrative structures and finding new and urgent meaning in them to help us understand the corruption that underlies modern masculinity and the pervasive misogyny of visual entertainments. In THE NEON DEMON, his finest film to date, he reaches new extremes of precision and expertly subtle dissection.

The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: iNFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Jesse (Elle Fanning) is a young, aspiring model who has just moved to Los Angeles with no parents and little money. She's told by her contemporaries, all of whom have had Botox, plastic surgery, and body-work done to resemble human Barbie dolls more-so than women in their early twenties, that nobody likes the way they look and everyone wants to change something about themselves in order to either be accepted or self-confident. Jesse is the outlier amongst her peers because she doesn't possess the will, desire, or need to change anything about her image; when she walks into a room, judges and photographers quietly shift their eyes to her direction and notice her physical beauty that practically radiates off of her wavy blonde hair and embodied innocence. She's beautiful.

It isn't long before Jesse becomes involved in a modeling agency all while living in a rundown little motel run by a sleazy man, played by Keanu Reeves, who has a scene-stealing sequence where he collects money for damages done to Jesse's room from a friend and proclaims that there is a fourteen-year-old girl who is staying in a specific room. "Real Lolita s***," he tells him, as his eyes widen and his smirk grows with devilish intent. Meanwhile, Jesse winds up becoming the envy of fellow models (Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote). Jesse's only friend through this all is a young makeup artist named Ruby (Jena Malone), who spends the bulk of her time applying makeup onto corpses in a morgue she works in.

Consider the sequence where Ruby carefully applies makeup to a dead woman and gently adjusts her face in order for her to smile; in another scene, she makes love to a dead man on a cold, metal table, in a scene that's oddly one of the most romantic of the year. It's a scene that takes note of the human desire to beautify the ugly or the imperfect; a constant desire not only to soften but desensitize us not only to value beauty but to accept it as normative and everything else as abnormal.

The same thing can be said with Jesse. Here's this young girl who is viewed as perfect by everyone, so much so that it takes almost no preparation or makeup to get her ready for the day's shoot, while her contemporaries spend hours in makeup chairs and dressing rooms exhausting themselves to look, play, and feel the part. Jesse's natural beauty is something that is unheard of; not only does she not need any kind of work done, she knows it too, and she's caught in the middle of an industry that predicates itself upon fixing or mending imperfections upon identifying them. Jesse is the demon in the rough.

If this sounds less like a structured review and more like messy, disorganized praise, that's because it is. Nicholas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon is a mesmerizing film with subtext to match its heavily aestheticized, original beauty. It's a rare, sensual, neon-soaked confection that combines blunt (the cougar, triangular prisms) and subtle (food, sex, and dessert) symbology with that of amazing and eye-popping cinematography by Natasha Braier to create a world one could mistake for being a dystopian land rather than reality.

The Neon Demon almost hypnotizes the viewer in the way it uses sound, light, and beauty to appeal to our most basic, carnal senses, and snaps its fingers on occasion for us to try and decipher and decode a lot of its meanings. I'll be honest and admit I find less meaning in the blunt symbolism as I do the more lower-key subtext. The film is less a critique on the benefits the patriarchy reaps as young women figuratively and literally kill themselves to be accepted and to feel beautiful as it is a look at the way women themselves operate in this world. It's a look at the need for beauty in all facets, as well as it is a harrowing and downright grotesque showcase for what happens when beauty can't be matched or duplicated.

This is the kind of film that will divide audiences, even before the explosive and unforgettable climax, as many great movies often do. Some will claim it's too slow, others will clam it's too monotone, and others will claim its non-eventful. There's not much to say about that other than the fact that The Neon Demon bears some of the strongest filmmaking aesthetics of the year, including cinematography, sound design, and of course, the incredible soundtrack that both matches and creates the film's ambience marvelously. This is the rare film that has everything it needs to not only succeed but to etch itself into that rare class of unforgettable films, let alone experiences.

The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]

The problem in trying to critically assess Nicolas Winding Refn’s putrid atrocity of a film The Neon Demon is that regardless how much outrage is thrown at it, Winding Refn invariably wins, since that’s exactly what he’s after. The director has set out to make the most repellently misogynistic film imaginable, yet he’s disguised it as a postmodern feminist satire. By shattering every possible taboo, the film is supposed to be an attack against the very thing it represents. Really, though, any semblance of commentary is simply a posture for Winding Refn to cover his ass. This isn’t a case of épater les bourgeois, nor is The Neon Demon qualitatively comparable to the works of Paul Verhoeven or Harmony Korine – it’s much, much too stupid for that.

Set in Los Angeles, that signifier city for all things superficial, The Neon Demon aspires to be a sort of Faustian tale of the fashion world. 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) is the new girl in town, fresh from Georgia and dreaming to make it as a model. As everyone repeats ad nauseam, she’s incredibly beautiful. More importantly, hers is a natural beauty, unlike the plastically enhanced perfection of her peers who reel with murderous envy as she threatens to steal their spotlight.

After being ushered into the fashion industry by the Mephistophelian make-up artist Ruby (Jena Malone), Jesse seals her fate through the first catwalk show. As she steps onto the runway, her damnation contract appears in the form of four floating neon triangles linked together to form one bigger triangle. In the last few years, triangles have emerged as meaningless symbols of hipster cool, so it follows that four of them will quadruple the cool factor. (The Sierpinski triangle would seem to offer infinite potential for coolness, but Winding Refn shows some uncharacteristic restraint in this case.)

From the get-go, The Neon Demon pushes objectification to new extremes, presenting every female character – except maybe Ruby – as a sentient mannequin. Once Jesse sells her soul about two-thirds of the way in, however, that’s when Winding Refn really starts getting his rocks off. (Spoiler-averse readers wishing to relish the full impact of this film’s invention will want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) Highlights include various types of rape, the most creative of which involves the coerced blow job of a knife; a sequence in which Ruby lies in child-giving position and the camera slowly tracks towards her loins as they expel a torrent of blood à la The Shining’s elevators; and another that intercuts between Jesse masturbating and Ruby molesting a model’s naked corpse.

Yet, for all his zeal to offend, Winding Refn is nonetheless a circumspect provocateur. In addition to having a primarily female cast, The Neon Demon also has a female DP (Natasha Braier), and while the director retains sole story credit, he made sure to co-write his script with two women, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham. Just to be really safe, the final pre-credits image features a caption dedicating the film to his wife, the actress and filmmaker Liv Corfixen.

All these precautions notwithstanding, there is one crucial element that actually could have exonerated the film but is nowhere to be found: irony. Prior to its premiere, The Neon Demon was described as a take on the giallo, the trashily ultraviolent horror genre once practiced by the likes of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Misogyny was, of course, a central aspect of most giallos, but Italy at the time – the 1960s through to the 1990s – was not exactly a bastion of any type of equality. Using genre as a justification would be like making a virulently racist film and excusing it as a remake of The Birth of a Nation. In any case, Winding Refn appropriated the gore and revolting sexual politics but left out all of the fun. Apart from a few exaggeratedly stilted lines, most of them courtesy of a woefully miscast Keanu Reeves as a motel-owner-cum-teenage-prostitute-procurer, The Neon Demon is a rigorously unsmiling and self-important film.

Rather than the cheap kitsch of giallo, The Neon Demon‘s aesthetics – all glossy, clinically polished images and deep, starkly contrasted neon colors – seem drawn from the films of Matthew Barney and Gaspar Noé, arch-provocateurs hardly known for their nuance who are nevertheless made to look like Ozu and Bresson when juxtaposed with Winding Refn. The Neon Demon ostensibly puts forward a censure of contemporary society’s superficial beauty standards as propagated by the media, and yet any still from the film would be right at home in the pages of Vogue — perhaps the film does contain some irony after all. Everything is pure surface and, while reliably excellent, Cliff Martinez’s throbbing electronic score doesn’t achieve much by way of compensation.

The most glaring proof of The Neon Demon’s failure is how stultifying it is. Although Only God Forgives’ risible attempt at elevating its sordid narrative through Freudian concepts already demonstrated Winding Refn’s severe intellectual limitations as an artist, Drive did amply prove his potential directorial prowess. The perfectly executed set-pieces that rendered that film such an exhilarating ride are sorely missing here. Instead, The Neon Demon consists of scenes involving minimal camera movement and impassive characters drifting through immaculate compositions that lose all their appeal within the first ten minutes. Thereafter, the viewer is left to stare at a ponderous and incoherently stitched-together succession of vapid images for what feels like an eternity until the carnage starts.

Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

The Neon Demon review: everyone's an object in Nicolas ... - The Verge This time, Refn fetishizes femininity the way his films Drive and Only God Forgives fetishize masculinity, by Tasha Robinson

Girl on girl crimes: “The Neon Demon” makes women look like the real... Nico Lang from Salon, July 3, 2016

'The Neon Demon': Shiny, Unhappy People | New Republic Will Leitch from The New Republic

The Neon Demon - The Playlist Jessica Kiang

Sight & Sound [Catherine Bray] May 20, 2016

Slant Magazine [Sam C. Mac] also seen here: The House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]

The Neon Demon offers sleek and sexy scares with a satirical ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Spectrum Culture [Dominic Griffin]

The Neon Demon :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Michael Snydel

ScreenAnarchy [Jason Gorber]

Oh, the Horror! [Brett Gallman]

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DVDizzy.com [Luke Bonanno]

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Wylie Writes [Trevor Jeffery]

FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]

Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

HellHorror.com [Florita A.]

Georgia Straight [Steve Newton]

Cineuropa.org [Domenico La Porta]

The Neon Demon Angus Wolfe Murray from Eye for Film

Artsforum Magazine [John Arkelian]

The Neon Demon | Chicago Reader JR Jones

Daily | Cannes 2016 | Nicolas Winding Refn's THE NEON DEMON ... David Hudson from Fandor

'The Neon Demon': Cannes Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

'The Neon Demon' Review – Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Variety Owen Gleiberman

The Neon Demon (2016), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun

'Movie blood tastes so good' – on The Neon Demon set with Nicolas ... Danny Leigh from The Guardian

The Neon Demon review: So beautifully arranged ... - The Independent Christopher Hooten

Irish Film Critic [Joseph Tucker]

Telegraph Film [Robbie Collin]

Toronto Film Scene [Will Brownridge]

Examiner-MTTS Lit. [Ty Bru]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Huffington Post [Brandon Judell]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Neon Demon' is a ... - Washington Times ‘The Neon Demon’ is a singularly depraved exploitation film masquerading as art, by Eric Althoff

Charlestown City Paper [T. Meek]

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The Neon Demon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nicolas Winding Refn's hypnotic 'Neon Demon ... - Los Angeles Times Juastin Chang

The Neon Demon Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Simon Abrams

Cannes 2016: "Graduation," "The Neon Demon" | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres

Review: In 'The Neon Demon,' Beauty Masks a Rotting Core - The ... Glenn Kenny from The New York Times, also seen here: The Neon Demon - The New York Times

Nicolas Winding Refn Dissects His Bloody Confection - The New York ... The New York Times

Reggio, Godfrey

KOYAANISQATSI

(87 mi) 1983

A wildly charitable viewer might describe this as an ecological documentary. Less than 90 minutes transport us from the primordial cuteness of the American South-West (a Good Thing) to the squalor of a Manhattan rush hour (a Bad Thing); and in case you still don't get the message, there's plenty of time-lapse photography to make people look like machines, and an apocalyptic score by Philip Glass to tell you off for daring to find visual pleasure in New York's skyline. At once maudlin and doggedly sarcastic, the film gives you the uncomfortable sensation of being condescended to by an idiot; it is, transparently, a product of the advanced technology it purports to despise. The title, by the way, is pilfered from the Hopi tongue and means 'vacuous hippy'.

Koyaanisqatsi Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine, also reviewing POWAQQATSI

Koyaanisqatsi remains the more heartfelt of the Qatsi films though it's not without its structural and theoretical complications. The film's synergy of natural beauty and urban decay contemplates a "life out of balance" yet director Godfrey Reggio is seemingly intoxicated with the very blight he questions. Though he cannot be accused of being an active participant in the destruction he photographs, Reggio nonetheless shoots with a complicity that's noticeably missing from Ron Fricke's far superior Baraka. Fricke's photography for Koyaanisqatsi is a work of mechanical splendor, as is the Philip Glass score. The film's closing title card offers three different interpretations of the word Koyaanisqatsi. Crucial here is the first: "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster." In Koyaanisqatsi, nature and technology collide in aesthetic harmony but Reggio, a self-proclaimed idealist, sees nothing but disaster in this fusion. Rather than contemplate a healthier relationship between these opposing forces, Reggio sees enlightenment only in their complete disunion. Powaqqatsi is every bit as viscerally engaging though less provocative than its predecessor. This National Geographic travel guide through Asia and South America contemplates "life in transformation," the impact of technology on third world nations. After Koyaanisqatsi, the journey feels redundant though Reggio's jabs at consumerism anticipate Naqoyqatsi's more heavy-handed pokes. When Reggio takes Koyaanisqatsi into the housing projects, he finds irony in modern society passively perpetuating the decay of buildings so meticulously carved from nature's resources. The major contradiction here is that Reggio's simulacrum is recorded on celluloid (natural ingredients: nitrating cellulose fibers, nitric and sulfuric acids). He neither acknowledges this contradiction nor does he rebut his hands-off, value-free approach. There's a sense that all would be forgiven had the film closed with celluloid deteriorating into flames as in Michael Snow's Corpus Callosum.

Raging Bull [Vanes Naldi]

I don't want to call Koyaanisqatsi a "film." This is visual poetry, or rather visual AND musical poetry connected to perfection. The "film" starts showing us old Hopi Indian paintings of men and moves to beautiful, astonishing landscape panoramic of natural beauties untouched by man. All these images are so beautiful and quiet in their simplicity; it's a calm feeling, very relaxing. All this simplicity comes off as perfectly balanced and ordered, connecting one thing to the other like a divine act.

The film gradually moves from the beauty of all this to the sheer brutality of machines: the cold, chaotic world of technology and consumerism. This is shockingly brutal in its honesty. The rumbling chaos of the machines created by man is a perfect contrast to the almost godly calmness and tranquillity of nature's creation.

The third part of the film focuses on mankind, not particularly "men." We're shot from a god-like perspective, and everything possible is done to make us look like futile insects dependent to machines and technology. Every facet of our life is guided by and related to machines. From the food we eat, to the way we entertain ourselves, to our work, to the place where we live, EVERYTHING involves machines. The point is man will cause his own demise.

From the moment the first machine is shown on screen, the message is pretty clear. Koyaanisqatsi is Hopi for "life disintegrating" or a way of life that requires a new way of living. We're reminded of the world we created, its brutality and pathetic continuity in contrast to the beauty and amazing balance of the world we used to live in. There's a scene I consider one of the all-time best works of cinematography. It starts with a bird's eye view of New York then zooms out to a satellite view of the city while shots of microchips are intertwined in the picture. It looks very similar, to the point we come to understand we've become like transistors, like ants. We keep mindlessly doing our work without taking into account what we're doing to our planet.

The last part of the film represents what could be considered an Apocalypse, with various explosions such as buildings blowing up. The last shot is both beautiful and brutal at the same time: a rocket is shown exploding in the air and the camera focuses on it until the very last moment, reminding us what could happen if we keep living like this. The attention to detail even in the frantic and chaotic atmosphere is incredible.

The first thing that comes to mind watching this 87 minutes masterpiece is the amazing cinematography, from the beautifully shot first part, portraying earth's natural beauties, to the frantic chaos of the second and third part. The night scenes are amazing, especially when everything speeds up to the point we only see colored lines.

The score by minimalist extraordinaire Philip Glass is simply incredible. The way the camera shoots the fast evolving world, the frantic repetitivity of it, matches perfectly with Glass' redundant and simple tracks. Sometimes the score offers touches of Carmina Burana-like choirs, ominous low-key tones, giving it a poetic feeling. The score is so involving in its simplicity, so effective, so touching, that it adds tremendously to the film. I envy those who saw the film in theaters with the live orchestra because this is as much a musical experience as it is visually.

People say this film has no story, but subliminally, there's a story. There's a gradual progression from nature to machines and eventually to man and what he did to nature. It all comes down to the message of the title itself, Koyaanisqatsi or life disintegrating. Reggio is saying that life needs to be changed for the better.

This not only is the most powerful visual experience I've ever witnessed, but it contains one of the most effective soundtracks ever, amazing cinematography, and incredible sense of timing and pacing. It's also perfect in conveying the need for a change, in giving its final message. Much like what Kubrick did with 2001, the visuals tell much more than the dialogue. When you enter this experience, you become involved in it. Time becomes relative, but you become abstract to it. At times it passes slowly, so slow it makes you wonder how much time you spent watching the same scenes. At times, it's so frantic and chaotic that it completely reverses that feeling.

Koyaanisqatsi is obviously not for everybody because getting the message requires a long attention span, an open mind, and attention to detail. If you don't possess these three qualities you'll probably think it's just a collection of weird shots and want to look elsewhere for "cooler" explosions.

Watching Koyaanisqatsi on a regular TV won't allow you to appreciate it as much as if you can see it on the big screen or on a Widescreen TV in Dolby Digital with the loud speakers guiding you through the film. This is like a poem written with images and sounds, and one of the most memorable experiences in all of cinema.

Collingswood Patch [Robert Castle]

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POWAQQATSI

(97 mi) 1988

Raging Bull [Vanes Naldi]

Like its predecessor Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio's wordless eco-doc is visually stunning, but undermined by a fairly serious flaw. Where Koyaanisqatsi looked at the madness of First World civilisation, and ended up criticising the very technology that enabled the film to be made, Powaqqatsi (Hopi for a parasitic life force) directs the same technology at the Third World. The result is even more dubious than its predecessor. Once again Philip Glass supplies the soundtrack, infiltrated here by choirs and Third World instrumentation; and where Koyaanisqatsi was edited into a progressively steeper climax, this has little sense of rhythmic flow. At best the message is a fairly obvious criticism of First World domination of the Third, and at worst a hippy celebration of the Dignity of Labour.

Powaqqatsi is not a story, it's the collective impact of the images that makes a statement on the audience . . . it's people and culture and tradition, not pretty images with music behind them." Ken Foster (Center of the Performing Arts, Director).

There are times when films or documentaries become something more, they go beyond, cross a line. After abandoning any narrative intent, any attempt at political, social or religious propaganda, those works simply become experiential. They become experiences that, with the help of sounds and images, connect with our mind and create a different message in every one of us because we're all different. We get a different message based on our backgrounds (religious, social, political, and environmental), but we feel emotions. As a result, Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi might the most explicit example of a love it or hate it masterpiece. How you react to it depends not only on how you interpret the images and sounds, but also on how you feel about them. I can't guess how it will effect you. As a mere film fan, I can simply give you my view on the experience. I can talk about WHY this is an even better experience than Koyaanisqatsi, and why Godfrey Reggio might be the most effective visual communicator of our era, but you need to see Powaqqatsi as soon as you can.

Powaqqatsi (Powaq=sorcerer, Qatsi=life) is Hopi Indian for an entity, a spirit which consumes life in order to further its own. This might make you believe the film is another strong message against the industrialized world sucking life out of the "Third World" to further its own well being. You'd be right, and wrong. That is certainly one aspect that will emerge from viewing Powaqqatsi. However, it's also about the will, courage, and tenacity of a population in a disadvantageous position (like most of those in the Third World) to continue to progress, dedicate themselves to a better future, and consume their lives to further that of those who will follow them. The film is also about the fact that, trying to progress technologically, populations living in the Southern Hemisphere are losing their tradition, their culture, eventually their souls. They have been living a hand-made, simple and ordinary life, based on orality as method of communication, for centuries. Now, seduced by "progress" and "development", they're destroying this entity, this way of life that was built inside of each and every one of them, to further their own will for technology. Being this the second of Reggio's QATSI trilogy, Powaqqatsi is almost an opposite to what Koyaanisqatsi shows. It's about a disintegrating life too, but in a different way. It's quite an ambiguous message if you think about it, touching totally different matters, but it eventually goes back to the meaning of the title.

The technique used by Reggio differs from Koyaanisqatsi, focusing on slow motion, extreme close-ups, lots of cross fades, and time lapses (there's an impressive one with a destroyed car in the middle of a highway, while "phantom" cars pass by the side like spirits). There's also more focus on humanity, facial expressions, feelings, and suffering. There are different views of people staring at the camera, each one with his own uniquely interested look. Reggio feels that people living in non-industrialized worlds are more interesting to portray because they express interest in the camera; they see something new and want to explore, like a cat put in front of a mirror who is shocked by the sight of this alien object. They aren't ego-driven, just posing for the camera like people in the industrialized world do. They're moved by curiosity, not vanity.

The film totally violates the norms of proper thought because it caters to every view you want it to try to express. In a sense, it's provocative: it requires your mind to form its own view of the product. It isn't a clear-cut message-driven opera like Koyaanisqatsi; it's more of a hymn to life, something that showcases the truth in a more effective way. Stripped of any dialogue, manipulative plot, political reason, and incorrect interpretation by the actors, we see REAL people and real LIFE. There isn't a single thing that is put together just to elicit contempt. It's not a tearjerker commercial spot to ask people to support the dying children in Africa. It isn't one of those "social progress" manifestos that try to catch your heart, or should I say your wallet, before your mind. Powaqqatsi tries to catch your real feelings. The provocation, the search for your own message is generated by the way the images are portrayed.

I've come across different people having different views on the meaning of this "film." Some disliked it because they said Reggio basically stooped to the level of the people he was criticizing, exploiting the Third World to explain his message. Some loved it citing the reality, the passion Reggio finds in "primitive" populations. In the end, beyond hatred or love, what remains is the experience, and nobody can deny this artwork generated a strong feeling, that the images suggested something in his head. Nobody will say Powaqqatsi didn't move them in some way. Whether you enjoy it or not is just a matter of different backgrounds, different views, DIFFERENCE.

The cinematography, as always, is stunning. This time, instead of focusing on god-like views of earth or virtuous mixes of technology and raw life, the film focuses on human expression, on emotions, and on the creations of these people. There are aerial shots of different buildings, of incredibly creative buildings, showing the difference and the creativity level of the people who built them. The images don't have any arbitrary meaning or goal. Some are brutal. Some are beautiful, for instance, a row of kids laughing and staring at the camera. In the overall context of the film though, these images help build Reggio's ultimate goal, if you want to call it that, showing the power and the beauty of human spirit.

I wasn't a big fan of Philip Glass until recently. I knew his awesome work in Koyaanisqatsi and a few of his very good operas, but I never believed he would compose something like he did here. More than ever, this is the perfect connection between music and sounds. Instead of focusing on synth-driven sounds, the frantic and frenetic repetitions of Koyaanisqatsi, the score for Powaqqatsi is way more melodic. He adds touches of ethnicity, like the great percussion for the scenes filmed in Africa. It borrows from the subcultures depicted in the film and intertwines them perfectly to form greatly impact the viewer. In a way, Philip Glass is like a new age Ravel: his minimalism induces almost a hypnotic state that leads to meditation. Stripped to bare bone sounds, simple melodies like the sublime Bolero, there's a Rossinian Crescendo of emotions that all explode toward the end and offer your feelings something. In Powaqqatsi, there's an intense use of brass instruments (horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and especially exquisite use of French Horns) that's perfect for giving tone to and sustaining the percussive themes.

Reggio has been accused of being an activist filmmaker, of trying to cash in on the "new age" preservation craze. He's just an anarchist in love with his planet. He shows the beauty and the extreme contrast, the brutality. He pulls no punches and has no ulterior motives. Powaqqatsi doesn't show any ideology or further one's belief; it's just a stimulus. It goads your mind trying to generate, to provoke thought about what you've seen. I think the only way to fully understand what Reggio is going for is if you like me (at least I hope :)) don't subscribe to any particular political, social, or religious ideology. Some people love it or hate it based on how they've been "trained" to react; their preconceptions and prejudices have already been shaped by societies upbringing. I'm probably too much of an anarchist to feel offended by or particularly love anything about the messages I find in this film. However, I'm able to understand and to tell you how incredibly effective the images and sounds challenge your mind to come up with a message. It has many different meanings and can make you feel different emotions. You can hate it or love it, but it will impact you so strongly, and that's why it's such a great masterpiece.

The Digital Fix [Noel Megahey]

digitallyObsessed! [Joel Cunningham]

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DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Randy Miller III]

Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]

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New York Times [Janet Maslin]

Reichardt, Kelly

The Political Cinema of Kelly Reichardt Tim Gannon from Decent Exposure, April 26, 2013

Kelly Reichardt is one of the most independent and political voices coming out of American Cinema today. Her films wrestle with the political in the personal in subtle and open ended ways unlike anything else done by her contemporaries in the US. Although she has been releasing films from the mid nineties onwards (Her debut being 1994’s River of Grass), let us focus on her collaborations with writer Jon Raymond – Old Joy, Wendy & Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff. This trilogy may be set in different times and spaces but each examines modern political and economic landscapes and ideals through seemingly apolitical characters and situations.

Although River of Grass is, to a certain extent, an indictment of the American Dream and traditional family living, it wasn’t until the onset of the Bush Administration that Kelly Reichardt found her true cinematic vision of an America where ordinary people were openly affected by directionless politics and the downturn in the economy. Her debut feature is more concerned with the myth of the outlaw and urban ennui whereas Old Joy (2006) finds its characters immediately caught up with the state of the country and struggling to find their place within a divided and uncertain social backdrop. The foreground of the story sees Mark, a thirtysomething man on the cusp of fatherhood, reunited with an old friend Kurt for a road trip that stirs up old and new feelings about one another and their perspective paths in life. Both men have, in the past, had the same idealistic outlook about society, politics and the environment but their approach to these ideas have diverged evidently. Mark is, or has become, a pragmatist and finds it tough to keep up the same passion about his principles that he used to have. His socio-political interest is more abstract and fleeting now as he strives to become a ‘good citizen’ and ‘do whatever it is people do’. He has a regular job, probably a mortgage on his house, pays taxes and is about to become responsible for another human being. He keeps a passive interest in politics, community and green issues through talk radio, yoga and volunteering. These pursuits marginally relieve the guilt he may be feeling for not doing more for the world. He is obviously ill contented but feels he doesn’t have a better outlet or sounding board to vent his views on society. Kurt is on the opposite spectrum of being a ‘good citizen’; he is somewhat out of society – his address seems to be floating, his employment unknown, his behavior is dictated by carpe diem but he is still passionate about the politics and the philosophy of his youth. Both men struggle to balance desires and requirements; Mark needs to keep a job and take care of a family while trying to maintain a connection with his ideals. Kurt’s main problem is finding a practical means and channel for his activism and beliefs. As the Air America radio debates on the soundtrack tells us, the left or at least the socially concerned wing of the democratic party are also divided like the characters on how to progress, on how to communicate a viable path forward and on how to help society, people and politics develop in a complex time for the country.

Reichardt, despite the blunt diegetic ranting on the radio, does not force the politics down people’s throats. She observes the difficulties that the characters have in relating to one another and the complications of melding their similar yet different world outlooks together. Mark stands for many American environmentalists and liberals who are ‘insiders’ but are uncertain how to direct their interests for the greater good. What may be more fascinating is how society treats a voluntary ‘outsider’ like Kurt. His voice and others like him may be depreciating into minus value due to his own partial disregard for the needs of formalized democracy and society. He is left just a notch above the begging man on the street who he gives money to near the end of the film. Mostly though, his values are undermined by those who were probably like him in their twenties. Due to the infighting and lack of leadership within socially directed politics and a wider acceptance of the neo conservative opinion that ‘people should help themselves first’ the character of Kurt now stands for a disenfranchised, quasi disillusioned yet still passionate group that society does not know how to handle or is gradually trying to forget. Even Mark seems resentful of Kurt’s fecklessness and freedom.

The film is not a bitter portrait of lost ideals; it does have within it the possibility of renewal or progress. As the characters delve deeper in the forest there is a sense that they can open up and literally and metaphorically strip things down to the bare bones. This is maybe where Reichardt sees hope lying, a sense of getting back to basics, removing all the stress and convolutions from the arguments so that they and the audience can see a brighter way forward. This could almost be a Buddhist or far eastern philosophy and adds another layer of intrigue and texture to the ambiguous proceedings.

The idea of urban intrusion into the environment is something noticeably close to Reichardt’s heart. This is a theme that is most prevalent in ‘Old Joy’; it doesn’t just reflect an industrialization and degrading of green areas throughout the history of ‘progressive’ societies but comments on some dubious environmental policy in the early-mid part of the Bush administration- the non signing of the Kyoto Protocol, lax measures towards Clean Air Acts and the liberalization of oil drilling near national parks. If a country’s government and its leaders aren’t that concerned with keeping its land in good shape why would its people be? The campfire scene illustrates that even a protected park can be left damaged with plastic bags, cans and general burned man made debris. The closeness of the forest to roads and amenities signals the ever decreasing boundary between green spaces and pollution from the towns and cities. There seems to be a disheartened acceptance of this in the film however a wonder and excitement is retained by the characters as they explore something so precious and quiet that is practically on their doorsteps. The spring’s proximity to the city appears to be one of its main attractions for visitors. Again the marginalization of green issues by successive governments and a broad acknowledgement from most people of the unstoppable nature of industrialization have led to a sort of apathy from the general public in regards to the environment. The relationship between ‘man’ and the nature is a fragile one and made all the more delicate by the knowledge that it is ‘man’ that is simultaneously the protector and destroyer of the natural beauty of the world. The director refuses to condemn this blurring of the environment and the city explicitly; she observes it as it is and lets the audience make up their own minds. The effects of this urban/rural merging are something that she will return to in her subsequent work.

Fundamentally the film questions its target audience’s (middle class socially and culturally aware people, we presume) views and opinions on what is best for society and its different strata of people in general. It specifically asks its viewers to consider where American politics can go, how people should directly influence their environments and what role can those that are on the edge of society play in its future? As this debate became more prescient with the global economic collapse and the re-election of Bush, Reichardt’s cinema also became more urgent and clear in the form of Wendy & Lucy. Made in 2008, the year of global recession and bailouts, Reichardt’s minimalist third feature explores how poverty can affect ordinary people in the most life changing ways and asks how much responsibility should individuals take to help one another in a climate of ever decreasing opportunities. We find the character of Wendy set adrift in a temperamental car with only her canine companion Lucy for comfort. The road trip is traditionally seen as a path of freedom in American iconography but here it is a giant obstacle with a sense of forbearance standing in the way of Wendy and a new life with better prospects. In this atmosphere every penny counts and huge decisions rest on narrowing constrains. Reichardt focuses myopically on a class of people struggling to come to terms with the ravages of recession in the face of little governmental assistance. Through the eyes of Wendy (as she waits for her car to be repaired and as she searches frantically for her lost dog) we see a sort of underclass relegated to the woods, the ends of railway tracks and to literal nothingness. Being out of society actually means ‘out of society’ and into a murky and dangerous wilderness where thieves, drugs and craziness lay waiting. Like these outsiders the environment is seen as being hidden away, maltreated and something to be forgotten about. The general policies by the US government from 2006 to 2009 towards the environment weren’t as openly detrimental as its treatment of welfare recipients and Hurricane Katrina victims. However it is evident that green issues were put on the back burning whilst the state concerned itself initially with its war and national debt and subsequently concentrated on rescuing the banks and the economy as a whole at the backend of 2008. Given these facts, the state of the natural milieu depicted in the film reflects a deeper level of distress in the country in all reality. Even the main character’s supposed destination of Alaska, some sort of faux haven in the film, had been, in real terms, a point of environmental controversy with the Bush supported drilling of the oil reserves near its national parks.

Reichardt talks about the film’s fruition and puts it in to relevant social context (http://bombsite.com/issues/105/articles/3182).

“The seeds of Wendy and Lucy happened shortly after Hurricane Katrina….. We were watching a lot of Italian Neo-Realism and thinking the themes of those films seem to ring true for life in America in the Bush years. There’s a certain kind of help that society will give and a certain help it won’t give”

The main character encounters indifference from the mechanic as he offers to take her car off her and corporate compliance to the rules in the form of the shop assistant. Also there is no sense of community to the town she is left stranded in. This is emphasized by the repair shop owner who sees her as just someone passing through and does not want to involve himself in her obvious distress. Can he be blamed for looking after himself in difficult times? Probably not but the film questions his responsibility to another in need outside of commercial gain. He is on the fence and staying there. The young shop assistant is another matter; he definitely sees Wendy as a sponger thief and wants her to pay for her transgression. He goes out of his way to make sure that the shop’s rules are adhered to even though his manager wavers on the matter. The shop boy is an example of society’s and contemporary politics’ contempt for ‘people who refuse to help themselves’. The only hope for Wendy is the security guard who takes pity on her but, given his economic status and worn old demeanor, there’s only so much he can do. He may have the advantage of a support network himself but he’s just as caught up in the economic slump as everyone else. He tries to help as best he can, even providing Wendy with a contact number and touchingly, giving her a few bucks near the film’s end. He recognizes her struggles just like the rest do but he is the only one to help although it is only token in the greater scale of things. She is caught in a land that sees economic prosperity or at least the ability to pay your own way as the only feasible means for social visibility and mobility. Heartbreakingly grand decisions of her behalf are forced to be made because of temporary poverty. This is an indictment of a political system that justifies its war debt, federal bailouts and indifferent welfare structure but leaves the decisions to help out those in need to those who are already too financially and physically stressed to make a difference.

The minimalism of Wendy and Lucy focuses the subject matter and the themes for the audience like the films of the post war neo-realists as mentioned but it is also influenced by the politics of New German Cinema and the quiet Americana of Reichardt favorite Monte Hellman. Those sorts of films (with the possible exception of Hellman’s whose quiet downbeat road movies made an impression for Reichardt) penetrated sharply to the core of the social, economic and political problems in their perspective societies that they were trying to emphasize. Although Wendy and Lucy isn’t as tranquil and lush as Old Joy it does favor calmness like its predecessor to underline the isolation of the characters from one another and in this case to detach Wendy from the faceless town she has found herself in. The stillness, the bare bones of the character and the streamlining of situation leaves us to derive the film’s point of view without the manipulation of formalized exposition, emotive soundtracks or indeed Hollywood acting. This clarity allows the viewer to see through a proverbial cinematic forest and reflect on Reichardt’s observations with wide open logic.

Wendy and Lucy poses universal questions on how society can work and how it doesn’t. It matters not whether you’re stuck in some remote town in the mid west of the USA or in a chic European city, the questions remain the same: how easy is it to end up on poverty row? How much should we help each other and how deep should this help go? The film is quite emotional in the sense that the anxiety and pain we feel for Wendy in her search for her dog is palpable. We stare so long at Michelle Williams in near silence that we can almost see her mind ticking over, trying to figure ways out of her desolate situation. Having her linger in almost timeless close up and mid shot, it’s near impossible not to feel for her in her predicament.

The politics is understated as always but the message is driven through with precision; it’s a painful meditative watch that essentially makes you engage with your opinions on outcasts, people in temporary and long term need and your own sense of guilt and responsibility in society. Although it does not actively politicize its surface, the context and background of the film weighs heavy with the role of the state and its potential for intervening in ordinary but desperate situations investigated. The best way, Reichardt feels, to get across a need for debate on these issues is through a humanist low key approach. She clearly cares for political and social engagement but there’s no polemic on show here. Maybe she needed some distancing device to connect further with a more pointed political critique and this is what she got on her next venture.

Reichardt’s fourth picture Meek’s Cutoff was her third successive alliance with the writer Jon Raymond but her first outside the realm of the present. Probably her most ambitious and accomplished work yet, the film focuses on the 19^th century pursuit for land on the Oregon Trail.It is somewhat an anti western where freedom and vast vistas are negated and closed off for the characters and the audiences alike. In a traditional western setting the opening up of the land, through grand and iconic shot selection in widescreen, purports positively to the idea of expansion and colonization. However, in this film, the director subverts the traditional style of the western genre and encloses both audience and characters within a narrow space of uncertain and potentially negative effects. The 4:3 screen ratio, obtuse and naturalistic framing and a discordant soundtrack is used to breathe realism as well as unease and claustrophobia.

Given its period placement, Meek’s Cutoff superficially looked like a release from modern issues but instead it is a deep allegorical exploration into the notions of leadership and racism that has just as many current day resonances (maybe more) than her previous two efforts. The American Dream is at the forefront of the themes and unlike a lot of frontier depictions the role of women in society is delved into in detail.

Reichardt’s recurring theme of the encroachment of people on the land manifests itself again in Meek’s Cut-off. In her previous film, the director hinted at the destructiveness of centuries of progress on the environment; now she observes its origins or at least its central building blocks on American History. People setting up ‘civilizations’, town and cities have had an inevitable cost on the natural resources and the native population. The vast unplundered spaces of the US led an ever growing population to seek out new frontiers for development in an almost internalized colonial way. Without due care for the existing ecosystem and its inhabitants, without concern for the ways of the native Indians, these previously tranquil areas were disrupted, harmed and bulldozed in the name of ‘growth’ and town planning. The film contrasts two ways of life (the Oregon trailers looking for prosperity and new areas to settle in and the Indian who protects the status quo) and how these opposing views lead to mistrust and conflict once they meet one another. Obviously the trailers are not out directly to destroy the land and its stability; history has shown us that, for the most part, a balance is struck between progress and preservation. However as Reichardt’s previous work have implied, in contemporary times, this balance may have been, through greed, ambition, power and possibly ignorance, weighted drastically in the direction of urbanization. Whether the director has a more militant argument for protection of the environment may be revealed in her upcoming ‘Night Moves’ which is reportedly about eco-warriors and the blowing up of a dam.

The uncertainty of direction and leadership that the travelers get from their guide Meek is reflected in the audience’s feelings as well. We, like them, don’t know if he is a prophet or a charlatan and as the trail goes on divisions are evident within the party. When Michelle Williams’ character Emily Tetherow says ‘is he ignorant or is he just plain evil?’ the audience is left to empathize with her and fear that the conclusion may be closer to the latter than the former. The idea of a leader moving his faithful supporters into new pastures is as old as time but the ambiguity of where they are on course to or if they are heading on a destructive route raises comparisons with the state of American foreign policy and the divisiveness of the Gulf war and Afghani occupation. Given that the Bush administration had just been ousted by the time the film was in production, it is fair to suggest that Meek’s Cutoff reflects on the Republicans’ aggressive steering of the country in the first decade of the century. The parallels between Meek’s almost evangelistic belief in his own righteousness and cunning and that of the decisions and attitude of the Bush regime are there to be seen. Meek’s followers, whether they are wholeheartedly behind him or don’t have an alternative, are like lost sheep in a barren landscape looking for a savior or some sort of hope to grasp on to. They are the American people, somewhat skeptical, somewhat cuckolded into believing that a better world with greater riches is over an unknown horizon.

Further modern analogies are introduced by the capture of the Indian. Even before the native’s first sighting, Meek builds up a climate of fear to strengthen his position of indispensable power. The Indian is the flip side of Meek; he is ungraspable, almost mystical like the land and does not campaign belligerently for the group’s attention. The troop is in fear of him primarily due to urban legend and misinformation mainly elicited from the mouth of Meek thus allowing suspicion and racism to take hold. Miss Tetherow and, to a lesser extent, her husband Solomon put their faith in the unintelligible Indian and a split for the hearts and minds of the camp ensues. The primary dilemma of whether to trust a preaching, smooth talking probable swindler or their captive foreign victim, who seems closer to the spirit of the land than anyone else, takes hold. This conundrum is put to the audience by Reichardt in her familiar non judgemental style but the decision of which side to take is made more difficult by the lack of information on or translation of the Indian’s dialogue. This is a brave and potentially alienating move on the part of the filmmaker but a clever one all the same to make us question our relationship with our own leaders and those considered ‘Other’ or foreign. Should we automatically trust our authority figures because they are articulate and say they have our best interests at heart? Should we get them to earn this trust by evidence and moral courage? Should we question the motives of those who preach that people contrary to us are enemies and only out to harm us? These are all significant queries that the film tries to address to its audience. Ms Tetherow is more trusting and willing to treat the Indian like a human than the others but she does this not primarily because she feels sorry for him but because she recognizes him as a better option to provide their overall survival. In saying this she does not identify his culture as being equal to her own. When she says ‘you can’t believe what we’ve done, the cities we’ve built’ she is only aggrandizing her ‘civilized’ way of live however it is ironic that they are now lost in inhospitable lands and are looking to this ‘primitive’ for their salvation. Essentially the audience and the travelers are asked, through the contrast of Meek and the Indian, to believe in something that is probably wrong or to believe in something that is unknowable. Both may ultimately lead to devastation. The ambiguity and mystery continues at the climax but the themes and questions of leadership, political direction and the meeting of different cultures that the film provokes are there to be debated by all immediately.

The role of women is considerable in Meek’s Cutoff in that they are the binding glue of the families yet they are denied any real say in decisions and discussions. We see the women cast adrift from the men but we are able to identify with them more in their isolation due to our own denial of information by the film as the men go off to debate. We, like the women, can’t hear the discussions, are held at a distance and only get morsels of soundbites passed from one woman to the next. Interestingly it is through the better judgement of human nature on the part of Ms. Tetherow that Meek’s direction is questioned. When most of the men are taken in by his confidence and brusqueness, it is Emily who makes her husband muse over Meek’s worthiness and makes him question whether he is taking them not to the land of plenty but down the path of destruction. She, as mentioned before, is willing to treat the Indian humanely but not in an emotionally clichéd female way but for the practical reasons that he is their best hope of getting out of the situation alive. In positioning this character as the most sensible and astute mind in the camp, Reichardt may be calling for a greater female presence in the realm of government affairs or she may even be criticizing how a male orientated decision making process has led her country in to a dubious war that benefits no one and causes huge human losses. Reichardt’s naturalism with elements of documentary style also gives prominence to the women on the frontier. The early scene of clothes washing down by the stream is Robert Flannery like in its matter of fact realism and the silence and emphasis on the common place and nature elicits a feeling of Terrence Malick through its tranquillity. In some ways Meek’s Cutoff is Reichardt’s most naturalistic film with its wide shots and the authenticity of location and production design. We really get a sense that they have traveled on a long arduous route, are wore out and kept in dirty and ragged clothing and have to sleep in brittle and cramped wagons. This naturalism could not have been pulled off without given the female characters equal, if not more, screen time than the men.

From Old Joy to Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt has developed her themes and situations from the forests of small intimate relationships to the barren and wide open deserts, posing increasingly difficult questions about society and the nature of politics within America. From one film to the next the situations that the characters find themselves in have become progressively complex and threatening. Old Joy’s central premise relies on an emotional internal arc rather than anything concrete, its gentleness and tension seems from an almost abstract need for connection between the characters and their environs. Wendy and Lucy ups the ante somewhat as it draws a clearly defined situation of a young woman and the forced decisions she has to make for the possibility of a better life. Meek’s Cutoff marks a serious jump in narrative for Reichardt as it essentially describes the journey of survival or destruction of a whole group of people. Her stories have moved from the near theoretical and the personal through to a larger yet just as complex canvas. Her key themes can also be said to have broadened; Old Joy is a personal questioning of people ideals in society, Wendy and Lucy moves on to ask about class and the state intervention and Meek’s Cutoff raises wider questions about the nature of leadership, race and the position of women in America as a whole. What binds these films together is Reichardt’s insistence in observation, in non judgement and her interest in naturalism and the underdog. However what makes her work unique in contemporary cinema is the subtle probing of large socio-political themes through the eyes of ordinary people striving to survive or find their place in the world either philosophically or literally.

Over the course of the last decade Kelly Reichardt has funneled the political through the personal. Her voice is not outwardly didactic but through character and situation she has managed to ask some pertinent questions about the nature of community, the responsibilities of individuals to one another, the role of the government in economic, social, environmental and military issues without taking away from the inherent core of her stories. What next for her? The issues that her films obliquely provoke remain largely unchanged despite the fact that the country is in the middle of a more hopeful administration. We can only hope ourselves that she continues to keep her unerring critical eye on America whilst producing the same standard of mysterious and evocative storytelling in future. She is truly a unique voice that uses the ordinary and the disenfranchized to magnify her observations on the problems and difficulties in society and its politics in general.

Kelly Reichardt - Media Arts Fellow brief profile

Kelly Reichardt Kelly Reichardt pages from Larry Fessenden independent movie projects

Kelly Reichardt • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Sam Littman, June 2014

j.j. murphy on independent cinema » Kelly Reichardt December 28, 2008

Kelly Reichardt - Cinema Scope Jason McBride, 2009

Escape From Portland: Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy ... Kimberly Gehl from pdx pipeline, January 6, 2009

St. Louis Movies - Lady with the Little Dog: Kelly Reichardt's ... J. Hoberman from The Riverfront Times, January 20, 2009

'Wendy and Lucy' Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt Eyes the Frayed Edge of ... Filmmaker Eyes the Frayed Edge of Social Fabric, by Laura Winters from The Washington Post, January 25, 2009

The Political Cinema of Kelly Reichardt Tim Gannon from Decent Exposure, April 26, 2013

In Defense of Kelly Reichardt's Directorial Touch | PopMatters Colin McGuire, December 3, 2013

The Film Independent: Director Kelly Reichardt - Bloomberg Logan Hill from Bloomberg Businessweek, January 14, 2016

Lost in America The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt - Tiny Mix ... Christopher Bruno from Tiny Mix Tapes, March 28, 2016

The Quiet Menace of Kelly Reichardt's Feminist Westerns - The New ... Alice Gregory from The New York Times, October 14, 2016

A beginner's guide to the films of Kelly Reichardt - Little White Lies Edward Cripps, March 1, 2017

TSPDT - Kelly Reichardt

BOMB Magazine: Kelly Reichardt by Todd Haynes Interview by Todd Haynes, Fall 1995

Q&A: Kelly Reichardt, Director of Old Joy :: Stop Smiling Magazine Interview by Joshua Rowin Martin, September 22, 2006

Kelly Reichardt: An Interview | Reverse Shot Interview by Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega, Fall 2006

Filmmaker Magazine | Fall 2006: SOUND OF SILENCE Feature and interview by James Ponsoldt, Fall 2006

BOMB Magazine: Kelly Reichardt by Gus Van Sant Interview by Gus Van Sant, Fall 2008

NYFF Exclusive Interview: Kelly Reichardt Interview by Katey Rich from Cinema Blend, October 6, 2008

Questions for Kelly Reichardt - Social Realist - Interview ... Interview by Deborah Solomon, November 28, 2008

Slant Magazine - Redefining Success: An Interview with Kelly Reichardt Interview by Ryan Stewart, December 5, 2008

Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Wendy and Lucy - Gothamist: New York ... Elisa Winter from The Gothamist, December 8, 2008

Kelly Reichardt, director of WENDY AND LUCY, Interview | SpoutBlog Interview by Karina Longworth, December 9, 2008

Interview: Kelly Reichardt on "Wendy and Lucy" Interview by Alison Willmore from IFC magazine, December 10, 2008

The Phoenix > Features > Interview: Kelly Reichardt Interview by Peter Keough from The Boston Phoenix, January 20, 2009

Kelly Reichardt: how I trekked across Oregon for Meek's ... Ryan Gilbey interview from The Guardian, April 8, 2011

Kelly Reichardt: 'My films are just glimpses of people ... Xan Brooks interview from The Guardian, August 21, 2014

RIVER OF GRASS on YouTube (1:09 mi)

Wendy and Lucy Trailer (1:39)

Old Joy (theatrical trailer) (2:21)

Asterpix Interactive Video - Old Joy - Daniel London and ... (3:50)

WENDY AND LUCY Q&A: Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams (3:53)

Michelle Williams * Kelly Reichardt * Wendy and Lucy * AFI (4:42)

NYFF: "Wendy & Lucy" Q&A With Director Kelly Reichardt (7:13)

WENDY AND LUCY Q&A: Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams Interview by Richard Pena, also seen here: Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » WENDY AND LUCY Q&A: Kelly ... (9:11)

RIVER OF GRASS A- 93

USA (100 mi) 1994

Arguably Reichardt’s best film remains her first, easily the most enjoyable work over her entire career, despite the slow and relatively downbeat subject matter, as it’s given a playful and surprisingly blunt style that remains invigorating throughout. First films are often an indicator of what’s to come, but this is infinitely more amusing than the films to follow, where the jazz soundtrack with occasional drum solos sprinkled throughout pay homage to that subterranean subset of cool music aficionados inhabiting the cozy intimacy of late night, smoke-filled rooms. While her recent features are far more mannered, intellectually refined, and quietly paced, judiciously taking place somewhere on the fringe of feminist consciousness, where there is historical relevancy to the indicated time periods, this first feature has a more brash and youthful pedigree, where there’s a surprising amount of quirky energy going on where the unique circumstances of dumbstruck and outwardly naïve outlaws-on-the-run definitely adds a bit of flavor, where the painfully underfunded, low-budget production helps to provide a raw and edgy vibe. Incredibly, despite the accolades that greeted her first film, nominated for Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as three Spirit Award nominations in 1994, it was more than a decade before her next feature, where women even now continue to be denied access to the industry, yet ironically, they are plastered across the screens as sexual objects which express an exclusively male point of view. As a result, she made a few video shorts until fellow indie filmmaker Todd Haynes signed on to produce her next four films, including Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and Night Moves (2013).

Ryan Gilbey interview, April 8, 2011, Kelly Reichardt - The Guardian

“The more money you take, the more hands there are in the pie,” she points out. “Right now, there’s no one telling me what to do. I can edit on my own schedule. No one gives me notes outside the same friends who I’ve been showing my films to since I started.” Small wonder she’s so contented when those friends include fellow directors Phil Morrison (Junebug) and Todd Haynes (I’m Not There), who have executive-produced most of her work. She began her film career on the crew of Haynes’s 1991 feature debut, Poison, but he’s an equal rather than a mentor, and has been known to drive her around when she’s scouting locations.

Despite such influential friends, it continues to be a fight for Reichardt to get her movies made. Depressingly, her difficulties have often come down to old-fashioned sexism. “I had 10 years from the mid-1990’s when I couldn’t get a movie made. It had a lot to do with being a woman. That’s definitely a factor in raising money. During that time, it was impossible to get anything going, so I just said, ‘Fuck you!’ and did Super 8 shorts instead.” She’s doubtful that the climate has changed much, even after Kathryn Bigelow’s best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker. “I’m outside the industry so I have no idea. But you can watch awards shows or see what’s being made and you still don't see women who have the career of Todd or Gus [Van Sant] or Wes Anderson, or any of those men who make personal films. I teach for a living, and I make movies when I can. I’ve never made money from my films.”

Curiously, Reichardt’s first feature was the inspiration behind the recent Amy Seimetz lovers-on-the-run film Sun Don’t Shine (2012). While the mismatched lovers weigh down Seimetz’s film, as they couldn’t be less interesting, they are an absolute delight in the original, starring Lisa Bowman as Cozy, a bored, 30-year old housewife still living with her father who dreams of being an acrobatic dancer, the daughter of a jazz musician (Dick Russell) turned detective, whose own mother left home at an early age, feeling surprisingly just as ambivalent, showing little interest in her own children, leaving them home one night, meeting a man named Lee (Larry Fessenden) at a roadside bar, a guy still living with his mother who recently discovered a gun lying on the side of the road, and running off with him. Together their adventure comprises the entire film. The unique structure entices from the outset, with a surprisingly candid voiceover from Cozy that provides an air of indifference about the monotonous emptiness in her life, as if she’s just been drifting through the days waiting for that one moment when a switch will suddenly flip on. The similarity with Sissy Spacek’s character in BADLANDS (1973) is inevitable, as little does she know that another person feeling equally as low and unhappy is living in the neighboring county, where the two are destined to meet. While this foreshadows an epic encounter where the stars are aligned, nothing could be further from the case. These two characters are barely there, defined from the start by their social dysfunction, so we never see them actually click together as a couple, rather they seem thrown together by circumstances beyond their control. Almost at random, numbers occur, like chapter headings, providing apparent order to the meandering nature of the story. The intimacy of the music adds a special twist, as it feels highly personal, adding a swagger and sensuality missing from these characters who never feel comfortable in their own skin. By no means does this detract from the viewer’s interest, as it’s their conventionality and sheer ordinariness that feels so appealing, where they’re perfectly relatable, as if we’ve known them all our lives, as there’s a part of us they each seem to possess, like the existential loners from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Set in the stagnant depression of the Florida Everglades, where dilapidated businesses appear on the verge of economic ruin, there’s no sense of hope or advancement, as if we’ve wandered into the same desolate universe as Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), an unflinching portrait of a woman with no ambition and low self-esteem, whose very character is personified by a lack of ambition or personal drive, where there’s not an ounce of artifice anywhere to be found on the screen. The conscientious aspect of feminist filmmaking shares a similar spirit, as we find ourselves in the company of a woman we have all met many times over, but probably paid little attention to, as there is little about her that stands out. Throwing two characters together whose lives have never really gotten started is a real challenge, as the combustible energy of their collective lives barely lights a flame. The brightest color onscreen is expressed by the extreme yellow suit worn by Cozy’s father, who’s struggling with his own woes within the department, as he’s mysteriously lost his police revolver. This missing item inexplicably ends up in the hands of Lee and Cozy, where in a moment of panic, their comedy of errors begins. Thinking they’ve shot someone, they immediately go on the run to avoid detection, hanging out in local dive motels, never really venturing far, as the only means of obtaining cash is selling his mother’s record collection. The dubious nature of their criminal mentality is challenged throughout, as there’s some question whether they’ve even committed a crime, but nothing is more shocking than witnessing Lee loitering around inside a convenience store, where all the pressure of the world is upon him to provide some money to pay their motel bill, where he’s at the psychological precipice of committing a real crime when in a flash someone (looking very much like the director herself) runs in with a gun and grabs the contents of the cash register, leaving him utterly flabbergasted. The meager nature of their dreams and fantasies are continually undercut by the bleak miserablism of their real lives, yet this effortlessly plays out with such meticulous precision that by the end the imaginary world wonderfully intersects with reality to the point where the viewer and the characters onscreen can’t seem to tell the difference. In one of the more fascinating realizations, Cozy is stunned by the idea that she might not have actually killed anyone, which leaves her terribly disappointed, as her dream of being an outlaw has suddenly been snatched away, suddenly feeling desperately lost and alone, losing all sense of her remarkably resuscitated self-esteem, where she absurdly thinks if you’re not a murderer, then you’re not really anybody. She quickly rectifies that, at least in her mind, fueling into the dark swirling themes that define the entire picture, largely fed by pseudo imagery from the sexually empowered female protagonists in Roger Vadim’s …AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (1956) and Louis Malle’s VIVA MARIA! (1965), not to mention the many 50’s and 60’s jazz album covers that feature sexually alluring women in provocative poses, where she can be heard muttering under her breath, “Murder is thicker than water.” Reichardt herself described the movie as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime.”

Cinema Romantico [Nick Prigge]

A canny, contemporary portrait of shiftlessness, this adept first feature (1993) by American independent Kelly Reichardt, set in the Florida Everglades, is about people so bored they jump at the chance to go on the lam--taking off even before they've committed a crime. Reichardt has an original sense of how to put together a film sequence and an effective way of guiding her cast of unknowns through an absurdist comedy of errors. With Lisa Bowman, Larry Fessenden, Dick Russell, Stan Kaplan, and Michael Buscemi.

Review: River Of Grass | Newcity Film Ray Pride

In a career of two decades plus, Northwest-centric filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s established her voice in features like “Old Joy” (2006; two male friends reunite on the road), “Wendy and Lucy” (2008; a woman and her dog part on the road), “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010; a western in search of a trail), and “Night Moves” (2013; activists seek action to ignite ideas). But even her 1994 feature debut, “River Of Grass,” is a deadpan delight, as richly observant of suburban southern Florida landscapes as the more classical locations in which her characters now shift. (It’s being rereleased now in a digital restoration.) Reichardt’s described the sun-kissed not-quite-a-comedy as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love and a crime story without the crime.” Genial Lisa Bowman plays Cozy, a bored thirty-year-old housewife who hits the road with Lee (Larry Fessenden, also the film’s editor and co-producer), whose hope is to “just drink.” There’s no lack of charm in the not-lackadaisical spark between these two generous performers as guns, hapless robbery attempts and seedy motels decorate their lives. The miasma of bright yet sodden southern Florida landscape seeps into their every failed impulse or ambition. Jim Denault’s 16mm cinematography is one more facet that makes “River of Grass” one of my favorite American indie movies of the 1990s. With Dick Russell, Stan Kaplan, Michael Buscemi.

Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs

Disclaimer: Oscilloscope Laboratories raised the money to restore Kelly Reichardt's RIVER OF GRASS via a Kickstarter campaign, and I donated to it a little over a year ago, unsure of whether or not I would like the film but still eager to support one of the generation's most interesting independent filmmakers. I'm happy to report that it was money well spent—RIVER OF GRASS may be my favorite film of hers, besting even the exquisitely bleak MEEK'S CUTOFF. Set in a small town near the Florida Everglades (Reichardt herself is from Miami), it's about Cozy, a disenchanted stay-at-home mom, and Lee, an apathetic ne'er-do-well, who embark on a life of a crime after they accidentally shoot a man with Cozy's policeman father's gun. Said “life of crime” turns out to be much like their actual lives, full of confusion, disappointment, and ennui. Described by Reichardt as being “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime," it succeeds insomuch as Cozy and Lee fail. They're something of an antithesis to the Bonnie and Clyde mythology that's inspired generations of road-hungry filmmakers, though Cozy and Lee arguably have more in common with them physically than, say, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. RIVER OF GRASS also contains Reichardt's signature brand of idle suspense that's since permeated the rest of her acclaimed feature-length films. I won't spoil the ending, but let me just say that the surprise is more so a culmination of simmering uncertainty than an unexpected action meant to catch viewers off guard. The performances are similarly melancholic—particularly Lisa Bowman as Cozy and Dick Russell as her dad—and the 16mm cinematography lends itself to the discomfiting atmosphere. Don't feel compelled to see this merely because it's Reichardt's first film. Instead, you should see it because it provides further insight into her career-long examination of aimless exploration and pathetic apostasy.

Kelly Reichardt - Cinema Scope Jason McBride

I’ve seen each of Kelly Reichardt’s feature films at least twice, but for some reason I can never really remember how they end. This despite the fact that they all end in roughly the same way: which is sort of not ending at all, with characters still in motion, heading somewhere, anywhere, their futures both assured and uncertain. Whether they take place in 19th-century Oregon or a noirish Floridian non-time, Reichardt’s films exist in a kind of perpetual present where possibility always persists even as it’s threatened, perverted, or temporarily snuffed out.

The subjects of Reichardt’s films, however, don’t immediately suggest such possibility; in fact, more often than not they suggest exactly the opposite. Her droll feature debut River of Grass (1994) depicts a couple so desperate to star in their own road movie that they go on the lam before they’re even able to commit a crime. Old Joy (2006), made more than a decade later, portrays two braided, and competitive, strains of masculine stasis: the rebel-without-a-cause and the midlife crisis. (The score by Yo La Tengo, both ominous and dreamy, constantly hints at the potential peril of each position.) In Wendy and Lucy (2008), the co-dependent relationship between a girl and her dog presages the desperate, desolate misery breaking out all over a recessionary America. The pioneering protagonists of Meek’s Cutoff (2010) are set adrift in the forbidding, desert landscape of the Oregon Trail circa 1845 (“We’re not lost, we’re finding our way,” says Bruce Greenwood’s eponymous frontiersman), but their real journeys—ethical, spiritual—take place largely within their private, silent souls.

All of these characters are escape artists in slow motion, with lockpicks that open their own hearts. Reichardt’s films are essays in the way that Anne Carson’s poems are essays, teaching us to look at real life more deeply, more imaginatively, more lyrically. Reichardt’s next film, Night Moves, to shoot this summer, is reportedly about a pair of environmental radicals—“eco-terrorists” in the military-industrial complex parlance—who attempt to blow up a dam. It’s easy to imagine the relentlessly empathetic Reichardt sharing some of the disaffected idealism that animates such activists. As misguided as their actions can sometimes seem, their rage against an industrial, earth-killing machine and the criminalization of dissent also insists that a different, better, world is possible.

River of Grass :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Kenji Fujishima

When it comes to discussing the films of Kelly Reichardt, most people tend to forget about River of Grass, her debut feature from 1994, a whole 12 years before her sophomore effort, Old Joy, would put her on many critics’ radars. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of Oscilloscope Laboratories, Sundance, UCLA Film and Television Archive, TIFF and a host of Kickstarter backers, though, Reichardt’s first film is about to reenter the cinematic landscape in a new digital restoration—and what a striking opening salvo it is, both on its own terms and in light of her later work.

Certainly, anyone expecting the social consciousness of Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy and Night Moves will be thrown for a loop by the purely genre-based leanings of River of Grass. It’s essentially a variation on They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde and other such lovers-on-the-run pictures, with a noirish mystery thread revolving around cop Jimmy Ryder (Dick Russell), the oblivious father of one of the escaped lovers, Cozy (Lisa Bowman). But the film evinces other stylistic debts that Reichardt wouldn’t pursue quite as strongly in her later films: most notably to Badlands in its voiceover narration—Cozy’s, in this case—to both support and contradict the action shown onscreen.

That is not to say that Reichardt’s debut is totally bereft of signs of the films to come. One unexpected montage in the middle of the film—of a series of album covers, all of them featuring women in romantic and/or sexually suggestive poses—hints at the more overtly feminist bent of her later work. And on a broader level, River of Grass’ vivid evocation of ennui—a mood she conjures through her use of sultry jazz music on the soundtrack and a deliberately lackadaisical pace—would find a grander historical echo in her Western Meek’s Cutoff, similarly invested in conveying characters who are lost both physically and psychologically.

That 2011 feature also connects to Reichardt’s debut in the way it toys fascinatingly with genre conventions. If Meek’s Cutoff could be seen as an anti-Western, using the genre’s tropes in defiantly subversive ways, River of Grass pulls similar tricks with crime drama and noir clichés. The two bored and disaffected lovers on the run, Cozy and Lee (Larry Fessenden), may not be really lovers at all; the incident that leads them to try to escape their Florida Everglades homes may not have actually happened the way they think it did; and Lee turns out to be as incompetent at being a criminal as former jazz musician Jimmy Ryder is at being a cop.

The key to Reichardt’s vision in River of Grass, however, lies in Cozy’s character—her voiceover narration, especially. A 30-year-old housewife who still lives with her father, she frequently gives herself over to her daydreams, imagining a life outside her dead-end environment. Reichardt doesn’t signal this with any fantasy sequences; all one needs to do is hear her dryly delivered faux-poetic musings—“Murder is thicker than water,” she says at one point—and see the cheerleader-like routines she does out of the blue to grasp her essential immaturity (one scene featuring a dreamy slow dance is especially mesmerizing). But though Reichardt maintains a deadpan distance from her and the rest of the characters, Cozy’s desperation and her subsequent excitement at getting caught up in all of this intrigue register with enough force that, toward the end, when the much less glamorous reality of her situation dawns on her, the revelation also hits us with a devastating punch.

[Review] River of Grass - The Film Stage Michael Snydel

Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass is a “lovers on the run” film, but the main characters aren’t lovers, and their version of the lam is spending a few days at a flop-house in an adjacent zip code. Originally released in 1994, Reichardt’s debut is a digressive walkabout into a world of delayed responsibility and halted potential. It’s a story that perfectly aligns with the mythic Americana themes that have emerged over her career, while also feeling formally radical. Rereleased this year through a Kickstarter from Oscilloscope Laboratories, River of Grass isn’t able to reach the peaks of Reichardt’s later monumental work, but it’s educational in mapping out her concerns as a filmmaker and a stirring reminder of her abilities as a visual stylist.

River of Grass sketches out the story of two spiritual bedfellows, Cozy (Lisa Bowman), and Lee Ray Harold (Larry Fessenden), who together descend into a loop of graceful panic after they believe that they’ve accidentally killed someone after a night of heavy drinking. Cozy is a restless soul, a mother and wife who despairs about an already written future with a loving husband she doesn’t love and kids she barely tolerates. Above all else, she really wants a new life, but her happiest moments come in a time of deepest limbo when she’s puttering around smoking in a motel, or becoming entranced with sultry jazz records.

Lee is a thirty year old ne’er-do-well living with his grandma, who’s torn between his desires to have a functional life, or to sink into the romance of taking that life. For him, a life of pickpocketing and a holstered gun seems like a gateway to this higher form of life, but his crime sprees are rarely more glamorous than trying to grab quarters from payphone slots or stealing some hapless sucker’s clothes from a local laundry.

Adjacent to their half-formed escape from society, the story checks in on Jimmy Ryder (Dick Russell), Cozy’s father and a jazz drummer turned private detective who’s been disgraced for losing his gun in a robbery that has coincidental connections to Lee. Aware of his daughter’s disappearance, Jimmy slowly pieces together the non-story, and wonders why his daughter has suddenly decided to take a pit-stop on her way to adulthood. Reichardt isn’t particularly interested in the details of his actual life, but she does find a way to build his life through the random items in his home or brief flashbacks that serve as windows of who he was in those exact moments

River of Grass feels defiantly different than Reichardt’s future filmography, but there’s still a stubborn sense of moral equilibrium – a constant tugging sense that even romanticism is hollow when reality is based on a defined order of who deserves a life of pleasure or pain. As much as Cozy and Lee’s characters would like to feel like they are floating in some ethereal space of limbo – untouchable by a world that’s stuck in a rut of untroubled routine – they’re plagued by the same everyday problems of trying to pay the rent and find a place called home.

Set in Florida’s Miami-Dade county, this sunshine state is less a tropical hideaway than a run-down place of half-built dreams and everyday philosophers repeating bad jokes in the hopes that they’ll make sense down the line. And while its formal acumen feels entirely distinct from the rest of her oeuvre, there’s still a recognizable sense of mood as a spiritual sense of being. Like the rest of her films, feeling homeless is a physical state, but it’s also a lingering form of alienation.

Reichardt has practically become known as transgressive in her emotive use of stillness as a modulation of mood. But River of Grass feels swift in comparison with its flurrying editing style that’s as likely to dabble in Chris Marker-style collage photography as Claire Denis-esque rhythmic cross-cutting. A sequence that tosses back and forth between Dick’s increasingly martial drumming patterns and a person curling their eyelashes shows that even early on, Reichardt had a singular way of making process into something experiential.

Still, there is something occasionally strained about River of Grass’ confluence of poetic symbolism and juxtaposition of apathy and romance. Whereas dialogue has become nearly peripheral to narrative in her later work, this film is characterized by monologues from Cozy with a nearly prophetic tendency to foreshadow the contours of the storytelling. And the dialogue is similarly filled with a few too many moments that feel wedded to a schematic of the story’s evolution rather than a spontaneity built from character.

Rather, it’s more productive to view the entire picture as an essay about empowerment nestled in the well-worn archetype of the outlaw story. Reichardt taps into the framing as an elemental feeling of comforting alienation. Evoking the dialogue in Meek’s Cutoff about women being built on chaos and men being built on destruction, River of Grass is as much about the comfort of trouble as the anxiety in wiping that same slate clean. And, in the end, it has far more in common with Belle de Jour or Jeanne Dielman than genre staples like Badlands, even as Fessenden’s nervy body language is a dead ringer for Martin Sheen’s tilted symbol of desperation in Malick’s film. But as the film reaches its nearly perfect finale, it still can’t help but feel like a minor detour in a career-long road trip.

River of Grass: Kelly Reichardt's Ragged Debut | New ... Tim Grierson from The New Republic, March 9, 2016

Lost in America The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt - Tiny Mix ... Christopher Bruno from Tiny Mix Tapes, March 28, 2016

Kelly Reichardt • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Sam Littman, June 2014

River of Grass | Film Review | Slant Magazine James Lattimer

Before she broke through with Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt made Michael Sicinski from The Onion A.V. Club

River Of Grass · Film Review The director of Old Joy made ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Reichardt's 'River Of Grass' Reissued: A First Film At A Fast Pace Ella Taylor from NPR

Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]

Way Too Indie [Aaron Pinkston]

The Movie Scene [Andy Webb]

Joshua Reviews Kelly Reichardt's River Of Grass [Theatrical ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast

DVD Talk [Don Houston]

Blu-ray.com [Michael Reuben]

Don't Miss the Chance to Catch '94's 'River of Grass,' Kelly ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]

Nictate

AllMovie [Andrea LeVasseur]

Martin Teller

User comments from imdb Author: postmanwhoalwaysringstwice from usa

BOMB Magazine — Kelly Reichardt by Todd Haynes Todd Haynes interview, Fall 1995

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

River of Grass, directed by Kelly Reichardt | Film review Time Out London

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review

River of Grass Movie Review & Film Summary (2016 ... Brian Tallerico from Roger Ebert

New York Times [Stephen Holden] also seen here: Movie Review - River of Grass - FILM REVIEW; Just Too Bored

DVDBeaver Blu-ray The Kelly Reichardt Collection [Gary Tooze]

River of Grass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THEN A YEAR

USA (14 mi) 2001

User comments from imdb Author: Jason Olshefsky (Jayce) from Rochester, NY, USA

I got to see this film at Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House prior to a screening of Reichardt's "Old Joy". Described as an experimental short, I braced myself for a barrage of semi-coherent abstract images, but was pleasantly surprised at its subtlety and consistency. I found it to be an anti-narrative about a passion-crime. The disconnected bits and pieces thrown together was reminiscent in a way of Michael Haneke's "71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls" (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance). It made for an interesting complement to "Old Joy" in that way as well, except that "Old Joy" has a much more concrete grounding, as you'd expect of a character-story.

TRAVIS – video

USA (12 mi) 2004

User comments from imdb Author: yortsnave from Columbus, OH USA

I saw this experimental short film on November 30 2005 at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of The Ohio State University. The video was being shown on a continuous loop in a small exhibition room known as "In The Box". I watched a few minutes of it. According to a handout provided by the Wex, the audio portion was taken from an NPR (National Public Radio) interview with a woman whose soldier son (Travis) was killed just after President Bush declared an end to major hostilities in the Iraq war. The video portion was a fluid and changing pattern of abstract colors. Perhaps the movement of the colors was tied in electronically with the mother's voice; I don't know. I found the film rather haunting. I could really pick up on the mother's anguish, and the video portion reinforced that. Recommended if you ever get a chance to see it.

OLD JOY A- 93

USA (76 mi) 2006

Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy

Otherwise known as Old Geezers on Parade to the general twentysomething viewing public, made for just $40,000 with music by Yo La Tengo, this is just a terrific indie film, amazingly free of narrative content, much of which must be supplied by the viewer, where the more you know about these guy’s backgrounds yourself, the more you’ll get something out of the film, as you’ll understand all the references, visual and otherwise, which include treks through the lush forests of the Cascade mountains outside Portland, Oregon, as two guys (Will Oldham and Daniel London) go in search of the Bagby Hot Springs (described as GERRY of the Redwoods!!!). But it’s an unusual subject matter, the aftermath of the 60’s counterculture, seen in light of today’s politics, which must include dealing with the disillusionment of lost ideals, and the political ruination of everything you once hoped might come to pass in your lifetime. On the other hand, without the background knowledge “prior to” entering the theater, this may be perceived as a stoner flick, as people behind us were lighting up a bong in the small theater of the Music Box. There was very little dialogue spoken in the entire film, hardly anything “between” these two guys, just rambling fragments of thoughts which never really lead anywhere, which suggests an interesting disconnection between who we were and who we are.

This could be called a macrobiotic style of filmmaking, like a trip to one of those Big Sur Esalen Institute retreats as it beautifully blends into the character of the gentle Oregon slopes and is an apt reflection of West coast mentality, which has never veered far from the 60’s counterculture mentality, but has also never found a comfort zone in society at large. This is a deceptively subtle film whose loudest voice is its silences, harking back to a time when we really used to “listen” to one another with an almost insatiable appetite, and had plenty to offer in terms of relevant cultural insight and point of view, which has been curbed through the passing of time, subsided into the distant, faraway regions of the current political landscape and been deemed irrelevant in the sound bite, talk radio and/or blog opinion instant script that has become the vehicle for today’s news.

There’s a beautiful minimalist understatement of this journey into the woods, which allows us to see and feel the distinct flavor and landscape of the Oregon Cascade mountains, which are mere hours away from the Portland city dwellers. In California, Oregon, and Washington, there are major urban areas, yet within an hour or so in any direction, one can immerse themselves into mammoth wilderness regions which are filled with naturalistic wonders to explore. In the 60’s, groups would routinely leave the cities either hitchhiking or in VW buses and take expeditions into these outback regions to avoid the reach of the law, to get high, strip naked, and just let themselves go in an uninhibited expression of being free without having to worry about being subjected to conformist “straight” thinking. Here one dropped out of conventional society, leaving behind the prejudices, preconceived notions, judgments, and other inherently self-centered, short-sided views and dropped into a completely different state of mind, where one communed with nature and developed a relationship with planet earth. Questioning and even rejecting the validity of what people routinely heard on television, in the news, from leading political figures, and even what we were being taught in schools or at home, was pretty common in those days, and what was advocated instead was not some grandiose, violent scheme to overthrow the government, though some went that route, but instead each was responsible for discovering their own personal journey, for finding their own way. OLD JOY reflects on this philosophy, this search for internal wisdom through peaceful means, by dropping the ordinary hang ups, the stress-induced competitive urge to succeed at all costs, or to be judged by age old traditional religious values that reflect worth only through work.

Unfortunately, the political process since the early 70’s has tainted the playing field through a series of unending dirty tricks, negative ads, and out and out lies, which leaves a populace so cynical and suspicious of anyone’s political motives that Jesus Christ himself, should he return, would probably be labeled a “liberal,” or some other irrelevant label, which only serves to diminish his real value in the eyes of others. This is standard operating procedure for the past 30 years, leaving many anxious and confused as to where they stand, as what they believe in has been pulverized by the press and political pundits to such a degree, factionalized into single interest groups, demoralized into believing there’s really no hope anymore, pitting one against the other, isolating them into mere afterthought, until eventually we are led to conclude that only the interests of the really rich are represented in Congress anymore.

All of this build up of resentment and disillusionment is a backdrop for the film, and never mentioned outright, only suggested through hints and small gestures of the beautifully detailed characterizations, but provides the emotional core that generates the urge for these two long lost buddies, each apparently heading in different directions in their lives, to get back together again for a two-day venture into the woods as they search for the remote seclusion of the Bagby Hot Springs. One is married and about to become a father while the other remains something of a wanderlust, wary of ever being tied down. Yet even as they meet, they rarely look one another in the eye, or hold any discernable conversation at length, but remain hidden behind their own invisible veneers, continually protecting themselves not from one another, but from having to admit their own disillusionment with themselves, failing to live up to their own set of ideals, and from having to acknowledge the vacuous emptiness that continuously gnaws at them just under the surface each and every passing day.

The spirit of the film is amazingly tender and oblique, beautifully shot by Peter Sillen, drawing an odd similarity to the missed connections in Wong Kar-wai’s HAPPY TOGETHER (1997), even to the way they get lost en route and discover their road map is all but useless, but this is a smaller, simpler vision suggesting we’ve never before reached this particular fork in the road, this uncertainty about the future. There is the possibility that the film is entirely too spacious, that many younger viewers are unfamiliar with the kind of communal hope and idealism that once existed, in which case the slim narrative may feel like a stoner comedy with an air of eloquent 60’s nostalgia, none of which was actually shown in the film, yet there are peculiar, unmistakable references, especially to West coast 60’s mentality, which anyone who’s ever been there understands. But disillusionment is key, the internalized heartbreak from having to accept so much less from our nation and from ourselves than what we had once hoped is a central message of this film, how far we are from the kind of world we once dreamed of, as we continue to be divided and disconnected from the planet and from one another in ways that only leave us more emotionally paralyzed and incapacitated.

Listen Eggroll: Sundance: Day Seven Mike D’Angelo

[This is one of those films I'd rather not talk too much about, for fear of ruining the experience for others. (Not that anyone's likely to see it -- hands up, everyone who saw Reichardt's equally terrific River of Grass in its initial commercial run.) I'll just say (a) that this is the movie I wanted Blissfully Yours to be, and (b) that afterwards I was so choked up I couldn't eat, even though my stomach was rumbling for the entire 83 minutes. Oh, and also (c) that I still can't believe that's the preacher kid from Matewan.]

OLD JOY (d. Kelly Reichardt) *** Ken Rudolph

Two thirtysomething old friends, one (a spacey Will Oldham) a familiar counterculture type drop-out, the other (Daniel London, in a naturalistic, bemused performance) married with a kid on the way, ready to embrace the realities of working life in Portland, OR with his Beemer station wagon. They embark on an overnight camping trip to a backwoods hot springs, get lost, camp out, get loaded, find peace. I kept waiting for the dueling banjos of Deliverance; but that isn't what this film is about at all. It's about rediscovering the old joys of life in a throwback way curiously close to my life when I was in my 30s (so many many years ago). Nostalgic, and somehow lovely. Nothing much happens in this film; and yet I was blown away by the good feeling it engendered in me. I think I'm going to try to search out Bagby Hot Springs before I get too old to hike in.

stylusmagazine.com (Learned Foote) review

Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" is something like an ultra-economical remake of "Sideways," with music by Yo La Tengo and the plot pushed from the dialogue into the images. Two 40-ish old friends in Portland, Ore., Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), go on a camping trip in the Cascade Mountains, get lost looking for a deep-woods hot spring, and spend the night in the middle of nowhere shooting at beer cans with a pellet gun. They find the hot spring the next day, have a soak and go home. That's pretty much it.

But there's an entire world of emotion between these guys, and even if we never discover exactly what the source of the rift or drift between them is, we get enough clues to feel its intensity. Mark and Kurt are aging urban slackers of an identifiable vintage (they probably once liked at least some of the bands in "American Hardcore"). Mark's the faintly responsible one who's finally gotten married and is having a kid. Kurt's the one who's still deliberately rootless, traveling North America in search of an elusive, transformative bliss. If you're somewhere near that demographic yourself, these guys will have the transparency (and opacity) of real people; they won't require explanation.

"Old Joy" (adapted by writer Jonathan Raymond from his own short story) is only 76 minutes long, but it has the contemplative power of Buddhist meditation. Reichardt gives us long, stoned takes of rural roads; shots of birds, insects and slugs in the spectacular Oregon rain forest; interludes with Mark's dog, Lucy. Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this. I found it masterly, riveting.

The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias

For a few lyrical stretches in Kelly Reichardt's beautiful Old Joy, there's a sound you rarely hear in American movies—silence, or at least the gentle assertions of nature when people aren't yapping over it. And for Reichardt, the space between conversations speaks loud enough, whether the silence signifies an awkward divide that two uncertain friends can no longer fill, or merely an idyllic break from the clamor of everyday life. Either way, Old Joy feels like the flip side to Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation: The former keeps quiet, the latter can't stop talking, but both have a level of insight into young adulthood that far exceeds their pricier "independent" cousins.

Through the simplest of setups, Reichardt reveals two men who have reached a crisis point in their individual lives and their friendship. Married with a baby on the way, Daniel London seems eager to get away from this ticking time bomb, if only for a couple of days. When his old friend Will Oldham suggests a camping trip up in Oregon's Cascade Mountains, London jumps at the opportunity, even though things have grown a little awkward between them. However reluctantly London embraces the prospect of fatherhood, his tentative advancement into adult responsibility has left his wayward friend Oldham in the dust. For his part, Oldham seems stuck in post-graduate townie phase, still advancing fanciful dreams in lieu of a real plan and retreating into a stoned haze at every opportunity.

The bald fact that these friends have grown apart asserts itself in a couple of painful exchanges, but never to the point of melodramatic eruption. More often, their estrangement doesn't need to be vocalized, because Reichardt suggests it so beautifully in the pained rhythms of their conversation and a slightly mournful tone. At the same time, this weekend in the woods represents a genuine escape for the characters, and Old Joy perks up with several lyrical sequences in the natural world, highlighted by a visit to hot springs that serves as the film's moving centerpiece. For such a simple, determinedly minor film, it's remarkable how much insight and feeling Reichardt packs into that scene: As Oldham goes off on a rambling monologue, London seems shelled off by preoccupation, but a surprising gesture suddenly restores their lost connection, however briefly. In and out in 76 minutes, Old Joy doesn't try for too much, but its subtle victories leave plenty to savor.

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

Carefully accumulating and juxtaposing details to form an interconnected web of loneliness, regret, and longing for happier times gone by, Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy would warrant being called a mash-up of Sideways and Brokeback Mountain if it weren't so superior to those heralded "independent" predecessors in both form and content. Crafted with the leisurely rhythm of a Sunday afternoon drive, Reichardt's deceptively simple film achieves its perceptivity from laid-back unobtrusiveness, her cautiously detached direction providing an intimate fly-on-the-wall perspective on friends Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham) as they reunite to take a weekend camping trip to the hot springs nestled deep within Oregon's Cascade Mountains.

Throughout their journey, almost nothing of outward import occurs: the duo chat amicably, get lost, have breakfast, and quietly penetrate the lush, green wilderness while listening to Air America radio broadcasts in which both callers and hosts lament the sorry state of the Democratic party, national race relations, and the country's two-party political system. And yet beneath this outdoor expedition's façade of inactivity lurks the dull, persistent throb of heartache and concealed anguish, a mood intensified by Reichardt's exquisite attention to her milieu's ambient sights and sounds, and brought to melancholy life by the expressive minimalism of her leads. "Man, Mark, you really hold onto shit," says Kurt after seeing his friend's well-worn marijuana container, though the statement is just as applicable to the speaker himself, a bearded, balding guy who seemingly coasts along with blissful stoner nonchalance but who, it's slowly revealed, also harbors inescapable sadness.

Their excursion instigated by Kurt as a chance to reconnect after an apparently lengthy separation, the two (accompanied by Mark's dog) dutifully catch up on each other's lives—Kurt's miscellaneous stories about running into old friends, Mark's feelings about his relationship with Tanya (Tanya Smith) and his fear of impending fatherhood—all the while carefully avoiding any overt talk about the tumultuous shared past that stands as the proverbial white elephant in the forest. The two discuss topics such as an old record shop's distasteful transformation into a health food shop (dubbed "Rejucination"), Mark's father leaving his mother at the age of 70, and Kurt's personal superstring theory that the universe is in the shape of a tear falling through space, all while a radio voice pontificates about the "uncertainties of the future." Through such indirect conversations, as well as a naturalistic mise-en-scène encoded with oblique (but nonetheless ever-present and piercing) signifiers, Reichardt delicately reveals stratified layers of emotion.

While such reserve sporadically dampens down its narrative, Old Joy's informality and subtlety is furthered by London and Oldham, the former displaying a reticence that barely masks his character's heightened anxiety, the latter concealing apprehensive hopefulness behind charming, carefree affability. Reichardt fashions an intricate rapport between her protagonists and setting, the silence of the Oregon woodlands counterbalancing the noxious noise of the modern world ("You can't get real quiet anymore," Kurt says in explaining his affection for the rural), and the seclusion of their tree-lined destination conveying the friends' inner and interpersonal alienation. That the hot spring baths are eventually revealed to be hollowed-out tree trunks in which people lie—thus entailing physical communion between naked man and his ancient environment—further reinforces the notion that the trip is, at heart, an attempted reversion to a more natural, harmonious state.

Yet even during Kurt's climactic explanation of the film's title and subsequent stab at recapturing what he'd lost, Reichardt's delicate touch creates room for interpretative flexibility, allowing dialogue pauses and the unseen spaces between scenes to breathe with palpable, mysterious life. And thus fittingly, Old Joy concludes not with expository enlightenment but, rather, with an abrupt, inconclusive note still ringing with the sorrow of its airwave-transmitted Greek chorus.

Old Joy Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

I assume that my tiny readership is well-versed in the ways of Film Comment, Cinema Scope, The Village Voice, and all things cine-indie. I assume you follow the reports out of film festivals such as Rotterdam and Sundance, and if you're reading this and don't fit that description, I thank you kindly, because you're almost certainly my mother-in-law. (Hi, Linda!) But, assuming that you aren't, you'll need little introduction to Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, already lauded as one of the year's finest films, and one of the most patient, insightful American indies in ages. Such descriptions are without a doubt true. Old Joy is a cinematic miniature with a deft, literary attention to the minutiae of human behavior, the awkward hesitancies and interstitial silences that accrue between friends as time and distance wear away at who we are. It's jewel-like in its construction, bursting with the verdant flora of the Oregon forest yet meticulously fashioned and arranged, a rare, effortless-seeming union of the natural and the manmade. Reichardt and cinematographer Peter Sillen (himself no slouch as an avant-garde documentarian) masterfully log the transition from manicured suburbia into the dense thicket around the Cascade Mountains. The film eventually arrives at the Bagby Hot Springs, a transitional space where human intervention has clearly been kept to an absolute minimum. As a pure landscape film, Old Joy yields vast sensual rewards.

But there's quite a bit more going on in Old Joy, and while some of it adds a layer of plangency and depth, other aspects are less formally resolved. Adapted by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond from Raymond's own short story, Old Joy examines the brief re-encounter of two old friends, Mark (Daniel London), a seemingly settled man whose wife is expecting their first child, and Kurt (alt-country artist Will Oldham), an itinerantly hippie who has fallen out of touch with Mark. The emotional crux of the film is in its quiet accumulation of silences and unanswered statements, the gaps between these two men and who they've become. (Or perhaps more accurately, who Mark has become; the implication is that Kurt hasn't . . . evolved? No, that implies a greater sympathy with Mark's newer commitments, and although I certainly identify with Mark's character more -- I used to live in communal situations, had lots of hippie friends, and now I'm kind of a low-rent yuppified professional, and one of the few men in my circle of friends to have gotten married -- Old Joy is careful to withhold judgment on either Kurt or Mark.) Reichardt teases perfectly downcast performances from her two leads, although periodically Oldham turns up the intensity, revealing Kurt's manic, needy side. (The ambiguous conclusion implies that more could be riding on this reunion for Kurt than Mark or the viewer realizes.) Compared to the mute presence of nature, Kurt and Mark are as verbose as any Rohmer or Bergman protagonists, but rarely does "conversation" take place. Rather, both men issue brief, ejaculatory statements of purpose, waiting in vain for the other man to pick up the ball, waiting for "connection." Instead, replies tend to consist of "No shit," or "Tell me about it," empty tokens of strained empathy. The loss of connection is the vacuum that Old Joy catalogs but doesn't fill, and even nature, big as life, proves inadequate to the task.

Upon first viewing Old Joy, I was gently nudged into a deep sense of personal loss. I wondered how I might even compose a review that did much more than issue a blanket apology to all those who have moved in and out of my life over the years. A second viewing lowered my estimation of the film ever so slightly, despite retaining its emotional valence. Some aspects of Old Joy feel over-written, too perfectly constructed to achieve its intended impact. If cinema and theatre are media best suited to the power of things unsaid, of the unrelieved tension of hanging pauses, then perhaps some of Old Joy's overdeterminations are the result of its literary provenance. When, during the restaurant scene, Kurt enthuses that "now we don't have to rush, we can take our time," the waitress returns to ask if the men need more time, and Mark says, "No," shoving the menu her way. This is Reichardt and Raymond driving the point home a little too directly. Likewise, when Kurt's dream delivers the meaning of Old Joy's enigmatic title, I found myself resenting these incursions into verbal symbolism. Make no mistake; even these highly directive passages "work," just as Mark's Air America radio soundtrack economically makes its own point about the sense of leftist ennui that bedevils his (and Reichardt's) generation. Even though, compared to most other American films of the past ten or fifteen years, Old Joy is a model of subtlety and finesse, I found myself torn by them, since the film's rolling landscapes and emphasis on the ethics of listening all imply that it is committed to an experimental, open form. In fact, it's heavily controlled. This isn't a flaw in itself (although I'll gladly cop to being partial to less mannered artworks with ample room to move), but it does point to an odd inconsistency in tone. The human drama and the great outdoors promise to become objective correlatives to one another, but actually end up floating downriver side by side.

North by Northwest | Village Voice J. Hoberman, September 12, 2006

New Age Anxieties: Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" on Notebook | MUBI Julia Cooper, July 31, 2014

not coming to a theater near you review Katherine Follett

Nature Boys: Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy” Adam Nayman, also Michael Koresky and Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot at indieWIRE

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

James Bowman review

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 1, 2007

Between Productions [Robert Cashill]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Film Monthly (Josh Staman) review

Isthmus (Kent Williams) review

Old Joy Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Nerve.com [Bilge Ebiri]

Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) dvd review [A] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]

not coming to a theater near you (Beth Gilligan) review

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review Page 2

DVD Talk (Preston Jones) dvd review [4/5]

The Lumière Reader [b] Tim Wong

cinemattraction (Myles David Jewell) review

New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review Page 2

OLD JOY by Kelly Reichardt : Alternative Film Guide Andre Soares

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival report

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Don R. Lewis

Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann

Reel.com review [2.5/4] Franny French

Twitch (Peter Martin) review

Variety.com [Scott Foundas]

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] including an interview with the director November 8, 2006 seen here: Kelly Reichardt

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Time Out London (Jessica Winter) review

The Guardian (Steve Rose) review

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Wesley Morris

The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]

Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [3.5/5]

San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review

Movie review: 'Old Joy' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune

RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

WENDY AND LUCY B+ 91

USA (80 mi) 2008

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself - well…how did I get here?

—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980), Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime (Full Length Version ... YouTube (4:31)

Adapted from a short story Train Choir by the author Jon Raymond and the director, shot in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon, where it is impossible not to reference local filmmaker Gus van Sant when watching this film, as there are so many similarities in minimalist style, such as the naturalism of the performances, the flexible use of camera, an extraordinary offscreen sound design, and the adherence to strict standards of realism and authenticity, including locale. While van Sant is receiving Oscar accolades for his more mainstream release, a somewhat conventional biopic of Harvey Milk, the first outwardly gay candidate to hold office in America, released immediately after the crushing defeat of Proposition 8 in California which now makes same sex marriage illegal, but his real standout film of the year was the lesser known Paranoid Park (2007), an oblique, fractured mosaic about a moody, self-absorbed teenager whose world is turned upside down by a horrible incident that plays out in his mind, none of which actually get at the truth of what happened, displaying an inventive editing scheme, mired in the foggy incoherence that is adolescent confusion. This film similarly avoids the details of exploring what happens, but explores the incoherence and confusion as it focuses on the fluctuating powerlessness in the main character’s state of mind, much of it no doubt due to her own her own poor decisions, but also impacted by a downward trend nationwide into dire economic circumstances. While there are many road movies similar to this, where Five Easy Pieces (1970) comes to mind, especially at the end, most all have male leads and none are as pared down as this one.

Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a young woman out on her own with little to show for it, having no one to turn to except the companionship of her dog Lucy (which happens to be Reichardt’s own dog — also featured in Old Joy). While not altogether homeless, Wendy is not far from it, living a bleak existence that includes the hopes of traveling from Muncie, Indiana to Ketchikan, Alaska where she believes she can find work in a fish hatchery. Little is ever known about her past or her future, or why she needs to get to Alaska, but she finds herself stuck in Oregon, her car broken down, little money left, and is continuously mired in the constant struggle of getting through the present. While the film hasn’t an ounce of artificiality and is a realist drama to the core, it lacks the complex sense of artistic exploration and poetic originality of Paranoid Park or the backdrop of the 60’s counterculture in her previous work Old Joy (2006). Instead it portrays a fall from grace, choosing to reduce minimalism even further, testing the audience’s limits by showing less and less, so that in the end it is close to being narrative free, becoming a tone poem capturing the quiet desperation and the subtle nuances and textures of a marginalized life.

While it’s interesting that this film was made before the stock market recently took a tumble a month or so before the November 2008 Presidential elections resulting in literally millions of people losing their jobs, this film, like van Sant’s MILK (2008), couldn’t be more timely, as it shows how easy it is to fall between the cracks, to lose everything, and to find yourself scraping bottom.

And you may ask yourself

How do I work this?

And you may ask yourself

Where is that large automobile?

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful house!

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful wife!

—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)

Written by David Byrne and Brian Eno, this song (though not in the film) comes to mind as an existential anthem to that moment in everyone’s life when they realize that youthful ideals and dreams can’t pay the rent, replaced by unrecognizable yet more practical values like family, security and responsibility. Still discovering herself, Wendy is swallowed up whole by the unforeseen circumstances that she allows herself to experience, having little or no defenses, as she values her individuality and believes in that great American myth that life is better somewhere else down the road. Reminiscent of the uncompromising, harsh realities expressed in Lodge Kerrigan’s lower class mental health film KEANE (2004), much of this resembles the caged animal pacing that was the stark feature in the Dardennes brother’s film ROSETTA (1999), as despite all the effort Wendy is making just getting from place to place, she’s not getting anywhere, stuck in the quagmire of her own helpless futility where she finds herself increasingly lost and alone. Released the same year as the completely unexpected and devastating death of Williams’ husband Heath Ledger, there is an acute feeling of sympathy and anguish associated with Williams’s performance.

Sadness pervades nearly every frame of this film, as instead of discovering more opportunities on the road, she’s faced with the ever decreasing prospect of finding even fewer, where the vast open spaces that she believes lie ahead cave in on her, leaving her lost in the tightening emotional and economic stranglehold of being homeless and broke, still believing against all odds that blue skies lie ahead. When traveling on the road, one learns early on to expect the unexpected. Wendy hasn’t even reached that point yet, as she’s still close to the beginning of her journey where she’s still stripping herself of all earthly possessions. Shot mostly out in the elements, this is a bleak portrait of naiveté, of stubbornness and dead ends, of quiet hope and a yearning for something better to materialize out of thin air. Call it God, call it Alaska, sometimes one needs more than blind faith, yet it’s an apt moral comment on our contemporary society by looking at one life on the edge of economic ruin, where the predominate feeling is that of hopelessness and utter despair, yet people avert their eyes and just walk in the other direction, expecting people to fend for themselves, where any sense of what was once a frontier community in the American West has all but been shattered to pieces.

Wendy and Lucy JR Jones from The Reader

Kelly Reichardt's masterful low-budget drama tells a story a child could understand even as it indicts, with stinging anger, the economic cruelty of George Bush's America. Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) is impressively restrained as Wendy, a young homeless woman who's living in her car with her beloved mutt, Lucy. After the car breaks down in an Oregon hick town, she makes the mistake of tying Lucy up outside a grocery store before going in to shoplift, and when she gets busted and taken to the local police station, the dog disappears. Reichardt (Old Joy) and cowriter Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after hearing conservative commentators bash the poor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and their movie is a stark reminder of how easily someone like Wendy can fall through our frayed safety net. The climax is a heartbreaker, and in its haunting finale the movie recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. 80 min.

Review: Wendy and Lucy Ray Pride from New City

In Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” Michelle Williams continues to astonish with her quiet range in a too-timely story of contemporary working-class despair. What is acting? When I read the best reviewers of theater, I feel less than suited for the task of describing performance, but watching Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” with the very alive Williams at its dead center, I understand, you understand: a centeredness, a beingness, a simple, elegant, understated, yet stated presence. There is a magnificent poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” with the lines, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” Mere anarchy. That’s this moment, suspended in history. That is also this film: bad things are visited upon a good person. Mere anarchy. “Wendy and Lucy” is about a girl and her dog. She’s traveling the Pacific Northwest toward a hoped-for job. She loses her dog. She is disadvantaged and lightly abused in all the common ways. She wants work; she wants dignity. She wants the return of Lucy. The world hardly notices. She whistles an almost tuneless tune to keep her breath in the air, her life in the world (written for Williams, in an inspired stroke by Reichardt, by Will Oldham). So much better than her fine “Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy” defines Reichardt as a poet of the overlooked American working class. 80m.

CINEFILE.info Rob Christopher

"You know, scientifically speaking, Marian," says Matthew Modine in SHORT CUTS, "there's no such thing as beyond natural color." Is there such a thing as beyond naturalism? If there is, Reichardt has moved beyond it, beyond even neorealism, using an unvarnished eye to fashion impressionistic portraits of characters who inhabit very specific times and places. Though she's made only a handful of films, a randomly chosen moment from any one of them bears her distinct sensibility. Her most recent film, 2016’s CERTAIN WOMEN, has garnered considerably more attention than her previous work, bringing her name to larger audiences. That's a great reason to revisit one of her previous masterpieces (though "masterpiece" seems like a pretentious way to describe this simple, heartbreaking story about loneliness). WENDY AND LUCY is centered on an outstanding performance by Michelle Williams and a painterly eye for the environs of Oregon. Anyone who's ever spent time in the Pacific Northwest will savor details like the greenness of the grass in an empty field or the slow clatter of a freight train going by. It's a small gem that has all the Americana of a John Ford movie yet recalls the naturalism of VAGABOND and even UMBERTO D. And like those movies it's about people literally living hand to mouth, an existence where a gift of $6 (which occurs towards the end) is truly a sacrifice. Owing much to co-screenwriter Jon Raymond's fiction, it unfolds like a perfectly constructed novella.

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Kelly Reichardt is one of the last American directors to be at all credible. While her more high-profile contemporaries are obsessed with overblown bombast and empty quirk, Reichardt quietly goes about her business of documenting people under the radar.

If this latest effort isn’t quite the revelation that was small masterpiece Old Joy, it’s still a refreshing change-up from the badassnature or cutesiness of most Amerindie.

Michelle Williams stars as a young woman drifting into homelessness; she’s Wendy and Lucy is the dog she keeps with her as a constant companion. When Wendy’s car inconveniently breaks down, she winds up vulnerable, steals some food, is caught and becomes separated from her beloved Lucy. The ensuing financial and legal red tape conspires to keep them apart: Lucy becomes the film’s structuring absence and a symbol of how the system of “responsible” law-and-order makes it harder for people trapped on the social margins.

The characters aren’t quite as nuanced as they were in Old Joy, with one or two signpost figures that needed to be more fleshed out, but the good thing about this movie is that it takes things seriously without taking them strenuously. You never feel hectored by the politics, or bullied by the moralism, or attacked by the aesthetic means to an end; Reichardt quietly lets her river run as a you draw your own conclusions.

Williams is a revelation, as calm and articulate in her performance as the film is in its machinations, and as good a reason as any to see this movie, but there are plenty more reasons than that to spend your time with this way-better-than-average offering.

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]

To describe the plot of "Wendy and Lucy" is to invite guffaws. Simply put – and there's no other way to put it – the film is about Wendy (Michelle Williams), a young drifter from Indiana who sets out for Alaska with her dog Lucy, loses her en route in Oregon when her car breaks down, and spends the rest of her time trying to find her.

Improbably, it's one of the most affecting films of the year, which once again demonstrates that all you need to make a good movie is talent.

I was not expecting the movie to be this good, since director Kelly Reichardt's overpraised previous film, "Old Joy," was an anomic snooze. But "Wendy and Lucy" captures like no other film the low-key despair of the vagrant's life in these hard-pressed times. Williams gives a performance that is so shorn of mannerism and theatricality that the effect is almost documentarylike. But make no mistake, we are watching a performance. Williams fully inhabits Wendy's moodscape. She captures the sullen fragility of someone who distrusts other people and yet relies on them to survive. Wariness and openness are writ equally large on her face.

This is one of the best movies ever made about how people bring their hearts and souls to bear on their pets. And it does so without a trace of sentimentality and special pleading. The emotional connection between Wendy and Lucy is a lot more nuanced than most movie portrayals of friendships between two-legged types. (Lucy is played by Reichardt's own dog, who also appeared in "Old Joy." This no doubt explains her terrific performance, which won last year's unofficial Palm Dog prize in Cannes.)

"Wendy and Lucy" is a road movie where much of the action takes place in one place. The road that looms before Wendy is a beckoning to a better life that she might never experience. We never learn much about the life Wendy has left, and this is as it should be. In a movie this understated, any sort of heavy-duty back story would seem jarringly out of place. We learn about Wendy from the company she keeps: not only Lucy but also strangers – a stockroom boy (John Robinson) who busts her for shoplifting, a security guard (Wally Dalton), an auto mechanic (Will Patton), a vagrant (Larry Fessenden). Like Wendy, these people carry an authenticity so unforced that "realism" seems like too heavy a term to describe it.

It takes a great deal of art to make a movie this artless. "Wendy and Lucy" is adapted from a short story by Jon Raymond, and it has the signal virtues of that form. It's a resonant little mood piece that packs a great deal into a small compass.

A girl and her dog JR Jones from Chicago Reader blog

TORONTO—Four days into the Toronto film festival, I've seen many fine features, and four that were excellent: Agnes Varda's delightful, career-spanning memoir The Beaches of Agnes; Jonathan Demme's vertiginous domestic drama Rachel Getting Married; Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's melancholy immigrant tale Sugar, and Joel and Ethan Coen's cruelly funny farce Burn After Reading. But the only film so far that's really turned me inside out is Kelly Reichardt's minimalist, ultra-low-budget indie Wendy and Lucy.

Readers might remember Reichardt's previous feature, Old Joy, which premiered in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September 2006 and played for a week at the Music Box two months later. Part landscape film, part muted drama, it followed two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) as they try to rekindle their relationship with a road trip to a natural spring out in the wilderness. Like many such reunions, their time together only confirms that they no longer really understand each other, and the sadness of their dead friendship is objectified by the passing of lush greenery into crummy industrial landscape as they drive home.

Wendy and Lucy is similarly low-key and landscape-oriented, taking place in a hick town in Oregon, but its simple story also delivers a profound social punch. Wendy, played with impressive restraint by Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain), is homeless and sleeping in her car, trying to make her way north so she can find work in a cannery. Her only companion is her beloved mutt, Lucy, who she makes the dire mistake of tying up outside a grocery store before she goes in to steal some food. Caught red-handed, Wendy spends 12 hours at the police station, and by the time she gets out, Lucy has long since disappeared.

Presenting her film at the AMC theater in Toronto, Reichardt explained that she and coscreenwriter Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after listening to the conservative backlash and "contempt for poverty" that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some commentators, she recalled, couldn't fathom the idea that you can't escape a storm zone if you're too poor to own a car. In her movie, Wendy has no safety net whatsoever—no job, no insurance, no assets except for her beater. She's one mishap away from falling through the cracks forever, and in its haunting finale, Wendy and Lucy recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's classic Depression-era drama I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932).

Remarkably, when Wendy and Lucy opens in Chicago this December, it will be the second high-profile American indie this year to stare poverty in the face, after Courtney Hunt's thriller Frozen River. This may be box-office suicide, but it's also a hell of a dramatic device. Most movies do all sorts of huffing and puffing to raise the stakes for their characters, but when you don't have a dime to your name, just pulling a meal together can be a matter of life and death.

Slant Magazine review Nick Schager

Though it doesn't feature Old Joy's Air America radio call-in Greek chorus, Kelly Reichardt's follow-up Wendy and Lucy is nonetheless a somber politicized lament for hardscrabble lives struggling to exist on the economic precipice. Reichardt's latest (based on Jon Raymond's short story Train Choir) opens on Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her beloved dog Lucy amiably strolling through the Oregonian woods, their casual and affectionate rapport amidst their verdant environment underscored by the soundtrack's melancholy humming by Wendy, who's on her way from Indiana to Alaska in the hopes of finding employment at a Northwest fish cannery. Dressed in a flannel shirt, a hooded sweatshirt and homemade corduroy cut-offs, and boasting a boyish haircut, Wendy looks the part of an aimless drifter, yet her desire for stability becomes clear once she comes across a group of itinerants' campfire, her face peering through the brush with fearful hesitancy that suggests her stark contrast with these nomads. Her plans to reach Alaska, however, go awry in a small Oregon town when she's arrested for shoplifting dog food and carted off to jail, with Lucy left to fend for herself while tied to a post outside the grocery store. When Wendy makes bail and returns to retrieve Lucy, the dog is gone, initiating a desperate search that soon consumes the narrative.

Both the callous self-interest and compassionate altruism of strangers are on display in Wendy and Lucy, as Wendy's circumstances are created by the insensitivity of a grocery store employee and aided by the generosity of a Walgreens security guard who provides encouragement as well as the use of his cell phone. Permeating her plight is an encompassing sense of sadness rooted in loss, loneliness and, most strikingly, departure, with Reichardt repeatedly closing scenes with the sight of Wendy, her back to the camera, exiting the frame. Wendy has not only left Indiana but, now specifically, wants to "pass through" Oregon, a place where, per Wally Dalton's security guard, there are few jobs and fewer people. Thus, her northern migration soon becomes emblematic of a country where financial and—as evidenced by the coldness of Wendy's sister over the phone—also familial instability have fostered rootlessness on both a personal and societal scale. In Wendy's efforts to endure, which additionally involve figuring out a way to repair her car, Reichardt taps into a larger cultural malaise, her film's stripped-down realism capturing—in gorgeous shots of the damp, misty Pacific Northwest pines and aged train yards (further symbols of departure), or of Williams's determined countenance struggling to maintain self-possession—the arduousness of subsisting alone in the face of hardship.

Despite a lost-dog story primed for manipulative sentimentality, Reichardt's gracefully unfussy direction maintains consistent tonal composure, so that when Wendy finally breaks down after having a nocturnal forest run-in with a wacko (Larry Fessenden), her sobbing registers not as melodramatic hysterics but as hard-earned release. With regard to finding Lucy, a pound employee tells Wendy, "It's going to be up to you now," and despite espousing the belief that one can still sometimes rely on the kindness of others, Wendy and Lucy ultimately does grant Wendy control over her and Lucy's fate. Likewise, it places the burden of carrying the film on Williams, whose expression of at-the-breaking-point strain—a combustible fusion of fear, despair and misery over having lost the only genuinely true, reciprocal love in her life—is made intimately wrenching by her shaky suppression of those feelings behind a façade of defiant solemnity. Absent any showy histrionics or mannerisms, her performance makes painfully real Reichardt's depiction of everyday problems magnified by poverty into mini-calamities, exhibiting a measured grace that's matched by complementary beginning-middle-end tracking shots—of woman and dog playing fetch, of dog pound cages, and of dusk-dappled trees spied from a moving train—that encapsulate the film's emotional trajectory from contentment to sorrow to hopeful uncertainty.

The House Next Door [Lauren Wissot]

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

Reverse Shot (Adam Nayman) review

not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review

Filmbrain [Andrew Grant] Like Anna Karina’s Sweater

indieWIRE review Kristi Mitsuda from Reverse Shot

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [3.5/4]

The Onion A.V. Club (Scott Tobias) review

Review: "Wendy and Lucy" (Reichardt, USA) on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]

PopMatters (Steven Rea) review which includes a running conversation with actress Michelle Williams

Cinematical (Kim Voynar) review at Cannes

Karina Longworth at Cannes from Spoutblog

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review

Wendy And Lucy Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily

Pajiba (Dustin Rowles) review

Culture Wars [Ion Martea]

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

The House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]

Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks] at Toronto

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Viennale '08 capsules

They Shoot Actors, Don't They?

World Socialist Web Site David Walsh

Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman

Variety (Scott Foundas) review

The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) capsule review [3/4]

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [4/6]

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]

Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Wesley Morris

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

Los Angeles Times (Sam Adams) review

an interesting note from the American Humane Association regarding this film

The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review December 10, 2008

Cannes Journal: A Cantankerous Crowd in No Mood for Love Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 24, 2008

The New Season Film: For Michelle Williams, It’s All Personal Dennis Lim from The New York Times, September 4, 2008

Questions for Kelly Reichardt: Social Realist Interview by Deborah Solomon from The New York Times, November 28, 2008

MEEK’S CUTOFF B+ 90

USA (104 mi) 2010

A revisionist western that depicts the aimless wanderings of a small wagon train party of three young married couples bound for Oregon Territory in 1845, who apparently break off from a larger group to set out on their own led by a gruff, Buffalo Bill-style frontier guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who prefers to constantly remind them of the perils that surround them instead of actually being of some use and leading them somewhere. Written by Jon Raymond, but supposedly based on real events, what’s interesting is how little actually happens in this film, where the drama is in the details of portraying day to day struggles, where compounding pressures to make the right decisions and endless hardships beyond their expectations continually await them, where the story actually becomes their deteriorating state of mind as they run short of faith and water. Something of an existentialist drama taking place in the expanse of the arid desert of the West, the film is not shot in ‘Scope, which would reflect the wide expanse of the ever distant horizons, but is instead shot in the box-shaped 1:33 aspect ratio which continually gives the audience the claustrophobic feeling of being boxed in while also punctuating the intimacy of human faces. The mood of the film is suffocating, where the darkness of the night and the near inaudible dialogue make it impossible to figure out what’s going on initially, as all conversations to make sense of the situation are drown out by their dire predicament, which suggests they are lost, having placed their trust in a guide who’s full of tall tales but no practical answers of where to find water.

Adding more psychological anxiety to the situation is the discovery of a lone Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux) roaming in the vicinity that they catch and keep tied-up as a prisoner, initially having to decide whether to kill him or not, as urged by Meek, believing all Indians are savages, or hope he can lead them to water. Solomon and Emily Tetherow, Will Patton and a heavily bonneted Michelle Williams, are the voice of reason, preferring to believe that since the Indian is from the territory, he knows his way around and can find water, even though he speaks no English and the words he utters are completely incomprehensible.* Still, they place their faith in him as the wagon trains follow his slow trek into the expanse of the distant horizon. Of interest, only Meek rides a horse, as all the rest walk, hoping to save the strength of the animals. Also, whenever it’s time to make a decision, the men gather off to the side while the excluded women sit and wait, accepting their husband’s wisdom. While this may seem like a minor point, this exclusion creates more psychic tension when things go wrong, as people typically need someone to blame, especially when they don’t have a choice in the matter. When nerves are on edge, people are liable to think the worst, making their situation even more catastrophic, which has a near comical effect when one woman has fanatical delusions that the Indian is not leading them to water, but to his tribe and their ultimate doom. With mounting dread, around every hillside they expect an awaiting ambush. This gives the film a kind of sci-fi feel, as the Indian is not seen as civilized or human and may as well be from outer space, treated as if he is an outlaw alien.

Emily grows to bitterly distrust Meek as a man who does not live up to his word, as he hasn’t led them anywhere, seemingly traveling in circles, viewing him as a worthless creature that is all “vanity,” but has her doubts about a kept prisoner who’s liable to turn on them at any second. The film has elements of two superb Australian outback films, Nicolas Roeg’s WALKABOUT (1971), which presents the psychological ramifications of both cultures when a young white brother and teen sister lost in the outback happen upon a young, barely clothed teen Aborigine, placing their faith in him as they wander idyllically at times, where each never really comprehends the other. The other is Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), where a captured and enslaved Aboriginal tracker is placed on foot and in chains to lead three armed white mounted police in pursuit if an alleged black murder suspect who has retreated into the bush. Contrasting visions of colorful Aboriginal art with the vulgar racist slurs of the white police patrol is a dramatic tool in detailing the psychological motives of each party. But in this film, the Indian rambles in unsubtitled words, where his character and inner soul remain a mystery, while Meek has proven himself to be a conniving braggart who never lived up to his part of the bargain. There is a flash point where a meeting of the minds surges out of control, where in a state of panic and desperation, anything can happen, as people are at their wits end and see no way out, trapped by their own delusions and misplaced trust. The spare but eerie music by Jeff Grace is exceptional, giving this a Zen, acid-laced tinge with a mythical feminist twist for the times. Not your ordinary western, this feels more like an existentialist play where the characters are stuck in a purgatory of endless doubt and ever mounting futility.

*Note: according to Cayuse language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, the language of the Cayuse Indians is extinct, so instead they used the untranslated words of the neighboring tribe Nez Perce Language or Nez Perce language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, where there are some 600 remaining Indians in Idaho who speak the Native language, but fewer than 100 are fluent. Throughout history, actions have consequences, where the film’s portrayal of Native Indians in 1845 as uncivilized and savage, someone less than human, has resulted in a language that through the passage of time is extinct. Not only did the U.S. military track down Native tribes and force them to live on barren reservations, but they stripped them of their existing culture.

Based on an actual 1845 incident, Kelly Reichardt’s latest road movie (just picked up by Oscilloscope) is a great leap into the void for this talented, quirky New York filmmaker—a minimalist Western with intimations of frontier surrealism and manifest destiny madness. The members of an Oregon-bound wagon train (including a severely bonneted Michelle Williams) are misled into the desert by their bombastic, wrong-headed guide (Bruce Greenwood). The movie has a spacey, tranced-out quality, but the political implications, regarding trust given and abused, are unmistakable.

The Magic Mountain: The 2010 New York Film Festival | The Nation Stuart Klawans, November 10, 2010

Among the other outstanding narratives on the schedule, films by Kelly Reichardt and Aleksei Fedorchenko testified to the festival's abiding love for movies where made-up characters pass through real though myth-laden landscapes.

Meek's Cutoff is the latest of Reichardt's studies of Americans adrift in the West and is her first period drama. Set in 1845, it follows the dangerous social dynamics within a small wagon train that has gotten lost in the Oregon Territory and is growing desperately short of water. As the party doggedly travels right to left across the classically formatted frame, going through grasslands and desert and rocky hills, power shifts back and forth among a braggart frontier guide (Bruce Greenwood), an increasingly self-assertive woman in the party (Michelle Williams) and a captive Indian (Rod Rondeaux), who may or may not be leading the group to its doom. You might be tempted to call Meek's Cutoff an exercise in feminist, multiculturalist piety if these two latter characters had any clear idea of what they were doing, or an overriding motive other than self-preservation; but they don't, and you won't.

Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair] at Toronto

Set during the 1800s, Meek's Cutoff follows a disparate group of settlers (including Michelle Williams' Emily, Paul Dano's Thomas, and Will Patton's Soloman) as they attempt to make their way across Oregon's infamous (and perilous) trail. Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has infused Meek's Cutoff with an atmosphere of palpable authenticity that's undoubtedly quite impressive, yet the director's refusal to develop the various characters or offer up even a shred of plot ensures that the movie quickly becomes a seriously (and aggressively) tedious piece of work. The film, which ultimately comes to feel more like punishment than entertainment, has seemingly been designed to appeal solely to those viewers with a deep-seated interest in the time period, as it's impossible to envision anyone else finding anything here worth embracing. Exacerbating the film's hand's-off atmosphere is the frustratingly unintelligible nature of over 80% of its dialogue, as Reichardt has evidently directed her actors to either mumble or whisper the majority of their lines. (It's a problem that's so bad, in fact, that coming upon a completely coherent conversation is akin to stumbling on a spring in the middle of the desert.) The end result is a maddeningly dull drama that might fare well among historians, admittedly, yet it's impossible to envision even fans of the actors walking away from the proceedings satisfied.

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon] in London (capsule version)

As much as I've admired Kelly Reichardt's previous films, Meek's Cutoff feels like a real advancement for the director. This story of three families lost on the Oregon trail in 1845 has a timeless, fable-like quality to it, and Reichardt never falters in her delicate handling of Jon Raymond's screenplay. She creates an authentic sense of time and place while simultaneously evoking a strange, otherworldly atmosphere, superbly utilising the landscape to create a sense of isolation and despair in the unforgiving sun. The families have been led into this wilderness by Meek (an unrecognisable Bruce Greenwood), who covers his folly with big talk and bluster but who is increasingly viewed with suspicion by Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams, outstanding again). When a Native American crosses their path, the party is split – some think he should be killed on sight, others think that he can lead them towards salvation – and under Reichardt's ambiguous gaze, we're never sure which option will give these lost souls the best chance of survival. Meek's Cutoff is a stunningly crafted film, with Chris Blauvelt providing some breathtaking cinematography and Jeff Grace contributing a compelling, haunting score. The sound design is also exceptional; just look out for the way the women try to listen in on a distant conversation. It reminded me of There Will Be Blood and made me recall parts of the 2006 western Seraphim Falls, but this is very much a distinctive and singular piece of work. From the handmade opening titles to the chilling final shot, Meek's Cutoff feels like something very special indeed, and it is unquestionably one of the great American films of the year.

Meek's Cutoff Tom Huddleston from Time Out London

The travesty of last year’s Venice Film Festival may be old news, but it bears repeating now that Kelly Reichardt’s glorious slow-burn western, which had its world premiere at the Italian shindig, is finally rolling into UK cinemas.

Two equally cool, contemplative and plot-neutral films – ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ and Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ – competed for the Golden Lion. One was universally lauded and touted as the surefire winner. The other was dismissed as shallow, self-regarding and meaningless. And the wrong film won.

The sheer gulf of quality and intention between these two superficially similar films couldn’t be wider. The ‘cinema of nothing’ that both Reichardt and Coppola practice may be currently in vogue, but their approaches to it differ wildly: where Coppola uses the camera to reflect her own celebrity-centric interests, Reichardt’s gaze is firmly fixed on the outside world, and particularly on those poor souls who have lost their place within it.

‘Meek’s Cutoff’ is a western, but it’s like no horse opera you’ve ever seen. Michelle Williams plays Emily, one of a small band of settlers wagon-training west, keeping their eyes peeled for Indian raiders. But with supplies dwindling and tough-talking guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood) looking increasingly out of his depth, the group reluctantly turn to a captured Cayuse warrior (Rod Rondeaux) for guidance.

Employing the same stylistic restraint and sense of inexorably mounting tension she perfected in ‘Old Joy’ and the heartbreaking ‘Wendy and Lucy’, Reichardt creates a mood which is at once entirely believable and entrancingly otherwordly. The period trappings, sparse dialogue and hard-bitten performances feel utterly credible: from the long, wordless opening scene of the settlers lugging their possessions across a shallow river, ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ feels like a sepia-toned snapshot of a bygone era.

And yet, in the emptiness and endlessness of the landscape and in the sheer helplessness of its few inhabitants, there’s a disconnect from modern reality which is powerfully unsettling. Comparisons could be drawn with the opening act of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, but Reichardt‘s vision has little of the beauty and all of the threat: where Peter Weir relied on camera trickery and a haunting score to create a sense of nature’s implacability, Reichardt is a staunch realist, shooting straight and letting the setting and the situation speak for themselves.

The result is bold, unrelenting and wilfully oblique, perhaps to a fault: Reichardt’s refusal to provide easy solutions may be thematically appropriate, but it can be alienating. Nonetheless, ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ is one of 2011’s singular cinematic experiences: subtle, simple and devastating. Saddle up.

Meek's Cutoff - Washington Post Ann Hornaday interviews the writer and director, February 6, 2011

Since the writing-directing team of Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt released its breakout film "Old Joy" five years ago, its movies have proved astute, emotionally powerful alternatives to the product as usual that dominates theaters.

Raymond and Reichardt's coming film, "Meek's Cutoff," opening in April, is no exception. A Western set on the Oregon Trail in 1845, the film stars Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano as settlers on their way to build new lives in the Pacific Northwest. An unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood plays their guide, Stephen Meek, who, while insisting he knows the best way through the Cascade Mountains, seems increasingly to be sending the group to its doom.

Methodical, poetic and spare, "Meek's Cutoff" evinces Reichardt's signature gift for filming people against a natural landscape that becomes a character in itself. As the somber band makes its way across the harsh expanse of the high desert, the film becomes less a narrative than a cinematic trance. In a nod to the classic Westerns of Anthony Mann, William Wellman and Howard Hawks, Reichardt filmed "Meek's Cutoff" using the 1:33 aspect ratio that renders the image nearly square.

As she explained when she presented the film at the Sundance Film Festival last month, that pictorial device had practical advantages for a script that entailed its share of surprises and sudden revelations. "When you're in the desert and you can see 40 miles in front of you in every direction, it's very hard to be taken aback by something," she said.

But the square frame had deeper philosophical implications as well. If she had filmed the settlers' arduous journey in widescreen, she said, the audience would be able to project the past and the future on to the protagonists. "The square just really helped keep me in the moment with them," she said.

Raymond, a novelist who lives in Portland, Ore., explained that he came up with the idea for "Meek's Cutoff" when he was researching Oregon history while working on a branding campaign for a new development at the height of the real estate boom. "One of the stranger jobs I had was naming a golf course in Bend, Oregon," Raymond said at Sundance. "I came across this story of Meek's Cutoff which, it turns out, is one of the more famous episodes in the early Oregon Trail. . . . [The pioneers] really did hire this guy Stephen Meek to guide them across the mountains, and they did actually get lost in the desert out there and they did question themselves: Is this guy leading us stupid or evil?"

The allegorical whiffs are unmistakable in "Meek's Cutoff," from the hubris of Manifest Destiny and fear of the Other to the enduring tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility. Mostly, though, it's a welcome portrait of the grit, courage and perseverance of the women who were so often marginalized or missing in the heroic Westerns of yore. "Meek's Cutoff" is revisionist in the best sense of that word, giving audiences a new way to see the past and, quite possibly, the present.

New York Film Festival 2010: Meek's Cutoff Kenji Fujishima at The House Next Door, October 7, 2010, also here: The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]

Sight & Sound [Kate Stables] May 2011

REVIEW: Michelle Williams Shines in Ambitious, Gorgeous Meek's ... Stephanie Zacharek at Movieline

Kelly Reichardt's stunning Meek's Cutoff strips the Western of empty gestures Jim Ridley from The Nashville Scene

Meek’s Cutoff (2010) – Sous le Sable… les Femmes Jonathan McCalmont from Ruthless Culture

Meek's Cutoff - Slate Dana Stevens

Meek's Cutoff: Michelle Williams Hits the Oregon Trail in a New ... Mary Pols from Time magazine

Jigsaw Lounge // Tribune [Neil Young]

Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Toronto

Meek's Cutoff | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

2010 Mike D’Angelo at Toronto from The Man Who Viewed Too Much, September 14, 2010

CinemaNerdz.com [Gregory Fichter]

Gordon and the Whale [Drew Tinnin] in Austin

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]

Moving Pictures Magazine [Randee Dawn]

advancescreenings.com [Matthew Fong]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson] at Austin

Movies Kick Ass [Jose Solís]

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon] long version

notcoming.com | Meek's Cutoff Michael Nordine

Tonight at the Movies [Ryan Rojas]

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

SFIFF54 #5: Hear the words in here out there Ryland Walker Knight from Vinyl Is Heavy, May 8, 2011

'Meek's Cutoff' Review: Men, Muskets, & Michelle Williams (NYFF ... David Ehrlich from Cinematical

Birds Eye View Film Festival 2011 – Meek’s Cutoff Georgie Hobbs from Little White Lies, March 15, 2011

Meek’s Cutoff’s Mysterious Indian, Translated Nina Rastogi from Slate, September 20, 2011

The Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman] at Toronto

Cinespect [L.Caldoran]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]

The Film Pilgrim [Stephanie Huettner]

Battleship Pretension [Rudie Obias]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Dave Campbell] at Austin

The Critical Movie Critics [Mariusz Zubrowski]

Sound On Sight Christopher Clemente

floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]

Review: 'Meek's Cutoff' Beth Accomando from KPBS

Little White Lies Magazine [Adam Woodward] April 14, 2011

Meek’s Cutoff – Rootin’ Tootin’ Times Hoss Ghonouie from Little White Lies, April 12, 2011

The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]

David Edelstein on 'Hanna,' 'The Conspirator ... - New York Magazine David Edelstein from The NY magazine

Combustible Celluloid film review - Meek's Cutoff (2011), Kelly ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Meek’s Cutoff Sneersnipe

Incendies, Water for Elephants, Meek's Cutoff, The Greatest Movie ... Joe Morgenstern at The Wall Street Journal

Popdose [Robert Cashill]

Boxoffice Magazine [Steve Ramos]

The Village Voice [Karina Longworth] at Toronto

Toronto International Film Festival 2010: Day 6 – Meek's Cutoff, Promises Written in Water, and Kaboom Fernando F. Croce at The House Next Door, September 17, 2010, also seen here: The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]

Meek's Cutoff: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer

The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]

Film-Forward.com Michael Lee

Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club Sam Adams interview, April 26, 2011

Kelly Reichardt Adam Woodward interview from Little White Lies, April 14, 2011

T Magazine: O Pioneers! | Kelly Reichardt's Anti-Western Joy Dietrich interviews the director from The NY Times T magazine, April 7, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Variety [Justin Chang]

Hartford Advocate [Ann Lewinson]

Meek's Cutoff Kimberley Jones from The Austin Chronicle

'Meek's Cutoff': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Meek's Cutoff :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

Movie Review - 'Meek's Cutoff' - 'Meek's Cutoff,' Directed by ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, April 7, 2011

Oregon Frontier, From Under a Bonnet Nicolas Rapold interviews the director from The New York Times, April 3, 2011

NIGHT MOVES B 89

USA (112 mi) 2013

There’s East coast weirdness, like Sean Durkin’s exposé of the lingering psychological aftereffects of cult paranoia in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), and then there’s West coast weirdness, like Antonioni’s acid trip reflection on the radical 60’s in Zabriskie Point (1970), where this film is more reminiscent of the latter, a modern era, eco-terrorist version of the 60’s Weather Underground. All dialogue is kept to a minimum, allowing only a scant outline of a story to develop, where Reichardt’s interest is delving under the surface, probing into the restless psychological territory, where the film is really told in two parts, the events leading up to the incident, and what comes afterwards, where both are given equal treatment. Once again examining souls living on the edge of society, pitting man against nature, the film is shot in the lush interior forest regions of Oregon, Reichardt’s fourth consecutive film shot there, where there’s no question that the stunning landscape is the feature character. Humans are little more than ants that play a minimalist role in determining its fate, curiously disinterested in the land and how to use it, or developing any concept of global sharing, where according to this film, science suggests the toxic damage currently being done to our global ecology is rapidly outweighing any attempts at curative effects to stave off what amounts to catastrophic outcomes, where at current rates the oceans may lose nearly all its fish within forty years. There’s an interesting movie within the movie shown to environmental activists in the region that suggests the future is overwhelmingly grim, leading one lone individual to feel pretty hopeless, yet they are encouraged to do what they can to save the planet. Given that reality, with no more backstory, we follow the lives of three dedicated individuals who have already decided upon a course of activism to blow up a hydroelectric dam, though like Fassbinder’s THE THIRD GENERATION (1979), certainly part of the intrigue is seeing how ridiculously amateurish and unprepared this group is in considering likely outcomes and possibilities, where they are thoroughly unprepared, sometimes comically so, to deal with real consequences.

Jesse Eisenberg as Josh is playing totally against type, as he’s known for his Woody Allenesque rapid fire dialogue, but here he barely utters anything, convinced of his cause, where there’s nothing to discuss. Living on the grounds of a food coop, he is rooted close to the land, making a statement by his chosen lifestyle. Dakota Fanning is Dena, running an upscale women’s spa out in the woods, where she helps women find their inner harmony, complete with flute music along with other tranquil sounds playing throughout. These two set the stage, as they live nearby and are apparently friends, seen buying a boat with a live-in captain’s quarters (called Night Moves in homage to Arthur Penn’s taut 1975 post-Watergate thriller starring Gene Hackman), before they set off to find their third partner, driving a good part of the day and early evening just to get there, where who else but the always slightly unhinged Peter Sarsgaard plays Harmon, an ex-Marine who is a trained explosives expert. Drinking beer to calm their nerves, each has their own agenda, where Harmon questions the need for Dena, as she’s not as tight as these two comrades in arms who have probably pulled off other underground acts together, but this is obviously a step up. Dena handles herself admirably the next day, however, thinking quickly on her feet, pulling off the sale of 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer without providing appropriate identification, seen mixed with the 1000 pounds Harmon already had afterwards, treated and loaded into the boat, driving to a nearby campsite by evening. The centerpiece of the film is nicely structured, set in the calm and quiet of the night, underlined by soft piano music from Jeff Grace, as the tense atmosphere is driven by the meticulous detail of the planning, much like the wordless bank heist sequence of Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955), where what’s supposed to go perfectly starts out as a well-precisioned machine before things start to unravel. The actual incident is never shown, but can be heard from a distance offscreen, where the audience is immediately attuned to the paranoia seeping in as they make their getaway, remaining on high alert for the duration of the film, where fear is palpable as their nerves are tested by a variety of circumstances, each one accumulating more underlying dread, becoming an existential drama on Crime and Punishment.

Shot almost like a silent era film, this is largely a study of facial expressions and interior reactions, where the dire moods of Josh, never once breaking into a smile, exude the intensity of the moment, where the food coop employees and their families are crammed around a computer screen the next morning following the news, where the reaction is interesting, as the most radical member among them, perhaps the one Josh most wished to impress, is Sean (Kai Lennox), the guy running the coop, yet he’s the one least impressed by the actions, calling it “theatrical,” as it doesn’t go far enough to have any meaningful or longlasting effect, while the kids are more electrified by the subversive nature of the terrorist act happening in their neck of the woods. The focus is again on Josh, as the camera never leaves his face, where the constant presence is burning a hole through his skull, penetrating his psyche, where his calm exterior belies his trepidation, where he is completely at odds with his natural surroundings, where kids all around him are playing with the animals and having fun, but he’s overly consumed in work, where every noise sets off the thought of a potential police visit. Almost immediately, their agreed-upon phone silence is violated, especially after word gets out in the news that a nearby camper has been missing since the blast. One by one, their frayed nerves unravel, where it only takes one to set off the others, causing a chain reaction of exacerbated horror that only increases the terrifying fear of being exposed. Reichardt balances this growing instability with the routine farm chores of the day, along with banal chatter and ordinary conversations, where Josh is petrified, feeling lost and helpless, growing worse when it’s discovered that the missing man is found dead, pushing them all over the edge in justifying any idealism in their actions. Instead, like the 60’s Weathermen who took great care in bombing buildings, not people, the unexpected can happen, as people can be where you least expect them, and tragically, what’s meant to convey human outrage at despicable corporate practices becomes little more than murder. This increasingly troubling thriller shows the effects of idealism gone wrong, where instead of elation, the participants are filled with guilt and regret, as the dilemma rises to unforeseen heights, where the fear continues to escalate, never really going away, much like the panic at the end of Martha Marcy May Marlene where cult escapees are forever looking over their shoulders to see if someone is following them. Reichardt’s method is more minimalist and understated, where instead of revealing any grand political motivation, everything is implied, where it’s up to the audience to infer their own motives.

The film does recall an op-ed piece written by former Weatherman William Ayers, "The Real Bill Ayers" in The New York Times, December 5, 2008:

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]

Consider Night Moves Kelly Reichardt’s La Chinoise. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film about young Maoists, Night Moves devotes a considerable amount of screen time detailing its radical activist characters’ attempts to pull off a terrorist act that they have convinced themselves will bring about some kind of social change, however slight in the moment. Unlike Godard, however, Reichardt doesn’t bother focusing on any of the ideological training that gets them to this point intellectually; Night Moves begins with the main players already in the full flower of their belief that the only way to get people aware of the environmental damage of a dam in Oregon is to blow it up.

The other crucial difference between those two films is primarily stylistic. Night Moves takes the form of a low-key thriller; it’s the most genre-based film Reichardt has yet made. With Jeff Grace’s tension-filled electronic score and a handful of effective suspense setpieces—one hinging on Dena’s (Dakota Fanning) ability to procure the appropriate fertilizer for their explosives, another focused on the three homegrown eco-terrorists ride out to the dam to plant their explosives—the film echoes the structure of a classic heist film in its own way, with similarly morally ambiguous characters who are forced to deal with the consequences of their actions in ways that gradually turn threatening and even fatal.

Reichardt, however, is too intelligent a filmmaker to settle for easy moralizing. She has proven to be a politically outspoken artist, though, in ways that has sometimes led to heavy-handedness (Wendy and Lucy) and thin topical allegory (Meek’s Cutoff) in her previous work. Thankfully, her political concerns in Night Moves remain ruthlessly focused on their effects on her characters—especially Josh, who becomes the film’s central focus in its second half as he deals not only with a deadly unintended consequence from the blow-up, but also the threat of discovery and capture that subsequently hangs over him, challenging his humane impulses.

Perhaps the true measure of the strength of Night Moves as a political film lies in the fact that, for once, we in the audience aren’t entirely sure where the director herself stands on the events she dramatizes and the characters she depicts. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether she aligns with the environmentalist sentiments of the main characters; most terrorists act in their own personal belief in the fundamental rightness of their positions. Reichardt is more interested in the moral gray areas of their behavior, particularly in the gap between thought and action. But her thematic interests don’t preclude her from using her formidable filmmaking talents to evoke states of mind and express a character’s perspective through an indelible image. There was perhaps no more fascinatingly ambiguous a final shot at TIFF this year as the disturbingly ironic one that closes Night Moves: a point-of-view shot of a mirror in a convenience store reflecting its aisles and texting denizens—in other words, the kind of urban conformist environment these characters had been fighting to avoid, but one in which one of them is now forced to join out of sheer survivalist necessity.

Exclaim! [Robert Bell]

With Wendy & Lucy and Meek's Cutoff, minimalist director Kelly Reichardt established herself as a political, albeit contemplative and practical, director interested in examining culturally thorny topics like living on the edge of an economic void (Lucy) and the role of women during the European settlement in the Americas (Meek's). Normally, such topics would incite grandstanding and soapbox preaching amidst a narrative tainted by persisting moral vanity. But Reichardt isn't an egocentric director trying to establish an image so much as she's genuinely motivated by exploring the complexities of issues that don't have easy solutions.

With Night Moves, her fourth and arguably most accessible film, she details the motivations and rationale of a group of militant environmentalists plotting to blow up a dam. Their goal is idealistic, hoping to incite a social dialogue about rampant energy consumption and the resulting decimation of a natural landscape to sustain it, but their assessment of repercussions and potential blowback stops short of considering anything negative aside from the obvious problem of being arrested.Originally, the plan involves only Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a mostly undefined, albeit morally ambiguous, practical logistic coordinator, and Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), a generic twenty-something living and working at a sustainable agricultural co-op. What complicates matters, at least for Harmon, is Josh's decision to include disillusioned college dropout Dena (Dakota Fanning), a rich girl grappling with the theoretical application of imposing social change on a reluctant populous.

For the first half of the film, Reichardt limits her characters socially and psychologically, forcing them into an enclosed world where only the plan and their internal dynamics matter. Despite approaching others to purchase fertilizer or a boat, their behaviour is detached and calculated; it's performative when necessary and exclusionary otherwise. That they limit themselves to those that share a very specific ideological stance is key; they're working together to enact a plan that the world around them is implicitly (despite not being conscious of its eventuality) trying to avoid through laws and basic ethical composition, making their act one of anarchic rebellion.

The divide between setting off the bomb and resultantly having to live with it is deliberate. Reichardt doesn't give away any hints as to where the story might go after the carefully orchestrated plot, one that has many hiccups and a persistent sense of tension, unfolds. It makes the eventual psychological thriller component somewhat surprising—despite being a logical progression—and subversive, remaining within the lexicon of politics without dwelling on it.

Ideally, the three were to avoid talking to each other in an effort to evade suspicion, but when one of them has a moral crisis, questioning if they should go to the police, the resulting paranoia and power struggle transforms this seeming environmental parable into one of gender power dynamics and the compounding weight of mental malaise.

Reichardt, being a director that prefers to dwell in the quiet, unspoken apprehensiveness of any given moment, gives an entirely different sensibility to a fairly standard social deconstruction. If tackled by a more traditional director, Night Moves could easily have played as a standard thriller, eschewing the internal implications of acting on ideals in favour of sensationalizing the many tight situations these characters find themselves in.

Because Reichardt takes a deliberate, slow moving approach to the material, it's almost surprising that anything beyond mere conversation happens, inverting the expectations of a psychological thriller by making it an analytical art film that, in part, evades its own trappings. This strange balance between assessing the basic tenets of contemplating social change while adhering to the tropes of a formulaic narrative, subverting the status quo of cinema through subtleties like tone and emotional focus, is what inspires thought, partially suggesting a method for shaking up traditionalist thinking through method of storytelling. It's just a shame that in juggling these two worlds, Night Moves struggles to maintain believability in the third act when everything becomes a little too big for the mostly subdued template.

Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]

In Night Moves, the story of three ecoterrorists who blow up a dam and don't know what's coming after, Kelly Reichardt brilliantly extends her reputation for making limited material resonant. Providing little information about the details of the deed and minimal dialogue, she has managed to craft one of the most tense and disturbing watches in a long while. To call it a "thriller" would be wrong, though, because that would imply something more conventional. The essence of Reichardt's use of limited means is that she makes us unbearably nervous and on edge with action that, from moment to moment, seems so flat, and with characters about whom we are told so little. It's a tour-de-force crime procedural with a classic falling out once the crime is done, a thriller without the thrills that morphs into horror and fades away in disturbing, open-ended mystery. Reichardt makes the elaborate, commercial ecoterrorist thriller The East look foolish. The East, with its intricate, complicated action, its myriad motives, and its confused ideologies, does nothing but spew forth drama and raise questions it can't answer. Night Moves has no questions or answers. It just leaves us to absorb the enormity of carrying out a crime in the name of a cause, thinking a wrong will make a right.

This time after an existential foray into the world of 19th-century western settlers in Meek's Cutoff, Reichardt returns to the Pacific Northwest of the present day, somewhere near Ashland, Oregon. But there's a similarity. If the people in Meeks Cutoff were led dangerously astray by someone they oughtn't to have trusted, there are serious trust issues here. There isn't much of it between Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning), and the older Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), either. They are each led astray too, by themselves, individually, having not much connection with each other, and intending to split up and cut off contact when the action is done. The usually jittery and hyper-intellectual Eisenberg (the New York Jewish youth in The Squid and the Whale, Mark Zuckerburg in The Social Network), as Josh is stern, dark, still and mysterious. His silences are a little frightening. While Josh really seems to trust Harmon, Harmon questions Josh's bringing a young woman, Dena, into something he tells Josh is bigger than anything he's done before. Dena is shocked when a chance encounter reveals Harmon has done jail time and so has a "prior." They look at new fake IDs Harmon has made and pass them around. Do they know who they are? In the circumstances, the criticism of the film that its characters are left too vague misses the point. Of course they are vague.

All the events are engraved in ordinariness, but there is tension in every scene, start to finish; it's just that the nature of the tension changes. There is the purchase of a boat (its name is Night Moves; but the operation also is done very late at night). A major early sequence concerns buying an additional 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and is just a matter of talking to employees at a farm equipment dealer. After the action is over, Josh reminds Dena that they must rest and go back to their jobs as if everything is the same.

There's a critique of the dam explosion by one of Josh's farming group, who says it's just "theater," not a "statement," which would require destroying not just one dam but the whole "network," which consists of some 25 dams. But what's done is done, and what's done is a huge gesture that remains unseen and whose consequences are unfolding. We stick with Josh, and he works in a hippieish, very Pacific Northwest communal farm situation. Then of course, little by little, things fall apart. As the situation grows more and more claustrophobic and dangerous, as in a Patricia Highsmith novel, we're led closer and closer to Josh, and we are reminded how awful and strange ordinary reality can be when what's going on inside us is disturbed. When we get to the inconclusive, mysterious ending we don't know what Josh is doing because he doesn't know, and we are for those moments at one with him.

But not everyone buys into Night Moves, and those who don't consider the ending a baffling wrong turn. Reactions to the whole film were mixed at Toronto and Venice when the film debuted. Some don't tune in, and see no there there. But those who get on the wave length are in for a powerful experience. Reichardt has an admirable gift for finding the essentials in a situation and sticking with them.

Night Moves: A Slow-Burning Suspense Thriller With ... - Slate Dana Stevens

“Night Moves”: A nail-biting procedural explores the “eco ... Andrew O’Hehir from Slate

Film.com [Calum Marsh]

'Night Moves' Sets a Hell of a Mood and Doesn't ... - The Wire 'Night Moves' Sets a Hell of a Mood and Doesn't Quite Know What to Do With It, by David Sims from The Atlantic Wire

[Tribeca Review] Night Moves - The Film Stage Forrest Cardamenis

Paste Magazine Tim Grierson

In Review Online [Dan Girmus]

Film Racket [Chris Barsanti]

Movie Mezzanine [Casey Cipriani]

Review: Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg make ... - HitFix Guy Lodge

Row Three [Kurt Halfyard]

Sound On Sight [Simon Howell]

Night Moves - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl, May 28, 2014

Venice Update: Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, James ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, September 3, 2013

The House Next Door [Nick McCarthy]

IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]

DVD Talk [Jeff Nelson]

Night Moves / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

BeyondHollywood.com [Brent McKnight]

'The Immigrant,' 'Night Moves,' - Grantland Wesley Morris

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

Film-Forward.com [Daniel Glenn]

At The Back - 100 Years of Film [Tom Gooderson-ACourt]

The Digital Fix [Nick Chen]

MUBI [Fernando F. Croce]

Movie Mezzanine [Jake Cole]

theartsdesk.com [Nick Hasted]

Night Moves' Kelly Reichardt recommends an infectious movie Sam Adams interview with Reichardt recommends people see Todd Haynes’ SAFE (1995), from The Dissolve, June 2, 2014

Night Moves: Venice Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Night Moves' eco-terrorists are doomed from the start | City ... Alan Scherstuhl from Minneapolis City Pages

'Night Moves' explores line between activism, terrorism - Los ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

Night Moves - Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico

'Night Moves' Tracks Three Eco-Terrorists in Oregon - The ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

CERTAIN WOMEN B 88

USA (107 mi) 2016

About as minimalist and low-key as you can get, as this threadbare portrait in three sections of women in small town Montana offers a positively enthralling view of Montana, shot in and around Livingston and Bozeman in the southeastern corner of the state by Christopher Blauvelt on 16mm (as the digital test shoots revealed a flatness and startling lack of detail in the images of snow), yet the delicate insight into the qualities of being a woman reveals hidden attributes rarely seen in movies, as there’s nothing particularly sexy or dramatic about their lives, never rising to any elevating moments, where instead the focus seems to be on the commonplace, the everyday, ordinary aspect of their lives where ambitions and relationships remain unfulfilled, with unappreciated work viewed as monotonous or even meaningless to the point of drudgery, with little expectation that they will ever rise above to some other level. This harkens back to an earlier Soderbergh film BUBBLE (2005), a technical exercise in detached evasiveness, where an indescribable loneliness seems to be the shared common denominator. By creating more relatable characters, Reichardt is deflating the expectations of the audience, changing the stereotype, altering the mythological focus on surface artificiality like beauty and sensuality, instead probing under the surface, providing a window into more realistic women’s lives that typically go unnoticed by television or Hollywood. While the director’s intent appears clear, described by Cinema Scope: Blake Williams as “simple portraits of women trying to live their lives, fulfill their desires, and maintain or manufacture some idea of happiness—may be nothing more or less than an object of pure dignity, a film about the joys and virtues of being a woman,” she’s also removed any lingering sense of drama or passion, where this feels like a kind of anti-cinema, so inert and narratively loose that it barely feels like a film, more like fragments in time, scenes from a diary, or even a literary work, adapted from two of Maile Meloy’s 2002 collection of fourteen short stories from Half in Love, Tome and Native Sandstone, and one, Travis, B, from the eleven short stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times. While it may have been motivated by Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), though not nearly on the same grand scale, the film is basically a merging of both Kelly Reichardt’s and Maile Meloy’s unique voices and vision, as both focus upon marginal or disenfranchised women who usually go unnoticed, whose struggles against the banality of their routines reflect a growing compulsion for more, yet whose lives often end up in disappointment, highlighted by emotional disconnection or some unseen human failure, leading to no comfortable resolution.

Tome

The maker of River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and Night Moves (2013), the film opens with a long and winding freight train moving through the vastness of the landscape, where one constant throughout the opening segment of the film is the recurrent sound of train horns that are sounded as they move past small towns. In the first sequence, Laura Dern stars as Laura Wells, a Livingston lawyer seen having an affair with a married man (James Le Gros) before heading back to the office where her most hopeless client awaits her, Mr. Fuller (Jared Harris), a man who suffered a serious workplace accident landing on his head leaving him with permanent double vision and possible brain damage, but as he accepted an initial insurance payment from the company, they are no longer liable for additional damages, leaving him destitute and out of options. While he repeatedly visits the woman he calls “his lawyer,” she can only sympathize, as there is nothing she can do for him. She does arrange a meeting with another male lawyer, to offer a second opinion, and when he offers an identical assessment, Mr. Fuller seems to accept his explanation, leaving Laura to fret about how much easier it is to be a male attorney. But the guy falls off the rails shortly afterwards, abducting a night watchman in a hostage situation at the employer where he used to work, with “his lawyer” being called to the scene, prepped by officers before being sent alone into the building to peacefully talk him out. The man being held hostage is of Samoan descent (Joshua T. Fonokalafi), indicating that in his country, he’s only 14 people removed from assuming leadership, adding a note of levity, where Fuller wants to hear the company file on his case, quickly learning that he was cheated out of a larger settlement. His escape plans go awry and he is quickly arrested by the police, where Laura is seen at the prison some time later in a kind gesture, where she ends up being his only visitor, urging her to write more, about absolutely anything, even the weather, as it wears on inmates never receiving any mail.

Native Sandstone

In the least compelling segment, Michelle Williams as Gina Lewis dominates the middle section, which is all about her blind ambition, where other people barely register in her quest to obtain what she wants. While she has an obstinate teenage daughter (Sara Rodier) that defies her at every turn, her husband Ryan is the same man seen in the first segment having an affair. They’re camped out in a tent on a plot of land where they intend to build a house, with Gina scolding her husband for constantly undermining her efforts with their daughter. Ryan is a get along kind of guy who simply wants to be everyone’s friend. They pay a visit to an elderly man Albert, René Auberjonois, brilliant as the barkeep in Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) forty five years ago, with Gina trying to talk him out of some sandstone rocks heaped in front of his house for years. At 83, Albert has always refused to part with these rocks, as they are his link to history, reminding her that they come from the old schoolhouse that was built before the railways. She doesn’t care, she’s willing to pay, but her visit is clearly having an effect on Albert, whose mind seems to be fading, launching into near-incoherent soliloquys that she simply waits out before reminding him again of her intentions, as she wants to use it in building her house, “It’s beautiful stone. We want native stone to build with, railroad ties, things that fit in.” Ryan attempts to interject, sensing the old man’s unease and how important the rocks are to him, but Gina again dominates the discussion until she gets her way, scolding her husband afterwards for offering the man a way out. Obtaining what she needs appears to be her sole objective. As they load it into a truck, Albert can be seen staring out the window, where she waves, but he doesn’t wave back, now completely cut off from his past.

Travis, B.

Though the interior world of women dominate the film, Albert’s silence speaks volumes, which leads into the final segment where Reichardt has changed a male character in the story to a female character, Jamie, played by Lily Gladstone, who is easily the most affecting character in the film. A grown up version of Ally Sheedy from THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985), who wanders aimlessly into a Saturday high school detention session because she has nothing better to do, while here Jamie, a native of the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, is a ranch hand in rural Belfry who lives and works in isolation during the winter, but sees cars pulling into a rural school parking lot gathering for a meeting, so she curiously walks in as well. Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart) is a harried young female lawyer teaching an evening class on school law twice a week, suggesting students have a right to due process and a hearing before they can be expelled, yet the teachers seem more interested in what to do with kids that interrupt their classrooms, how to more easily expel them. As the others leave afterwards, Jamie accompanies Beth to the local diner, rarely uttering a word, instead watching her eat while listening to her complain about how it’s a difficult 4-hour ride one-way to Belfry, which she mistakenly thought was Belgrade, which is nearby, driving through wretched conditions of ice and snow and then she has return home to Livingston the same way, another 4-hours, just to get up early the next morning for work. Despite having no connection to her class, Jamie returns week after week, even riding a horse to the café one week, until one day, without word, someone else has permanently taken over Beth’s teaching duties. While we see Jamie dutifully perform her work in complete isolation feeding the horses with snowy mountains looming in the distance, we also see her walk out of that class and take the 4-hour trek to Livingston searching the next morning for the law firm where Beth works, surprising her in the parking lot. Few words are spoken in a heartbreaking encounter, but Jamie mentions if she hadn’t done this, she would never see her again, leaving Beth a bit startled, not knowing what to say, so, not intending to cause a scene, Jamie leaves just as abruptly. Somehow caught in the places in between, this film thrives on the tenuous threads holding us together, featuring characters who go to unusual lengths to pursue what they want, often feeling shortchanged and emptyhanded.

Cinema Scope: Blake Williams March 21, 2016

And a final word for Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, the best film I saw in Park City and sure to wind up on my shortlist of the year’s truly beautiful things. Reichardt has tended to train her attention on subjects trying, and inevitably failing, to navigate the world outside of the established order, and her adaptation here of three short stories from Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It—simple portraits of women trying to live their lives, fulfill their desires, and maintain or manufacture some idea of happiness—may be nothing more or less than an object of pure dignity, a film about the joys and virtues of being a woman and making films about the experiences of being a woman. Christopher Blauvelt’s gauzy 16mm photography, conjuring Whistlers and Vermeers, distresses Reichardt’s overcast Americana in a slumbrous grace, producing effortlessly wistful images from the sheer banality of freight trains, smeared mirrors, and barnyards, while elsewhere Lily Gladstone delivers one of the great screen performances I’ve seen in any movie, and does so without saying more than a few words. There may be a dense underlying sorrow running through every frame of this picture—coasting on the essence of silence and silencings—but its impact arouses something closer to the satisfaction of a victory, the auspicious approach of some tipping point or other that, were it to ever arrive, would likely have the means to split our ears.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kyle A. Westphal

Ever since America decided to nullify itself last month, the so-called bubble-dwellers have been endlessly lectured, cajoled, shamed, and tsk-tsked by a cadre of opportunist pundits hell-bent on prettifying white nationalism. Their weapon of choice has been a crooked cudgel of empathy—the daily drumbeat that cosmopolitan 'identity politics' is over, that coastal elites don't understand the economic anxiety of third-generation factory hands in our one-stoplight towns, and that liberals can never hope to come anywhere close to regaining power until they reckon with the white working class's long-standing cultural affinity with Vladimir Putin. Don't condescend to hard-working real Americans, don't denigrate xenophobia, don't badmouth sexual assault, don't mock Pizzagate conspiracy theorists. This quisling impulse arises from a deep unfamiliarity with the actual artistic output of the arugula set, frequently awash in sentimental examinations of the upheaval of fraying communities, the scourge of meth addiction, the plight of under-employed, middle-aged white men. Noted coastal elitist and great American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, who teaches at hippie-dippie, clothing-optional Bard College, recently made a movie that speaks to rural America with more genuine empathy and curiosity than a thousand scolding op-eds. Would the legion of Trump voters recognize themselves in it? CERTAIN WOMEN, adapted by Reichardt from a trio of stories by Maile Meloy, is not simply a film randomly plopped down in Montana to score a tax rebate. Its whole rhythm and grammar arises organically from the setting and its pokier pace of life. (Remember those "Montana Moment" tourism adverts that plastered the CTA trains a few years back?) The first story, which might loosely be described as a true crime legal thriller starring Laura Dern, checks all its thematic boxes but does not translate Reichardt's aesthetic to down 'n' dirty genre mechanics as effectively as NIGHT MOVES. The second remains under-developed, with Michelle Williams as a walking McSweeney's caricature, dedicated to building a cabin exclusively from locally-sourced railroad ties. But the third story—an extended diner duet between Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone—belongs among Reichardt's best work. Somewhere along the way, the accumulation of daily rhythms—cleaning a horse stable, driving down a darkened interstate, waiting in an empty classroom, crossing a parking lot—builds to something much more powerful than the sum of its parts. It becomes an argument for a way of life, an act of inoculation and reclamation. A lesser work would be content with settling; this one levitates until it grazes solace.

ScreenAnarchy.com (Dustin Chang)

The landscape of Montana, gorgeous, fresh, and shot like a painting by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring) is anything but ornamental. The beauty when humans and their edifices are out of sight lets us breathe, precisely because of the contrast. Living with other people is tough out there in the west just as it can be everywhere else.

Certain Women is a title that triggers different reactions for different people. It invites us to put the women into a category that binds them together and distinguishes them from a majority. Maybe only to discover that they are not other at all and share in the struggle to actually connect to the human beings around them. It might be easier to do with a corgi or a pile of stones or an image of oneself.

Lawyer Laura Wells (Laura Dern) will return late to the office after a clandestine lunchtime rendezvous with her married, bearded, long-johns-wearing lover (James Le Gros). While getting dressed, she describes the colour of her sweater as "like a peach." "It's called taupe," he informs her. The client Laura is about to meet, Fuller (Jared Harris, heartbreakingly disturbed), is desperate and will take extreme measures to be heard. For eight months Laura has been telling him where the law stands in his case. A male colleague's second opinion, he accepts quickly and with ease - the yardsticks of professional trust are still not the same.

Based on Maile Meloy's short stories, Certain Women is a film suffused in uncertainties. The pictures painted tend towards the in-between, moments that are memorable in a very private way. Three stories from Montana present a triptych of life lived in present day, rural America. It is the cursory gesture, a glance inwards, a seemingly throwaway sentence, the sound an animal makes, that stick with you. The nothingness that contains it all is Kelly Reichardt's domain. Her splendid actors make it pure cinema.

Michelle Williams (Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By The Sea, also in the New York and London Film Festivals) is central to part two as Gina Lewis, jogging, smoking, busy building a house with her husband (Le Gros) and her disinterested in the world beyond her phone daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier). Gina's mind is set on getting a pile of sandstone from an old man (Rene Auberjonois) who says the bricks stem from "the old schoolhouse when the town was settled."

A quail flies up in the air. Their call sounds like "How are you?" he says. And Gina knows the quail response - "I'm just fine." She serves home-made sandwiches to her family and friends at a get together in the tent on their building site. The others watch sports on TV. Gina has a glass of wine and a cigarette elsewhere, alone, in the fresh air with the grey sky.

Part three is about farmhand Jamie (Lily Gladstone) who takes good care of the horses and a corgi, compact and limber and as alive as any of the humans in this film aspire to be. She encounters a stranger from out of town, Beth (Kristen Stewart) who teaches a night class on education law at the local school. Beth is hungry and Jamie guides her to a diner. Beth has a quarter of a greasy burger and ice cream and complains about the long drive. Jamie looks at her. She does not place an order.

Another night, where, again, the handful of people in the classroom don't even say "good evening" to each other, Jamie comes on horseback and offers Beth a ride to the diner. The lawyer, "so unbelievably self-involved," as Kristen Stewart told me, that she does not even unwrap the knife and fork from the paper napkin before using it to wipe her mouth, accepts the gesture and gets on the horse behind her.

Costume designer April Napier gives the four central women a distinct look. If they swapped clothes, they wouldn't be themselves any more. Dern's Laura wears her camel coat as a signifier that she is more city than rural and to be taken seriously. Williams's Gina dons athleisure wear and piles on jackets the colour of the sky. Gladstone's Jamie opts for gender neutral ranch hand wear, if that exists.

Stewart gets the most inspired outfits by far. The combinations of grandma's embroidered knits with mom's pale I-don't-give-a damn jeans, or skirts of just the right wrong length - all look so fantastically style-blind that they become trendsetting. Her attire will be fashion reference for years to come.

With Certain Women, writer-director Kelly Reichardt heads for ... JR Jones from The Chicago Reader

Indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has made a career out of the saying "Wherever you go, there you are." A naturalist at heart, she observes her characters intently as they roll into new environments, size up their surroundings, and try to conquer them. Her breakthrough film, Old Joy (2006), follows two old pals on a road trip to a wilderness hot spring, where their friendship blooms again, and back to the city, where it withers. Her remarkable Wendy and Lucy (2008) makes a giant statement about economic injustice in America through the tiny story of a young woman stranded in a small town. Meek's Cutoff (2010) dramatizes the 1845 incident in which a frontier guide named Stephen Meek led a wagon train full of settlers on a perilous journey through the Oregon desert. And in the sadly overlooked Night Moves (2013), scruffy ecoterrorists scout out a hydroelectric dam, disable it with an explosion, and try without success to melt back into their previous lives.

Reichardt has developed a loyal following based on those four features, though less attention has gone to her screenwriting collaborator, Jon Raymond, whose short stories provided source material for both Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. With Certain Women, Reichardt is flying solo and having a rough time of it. The earlier movies unfolded in Oregon, where the majesty of the forest can plunge characters deep into themselves, but the new film, adapted from a trio of short stories by Maile Meloy, takes place in Montana, a harsher and lonelier terrain to which some of the characters have already surrendered. Reichardt presents character studies of a beleaguered attorney, a grasping wife, and a lovelorn ranch hand, yet their stories are slow-paced and clumsily integrated. For the most part, these narratives lack the kind of tension between character and setting that have made Reichardt's quiet, modest, measured films so compelling.

Certain Women opens with a panoramic long shot of an approaching freight train, whose lonely horn sounds in the distance and then explodes into a Doppler effect as the train passes through the frame. For Laura Wells (Laura Dern), an attorney at a Livingston firm, life seems just as rigidly tracked, and she's in the process of following one client to his ultimate destination. Fuller (Jared Harris), an aging construction worker, has suffered a disabling fall and wants to sue the contractor who's responsible, despite the fact that he has already accepted an insurance settlement. Frustrated in his plans, he storms the contractor's offices one night, taking a security guard hostage, and Laura is enlisted by the local police to go inside the building and reason with him. The open spaces of the early scenes give way to inky black interiors, and a situation that most other filmmakers would play for suspense turns into a sleepy sequence in which Laura sits in the office reading Fuller all the documents from his company file.

Reichardt manages to connect this first story with the second when Ryan (James Le Gros), Laura's lover, is revealed to be the guilt-ridden husband of the frosty Gina (Michelle Williams). The spouses and their crabby daughter, who live in the city but have purchased land for a second home, arrive at the farmhouse of their octogenarian neighbor, Albert (René Auberjonois), for a friendly visit that conceals an avaricious plan: Gina, full of ideas for their house, wants Albert to sell her a pile of sandstone blocks that were once part of a historic schoolhouse but have been parked on his property for 40 years. Her emotional maneuvering with the old man, so nicely rendered in Meloy's story "Native Sandstone," doesn't really come across onscreen, and Reichardt has beefed up the episode with vague family conflicts, though these are so muted they barely break the surface of the dialogue. A contemplative scene of Gina strolling alone through the woods may call to mind Williams's touching performance as the young drifter in Wendy and Lucy, yet she plays a tougher, shallower person this time around.

Only the third and last story approaches the emotional force of Reichardt's earlier work. Jamie (Lily Gladstone), a young woman who tends horses at a ranch, happens into a night-school class in small-town Belfry and falls head over heels for the instructor, Beth (Kristen Stewart), a young attorney from far-off Livingston. In Meloy's story "Travis, B." the ranch hand is a man pursuing a woman, but by turning it into a sweet tale of lesbian infatuation in a red state, Reichardt only heightens its loneliness and poignance. More than the other stories, this one exploits the friction between the characters and their environment: Beth endures a four-hour commute each way to teach the semiweekly class, and finally she bails out, handing the class over to a replacement. Jamie tracks her down at her firm in Livingston, but what she wants from Beth is impossible. As in Reichardt's best movies, who you are is powerfully constrained by where you are.

Adam Nayman - Archive - Reverse Shot October 14, 2016

Certain Women: Disconnecting the Dots | New Republic Tim Grierson

Sundance Review: Kelly Reichardt's 'Certain Women' Starring ... Noel Murray from indieWIRE

Quiet and Beautiful, 'Certain Women' Is Observational ... - PopMatters Bernard Boo

Certain Women starring Kristen Stewart, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens

Movie Review: Certain Women -- Vulture David Edelstein

PopOptiq (Dylan Griffin)

Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]

Spectrum Culture [Jake Cole]

'Certain Women': Sundance Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Anthony Kaufman

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]

Kelly Reichardt and Christopher Blauvelt Collaborate on Certain Women Motion.Kodak

PopMatters [Piers Marchant]

TheFilmFile Review: Certain Women (2016) by Dustin Putman

AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Way Too Indie [Dustin Jansick]

FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]

Film-Forward.com [Rania Richardson]

CineVue [Ben Nicholson]

Qwipster.net [Vince Leo]

Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Critic's Notebook [Sarah Manvel]

In Review Online: Luke Gorham

Brooklyn Magazine: John Oursler February 01, 2016

Kelly Reichardt's CERTAIN WOMEN - Fandor David Hudson

Kelly Reichardt on Shooting Certain Women on 16mm, the Ugliness of ... Paula Bernstein interview from Filmmaker magazine, October 14, 2016

Kelly Reichardt on Her New Film Certain Women -- Vulture Stacey Wilson Hunt interview, October 15, 2016

'Certain Women': Sundance Review | Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin

'Certain Women' Review: Reichardt's Elegant Female-Powered - Variety Guy Lodge

Irish Film Critic [Tracee Bond]

Movie review: 'Certain Women' feels incomplete - Tulsa World ... Michael Smith

Kelly Reichardt's Back in Form with Certain Women Dustin Chang from The LA Times

Certain Women (film) - Wikipedia

Certain Women Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico

Review: 'Certain Women' Are Worlds Unto Themselves - The New ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Reichman, Thomas

MINGUS

USA (58 mi) 1968

Chicago Reader [Don Druker] (capsule review)

A 1968 portrait of the great jazz musician going through some particularly hard times in a life that seems to constitute the definition of turbulence. The Village Voice called this "the first jazz film about jazz," and surely the implication (that jazz films have never really been about jazz) is undeniable. Thomas Reichman directed. 58 min.

User reviews from imdb Author: teledyn from Canada

Footage from various club dates punctuated by poetry and all of it woven with Tom Reichman filming Mingus and his daughter during the final moments before they are evicted from the Manhatten studio where Mingus hoped to build a new jazz school. Yes, Charles is upset.

Not so much so that he's going to smash a bass (rock stars smashing their gear was apparently inspired by some Brit rockers witnessing a bout of Mingus stage-rage) but he's rightly peeved at the city, peeved at the government, and peeved at America. They'd already relocated his studio once with a list a lame excuses about feeds and licenses and by-laws, and relocated him into a rat-hole of a space. "I pledge allegiance to the White Flag of America ... for the hell of it." "What's the gun for?" "Somebody robbed me, first day I was in here ... Stole my watch, took a lot of money" I had to write this review seeing only one other that said this was the ranting of a mentally disturbed man brandishing a gun. This is a film of a man who used to be the darling of Uptown, down and out, no one even interceding to let him open a simple jazz workshop. I'd be drinking a bit of wine too, I'll tell you. I'd be a little bitter too. I'd have a few choice words, and maybe a few more as the wine bottle got emptied. If you ask me, Charlie Mingus, for all his hot-temper reputation shows remarkable restraint and decorum standing waist deep in his own Armageddon.

And he's nobody's raving armed madman; "Blood ain't my game. But women, women are my game; I'm gonna take (ie steal) his woman and sell her back to him ..." although, OK, he does demonstrate how the rifle he bought for $7, the same model used to assassinate Kennedy, does indeed work, but it's such a run down discard of a space, and the bailiffs are due with their muscle-men any minute, so, like, who really gives a @#$ about the new hole in the wall.

Remember, Charlie Mingus is from Watts, a bottom-cast man of little schooling who worked his way up to the top of Downbeat, a man of so-called "mixed race" growing up in L.A. long before Nike and Rap made it cool (if they ever did).

Remember, this is 1968 America, where a rifle costs only $7.

The concert footage is amazing, and you bass players are going to be very happy with the angles because you get to see every little pyrotechnic beat.

But I'm not so sure this is a jazz film so much as a film about America, about America even after Rev King, an America with still a long way to go. Today there is no doubt of the genius and authenticity of expression that was the composer Charles Mingus, and this film makes me wonder who it might be that we are evicting today.

Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby

"MINGUS," the 60-minute documentary that opened here yesterday at the New Cinema Playhouse, is a very personal, very moving portrait of a man dispossessed—a freely photographed, large-pore close-up of Charlie Mingus, the jazz composer and bass fiddle virtuoso.

Most of this cinéma vérité feature, which was produced and directed by 23-year-old Thomas Reichman, was shot on a night in November 1966, when Mingus awaited the arrival of police and eviction from his Bowery loft for nonpayment of rent. As Mingus, a hulking but gentle man, moves back and forth through the clutter of crates, playing with his small daughter and talking to Mr. Reichman, who remains off-screen, it becomes obvious that his dispossession is more than just physical.

He talks tenderly to his 5-year-old Carolyn and asks her if she remembers the good old days when they lived on Fifth Avenue. He then observes that he'd like to live on Sutton Place, adding: "I'll kill—if I have to—to get there. I mean—people go to war and kill for locations."

At another point, at Mr. Reichman's suggestion, he pledges his allegiance "to the white flag of America" and almost moans: "How I suffered in this goddam society!"

Mingus also manages to touch on the sex life of his parents, describe a television commercial for a "zap" dress he has invented ("Zap! And it comes off!") and blow a hole in the ceiling with a shotgun. ("Hey, Tom, you dig that, man? That's not bad for not aiming!")

As this consciously choreographed, real-life performance progresses, the put-ons overtake one another and the real meaning of Mingus's dispossession is made sorrowfully apparent.

It is that of a black artist in a white world with which he can communicate only through a kind of supertalent.

Mr. Reichmnan's 16-mm. sound system is not, perhaps, the best medium for capturing the essence of the Mingus supertalent.

The director cuts away from the loft at intervals to show the star in action on the bandstand—where the emotion is clear but the sound is fuzzy, so fuzzy, that much of what is essentially a monologue also is difficult to catch. The camera, however, is mobile and unerring in capturing the performed truth.

"Mingus," like Shirley Clarke's "Portrait of Jason," makes no pretense to being the work of a hidden camera. Mingus knows—as we know—that he is being filmed. This frontal approach is, of course, as interpretive as staged, fictional cinema. Although it is one step removed from reality, it is no less true.

Mingus review [Lonnie Newsome]

Been buying some jazz videos lately when I see them at the record store that I always go to. Picked up a copy of this video on Mingus. It's a documentary featuring an interview with him on the eve of his eviction from a New York loft intertwined with live performances and just scenes back by his poetry.

The mood of the documentary is angry, which is probably justifiable, considering what is going to happen the next day. Mingus is interviewed and is very upfront about his feelings, but he sometimes rambles and goes off on strange tangents at times. (Goes on to talk about who killed Kennedy a couple of times, mentions gangsters, LBJ, etc) He was baited sometimes by the interviewer, but he mostly goes off on his own.

But he does get his point across and you learn that this was basically a kind and caring man, who just wanted respect. He constanly made references that "he hadn't done too bad for an uneducated man." His daughter, Carolyn, is in the video, and he sometimes stops to play and talk to her. You can see the love that he had for her and her mother. The one disturbing part was when he actually fired a rifle in the loft (toward the ceiling) while his daughter was there.

The interview takes place in the loft, which looks like a hurricane just went through it. It's so bad he could hardly walk around. The performances took place in what looked to be a very small club. (there was an outside scene of him driving up in a VW bus to a small shack called "Lennie's Jazz Spot", notes say somewhere near Boston). He was joined on those performances by Dannie Richmond, Walter Bishop, JohnGilmore and Charles McPherson playing such tunes as "All the Things You Are", "Secret Love", and "Take the A Train". There are also scenes of him conducting a big band, composing and singing. But one of the highlights for me was the poetry.

The documentary ended with the actual eviction... New York's finest escorting him out of the building then arresting him for finding syringes in the loft. It also shows the Sanitation Department loading up his things (including his bass) into a truck and the superintendent stating they would store the stuff for 30 days before trashing it. A bit of humor - while they where loading Mingus in the police car, the photographers were pushing for position and it got a little rough ("Get out of my way, g*d dammit", "I'll kick your ass",etc.) When the cops turn around to handle the photographers, Mingus opens the door and starts to get out. (they hadn't handcuffed him or anything). It was funny to see the look on one of the policeman face when he saw this. He said something like "C'mon Charles, get back in the car." It was all good natured you could tell the cops were just doing their jobs and Charles knew it and didn't seem upset. He was explaining that the syringes was for medication for him or his wife. (have to watch it again to find out for sure).

Not sure of all the details of why he was being evicted, but it had to do with a discrepancy with the city of New York. You didn't find out until the end that this was not where he was living, but where he was going to build a school to teach jazz.

Sad, because you then understood what he was saying earlier a little better. And when they showed him crying ....well, nobody likes to see a grown man cry.

Reidemeister, Helga

THE PURCHASED DREAM (Der Gekaufte Traum)

Germany (88 mi) 1977 co-director: Eduard Gernart

IS THIS DESTINY? (Von wegen Schicksal)

aka: Is This Fate?

Germany (117 mi) 1979

Helga Reidemeister interview The Working Class Family, by Marc Silberman from Jump Cut, July 1982

On Documentary Filmmaking Helga Reidemeister from Jump Cut, July 1982

Brückner, Perincioli, and Reidemeister group interview by Marc Silberman from Jump Cut, July 1982

Reiner, Rob

THIS IS SPINAL TAP

USA (82 mi) 1984

This Is Spinal Tap Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York

I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the band was down," insists lead singer and guitarist David St. Hubbins (McKean). "I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed...by a dwarf. All right? That tended to understate the hugeness of the object."

Great comic movie dialogue seems in shorter supply than ever these days—bodily functions having largely supplanted verbal dexterity as Hollywood's primary yuk-source—so it's rather ironic that the funniest, most relentlessly quotable movie currently in theaters was largely improvised by its cast. Working with characters they'd been gestating for years (Nigel Tufnel's picture, identified by name, is on the inner sleeve of an album by Lenny and the Squigtones, released at the height of Laverne & Shirley's popularity in the late '70s), the actors so thoroughly inhabit the skins of their self-important heavy-metal musicians that many scenes were captured on the first take, the trio fielding questions they'd never heard before with a wit worthy of the Beatles at their first American press conference. (Reiner, quoting a review: "The musical growth rate of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry." Nigel: "That's nitpicking, innit?")

Much of the fun of repeated viewings—Spinal Tap being one of those rare movies that never becomes tiresome, no matter how many times you watch it—is picking up on the offhand details that make the film's world so remarkably inviting. "GSM, GSM," Nigel calls to his mates at soundcheck, just before the band kicks into "Gimme Some Money," and anybody who's ever played in a garage band smiles in recognition of the way that the songs in a group's repertoire acquire abbreviated titles. (That the actors actually wrote and performed the songs themselves contributes immensely to the feeling of slightly skewed authenticity.) Or take a look at the bit where David and Nigel struggle to recall the lyrics of the first song they ever wrote together, a little ditty called "All the Way Home": The way that they falter through the first verse, each one jumping in when the other gets stuck, is so believable that it's possible to forget for a moment that the whole movie is one big put-on. Indeed, it's rumored that many of the folks who saw Spi¨nal Tap during its original run assumed it to be a real documentary.

Reiner, of course, has since become one of Hollywood's A-list directors, but his later, blatantly Oscar-hungry pictures (Ghosts of Mississippi, A Few Good Men) pale in comparison to this shabby treasure. He'd do well to return to smaller, less ambitious projects. For, as David St. Hubbins once pointed out, there's a very fine line between stupid and clever.

Reisner, Allen

ST. LOUIS BLUES

USA (105 mi) 1958

Classic Film Guide review

The usual liberties are taken in this so-called biopic of WC Handy, which ends with the usual embarrassingly patronising attempt to dignify jazz by showing its triumphant arrival in the concert hall. Otherwise, despite some heady melodramatics (Handy suffering psychosomatic blindness because of his preacher father's stern disapproval) which are defused by sympathetic handling and excellent performances from Nat King Cole and Juano Hernandez, this is a pleasing film with a distinct feel for jazz. Above all, Nelson Riddle's arrangements provide an excellent account of Handy's marvellous blues, and the cast assembled to play and sing them is well worth listening to (with only Eartha Kitt remaining obstinately out of period).

St. Louis Blues - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco

W.C. Handy has been called "The Father of the Blues", although he modestly said that he merely transcribed the music and made it available to a wide audience. Nevertheless, his music defined the blues, the best known being "St. Louis Blues", which was used as the title of the film biography Paramount Studios made of his life in 1958. The cast of St. Louis Blues reads like a list of some of the best African-American talent of the mid 20th Century: Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee, Juano Hernandez, and Pearl Bailey. There is also a future star in the cast: the young boy who plays W.C. Handy as a child would grow up to make a name for himself ten years later when he played with The Beatles: Billy Preston.

Starring as W.C. Handy was the great Nat King Cole, whose velvet voice and piano prowess had taken him to the top of the musical charts for two decades. Not a natural actor and being a shy man in his private life, Cole worked hard to create a credible portrayal, but it must have been difficult for him to concentrate on his role. At the time that St. Louis Blues was in production (October 7th to November 1st, 1957) Cole was under a lot of pressure doing his fair share of multi-tasking: nightclub singer, film actor, and star of his own television show which had been very popular with viewers, but was in danger of being pulled by the network because they could not find a sponsor. Ad agencies at the time were not enthusiastic about programs starring African-Americans, or as Cole famously declared, "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark."

Cole wasn't the only cast member who was doing double-duty during filming. Pearl Bailey remembered in her autobiography, "I played Nat's auntie, and we often laughed about that. I was working at the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas for Mr. Parvin and for three weeks I commuted. I'd do the show, leave in a car at 1:30 am, arrive at the studio in time to dress at 8 a.m., finish at 3 p.m., catch a plane (which most of the time was late), arrive in Vegas to bathe and get ready for two shows at eight-thirty and midnight. This went on for the entire picture."

Despite his personal problems, St. Louis Blues was a work of love for Nat King Cole. After Paramount had offered him the role, he drove to Yonkers, N.Y. for W.C. Handy's 83rd birthday party and spoke with him about making the film. Handy approved of the casting; at a dinner given in his honor in November 1957, he called Cole's portrayal of him, "forever a monument to my race." Ironically, St. Louis Blues had its world premiere in St. Louis (as a fundraiser for needy children) on April 10, 1958, only days after Handy's death on March 28th at the age of 84. To coincide with the premiere, April 10th was declared "Handy Day" by the mayor and featured a day-long celebration.

The film was a disappointment at the box office. Critics particularly singled out Cole's performance as "thin and anemic and much too suave and courteous, Cole seemed out of place and it was apparent that he lacked the strength and range to carry the picture." Regardless of what the critics may have thought, St. Louis Blues is well worth watching for the pleasure of seeing such superb musicians as Cole, Fitzgerald, Kitt, Bailey, Jackson, and Preston in their prime.

The Horn Section Hal

2 Things @ Once

Reisner, Charles

THE BIG STORE

USA (83 mi) 1941

Kitsch wins over comedy in the Marx Brothers' last MGM film, which remains in the mind mainly because of the amazingly awful 'Tenement Symphony', in which Tony Martin and a screen full of sparkling urchins warble a lyric of the finest drivel: 'The songs of the ghetto inspired the allegretto'. Nothing the Marx Brothers do is funnier than this, though Harpo and Chico's musical bits are livelier than usual. Dumont is prominently featured and totally mishandled, Groucho seems half asleep, and the plot (centred on a department store) doesn't bear thinking about.

User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States

Groucho Marx, in one of the interviews in Richard Anobile's book about the brothers, admitted that the films after the death of Irving Thalberg (he meant after A Day At The Races) were not his favorite, and he considered them the team's worst films. This is not a totally fair evaluation. Two of the films (Room Service and A Night in Casablanca) were as good as Horsefeathers or Animal Crackers. But it must be admitted that At The Circus, Go West, The Big Store, and Love Happy (not to say their unfortunate solo performances in The Story of Mankind)were below par Marx. All had good moments in them - but only moments. If one can cut these films to only highlight their highlights the resulting anthology film would be almost as good as Room Service and A Night in Casablanca.

Groucho is Wolf J. Flywheel in this film - one of his catchiest pseudonyms. Like his later, tamer film role as Sam Grunion in Love Happy, he is a detective. Like Grunion he is living a hand to mouth existance, owing rent. In the last moments of the film Charles Lane forcibly reposes his car, an ancient vehicle (for 1941 America) with the sign, "Welcome Admiral Dewey, Hero of Manilla" on the back - the battle of Manilla Bay was in 1898, and the car looks like it just arrived on the scene before Dewey died in 1917. Groucho is therefore definitely interested in impressing and romancing his normal foil, Margaret Dumont, for financial security. In the end they and Harpo are in the car as it is towed away.

It was not the first time that Groucho played a character named Flywheel. In the missing year of 1934, while he and his brothers left Paramount after Duck Soup failed (and when Zeppo decided to become an agent rather than a straight man - a wise decision as he was a very successful agent), Groucho and Chico made a series of radio programs about a firm of shyster lawyers, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. The tapes of these broadcasts no longer exist (apparently) but the scripts have been published. Many of their routines appear to have been used in these scripts, which are funny. One hopes the tapes will still manage to turn up one day.

The best moments in the film are those dealing with Groucho trying to impress Dumont, and his confrontations with Douglass Dumbrille, as the conniving, pompous store manager Grover. Harpo's fantasy moment with two other Harpos playing a trio is fine. Chico really does not do too well in the film - nothing in particular standing out. This is not enough to sustain the film, until the final ten minutes.

The brothers have photographed Grover paying two goons to assassinate Tony Martin (the heir to Dumont, the owner of the store - Dumbrille wants to marry her to get control of the store). Dumbrille tries to get the photo back, and chases the brothers through the deserted departments of the store.

Douglas Dumbrille was a recognizeable movie villain throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He appeared opposite Crosby and Hope in Road to Utopia, and opposite Abbott and Costello in Lost in a Harem. In such roles he usually just gave the normally competent straight dramatic villainy that he gave in such films as Treasure Island (he was Israel Hands, who tries to kill Jackie Cooper/Jim Hawkins). But it was different with the Brothers, as he appeared in two films with them. He had played Morgan, the racetrack owner in A Day at the Races. Dumbrille was not the only actor who played in several Marx Brother films - Walter Woolf King was Gasparri in A Night at the Opera and was one of the two villains in Go West. Sig Ruman was Herman Gottlieb in A Night at the Opera, Dr. Leopold X. Steimetz in A Day at the Races, and Hans Stubel (the Nazi War Criminal in hiding) in A Night in Casablanca. Margaret Dumont appeared in seven Marx films, and Thelma Todd in Horsefeathers and Monkey Business. Ruman, Dumont, and Todd were all expert comic actors, and perfect foils for the brothers. King was okay, but no more. But Dumbrille was the interesting repeater in the bunch.

In A Day at the Races, Dumbrille had little to do, except to threaten Harpo for not throwing a race, and looking apoplectic while the brothers demolish his racetrack to prevent a race from occuring before their missing horse can be found. As such, his performance there is little different from his performance in Road to Utopia or Lost in a Harem. But the conclusion of The Big Store is different. Here, he steals the chase from the stars of the film

It is true that by 1941 the brothers were too old for the stunts needed - and so they use doubles (compare it to Go West a year before, where they still do some of their own stunt work). In some of the tumbles Grover is supposed to take, one can see that Dumbrille has a double too. But the difference is that the director noted that Dumbrille's unsmiling, stiff face can be used to punctuate what a ridiculous figure he could become. For he does become ridiculous, despite the grave reason for his chasing the brothers. Suddenly he has to do such ridiculous things as ride a bicycle in the store (a kid's bike at that) while wearing his floorwalker outfit) to catch the brothers who are on skates. He puts on skates too at one point, and falls into a counter full of ladies hats. He disappears behind the counter, and raises his head to show he is wearing a lady's hat with a flower on top. It's a priceless image, for his expression has not changed.

It is Dumbrille who makes the forced chase worth watching - it was (perhaps) his finest moment as a comic actor. I wonder if the brothers (especially the critical Groucho) ever stopped to realize how they had briefly abdicated their movie to a supporting player.

The Big Store - TCM.com Stephanie Thames

THE MARX BROTHERS COLLECTION - DVD Walter Chaw, also reviewing GO WEST

Movie Revival [Chad Newsom]

DVD Verdict (Bill Treadway) dvd review also reviewing GO WEST

The New York Times review T.S.

The Village Voice [Brian Miller]

Reiss, Jon

BOMB IT B- 80

USA (93 mi) 2007 Bomb It! Official Website

My name is graffiti on the wall

Hats off to this website (2008 INDIEFEST—REVIEW of Bomb It! - ScreenAnarchy) for offering up a series of terrific links (many more are listed on the film’s official website) that leads to exquisite photographic evidence of a good deal of this graffiti art, much of which is eventually destroyed by time and urban renewal. One of the intriguing aspects to this style of art is its temporary existence, much like other artwork designed using natural elements, such as seen in RIVERS AND TIDES (2001), a film featuring the ephemeral sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy made from elements of nature. Also, one must recognize the efforts of the filmmaker to track down the proponents of this art form around the world, people who are largely underground artists who are not widely known. However the film itself only peripherally tells their story, perhaps because the art form is itself so undefinable, but it never really gets to the heart of the matter, like what drives people to risk their lives in such an outlandish manner in order to express themselves. The filmmaker didn’t really document many of these jaw-dropping risks. It’s hard not to be impressed with some of the gravity defying locations that are chosen to display graffiti, usually seen by commuters on trains who are otherwise bored or lost in reverie on their way to work, and BAM!, an unusual design displaying someone’s initials hits them with the sheer audacity of the idea, like who would think to put something there, someplace that seems impossibly out of reach? Instead the filmmaker chooses more earthbound subjects, starting with Cornbread in Philadelphia, who supposedly originated the art form in the late 60’s before it caught on in New York City, where the trains were literally tagged with graffiti from head to toe.

Moving to Barcelona, Cape Town, São Paulo, and Tokyo, the viewer gets a good sampling of the various personalities that engage in this activity, where graffiti art in Barcelona is introduced with images of Gaudi architecture, followed by a pair of extremely intelligent and talented guys who create among the best work seen in the film, usually on near-crumbling brick or cement surfaces under a highway overpass where their highly decorative art brightens an otherwise dilapidated structure. Cape Town, South Africa features graffiti as a means to express political liberation, especially during the Apartheid era, while São Paulo, Brazil is the site of an artist who works exclusively in darkened underground sewage tunnels, perhaps the most toxic and contaminated area of the city, who was surprised to find a family living under there, believing it was art for the uninhabitable. In Japan, an attractive young woman likes the idea of empowering young girls, creating fantasy action figures. Interjected within these pieces are a few neighbors who are offended by the street art, or law enforcement officials who see it only through the narrow view of destruction of public property and therefore a criminal act. Many associate graffiti with crime, believing one leads to the other, and that keeping the neighborhood free of graffiti helps reduce the crime rate.

The artists, on the other hand, refuse to allow themselves to be defined by textbook examples of what are acceptable forms of art, like only those that hang in museums, as few citizens where they come from will ever enter an art museum in their lives, but they do see the streets of their neighborhood and some of the highly imaginative artistic conceptions force people to see the world around them differently. For instance, public space is bombarded by immense billboards or giant advertisements for various products and no one gives this a second thought, as it’s a part of any urban landscape, also the vertical lined high-rise concept which shows exclusively one-directional concepts, everything points straight up, while graffiti artists feel compelled to challenge the existing status quo with unusual designs and colors that boldly denounces the passive indifference of the public in accepting these commercialized expressions without a fight. So part of the unique appeal of graffiti art is their unusual location which forces the viewer to rethink that use of space. If an average person was asked to describe a particular urban area, they would likely pick out noted landmarks or the most recognizable images, but a graffiti artist is likely to notice newspaper stands, bus stops, street signs, or other public fixtures that offer unfilled space that they can use, such as the back of billboards or street signs. Despite the fact the film moves too quickly off the many subtitles, leaving a confusingly fragmented, disjointed effect of mild frustration for the viewer, the message is clear that these artists remain unheralded and misunderstood, where the risk is unusually dangerous in some instances, which on occasions has lead to deaths, yet they are defied by a large segment of society that believes their work should be outlawed. It’s an interesting battle for recognition, expanding the public’s horizon of art versus ordinary citizens who advocate cutting existing art programs from public schools as a legitimate cost cutting measure to help keep their taxes down. One may in fact be a byproduct of the other.

Bomb It Jonathan Rosenbaum

Genuinely global, multicultural, and multilingual in its urban perspectives, this lively documentary features graffiti artists talking about their work and illustrates their discourse with images shot in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Cape Town, Sao Paolo, Tijuana, and Tokyo. Filmmaker Jon Reiss also occasionally gives voice to people trying to eradicate graffiti. The relentless quick cutting and pop soundtrack are counterbalanced by the artists’ personalities and sociopolitical credos. Unlike Michael Glawogger’s more visionary Megacities (1998), this offers neither city symphonies nor overarching theses, but as the title suggests, the theme of rebellion predominates. Subtitled. 93 min.

Bomb It Facets Multi-Media

A guerilla look at contemporary graffiti around the globe, Bomb It spans five continents to capture graffiti writers and street artists in action, tracing its history from ancient rock paintings to its current incarnation on the street, in galleries, and its influence on popular culture. Graffiti has always been shrouded in controversy, and as integral to this story are anti-tagging groups and an integral part of this story are anti-tagging groups and New York City's infamous "Quality of Life" laws. Artists and writers speak eloquently about the concept of public space and the reasons they risk incarceration and death to emblazon their tags. Whatever your point of view, graffiti is a fascinating and radical movement that defies definition except as a voice demanding to be heard. Directed by Jon Reiss, U.S.A., 2007, BetaSP, 94 mins. In English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish with English subtitles

Graffiti taggers wearing masks, lurking in the shadows, watched by security cameras, and running from the police inevitably suggest a different kind of resistance fighter against globalism. And their signature phrase, "Bomb it!" (i.e., paint it, tag it, hit it, put a spray can to it), places graffitists uncomfortably close to jihadists. Certainly, Jon Reiss's briskly edited and energetic documentary captures a lot of anger. From the Bronx in the '70s to the border walls in Palestine to the banlieues outside Paris, we hear the same basic "Fuck it!" from young people and outcasts who insist that since society won't invest in them (often true), they're entitled to strike back. Some taggers vow never to deface a person's home; others maintain a more anarchist credo, attacking "whatever is paid for by taxes." Bomb It's uncritical survey of world graffiti culture nods to history and cave art, then basically repeats itself (in Tokyo, São Paulo, Barcelona, etc.), making no distinction between gangbangers, pissed-off teens, and artists. Though street satirists like Robbie Conal and Blek le Rat appear briefly to argue their case, along with guerrilla designers Marc Ecko and Shepard Fairey, Bomb It doesn't have the patience or the smarts for real analysis. Those who despise graffiti are made to look like old fools; those who tag are inarticulate but undeluded that their work, or names, will outlive them.

Dreamlogic.net [Kris Kobayashi-Nelson]

Chris rolls his eyes at me but obligingly spins the car around, heading back towards something I whined about missing during our serendipitous in-motion drive-by photo-op. It’s a shell of a building seemingly built out of graffiti, layer upon layer of splayed and swirly signature scribbles or tags, but in this remote sketchy part of the City, graffiti writers have enough time to create the more elaborate throw-ups and pieces, short for masterpieces. Some call graffiti art, some a lifestyle and savior, others say it’s revolting vandalism, and the brilliant documentary Bomb It! smoothly offers all opinions, passionate whether it be love or hate.

Graffiti defines rebellion, as most writers are proud to be street soldiers, typographic terrorists, comparing themselves to guerilla militia, rampaging war against gentrification and urbanization, which they are likely a direct descendant of. Graffiti artists denounce industrial progress, criticizing boxy skyscrapers as physical manifestation of oppressive societal schism; bombing (spraying multiple areas quickly) being the obvious revolution.

Bomb It! takes us all across the globe to reveal the similarities of every society, wealthy or impoverished, riotous or safe. NY and LA are gimmes, but there’s angst on the walls of Tokyo, too, admittedly a recent phenomenon in their realm of rules and respect. In tragic Capetown, ripped by Apartheid, a youthful bunch with corrugated tin sheds as their canvas try to give a deprived community something beautiful, and the townsfolk ecstatically agree. A São Paulo official agrees that the rapid skyline protrusion is obtrusive. Barcelona, a land rife with gorgeous abstract architecture is also home to some of the most gorgeous and abstract burners (murals) ever painted, accompanied by a mature casual aura one would expect from the native artists, still commanding that vigilante spirit and belief in art for the masses.

Graffiti mysteriously exemplifies identity, ephemeral yet permanent, simultaneously attaining notoriety and anonymity. Bombing gets you noticed, earns acclaim, albeit hidden in the shadows, hiding from the law. With the popularity of crossover graffiti artists, paved by legends Keith Haring, Basquiat, maybe even Upper Playground and Mark Ecko, the fine line between selling and sell out have evaded those with an entrepreneurial edge. But for most writers, profit eschews the very essence of graffiti, and they’d rather live and die on the edge rather than legitimize their designs.

For some, freedom of expression with an aerosol can is no less an intrinsically innate human response, comparing graffiti to Egyptian wall paintings. Bomb It! proffers the argument that public space belongs to the people, that democracy doesn’t exist without this simple recognition. If you have something to say, say it, or hmm, spray it, Bomb It!

2008 INDIEFEST—REVIEW of Bomb It! - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen, also seen here: The Evening Class

Citing Goethe as literary precedent—"I was, after the fashion of humanity, in love with my name, and, as young educated people commonly do, I wrote it everywhere"—Jon Reiss then explores nature’s (i.e., the human ego’s) horror vacui in his energized global graffiti documentary Bomb It!—my “don’t miss” pick from the 10th Annual San Francisco IndieFest.

Retaining the revolutionary cry for action inherent in the graffiti art form, Reiss tempers that cry with a sense of social responsibility (keenly aware of that term’s malleability) as well as providing a thoroughly captivating overview of the art form’s cultural variance in cosmopolitan centers around the world, namely New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Capetown, São Paulo, Tokyo and Los Angeles (though several others are featured on the film’s Flickr site).

Tracing street graffiti’s origin to Philadelphia where “Cornbread” came to the realization that—if everyone was talking about him because he’d written his name all over the walls of the jail where he was serving sentence—how much more would they talk about him if he took it to the streets? That aesthetic of self-promotion was amped up by New York’s Taki 183 who—in his job as a messenger—spread his nickname all over New York’s five boroughs, inspiring the next generation of ranging “street soldiers” committed to “bombing” the system by competitive tagging. That range increased further when TKID began tagging New York’s subway trains, creating a veritable “museum on wheels.”

This urban art form took a major leap when Tracy168 and his team developed “wildstyle” graffiti with its aggrandized expressions of the alphabet, with Lady Pink paving the way for female graffiti artists to compete with their male counterparts.

When Simon & Garfunkle sang that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls”, they might as well have been referencing the autobiographical strategy of REVS who claimed those spaces to diarize his existence when tagging trains became problematic and ineffective. Unfettered by aesthetics of beauty, the power of REVS’ work lies in its commitment to anarchic spectacle. He’s also situated at the pivot where—in an effort to contain and control the burgeoning graffiti movement—it was criminalized.

Contextualized as a “gateway crime”, street graffiti initiated the ongoing debate and fight for control over public space and the ensuing global proliferation of “Quality of Life” behavioral modification laws. Reiss has perfectly pitched this debate in his documentary, giving voice not only to the urban artists who protest foisted gentrification and its class-structured arguments of neutral space but the anti-graffiti advocates who question and seek to exclude its presence. Eloquent in this regard is Marc Ecko‘s refutation of the “broken glass” theory that if you “clean it up”, you get rid of crime. “Issues that are messy,” he states, “classrooms, class structure, you can’t cosmetically sandblast those off a wall. They are much harder to legislate around and to get people to understand.”

Bomb It! is essential for any comprehension of the birth and development of the street graffiti movement within the United States, but it intelligently ventures further to situate this urban art form in global resistance, providing an essential “who’s who” of the global graffiti community. I was particularly impressed with Paris street artist Blek the Rat who has adopted the rodent as a symbol of freedom. Blek’s stenciled work adapted the New York wildstyle lettering to the environment of Parisian architecture. Placing his work in dilapidated structures, Blek confesses to an almost “supernatural relation to the past.” Adamant that art should serve a social cause, Blek focuses on the plight of the homeless, further accentuating the great divide between the haves and the have nots via the continuing tension between private and public space.

Barcelona’s street graffiti scene is likewise aesthetically captivating. Kenor & Kode appropriate architecture in a wildly imaginative and colorful collaboration. When they saw each others’ work it was “love at first sight.” PEZ likewise caught my attention with his awareness that the iconic travels further than mere lettering. He uses a fish to promote himself.

In São Paulo the work reveals a concentrated effort to resist the mass commodification of public space by either reclaiming contaminated space, co-opting corporate images, or posing the question of—not so much what is beautiful—but what is ugly? The work of Os Gêmeos ("The Twins") seeks to capture the inhabitants of São Paulo through carnivalesque caricatures. Nina aggressively creates portraits of wide-eyed children to comment upon the fact that so many of them are forced into prostitution. Nunca—working against what he felt were the illegible characters of wildstyle lettering and responding to the verticality of São Paulo’s skyscrapers—developed a lettering style that separated characters and elongated them. Zezão, in some respects, emerges—in my estimation—as the most radical of them all for reclaiming contaminated space and leaving his blue-themed art in darkness, surrounded by roaches, sewage and trash, where few will ever see it. It’s his “gift” of healing to a filthy, diseased city.

Yet another fascinating and controversial issue raised by the documentary is whether or not graffiti can go mainstream; taken off the streets and placed in the art galleries? Is graffiti on canvas the end of graffiti? Is the commodification of graffiti its antithesis? Is it stripped of power when its criminality is sanctioned? How various graffiti artists negotiate the dance between their street credibility and mainstream acceptance is enunciated through a series of testimonials. Shepard Fairey‘s “Obey Campaign” is perhaps the most singularly successful crossover that retains a philosophical integrity. In its very commodification, it comments upon commodification. The billboard art of Ron English not only addresses the “visual pollution” of billboard advertisements and its intrusion upon public space through private enterprise, but notates the control over access. When he tried to place a billboard in Toronto that read: “Support Divorce: The Great Heterosexual Institution"—his way of expressing solidarity with the issue of gay marriage—he was told there was no way that statement would ever be advertised on public signage. “There is no democracy without public space,” English cautions and adds, “What good is an idea if you can’t disseminate it?”

There is a wealth of ideas disseminated in Jon Reiss’s Bomb It! It’s been a while since this reviewer has been prompted repeatedly to think and found it so entertaining. Again, don’t miss this one!

Cinematical James Rocchi

Director interview (23.41)

Chicago Public Radio Jonathan Miller

Taki 183 Wikipedia Profile

TKID Wikipedia Profile

Tracy168 Wikipedia Profile

Lady Pink Wikipedia Profile

REVS Wikipedia Profile

Marc Ecko Wikipedia Profile

Blek the Rat Official Website

PEZ Wikipedia Profile

Os Gêmeos ("The Twins") Wikipedia Profile

Shepard Fairey Wikipedia Profile

Shepard Fairey's "Obey Campaign" Official Website

Ron English Wikipedia Profile

Bomb It! Flickr Website includes a photo gallery

Kenor & Kode Flickr Photoset more photos

Nina's Lost Art Gallery

Nunca's Lost Art Gallery

Zezão's Lost Art Gallery

Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin)

Variety.com [Dennis Harvey]

Chicago Tribune (Matt Pais)

New York Times (registration req'd) Laura Kern

Reitman, Ivan

GHOSTBUSTERS B 84

USA (105 mi) 1984 ‘Scope Official Website

A blast from the past, this is a somewhat cheesy looking 1980’s summer blockbuster hit featuring its own theme song that was immensely popular along with a cast of Saturday Night Live alums, especially the wisecracking Bill Murray who was still perfecting his deadpan stoneface, a zany script from Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis which delved into an amusing intersection of ancient history and the supernatural, with some special effects that provide the scientific allure of Frankenstein along with an adolescent comic book mentality. Initially Ackroyd wrote an over-the-top comedy for John Belushi, but after his death it was reworked to suit the more jaded and cynical lounge lizard style of Murray. Memorable for its wacky lines and a sultry appearance from a demonically possessed Sigourney Weaver, whose call for help when she discovers her refrigerator is a portal to a fascinating ancient mythical universe that goes undetected by the infamous ghostbuster team (“Generally, you don't see this kind of behavior in a major appliance,”), a slight oversight on their part, but one for which they eventually make amends, saving not only New York City but all of mankind.

After getting kicked out of Columbia University and losing their cash cow financial grant status to study the paranormal and psychic worlds, apparently just a scheme to get girls, they decide to go into business for themselves after discovering a paranormal phenomena on the loose at the city library, calling themselves ghostbusters, complete with sci-fi uniforms, weaponry, a classic Batmobile-like car, a catchy TV advertisement theme song, and various other paraphernalia that one might collect at the annual sci-fi conventions happening across the lands. While Ackroyd and Ramis are near cult believers, nerdy bookworms using hilarious rapid fire vernacular that sounds completely ad-libbed, and Johnny-come-lately Ernie Hudson (who took the Eddie Murphy role to make BEVERLY HILLS COP) joined the group because he just needed a job, it is Murray who retains his sleazy outsider status, making a mockery of everything they stand for, but he starts taking it personally when he gets slimed by a pesky little ghost they discover trapped in a hotel hallway munching off of a leftover food tray. Confounding even themselves, they actually trap the little booger (still steaming) and tuck it safely away in some kind of modern contraption that no one has yet invented. Business is booming until an EPA representative shuts them down and releases the little critters back into the world causing utter panic on the streets of GODZILLA or KING KONG proportions. Even the mayor calls upon the ghostbusters to save his city, where they are immediately elevated to rock star status, cheered and idolized by a hysterically approving mob scene on the streets as they make their way for the inevitable showdown between the present universe and the mythical one that’s gathering forces atop Sigourney Weaver’s penthouse apartment under earthquakes, dark clouds and lightning bolts after making their way out of her refrigerator.

While Murray is especially good in his role, reveling in his smart-assed character and getting most of the good lines, the film’s charm is that it never takes itself seriously, that it’s all in good fun, and as a result, it feels like fun. The ghoulish spirits on the loose seem happy to be free and not at all harmful until threatened at which point they develop fangs and a ferocious anger, while the guys hunting them down appear more disorganized and goofy, as this stuff was only happening in their heads before, as there was no practical application in the real world, so it’s all new to them as well. The cast is excellent, and while there are slow spots where not much happens, the actual dialogue remains hilarious throughout, and even over time there’s a hip, off-beat charm to the whole thing. To today’s audiences, which are used to much more sophisticated computer-enhanced special effects where the action dominates the 2 and 3-hour movie extravaganza, the special effects may feel low grade, as they’re not the feature attraction. Instead the action is blended into the character-driven comedy where the quirky reaction of humans becomes a spoof on 50’s B-movies of all kinds, a postwar era when the supposed economic boom provided unheard of levels of peace and prosperity, only to be threatened by the disturbing psychological paranoia of being completely unprepared for the disastrous aftereffects of nuclear fallout and toxic waste, where the idea of mutant creatures took hold. GHOSTBUSTERS is an irreverent child-proofed parady of monsters on the loose, a mild, relatively harmless satire on blockbuster action flicks, led by a clueless group of social rejects and misfits who are suddenly thrust into the spotlight, only to delight in the opportunity.

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

The absolutely gorgeous DVD transfer of this landmark American special effects comedy is the big news here, an extras-laden item that enhances the film’s special effects without losing the 1980s spirit of the movie. For it’s fifteenth anniversary, Columbia Pictures has released a disc that features a generous handful of deleted scenes, "Tricks & Trivia" listed below the image (did you know the slime was actually methylcellulose ether and that the movie was almost called Ghoststoppers?), a nifty section that allows the viewer to use the angles button to actually jump back and forth in a scene between the original footage and the special effects version in the final print (the sfx can also be compared in shots from original and 1999 featurettes), and even a Mystery Science Theater-type effect that has the silhouettes of director Ivan Reitman and others in the lower corner of the screen during their commentary. Originally envisioned by Dan Aykroyd as Ghost Smashers, an outer space fantasy pairing him with pal John Belushi, the retooled Ghostbusters made a star of Bill Murray as the wisecracking cynic who teams with his university colleagues to rid New York City of ghosts and created a template for success that has influenced big-budget American comedy ever since. Also available in a widescreen VHS version minus many of the bonuses, this is the latest in a long line of reasons to make the jump to DVD.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Michael Castelle

Upon its original release, the 1984 summer blockbuster GHOSTBUSTERS wittily inscribed a bourgeois, rationalist ideology onto a inestimable cross-section of Generation X. Amateur occultist Dan Aykroyd's screenplay, a contemporary updating of the corny Abbott & Costello and Bob Hope comedy-horror features of his youth, is sustained by an ingeniously savvy understanding of Reaganomic mythology that makes Frederic Jameson look like Dave Barry. The titular expelled Columbia University parapsychology postdocs get in on the ground floor of an emerging urban economy: the containment of the psychic energy of investment capital, sublimated into ludic, phantasmic form. Manifesting in historic arenas of the old-money upper class (Ivy League libraries, Upper West Side apartments, posh turn-of-the-century hotels), these gilded ghouls rise from the grave to celebrate industrial deregulation and income-tax cuts (Slimer in particular representing a ravenous and futile hyperconsumption), but unsurprisingly bring chaos to the liberal, environmentalist enclave of Manhattan. As the protagonists' success ushers in an era of celebrity entrepreneurship, the infantile collective Ghostbusters id repeatedly transgresses the demands of a variety of old-fashioned academic, bureaucratic, or municipal-juridical superegos to now-classic comic effect. GHOSTBUSTERS is suffused with a particular heteronormative, ascetic intellectual machismo from start to finish. Feminine promiscuity, for example, is definitively linked here to demonic possession, and the absurd Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (unleashed by the secular unconscious as a direct result of the Ghostbusters' attempt to physically mediate between an empirical positivism and occult theology) is defeated only through the violation of a puerile "stream-crossing" taboo, with our heroes simultaneously jizzing nuclear-powered laser beams into the glammy, gender-ambiguous Gozer's icy ziggurat. A very serious diversion.

filmcritic.com (David Bezanson)

Films like Ghostbusters are inseparable from the '80s -- self-mocking and smart, yet lowbrow and mainstream, they rescued us from the unfunny film comedies of previous times. (If Ghostbusters had been made earlier, it would have been much less funny. If it were remade today, it would probably be much dumber, like TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Like Bill Murray's other top comedies, the slightly more subversive Caddyshack and Stripes, Ghostbusters passes the most important test of cinematic greatness -- no matter how many times you've seen it, you may end up watching it again when it comes around on TV. Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis are postgraduates in "parapsychology" who pretend to investigate paranormal phenomena (the movie begins with Murray trying to pick up a coed by convincing her she's psychic) until they're kicked off campus. So they start a business and become celebrities when they start capturing real ghosts. This cheesy premise is handled so smoothly that there is never a confusing moment, something screenwriter Ramis would achieve again with Groundhog Day, an equally odd concept which also worked. Unlike Groundhog, Ghostbusters is strictly for laughs -- which doesn't mean that it's dumb.

Ghostbusters is Bill Murray's movie all the way -- Ramis and Aykroyd wrote it and costar, but they mostly serve as straight men for Murray's irony-soaked one-liners. Everything about the movie is goofy but somehow irresistible, from the Ray Parker Jr. theme song to the climactic marshmallow man. The supporting characters are likewise wacky but logical, including Potts as the jaded receptionist who puts the moves on Ramis ("Do you have any hobbies?" "I collect spores, molds, and fungus.") and Moranis' nerdy tax consultant who ends up possessed by a Mesopotamian demigod.

The script is not flawless -- in an unnecessary subplot that stalls the movie in the middle, the boys get busted by the EPA. (Only in the '80s could everything, even ghosts, be blamed on too much government.) Otherwise, the movie is fun from start to finish, when the 'busters destroy the evil Sumerian demigod atop a Central Park high-rise and Ernie Hudson (as the token African-American ghostbuster) jumps in the air and yells "I love this town!" -- reducing the whole movie to a New York City joke.

One of the most popular comedies ever, Ghostbusters inspired many subsequent blockbusters (most obviously Men in Black, which even threw in a couple of NYC jokes itself) plus a children's cartoon. The entire cast reunited for an uninspired, but not bad, sequel in 1989.

Now available on a two-DVD set with the sequel, you get not only a collectible booklet of drawings and errata, but also a commentary, deleted scenes, and various featurettes.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

After looking at some of the great work actor Bill Murray has done in the last decade, I got the urge to go back and watch one of his earliest successes, Ghostbusters (1984), a film that I've seen at least ten times. Even when I first saw it in high school, I sensed that Murray was the best thing in the movie, and not the special effects, and certainly not the popular and dreadful theme song by Ray Parker Jr.

Murray managed to successfully transplant his wise-ass character from Saturday Night Live into the movies, something that many SNL actors have failed to do. He made quite a few movies around the character, like Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), all big hits. Ghostbusters was the biggest hit of them all, though, seemingly because of the special effects that attracted younger audiences and repeat viewings. Murray is enjoyable in the movie, but he really didn't develop his acting chops until much later. Tellingly, he used his clout from Ghostbusters to make his dream project, The Razor's Edge released later the same year. But Murray tried to play it with his smart-ass character and it failed.

Murray worked so well in Ghostbusters because he seemed to be operating slightly outside of it, winking at us from the sidelines. While the other actors Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts, seemed to be completely caught up in playing their characters and acting out the story, Murray was always bemused by the proceedings. He would always say something inappropriate for the moment, and because of its inappropriateness, we would laugh. For example, when Weaver is possessed by the spirit of "Goser," Murray has nothing but wisecracks, "what a lovely singing voice you must have," and so on. In fact, Weaver's lines seem purposely crafted as set-ups for his remarks.

To go one further, Murray's lines are crafted to jump out during the suspense sequences as well. Our adrenaline is (supposedly) rushing around during the final battles with ghosts and marshmallow men, so when Murray pops out with something strange like "mother pus bucket," we can't help but laugh. Murray could even go so far as to look directly into the camera to let us know that he is on our side, "isn't all this ridiculous?" he asks us.

Of course, this speaks more about the writing of Aykroyd and Ramis and the direction of Ivan Reitman than about Murray's acting. But it does say something about Murray's screen presence, his ability to control a scene and still be involved in it. At this early point in his career, he was not the skilled actor that he is today. That's clear. But he was developing a powerful persona that undeniably helped him to perfect an acting technique. Just the fact that Aykroyd and Ramis wrote the script around him instead of themselves confirms this idea.

The one thing the movie misses out on is a kind of Marx Brothers camaraderie between Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis. Because Murray is acting on a different plane from the other two, they never really connect in a comic way. Aykroyd and Ramis, like Weaver, set up straight lines for Murray to launch from but that's it. Interestingly, Aykroyd wrote Ghostbusters a few years earlier with the intention of playing it with his pal John Belushi, who died in 1982. (He also wrote Spies Like Us during this time.) It must have been seriously re-written to fit Murray's character, but I suspect that the original version contained more give-and-take between Aykroyd and what would have been the Belushi character.

Ghostbusters was one of the first expensive blockbusters made in the 80's, a tradition that sadly continues to this day. Most directors don't know how to handle them, and Ivan Reitman seems more comfortable with the comedy scenes than with the special effects, which are sadly dated now (witness the claymation "dog" that chases Ramis through Central Park). Also, Ghostbusters was one of the first movies to be popular on cable and in VCRs, then a brand-new technology. But the movie was shot in Cinemascope and it was also one of the first to suffer from pan-and-scan. Now, thankfully, the movie has been released in a letterbox version on both laserdisc and DVD.

There was a sequel, Ghostbusters II, in 1989 that's hardly worth mentioning. Though it seemed to motivate Murray into trying new things, because afterward, he gave us his first layered and nuanced performances in movies like Quick Change (1990), Groundhog Day (1993), and Rushmore (1998).

I had a good giggle watching Ghostbusters again, and I recommend checking it out for an evening of turn-your-brain-off entertainment. For all its expense and special effects, though, my favorite scene is still: Aykroyd: "Hey! Where do these stairs go?" Murray: "They go up."

The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson

Blinded by Pseudoscience

Once upon a time, boys and girls, longer ago than most people remember, there was a time when the release of a movie starring Saturday Night Live alum was cause for celebration, and not a sign of the apocalypse. We ancient Xers remember this, my sweet little Millennial children, because a single film of this nature is, perhaps, the sardonic base upon which the entirety of Xer culture is built.

"Back off, man, I'm a scientist."

Would The X-Files exist without 1984's Ghostbusters? Would Buffy? Would world-weary sarcasm and snarky self-reference ever have reached the level of art form if not for Peter Venkman? The answers, okay, more than likely, are Yes, Yes, and Yes. But they'll all more fun because Ghostbusters seared its way through our impressionable adolescent brains at just the right time to inflict the most grievous psychological injury.

"Let's split up."

"Right, we can cause more damage that way."

Science is a scam to Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray: Cradle Will Rock, Rushmore), a way to pick up chicks. Science is an all-consuming passion for Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis: As Good as It Gets). Science is a way to avoid real work for Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd: Grosse Pointe Blank, Driving Miss Daisy) -- "they expect results" in the private sector, he frets when the university funding for their studies into the paranormal is yanked. So they start up Ghostbusters, a firm that provides "professional paranormal investigations and eliminations." They go to town, zapping "pretty pesky poltergeists" all over the Big Apple, using some of the coolest gadgets ever invented for a movie -- including pocket-size ghost traps and backpack nuclear accelerators -- and technobabble -- like "free-floating, full-torso, vaporous apparition" -- that would stand unchallenged for years in the annals of science fiction as the finest ever uttered. (until Star Trek: The Next Generation's invention of "the Heisenberg compensator," a component of the transporter -- it brings a tear of joy to my eye to think that the guys writing ST:TNG episodes were just as geeky as the fans)

"He slimed me."

The boys are a hit, and their rise to fame and glory is chronicled in one of the most effective montage sequences ever spliced together: Intercut with the bejumpsuited Ghostbusters dragging their steaming spirit traps through famous New York City landmarks and neighborhoods are spot-on parody covers of publications from USA Today to the New York Post, Omni to Atlantic Monthly -- you're not famous until you hit the cover of Time, and our heroes do. But evil things are brewing: the refrigerator in Dana Barrett's (Sigourney Weaver: Galaxy Quest, The Ice Storm) Central Park West penthouse has been taken over by a demon named Zuul, and he won't be happy till he sponsors carnage on a massive scale. The Ghostbusters have their work cut out for them.

"24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no job is too big, no fee is too big."

Ghostbusters wasn't the irreverent spawn of only Saturday Night Live veterans -- that other bastion of brilliant late-night satire, SCTV, was a partner in crime. Written by SNL's Ackroyd and SCTV's Ramis, this flick -- did I mention how totally, completely, and in all other ways awesome it is? -- combines the best of both brands of comedy: the over-the-top goofiness of SNL and the subtler, more introspective humor of SCTV. SNL's Murray and SCTV's Rick Moranis (as Dana's nerdy accountant neighbor Louis Tully) are both self-deprecating, but Murray's manifests itself in his character's bigness and his outrageousness, in the silly faces he makes at his own bumbling, while Moranis's is small: his Louis shrinks into himself, shy and nervous; his whispered conference with a horse in Central Park after he's been possessed by a minion of Zuul is a masterpiece of comic underacting. SNL's Ackroyd is big, full of childish enthusiasm; SCTV's Ramis is small, barely moving but imbuing throwaway lines like "Print is dead" (in response to a question about what he reads) with subdued comedic energy.

"Take me now, subcreature."

Ancient Mesopotamian gods that look like Sheena Easton, ectoplasmic goo, unfakeable New York 'tude, psychokinetic Twinkies, and quotable quotes for every occasion... Ghostbusters is the perfect Xer movie. I have a little Stay Puft marshmallow man on my toy shelf (every fangirl Xer worth her salt has a toy shelf), and it makes me very happy to look at him and think, "Nobody steps on a church in my town!"

Ghostbusters | Film at The Digital Fix Matt Shingleton

Ghostbusters 1&2 - Collectors Gift Set | Film at The Digital Fix Kevin Gilvear

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks)

The Ghostbusters Are Horrible People | Overthinking It Matthew Belinkie from Overthinking It, June 8, 2009

Classic-Horror.com Jenn Dlugos

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis

EyeForFilm.co.uk Scott Macdonald

Movie Vault [Greg C.]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Chiranjit Goswami]

And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley)

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Dragan Antulov

Ghostbusters zunguzungu, December 19, 2009

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing STRIPES and GROUNDHOG DAY

this Premake Ghostbusters, 1954 on YouTube (2:48)

KINDERGARTEN COP

USA (111 mi) 1990

Kindergarten Cop (Ivan Reitman, 1990) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

Second in an ongoing series of overreaching reflections on TBS rotation flicks. Kindergarten Cop, from Ivan Reitman, the man who molded (and, I would add, obfuscated) the machismo behind Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, gave us this family-friendly Ah-nold vehicle (in which his undercover cop — what?! the man couldn’t be more conspicuously fuzz — ludicrously poses as a kindergarten teacher to locate the fatherless child in danger of being reclaimed by his murderous pop). The film seems to me a vaguely paranoid take on gender-equality, especially in societally regimented institutions of authority (be it top man of the vice squad or the mice squad). Masculinity is portrayed here as in flux and hopelessly volleyed between women’s liberation and men’s latent maternal instincts. Linda Hunt, who won an Oscar for playing a man, plays a hard-nosed school principal who, behind closed doors, relishes the physicality of the beatdown Arnold delivers to an abusive father. Pamela Reed (a durable and unfortunately underused character actor), who eats like lumberjack, is a classic sort-of-Hawksian tough lady, whose cookin’-n-cleanin’ husband is first glimpsed wearing a silky woman’s robe. And the film leaves us with every indication that the villanous and serpentine Crisp developed his criminal proclivities from the sort of ambiguous developmental retardation inevitable when a lone son is held hostage by a vindictive, overbearing, cartoonishly Type A mother. Still, considering this is an Ah-nold moo-vie, it’s interesting to note that most of these confusions are, in the end, resolved in favor of hanging up the piece and taking on the role of Mother Hen.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED C+ 77

USA (110 mi) 2011

If we were in a relationship, I'd become a weird, scary version of myself. —Emma (Natalie Portman)

I suppose a lot of what you get out of a movie like this depends on what you bring into the theater with you, such as preconceived notions. Certainly the draw here is seeing Natalie Portman lower herself to this dreck, where she’s actually named as a producer and beaming with a smile on her face, actually looking happy right on the heels of her Academy Award nominating role which couldn’t have been more dramatically challenging in the psychic horror thriller BLACK SWAN (2010) where she took a deep descent into madness. Having low expectations is the key to enjoying a movie like this, after all, it’s directed by the guy who made GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) more than 25 years ago, which was cheesy even then - - so if you get a little something to enjoy, be grateful. I still remember sex columnist Dan Savage’s infatuation with teen throb Ashton Kutcher wearing whities, so don’t expect much else out of a guy who’s more a Hollywood celebrity than an actor, accurately described in the film as annoyingly happy. If the entire plot feels borrowed from a Friends TV sitcom episode where Natalie Portman’s role is interchangeable with Jennifer Aniston, well perhaps it is. The jury is still out on whether Natalie Portman can carry a film alone, as she is surrounded by a sizable secondary cast which keeps popping their heads in and out of the picture, usually for comic relief in order to keep re-energizing the film with easy laughs. There’s not much doubt that this is another formulaic film, but one wonders if Portman’s presence will add anything different, like Jodie Foster or Julia Stiles, young attractive women who also brought an edge of smartness and strength to their roles. I suppose playing opposite Kutchner tells us all we need to know, as he continues to be a grown up adolescent, and he ends up being the responsible one in their relationship.

Kutchner and Portman initially grow attracted as sex buddies, where due to Portman’s hectic schedule working at a hospital she simply has no time for dates and small talk, preferring a few moments in the sack until it’s time to go back to work again. Kutchner plays along, thinking this is any guy’s dream, but he soon wants more out of it, and he’s not afraid to say so. Portman on the other hand has an aversion to cuddling and commitment, thinking somebody always gets hurt, so she avoids all the small stuff. Of course, this plays out in obvious fashion, where initially there’s a rush of sexual attraction and interest. One of the things the film does best is express this candidly through cell phones, gossip, and the Internet age, so soon all their friends who weren’t supposed to know have heard all about it. They’re the talk of the town, as they seem so grown up about a relationship without emotional attachments, except they get disturbed at the thought of their so-called partner seeing someone else. So it’s a little more complicated than they let on. When they have a falling out, the energy sags and the film sinks, where in no time at all we have nearly forgotten what we liked about this film. Thoroughly predictable, the secondary characters are terrific, especially Portman’s roommate Greta Gerwig, also Kutcher’s buddy Ludacris, who themselves feel like a couple with possibilities. This is a breezy, light-hearted romantic comedy that accentuates the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, and being single, where people are rarely if ever seen at work, but the focus is on all the fun and extracurricular activities in their lives, as if the audience can re-live their youth vicariously through this virtual reality world where relationships require no commitment whatsoever. That premise is intriguing, but this is Hollywood, where artifice reigns supreme, so girls aren’t allowed to have fun and be in love without first recognizing the error of their ways and quickly correcting it, showing maturity, wisdom, and of course, providing the moral of the story.

Time Out New York [Nick Schager]

Directed by Ivan Reitman, No Strings Attached follows Adam (Ashton Kutcher) and Emma (Natalie Portman) as they attempt to sidestep issues of intimacy by engaging in a purely physical relationship - with problems ensuing as Adam begins to develop romantic feelings for Emma. It's clear right from the outset that Reitman, working from Elizabeth Meriwether's screenplay, isn't looking to offer up a typically slick romantic comedy, as the filmmaker has infused the proceedings with an edgier sensibility that initially holds some promise - with Kutcher and Portman's charismatic work heightened by an impressively eclectic supporting cast that includes Kevin Kline, Cary Elwes, and Greta Gerwig. It's only as the movie progresses into its unusually sluggish midsection that one's interest begins to flag, and it's clear that Meriwether's increasingly episodic sensibilities are compounded by her ongoing reliance on eye-rollingly familiar romcom clichés (ie Adam and Emma's unreasonably wacky friends). The incongruously dramatic bent of the film's final third - the fake break-up makes an especially needless appearance - cements No Strings Attached's place as a consistently underwhelming piece of work, although Reitman does deserve some credit for avoiding the slickness that seems to be part and parcel with the genre nowadays (ie a typically empty Katherine Heigl or Kristen Bell vehicle this isn't).

Remember the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you’ve got this tone-deaf dud, in which TV production assistant Adam (Kutcher) becomes the on-call boy toy for commitmentphobic med student Emma (Portman). She likes to get down but doesn’t want anything more than casual intercourse—because, well, that’s the primary plot device driving this contrived excuse for a farce. And would you believe that complications ensue when Adam begins having serious feelings for Emma? Who could have seen that coming, right?

That these amorous proceedings adhere to genre conventions isn’t nearly as problematic as the film’s strained outrageousness and all-around sloppiness. Subplots either have no bearing on the plot or affect it in mind-numbingly obvious ways (Kutcher’s sitcom-star father, played by Kevin Kline, knocking up his son’s ex-girlfriend?); comedic relief sidekicks are plentiful (Gerwig, Olivia Thirlby, Ludacris) and yet seem to have simply stumbled onto the set by accident (Cary Elwes, I’m looking at you!). Kutcher appears confused by any scene requiring him to sincerely emote, his face scrunching up in an expression that suggests constipation more than compassion. Portman, meanwhile, is saddled with nonsensical neuroses that we’re supposed to take seriously—yet in every regard, they pale in comparison with the psychic free fall of her bonkers Black Swan ballerina; not even her sporadic displays of charm can elevate this antivalentine.

No Strings Attached, The Way Back, Summer Wars | A Romcom With ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

The prospect was iffy at best: a romantic comedy, from a Hollywood studio, with a premise that smacked of "Last Tango in Paris," the scandalous classic in which Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider have a sexual liaison with no strings—or names—attached. Yet the outcome is delightful. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman are the lovers in "No Strings Attached," which Ivan Reitman directed, with great verve and unflagging finesse, from a terrifically funny script by Elizabeth Meriwether. These lovers do have names: Adam and Emma. They're longtime friends who decide to become FWBs—friends with benefits, i.e. sex friends—because they don't think they can handle the demands of a committed relationship without wrecking their cherished friendship. In fact, it's more complicated than that, and much more interesting, but their earnest entry into a no-strings pact is enough to put them on a bumpy, raunchy—sometimes very raunchy—and pot-holed road to true love.

Adam is an aspiring writer on a cheerfully silly TV show about high schoolers "who sing, dance and blog." Emma is a doctor, which is why she tells him at one point, "You give me premature ventricular contractions—my heart skips a beat." The movie doesn't miss a beat, be it comical, farcical, emotional or even lyrical. (Well, maybe one—a change of heart, announced by Emma in the courtyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that seems to have happened off camera.) This success is due in huge part to the beautifully tuned work of its co-stars, to the lilt of their verbal—and, yes, physical—duets. Both of the actors, like their characters, seem to be enjoying themselves with a graceful sense of self-irony that inoculates them against narcissism. Mr. Kutcher's Adam is an intelligent, good-hearted hunk who's genuinely lovable. Ms. Portman's Emma has a gift for floating and darting while staying grounded.

Still, actors can't do what these two do without gifted people around them. The director, Mr. Reitman (that's Reitman père, of "Ghost Busters," not Reitman fils, of "Up in the Air"), sustains precise and often delicate comic rhythms, yet he also allows for enjoyable looseness in scenes that can use it. (Some of my favorites involve a special musical mix that Adam burns for Emma, a congratulatory balloon that he brings for her, and an interlude on a miniature golf course.)

The writer, Ms. Meriwether (no grounds for confusion here; it's her feature-film debut), keeps the zingers coming with remarkable regularity and almost eerie accuracy. More than that, though, she has created a heroine with substantial, if unstressed, depth. Far from a flirty beauty who wants to keep her options open, Emma keeps her distance from open feelings because she hasn't learned how to do otherwise. "I'm not an affectionate person," she says in a girlhood prologue. That's before she blossoms forth as Natalie Portman, but even then Emma knows herself all too well.

In keeping with the quality at the top of the bill, the supporting cast is chockablock with comic chops: Kevin Kline as Adam's father, Alvin, a fatuously lascivious actor who's famous mainly for saying "Great Scott!"; Greta Gerwig as Emma's quick-witted friend Patrice; Lake Bell's Lucy, a major-league neurotic producing minor-league TV; Chris "Ludacris" Bridges as Adam's cheerfully profane and dependably obtuse friend Wallace. "No Strings Attached" doesn't have the overexposed, washed-out look of a studio comedy—the cinematographer was Rogier Stoffers—and doesn't for a moment feel like one. It's a smart, sexy romcom that turns the neat trick of staying sweetly human.

Village Voice [Karina Longworth]

About.com [Rebecca Murray]

Filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell

Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]

Cinematical [William Goss]

IC Places [Chris Knipp]

No Strings Attached | It Could Have Used a Few Strings | Pajiba ... Steven Lloyd Wilson fropm Pajiba

David Edelstein on 'No Strings Attached' and 'Applause' -- New ... New York magazine

No Strings Attached (C) Brad Brevet from Rope of Silicon

No Strings Attached reviewed: Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher ... Dana Stevens from Slate

ReelTalk [Betty Jo Tucker]

Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Dirk Sonniksen]

No Strings Attached : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster

No Strings Attached Mel Valentin from eFilmCritic.com

Review: No Strings Attached - JoBlo.com Genevieve Blader

No Strings Attached : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jason Bailey

Briandom [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: eFilmCritic Reviews

No Strings Attached — Inside Movies Since 1920 Wade Major from Box Office magazine

film review: No Strings Attached > Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

No Strings Attached | Movies | EW.com Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety.com [Justin Chang]

In 'No Strings Attached' guy wants more than just benefits ... Carrie Rickey from The Philadelphia Inquirer

'No Strings': Cynical view of romance | Philadelphia Daily News ... Gary Thompson from The Philadelphia Daily News

Review: At last, a romcom that's a comedy about romance ... Chris Hewitt from The St. Paul Pioneer Press

'No Strings Attached' review: New lay of the land Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

Crude spoils mood in 'No Strings Attached' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

Reitman, Jason

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING B+ 91

USA (92 mi) 2005

One of the funniest films of the year, the satirical rise and fall and then resurrection again of a high powered lobbyist, the spokesperson for the tobacco industry, a smooth, fast talking, snake oil salesman played by Aaron Eckhart who effortlessly makes his point while charming an entire room at the same time, making everyone forget it’s the corporate tobacco industry that he represents. Eckhart has always enjoyed roles where he crosses the line of political correctness, and here he revels in it, the guy with the killer smile who takes the air out of every one else’s balloon, given a smart, hilarious script adapted by the director from Christopher Buckley’s 1994 novel about a Washington spin doctor. That would be Christopher, the son of William F. Buckley, the icon of conservatism. The film is edgy and satirically biting, suffering from momentary lapses in pacing and continuity, which is pretty common in most comedies, but the lags are more evident here when so much of the material works so well and is presented at such a fast-paced clip, utilizing the brilliance of Eckhart, whose spontaneous response to his son who quizzically asks about a school assignment on what makes America great - - “Our endless appeals system,” or later offering him sage advice: “The beauty of argument is that if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.”

Much of this is set in the context of television sound bites, as people are always preening for the cameras, trying to get their 5 seconds of air time, which lobbyists are so skilled at, getting their message out in the least number of words. Yet, amazingly, these acerbic rants move public opinion more than well-researched and well-documented newspaper articles. This is extended to Senate hearings, where the behavior of perfectly rational beings changes in front of the cameras, as news agencies are always looking for the quick quips instead of an extensive reportage of what actually took place. These sound bites may be the precursor to reality TV shows, as why waste time and money to have a reporter sit there all day painstakingly documenting the facts when 5 or 10 seconds of an occasional uproar is what plays well on the later telecast?

One of the best bits is when his kid brings dad to school to talk about what he does for a living and is immediately the subject of controversy in the classroom, or a continuing bit with Maria Bello and David Koechner respectively where Eckhart meets with fellow lobbyists for the alcohol and firearms industries, affectionately called the MOD Squad for the Merchants of Death, quibbling over whose industry is responsible for more deaths. Seeing Koechner attempt to pass through a metal detector before entering a Senate hearing is priceless. But along the way, we see Eckhart in the company of his own corporate team, amusingly led by JK Simmons, the head of his lobby group, or meet with the granddaddy of tobacco, an aging patriarch played by a mint julep-drinking Robert Duvall, or the head of a Hollywood agency representing actors called EGO, played by an overly Asian-influenced Rob Lowe, who envisions nudity in outer space with the actors having the time to stop and smoke after sex, a brief fling with a cute but amoral reporter Katie Holmes who finds his bedside stories more revealing, or a meeting with gads of cash to pay off Sam Elliot, the original Marlboro Man, now diagnosed with cancer, in a cynical attempt to keep him from speaking out against tobacco, or that wily little Senator from Vermont, William H. Macy, who wants to put skull and crossbones poison labels on every pack. Despite these obstacles, our man in Washington perseveres, overcoming even his own divorce, always having the last word, perhaps even despite himself. Amusingly, the Kingston Trio version of “Green-Backed Dollar” plays out over the credits.

JUNO B+ 92

USA (92 mi) 2007

One of the more enjoyable movies of the year – what the film has a whole lot of is earnestness, so even with its comedic format and good intentions, it reeks of seriousness. Set in the world of high school, there are no MEAN GIRLS cliques or outward comedic targets to scandalize, instead it’s simply the travails of a 16-year old girl who ill-advisedly gets pregnant the first time she has sex. Despite the terrific performances and the witty, down to earth dialogue, the film is undermined by its own Kimya Dawson/Moldy Peaches musical choices which run throughout the movie which sound so cutesy after awhile that they always feel less inspired than what’s happening onscreen, basically undercutting the well-earned dramatic realism with silly little ditties that make a mockery of the film's authenticity but add a first person singular observational light touch. Diablo Cody writes a terrific script which 20-year old Ellen Page as Juno simply knocks out of the park, completely in step with her dad, J.K. Simmons who feels he was born to be a heating and air-conditioning man, and her acid tongued stepmom, Allison Janney, who’d prefer to be living in a world with dogs. From the outset where animation mixes with real life over the opening credits, where there’s inner narration from Juno as well, there’s a clever appeal to this film, reminiscent to the high school snarkiness of GHOST WORLD (2001), which was also elevated by an outstanding mix of originality in the script and authenticity in the performances. Despite the fact some of the best scenes have already been revealed in the overly played trailer, the film is a treasure chest of warm and fuzzy moments, a feel good movie if ever there was one, yet there’s an unfortunate overreach at the end into the happily ever after that might seem more in synch with the sentimentalized inclinations of a Charlie Chaplin movie. The buoyant spirit of Page, however, in the way she constantly overcomes her very real human dilemma of being pregnant in high school, which includes all the behind the back remarks and adolescent hormones literally flooding through her world, is a remarkable tribute to both the writer and actress to be so perfectly in synch with one another.

The film has literally the off-kilter template look and design of an indie movie, but the sincerity of the material constantly rises above any ordinary comparison, as the freshness of Page’s approach to Juno is so damn appealing. The scene where she announces her pregnancy to her parents is just too believable, as thoughts are obviously racing through her parent’s head of all the things that could possibly be wrong, but they are stunned nonetheless and their genuine concern for her is immediately translated to the audience, an eye-opener, as parents in high school pictures are usually portrayed as dorks. Initially contemplating an abortion, her trip to the Women’s Now office is wonderfully low key, especially the intervention of Su-Chin (Valerie Tian), apparently the only Asian student at school and who is the lone protester standing outside the clinic, whose unexpected brilliance at getting under Juno’s skin is wonderfully underplayed. Juno can’t stand the antiseptic creepiness of the office, so she bolts and decides to have the baby herself, finding a happily married suburban couple in the Penny Saver ads that is looking for a baby. Her initial meeting with them is off the charts hilarious, as a toned down performance by Jennifer Garner as the Type A mom-in-waiting and Jason Bateman as the happy hubby are simply too perfect to be real. Juno has complete faith in them and makes special trips out to see them in order to develop a comfort zone before the delivery, hanging out with Batemen playing guitars together or listening to forbidden household music that is not considered appropriate for the baby or amusingly watching splatter films of Herschell Gordon Lewis like THE WIZARD OF GORE (1970). There’s a wonderful moment when Juno is with a friend at the mall when she gets a chance to see Garner interact freely with a little kid, or when Garner feels the baby kicking in her belly for the very first time under the calm, awestruck gaze of Juno, which is beautifully realized in its utter simplicity. What she discovers later, however, is that the couple is about to split, a scene played solemnly and purposefully without a hint of music, as Garner is way out ahead on the baby thing while Bateman is crumbling under the pressure of responsibility. Juno goes into a free fall, claiming she’s dealing with things way beyond her maturity level, but recovers with the help of a serious but completely misdirected talk with her dad.

Lost in all this is the wonderfully subdued performance of the baby’s dad, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), a soft-spoken kid with a baby face who’s always seen in his bright red and yellow school running attire as he’s on the track team, looking like a geek who’s lost his way, but Juno’s got a thing for him and he couldn’t be happier. Their relationship is underdeveloped, particularly in the end, as they’re far more interesting than as conceived in the story, which settles for a safe, harmonious ending, almost childishly unreal at the end, like a fairy tale, once more with storybook music blaring in the background, reminding us how lucky they are to have found each other. Just as Woody Allen has for years over-utilized jazz soundtracks that intrude into the emotional realms of his movies, a form of emotional manipulation not uncommon with a Spielberg film, the effect here is the same, as it drowns out the wonderful naturalism of the characters and unfortunately forces the audience to hear and feel what the director forces us to feel. Why this remarkable authenticity, rarely seen in films, even indie films, is undermined by a music stream of what sounds at times like endless chatter is anyone’s guess, but there you have it.

The first thing you notice about Juno is the sparkling dialogue, sprinkled with liberal uses of slang and perky sentence construction. It's a joy to listen to, and novice screenwriter Diablo Cody (great name, that) is already getting the red carpet treatment in Hollywood. Likewise, her characters spring to emotional life, and they seem perfectly matched to the corresponding actors. It's so much fun that it's easy to overlook the film's rather conventional plot arc, and its vague similarity to both Knocked Up and Waitress. Ellen Page stars as the title character, a teen punk rocker, who ends up pregnant by her friend, a track jock, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Juno opts to carry the baby through to term and give it up for adoption. She chooses for the adoptive parents the Lorings, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman), who live in a spotless, expensive house. She bonds with Mark, a former punk rocker now writing jingles. Even Juno's parents, her father (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother (Allison Janney) get some real time to develop, rather than simply existing for ridicule purposes. Director Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking) keeps things brisk, occasionally employing cutesy visual flourishes that mostly work; it reminded me a bit of Heathers (1989), and if it doesn't get too much Oscar hype, it could be a future cult favorite.

The New Yorker (David Denby)

The eponymous character in Juno, a pregnant 16-year-old played with impressive verbal dexterity and heart by Ellen Page, speaks in quips and geeky references, and surrounds herself with ironic accessories like a hamburger phone and a plastic pipe. She seems on the surface the picture of carelessness, and her pregnancy serves as the ultimate symbol of her inability to take life seriously. About 15 minutes into the film, in the funny, touching scene where she finally spills the news to her parents (wonderfully played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney), that first impression turns out to be entirely false. Yes, she has a snarky, above-it-all attitude, but irony is her protective shield, masking the fear, vulnerability, and compassion lurking just under the surface. She'll make a great mother someday, just not now.

Strikingly written by newcomer Diablo Cody, Juno will get a lot of attention for its colorful dialogue, which is at times too ostentatious for its own good, but the film's sincerity is what ultimately carries it across. Set in the indie town of Quirksville, U.S.A.—Cody and director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking) go a little overboard in this regard—the film opens with Page burning through pregnancy tests, trying to shake off a "plus" sign as if, the store clerk says, she were handling an Etch-A-Sketch. She initially considers an abortion, but instead decides to give the baby up for adoption, with the consent of its perpetually thunderstruck father Michael Cera. Page finds a willing couple in yuppies Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman, but as she perhaps unwisely insinuates herself into their lives, she discovers some fissures in their marriage.

Garner and Bateman's characters are drawn a bit too broadly—she's the henpecking, Type A, overeager supermom-to-be; he's the whipped sellout who loves Sonic Youth and Herschell Gordon Lewis, and still dreams of being a rock star—but the actors do a fine job wriggling out of caricature. Garner, in particular, has found the right role to capitalize on her high-strung, hyper-driven screen persona; her excitement over being a mother would be overbearing if it weren't also so heartbreakingly sincere. That's Juno's appeal in a nutshell: It comes off as calculatedly irreverent at times, and its Wes Anderson-isms are too precious by half, but its sweetness is genuine and next-to-impossible to resist.

Working with the director Jason Reitman (“Thank You for Smoking”), the terrific comedy writer Diablo Cody has fashioned a lovely little movie, “Juno,” told entirely from the point of view of a teen-age girl. Juno (Ellen Page), who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis, finds herself in a terrible fix—she’s pregnant at sixteen—and her reaction to her overwhelming new situation is to treat it with the same flip, pop-cult, high-school sarcasm with which she addresses everything else. She goes to the local abortion clinic but finds the place disgustingly casual (they hand out flavored condoms), and she decides to carry the baby to term. Up to this point, all that Juno does, including having sex in a chair with her friend Bleek (Michael Cera), is based on nervy impulse, and Ellen Page, a young Canadian actress, speaks rapidly and irritably, nailing Juno’s lines with easy precision. Looking for adoptive parents, Juno quickly finds what seems to be an ideal couple: the wealthy Lorings, who live in a beige-walled McMansion with furnishings out of an upscale home-decorating magazine. Mark (Jason Bateman), a fortyish composer of commercial jingles, connects with Juno’s taste in rock music and slasher movies, and his wife, the beautiful Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), badly wants to be a mom. “If I could just have the thing, and give it to you now, I totally would,” Juno tells them. She’s a shrewd girl, and very blunt, yet she’s taken in by her own gift for rude comedy, which, as we learn, masks a great deal of uncertainty. When she and Bleek fight, and the Lorings’ marriage begins to fall apart, her cool collapses into bewilderment and tears. Where are love and constancy to be found? Reitman stages Juno’s crisis with great tenderness, and enfolds it in a witty and playful formal frame: the narrative progresses through the seasons, starting in autumn, with the first three corresponding to Juno’s trimesters. The seasons are also punctuated by Kimya Dawson’s plaintively funny songs, and by passing groups of runners from Juno’s high school, including Bleek, whose golden shorts reveal his slender long legs—his best feature, according to Juno. Michael Cera enters a scene like a soft breeze. Tall and mop-haired, he’s so mild it takes us a while to realize how intelligent Bleek is, and how entirely he appreciates Juno’s humor. This couple is younger than the battling Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in last summer’s unwanted-pregnancy comedy, “Knocked Up.” They’re not ready for roughhouse in bed or anywhere else. When they argue, they can’t conceal their dismay even as they are winging insults at each other. “Juno” is a coming-of-age movie made with idiosyncratic charm and not a single false note.

Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale

Actress Ellen Page won my heart in Hard Candy with her cruelty and unforgiving sadism, but here, in Jason Reitman’s latest attempt to mine the forced quirkiness that threatens to tear Hollywood apart, she’s gone soft in the middle, even if she’ll insist on ironic detachment throughout. Page is Juno, the sort of improbably articulate sixteen-year-old you won’t find in any corner of reality, but can’t help but trip over every time you suck it up and give the dying “independent” scene another chance. She’s dry, sarcastic, and full of well-timed quips and putdowns, but there isn’t an adolescent ounce of her that feels or sounds unscripted. As written by Diablo Cody, a grating personality I later encountered during an especially intolerable Q&A session (we walked out after her thirty-third “like”), Juno is bitter, rebellious, and a little untamed, but not so much that she won’t skip out of a scheduled abortion and look through the want-ads for a suitable set of adoptive parents (does anyone kill the fucking things anymore?). She finds them in Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner, whose face is mutating into Skeletor before our very eyes), a barren couple who live in a wealthy suburb, if for no other reason than to provide the young Reitman with a satiric opportunity that conveniently ignores his own alarmingly privileged upbringing. Strangely enough, though, husband and wife are relatively normal (one could easily imagine New Age hippies or humorless Stepford parents-to-be), though it stands to reason that the kid is seen as a band-aid for their dying marriage. It seems that he wants to rock out, man, and play in a band, while she’s the typical shrew who demands accountability and maturity from a man approaching his fortieth birthday. Guess who we’re supposed to root for?

Juno’s father and stepmother are also unsurprisingly inhabiting a fantasy world, as they are clever, quick, and forgiving to a fault. They exist to whip out one-liners by the bushel (and not care that their high school junior is having a baby), as in a scene in the doctor’s office, where the stepmom (Allison Janney) rips apart an ultra-sound tech with all the forced, populist rage that seems to be in fashion among those who don’t live the life. Not only was the tech quite right to applaud Juno’s decision to give the kid up for adoption, but if the procedure is as trivial as stepmom seems to suggest, perhaps the bitch would like to bring the fetus to term without the advances of modern science. Plug along, take your chances, and stay the fuck away when things go wrong. But that’s only a symptom of the movie’s major league issues. Page, channeling Christina Ricci’s turn in The Opposite of Sex as if her future depended on it, is a one-note smartass, and she has nowhere to go once she’s established her “type.” The dialogue is both artificial and flip, and is compounded by one of cinema’s most appalling soundtracks since Wes Anderson last bloodied our eardrums. Dig those lyrics, dude, so crazy and zany and, like, non-conformist! As the shit fills every other scene not nailed down with a hammer of hipness squared, it’s impossible to ignore, and we can’t help but think that everyone involved, including the suits that signed the checks, weren’t smiling with smug superiority every step of the way as they imagined releasing the year’s most raucous comedy. Try again.

DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]

Sometimes a movie comes along that is so incredibly perfect, it makes me wish for some kind of scientific device that will allow me to dig through time, space, and matter to find the exact moment where the universe came together in order to make it possible. I suppose such a device would have far more profound uses, like finally settling the score about where all life came from, but such things are of no concern to me. More important to my existence is discovering how the hell you make a film as great as Juno.

Written by the first-time screenwriter with the greatest name in the world, Diablo Cody, and directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking), Juno is the feel-good movie of the year that you don't have to feel bad for feeling good about. It's going to be the movie everyone is talking about this season. It's reminiscent of the work of Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways), and the kind of family comedy everyone wanted Little Miss Sunshine to be but fell short of. (Come on, admit it, that movie got a little cheesy in the end.)

Note, though, when I say family comedy, I don't mean comedy for the whole family. I mean a comedy about family and one individual's struggles to find herself and her place within the unit.

Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is your average sarcastic, punk-loving teenager in a sleepy suburb. In a fit of adolescent boredom, she decided to have sex with her best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera). They have a band together, and he's a track star. Unfortunately, the worst has happened, and Juno has gotten pregnant. Deciding that the only option for her is to find a needy couple who can't have kids of their own, Juno finds a pair of attractive folks in the classifieds. Mark (Jason Bateman) is a rocker stuck in the 1990s who has hung up his Les Paul for the lucrative world of commercial jingles, while Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) is a prim businesswoman whose biological clock has an alarm that won't turn off. Juno thinks Mark is pretty cool, even if his taste in music is pretty lame, but she's not so sure about Vanessa.

On the homefront, Juno's dad (J.K. Simmons) is the loving parent whose own quippy sense of humor provided the genetic blueprint from his daughter's penchant for wisecracks. Juno's mother is long absent, checking in once a year on Valentine's to send her child a cactus plant as a token of her prickly love. In her stead are Bren (Allison Janney), a slightly spacey stepmom, and her even spaceier five-year-old daughter Liberty Bell (Sierra Pitkin). It's a weird family, no doubt about it, but it works in its way. Both parents are there for Juno, ready to help her through this crisis even when she's not willing to listen.

And Juno tends not to listen to other people quite often. Always ready with an amazing one-liner, she's got that teenage syndrome where she knows she's smarter than everyone else, and the fact that a lot of people consistently prove her right isn't helping. Ellen Page is nothing short of remarkable in the lead. Juno is a tough character to pull off. The audience needs to be pulling for her even when she makes it difficult to be on her side. This kind of character, when its done wrong, can be off-putting, deserving of a good smack more than she is sympathy. Page's unbending conviction and caustic charm make her the most adorable little curmudgeon to grace the screen in a long time. Possibly ever. Her journey over the nine months of her pregnancy, the life lessons and the changing emotional states, aren't simple plot points, but an honest, believable chart of a real girl's transition into maturity.

The actress is, of course, aided by Cody's script, which makes sure that the people around Juno are not actually beneath her. That way, even when she is giving them a hard time, she's not looking down her nose at them. Jason Reitman's casting is letter-perfect. You can't imagine any other people in these roles. J.K. Simmons has had a long career as a character actor, and his comedic timing is honed to laser precision. It's his warmth that really makes this performance special, though. I saw my own father in his portrayal, as did my friend I saw Juno with--which I guess makes Simmons kind of every dad in some way.

Also quite good is Michael Cera, who has a lock on playing the cute, awkward teenage boy. Arrested Development fans will be sad that he and Jason Bateman don't have any screen time together, but as opposing crushtastic forces in Juno's life, they end up playing off each other regardless. Cera's Bleeker character is perhaps the best example of how Juno manages to be quirky without being overly precious or in-your-face about it. Bleeker has poofy hair, and he wears sweatbands on his head and wrists when he runs. He also is constantly eating orange Tic-Tacs. These are side details that add color to the character without being what really defines him. Reitman and his production team decorate every inch of their sets with similar details, establishing Juno's reality with carefully chosen props that make sense for who these people are rather than just being convenient decoration that it was easy to get clearance for.

Juno is a smart, funny, heartfelt gem of a film. Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman love their characters and understand where they are all coming from, and so the story moves organically, teasing our expectations and surprising us with the emotional curveballs that get lobbed at Juno's unsuspecting head. Growing up is often far too easy in the multiplex, and so it's a joy to see a comedy that understands how difficult life can be and still see the funny business within it. Arty enough for snobs like me, but still with a crowd-pleasing sensibility that can endear it to a mass audience, Juno is going to be the champion to beat in the end of the year rush to get all of the studios' prestige pictures in theatres. I have yet to see anything on the horizon with the muscle to k.o. this teenage queen.

Film Intuition [Jen Johans]

Film Journal International (Katey Rich)

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston)

Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]

The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]

Mike D'Angelo

Juno Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray)

Erik Childress (eFilmCritic.com)

PopMatters (Daynah Burnett)

eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Cinemattraction.com [Robert Levin]

Screen Daily [David D'arcy in Toronto]

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin)

New York Magazine (David Edelstein)

Planet Sick-Boy

eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver)

Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)

Moving Pictures Magazine Elliot V. Kotek

indieWIRE Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot, calling it a square, predictable crowd-pleaser

Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw] calling it brutally overwritten, smug, and self-indulgent to no discernible point

Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] calling it an often insufferable piece of hyperquirkiness

FilmJerk.com Review [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: DVD Talk, or again here: OhmyNews [Brian Orndorf] calling it a cartoon, an inflated piece of filmmaking

Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager] calling it an obnoxious fantasy vision of teendom slathered in self-satisfied snark

eFilmCritic [David Cornelius] calling it a hideous piece of faux-hipster crap

A Closer Look and Listen to Juno's Quirky Soundtrack Todd Martens from the LA Times

Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]

Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)

Juno Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun Times

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

UP IN THE AIR B- 82

USA (109 mi) 2009

"There's a dignity to the way I do it." —Ryan Bingham (George Clooney)

Not nearly as funny or as edgy as his earlier movies, both of which charted new terrain by crossing the line of political correctness, using savage satire to condemn existing practices by high powered lobbyists in the smoking industry and examining the social issue of teen pregnancy as seen from a teen’s point of view. Yet this smarmy but highly entertaining film wrapped up in a contrived mid-life crisis goes for easy laughs and is immensely successful in capturing that middlebrow audience that finds it charming, like a breezy French comedy, thinking it’s a scathing social satire that’s actually making a statement of some kind. Well it’s nothing of the kind. Hardly cutting edge, you’d be hard pressed to tell me what this film is about, as it disguises itself in an indie film format, using eclectic music and the social issue of the day, namely the economic downturn with layoffs and downsizing, but rather than identify with the victims who lose their jobs, which this film brazenly pretends to do, it instead asks the audience to sympathize with the guy who’s called upon to fire the poor working stiffs? Good luck with that. Made for 4 or 5 times the budget of his earlier films, this allows the studios to bring in the heavy hitters, box office stars that the public loves to see, namely the two-time People magazine sexiest man alive, George Clooney to grace the screen. And Clooney does an excellent job as a suave, soulless snake of a man with no roots whatsoever, a guy who spends 322 days of the year on the road firing people, business is booming, as they say, mostly traveling through airports, attached to no one, supposedly self-sufficient because of the apparent ease with which he moves speedily through airports with one swipe of the right credit card, avoiding the lines and frustrating hassles that others experience, having his frequent flyer business class routine down pat, where he is accustomed to the best service, including the upscale airport lounges, high end hotel rooms and the biggest, roomiest rental cars. Clooney’s charming, easy going manner allows him to get the upper hand in every interview, as he’s always the guy in charge, brought in like a gunslinger to mow down the staff, one by one, pretending to acknowledge the difficulty that others experience without actually experiencing it himself. This is an odd parallel to another film, THE MESSENGER (2009), which follows a similar policy when military personnel inform families of the death of a loved one, where there is no touching, no hugging, no physical contact of any kind. In both instances, they avoid all personal attachments. Both films attempt to fight through that barrier in an attempt to humanize what the movie is about.

But life in the fast lane comes to a skidding halt when he’s called back into headquarters to learn of a new plan to cut costs within their own company. Enter Anna Kendrick as Natalie, a confident, savvy, fresh-out-of-a-top-Ivy-league-school corporate piranha with a new idea, a plan to save 85 % of the company’s extravagant business costs by introducing Internet web-chat termination interviews. No hotels, no airplanes, no high end service, so Clooney’s world as he knows it would all but disappear. In short, for a guy that prides himself for accumulating 10 million frequent flyer miles, only the 7^th person in history to reach that milestone, he’d be grounded. Of course he acts like a pompous ass and attempts to undermine the plan by asking what happens if someone gets upset and simply walks away from the computer screen before the interview is completed? Not being there, one would have no way of going after them or bringing them back. It could get tricky. So the plan is to send Natalie on the road with Clooney to show her the ropes, which, of course interferes with his bachelor lifestyle, which includes sexual layovers with a fellow über business traveler, the alluring Vera Farmiga. But rather than give Natalie any real balls, like the ability to stand up to Clooney, she turns into a cartoon character of a whimpering schoolgirl when her boyfriend dumps her, so she remains emotionally vulnerable throughout while attempting to bolster her authoritative firing skills. This may give the story comical edge, but it’s gender demeaning as she becomes something of an easy target as a laughing stock, where her strictly repressed, morally upright conservatism is lambasted as an overly cheerful airline hostess refining her skills as a draconian terminator.

While the story takes a few detours, where Clooney actually attends his sister’s wedding, someone he rarely sees and barely knows, yet it gets all warm and fuzzy with heart warming sentiment, leaving Clooney suddenly doubting his own self serving philosophy. All of this feels overly contrived, as Clooney’s morally void character was rock solid initially, always in control with people lining up to be of service at his beck and call where he’s at the epicenter of the universe, so why should he suddenly doubt himself? With Clooney always in the driver’s seat, the film gives us no one to sympathize with, as he’s a slimeball through and through, yet there it is - - it’s all about him. Perhaps he’s capable of having a midlife crisis, but without any moral center, why should we care? Though it never veers into the uncomfortable territory of dark humor, it instead remains an empty, blissfully conventional film. At least that's how I saw it, where I left the theater thinking it wasn't really about anything. It's very much in the Cary Grant mold of comedy, however, and that part is undeniably attractive. But Cary Grant was never this much of a snake. Think of how many people this guy actually fired, one by one - - next to impossible to sympathize with him. It was easier for me to sympathize with Vito Corleone.

Time Out Online (Tom Huddleston) review [4/6]

At first glance, 'Up in the Air' looks like just another flashy corporate romcom: fast-talking, snappily dressed Gable 'n' Hepburn wannabees sipping strong cocktails to the strains of David Holmes-lite muzak. A focus on the American financial crisis – and its human fallout in the form of job losses and home foreclosures – feels like vaguely distasteful window dressing, an exploitative backdrop to George Clooney’s swingin’ adventures in the high-flying world of executive travel.

And this is exactly what director Reitman wants us to think, drawing in his audience with flashy aesthetics, toe-tapping tunes and Clooney’s finest line in old school smouldering, before whipping back the curtain and exposing the emptiness that lies behind this enticing veneer. As Ryan Bingham, corporate hatchet-man (or, as he prefers to see himself, unemployment counseller) for hire, Clooney has rarely been better, juggling self-reliant charmer and dead-eyed sociopath with remarkable dexterity.

There are plenty of opportunities for ‘Up in the Air’ to go off the rails: a burgeoning affair with Vera Farmiga’s equally self-reliant Alex promises gooey romance, a mentor-student relationship with Anna Kendrick’s spiky business novice Natalie hints at the awakening of suppressed paternal feelings, while a trip north for sister Melanie Lynskey’s wedding leaves the door wide for all manner of hugging, learning and growing.

And yet Reitman manages to keep his ship on an even keel: Ryan and Alex’s romance remains snappy and unsentimental right to its shocking conclusion, while his attempts to school Natalie in the ways of business lead only to a mounting series of distressing realisations. And while the wedding features a certain amount of hugging, it's hard to argue there’s any real learning or growing going on: this is, in the end, a movie about stasis, and the trap that the comfortable, unexamined life represents. Flawed it may be, but this is still a witty, thoughtful, surprisingly bleak satire on contemporary America, and the crumbling dream it represents.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]

Jason Reitman's Up in the Air flies comfortably with some of the most obvious of Hollywood clichés, but also doubles back and runs right over them. It's an odd duality that has caused some critics to slam the film, but has caused many more critics to over-praise it. Personally, I'm not sure the film always knows what it's doing; it seems to be struggling between populist and satirical impulses. But there are many, many moments it gets right and it's an enjoyable, if minor entry in the year-end movie rush. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, whose job is to fire people. He travels all over the country doing the dirty jobs that no one else wants to do. What's more, he loves traveling. He considers airports and airplanes his real home, and his apartment back in Omaha is just a temporary stopover. He has a whole system worked out, and he's proud of it. He's footloose and fancy-free, until a young upstart, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), decides that the company could save on travel costs by firing people over the 'net. Ryan complains about the new idea, and so his boss (Jason Bateman) sends them on the road together so that Natalie can learn the real-life ropes.

Already this setup reeks: Ryan must learn about what it's like to settle down and share his life with other people, and Natalie is the uptight one that must learn to loosen up. And Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno) sets up many of his scenes so that these old, tired routines can play out. But then he doubles back. The routines don't play out like they're supposed to. For one thing, Ryan never hooks up with Natalie. Instead, he meets sexy Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar; they share the same lifestyle and enjoy each other's company, and they agree to sleep together whenever they wind up in the same part of the country. Another major subplot comes when Ryan decides to attend his sister's wedding and must help the groom (Danny McBride) overcome cold feet. These setups, too, start to go just where you think they will go, and then suddenly detour.

The end result is that Up in the Air feels a bit schizophrenic. It wants to push the idea of family over isolation, of personal connections over technological barriers, but it subverts these ideas to avoid a conventional ending. In a way, however, this schizophrenia is as exciting and refreshing as it is baffling. It makes you want to look closer at the film, to see it again, to get a better idea of what Reitman's game is. Happily, even if you don't get a handle on the movie's ultimate point, it does have wonderful moments that help pass the time, and the funny screenplay and air-conditioned atmosphere help a great deal. Clooney in particular fits the bill wonderfully, so much so that I couldn't picture anyone else pulling off the role -- with its hint of exhaustion -- quite so well. Farmiga is one of our best actresses at the moment, and she's wonderfully at ease here. Likewise Anna Kendrick adds a splash of unexpected depth to her uptight character. In other words, even if the landing isn't quite perfect, the ride is smooth and pleasant.

The Hollywood Reporter review Stephen Farber

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Cynicism and sentiment have melded magically in movies by some of the best American directors, from Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder to Alexander Payne. Jason Reitman mined the same territory in "Thank You for Smoking" and his smash hit, "Juno," and it's pleasing to report that he's taken another rewarding journey down this prickly path in his eagerly awaited new film, "Up in the Air." Boasting one of George Clooney's strongest performances, the film seems like a surefire awards contender, and the buzz will attract a sizable audience, even though some viewers might be startled by the uncompromising finale.

Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner embellishes Walter Kirn's acclaimed novel about a man who spends much of his life in the air, traveling around the country to fire people for executives too gutless to do the dirty job themselves. The character is just about as unsavory as the corporate pimp played by Jack Lemmon in Wilder's "The Apartment." When a character begins as such a sleazeball, you know there must be a moral transformation lurking somewhere in the last reel. That redemption never quite arrives for Clooney's Ryan Bingham, which is one of the things that makes "Air" so bracing.

Before the movie plunges into deeper waters, it seduces us with some of the most darkly hilarious moments to grace the screen in years. Clooney's crack comic timing makes the most of Ryan's acrid zingers as he savors a life without the vaguest threat of commitment. Trouble arises when his boss hires a young dynamo, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who has the idea of cutting costs by instituting a program of firing people over the Internet instead of in person.

Ryan sees his footloose lifestyle threatened, but he is forced to take Natalie on a cross-country odyssey to train her in the niceties of delivering bad news deftly. The interplay between the world-weary Ryan and the naive Natalie makes for delicious comedy, and Kendrick plays her role smoothly. There's also a wonderful performance by Vera Farmiga as Alex, a dynamo who clicks with Ryan because she's also seeking no-strings sex on the run. ("Think of me as you with a vagina," Alex tells Ryan helpfully.)

Eventually, Ryan begins to question the assumptions that have ruled his life. His encounters with Alex and Natalie threaten his complacency. We can't help worrying that the film may take a sentimental turn, but miraculously, it never does. A scene in which Ryan returns home for a family wedding and talks a reluctant groom (well played by Danny McBride) into going through with the nuptials is a beautifully modulated sequence that manages to be poignant without ever falling into slop. Reitman is a rare director with heart as well as sardonic humor, but he always knows when to pull back. There is only one false note -- a montage sequence near the end in which several of the people fired by Ryan burble about their love for their families -- that simply restates the obvious.

But if this tiny gaffe reveals a touch of insecurity on Reitman's part, the rest of the film is perfectly controlled. The entire cast is splendid. A couple of "Juno" alumni pop up: Jason Bateman is the smarmy boss who makes Ryan look humane, and J.K. Simmons has a single scene that proves just how much a master actor can convey in two or three minutes of screen time.

The razor-sharp editing by Dana Glauberman gives the film a breezy momentum even while it's delivering piercing social insights. Holding everything together is Clooney, who bravely exposes the character's ruthlessness while also allowing us to believe in his too-late awakening to the possibilities he's missed. It's rare for a movie to be at once so biting and so moving. If Ryan's future seems bleak, there's something exhilarating about a movie made with such clear-eyed intelligence.

Film Monthly (Matt Fagerholm) review

It’s debatable whether Up in the Air is the year’s best film, but it’s certainly the best title. In just four words, it tells you everything you need to know about the film’s plot, characters, themes, and overarching message for our current times. As far as film titles go, it sure beats the wordy self-importance of Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire.

The film itself is a refreshing antidote to this year’s bombastic Oscar bait. It’s the third film by Jason Reitman (son of comedy maestro Ivan), who is finally receiving the critical attention he deserves. At age 32, he is clearly a master of his craft. His style is so airtight, it’s practically invisible. The protagonists in his films initially seem very sure of themselves, as they share their personal life philosophies with the audience. Yet their journey is always one of self-discovery, forcing them to leave their comfort zone, and leading them to question everything they once believed. Cinematographer Eric Steelberg often surrounds Reitman’s protagonists with a blurred landscape that makes them seem isolated even when they’re surrounded (creating a visual cocoon). Editor Dana E. Glauberman doesn’t waste a single frame of film, and has an exquisite eye for both comic timing and dramatic rhythm. And casting director Mindy Marin has a gift for finding the perfect actor for each role, turning fresh faces into household names. These are just three of the secret weapons that have helped make Reitman one of the most interesting Hollywood filmmakers working today.

As Ryan Bingham, the corporate downsizing expert who lives contentedly on the road, George Clooney delivers the most vulnerable and affecting performance of his career. Like Cary Grant, Clooney has always played characters who know all the angles, and emerge as the smartest people in the room (remember his great final monologue in Michael Clayton?). When he plays a character who’s not “in control,” his befuddlement is played for laughs (such as in Burn After Reading). Though there are plenty of well-earned guffaws in Up in the Air, the film is deeply serious at heart, and the rich texture of Clooney’s work is mesmerizing. Bingham’s job is to travel the country and fire people from their jobs, while offering half-hearted inspirational advice. He shares an emotional moment with an anguished worker, and then goes about his merry way, no strings attached. Yet when Bingham’s boss grounds him, opting for the web-based firing techniques offered by a new team member (Anna Kendrick), his fast-paced life hits a road block.

The plot has various twists and turns, some of which may be easy to guess for many viewers. Perhaps the film’s biggest weakness is that it lacks the exhilarating unpredictability of Juno, yet the script (by Reitman and Sheldon Turner, adapted from Walter Kirn’s novel) is much more naturalistic than Diabo Cody’s self-conscious dialogue (or, as Juno may have labeled it, “diablog”). All of Reitman’s characters are talkers, yet their best moments occur when they say nothing at all. There’s no breakout performance to match Ellen Page’s tour de force, but Kendrick is lovely to watch. She’s stolen scenes in all of her pictures (Camp, Rocket Science, Twilight), and she is more than up to the task of going toe-to-toe with her formidable co-stars. And if Clooney is Grant, then Vera Farmiga is Eva Marie Saint. As Bingham’s object of flirtation (and possibly desire), Farmiga resembles a Hitchcockian “icy blonde” (her hair seems to have been modeled after Saint in North by Northwest). There’s also some startlingly tender work from J.K. Simmons and Danny McBride, who reveals a sensitive side that’s a zillion miles removed from The Foot Fist Way. Some of the visual symbolism is a touch too obvious (such as when a grown man, frightened of commitment, sits in a nursery room and reads “The Velveteen Rabbit”). Yet for the most part, the film is strikingly beautiful and poetic, as Steelberg’s lens emphasizes the distance between Bingham and the rest of humanity. He also captures the devastation of the current economic crisis, which has left so many lives literally “up in the air” (several of the onscreen unemployed workers are real).

Reitman has made various indications that this film is indeed his most personal to date. Like his protagonist, Reitman has a love of traveling, and an obsession with acquiring frequent flier miles. He also seems to enjoy connecting with strangers. When he spoke last month at Columbia College, he was entirely at ease, charming the crowd and chatting with individual students (he’s as natural onstage as Kevin Smith). Toward the end, he looked at his surrounding audience and half-joked, “I’ll never see any of you again” (which directly mirrors one of Bingham’s lines). If you stay through the end credits of Up in the Air, you’ll hear a song by Kevin Renick, an independent musician based in St Louis, MO. Renick sent the song to Reitman, which he had written a year before the film was announced (coincidentally, the song and film share the same name). The song’s inclusion is a fitting coda to a film about the connections between strangers in an overcrowded world fraught with alienation.

Review: Up in the Air - Film Comment Scott Foundas from Film Comment, November/December 2009

Contemporary Hollywood has steadfastly avoided the workplace—unless the jobs are particularly glamorous (Broadcast News, The Devil Wears Prada), or the workers unfairly exploited (Silkwood, North Country) or the fodder for gallows humor (the Mike Judge oeuvre). And so there’s an immediate and ingratiating novelty to the fact that so much of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air unfolds in cubicles and conference rooms in nondescript office buildings in Wichita, Kansas City, and other outposts of the great American in-between. Likewise, the people Up in the Air finds there are neither the laugh-tracked eccentrics of TV sitcoms nor Michael Moore’s congenitally oppressed proles. They are, rather, the white-collar career middle-managers, useful but ultimately inessential to their employers, who believed they had jobs for life—until a tough economy rendered them expendable. They may not be the stars of Up in the Air, but they are what gives the movie its soul.

It’s into these fraught environs that Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) enters. A hatchet man for hire, contracted out to companies too timid or short-staffed to do their own firings, Bingham’s business booms while everyone else’s goes bust—a cruel reality that Bingham packages in a series of bright-side bromides imploring the newly unemployed to see the glass as half full. “Anyone who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are right now, and it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it,” he assures with such conviction that we can’t tell if Bingham actually buys what he’s selling or has simply been doing this for so long that his bullshit detector needs new batteries. Those on Bingham’s receiving end—many of them played by actual laid-off workers Reitman cast via classified ads—are less than fully persuaded. How, indeed, to make lemonade out of lemons when there are bills to be paid, mortgages to be kept up, mouths to feed? Bingham, conveniently, doesn’t stick around long enough to grapple with the aftermath, having already hopped on a plane to his next destination, taking refuge in the skies.

The title of this road-movie-at-20,000-feet, liberally adapted by Reitman and Sheldon Turner from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, describes Bingham’s literal and existential condition—a metaphor it (thankfully) carries as lightly as its newly anointed Oscar front-runner status. Past 40 and single, with a nominal home he rarely visits and sisters he rarely speaks to, Bingham has no more lasting relationships in his personal life than he does in his professional one. And rather than showing Bingham (and us) the error of his ways, Reitman’s film views its protagonist as an avatar for an “age of communication” that provides us with so many ways of being at once everywhere and nowhere, of maintaining human contact from a cautious remove. Bingham craves the impersonal touch, having eschewed conventional notions of home and family in favor of attaining ever more rarefied strata of airline and hotel customer rewards programs—a life of plastic membership cards and plastic smiles that Reitman and cinematographer Eric Steelberg capture with all the anodyne sheen of a high-end TV commercial (while cramming the screen with all manner of corporate logos—Hilton, American Airlines, et al.). At least Bingham still puts stock in the old-fashioned, in-person kiss-off, whereas his efficiency-minded junior colleague (the scene-stealing Anna Kendrick) is developing a model for making their work a strictly virtual affair: termination via teleconference.

By far Reitman’s most accomplished film to date, both in terms of craft and its stealth avoidance of typical Hollywood flight patterns, Up in the Air is not (early indicators to the contrary) a redemptive fable about a soulless corporate shill who gets his comeuppance by seeing how the other half lives, or by falling into the arms of a good woman. For starters, Bingham is less of an oily have wreaking havoc on the have-nots than he is just another guy doing an unpleasant job, a cousin of sorts to the law-firm fixer Clooney played in Michael Clayton. And when romance appears, it does so in the form of a literal fellow traveler (Vera Farmiga) who isn’t so much Bingham’s salvation as another way station. “Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina,” she cautions, every rat and tat of Reitman and Turner’s snappy dialogue rolling off her tongue with acerbic precision. A resourceful actress heretofore held prisoner by heavy melodrama and histrionic horror shows, Farmiga makes a terrific foil for Clooney, who, not surprisingly, wears his naturally charming, commitment-averse character as comfortably as a second skin.

Conflicts arise; some are resolved, others left in limbo. The movie itself plots a journey that moves in an elaborate zigzag only to end up very much where it began, with Bingham once more staring out into the wide blue yonder and wondering, Where do I go from here?

What's Wrong With Up in the Air | Movie Review | Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Slate (Dana Stevens) review

DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [5/5]

Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A-]

CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review

Pajiba (Drew Morton) review

Movie-Vault.com (The Film Phantom) review [9/10]

Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale]

filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]

Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]

The New Republic (Christopher Orr) review

The Onion A.V. Club review [B] Keith Phipps

About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A-]

Screen International (Tim Grierson) review

Slant Magazine review [2/4] Fernando F. Croce

Up in the Air Mark Harris from Patrick Murphy’s Diary, April 3, 2010

The Cinema Source (Ryan Hamelin) review [A+]

FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Moving Pictures magazine [Andre Chautard]

Bina007 Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]

Sound On Sight [Simon Howell]

Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman, also seen here: CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review

Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]

Boston Globe (Wesley Morris) review [3/4]

Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review

Tulsa TV Memories [Gary Chew]

San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [4/4]

The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review

YOUNG ADULT C 74

USA (94 mi) 2011 Official site

Oh where, Oh where has Charlize Theron gone? Since winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in MONSTER (2003), she has all but dropped off the face of the earth, barely seen since then, working in such low profile films that many haven’t seen her at all since then. She is back in a role that is pretty much written around her part, aka: confessions of a psycho bitch from Diablo Cody, who is attempting to glean untold truths from the safe and secure mediocrity of the heartland. Theron as Mavis is on the rebound after her failed marriage, one of the few who left her small town of Mercury, Minnesota to make it in the urban metropolis of Minneapolis, affectionately known as the Minnie Apple, a place that few in Mercury ever see. Mavis is the author of teen stories that are no longer in vogue, yet she’s busily typing away on her computer trying to complete the series, which is a running narrative throughout the film which mirrors the real life issues surrounding Mavis. This is largely an opportunity lost, as the book characters offer no fresh insight into real life, but remains lost in a superficial wish fulfillment haze of self-centeredness that defines Mavis’s own world. And therein lies the real problem with this film, as it’s stuck in a vacuous emptiness from which it rarely escapes. Post divorce, Mavis is on a mission, to return to her hometown and reclaim her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson), even though he’s happily married with a newborn. She makes this clear while throwing down tequila chasers in a bar one night, confessing her plan to a guy she went to high school with, Matt (Patton Oswalt), perhaps the most refreshing character in the film, seen as a loser in high school, a guy whose locker was next to hers but she never gave him a second look as she was a high school beauty queen that rarely thought of anyone except herself. Nothing has changed in that department, while others around her have matured and become more responsible citizens, which she ridicules endlessly as a town full of losers.

Mavis’s answer to everything is to fill herself full of liquor, which she does pretty much every day, falling face first into her bed at night without ever crawling under the covers. Like Reese Witherspoon in LEGALLY BLOND (2001), she has a tiny dog that you can carry around in the palm of your hand that she all but ignores. Matt becomes her regular drinking buddy, where he conveniently has a homemade whisky still in his garage and the two commiserate about his loser life in high school and her narcissistic intentions with a married man that seem wacko. The excessive amount of liquor consumption is a fairly standard device in the movies these days, which doesn’t seem to find alcoholism the least bit offensive or obnoxious, treating it as an opportunity for the characters to get more chummy and honest. In Matt’s case, this may be true, as he’s strictly a side character whose role becomes more relevant due to his genuine earnestness, while Mavis never for a single moment stops thinking of herself, like a smug and pampered rich bitch that treats everyone around her like crap, thinking their lives are little more than boring and miserable, where their freedom is typically hampered by having annoying babies. Her plan is to swoop in and rescue Buddy from this dreaded fate, knowing he would drop everything to run away with her. This is a strange take on the American Dream, which Mavis has appropriated as doing whatever she wants at everyone else’s expense.

While there are a few comical gestures, mostly in the exaggerated MEAN GIRL (2004) cruelty of Mavis’s derision of others, spoken mostly when drunk, as if this actually opens up possibilities for speaking candidly, but most may be surprised at how quietly unfunny this film actually is, as it’s more awkward and uncomfortable than funny, like watching a train wreck waiting to happen. Had there been more revelations, one can endure plenty of uncomfortable moments, but this film is as vacuous as it seems, where the empty-headed character who spends all her time accessorizing with manicures and pedicures and buying new clothes for herself really never gets below the surface, as she’s pretty much the same vain egotist she was in high school, where her good looks have allowed her to get away with anything. The way she stuffs herself with junk food and candy, not to mention plenty of alcohol, it’s a stretch to believe she never gains any weight. But this is Charlize Theron we’re talking about, who dons several different flirtatious and beguiling looks and still looks terrific when hung over in the morning. All in all, little happens, little is learned, and little changes, where the movie is basically a window into small town America as seen through the eyes of an overly pampered Barbie doll with a love for booze and spewing venom about the wretched and miserable lives of others, all the while blind to how pathetic her own miserable life has become. She is a perennial user, a blood sucker, a parasite, the kind of girl who survives by manipulating others to get what she wants. In the end all we can ask is so what? Why should we care?

Boxoffice Magazine [Kate Erbland]

An impressive departure for both Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, Young Adult follows Charlize Theron's Mavis Gary, an emotionally-stunted and depressive author of adolescent fare, as she impulsively decides to return to her hometown after discovering that high school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson) has just had a baby - with the film, for the most part, detailing Mavis' efforts at winning Buddy back and also her growing bond with a former classmate (Patton Oswalt's Matt). It's clear right from the get-go that Reitman and Cody have little interest in returning to the comedic, off-kilter landscape of their breakout film, 2007's Juno, as Young Adult immediately establishes itself as a low-key character study that often goes to unexpectedly (and impressively) dark places. The movie's most potent weapon is, without question, Theron's consistently engrossing performance, with the actress' fearless, go-for-broke turn initially capturing the viewer's interest and ultimately ensuring that Mavis, despite her less-than-sunny personality, becomes a compelling (and surprisingly sympathetic) figure. (Oswalt, cast as a put-upon geek who remains haunted by his high school experiences, is nothing short of a revelation, as his work here is miles beyond anything he's done before.) Reitman's subdued approach certainly proves an ideal complement to Cody's episodic screenplay, and while the film is occasionally just a little too uneventful for its own good, Young Adult boasts an increasingly captivating third act that culminates in a showstopping sequence that's as enthralling as it is cringeworthy. The decidedly unpredictable ending cements the movie's place as a seriously divisive piece of work, and it's finally impossible to recall a more impressive leap forward for either a screenwriter or a director in recent memory.

Young Adult | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Alison Willmore

Characters reminisce about the ’90s, wear Pixies T-shirts, and maintain collections of hand-painted action figures in Young Adult, all in line with what viewers might expect from a film that reunites Juno’s writer and director, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman. What’s different this time around? They’re on the sidelines, gazing with bewilderment, dislike, and/or awe at their heroine, played by Charlize Theron as the type of girl who once upon a time walked all over them. Though her character’s high-school glory days are almost two decades behind her, she’s dredged them up with an unstable determination that attests to the years of disappointment that followed them. It’s an empathetic but bravely brittle portrait of an aging queen bee that showcases a nuanced performance from Theron as a woman too used to being admired to admit how lonely and desperate she’s become.

Theron heads back to her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota to liberate her teenage flame (Patrick Wilson) from what she’s sure is an unhappy marriage—never mind that he doesn’t seem to think so, and that he’s a devoted new father. The ghostwriter of a once-successful YA series called Waverly Prep, Theron is now divorced and an alcoholic, and the film slowly layers on evidence of how close she is to a mental breakdown. Tromping through town on spike heels, she takes up with an old bullied classmate (a very good Patton Oswalt) she barely remembers and doesn’t treat much better as a grown-up; when he tells her “guys like me are born loving women like you,” it’s with gloriously complicated ruefulness and self-mockery.

Playing a character who crawls out of bed a wreck every morning and shellacs herself with salon treatments and makeup so she’ll look presentable by evening, Theron conveys both the unthinking entitlement of the (once-) adored and a quavering vulnerability all too evident underneath. It’s an impressive performance that’s rarely showy, and the restrained direction and screenplay offer it support, at least until a rushed final act that places a screaming showdown and recovery too close together. But Reitman lets the pop-culture references (oh hi, 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up”) accessorize the story rather than guide it, and in its uncompromising treatment of a character who’s troubled but also a stone-cold bitch, Young Adult offers compassion for rather than revenge on the “psycho prom queen” who has nothing left in life but a warped mix-tape from an ex who moved on long ago.

Long after the post-Juno glow has faded, director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody re-team with Young Adult, a darker and more accomplished outing about misdirected maturity and the destructive power of a woman made up of equal parts disappointment and Diet Coke. The film stars Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, glorified ghostwriter of a series of YA novels and wickedly great anti-heroine, who returns to her tiny hometown to reclaim her high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson)—paying no heed to the fact that his comfortable suburban life now includes a wife and infant daughter. Cody's snappy, spot-on writing and Reitman's clear-eyed direction should suit audiences looking for a black-as-night dramedy with bite, making the film a likely hit amongst the younger arthouse and indie crowd.

It's no surprise that the recently divorced Mavis pens teen fiction, because she still thinks, acts, and talks as if she is a teen. As she explains it, Mavis and former high school flame Buddy Slade (Wilson) are "meant to be" because "love conquers all"—platitudes that sound immature coming from high school juniors, let alone a thirtysomething career women. But Mavis is certain reclaiming her ex is her right, and so she confidently zooms into town in her messy Mini ready to steamroll anything (and anyone) who gets in her way.

What triggers Mavis' return to Minnesota is the recent receipt of a picture of Buddy and his wife Beth's (Elizabeth Reaser) new baby girl. Convinced that Buddy is being held "hostage" by his life, she's bent on rescuing him. But one minute with Wilson's Buddy reveals the truth plain as day: Buddy is a regular guy who likes his regular life. Such obvious facts don't dissuade Mavis, and she continues to hang around town, slowly slipping back into old high school habits, all while waiting for Buddy to wise up and succumb to her charms. Mavis' mission is never less than pathetic and while we laugh at her, Theron's sharp work accomplishes something much richer—after a while, we actually feel for her.

While Mavis may sell herself as a big-time author (never call her "just" a writer), her life is very clearly in shambles. Post-divorce, her apartment is in disarray, she subsists entirely on fast food and Diet Coke (sucked from the two-liter like a giant, adult-sized baby bottle), and she's unable to complete the last book of the Young Adult series that she ghostwrites. But while this type of character would normally earn pity from an audience, Mavis' messy cover barely hints at the story inside: namely, that Mavis is a modern monster made of—and for—our era of entitlement, ego and self-delusion.

Theron transformed herself to play murderess Aileen Wuornos in Monster, using make-up, hair, wardrobe, weight gain and a jolting lack of vanity to wash away her sizable beauty for award-winning effect. But in Young Adult, she goes one step further. Mavis is stunning, and she works hard to gussy herself up when the time is right (buying hair extensions, mining the local department store for chic attire), but here Theron crafts a new type of beast who masks her cruelty with an angelic face. It's both unnerving and amusing to see the well-turned-out Mavis viciously attack her victims, repeatedly sealing up one character's assessment of her as a "psychotic prom queen bitch."

And though Mavis' antics are continually funny, Cody slices through her complete lapses of judgment and manners with a mounting sense of heartbreak and horror. Even old bonkers Mavis is capable of exhibiting moments of piercing lucidity, such as when she calmly announces to her parents that she "thinks she may be an alcoholic." While her folks laugh it off, the truth lingers with Mavis—and it lingers with us.

But while Theron's fearless performance is admirable and gutsy, it's Patton Oswalt's turn as her former classmate Matt that is the hands-down stand-out of the entire film. Unnoticed by Mavis in high school, Matt becomes Mavis' primary confidante, a friendship eased by Matt's copious supply of homemade bourbon and his own teenage demons—it's as hard for this former geek to relate to people as it is for Mavis. But Matt is able to do what no one else can: he humanizes the she-devil. In a different world and through a more skewed lens, Young Adult would play as the love story between Matt and Mavis, but in this world, and through Reitman and Cody's lens, the two find themselves getting something maybe only one of them truly deserves—a friend willing to hear all the stories, even the ones better left on the shelf.

The Playlist [William Goss]

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]

Former Prom Queen Tries to Go Home Again in ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman

Young Adult Review: We Don't Have to Change at All - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

Young Adult - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Bernardinelli

Time [Richard Corliss]

About.com [Rebecca Murray]

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Young Adult | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | Nervy ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Review: Young Adult offers misanthropic comedy with great ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

'Young Adult' Review | Screen Rant Kofi Outlaw

AdvanceScreenings.com [Matthew Fong]

A Young Adult's Spinster Cycle | The New York Observer Rex Reed

Young Adult review: Charlize Theron and Diablo ... - Slate Magazine Dan Kois

Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]

Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]

FILM REVIEW: Young Adult - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner

'Young Adult' Review - Meet Mavis Gary - Rope of Silicon Brad Brevet

REVIEW: Theron, Reitman and Cody Combine For Stark ... - Movieline S.T. VanAirsdale

The Wrap [Alonso Duralde]

Movie Review - Young Adult - eFilmCritic Brett Gallman, also seen here: Young Adult

Movie Review - Young Adult - eFilmCritic Peter Sobczynski

A bracing comedy-drama that's a sharp gender - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

Movie Review - Young Adult - www.ericdsnider.com ... - Eric D. Snider

Movie Review: Young Adult | Jeffrey M. Anderson

Movie Review: Young Adult (2011) starring ... - Gone With the Twins Chris Pandolfi

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]

Screen Comment [Sam Weisberg]

The Daily Rotation [Jeremy Lebens]

Film Review Online [James Dawson}

Film Journal [Kevin Lally]

Review: 'Young Adult' is the Ultimate Anti ... - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux

We Got This Covered [Karen Bernadello]

Verbicide Magazine [Matthew Schuchman] also seen here: Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]

Patton Oswalt on Young Adult, Great Chemistry and the ... - Movieline S.T. Van Airsdale interview of actor Patton Oswalt from Movieline, December 6, 2011

Diablo Cody | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club Sam Adams interview, December 9. 2011

The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]

Variety [Peter DeBruge]

Young Adult: A Mean Girl fails to grow up - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey

'Young Adult' movie review -- 'Young Adult' showtimes - The ... Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe

Review: Young Adult - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Alicia Potter

'Young' creators old enough to know better - BostonHerald.com James Verniere

'Young Adult' review - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt

Young Adult - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

San Francisco Chronicle [Christy Lemire] also seen here: Boston.com [Christy Lemire]

San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]

San Francisco Chronicle [Greg Evans]

S F Weekly [Casey Burchby]

Pasadena Weekly [Carl Kozlowski]

'Young Adult' review - Featured Articles From The Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Young Adult - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times

The New York Times [A.O. Scott]

LABOR DAY B 83

USA (111 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site [Brazil]

While this is just an old-fashioned romance, told in the mythic Hollywood style where the prince in shining armor arrives on horseback and slays all the dragons, rescuing the fair maiden and earning her heart in the process, it does retain a certain fantasy element, where one finds this hard to believe, yet there’s also something oddly compelling about it. Based on Joyce Maynard’s 2009 novel, the same author that wrote the source material for Gus van Sant’s dark satire To Die For (1995), this is another film with a major woman’s role, this time starring Kate Winslet as a divorced mother Adele suffering from severe depression (including signs of agoraphobia), as she’s afraid to leave the safety of her home, rarely ever leaving the house. Compensating for her fears and anxieties is her 13-year old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith), who recognizes her loneliness, understanding that she never recovered from having her heart stolen from her when her husband left, “I don’t think losing my father broke my mother’s heart, but, rather, losing love itself,” so he willingly looks after his mom, taking care of her as much as he can, and runs all the household errands for her. While the book is set in New Hampshire, the film was shot in various small towns in Massachusetts that convincingly retain the period look of 1987. In the opening sequence, the camera glides through a seemingly neverending canopy of trees as we move further away from the posh suburbs out into the tree-lined street of a rural small town, where, interestingly, another actor is narrating the first person voiceover of Henry, the recognizable Tobey Maguire, who doesn’t figure into the film until the final ten minutes, seen as an older adult version of Henry, where many of his earlier thoughts read like a personal memoir. Despite the high wattage star of Winslet as his mother, this relatively unknown kid carries the picture on his shoulder, as it’s all seen through his eyes.

Persuading his mother to leave the house, the two spend the first day of the last weekend of summer together stocking up on needed school supplies, when Henry is pulled aside by a bleeding stranger, Frank (Josh Brolin), indicating he needs some help, and somehow manages to talk the two of them into allowing him to come home with them, placing his arm menacingly around Henry and telling Adele, “Frankly, this needs to happen.” By the time they get home to sort things out, he tells them he’s an escaped prisoner, that he jumped out of a 2^nd story hospital window while recovering from an appendectomy operation. Promising to be out in the morning, hoping to catch a ride on a freight train, hearing a whistle off in the distance, the underlying tension is established in silence, where part of the unique power of the film is its wordless quality, and what little dialogue we hear is essential, while the rest is captured in a kind of quiet intrigue. These harrowing moments are unsettling, as he’s inclined to tie them up, where this act of making Adele a prisoner in her own home is ironic considering psychologically speaking she’s already a prisoner. The look of helplessness and fear on her face is palpable, but her concern is for Henry, so Frank reassures her, ”I’ve never intentionally hurt anyone in my life.” The television news reports, however, suggest he’s been serving 18 years for murder and the police warn the public he could be armed and dangerous. Instead he goes on a wordless montage of fixing things up around the house, one after another, and even cooks up something to eat, where he spoonfeeds Adele bite by bite, while at the same time the director serves the audience brief flashbacks of Frank’s past, where we’re able to see what landed Frank in jail. Certainly one recurring parallel between Frank and Adele are their mutual thoughts of regret and sadness, where perhaps they’ve both been living their whole lives containing these haunting feelings of sorrow and loss.

Frank’s ease around the house, instantly making himself helpful, becoming the man that’s missing for both of them, feels too good to be true, where neither Henry nor his mom want him to go, urging him to stay just a bit longer for his wounds to heal, but the other side of the coin is they both have to hide his presence from the rest of the world, where occasional contact with actual people send them into anxiety mode. Henry is at an age where every girl is a godsend, and one literally falls into his lap, Mandy (Maika Monroe), an outsider teen who’s been badly scarred from her parent’s trauma-inflicting divorce, believing adults routinely get rid of kids to do what they want, which is have sex. And while she’s busy describing the teenage apocalyptic philosophy of doom, which makes perfect sense to her, Frank and Adele are thinking about making a run for the border (like Bonnie and Clyde, according to Mandy), escaping to Canada where they can start a new life. But as events fall into place, one of more more telling scenes happens when Henry spends Sunday with his Dad (Clark Gregg) and extended family, taking place at a Friendly’s family restaurant, which is an embarrassing depiction of what “normal” looks like in America, where adults are overly patronizing, to the point of being nauseating, while the kids are bored silly. This brief encounter hovers like a cloud of soot and smog over Henry’s horizon, as this is the life he could be leading, and instead he’s got Bonnie and Clyde, where the love-starved Frank and Adele become infatuated, bringing Adele out of her funk, where taking a chance on Frank is dangerous, but he’s attentive to Henry, becoming a poignant coming-of-age story while also showing the great risks involved in romance. While there’s a bit of schmaltz involved in the ending, the novelist Joyce Maynard once experienced an intense exchange of a flurry of letters in a relationship with a convicted murderer, suggesting ordinary people can be driven by impulsive decisions and reckless behavior, and that sometimes one must make a leap of faith to find love.

Film Blather [E. Novikov]

Based on Joyce Maynard's 2009 novel, Labor Day follows a mother (Kate Winslet's Adele) and her young son (Gattlin Griffith's Henry) as they reluctantly agree to hide an escaped convict (Josh Brolin's Frank) over the eponymous holiday weekend - with the movie detailing the illicit relationship that eventually ensues between Adele and Frank (and Henry's reaction to said relationship). It's clear immediately that Labor Day marks a significant departure for filmmaker Jason Reitman, as the director, working from his own screenplay, has jettisoned the comparatively easygoing feel of his earlier work in favor of a far more deliberate and subdued vibe - with the shift, more often than not, generally working far better than one might've anticipated. (It's not quite smooth sailing all the way through, however, as Reitman occasionally seems to be straining to sustain the film's understated atmosphere.) And although the narrative has been peppered with a few overtly needless elements - eg Henry's tentative friendship/relationship with a new girl in town - Labor Day, which benefits substantially from its uniformly captivating performances, grows more and more compelling as it progresses and builds to a palpably tense final stretch that's capped off with an emotionally devastating conclusion. The movie's slow pace ultimately proves an ideal match for Reitman's leisurely screenplay, and it's finally clear that Labor Day stands as an intriguing (and promising) first step in an entirely new direction for the Juno and Young Adult filmmaker.

Labor Day is the first Jason Reitman movie that doesn’t run on sardonic wit and a snappy pace. The sad, low-key film feels like it could have been made by Todd Field, or maybe a Gilbert Grape-era Lasse Hallstrom. And Reitman turns out to be an old hand at this sort of sun-drenched, nostalgic melancholia. Labor Day looks beautiful; it opens as a story of heartbreak and lingering depression, and Reitman’s slow tracking shots and fleeting flashbacks along with Rolfe Kent’s lovely, droning score effectively set a mood of longing and loss.

The plot has the feel of a romance paperback: an escaped prisoner (Josh Brolin) hides out in the home of a love-starved, agoraphobic single mother (Kate Winslet) and her young son (Gattlin Griffith). The guy turns out to be a studly mensch, playing catch with the boy and teaching the mom how to make pie, Ghost-pottery-scene-style. But Reitman is canny enough to turn the sexy-convict thing into relief rather than wish fulfillment. There’s an undercurrent of danger that feels ambiguous but very real, and we think, yes: the basic human demand for touch and affection could lead to someone making decisions this risky.

For an hour, the story feels self-contained and true, in a pulpy sort of way: a wounded woman and her loving son put themselves in harm’s way to get something they badly need. But then Reitman, working from a novel by Joyce Maynard, feels the need to amp up the drama, and unloads a honking dump of backstory that’s contrived and maudlin in a mode that I had thought was the exclusive province of Nicholas Sparks. The film then proceeds to a sappy eye-roller of an ending by way of a climax that wants to be suspenseful but doesn’t make a ton of sense. (Reitman does, to his credit, create an effectively paranoid atmosphere of curious cops and nosy busybodies.)

Introducing the film, Reitman spoke of his intention to remain as true as possible to his experience of reading Maynard’s book. He would have done better to omit some of the novel’s labored explanations and breathless thriller elements. The first 2/3 of this earnest, good-looking film say something powerful and troubling about the nature of loneliness and desire.

Movie Mezzanine [Anna Tatarska]

Jason Reitman’s latest film is surprising. It manages to preserve only scarce traces of what defined its predecessors, Juno, Up in the Air and Young Adult – a particular sense of humour that infused the overall tone and shaped the films’ attitude. Labor Day, on the other hand, clearly derives from the poetics of a classical melodrama. By changing his authorial strategy, Reitman took a risky step.

The director based his screenplay on a same-titled novel by well-known American author Joyce Maynard, a specialist in classical and para-biographical books. Adele (Kate Winslet) is a deeply depressed single mother who also seems to suffer from agoraphobia. Her husband left some time ago and started a new life. It is her teenage son Henry, who is the head of the family now, supporting his mom the best he can. When, on the eve of Labor Day, they go the supermarket for their once-a-month-bulk-shopping, they stumble upon Frank – a strapping, darkly attractive man with a mysterious blood stain on a shirt. It soon turns out he is fugitive, convicted for first-degree murder. Yet somehow Frank manages to convince Adele to grant him a few hours of her hospitality: a temporary shelter and help with the wound. Unexpectedly, the brief emergency visit turns into a longer stay.

Soon, runaway Frank proves to be a perfect master of the house, superb in various repairs: fixing, patching, oiling, polishing. Moreover, his gift of instinctively targeting objects in need of his helping hand is striking. He’s also always there to serve Henry with an advice about women or baseball. It goes without mention that Adele receives all sorts of support from him, and their in-depth conversations are endless. On top of everything, sensual and compassionate, Frank is also a great cook! The scene in which the protagonists are preparing a peach cobbler together can easily compete with the legendary sculpting-in-clay episode from Ghost – although here eroticism and lyricism mix in with the grotesque in quite confounding and startling way. Over the course of just a few days the intruder smoothly becomes head of the family, the miraculously retrieved missing piece in the puzzle. The stigma of the murderer becomes less and less visible, wearing away with further situations, conversations and glances.

But also – if you believe him – Frank’s story is indeed all but typical. Him and Adele are as two crooked mirror images of the same figure, both carrying the secrets of their destructive past. Frank is a prisoner in prison, Adele a prisoner in her own home. They both long for freedom but cannot win it alone, only together. Frank’s arrival has almost allegorical weight in the narrative. When, at one point, Adele tell him “he came to save her”, his protagonist is portrayed almost as The Lord and Saviour. Just that this godly figure wears no white garment, uncovering a muscular torso and strong, masculine arms. His weapon of choice is iron.

Young Adult, Reitman’s previous film starring the brilliant Charlize Theron, is perhaps the best he has ever made: (pop)culturally conscious, ironic, sharply intelligent and original. Unfortunately the picture did not reach ever near the success of his previous productions. It might be the reason why, in the very professionally executed Labor Day, Reitman changes the melody. This is where the game he plays with the viewer, accustomed to his usual tone, becomes confusing to the audience. Instead of the trademark humorous irony the viewer gets a classic tearjerker, randomly seasoned with witty moments. The protagonist are one-dimensional as cardboard cutouts. Winslet, as depressed single mother, is even more unkempt, makeup-less and trembling than in Mildred Pierce; Josh Brolin’s Franks a model husband and father figure imported from a prison cell (a tiny nuance). Surprisingly, Reitman looks at the development of their relationship with admiration, not questioning its unbelievable, uber-romantic trajectory, way too idyllic to be unconditionally swallowed by the viewer without choking on chunks of heavy cliches and grains of kitsch.

The only structural gate for irony in Labor Day‘s is Henry’s friend, a rebellious daughter of divorced parents, ranting and raving nihilistic, cynical comments. Usually in Reiman’s strategy they would be prophetic, but this time her cynicism does not find confirmation in the surrounding reality. Reitman blatantly serves us the story, where “there is a lot of suffering, but after all they live happily ever after”.

Upon leaving the theater we are confused: has the author simply decided to reveal his sensitive side, or if he’s just puling our leg? No matter what the truth is, Reitman’s previous incarnation was much closer to my taste and, judging by the reaction of the room, I’m not alone on this one. Mavis Gary, I miss you. Who would have thought?

SBS Film [Michelle Orange]

Anthony Lane: “Labor Day,” “The Selfish Giant ... - The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]

'Labor Day' Review: Best. Kidnapper. Ever. - Pajiba Dustin Rowles

Review: Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin feel stranded in the arch - HitFix Drew McWeeny from Hit Fix

Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]

The House Next Door [Tina Hassannia]

PopMatters Bill Gibron, also seen here: Film Racket [Bill Gibron]

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

Review: Jason Reitmans Labor Day is a suspenseful ride if you - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

Twitch [Jim Tudor]

Sound On Sight [Lane Scarberry]

Labor Day (2014) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD with Pictures [Luke Bonanno]

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]

Blu-ray.com [Martin Liebman]

DVD Sleuth [Mike Long] Blu-Ray

UpcomingDiscs.com » Blog Archive » Labor Day (Blu-ray) Paul O'Callaghan

DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Christopher Zabel]

Labor Day / The Dissolve Scott Tobias

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]

Little White Lies [Oliver Lyttelton]

Cinescene [Howard Schumann]

Jason Reitman's Labor Day: Kate Winslet and Josh ... - Slate Dana Stevens

Telluride Review: Jason Reitman's 'Labor Day' Starring Josh ... Chris Willman from The Playlist

The Cloying, Awful Labor Day - Christopher Orr - The Atlantic Christopher Orr

Film.com [William Goss]

Exclaim! [Cal MacLean]

Labor Day (2013) Movie Review - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland

CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]

PopMatters [Jon Lisi]

The Digital Fix [Nick Chen]

Georgia Straight [John Lekich]

Labor of Love: Author Joyce Maynard discusses the film adaptation ... Hank Sartin interviews the novelist from The Ebert Site, January 31, 2013

Kate Winslet swoons over improbable relationship in 'Labor Day ... Glenn Whipp interviews Kate Winslet from The LA Times, November 21, 2013

Jason Reitman's 'Labor Day' - Los Angeles Times John Horn interviews the director, August 31, 2013

Labor Day: Telluride Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy

Labor Day review – Winslet and Brolin swamped by 'folksy tosh' Jonathan Romney from The Observer

Labor Day review: 'Sugary and humourless' Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson]

'Labor Day' review: It is definitely not a fun family flick | Fox News Justin Craig

'Labor Day,' 'That Awkward Moment' and 'Gloria ... - Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Joyce Maynard's finger in the 'Labor Day' pie - Movies - The Boston ... Loren King from The Boston Globe

Labor Day is a total con | City Pages Amy Nicholson from Minneapolis City Pages

Kansas City Star [Jon Niccum]

Austin Chronicle [Louis Black]

Labor Day - Featured Articles From The Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Labor Day Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Christy Lemire

In 'Labor Day,' Josh Brolin Romances Kate Winslet - NYTimes.com Stephen Holden

Kate Winslet Stars in 'Labor Day' - NYTimes.com November 1, 2013

Labor Day (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Book Review: Joyce Maynard's 'Labor Day'" Caroline Preston book review from The Washington Post, August 12, 2009

'Labor Day' by Joyce Maynard - Los Angeles Times Donna Rifkin book review from The LA Times, August 7, 2009

Reitz, Edgar

Edgar Reitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heimat 123 biography of Edgar Reitz

Heimat (film series) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks ... Encyclopedia entry

Facets Multimedia Presents HEIMAT A Chronicle of a Dictator, from Facets Multi Media

Articles and books about Edgar Reitz - Die Zweite Heimat

Carole Angier · 'Heimat' and History · LRB 22 January 1987 ‘Heimat’ and History, by Carole Angier from The London Review of Books, January 1987

Long article about Reitz and Heimat Carole Angier, from Sight and Sound, Winter 1990-91 (pdf)

The Nazis, communism and everything | Media | The Guardian Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, May 4, 2005

An appreciation of Edgar Reitz' Heimat films - Die Zweite Heimat 129 page essay, Angela Skrimshire recounts each episode from Heimat 1, 2, and 3, January 2009 (pdf)

Article Memory of Everyday Life: A Study of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat by Pehr Englén from Dandelion, December 6, 2011, also seen here: https://doi.org/10.16995/ddl.251

'Heimat' of memory - Heimat123 147-page essay by Angela Skrimshire, ‘Heimat’ of memory, imagination and choice: An appreciation of Edgar Reitz’ Heimat films, revised version, February 2012 (pdf)

Heimat: unreliable memories and 'living-in-spite-of-everything' – That's ... Gerry on TV & Radio, December 5, 2014

History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz' Heimat Project as ... History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz’ Heimat Project as Transformative Narrative, by Ib Bondebjerg, July 11, 2016

HEIMAT (Eine deutsche Chronik) – Made for German TV

aka: Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany

Germany (15 and ½ hours, 924 mi – 11 episodes) 1984

Disc 1 (120')
Episode 1 "The Call of Faraway Places (1919-1928)" (119'18")

Disc 2 (148')
Episode 2 "The Centre of the World (1929-1933)" (89'37")
Episode 3 "The Best Christmas Ever (1935)" (57'50")

Disc 3 (176')
Episode 4 "The Highway (1938)" (58'19")
Episode 5 "Up and Away and Back (1938-1939)" (58'36")
Episode 6 "The Home Front" (1943)" (58'37")

Disc 4 (161')
Episode 7 "Soldiers and Love (1944)" (58'36")
Episode 8 " The American (1945-1947)" (102'02")

Disc 5 (139')
Episode 9 "Little Herman" (1955-1956)" (138'25")

Disc 6 (183')
Episode 10 "The Front Years (1967-1969)" (82'08")
Episode 11 "The Feast of the Living and the Dead (1982)" (100'23")

PopMatters (Marco Lanzagorta) review

In this eleven-part film made for TV, Reitz portrays his country's difficult history from 1919 to the present day without recourse to soap operatics. Maria, born in 1900, is the still point around whom others move emotionally, economically, and politically, with the narrative developing through a superbly sustained accumulation of detail. Humane and comic, it's very finely acted, exact in period detail, and immaculately photographed in monochrome with occasional bursts of colour of an epiphanic resonance. A magnificent achievement that will reward every hour it demands of your time.

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

Edgar Reitz's 15<4-hour film is an attempt to restore a sense of continuity to 20th-century German history by presenting 63 years, from 1919 to 1982, in the life of Schabbach, a small village in the Hunsruck region. The chief characters are the members of the Simon family—the grandfather is a blacksmith, the grandson will be the founder of a precision optical company—and the shape of the plot is dictated by the century's constantly changing economic and political conditions, driving some members of the family to emigrate, others to form alliances with the Nazis, others to find prosperity in the postwar “economic miracle.” Reitz avoids the ceremonial events—births, deaths, marriages—that usually punctuate this sort of family chronicle, concentrating instead on the textures of daily existence and the shifting relationships among the characters. Though not without its longueurs (the treatment of the 50s, for example, is largely limited to an extremely conventional tale of adolescent frustration and romantic revolt) and marked by a rising nostalgia for the “good old days” as opposed to the debased present, Reitz's project stands as a monumental act of imagination, teeming with evocative incident and Proustian detail.

Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]

If you can imagine a work that fuses the collective memory of an area with that of the authors’, and then renders it on film in all it’s wandering yet richly detailed glory, you can conceive of the accomplishment that is known as Heimat. Drawing not only from his memories growing up in the region, but also from interviewing and conversing with hundreds of people from the Hunsruck region, Edgar Reitz created this cinematic version of oral history. Though the 52 ½ hour Heimat trilogy is fictional, Reitz’s cinenovel is far more true to life than at least 99% of the stuff that passes as docudramas or “based on a true story”. A dense multilayered text covering all facets of life from many angles, Reitz’s aim is to tell compelling stories that realistically observe mankind without judging them. Thus his study of life, which is never sentimental or ideological, helps free us from the stereotypical misconceptions about German citizens while providing an alternative to the tired accounts that dominate our perception of the past.

Dismayed by a typically oversimplified good vs. evil American holocaust film becoming an event when broadcast on West German television, Reitz created Heimat as his riposte. His television series breaks down the limiting depictions of history that revolve around the megalomaniacs and focus on black and white issues, persecutors and persecuted, aggressors and defenders. The history of Hitler’s Germany is perhaps accurate of Hitler and his closest minions, but even the most notorious madman doesn’t define the whole of his country, much less his era. Most people are more concerned with their own family, work, love life, things they have more direct influence and control over. These stories may be less important, but they are far from meaningless. Ruthless heartless dictators are a dime a dozen, but how people lived is somewhat different in every decade.

What we normally consider as history - the ruling party, the not so great dictator, the pointless wars - are always on the periphery in Heimat. Reitz avoids the usual cliches, refusing to depict the big names and notable events. He instead allows their respective presence and occurrence to seep into if not shape the narrative as much as it could be expected to, which in peacetime isn’t very much. However, if you’ve already returned from war you are forever changed, even if only through a certain alienation that’s inherent in trying to feel comfortable in a place that’s gone on without you for a number of years.

Though critics so used to old hat they miss it criticized Edgar Reitz for downplaying certain aspects that are thought to define 20th century German history, whether it be the depression or the concentration camps, I find Reitz’s film refreshing as it’s neither political nor apolitical. Reitz and cowriter Peter F. Steinbach show that while politics effect the lives of ordinary citizens to a certain extent, it’s rarely in the kind of direct, easy to pin down ways we typically see in the few movies that actually want to be political. In fact, the silly fads of the day hoisted upon the public by mass marketers and their enabling subordinates have far more obvious and widespread effects, if for no other reason then everyone encounters them everyday until they are replaced by the next craze. One example Reitz & Steinbach use is having Ernst get into the home “improvement” business, replacing traditional quality with phony stonewall facings. In all cases though, Reitz shows positive and negative aspects of change, and just as his characters do, the audience interprets the events through their own perspective.

It’s not only the bigwigs and historical landmarks that are put on the backburner, Reitz similarly refuses to allow Heimat be defined by big moments in the personal lives of his characters. Births, marriages, graduations, even deaths are noticed more than observed. In fact, we learn of the passing of key characters by seeing a year of death on the family tree, or their headstone at the graveyard. The exception is the death of the matriarch of the house, Katharina (Gertrud Bredel) and Maria (Marita Breuer), as they are the consistent presence, the incarnation of home.

While sometimes tense and suspense, payoffs and climaxes aren’t what Reitz is after. He prefers the petty to the grand, little anecdotes and incidents adding up to something profound. He may focus intensely on a particular year then skip several. We come to sense that everything and nothing is of the utmost significance. A work of such texture, depth, and complexity could never be accomplished in the usual two hours. This near 16 hour masterwork ignores even cinematic convention, maintaining the rhythm of daily life. It’s the accumulation of minute details that eventually add up to a story of great significance.

Reitz’s masterpiece simply can’t be compared to traditional television, as there’s not necessarily a specific reason people do what they do, treat someone in the manner they treat do, especially one that’s specifically related to that character. One thing Reitz has done is eliminate the simplistic cause and effect that dope opera is based on, the actions of the characters are never so obvious we come to them ages before they do. Heimat isn’t the usual judgmental television crap that’s based on action and reaction, for instance someone has an affair so their spouse or lover breaks up with them and then everyone close to both of them is forced to take sides. There’s none of the typical situations that pit saint against sinner, everything exists in gray areas. Reitz isn’t about the decision or the damage done, so much as root of the problem. We see a person with an ambition, a discomfort, some subtle disquiet that nags at their soul until they follow it. He won’t explain it, and in fact it’s difficult to really put into words, but the central conflict of Heimat is between man and his homeland. His decisions aren’t based on loving his family or not, but rather whether he can be comfortable spending his life in the region. Everything else is secondary, and thus there’s a tremendous amount of collateral damage.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything where the characters have so many varying aspects. Reitz & Steinbach quite simply obliterate the concept of likeable and dislikable, allowing life to shape the characters and situation to shape life rather than consistently imposing a set of morals, values, ideals, which they either live up to or contradict. We are allowed to feel so many positive and negative emotions toward each character, many times at once, but also to so often be neutral. The characters are always complex, sometimes troubling, but at the same time both ordinary and impressive. We rarely focus too much or too long on their strengths or weaknesses. It’s not about flip flopping the characters, they change credibly but the goal isn’t to show them evolve or devolve as individuals, this is of course part of most great movies or novels, but greatness is never attained by narrow definition. Heimat is more about pitting the specificness of your roots against the universality of human experience to show lives so unique yet so familiar, a mix of the unfathomable (unless you’ve actually lived it) and the incredibly familiar (from your own experience). Reitz once commented that, “The work itself gives no answers whatsoever, but the observer gives himself answers. The work gives him time, and again the key to unlocking those secret rooms (of your own soul)”

Brothers Anton & Ernst provide a good example of the impossibility of consistently rooting for or against anyone, of thinking they are simply amiable or abominable individuals. Anton is quiet and sensitive in his youth and early adulthood, but loud and judgmental once his business succeeds, playing the boss of his brothers as well as his coworkers. Still, Anton is the proper son who does what he’s expected of him, for better and worse, while Ernst is an adverturer who is something of an unsuccessful version of his deserting father Paul, doing his own thing irrespective of anyone else. Anton stands for building a tradition of quality, not simply practicing traditional methods but rather doing things in the proper manner so business is beneficial to someone beyond the owner. On the other hand, Ernst stands for fashionable change, perfuming new wood to smell as if it were antique, an authentic relic of 100 years ago. Still, at least in the short term, this also makes people happy.

Anton is the heel of episode 9, a tyrannical bully who persecutes adult Klarchen (Gudrun Landgrebe) for loving his teenage brother Hermann (Peter Harting), even getting her fired from a job she takes in another town after she’s no longer welcome in his office. In episode 10 he’s the hero, ignoring his father’s advice to sell as he did and keeping his business as a symbol of quality and the primary source of local employment, thus preserving his Heimat from the interloping multi national corporation that invariably strives to eliminate competition and standards.

Ernst is at his most likeable in episode 9, standing up to his older brother who has always bullied him, treating him as if he were instead his father, when he tries pulling the same thing on Hermann. He helps Hermann by secretly delivering letters to and from his lover Klarchen after Anton has made it impossible for them to communicate. However, he soon reminds us of his selfishness, even stooping to getting his lackies to strip his childhood home of it’s history, of any antiques or anything he might get a few marks for, while he’s at his mother’s funeral.

Eduard’s wife Lucie (Karin Rasenack) is the type of character that’s easy to detest. She’s a complete self aggrandizing phony who always has to be the center of attention, a chameleon who constantly adapts to the fashionable principles, sucking up to everyone who has more money or power in hopes of exploiting their resources to her advantage. Even if the drama queen is soiled by her unyielding desire for advancement, she is intelligent and resourceful, rising from whorehouse matron to dignified mayor’s wife. Though as everything else it’s more to her benefit than his, Lucie getting Eduard (Rudiger Weigang) elected to high office is akin to single-handedly getting Dubya into office if Dubya had no money, family heritage, or powerful enablers to rig the election in his favor.

Both generations of Simon mothers, Katharina then Maria, are honest and truthful if simplistic. They aren’t particularly educated, but are sensible characters who possess conventional and practical wisdom. Katharina isn’t blinded by change of any form, which always puts her at odds with Maria’s brother Wilfried Wiegand (Han-Jurgen Schatz), who like Lucie allies himself with whatever party is presently fashionable. Katharina’s son Eduard is also a follower, though generally not dangerous like Wilfried, as he’s a good natured simpleton rather than a fanatic who has no qualms about going along with whatever would seem to benefit him.

Once Katharina’s son Paul Simon disappears the end of episode 1, we realize it’s Maria that will be the hero of the coming episodes. Despite being deserted, left to raise two young boys on her own, Maria is a glowing, loving woman until Paul returns to Germany after WWII. His first attempt to come back in 1939, in fact the first contact he’d made with any of them since his unceremonious departure, ruined the only love she ever experienced in her life with Otto (Jorg Hube), an engineer who became a boarder in the Simon home while building the first highway through the area. Though Paul wasn’t let off the boat because they couldn’t prove his pure German blood in time, Maria casts Otto off, with the broken hearted man signing up for the suicide occupation of landmine defuser.

Until stealing some moments with Otto, discovering new activities such as dancing and auto racing which open her eyes up to possibilities and aspects of life most people take for granted, Maria never had a chance to have or enjoy her own life. She went from working at her father’s to taking care of the Simon family, soon without another adult to share the joy and burden with, leaving her with little time for friends or outside pursuits. Between Otto’s death, Paul’s return, the arrival of her son Ernst’s supposed girlfriend Klarchen as yet another tenant in the cramped little house that still doesn’t have him as he hasn’t returned from the war, and generally everyone and everything slowly leaving her behind, Maria loses her smile and enthusiasm for life. She still never gets riled up, but she becomes a rigid and dull character, a kind of walking corpse, reliable and well functioning only because she’s reprising her daily routine. Maria was a young mother raising Anton & Ernst and she was able to share their hobbies, photography and model airplanes respectively. Now all she has is Hermann, who she had with Otto when she was 40, but he grows increasingly distant as his schoolwork (trigonometry) is above her and as she isn’t cultured she’s unable to appreciate if not comprehend the literature he loves and the music he creates, which eventually includes prerecorded sound effects.

Little Hermann seems the most personal episode as a young Edgar Reitz had a relationship with a woman 11 years older and left his Heimat after high school to pursue a career in the arts. Though Reitz isn’t nearly as big a name abroad as contemporaries of the New German Cinema such as Werner Herzog & Wim Wenders, after filming Yesterday Girl for Alexander Kluge, a cinema colleague at the Ulm School of Design, he won best first feature at Venice for Mahlzeiten and had a series of successes for the next decade before the colossal commercial failure of by far his most expensive feature, The Tailor of Ulm, seemingly sent him into retirement from feature film making. As it turns it, it reconnected him with his roots, prompting him to combine the personal and professional into the documentary on the Hunsruck region Geschichten aus den Hunsruckdorfern, now considered a prequel to the Heimat trilogy. The self discovery continued, ultimately propelling him to the fictional works that have become his signature pieces. By the late 1990’s, when Stanley Kubrick decided his best chance at passable dubbing for Eyes Wide Shut would be to have his favorite European directors act as overseer for their respective country’s version, it was Reitz who was asked to handle the German version.

Heimat, which means homeland, is very specific to a way of life in a certain area during the 20th century, but has been received very well abroad as the story is ultimately universal, as in the end life at any time and in any era is built around the same few primary characteristics. The greatest conflict in Heimat is the struggle to belong in and to your homeland. Those who leave perpetually long for their roots even if they attain success they never could have at home, as your homeland represents security, innocence, perhaps even your very essence. It’s a place of nostalgia, but also of pain and rejection, a personal warfront. Reitz finds many ways to show this struggle is between progress and tradition, as men invariable alter their homeland then long for the previous comforting state.

Reitz doesn’t bow at the alter of progress. Selling your cow is a loss because you’ve been milking the animal all your life. Even if it’s no longer worth the hassle to do so, it’s been a consistent daily form of sustenance for as long as anyone alive can remember. Maria only agrees to sells her cow because her sister-in-law Pauline (Eva Maria Bayerwaltes) convinces go with her to visit Paul in America, where he’s made his fortune as the owner of Simon Electric, which would leave no one to care for the beast. We never find out if they make the trip, which would be a major event in Maria’s life though the men venture to all corners of the earth she never leaves the region even for a day trip. But the point is it’s the end of an era, no more animals for nourishment at the Simon home. That said, Reitz isn’t simply against progress, as that would be equally narrow-minded and simplistic. The irony of the dual meaning is part of the reason he chose the title Heimat, as Heimatfilm was originally a genre of Nazi propaganda films that glorified the rustic past for ideological purposes. In the 1950’s, the genre’s aims shifted toward capitalism, exploiting the tourist potential of the traditional less developed areas.

People come and go, but Reitz largely sticks to the Shabbach region, as home is the center of everyone’s world. More specifically, men leave to pursue their careers while women provide a sense of home by holding down the fort. Home is not so much a place to Reitz, but rather your mother’s house with her in at, the location of all your memories since childhood. The center of Reitz’s film is the historical old Simon house, as it outlives any and all tenants. It’s stable even as all else shifts, but sometimes this stability is alienating, for instance when Paul return home from World War 1. It’s not so much that his homeland has changed, but rather that he’s transformed into another person to the point he no longer feels he belongs.

Though Shabbach is the center of the universe for pretty much all the characters we encounter, we see the difficulty of living in a small town as invariably everything of real importance takes place elsewhere and all ideas, changes, and developments are ultimately imported. This breeds a feeling of helplessness, a sense that one has to leave to truly accomplish anything, though as always this is countered. Utilizing the clean air of his heimat to set up Simon Optical Factory, Anton’s company becomes the clear leader in the field.

Heimat is a moving piece of cinema in part due to Reitz’s ability to profoundly express multiple conflicting feelings at once. For instance, the scene when Anton is reunited with his wife Martha (Sabine Wagner) after his 5000k walk back from WWII is a mix of loss and hope. After all the bloodshed and death he’s withstood, he immediately announces he’s going to make it in opticals, he even doubled back to figure out all the necessary steps to make the business succeed.

Among the 5000 non professionals that took part during the two year filming, many locals, often amateur theater actors, are cast in prominent roles. They not also lend a regional authenticity, but more importantly serve as co-collaborators, contributing their recollections and remembrances. The most successful of the amateurs is Kurt Wagner, who plays the film’s narrator Glasisch, an outsider who comments upon the lives of his relatives but rarely has much direct participation in them. Born in 1900 like Maria, he’s in many ways her opposite as she’s always accepted and respected while he’s always been the outsider looking in. Returning from WW1 with a skin disease that doesn’t make him a favorite of the ladies – he looks like Pascale Greggory playing Cyrano de Bergerac - he’s now often dirty and treated as dirt. Though town drunk is dealt with akin to a retard, if this idiot savant is a fool, he’s Henry Fool. Glasisch is arguably the most perceptive character, shown in minor examples such as being the only one to see through Hermann’s masking devices and detect his sound effects are nightingales.

Each episode opens with Glasich organizing a series of photos, always shown to be mere poses, to piece together a narrative. Reitz never allows us to feel we are getting anything but a perspective. History, official or otherwise, is simply an author’s interpretation of what’s worth remembering, which changes from episode to episode, or book to book.

Reitz allows the talented cinematographer and sometimes director Gernot Roll, probably best known abroad for lensing Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa and Beyond Silence, to convey the concepts, ideas, and themes through the imagery. The conversation interweaves important aspects, but doesn’t spell everything out for the usual series of didactic dissertations. The controversial aspect of the presentation is their decision to alternate between black and white and color. In general, the memories are shot in black and white when color is irrelevant to the memory and color when it’s pertinent, for instance when scenery, landscapes, decorations, or fruit make an impression. A red hot iron can only be shown in color, but this aspect is rather inconsistent as it seems Reitz & Roll more or less decided on the fly, going by feel.

Heimat is filmed as a memory, imbued with echoes of the past, both obviously (flashbacks) and symbolically (repetition of objects, events, with similar light and framing). Scenes of walking down a long straight road or even making a phone call are staged to evoke occurrences of the same event in the past. Life is a series of repetitions, differentiation coming from the ever changing if not evolving manner in which we experience it. The act may be the same, but each incident is slightly different, the aspects that are noticed, that come to the forefront or are disregarded yielding variance.

An appreciation of Edgar Reitz' Heimat films - Die Zweite Heimat 129 page essay, ‘Heimat’ of memory, imagination and choice: An appreciation of Edgar Reitz’ Heimat films, Angela Skrimshire recounts each episode from Heimat 1, 2, and 3, January 2009 (pdf)

Carole Angier · 'Heimat' and History · LRB 22 January 1987 ‘Heimat’ and History, by Carole Angier from The London Review of Books, January 1987

Long article about Reitz and Heimat Carole Angier, from Sight and Sound, 1991 (pdf)

Heimat: unreliable memories and 'living-in-spite-of-everything' – That's ... Gerry on TV & Radio, December 5, 2014

Article Memory of Everyday Life: A Study of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat by Pehr Englén from Dandelion, December 6, 2011, also seen here: https://doi.org/10.16995/ddl.251

History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz' Heimat Project as ... History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz’ Heimat Project as Transformative Narrative, by Ib Bondebjerg, July 11, 2016

Heimat (film series) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks ... Encyclopedia entry

Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik Review - ScreenAnarchy Jon Pais, August 19, 2006

Heimat 3 - Rouge Signing Off On The German Century, by Roger Hillman, 2005

Film Reference.com Julian Petley

953 (95). Heimat (1984, Edgar Reitz) — alsolikelife Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, January 31, 2009

Heimat | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Movie Talk [Jason Best]

Heimat (no 6) « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish, September 25, 2009

In Praise of Edgar Reitz's Heimat | Slow Travel Berlin June 2, 2010

The Heimat Series of Edgar Reitz Mubi

User reviews from imdb Author: Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from Dublin, Ireland

User reviews from imdb Author: Max_cinefilo89 from Italy

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: eldino33 from United States

Edgar Reitz's own Heimat page in English

Heimat fansite

Heimat 1, 2, 3... - Edgar Reitz - news

Photos of HEIMAT- und HEIMAT3 - film locations at Hunsrueck/Germany

DVDBeaver.com [Rob Janik]

BBC4's Heimat pages

The New York Times Vincent Canby from The New York Times, April 6, 1985

Heimat (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edgar Reitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heimat 123 biography of Edgar Reitz

HEIMAT 2 (Die zweite Heimat – Chronik einer Jugend) made for German TV

aka: Heimat: Chronicle of a Generation

Germany (26 hours, 1532 mi – 13 episodes) 1992

PART ONE: 1960 - Hermann
Die Zeit der Ersten Lieder (The First Songs), 116 minutes

PART TWO: 1960-1961 - Juan
Zwei fremde Augen (A Stranger's Eyes), 115 minutes

PART THREE: 1961 - Evelyne
Eifersucht und Stolz (Jealousy and Pride), 116 minutes

PART FOUR: 1961-1962 - Ansgar
Ansgars Tod (Ansgar's Death), 100 minutes

PART FIVE: 1962 - Helga
Das Spiel mit der Freitheit (Playing with Freedom), 120 minutes

PART SIX: 1963 - Alex
Kennedys Kinder (Kennedy's Children), 109 minutes

PART SEVEN: 1963 - Clarissa
Weihnachtswölfe (Christmas Wolves), 110 minutes

PART EIGHT: 1964 - Schnüsschen
Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), 120 minutes

PART NINE: 1965 - Fraülein Cerphal
Die Ewige Tochter (The Eternal Daughter), 118 minutes

PART TEN: 1966 - Reinhard
Das Ende der Zukunft (The End of the Future), 132 minutes

PART ELEVEN: 1967-1968 - Rob
Zeit des Schweigens (A Time of Silence), 118 minutes

PART TWELVE: 1968-1969 - Stefan
Die Zeit der vielen Worte (The Time of Many Words), 119 minutes

PART THIRTEEN: 1970 - Hermann and Clarissa
Kunst oder Leben (Art or Life), 119 minutes

Kamera.co.uk review Edmund Hardy

Heimat 2 is a beautifully conceived and created film series, a 26 hour dash through the Sixties, each of thirteen episodes focusing on one individual from a loose grouping of young intellectuals – musicians, film-makers, philosophers – who have arrived in Munich to study and to search for, as in the German title, 'Die Zweite Heimat', a second homeland, a generation trying to find or found a new country of art and watershed politics. The original Heimat (1984) chronicled the twentieth century through the lens of a small village, Schabbach, in the Hunsrück, and one of its characters was Hermann, a precocious young man whose love affair with the immigrant Klärchen ends when she is shunned by the community; he left at the end of episode 9. Heimat 2 begins with that leaving, as Hermann swears never to return and never to fall in love again, but it isn't necessary to have seen the first Heimat as we immediately enter a new world, that of Munich, a city which serves as a petri dish for the currents and moods of the decade, as characters become politicised, as ambitions flounder, ideas take flight. Heimat 2 is a celebration and critique of a generation.

Heimat sits in a genre of its own: the gigantic film series. It belongs to a world in which Neighbours might be a tremendously ambitious epic about white settlers, the foundering of a sunshine republic, Australian happiness and guilt tinged with urban disaffection, or Eastenders an exorcism of London's psycho-geography through the aperture of a Zolaesque critique of society powerfully directed through a particular community and its economic survival. Heimat 2 is like these soap operas in that its structure is cellular. In this it avoids the fatal grandeur of epic flow. Each scene is simultaneously a self-contained drama and one which links to a particular thread, to the overall construction, and to the different scenes before and after. The same is true of each episode. Where it differs from the convention of TV drama is that there are no addictive story threads – these would appear a crude and limited device in this setting. Characters recur, and as each year clocks by, they change, but we simply register this in details. The dialogue is never formulaic but always alive with convincing speech patterns which are somehow distilled, a quality of dramatic writing so effective that I often paused after a scene to let its impact sink in.

As the character who ties the series together, Hermann is by turns sympathetic, self-centred, unsentimental, obviously talented, overly distant. We are never invited to identify with him or with any other character, they are all too human in their own right, not ciphers for us to boo and hiss. Each episode strikes a new tone, as we see the city and the other characters through the life of a different individual, and people – such as Alex, a philosopher at the centre of episode 6, Kennedy's Children – who appear entirely absurd or else slightly cryptic in other episodes, suddenly snap into focus in their own episode. Because of this remarkable quality, Heimat 2 is constantly acquiring depth, rather than a skimming narrative drive. Happily, the ensemble cast is uniformly excellent, inhabiting their complex roles, never grandstanding or appearing to grudge an episode where their characters may be sidelined.

Two other elements of the production also contribute to this unique experience. The photography of Gernot Roll, Gerard Vanderburg and, predominantly, Christian Reitz, makes a series of switches – from black and white to colour; from monumental, fluid shots and perfect compositions to steadicam and witty reveals – which roughen the texture and keep us interested in the surface of this enormous work, a surface which is always worth paying attention to. The colour/black and white switches are a constant delight, the first one as Hermann arrives in Munich and a red signal goes out to grey. Elsewhere, a car goes past, or the camera tracks past a tree, or the screen is filled with a white screen – in a cinema – and we don't realise we've made the switch until a yellow shirt appears. Each change – several an episode – means that we blink and see the film anew. No heavy dramatic significance is attached to these switches – other than that they often mark the edges of daylight and darkness – a relief from directors who use such a device as inverted commas around a dream or a particular viewpoint.

The series is also washed through with music – as on a conventional soundtrack, where the music's creation is 'hidden' atmosphere to the on-screen action, but best of all in the many live performances which tend to spill over into following scenes – Hermann is a music student, after all – and I can't think of another film which, rather than representing musical creation, or using music to create emotional pitch, effectively and simply allows music to erupt, to permeate, to be a presence by turns joyful and problematic. There are impromptu sessions which burst out of nowhere, such as percussion on cutlery and plates in the music college's refectory, and there are concerts and songs and improvisation. Heimat 2 gives us the music of a decade even if it wobbles on the politics: the first eight episodes strike me as virtually flawless, but then there is a loss of coherence with episode nine, as the group of friends and the house, 'Foxholes', where they have hung out, fall apart; it is not the disintegration which is the artistic problem, but the fact that time speeds up as the final years of the decade speed past. Another failure is in the dream and overtly fantastical 'mood' sequences, which either come over as sub-Tarkovsky (rain falling from the ceiling) or as insulting to the audience's appreciation of filmic reality because the fantastic elements are rare and therefore come across as aberrations. Reitz would overcome these flaws and master the technique of ambiguous reality, of expressionistic cinema in Heimat 3, in which film itself becomes a kind of heimat, an ultimate homeland.

I've just begun watching Heimat 2 for a second time; it's compelling in its generous, brimming-over nature, like an enormous mansion one is free to wander through. I would think it approaches inexhaustibility and is certainly one of the finest things created for TV, its closest artistic companion perhaps Zola's Rougon-Macquart, a sequence of twenty disparate novels conceived as scientific observation of environment and inheritance. The DVD transfer is 1:33:1, as one expects as this was made in pre-widescreen 1992, and the picture is crisp in black and white, ever so slightly soft in colour. The only extra, apart from the lavish presentation box, is an introductory booklet written by David Parkinson, which was not part of the review package.

Carole Angier · 'Heimat' and History · LRB 22 January 1987 ‘Heimat’ and History, by Carole Angier from The London Review of Books, January 1987

Long article about Reitz and Heimat Carole Angier, from Sight and Sound, 1991 (pdf)

Heimat: unreliable memories and 'living-in-spite-of-everything' – That's ... Gerry on TV & Radio, December 5, 2014

Article Memory of Everyday Life: A Study of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat by Pehr Englén from Dandelion, December 6, 2011, also seen here: https://doi.org/10.16995/ddl.251

History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz' Heimat Project as ... History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz’ Heimat Project as Transformative Narrative, by Ib Bondebjerg, July 11, 2016

Heimat (film series) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks ... Encyclopedia entry

Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik Review - ScreenAnarchy Jon Pais, August 19, 2006

Heimat 3 - Rouge Signing Off On The German Century, by Roger Hillman, 2005

Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation (Die zweite ... - The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

VideoVista review Kara Kellar Bell

Movie Talk [Jason Best]

User reviews from imdb Author: Christian Wasser from Langen, Germany

User reviews from imdb Author: Max_cinefilo89 from Italy

Edgar Reitz's own Heimat page in English

Heimat fansite

Heimat 1, 2, 3... - Edgar Reitz - news

Photos of HEIMAT- und HEIMAT3 - film locations at Hunsrueck/Germany

BBC4's Heimat pages

Movie Review - Die Zweite Heimat: Leaving Home - A 25 1/2-Hour ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times, June 17, 1983

DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow

Heimat (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HEIMAT 3 (Chronik einer Zeitenwende) made for German TV

aka: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings

Germany Great Britain (689 mi, theatrical version, 525 mi – 6 episodes, TV version) 2004

1: Das glückliste Volk der Welt/The Happiest People in the World (1989) (101:31)
2: Die Weltmeister/World Champions (1990) (95:44)
3: Die Russen kommen/The Russians are Coming (1992-93) (119:31)
4: Allen geh’s gut/Everyone’s Doing Well (1995) (126:22)
5: Die Erben/The Heirs (1997) (100:38)
6: Abschied von Schabbach/Farewell to Schabbach (1999) (110:04)

London Times [Wendy Ide]

Family tensions are at the heart of Heimat 3, the third heavyweight instalment of the acclaimed German television mini-series by Edgar Reitz. This one covers the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the present day, and as with the two previous Heimats, Reitz uses the people and events in the village of Schabbach in the Rhine valley as a microcosm to reflect the socio-political climate of Germany.

To appreciate the third instalment, I probably should first have sat through Parts 1 and 2, but that would have taken nearly 41 hours. Heimat 3 works pretty well, nonetheless — a kind of highbrow soap opera that plays the artistic endeavours of its characters against the naked avarice of the freshly re-unified and enthusiastically capitalist new Germany. It’s well worth watching, but tackling some 11 hours at the cinema seems like an unnecessary ordeal.

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Clocking in it an imposing 680 minutes and divided into six self-contained episodes, this is the third cycle in writer/director Edgar Reitz's colossal chronicle of 20th-century German life. Spanning the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the Millennium celebrations, Heimat 3 : A Chronicle Of Endings And Beginnings revisits the rural Hunsrück region of the original Heimat series, to explore how the tide of recent history - the departure of NATO troops, immigration from Russia, global economic trends - impacts upon everyday lives and identities.

The pivotal individuals here are familiar figures from the previous episode Heimat 2: the conductor/composer Hermann (Henry Arnold) and the singer Clarissa (Salome Klammer), who return as a giddily happy couple to the Rhineland countryside. The film's novelistic range incorporates the experiences of their parents and siblings (particularly Hermann's older brothers Anton and Ernst), their own adult children, and also the East German workmen they hire to renovate their dream home outside the village of Schabbach.

The mood of jubilation surrounding national reunification, which reaches its peak with Germany winning the World Cup in 1990, gives way to a powerful sense of melancholy and disappointment. Ageing characters become preoccupied with their own mortality, and nature itself - in the form of tremors and floods - heightens the mood of human vulnerability. Guided by an urgent score and shot with considerable visual flair, it's another impressive feat of multi-stranded cinematic storytelling from Reitz, whilst the foreboding final shot paves the way for Heimat 4.

Carole Angier · 'Heimat' and History · LRB 22 January 1987 ‘Heimat’ and History, by Carole Angier from The London Review of Books, January 1987

Long article about Reitz and Heimat Carole Angier, from Sight and Sound, 1991 (pdf)

Heimat: unreliable memories and 'living-in-spite-of-everything' – That's ... Gerry on TV & Radio, December 5, 2014

Article Memory of Everyday Life: A Study of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat by Pehr Englén from Dandelion, December 6, 2011, also seen here: https://doi.org/10.16995/ddl.251

History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz' Heimat Project as ... History, Memory and Film. Edgar Reitz’ Heimat Project as Transformative Narrative, by Ib Bondebjerg, July 11, 2016

Heimat (film series) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks ... Encyclopedia entry

Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik Review - ScreenAnarchy Jon Pais, August 19, 2006

Heimat 3 - Rouge Signing Off On The German Century, by Roger Hillman, 2005

Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings ... - The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Heimat 3 (no 41) « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish, June 9, 2010

gareth's movie diary: September 2008 September 23, 2008

Edgar Reitz's own Heimat page in English

Heimat fansite

Heimat 1, 2, 3... - Edgar Reitz - news

Photos of HEIMAT- und HEIMAT3 - film locations at Hunsrueck/Germany

BBC - BBC Four Drama - Heimat 3 Episode Guide

BBC4's Heimat pages

Heimat (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Nazis, communism and everything | Media | The Guardian Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, May 4, 2005

Rejtman, Martín

THE MAGIC GLOVES

Argentina (90 mi) 2003

The Magic Gloves Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

A few years ago, I was publicly bemoaning the hollow hype of the Argentine New Wave, and fortunately I was just looking in all the wrong places. This is the first of Rejtman's four features I've seen, but it's absolutely clear that we're dealing with a guy with a sharp, witty, almost musical sensibility. Why musical? Because where other filmmakers employ running gags as interruptions of a main narrative through-line, here Rejtman generates a film that consists of virtually nothing but running gags, recapitulating them over and over, in different groupings and sequences, like sections of an ensemble. That is, their deployment becomes abstract, and it's the abstraction (not their non sequitur quality within an overall narrative frame) that generates hilarity. (I fear that the above analyzes the structure of the humor so much that a reader might be skeptical about how funny the movie could actually be. Trust me. It's so fucking funny.) There is a narrative structure of sorts, but it's more like an overall theme of class resentment that never bubbles up, instead manifesting as resignation within the deterministic wackiness of Glovesworld. Alejandro (pitch-perfect shlub Gabriel Fernández Capello) is constantly brought into the orbit of people from all walks of life, mostly the upper- and middle-classes, all of whom are united by their inability to see Alejandro as anything more than a means to an end. Alejandro, for his part, makes the best of things, and even seems to have honest affection for these "friends," since he takes using and being used as the way of the world. Best gags: Piraña's sound system and the super-sized Canadians.

Renoir, Jean

from DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/masterlist.htm

Son of the famous impressionistic painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, Jean moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking in the 1920's. Popular success eluded Renoir as his initial movies, even critically, were dismissed as confusing, complex and unconventional. However, time has been favorable to Renoir's body of misunderstood cinema which is now academically and intellectually appreciated and revered. With an inherited ability to capture intrinsic beauty and subtle detail Renoir's films hold deep passion and social relevance drawing upon diverse issues often on very complex levels. His camera typically recorded fluid relationships using a deep-focus frame, kinetic camera movement or extended takes which would imbue the intimate thoughts of his characters. Described as a humanist and "the least arrogant of all men," Renoir left France in 1941 during the German invasion (World War II) and eventually became a naturalized US citizen.

BFI | Library | Exhibitions and Events | Jean Renoir display Ginette Vincendeau from BFI, February 2006

Francois Truffaut and Orson Welles described Renoir as "the greatest filmmaker in the world". There is no doubt that Renoir has dominated both the French cinema of the classical period and the international pantheon of great auteurs.

The second son of Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, Jean grew up in the artistic milieu of turn-of-the-century Paris. Much - too much - has been made of this legacy, though it was of consequence for Renoir's realist aesthetics and financial independence. Following World War I, in which he was wounded, and an attempt at ceramics, Renoir's film career began when he scripted Catherine (or Un Vie sans joie, 1924, directed by Albert Dieudonne). Renoir then directed his first film, La Fille de l'eau (1925), followed by several more, notably Nana (1926) and La Petite marchande d'allumettes/The Little Match Girl (1928, with Jean Tedesco), all displaying Hessling's expressionist performances, in contrast to Renoir's naturalistic use of actors in his later films. Yet Renoir's realism goes hand in hand with the theatrical, most of his films alluding to, or staging, spectacles.

Renoir's 1930s films, such as Boudu, Partie de campagne, Toni, La Bête humaine, and La Regle du jeu, offer a Zolaesque panorama of French society, while working-class solidarity is expressed in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Vie est à nous, and La Marseillaise.

After World War II, Renoir left France for Hollywood, where he made six American films with limited success. As his film career stalled, he turned to writing (novels and autobiographies), to the theatre, and to television.

Because several Renoir films found little commercial success and La Regle du jeu, considered his masterpiece, was a resounding failure, he is often regarded as a misunderstood genius. Considered a role model for the French New Wave cinema, Renoir was awarded an Oscar for life achievement in 1975 and the French legion d'honneur in 1977.

Renoir, Jean Art and Culture

Jean Renoir inherited his acute feel for the poetry of landscapes -- from the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, his father. Emotive impressions of place, captured by a slowly panning camera, underlie the movement of his narratives. Renoir’s genius lay in fusing environments and narratives together into a seamless whole.

Renoir had the luxury of growing up in a family that valued artistic creation. He was encouraged by his father (for whom he also modeled) to dabble in poetry and ceramics, but finally settled into filmmaking in the late 1920s. His first features, "La Fille de L’Eau" and "Nana," were rough-edged and unwieldly despite the occasional glimmer of Impressionist brilliance. “Nana” in particular -- a loose adaptation of Zola’s novel -- was a huge commercial flop that threatened to terminate Renoir’s film career before it had even really begun. Forced to scale back his expenses, he resigned himself to less grandiose projects. His first real achievement was the charmingly fantastical "Little Match Girl" in 1928.

Comic satire emerges in Renoir's films of the ‘30s. Perhaps inspired by Flaubert (Renoir would eventually adapt "Madame Bovary"), he began to churn out films that mocked the petty indulgences of the French middle class. This endeavor was aided significantly by the innovation of sound; contrary to many filmmakers of his time, Renoir embraced sound enthusiastically, excited by its potential for use in social satire.

The result was his 1939 masterpiece "The Rules of the Game," which Renoir directed, produced, acted in, and wrote. This biting critique of pre-war French society managed to function as farce, drama, and tragedy all at once; it manifested Renoir’s capacity to be both critic and heartfelt humanist. However, the film met with grave disapproval from the right wing; condemned as a "demoralizing" vision of France, it was severely cut. It wasn’t until 1959 that Renoir’s complete version was rediscovered and the full merit of the film finally recognized.

In the ‘40s Renoir moved to America and made a series of mediocre films. Unhappy with the scripts offered him and uncomfortable working in English, his output was notoriously poor. ("The Southerner," which successfully captured the feel of the rural American South, is an exception.) Of these years of his career, Renoir said, "They represent seven years of unrealized works and unrealized hopes, and seven years of deceptions too." Once he returned to Europe, his deftly plotted narratives and mood-setting natural environments returned too.

Jean Renoir - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Tom Conley profile essay from Film Reference

Jean Renoir's major work dates from between 1924 and 1939. Of his 21 films the first six are silent features that put forward cinematic problems that come to dominate the entire oeuvre. All study a detachment, whether of language and image, humans and nature, or social rules and real conduct. Optical effects are treated as problems coextensive with narrative. He shows people who are told to obey rules and conventions in situations and social frames that confine them. A sensuous world is placed before everyone's eyes, but access to it is confounded by cultural mores. In Renoir's work, nature, like a frame without borders, isolates the impoverished subjects within limits at once too vast and too constricting for them. Inherited since the Cartesian revolution, and the growth of the middle class after 1789, bourgeois codes of conduct do not fit individuals whose desires and passion know no end.

The patterns established in the films appear simple, and they are. Renoir joins optical to social contradictions in the sense that every one of his films stages dramas about those who cannot conform to the frame in which they live. For the same reason his work also studies the dynamics of love in cinematography that marks how the effect is undeniably "scopic"—grounded in an impulse to see and thus to hold. Sight conveys the human wish to contain whatever is viewed, and to will to control what knows no border. As love cannot be contained, it becomes tantamount to nature itself.

The director has often been quoted as saying that he spent his life making one film. Were it fashioned from all of his finished works—including those composed in the 1920s or 1940s or 1960s in France, America, or India—it would tell the story of a collective humanity whose sense of tradition is effectively gratuitous or fake. The social milieu of many of his films is defined by a scapegoat who is killed in order to make that tradition both firm and precarious. All of Renoir's central characters thus define the narratives and visual compositions in which they are found. Boudu (Michel Simon), who escapes the confinement of bourgeois ways in Boudu sauvé des eaux , is the opposite of Lestingois (Charles Granval), ensconced in a double-standard marriage à la Balzac. Boudu, a tramp, a trickster, and a refugee from La Chienne (1931), changes the imagination of his milieu by virtue of his passage through it. The effect he leaves resembles that of Amédée Lange (René Lefevre) in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange , who gives life to a collective venture—an emblem of Leon Blum's short-lived Popular Front government launched in 1936—that lives despite his delusions about the American West and the pulp he writes. Lange is the flip side of Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) of La Bête humaine (1938), a tragic hero whose suicide prefigures André Jurieux's (Roland Toutain's) passion of La Règle du jeu (1939).

Boudu floats through the frame in ways that the migrant laborers of Toni or the souls of La Vie est à nous cannot. The latter are bound to conventions of capital exploitation that incarcerate humanity. In these and other films the characters all "have their reasons," that is, they have many contradictory drives that cannot be socially reconciled but that are individually well founded and impeccably logical on their own terms. When Renoir casts his characters' plural "reasons" under an erotic aura, he offers superlative studies of love. His protagonists wish to find absolution for their passion at the vanishing points of the landscapes—both imaginary and real—in which they try to move. The latter are impossible constructs, but their allure is nonetheless tendered within the sensuous frame of deep-focus photography, long takes, and lateral reframing. Rosenthal and Maréchal (Marcel Dalio and Gabin) seek an end to war when they tramp into the distance of a snowscape at the end of La Grande Illusion. Lange and Florelle (Valentine) wave goodbye as they walk into the flat horizon of Belgium. But Jurieux can imagine love only as a picture-postcard when he and Christine (Nora Grégor), he hopes in desperation, will rejoin his mother in snowy Alsace. Or Lantier can be imagined jumping from his speeding locomotive into a space where the two tracks of the railroad converge, at infinity, beyond the line between Paris and Le Havre. In Une Partie de campagne , Henri (Georges Darnoux), frustrated beyond end at the sight of melancholy Juliette (Sylvia Bataille) rowing upstream with her husband sitting behind her in their skiff, looks tearfully at the lush Marne riverside. Sitting on the trunk of a weeping willow arched over the current, he flicks his cigarette butt in the water, unable to express otherwise the fate he has been dealt.

These scenes are shot with an economy that underscores the pathos Renoir draws from figures trapped in situations too vast for their ken or their lives. If generalization can seek an emblem, Renoir's films appear to lead to a serre , the transparent closure of the greenhouse that serves as the site of the dénouement of La Règle du jeu. The "serre" is literally what constricts, or what has deceptive depth for its beholder. It is the scene where love is acted out and extinguished by the onlooker. The space typifies what Renoir called "the feeling of a frame too narrow for the content" of the dramas he selected from a literary heritage ( Madame Bovary, The Lower Depths ) or wrote himself, such as Rules. Renoir's films have an added intensity and force when viewed in the 1990s. They manifest an urgent concern for the natural world and demonstrate that we are the "human beast" destroying it. Clearly opposed to the effects of capitalism, Renoir offers glimpses of sensuous worlds that seem to arch beyond history. A viewer of La Fille de l'eau (1924), Boudu , or Toni surmises that trees have far more elegance than the characters turning about them, or that, echoing Baudelaire's pronouncements in his Salons of 1859, landscapes lacking the human species are of enduring beauty. Renoir puts forth studies of the conflict of language and culture in physical worlds that possess an autonomy of their own. His characters are gauged according to the distance they gain from their environments or the codes that tell them how to act and to live. Inevitably, Renoir's characters are marked by writing. Boudu, a reincarnation of Pan and Nature itself, can only read "big letters." By contrast, Lantier is wedded to his locomotive, a sort of writing machine he calls "la lison." The urbane La Chesnaye (Dalio) in Rules cannot live without his writing, the "dangerous supplements" of mechanical dolls, a calliope, or human toys. These objects reflect in the narrative the filmic apparatus that crafted Renoir's work as a model of film writing, a "caméra-stylo," or ciné-écriture. Use of deep focus and long takes affords diversity and chance. With the narratives, they constitute Renoir's signature, the basis of the concept and practice of the auteur. Renoir's oeuvre stands as a monument and a model of cinematography. By summoning the conditions of illusion and artifice of film, it rises out of the massive production of poetic realism of the 1930s in France. He develops a style that is the very tenor of a vehicle studying social contradiction. The films implicitly theorize the limits that cinema confronts in any narrative or documentary depiction of our world.

Jean Renoir online – a craftsman's cinema

JeanRenoir.com director website

BIFI Bibliothèque du film (French language site)

Je m'appelle Jean Renoir... another French language site

Renoir - Renoir : Partie de Campagne yet another French language site

Jean Renoir • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema James Leahy from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2003

Jean Renoir | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography from Bruce Eder

Jean Renoir | French director | Britannica.com biography from Encyclopedia Britannica

Jean Renoir: Biography from Answers.com extensive biography

Jean Renoir Baseline’s Biography of Film

Jean Renoir Biography - Yahoo! Movies biography

Biography for Jean Renoir - TCM.com biography from Turner Classic Movies

Jean Renoir. Profile and filmography. biography from Books and Writers

Jean Renoir biography from Novel Guide

Jean Renoir brief bio and filmography from NNDB

Jean Renoir - Filmbug brief bio

Biography of Jean Renoir - Short Biographies brief bio

UCLA Film & Television Archive - Collections - Jean Renoir brief bio

Profile on Jean Renoir Famous Like Me

Jean Renoir - Writer by Film Rank Films 101

Timeline results for Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir Mubi

LE CINÉMA, C'EST JEAN RENOIR by kenji Mubi

Films de France Profile James Travers

The Films of Jean Renoir - by Michael E. Grost Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television

Jean Renoir. Strictly Film School Acquarello film comments

French Directors - Jean Renoir comments on available videos and films

Realism in film history - Realism - actor, children, movie ... origins of realism in cinema, from Film Reference

Jean Renoir - CO LLE CT IO NPRO FILE brief biographical essay from UCLA Film and Television archive (pdf format)

Bazinian Realism: Jean Renoir First issue of Cahiers du Cinéma, April, 1951

New Left Review - Lee Russell: Jean Renoir Lee Russell from New Left Review, May-June, 1964

Jean Renoir - Google Books Result Jean Renoir by Raymond Durgnat (429 pages), 1974

Toni (1974 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 1, 1974

On Jean Renoir | Jonathan Rosenbaum May/June 1976

"S/Z" and "Rules of the Game" by Julia Lesage - eJumpcut.org Winter 1976-77

EuroScreenwriters Article (From 1979) The Artistry of Jean Renoir, by Claude Beylie from The Movie, Orbis, 1979

Jean Renoir - Hollywood Star Walk - Los Angeles Times Paul G. Levine from The LA Times, February 13, 1979

Wellesnet (Los Angeles Times): Jean Renoir: ‘The Greatest of All Directors’ JEAN RENOIR:‘The Greatest of All Directors by Orson Welles, from The Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1979

THE MAGNIFICENT CHILD - New York Times Andrew Sarris from The New York Times, March 25, 1990

My life and my films - Google Books Result by Jean Renoir (287 pages), 1991

Jean Renoir - Google Books Result Jean Renoir by André Bazin (320 pages), 1992

The Auteur Who Coined the Word Commentary » Leo Braudy to The LA Times, July 15, 1994

View From Behind the Camera : An affectionate biography marks the centennial of Jean Renoir's birth : JEAN RENOIR: Projections of Paradise, By Ronald Bergan (Overlook: $23.95; 378 pp.) Kevin Thomas from The LA Times, September 11, 1994

Grand Illusions - Jean Renoir at the Harvard Film Archive Peter Keough from The Boston Phoenix, July 2 – 9, 1998

Jean Renoir - Google Books Result Jean Renoir by Martin O’Shaughnessy (251 pages), 2000

French CanCan • Senses of Cinema Rick Thompson, November 5, 2000

Out of the Past - Three French Films Released on ... - Senses of Cinema Geoff Gardner from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000

An Archive of the (Political) Unconscious Christopher Faulkner from The Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 26, No 2 (2001), seen in full here: HTML

Lunch on the Grass • Senses of Cinema Stuart Lord, July 25, 2003

Bazin and “The River” as a Problem in the History of Film Theory, Part 1 Prakash Younger from Offscreen, July 31, 2003

Re-thinking Bazin Through Renoir's The River, Part 2 Prakash Younger from Offscreen, July 31, 2003

FILM; 'The Film of Films': Renoir's Masterpiece - The New York Times Terrence Rafferty, January 18, 2004

La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) Peter Rist from Offscreen, June 30, 2004

• View topic - Jean Renoir Criterion Film Forum, a film discussion group, November 8, 2004

Jean Renoir: interviews - Google Books Result interviews by Jean Renoir, edited by Bert Cardullo, (217 pages), 2005, also seen here at the Mississippi Press: Jean Renoir: Interviews

Plumbing the Depths: Renoir and Kurosawa Do Gorky - Bright Lights ... Criterion Collection, Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2005

Renoir and the Scandal of “First Love” or The Perils of Catherine ... Tag Gallagher visual essay from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005

The religion of Jean Renoir, film director Adherents, July 31, 2005

Renoir on the Seine: Boudu Saved from Drowning on DVD - Bright ... Matthew Kennedy from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2005

Train to Nowhere: On Renoir's La Bête Humaine - Bright Lights Film ... Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2006

Director Renoir's lasting imprint » Susan King from The LA Times, April 27, 2007

kamera.co.uk - film review - Jean Renoir Collection - Andrew Benbow Andrew Benbow DVD Film Review, August 23, 2007

Jean Renoir Jacqui Freeman from The Socialist Weekly, September 2007

Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion | AHA James J. Sheehan from Perspectives on History, March 2008

Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game Reconsidered ... Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Offscreen.com :: Honor, Humanism, Humor: Notes on Jean Renoir's ... Honor, Humanism, Humor: Notes on Jean Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game and the book Jean Renoir: Interviews, by Daniel Garrett from Offscreen, August 31, 2008

Auteur House» Blog Archive » Jean Renoir September 22, 2008

Arthur Shields and the Politics of Jean Renoir's The River • Senses of ... Antony Seller from Senses of Cinema, February 2, 2009

The River • Senses of Cinema James Leahy, March 10, 2009

Jean Renoir's River - Parallax View David Coursen from Parallax View, June 21, 2009

Jean Renoir's Toni: Unreal and True - Bright Lights Film Journal D. J. M. Saunders, January 31, 2010

Jean Renoir - Jean Renoir retrospective at LACMA - Los Angeles Times Susan King from The LA Times, March 10, 2010

Why Jean Renoir still matters - Film - Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out NY, April 6, 2010

Jean Renoir, the Boss: A Portrait of Jean Renoir by BAM | The ... Aaron Cutler from Slant magazine, April 9, 2010

BAMcinématek | Jean Renoir Renoir Retrospective, April 9 – May 11, 2010

Re: Renoir Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, April 18, 2010

Jean Renoir Retrospective at the BAMcinématek | By Kristin M ... Child of Impressionism, by Kristin M Jones from The Wall Street Journal, April 28. 2010

The rules of Jean Renoir's "Game" - Our far-flung correspondents Omar Moore from Popcorn Reel, reprinted at The Chicago Sun-Times, June 8, 2010

Partie de campagne • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, July 11, 2010

Mike Sragow Gets Reel: Happy Bastille Day, Jean Renoir! - Movie ... Michael Sragow from The Baltimore Sun, July 14, 2010

Happy Birthday, Jean Renoir, French Filmmaker Jennifer Ferris, September 15, 2010

• View topic - Jean Renoir Criterion Film Forum, a film discussion group, September 30, 2010

Shorts from the last few months Brandon’s Movie Memory, November 28, 2010

French poetic realism – an analysis of Renoirs “A day in the country ... Manuela Gilke, February 4, 2012

The Rules of the Game (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine Graham Fuller, Summer 2012

The great escape: La Grande Illusion | The Sight & Sound Greatest - BFI Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, November 17, 2016, originally published February 10, 2012 here: BFI | Sight & Sound | The great escape: La Grande Illusion

Jean Renoir on Technology and Art | The New Yorker Richard Brody, August 15, 2012

La Bête humaine, Jean Renoir • film analysis - Senses of Cinema Matthew Sorrento, November 2013

World War I film La Grande Illusion | New Republic David Thomson, June 27, 2014

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

10 Essential Jean Renoir Films To Take You To 'The River' | IndieWire Nikola Grozdanovic, April 22, 2015

Rules of the Game, The (1939) - Classic Art Films Matthew, July 31, 2015

La Grande Illusion film review • Senses of Cinema March 18, 2016

The 10 Best Jean Renoir Films - The Playlist Nikola Grozdanovic, June 21, 2016

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, November 15, 2016

Verhoeven's Elle and Renoir's The Rules of the Game Peter Verstraten from Senses of Cinema, December 14, 2016

Jean Renoir's pacifist masterpiece La Grande Illusion turns 80 - BFI Pamela Hutchinson from Sight and Sound, June 8, 2017

The Complete Jean Renoir - Harvard Film Archive June 9 – September 1, 2017

TSPDT - Jean Renoir

Fathom: Jean Renoir on Actors and Audiences Interview with the director from Columbia University, 1960

The 16th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)

Pantheon Director

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

Robin Buss' Top 10 Directors

Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors

Kent Jones' Top 10 Directors

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Jean Renoir. Jean Renoir: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library

Jean Renoir (1894 - 1979) - Find A Grave Memorial

Jean Renoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Images for Jean renoir

Jean Renoir various YouTube films on Jean Renoir, from World News

Jean Renoir Discusses His Art With Jacques Rivette | The New Republic YouTube, subtitled (7:49)

CATHERINE

aka: Backbiters

France (82 mi) 1924 co-director: Albert Dieudonné

User reviews from imdb Author: guido-vermeulen from Brussels, Belgium

Interesting first (silent) movie from Renoir he realized so his wife could have the leading role of Catherine. The movie became an object of quarrel between Renoir and Dieudonné who directed this vehicle together and each played also a part in the movie. Was this a Renoir movie or one of Dieudonné, reducing Renoir to its pupil? The dispute became so heavy 2 versions exist, one cut by Renoir and one by Dieudonné. However the themes are so typically Renoir that I question the claim of the co-director. Like in so many other Renoir movies you see a picture of the relationships between masters and servants, with a clear sympathy for the servants and a great dislike for the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. Also the contradiction between order and disorder (major theme in the complete oeuvre of Renoir) is already present in this first attempt to make a movie.

Catherine is a servant girl working for the local mayor and victim of the sharp tongues of the mayor's wife and her friends. This is made clear in a first scene where she is asked to get the key of the mayor's desk at a cultural party the wife is attending. She is harassed by the whole elite who dislike the intrusion of the maid. In this scene it's made clear also that the wife has a secret lover who will later challenge the mayor's political career and will use Catherine as a scapegoat for his own ambitions. This role of "bad guy" is played by Renoir himself. The mayor who is fond of Catherine and is afraid that she'll be more victimized by his wife asks his sister to give Catherine a position in her own household. The sister has a son with tuberculosis (role played by Dieudonné). He's so weak he has no success with women of his class but of course Catherine will like instantly this fragile man. He dies after kissing Catherine while the rest of the town is celebrating carnival. The kissing scene at the window mixed with the fireworks is a brilliant moment of silent melodrama. Catherine is in mourning and because of that driven away by the mayor's wife and her friends. It is indecent that a servant girl is in mourning and shows public affection for someone who is not from her own social status. The emotions of Catherine are the element of disorder in the social ordered world of the rich. Catherine goes away and hides in a cheap hotel in the city where she is also bullied by a local pimp who sees in her an easy target to exploit. By accident Catherine is seen in the hotel window with the pimp, so more reason for gossip by the elite. When she returns to the village looking for a job she is rejected everywhere, even by the local Christian relief organization of which the mayor's wife became president. She meets the mayor again who is shocked by the attitude of the town, takes her in his home again and promotes her to his secretary. The wife is furious of course and leaves her husband to live with her mother. It is start of a slander campaign against the political credibility of the mayor. The lover of the mayor's wife sees what is happening as a golden opportunity and makes a public attack on the moral character of the mayor (what's new under the sun?) Catherine wants to avoid the downfall of her protector and leaves the mayor, explaining herself in a note. She hides in an old tram for the rain while the mayor is driving around in his car frantically looking for the girl. Two vagabonds are thrown out of a pub and out of frustration push the tram car, so it starts a crazy race up and down the hills towards the bridge and the valley abyss. Catherine is already accepting her death but is saved in time by the mayor who has made his choice for the girl. The social implications of his choice are not shown but are clear for all.

The chase of the car and the tram and the way Renoir shows speed with the camera are rather remarkable. This final scene illustrates also the influence of the American silent movie but of course the context is quite different. This is not a funny Keystone Cops chase but pure drama. Other more stylized elements in the movie show the influence of German cinema (Renoir was a huge admirer of Stroheim). Both influences will go hand in hand in other movie productions, all financed by selling the paintings of his father, the famous painter Auguste Renoir.

Catherine (1924) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

In the provincial town of Varance, Catherine Ferrand, an orphan, is employed as housemaid to Georges Mallet, a prominent local councillor. Mallet’s wife, a sour vindictive woman, turns against Catherine and has her dismissed. Fortunately, Mallet finds a place for Catherine with his sister, Madame Laisné, who lives in Nice with her chronically ill and depressed son, Maurice. During the Nice carnival, Catherine dances with Maurice. Both appear to have found happiness – but then Maurice suddenly dies. To avoid a scandal, Catherine is dismissed again and she ends up in the clutches of an unscrupulous pimp, Adolphe. On her return to Varance, Catherine is unable to find work, thanks to the efforts of her mortal enemy Madame Mallet. Georges Mallet takes pity on Catherine and engages her to work as his secretary, prompting his wife to leave him. Mallet’s political rivals use this news to blacken his name and thereby prevent him from winning the next local election. When she hears of this, Catherine runs away. Desolate, she sleeps in an abandoned tramcar. When she awakes, the tramcar is in motion and she realises that the tram is hurtling inexorably towards a mountain precipice. Unable to go on living a life without joy, Catherine accepts her fate with resignation...

Jean Renoir, one of the greatest figures in French cinema, began his film-making career with this poignant little melodrama, an obscure film which deserves wider appreciation. Renoir’s multiple talents are revealed by the fact that not only did he co-direct the film, with Albert Dieudonné, but he also co-authored the script and produced it (with money inherited from his father’s estate). He even appears in the film in a minor role (ironically playing the part of a member of the establishment he so enjoyed caricaturising). Renoir’s directing partner, Albert Dieudonné, who also appears in the film, is best remembered as the actor played Napoléon Bonaparte in Abel Gance’s 1925 epic film Napoléon .

Although not as polished or as intense as Renoir’s later masterpieces, Catherine (or Une vie sans joie) bears many of the features we best associate with Renoir’s films – and in some ways it is a prototype for what is to come. First and foremost, it is a film with great humanity in which people of good and bad character are clearly defined and set against one another. Renoir’s left-wing sympathies are readily apparent in his mocking portrayal of the Bourgeoisie, who are shown to be shallow, manipulative creatures, without soul or the slightest awareness of their cynical hypocrisies.

What is interesting about the film is that it combines elements of what is now termed poetic realism with familiar melodrama. Two forces determine the destiny of the orphan Catherine – the cruelty and kindness shown by her fellow man, and fickle Fate herself. In the poetic realist films of the late 1930s, it is mere chance, the luck of the draw, that ultimately decides the outcome for the films’ central characters. There is more than a hint of that in the film’s dizzying final twenty minutes, where events appear to be completely out of the control of mortal man and things appear to be unravelling according to some pre-ordained plan. It is this tension between the seemingly inevitable and the faint hope that human beings can determine their own destiny which makes the stunningly filmed final part of the film almost unbearably suspenseful.

A compelling and underrated work, Catherine delights mainly through its imaginative and varied photography. There is more than a hint of German expressionism in the way lighting is used to draw out emotion and emphasise disaster. In the exterior location work, the ordinary everyday experience of working class people is strikingly redolent of neo-realism. And the nail-biting ending looks as if it may have been filmed by Hitchcock when at the height of his powers.

The only thing that definitely mars the film is Renoir’s decision to cast his wife, Catherine Hessling, in the leading part – an error of judgement which would blight many of the his subsequent films. Neither beautiful, young nor particularly talented as an actress, Hessling fails to be convincing as a lonely orphan girl and so it is a struggle for the spectator to sympathise with her character. Fortunately, the skilful photography and calibre of acting elsewhere compensates for the failings of its lead actress and, in the end, Hessling’s charms do just manage to win through.

Admittedly, the plot of Catherine does now appear a tad unsophisticated, geared no doubt to the insatiable taste for melodrama at the time. However, its realisation (by two inexperienced filmmakers) shows genuine flair for innovation and great technical competence. Overall, the film makes an impressive beginning for Jean Renoir, the man who was destined to be one of the leading figures in cinema history. Meanwhile, his fellow director Albert Dieudonné would have to content himself with playing the most famous part in French cinema history.

LA FILLE DE L’EAU

aka: Whirlpool of Fate

France (71 mi) 1925

The Whirlpool of Fate Time Out London

Virginie lives on a barge with her father and uncle. Papa accidentally drowns, uncle develops an incestuous itch and Virginie flees into a series of adventures with a gypsy poacher, a brutal farmer and, for hero, a handsome young landowner. This was Renoir's first feature, and various influences are discernible: a dash of Stroheim here, a streak of Surrealism there. But the naturalistic settings, sensuously rendered (with very few interiors), contrasted with the theatricality of the narrative and an eccentric attitude to performance (especially that of the clown-like Hessling), already reveal a quite recognisable Renoir.

La fille de l'eau Dave Kehr from the Chicago Reader

Jean Renoir liked to mark the true beginning of his career as a filmmaker with Nana, his second solo feature as a director, although this earlier silent effort (1924), while atypical and inferior to its successor, is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Strongly influenced by the experimental French impressionist cinema of that period and starring his wife Catherine Hessling, the film follows the dreams and adventures of an orphan who escapes the advances of her uncle by hiding in a Gypsy camp. The results are more pictorial than most of later Renoir—he saw the film largely as an opportunity to experiment with various visual effects—but full of charm and poetry.

La Fille de l’eau (1925) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

After the death of her father, a barge man, Virginie has no one but her cruel uncle Jef. But he merely squanders his inheritance and sells the barge, before attempting to rape his niece. Virginie flees into the countryside where she is befriended by a young poacher, ‘the Ferret’, who teaches her his trade. They get into a feud with an unpleasant farmer, Justin, which leads them to burn his haystack. In revenge, Justin coaxes his friends into driving the poacher and his mother from the area. Alone again, Virginie stumbles into a quarry and falls deliriously ill. Georges Raynal, the son of an eccentric landowner, finds her and takes her to a farmer’s cottage where she can be cared for. Virginie’s new found happiness is short-lived, however, as uncle Jef appears and demands money from her...

Jean Renoir’s first full length film, La Fille de l’eau, is an improbable yet compelling melange of melodrama, neo-realism, farce and surrealism. Although the film oscillates from one extreme to the other, between high drama and light comedy, between naturalistic and highly stylised photography, it manages to captivate its audience with its typically Renoir-esque blend of romantic charm and raw humanity.

The film features Renoir’s young wife Catherine Hessling, in the part of the orphan girl Virginie. She was his father’s last model and Jean Renoir is evidently equally besotted with her, casting her as a classical heroine in a countryside idyll which could equally have been the subject of his father. The script was written by Renoir’s close friend, Pierre Lestringuez (who also appears in the film in the role of Jef), inspired by American serials, French melodrama and traditional fairy tales. Admittedly, the narrative is simplistic, even nonsensical, but Renoir’s treatment of it is surprisingly mature and he manages to create a work of immense beauty and originality.

Renoir was clearly influenced by the avant-garde of the silent film era, particularly Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, adopting and modifying some of their experimental cinematic techniques. This is noticeable in Renoir’s masterful use of rapid montage (showing a series of camera shots of separate actions in rapid succession), creating an impression of naked brutality and blind panic. This is used to great effect in the harrowing scene where Jef attempts to rape Virginie and, later, when Justin and his entourage set fire to the gypsy caravan.

Perhaps the most noteworthy sequence in La Fille de l’eau is the remarkable dream sequence where, in a state of delirium, Virginie imagines an extreme fantasy version of her real-life experiences in the film. Using techniques such a reverse slow motion photography, superposition of images, dissolves and slow-motion tracking shots, the sequence is both mesmerising and awe-inspiring, combining surrealism and children’s fantasy. This is certainly one of the most extraordinary set of images to be seen in early French cinema.

La Fille de l’eau is not Jean Renoir’s greatest film – the plot is too fanciful to be taken seriously and the film generally lacks the maturity and restraint of Renoir’s later years. Nevertheless, it deserves to be considered as a major cinematic achievement for a young director who was still undecided as to whether he was cut out for a film-making career.

A cinema history [J.E. de Cockborne]

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Sean Axmaker, Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

La Fille de l'Eau - notcoming.com | Screening Log Ian Johnston capsule review

cinematic threads Matthew Lotti capsule review

NANA

France (150 mi) 1926

Nana Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Renoir's rare 1926 adaptation of Zola's novel about a gamine's rise to riches and notoriety during the Second Empire, and widely regarded as the director's finest silent. True, the lead performance of Hessling is at the very least broad, eccentric and at odds with the overall naturalism of the piece, while for the first hour or so the film is rather static, mostly content simply to tell the story, record the performances, and lavish attention on Claude Autant-Lara's sumptuous sets. As the movie proceeds, however, with the amoral courtesan gleefully taking every opportunity to humiliate her various, rival suitors, the initially light-hearted satire gives way to a bleaker mood, admirably incarnated by the increasingly dark, shadowy images. Renoir's subtle way with detail, coupled with a beautifully restrained performance from Krauss as the Count Muffat, makes for an accumulation of psychological and emotional nuance that anticipates his (superior) later films.

Nana (1926) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A proud but talentless young actress, Nana, dreams of a better life for herself, away from the tawdry slums of Paris. She gets her chance when a government official, Count Muffat, falls under her spell having watched her performance at the theatre. Through Muffat’s influence, Nana gets the starring role in her next play, but the play is a commercial disaster. Humiliated, Nana accepts Muffat’s offer of a new life as his mistress, living in the sumptuous apartment he provides for her. One day, Nana receives a visit from her hairdresser’s uncle, the Count de Vandeuvres, who proves to be an easy victim for her charms. Vandeuvres risks everything to win Nana for himself – but fails. Even Nana’s hairdresser, Hugon, is not immune to Nana’s charms. Jealous of Muffat, he kills himself, and the shock of his death drives Nana back to the life of drunken debauchery she thought she had escaped from...

Jean Renoir’s second full-length film is this lavish and fairly faithful adaptation of Emile Zola’s classic novel, Nana. The film’s extravagances include spacious, overly decorated sets and two magnificent set pieces – a horse race and an open air ball (complete with a stunningly choreographed cancan sequence). So much money was spent on the film that it could never have made a profit, and it was the commercial failure of this film which robbed Renoir of the opportunity to make such an ambitious film again for several years.

Whilst Nana is noticeably less experimental than Renoir’s previous film, La fille de l’eau (1924), it is a more sophisticated and mature work, and certainly more characteristic of Renoir’s subsequent films.   The freedom of expression, the overriding importance of characterisation (even for minor characters), the brittle relationship between men and women – the style of the film is unmistakably that of the great director Jean Renoir.   There are even some fine examples of Renoir’s wicked sense of humour – including some witty visual jokes and a bedroom farce scene - to complement the film’s darker dramatic moments (of which there are plenty).

The film stars Renoir’s wife, Catherine Hessling, in one of her most eccentric performances as the flawed heroine Nana. Hessling is brilliant at capturing the negative qualities of the character – her vulgarity, her arrogance and vanity – but she also manages to arouse sympathy in the spectator and comes across as a victim of her own social background and uncontrollable impulses.   Hessling’s performance is characteristically stylised, noticeably lacking in subtlety, but – for once – perfectly suited to the character she is playing.

Hessling works well with her co-stars, Werner Krauss and Jean Angelo, who play Nana’s love-struck admirers. Whilst Hessling’s portrayal of Nana appears to lack humanity, there is no end of that quality in her co-stars’ performances. The film is primarily about the power of love to take hold and drag its victims inexorably towards their doom, but it is also about the inability of a working class girl to elevate herself above her baser qualities.

Renoir’s scriptwriter, Pierre Lestringuez, and art director, Claude-Autant Lara, also appear in the film (as theatrical director and amorous playwright respectively).   The film was magnificently restored in 2002 by Cinéteca Comunale, with the support of the Franco-German television channel Arte.

Nana (1926) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker, Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

Nana - notcoming.com | Screening Log Ian Johnston capsule review

New York Times [Charles Morgan]

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Nana - cinematic threads Matthew Lotti capsule review

CHARLESTON (Sur un air de Charleston)

aka: Charleston Parade

France (21 mi) 1927

Sur un air de Charleston (1927) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

With some material left over from his previous film, Nana , Jean Renoir decided to indulge his whim for comic fantasy in this bizarre short film which defies any attempt at rational interpretation. The film was intended as a surreal tribute to jazz, which Renoir claimed to have just discovered when he made the film. With a blacked-up lead character and clumsy erotic dances from a semi-nude Catherine Hessling, the film manages to push back the frontier of bad taste by several leagues, but Renoir’s humanist treatment of his subject – to say nothing of his bizarre imagination – makes the film an interesting and oddly entertaining curiosity.

Charleston Parade (Jean Renoir, 1927) Jaime Christley from Unexamined/Essentials, September 6, 2009

Two forms we are not conditioned to expect from Jean Renoir: the short form, and the science fiction genre. Still, the more one delves into Renoir's filmography, the fewer expectations one hangs onto. He made features almost exclusively, with few exceptions (the most noteworthy being the 40-minute Partie de campagne [1936]), but there is the late-period Jekyll & Hyde variation from 1959, Le testament du Docteur Cordelier, and it can be argued that, in the manner of sci-fi, Renoir treats the landscapes and social strata on display in many of his films, from La nuit du carrefour to The Rules of the Game to This Land is Mine to French Can Can, as an intrepid explorer would treat an alien planet.

Still, among the great towers that comprise the vast city of the artist's career, you wouldn't be blamed for assigning Charleston Parade to one of its smaller, more modest neighborhoods. In a post-apocalyptic vision of an obliterated Paris, as imagined perhaps by Ernie Kovacs and Rene Clair, a feral white girl teaches a blackfaced spaceman the long-thought-lost, aboriginal Charleston. As in:

...minus the spare-no-expense production values. Props and costumes seem willingly chintzy, the acting scaled to a camera placement one kilometer away and through fog, and the whole affair seems more to the benefit of the participants than the spectators. You may find, as I did, the slow-motion dancing considerably more hypnotic than the fast-motion shots of the same, but the Melies-esque heads-on-wings, and a trick-film bit in which the savage heroine draws a telephone into existence, are an appealing break. One imagines it was delightful to make.

One of Jonathan Rosenbaum's "1000 Essential Films"

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] March 19, 2010

Month of 121 Shorts: Silent/Early Cinema 2 Brandon’s Movie Memory

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Sean Axmaker, Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Silver in a Haystack [Fredrik]

MARQUITTA

France (120 mi) 1927

Marquitta (1927) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Practically ruined after the commercial failure of his lavish period piece Nana (1926), Jean Renoir willingly agreed to direct this conventional melodrama for the production company La Société des Artistes Réunis. Not only did it provide him with some financial security, it also allowed him to further develop his directorial technique, bringing some discipline to temper his creative impulses. Whilst not his most inspired work, the film shows characteristics that would become more noticeable in his subsequent sound films – imaginative camera work, a love of character and a strikingly humanist approach.

TIRE AU FLANC

aka: The Sad Sack

France (120 mi) 1928

Tire au flanc (1928) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

By an odd stroke of fate, the bourgeois Jean Dubois d’Ombelles and his valet Joseph Turlot end up having to serve their military service at the same time, in the same barracks. Neither man is particularly well-suited for army life and a series of disasters naturally ensues. Jean, who sees himself as a poet, is as inept at becoming a soldier as he has been in his attempts to court his cousin, Solange. Joseph is hardly any better. Having disgraced themselves in front of their fellow soldiers and their commanding officer, Colonel Brochart, Jean and Joseph have one last chance to redeem themselves. They will provide the entertainment at the impending regimental party...

Jean Renoir’s most overtly comical and anarchistic film, Tire au flanc is the definitive comedy of army life, a popular subject at the time (stemming most probably from the unpopularity of military service). Noticeably less restrained and less technically accomplished than Renoir’s other silent films, it is clear that the director’s main preoccupation here was to entertain. And, whilst many of the jokes are pretty laboured and dated by today’s standards, it is not hard to see why this film would have been appreciated by a 1920s audience.

Much of the comedy in the film was improvised, giving it a sense of unpredictability and a great sense of fun. The film marks Jean Renoir’s first collaboration with Michel Simon (who appears incredibly young and lively in this film). Largely as a result of Renoir’s support, Simon would become one of the most sought after actors in French cinema in the 1930s and the following decades.

The idea of partnering a well-to-do man with his valet allowed Renoir to explore one of his favourite themes, that of breaking down artificial barriers between different social classes. Here, this subject is treated comically, but in his later works, Renoir would develop the idea more seriously, giving it a far more humanist perspective. The best example of this is in his 1937 masterpiece, La Grande illusion.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL (La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes)

France (30 mi) 1928 co-director: Jean Tédesco

La Petite Marchande d'allumettes Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

All too often, Renoir has been simplistically characterised as a 'realist', poetic or otherwise. This little gem from his silent period, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story, gives the lie to both that categorisation and to the director's own oft-quoted assertion that he had only made one film over and over again. For here, as the little match girl (Hessling, then his wife) lies dreaming in the snow - her would-be customers and a gendarme become toy soldiers and a jack-in-the-box - Renoir revels both in various optical effects and in the fantastic nature of the dying girl's delirium. The imagery, an extraordinarily potent blend of impressionism and expressionism, creates a genuinely poignant magic, confirming the director's origins in the avant-garde. (The film under review is the sonorised version. The considerably longer silent version has been lost.

The Art and Culture of Movies: The Little Match Girl (Jean Renoir ... Matt Barry from The Art and Culture of Movies, May 20, 2010

Jean Renoir’s film is an interesting departure from the previous surrealist films screened, in the sense that it tells a more or less complete narrative. The match girl clearly falls into a dream state in which she enters a kind of giant toy shop, and interacts with the toys, including the captain of the wooden soldiers, but is then menaced by Death, who appears out of a jack-in-the-box wearing a kind of “pirate” outfit with a Death skull on his hat. A chase ensues, and the girl “falls back” to reality, where onlookers (and the audience) find her frozen to death in the alley after she has used up all the matches she had to keep warm.

Where this film departs, too, is in its use of more clear imagery. Rather than racing from one surrealistic image to the next, Renoir allows the viewer to take in the remarkable “living toys”. The tragic ending provides a fascinating, stark contrast with what has come before.

La Petite marchande d’allumettes (1928) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

One Christmas time, Karen, a young match seller, shivers in the cold whilst busy middle-class people brush past her, scarcely noticing her. Overcome by the cold, Karen falls into a deep sleep and starts to dream. She finds herself in a toyshop where the toys around her – including a battalion of wooden soldiers, come to life. Karen falls in love with one of the toy soldiers, a handsome young officer who dances with her. A horseman suddenly bursts from a box and announces that he has an appointment with Karen - he is death. As a demonstration of his power, the horseman starts to kill the toys around him. With death close behind them, Karen and her new lover speed away on a horse, flying up into the clouds...

La Petite marchande d’allumettes is regarded by many critics as one of the best of Jean Renoir’s silent films. The director’s genius is revealed in the film’s remarkable fantasy sequence which – similar to the dream sequence in Renoir’s earlier film La fille de l’eau (1924) – employs an impressive array of special effects to great effect.

The film’s only noticeable flaw is – as in many of Renoir’s early films – the director’s choice of lead actress. Catherine Hessling (Renoir’s wife) lacks the girlish innocence to be at all convincing in the role of the match girl and her performance is at times vulgar and unsophisticated. It is an indication of the film’s greatness that Hessling’s miss-casting scarcely matters. The film stands as a beautiful example of a French silent cinema, having all the charm and poignancy of the Hans-Christian Andersen tale on which it is based.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] March 19, 2010

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

Month of 121 Shorts: Silent/Early Cinema 2 Brandon’s Movie Memory

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Sean Axmaker, Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

User reviews from imdb Author: plaidpotato from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: ackstasis from Australia

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: FerdinandVonGalitzien (FerdinandVonGalitzien@gmail.com) from Galiza

The Tournament (Le tournoi dans la cite)

France (90 mi) 1928

Le Tournoi Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

This epic medieval drama, detailing the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Carcassonne, would have little in common with Renoir's later, more personal and mature work, were it not for the decidedly human perspective from which he views the story. Not only is this a question of his clearly having felt rather more at home with the intimate scenes than with the action-packed spectacle; it's also a matter of his characters being far more recognisably prone to ordinary human shortcomings than are the larger-than-life heroes of more stilted epics. Indeed, his eye for telling detail was already sharp, while both the sparsely decorated interiors and the naturalistic performances lend his vision of the past a rare feeling of lived-in authenticity.

User reviews from imdb Author: plaidpotato from United States

This isn't really a Jean Renoir-originated film. It was commissioned by a historical society to commemorate 500 years of history in whichever French city it was that this was made. Portions of the film are apparently lost, and what I saw was a three-reel reconstruction made much later, probably by the BBC. It runs about 30 minutes. It kind of tells a complete story.

It's a fairly large-budget, swashbuckling costume drama set in the 16th century in the court of Catherine de Medici. She, at the time, was trying to reconcile Catholic and Protestant factions in France. She promises to marry one of her ladies-in-waiting to a prominent Protestant nobleman (who's portrayed as the bad guy in the piece), in exchange for his promoting peace. But the lady has already promised herself to a Catholic nobleman, whom she loves, and who is a good buddy of her brother's. The Protestant taunts the brother about how he's going to have his sister; they fight a secret, illegal duel, and the brother gets killed. Finally, there's a big tournament between the rival lovers, the Catholic and the Protestant, with jousting and swordplay and whatnot. The Protestant is winning. But while this is going on, the he is betrayed by a former lover, and revealed as the murderer of the brother. Catherine de Medici orders a group of her men-at-arms to arrest him, but he refuses to be taken alive. He fights to the death. As he lays dying, he asks his mother--the so-called 'Queen of the Protestants'--to forgive. But she has a vengeful look on her face... The Catholic nobleman and the lady are back together, smiling. Some dust blows in the wind. The end.

I'd be curious to know how long this film originally ran, and whether there were additional sub-plots that are now missing. What remains feels kind of skeletal in the way of those very early silent dramas of the 1900s and early 1910s--it just hits the main points of the plot and leaves the rest up to your imagination. It's not terribly engaging drama, as in scenes aren't really developed or built up to; they just sort of happen. But I guess that's to be expected if really significant portions of the film are missing. The costumes and the sets seem nice, as is some of Renoir's camera work, but the print I saw was incredibly shoddy and non-restored, barely watchable.

It's hard to judge something like this fairly, but I give it a 6/10. It's probably only of interest to Renoir completists, and maybe some history buffs.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Michael Neumann from United States

LE BLED

France (102 mi) 1929

Le Bled (1929) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

On a streamer bound for Algeria, Pierre Hofer meets and is enchanted by the beautiful Claudie Duvernet, who is travelling to Algeria to collect her vast inheritance. Claudie is being pursued by some unscrupulous relatives, including the cruel Manuel, who intend to rob her of her new-found fortune. Fortunately, Pierre is on hand to thwart their schemes...

Jean Renoir’s final silent film is this rather ordinary but nonetheless watchable mix of melodrama and comedy, which reflects the French cinema-going appetite at the time for comforting dramas in exotic colonial settings. The film was commissioned by the French government to commemorate the centenary of France’s conquest of Algeria in 1830, and this explains why the film sometimes feels like a rather laboured and overly patriotic homage to the Algerian settlers.

Bled, Le (1929) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

LA CHIENNE

aka: The Bitch

France (91 mi) 1931

La Chienne Time Out London

M Legrand (Simon), a mild-mannered, middle-aged cashier, uses painting as a means of expression, of escape from his shrewish wife and the tedium of his job. After an accidental encounter with femme fatale Lulu (Marèze), he falls madly in love, setting her up in a flat which he fills with his paintings. Lulu, who loves only her pimp Dédé (Flamant), uses Legrand as a milch-cow, and when his money runs short, starts selling his paintings as her own (with the Sunday painter ironically unaware that his work is now much sought after). Freeing himself finally from his wife, Legrand arrives at the flat, only to realise that Lulu is still bedding Dédé... Renoir's first great talkie has been described as 'an insignificant little melodrama, given unexpected vigour and depth by a sense of momentary occasion in the filming'. That is, a glorious experiment in, and exploration of, the nature of cinema. Wonderfully moving, with great performances. Remade by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street.

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] also reviewing A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

Legendary French director Jean Renoir hunkered down and got serious for this, his first real masterpiece and his most toxic movie. It's the only time he dabbled in the "low" thriller genre.

The great Michel Simon stars as Legrand, an accountant and part-time painter saddled with a shrieking harpy of a wife. He "saves" a prostitute named Lucienne (Janie Mareze) from a beating, falls in love with her and rents her a secret apartment. But she still has a thing for her "boyfriend" (a.k.a her pimp) 'Dede' (Georges Flamant) and continues to see him on the side.

Dede cooks up a scheme to sell some of Legrand's paintings with Lucienne posing as the artist and signing Legrand's work. But Legrand catches on and murders her in cold blood with Dede to hang for it. The kick-in-the-pants ending has Legrand, now a tattered tramp living in the streets watching one of his paintings (a self-portrait no less) being sold for big dough.

Even with this pulp material, Renoir manages moments of great beauty and humanity. He shot real exteriors to match his set-bound interiors, opening up the feel of the film. One great shot has Legrand entering his love nest among a group of pedestrians, gathered to listen to a street musician. The camera moves up three stories to the top floor where we see Legrand strangling Lucienne. It moves back down in time to see Legrand exiting the building, noticed by no one, and the music continuing throughout.

The new La Chienne VHS tape from Kino also comes with Renoir's great short film, the 37-minute A Day in the Country (1936), based on Guy de Maupassant's story "Une partie de campagne." The film was supposedly intended to be included in a two-part feature film, but Renoir couldn't secure funding for the second half. Nevertheless, it's one of his most beautiful films, and one in which he purposely aped his father's painting style.

A family of dopey Parisians takes a picnic in the country. A couple of country boys conspire to seduce the beautiful daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) and her mother (Jeanne Marken) by giving their respective significant others fishing poles and sending them off down the river. Henriette shares a passionate moment that haunts her the rest of her life, even after she marries the doofus from the city. Renoir weaves nature itself not just into the background, but between and within the characters and the story. (The city dwellers constantly marvel at it, talking about bugs and dirt as if they were miracles.)

La Chienne and A Day in the Country -- two masterpieces for the price of one. Try finding a deal like that on Renoir's father's work...

One Perfect Shot: La Chienne James E. Price from Kabinet magazine, also seen here: Kabinet [James E. Price]

In his excellent book Jean Renoir, The French Films, 1924-1939 (Harvard University Press, 1980), Alexander Sesonske introduces the notion of the "epitomizing shot," a single shot that "[concentrates and expresses] the whole state of character or situation at some particular moment in the film into a single moving image." Sesonske first defines this term in a discussion of Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu Saved From Drowning, 1932), and states that "From Boudu on, such shots grace the Renoir films of the thirties." In fact, the earliest (and in my opinion, most beautiful) example of such a shot can be found two films earlier, in La Chienne (1931).

La Chienne tells the story of Legrand (Michel Simon), by day an accountant, by night a henpecked husband. His wife Adele (Magdeleine Berubet) forces him to live under the shadow of her former husband, a "real man" who was killed in the war. Legrand withdraws into his hobby of painting, but here as well, Adele gives him no peace. She criticizes his work, and threatens to throw it out unless he gets rid of it. By chance, Legrand meets Lulu, the kept woman of a small-time hood. He falls for her immediately, and using his meager savings and credit, sets her up in an apartment and hangs his paintings on the walls. When Legrand's money runs out he turns first to his wife's savings, and then to his company's coffers. His embezzlement is soon discovered, and the film moves toward a tragic close.

Legrand's decision to steal to support Lulu is a crucial moment in the film, and Renoir conveys it in a single exquisitely choreographed shot. We fade up on Legrand, who is shaving by an open window. The only sound is someone playing a piano somewhere offscreen. Through the window, across the apartment courtyard, we see Adele folding laundry. Legrand glances toward her; she hastily turns away. He pauses at the sink, and then the camera tracks with him as he walks across the room. He unlocks the cabinet where his wife hides her money, pockets a few bills, and then returns to the window where he continues to shave. As the shot closes, the camera pushes toward him and pans to reveal the source of the music: a young girl is practicing by the window of a neighboring apartment. Over Legrand's shoulder we hold on her for a moment and then fade out.

This seemingly mundane situation is presented in such an elegant and magical way that the beauty of the shot stands alone. However, it obtains greater significance (and the status of an "epitomizing shot") by distilling the major elements of the film, and offering us a tight visual summary of Legrand's world. As it opens, the distance between Legrand and Adele is considerable. Adele occupies herself with the duties of maintaining a home, excluding Legrand from even observing her actions. He is shaving, probably the only display of masculinity he is permitted. Also, the act of shaving represents a kind of metamorphosis, for Legrand has begun a new life with Lulu. He is sloughing off the layers of his tired old world, and (forgive me) facing the dawn of his new world with a fresh face.

Though it is easy (and certainly arguable) to equate the unlocking of the cabinet with the freeing of Legrand's passions, it is how Renoir follows this moment that is most important. He first shows us the act of betrayal, but then immediately places it in perspective by reminding us of Legrand's motivation. For when Legrand returns to the window after stealing the money he shares the frame not with his wife, but with another woman, the young girl. But even though she is closer in space than his wife, she is distant nonetheless; she works slightly turned away, as if to hide her true identity. And all this time her soothing music, like Lulu's soothing charm, has provided an accompaniment to Legrand's action, and he continues along his course, blissful, casual, unaware.Renoir clearly intended this shot to stand alone, for he has separated it from the rest of the film with bookends of black. In isolation, it becomes simultaneously a synopsis of the story as a whole, and a key transformational moment in the arc of the main character. Using a few simple camera movements, a few changes in focus, and deliberate composition in depth, Renoir sketches for us a three-dimensional illustration of Legrand's world. In a few seconds he shows us Legrand's torments, his desperate act of self-destruction, and his ultimate hope for salvation. For dramatic and visual economy, it is unsurpassed. It is One Perfect Shot.

Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931) « The Pinocchio Theory Steven Shapiro essay from The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, October 4, 2010 (pdf format)

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

La Chienne (1931) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Cagey Films [kgeorge]

LA CHIENNE (Jean Renoir, 1931) Dennis Grunes

DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long]

CutPrintFilm [Jeremy Carr] Blu-ray

DVD Talk Blu-ray [Justin Remer]

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chuck Bowen]

Ted Prigge

Strictly Film School Acquarello

I Found It At The Movies: 1931: La chienne (Jean Renoir) Jeffrey Goodman from Moviemaker Blog, May 12, 2010

Jean Renoir - La Chienne AKA The Bitch (1931)-Cinema of the World photos from Cinema of the World

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

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Chienne, La (1931) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

New York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen here: Movie Review - - 'La Chienne' Is Story of Degradation - NYTimes.com

ON PURGE BÉBÉ

France (62 mi) 1931

On purge Bébé Time Out London

Undertaken by Renoir to prove his efficiency as a director of talking pictures, this droll adaptation of a slight, one-act farce by Feydeau is chiefly memorable for the relaxed performances and the then revolutionary sound effect of a flushed toilet. The plot revolves around a porcelain manufacturer (Louvigny) vainly trying to sell a supposedly unbreakable line in chamber-pots to a supplier (Simon) for the French army. Meanwhile, the manufacturer's idle wife (Pierry), drifting casually about their apartment in her dressing-gown, struggles to persuade their son to take a laxative. Aside from the inimitable Michel Simon as the slow-witted supplier, the film also features the first screen performance by Fernandel.

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This is Jean Renoir's first talkie and he was probably delighted to let his audience hear...the sound of a flush!Preceding "la chienne",which was Renoir's first masterpiece,"on purge bébé" is a hilarious farce which is not totally harmless. Georges Feydeau who wrote the play and was the specialist of the "théâtre de boulevard" satirized the bourgeois society, the social conventions and even the Army. Baby's dad's problem is to sell chamberpots to provide the soldiers with the comfort they deserve! But the very day M.Follavoine meets M.Chouilloux, from the ministry of war, coming to make the deal, Baby refuses to go to the toilet! So his mother Julie has got to give him a purgative. A mad mad mad story, involving a love triangle, Follavoine throwing a chamberpot through the room to test its solidity, his wife trying to get his client to have a little purgative too (so baby will understand he must take some). Renoir's intellectual fans will probably disdain it. They do not know what they are missing!

On purge bébé (1931) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Monsieur Follavoine, inventor of the world’s first unbreakable chamberpot, invites a senior civil servant, Monsieur Chouilloux, to his house to sign a contract to sell his invention to the army. At the same time, his wife, Julie Follavoine, is trying in vain to purge their young son, Toto. In the ensuing confusion, Follavoine’s chamberpots prove not to be as indestructible as he claims and Toto is not the only one who is in for some unpleasant medicine...

Jean Renoir’s most outrageous comedy, based on a stage play by Georges Feydeau, provides ample material for its comic stars to prove their worth. Marguerite Pierry, Jacques Louvigny and Michel Simon each provide a comic performance that surpasses genius, whilst a then comparatively unknown actor Fernandel unleashes his talent on an unsuspecting world. Although not as noteworthy as Renoir’s later films of the same decade, On purge bébé is nonetheless a competently realised comic farce, showing the director at his most joyously unrestrained. What links this film to Renoir’s greater films is its carefree mockery of Bourgeois respectability, and seldom does the French Bourgeoisie come in for more mockery than in this hilariously funny film, all in the worst possible taste.

NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS (La Nuit du Carrefour)

France (75 mi) 1932

La Nuit du Carrefour Tom Milne from Time Out London

The screen's first Simenon adaptation, a wonderfully impenetrable mystery in which a series of murders and murder attempts gradually unravel a tale of star-crossed love and stolen diamonds, centring on a lonely crossroads, a sleazy garage, and a semi-derelict house harbouring an enigmatic, drug-stupefied femme fatale. Shot almost entirely on location and in direct sound, with most of the action taking place at night or in permanently shrouding mists, the whole film is seen and heard as through a glass, darkly. Myth (perpetuated by Godard) has it that three reels were lost; in fact nothing is missing, except that the money ran out and undoubtedly left gaps and rough edges. The mystification is an integral part of Renoir's conception: scenes are constantly being shot past Maigret or over his shoulder, as if to focus concentration on the mysterious person or object he is contemplating, but which is seen only hazily in the background, leaving us intrigued, tantalised and little the wiser until Pierre Renoir's Maigret ('Simple! Why didn't I think of it before?') condescends to explain. Weird, hallucinating and oddly poetic, it prefigures the treacherous perspectives of the later film noir.

La Nuit du carrefour (1932) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Inspector Maigret investigates the mysterious murder of a Dutch diamond dealer, found dead in a stolen car. The car belongs to an insurance agent, Michonnet, and has been abandoned in the garage belonging to Carl Andersen. Carl’s sister, Else, is not what she seems, but is linked to a gang of ruthless crooks...

Jean Renoir is not normally associated with the crime thriller genre, but in La Nuit du carrefour he manages to turn out a more than satisfactory adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel. Whilst it is apparent that the director is still experimenting with his technique, he shows a surprising maturity and in this film he appears to be defining the ground rules for what would become one of the most popular genres in French cinema in the following decades. Renoir cast his own brother Pierre in the role of the Inspector Maigret, the second film appearance of the legendary pipe-smoking detective (the first being in Jean Tarride’s Le Chien jaune, 1932).

Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) (link lost)

Three quarters of a century on, La Nuit Du Carrefour remains obscured in the fog of both its own mystery and past audiences’ half-remembered pleasures. In more ways than one it has the air of a lost film. No subtitled print – let alone a DVD – is available* and yet past viewings linger lovingly in the memories of a few lucky souls who recall a film of extraordinary, unforgettable French noir atmosphere. This chimes neatly with the film’s production history, where the legend has been printed so often it has gained an aura of fact. This is that several reels of the finished film were misplaced (French cinephile Jean Mitry takes the rap in most accounts), leaving inexplicable gaps in the film’s plot. While this resonates nicely as a film noir anecdote with the oft-repeated lacuna in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1945), where not even Chandler could explain who offed the chauffeur, on closer examination the facts get in the way of a good story.

Georges Altman’s phrase “languorous tempo” (Andrews 279) sums up this film well, as Carrefour‘s dynamic is actually most redolent of early 1930s Hollywood horror pix, especially those of the ‘old dark house’ variety. Early on there’s some fine rhythmic editing, especially in the repetition around a city newsstand where we see the story told through successive headlines in the morning, midday and evening editions of a newspaper, all of which end up in a rain-soaked gutter, a deprecatory comment on the ephemeral nature of tabloid crime sensation. This fuses to an extent with a tone in the film’s jaunty opening credits, and occasionally popping up throughout, that seems vaguely derisory, as if laughing at the thriller genre, undercutting it as if to say ‘it’s only pulp, after all’. The villains seem to have a derisory attitude too, and their identity is bleedingly obvious well before it’s revealed, as if the ‘mystery’ doesn’t actually matter.

In an era when Hitler’s formal ascension to power was only months away, political hindsight today enables some raised eyebrows upon seeing La Nuit Du Carrefour. Its crime victims are prominently Jewish and this point is handled matter of factly, albeit tactlessly. More disconcerting is the explicit xenophobia in the French villagers that is aroused by the suspects’ Danish origins, rendered through the quasi-Teutonic accents of two Danish actors cast for just this reason, which is quite jarring in a 21^st century viewing.

Yes, there are shots of fog-enveloped roads but what seals Carrefour in the memory is its extraordinary car chase, possibly the best ever filmed, and that includes Bullitt (1968). Renoir was renowned for preferring to record live sound, warts and all, rather than dub and re-voice, and (as with Bullitt) noise is one of the secret ingredients in the exhilarating sensation of taking a point of view ride in an open Bugatti racer in the night, bullets from the pursued car aimed at our faces whizzing just overhead, corkscrewing through dark, dank country laneways of high walls giving way to open fields and back again to even narrower alleys, all the while the incredible engine note grinding, rising and moaning brutally in the most coarse and rude tone imaginable – incredible! “Gunshots shattering the darkness; the purr of a Bugatti setting off in pursuit of the traffickers… the smell of rain and of fields bathed in mist” was how Jean Luc Godard recalled the movie in 1957 in Cahiers du Cinéma, and one can see why.

It is Godard who appears to be the primary source of the now well-entrenched myth of the missing reels of film rendering Carrefour ‘s narrative incomprehensible. Sadly for the storytelling, this furphy manages to overlook the more sober history of Georges Sadoul four years earlier (p.76) who painstakingly describes the economic and production realities, whereby simply running out of money (Renoir was no businessman and was forced to sell off the inheritance of his father’s paintings to bail out his own production company) prevented necessary linking expository scenes to be shot at all. As an historian Godard has always been more an interpreter than a reliable reporter.

Overall, then, Carrefour is little more than a convoluted Hercule Poirot style mystery procedural, which even Renoir himself seemed to disdain. I hate to reduce a legend to a mere car chase, but it is an extraordinarily visceral sequence… and, anyway, some memories are best left shrouded in mists of longing.

* Kudos to Mat Kesteven of the Brisbane International Film Festival for not only securing a difficult to obtain print in 2006, but also for coordinating new English subtitles based on information supplied by the British Film Institute.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

New York Times [Herbert L. Matthews]

I Found It At The Movies: 1932: La nuit du carrefour (Jean Renoir) Jeffrey Goodman from Moviemaker Blog, May 26, 2010

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Nuit du Carrefour, La (1932) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (Boudu sauvé des eaux)

France (81 mi) 1932

Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr

Jean Renoir's effortless 1932 masterpiece is as informal, beguiling, and subversive as its eponymous hero, a tramp who is saved from suicide by a Parisian bookseller and ends up taking over his benefactor's home, wife, and mistress. Michel Simon's Boudu is one of the great creations of the cinema: he's not a sentimental, Chaplinesque vagabond, but a smelly, loutish big-city bum; all he's got going for him is his unshakable faith in his perfect personal freedom. The bookseller thinks of himself as a free spirit and a dedicated humanitarian; he wants to be both Boudu's brother and his benefactor, but the tramp resists all of his approaches. He won't be trapped in any roles; like the water of the river from which he comes (and to which he returns), his only duty is to keep moving. Shot largely on location along the quays of Paris, the film features several early experiments with deep focus and nonnaturalistic sound, though its chief stylistic feature is Renoir's incomparable way of gently shifting moods, from the farcical to the lyrical to the tragic and back again. In French with subtitles. 81 min.

rep shows - Rio Cinema Wally Hammond from Time Out London

The most startling thing about ‘Boudu’ – which is being furnished with an extended run as part of a complete retrospective of the work of, for me, the finest director of them all – is just how incredibly fresh it remains. It’s hard to believe that sound cinema was a mere five years old when, in 1932, Renoir and his collaborator, actor and producer Michel Simon brought their tale of the disruptions wreaked by a priapic Parisian tramp to fruition. The film’s extraordinary vif and spontaneity is partly explained by Renoir’s liberating approach to acting, his leisurely takes and formal experimentation (notably with sound), and partly by his use of real location – you really feel you could step right on to these bustling boulevards. Simon’s ‘Boudu’ – who’s fished out of the river following a suicide attempt by a later rueful philanthropist and given the ultimate Trinny & Susannah makeover – is a comic masterpiece and stands alongside his Père Jules in ‘L’Atalante’ as a contender for his greatest screen role. Everybody has their reasons, but Boudu’s are finally hard to divine. His libidinous anarchy may provide the director with his funniest comedy but Renoir never pretends to unravel his sometimes surreal but often dark, troubling and challenging enigma. Great stuff.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

One of Jean Renoir's earliest features, this 1932 comedy of social disaster seems brutely simple—an unschooled Parisian bum is rescued from a Seine suicide and brought into the unhappy home of a petite bourgeoisie, where chaos reigns—and is also disarmingly Renoirian. Stereotypes die in the sun of Renoir's humanism; the class conflict is never as rote as the Hollywood remake would lead you to believe. The vain and stifling middle-classers are also generous, literate (bookstore owners!), and wounded, while Michel Simon's Boudu, sporting the most outrageous movie beard of the pre-war era, is hardly just a lower-depths agent of hypocrisy- demolishing nature. In fact, Simon's performance is so choked with swallowed mutterings, inappropriate postures, and disturbing tics that you'd even hesitate to call it comic—consider it, perhaps, a pioneering portrait of Asperger's syndrome. In any case, amid the early-talkie crudeness you can see Renoir discover what it means to visually evoke the unpredictable flow of life with composition, movement, and depth. The Criterion extras include vintage French TV shows featuring Renoir, Simon, and explicator Eric Rohmer; a contemporary appreciation by Jean-Pierre Gorin; and a superb digital-video map tour of Boudu's Paris, an inspired extra to what is, in a minor key, a symphony to the city.

In Jean Renoir's La Chienne, Michel Simon plays Legrand, an inept, nebbish (married) bourgeoisie in love with a voluptuous set of damaged goods. When she laughs cruelly at his overtures and seemingly bottomless capacity to ignore her devotion to her hot-tempered criminal boyfriend, he stabs her in a pique of rage and stands idly by as the boyfriend is fingered for the crime. Despondent and wracked with guilt, Legrand slides down the economic class scale until the ending, when he is shown as a grizzled vagrant who seems almost inordinately happy with whatever bits of leftover food or pocket change he can scavenge. The social condition that ended a dark and disturbing passion play in 1931 also ignites Renoir's very next film in 1932 as an uproarious social satire, Boudu Saved from Drowning. Again, Simon plays a bum, the lasciviously named Priapus Boudu. Only instead of portraying his plight as fate's dark joke, which would probably be a natural fit for a film that begins with the man's attempted suicide in the waters of the Seine (weighted down, no doubt, by his extremely heavy Priapic genitals), Renoir juxtaposes Boudu's infinite zest against the studied mannerisms of the genial bookseller who rescues him from the waters, Edouard Lestingois.

As Lestingois rides the repercussions of his altruism to local fame and esteem, his wife Emma and maid Anne-Marie (who is also his mistress) are basically held captive when Lestingois invites Boudu into his home. Boudu first offends their sensibilities by gobbling slimy sardines with his bare hands and spitting white wine over his shoulder, then offends their sense of order and homemakers' logic with his aimless lounging, and finally offends their honor when he swoops for a piece of tail. (Though the otherwise icy Mrs. Lestingois' trembling, giggly post-coital thaw after a scene that seems to imply rape indicates that her façade of honor is only really in place with the anticipation of being toppled.) All the while, Lestingois flanks his precious bookshelves and turns a blind eye to every inconvenience, excepting the fact that Boudu's sleeping hulk on the staircase blocks his midnight access to trysts in Anne-Marie's servant chambers.

As Raymond Durgnat notes in his book-length criticism of Renoir's films, the rescued, revived, and near-refurbished Boudu represents the inherent obscenity of "state without enterprise," or at least the obscenity required to stave off the requisite suicide attempts. And, to Durgnat, Lestingois represents "enterprise without state." His marriage, his affair, his career as a bookseller, his veneration by his peers—everything that Lestingois passively accrues to sculpt the shape of his legacy is branded staid. He ignores his wife's sexual needs in order to muster up the stamina for Anne-Marie, and even then he admits that he doesn't quite have it in him. He reads his collection of first editions but doesn't use their wisdom and insight to any real action, instead giving books away to young men with more enthusiasm and potential.

For a film that is frequently characterized as an unequivocal cherry bomb dropped in the toilet of middle-class airs (a stance fuelled by Simon's blowsy, sensual, canonical performance as Boudu), Renoir's portrayal of the otherwise pathetic Lestingois is surprisingly warm. Even his character's epigrammatic punchline, "one should only rescue those of one's own class," comes from Lestingois as a bemused quip of self-deprecation. Anyway, once Boudu rejects their way of life and floats back down the river (this time, escaping back to life as a bum), it is Lestingois who gets to hold both women under his arms. Even enterprise without state can be amply rewarded in the films of Renoir—his Little Theatre ended with a similarly sunny endorsement of the ménage-à-trois. That's real humanism.

Boudu Saved from Drowning: Tramping in the City Criterion essay from Christopher Faulkner, August 22, 2005

Renoir on the Seine: Boudu Saved from Drowning on DVD - Bright ... Matthew Kennedy from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2005

DVD of the Week: Boudu Saved from Drowning | The New Yorker Richard Brody, December 7, 2010

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1967) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen

Mise-en-scene in Boudu Saved from Drowing Collapsing Columns, by Richard Abel from Jump Cut, 1975

Boudu Sauvé des Eaux - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Robin Wood from Film Reference

Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Boudu Saved From Drowning Adam Suraf [Criterion Collection]

Procrast-Nation Scratch Corwood

BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (Jean Renoir, 1932) Dennis Grunes

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) Starring: Michel Simon, Charles ... Patrick from Three Movie Buffs

About.com - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine]

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Steve Evans] Criterion Collection

Boudu Saved From Drowning : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Ian Jane from DVD Talk, Criterion Collection

Boudu Saved From Drowning - DVD review (1 of 2) Christopher Long from DVD Town, Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: Boudu Saved from Drowning Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

UpcomingDiscs.com » Blog Archive » Boudu Saved From Drowning Sean Jester

Boudu Saved From Drowning | DVD | EW.com Edward Karam from Entertainment Weekly

Boudu Saved From Drowing David Jenkins from Time Out London

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Derek Malcolm on Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning | Film ... Derek Malcolm’s Century of Films from The Guardian, September 21, 2000

Boudu Saved from Drowning – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, December 16, 2010

Boudu Saved from Drowning - review Philip French from The Observer, December 19, 2010

Boudu Saved From Drowning, review - Telegraph Sukhdev Sandhu

MADAME BOVARY

France (101 mi) 1933

Madame Bovary | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Flaubert's tale, rendered in a seldom-seen 1934 film by Jean Renoir. Eric Rohmer noted that the theatricality of the style is required by the self-conscious theatricality of the characters, particularly that of Bovary herself, the greatest self-dramatizer of literature. But Rohmer's ingeniousness doesn't quite explain away the general stiffness—deliberate, presumably, because it is so uncharacteristic of Renoir. In its original version, the film ran 210 minutes; the problems of pacing, perhaps, were not solved when it was reduced to 117. Not the best Renoir, but Renoir nonetheless—and so, very well worth seeing.

Madame Bovary Tom Milne from Time Out London

Butchered by its original distributor (who cut it by an hour), surviving in a merely adequate print, this is nevertheless superb early Renoir. Valentine Tessier, mannered and theatrical - though not inappropriately so - is something of an acquired taste as Flaubert's unfortunate provincial lady, dreaming of romance while trapped in marriage to a bovine village doctor (magnificently played by Pierre Renoir), but the direction is masterly. Making systematic (and stunning) use of deep focus, Renoir captures perfectly the eternally irreconcilable beauty and boredom of the provinces, rooting Emma squarely in lovely Norman landscapes which her pathetic yearnings for a fantasy world turn into a bleak desert.

MADAME BOVARY (Jean Renoir, 1933) Dennis Grunes

One hopes that a film version of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary will have something of the excitement of the 1856 original, whose realism refreshed the art form of the novel. Jean Renoir’s film is one of his string of 1930s masterpieces. The opening is jaw-droppingly brilliant: the camera—in this instance, Emma Bovary’s soul—turns leftward, revealing a patch of trees, in Normandy, on the grounds of country doctor Charles Bovary, eventually stopping at a clearing that allows us to see and hear, in long-shot, farm animals close to the modest house. In a single shot wife Emma’s sparkling dreaminess passes into her squawking/oinking marital reality, where the camera gets stuck.

Renoir’s sensitivity to interior space maintains the film’s great (because functional) beauty. We glimpse Emma at a distance through doorways; when Charles shows her the secondhand carriage he has bought her, even the outdoors is constrained by the open window frame through which we watch them. When her mother-in-law, who lives with the Bovarys, insults Emma, who orders her to leave the house, an archway frames the depth of blackness into which Charles’s mother disappears—a void also threatening to absorb Emma, who stands right at its edge. Women are so vulnerable in this world—a point that the recent death of Charles’s first wife underscores.

The downward trajectory of Emma’s life (adultery, financial stress, sickness, death) is rendered in all its details without excess of melodrama. Thus we are able to see, calmly, the role that money plays in ruining people’s lives. Valentine Tessier is superb as Madame Bovary—not an enigma, like Isabelle Huppert in Claude Chabrol’s fine version (1991), or a sentimentalized, mouth-twitching neurotic, like Jennifer Jones, whose ineptitude reduces Vincente Minnelli’s version (1949) to grating soap opera and inadvertent farce.

Madame Bovary (1933) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A country girl Emma Rouault marries a recently bereaved doctor, Charles Bovary, but her love for him does not endure. Whilst Bovary is happy to remain an ordinary provincial doctor, Emma yearns for better things. After her husband botches up a foot operation she loses all respect for him and starts having an affair with a wealthy philanderer, Rodolphe. She plans to elope with her new lover, but he abandons her. Worse, she has unwittingly allowed her unscrupulous dressmaker to run up an account that she can never pay off...

Although not as well known and as celebrated as Jean Renoir’s subsequent films, Madame Bovary occupies an important part in the director’s film-making career. It is certainly am ambitious film for Renoir to attempt at this stage in his career and his film is faithful to Flaubert’s novel in content and spirit (although the film was far less controversial than the novel when it was first published).

Much of Renoir’s technique is visible in embryonic form in this film, certainly his camera work. His device of filming scenes from a distance, often through an open doorway, is particularly well used here, creating the impression that the viewer is standing on the set, spying on intimate conversations.

Valentine Tessier is certainly a strong contender for the best screen Madame Bovary of all time. She captures both the tragic vulnerability and her wayward flightiness with conviction and sympathy. Her captivating performance is easily the film’s strongest point. As a result, the film’s famous tragic denouement is intensely moving, without the clumsy sentimentality or grossness which has marred other film adaptations of the story.

Charles Bovary is played by Renoir’s own famous actor brother, Pierre Renoir. His rapport with Valentine Tessier is near-perfect. With his stout oafish appearance, his Doctor Bovary is an obvious foil for his wife’s contempt and frustration. Yet we never doubt his devotion to Madame Bovary and the film’s ending is all the more tragic for that.

For the story to work, the audience must be able to sympathise equally with both Madame Bovary and her husband. Jean Renoir’s version achieves that and, despite some noticeable flaws elsewhere (some clumsy editing and wooden acting), this remains one of the most satisfying adaptations of Flaubert’s timeless novel.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

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Madame Bovary (1933) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

TONI (Les amours de Toni)

France (95 mi) 1935

Toni | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Shot on location in the French border town of Martigues with a largely nonprofessional cast, Jean Renoir's 1934 film was one of the first masterpieces of realist cinema, using the deep-focus, long-take technique that would later be developed by Rossellini and De Sica. But the sentimentalism of the story--love and revenge among a group of Italian immigrant workers--takes its toll. Renoir subsequently went a long way beyond "simple people with simple hearts," and it's a little embarrassing to see him indulging the cliches here.

Toni Time Out London

A melodrama about love and sex, jealousy and murder - the sort of staples that have kept the cinema going for ninety years or so - but Renoir invests it with a sense of character and place that gives it an unusually blunt and sensual impact. Neither romanticising his workers nor turning them into rallying-points, he accepts them as they are and follows them where they go. The plot is based on a real crime that occurred during the '20s in Martigues, a small town in the South of France where the film was shot. Jacques Mortier, an old friend of Renoir's who was the local police chief, assembled the facts, and Renoir wrote the script with another friend, art critic Carl Einstein. The results are both stark and gentle, as well as sexy: Toni sucking wasp poison from Josefa's lissome neck is a particularly fine moment.

In its opening, Toni is established as an immigrant’s story. Foreign workers (Spanish and Italian) go to the south of France to work the quarries. The opening “prologue”--it’s never announced as a prologue, but there’s an “end of prologue” card--shows the workers’ arrival. The end also shows workers arriving, three years later, after the title character, Toni, has had some adventures. Problematically, he only gets a name after the prologue’s over so it’s hard to recognize him once the first part of the film starts. Toni’s present action is three years, split into one section a year after Toni arrives and has found a place (well, a girlfriend--his landlady) and another, two years later. Because of the split, the film mostly concentrates on melodrama--there’s a love triangle (or quartet, it’s reveal is one of the film’s only decent final act moments)--but never on anything interesting. We never see Toni become friends with the other workers, even though these friendships are incredibly important to the first part of the film. There’s one character--who’s in the entire film--who doesn’t even get a name until the last scene. We also never see Toni and his landlady’s romance, which might have been nice, since--by the time we arrive--he’s a jerk and she’s a nag. There are some moments of the second romance, the one leading into the love triangle, but when the film skips two years... well, it’s just hard for them to have any resonance.

Watching the film, I thought it was one of Renoir’s earliest works, but it’s not, it’s ten years into his career. Some of the shots are the regular, wonderful Renoir shots and I was all set with a sentence about how no one composed for black and white like Renoir did. But there’s a raw element to Toni. The focus is soft when it shouldn’t be and, since it’s filmed on location and some of the actors aren’t actors (there’s a great cutaway from some worker looking straight at the camera, followed by a couple kids who can’t keep a straight face), Toni feels amateurish. None of the lead actors--except Max Dalban as the dimensionless villain--are good, which doesn’t help the film either.

The film has an interesting pace. The opening moves, the middle drags, and the end is somewhere in between. Unfortunately, the perception of the end might be affected by how bad the film is getting. When Renoir ties it into the pretty, “immigrant worker story” bow, Toni flattens, losing anything (not much) it might have been doing. Still, since the quality ranges throughout--getting worse and worse, unfortunately--and starts reasonably high, the film’s not an unpleasant experience. By the end, for example, I’d forgotten I had been expecting a lot more from Renoir.

Toni | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Although made by Marcel Pagnol’s film company back in the 1930s, Renoir’s depiction of life among the working classes in the south of France is initially closer to the modernity of Robert Guédiguian (Marius et Jeanette) than the poetically pastoral qualities of Pagnol’s bucolic idylls (La Trilogie Marseillaise, Manon des Sources). From the opening scenes, Renoir shows the south of France as a melting pot, and a potentially explosive one, attracting labourers from Italy, Spain and further abroad, all seeking to make a home for themselves wherever they can find work.

One of these economic migrants is Toni (Charles Blavette), an Italian crossing the border for work, he soon makes himself at home, sharing the bed of his landlady Marie (Jenny Hélia) and employed in a quarry. His relationship with Marie however is a tempestuous one and Toni has higher ambitions. Falling for the seductive charms of a Spanish washerwoman, Josefa (Celia Montalvan), Toni hopes to leave Marie and marry into the vineyard run by Josefa’s uncle – but he has competition for Josefa affections from the brutish charm of Albert (Max Dalban), the foreman at the quarry.

The description of Toni might sound like the typical Pagnol Provençal drama of romantic entanglements and family struggles over land and inheritance, but Renoir’s approach is much starker in its realism, basing the story on a real-life incident taken from a news story, and using the real location of Martigues and even the real-life, non-actor people of the region. For all their character flaws, it is clear that Toni and Josefa were meant to be together, and it is only their dissatisfaction with the relationships they have mistakenly and foolishly entered into that leads them to tragedy. It’s a situation that is potentially as explosive and passionate as Bizet’s Carmen. Any potential melodrama in this storyline however is downplayed in Renoir’s naturalistic filming technique, without lessening in any way the impact of the desires that have been stirred and the tragedy that will doubtless ensue. It’s an approach that, a decade ahead of its time, would prove tremendously influential on Italian neo-realism, on films like Ossessione. Luchino Visconti, indeed, was assistant director on here on Toni.

Renoir’s approach to filming this hotbed of races and passions is consequently fascinating and rather appropriate, mixing hot and cold techniques and using both actors and non-actors to temper the otherwise traditional depiction of a script that feels like a filmed melodramatic play. Thus scenes of passion are filmed from unexpected angles and in an unexpected manner, from the subtle eroticism of Toni’s removal of the Josefa’s bee sting, to the use of twisted branches and foliage to mask the Albert’s seduction of the washerwoman. Likewise key dramatic moments such as an attempted suicide and a murder are also filmed in a distant manner that is not traditional for such scenes, yet they feel authentic and no less effective. The use of musical interludes, played by a troubadour-like guitarist, also lends the film a fine sense of structure, punctuating the film at key scenes and underlining the film’s sense of being a folklore murder ballad.

The various critics on the DVD commenting on the film point out Toni’s status as the first mature Jean Renoir film, and it’s not difficult to see just how important it is, not just in Renoir’s career, but in terms of French cinema . Moving away from romanticism and filmed theatre that had been up to then traditional, and away from the stylisations of silent film, Toni strives for a documentary-like realism, using non-actors and real-life locations, and in doing so Renoir captures true human passions and conflicts in their search for betterment and for love.

Jean Renoir's Toni: Unreal and True - Bright Lights Film Journal D. J. M. Saunders, January 31, 2010

Toni (1974 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 1, 1974

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

Toni (1935) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Provence: The Ten Best Films [Sheila Johnston]

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User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, Ireland

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WSJ Film Critic Joe Morgenstern on Telluride: An Education, A ... September 18, 2009

Toni (1935) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

TONI (1974 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum Time Out London

Movie Review - Toni - Film Festival: 'Toni,' Renoir's '34 Gem:Tale ... Renata Adler from The New York Times

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Lang]

THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE (La Vie est à Nous)

France (66 mi) 1936

La Vie est à nous Time Out London

Described in its original credits simply as 'a film made collectively by a group of technicians, artists and workers' with no names appearing, La Vie est à nous was the most overt work of the French Popular Front, made by Renoir with the assistance of Jacques Becker and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others, and produced by the Communist Party. Basically a collection of documentary footage and vignettes satirising bourgeois society, offering up plenty of Communist-inspired optimism; but what marks it out from most propagandist tracts is the familiar Renoir theme of community ideals transcending social classes, expressed so eloquently in his previous feature, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. A film of its time, conceived in the shadow of Hitler, it still communicates its message with an irrepressible joy and swagger.

La Vie est à nous (1936) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

As a reaction to the rising tide of fascism that is sweeping across Europe in the 1930s, the French communist party call upon workers to support their cause and unite to ensure a better future for themselves, their families and their country. The benevolence of the PCF is illustrated through heart-warming tales of working class folk. It is thanks to the communist party that an ageing working is reinstated in his factory job, that an impoverished farm worker manages to prevent his belongings from being auctioned off, and that a young unemployed man discovers solidarity with others in his position.

Made in February and March of 1936 by a team of French Communist Party activists and sympathetic film technicians, La Vie est à nous is a bold and effective piece of party propaganda, intended to bolster the PCF’s chances in the French elections in May of that year. The film is a curious mixture of newsreel images (which both ridicule and vilify fascism), short dramatic sketches and direct party political announcements espousing the virtues of Marxist-Leninist dogma.

1936 was something of a turning point in France’s political history, marking the dramatic rise in the popularity of left-wing politics (culminating in the election of the Front Populaire) and an improvement in workers’ rights. Whilst the film may now appear dated and unsophisticated, it captures the enthusiasm and sheer unbridled optimism of the time in a way that few other records of the period do. The film’s Utopian vision of a society united behind a common cause (principally to stop fascism and support workers) would have been irresistibly attractive to the French nation when the film was made, but now appears naïve and (when one recalls the grim reality of Soviet communism) mildly disturbing.

Jean Renoir was one of a number of young directors sympathetic to the communist cause who contributed to the film. His impact can be seen throughout the film, but most notably in the opening schoolroom sequence and the short dramatic sketches illustrating the benevolence of the PCF. His style is similar to the neo-realist approach he experimented with in his earlier film, Toni . Renoir later tried to disassociate himself from the film, saying that he had little creative input and agreed to make it not because he supported the PCF but because he wanted to make a statement against fascism. Other prominent contributors to the film include Jacques Becker (who both directs and appears in the film), Jacques Brunius and Madeleine Sologne (who makes her film debut here).

The film was banned by the censor and could only be seen in private meetings, hence limiting its potential impact on the French elections in May 1936. Its greater value is in providing a powerful visual record of the time for future generations.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE

France (80 mi) 1936

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

One of Renoir's most completely delightful movies (scripted by Jacques Prévert in the euphoria of the Popular Front days), a comedy-thriller-romance about employees of a publishing firm setting up a glorious collective when their lecherous and oppressive boss suddenly goes missing. Chaos sets in when he unexpectedly reappears to reap the fruit of their success, built on the imaginative efforts of a writer of Westerns who also finds a way out of the predicament by using a gun. Fantasy, politics and gentle naturalism combine to perfection, while Renoir's sympathies for his domestic revolutionaries are so infectious as to make the film genuinely uplifting.

Classic early French cinema, Renoir using black comedy to get over his picture of working-class solidarity. A new group of workers take over the running of the publishing firm where they work after the dishonest boss (Jules Berry) leaves without warning. Their cooperative venture is successful, but trouble is inevitable when the boss returns and expects to retake control of the now-profitable operation: which is the reason that the unassuming Monsieur Lange, a writer of pulp Westerns, is forced into the eponymous crime.

Although the political elements of the film are not so immediately relevant to the modern viewer as they were to the Popular Front supporters of the time, the film is remarkable for other reasons. It was shot in an astounding 25 days, and is notable for the opposing roles, one good, one evil, played by René Lefevre and Berry, and for the 360-degree pan performed at the film's climactic moment.

It is a film with considerable charm, and this combined with Renoir's artistry make it well worth seeing.

Slant Magazine [Zach Campbell]

The Crime of Monsieur Lange may not be the most famous film made by director Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game) or by writer Jacques Prévert (Children of Paradise), but it's a film that seems to be well-loved by those who know it, and deservedly so. Made in France in 1936, it crested a wave on French Popular Front sentiment, in which a coalition of leftists and liberals organized to make a stand before the onslaught of European fascism. The moment was almost too utopian; and it didn't quite work, of course, for France succumbed and the collaborationist Vichy government betrayed every ideal the Popular Front upheld. The Crime of Monsieur Lange rings with bitter power for the latter-day viewer who knows a little of this history, but regardless, the outright charm and optimism of this film should be enough to endear it to anyone.

The story is rich and complex but very easy to follow. Amédée Lange (played by René Lefèvre) is a daydreamer in love with pulp fiction, particularly Western tales of the American West. He stays up all night writing stories about a hero named Arizona Jim. When Lange is in a bind, his boss Batala (Jules Berry), a small-time magazine publisher, insists to an investor that Lange is the hot new writer whose masterpiece will be out on the stands (judicious advertisements included) very soon. Lange starts writing his pulp stories, gleefully unaware that Batala is using him as a cover. Before long, though, Batala has to flee his creditors and leave the city, leaving Lange and the rest of the staff to their own devices (and the mercy of the creditors). In a moment of uncertainty after news of Batala's death, the community decides to run the office as a cooperative. One of the investor's sons comes along and decides it would be a good idea to fund the enterprise—even though he initially has no idea what a cooperative is. It's all very "springtime": love blooms (for Lange and others), Arizona Jim is a huge success, and the community is happy.

The downside is that the news of Batala's demise proved inaccurate—he survived the train wreck and passed as a priest for months while the cooperative prospered. On the night that Lange and his friends celebrate a potential film deal, Batala returns to reclaim "his" fortune. Renoir shot the climactic moment of Lange's inevitable "crime" in a famous circular pan, making the bizarre choice of following Lange as he enters a courtyard, but as the character approaches Batala and moves out to the right of the frame, the camera moves left, scanning the empty courtyard which is the site of the community's life and productive activity. This evokes social roots, rather than personal ones, for Lange's vengeful action against Batala. This is a strength of Renoir's—he is likely the finest filmmaker to ever link narratives of complex human beings to progressive socio-political readings. And The Crime of Monsieur Lange is an exemplum of this skill with unsurpassed charm to boot. Prévert's script is so light on its feet, so "French," what with its whimsy and deep romance and periodic invocations of the spirit of "liberté, égalité, fraternité." This is the sort of film that leaves one, smiling, with the conviction that sometimes crime does indeed pay.

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... Ronald Bowers from Film Reference

For nearly three decades Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange was a film which failed to garner the recognition it so richly deserved. At the time of its release, it was received indifferently and suffered the vicissitudes of political censorship. It was not until 1964 that the film enjoyed a U.S. release, and belatedly earned its reputation as a pivotal work in Renoir's career.

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is the film which solidified Renoir's political reputation as the film director of the left. In sympathy with France's Popular Front, this film was Renoir's statement that the ordinary working man, through united action, can overcome the tyranny of fascism. Renoir's films were always imbued with a humanism and love for all mankind. With this film he uses a small group of Parisian workers, their families and neighbors, as a microcosm for the French common man.

Lange, played by René Lefèvre, is the author of a western pulp fiction series entitled Arizona Jim. When Batala (played magnificently by the great Jules Berry), the head of the nearly bankrupt publishing company, absconds with the company funds, Lange organizes a "cooperative" with the help of the other employees. Their venture is so successful it prompts the scoundrel publisher to return in the guise of a priest and reap the monetary rewards of the cooperative. In a brave and mandatory move, the naive and humble Lange kills the publisher to prevent the destruction of their venture. Lange and his girlfriend flee the country, are caught by border guards, but allowed to go free when the girl explains the details of Lange's crime.

The script of Monsieur Lange was written by Jacques Prévert from an idea by Renoir and Jean Castanier. As with all Renoir films, the script was simply a starting point around which Renoir composed his films. To emphasize the sense of community, Renoir centers all the action on the courtyard which surrounds the publishing firm as well as the homes of the workers. Thus the courtyard becomes an integral part of Renoir's mise-en-scene, as much a character in the film as any of the actors, representing a united world which in turn evokes Renoir's philosophical aspirations for all mankind. Renoir is thus able to demonstrate the importance of the interaction of his characters for the benefit of all. The beginning of the film is devoted mostly to scenes of characters one-on-one, emphasizing the lack of any central goal. When Lange begins his efforts to form the cooperative, Renoir shifts his scenes to those of group relationships. Throughout, he uses his extraordinarily fluid and cyclical camera movements to create a unity of both time and purpose.

While Monsieur Lange is both an intriguing story of crime and an exercise in black humor, the film encompasses much more. It is an attack on class superiority and prejudice, an attack on the church, and although Lange does commit murder, it is a crime of poetic justice exonerated by the victim's avarice and the altruism of Lange's goal. Despite its indifferent reception at its release, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is today regarded as one of Renoir's best films and one which significantly captures the social consciousness of the day.

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The Crime of Monsieur Lange | Film Review | Slant Magazine Zach Campbell

Jean Renoir Triple DVD Box Set | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

DVD of the Week: The Crime of Monsieur Lange | The New Yorker Richard Brody, December 6, 2011

THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE (Jean Renoir, 1935) Dennis Grunes

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Strictly Film School Acquarello

DVD Times Gary Couzens also reviews LA BÊTE HUMAINE and LA GRANDE ILLUSION

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User reviews from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

Movie Review - Le Crime de Monsieur Lange - Screen: 2 French ... Bosley Crowley from The New York Times

THE LOWER DEPTHS (Les Bas-fonds)

France (95 mi) 1936

Les Bas-Fonds Time Out London

The location of Renoir's adaptation of Maxim Gorki's play is not identified, but from the distinctive acting styles the feel is very French, with the enclosed world of a studio-built courtyard suggesting the dark side to his earlier success, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. But rather than building on a feeling of community, the characters assembled - among them an actor, a drunk, a fallen baron - exist more as individuals looking for a way to escape. Gabin and Jouvet are their usual glorious selves, though the tendency towards pessimism makes this one of Renoir's less rewarding films.

Another ingenious double bill from Criterion, this set slams together the 1936 French version of Maxim Gorky's theatrical yowl directed by Jean Renoir, and the 1957 Japanese adaptation by Akira Kurosawa. Both filmmakers were thick in their careers' peaking phases, and both films are miracles of deep-image composition and plan-séquence eloquence. In any other sense, the films couldn't differ more. Gorky's pre-revolutionary tantrum about class injustice and institutionalized poverty naturally proved to be timeless (though never as scandalous as in 1902 Russia). But, customarily, Renoir sought out balance and humanistic sympathy, reshaping the narrative so the thief (Jean Gabin) and the Baron (Louis Jouvet) bond over their mutual rebellion against the social system. The text's pre-Socialist message morphed into a tale of friendship and individualism, and according to Renoir, Gorky liked the changes. Kurosawa's vision, while more faithful to the play, is even more dire than Gorky's—the flophouse inhabited by self-deluding lowlifes is here, literally, a 19th-century shit-hole, almost Beckettian in its abstracted dehumanization. Supplementing the diptych is a fascinating array of essays, commentaries, and dossiers, including footage of Renoir himself introducing his film, and the obligatory episode from the superlative 2003 Japanese TV series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create.

filmcritic.com Jake Euker

Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths was released in 1936, a brief historical moment before his Grand Illusion of 1938 and The Rules of the Game of 1940. The latter pair of films long ago joined the pantheon of enduring cinema, glittering agelessly in textbooks and on the programs of festivals in the rarified company of titles such as The Battleship Potemkin and The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Lower Depths both gains and loses by its proximity to Renoir’s later masterpieces: It’s not one of them them, but the same guy made it. It’s tempting to think of the film as merely a lot of fun. But then again, something else is working here, too.

Adapted from Maxim Gorky’s original play, The Lower Depths follows the tawdry goings-on of a group of flophouse denizens whose lives are complicated by love, crime, a pair of unsavory landlords, and above all poverty. The primaries in this cast of miscreants are the thief Pépel (Jean Gabin), a baron whose taste for games of chance has stripped him of his wealth (Louis Jouvet), the miserly landlord and sometime fence for Pépel's goods (Vladimir Sokoloff), his shrill wife (Suzy Prim), and her beautiful and available sister (Junie Astor). An alcoholic actor, a prostitute with a longing for true romance, and a pilgrim of questionable sagacity function as secondaries. Driving the action is a complicated love affair being conducted by Pépel and the landlady; she's in love, he isn't. Or rather, he is, but not with her. The object of his true affections is her lovely sister Natasha.

Described this way, the plot sounds heavy-going, but in fact Renoir brings to the proceedings his usual, singular humanity and a sure balance of lightheartedness and gravitas. In this, he's abetted inestimably by the faultless cast he's assembled. Gabin, a handsome matinee idol of 1930s France, conveys the essential dignity of the down-and-out blue collar hero, despite his occupation as house-breaker; his scenes with Jouvet, a comic marvel as the debauched baron, are buddy film material taken to a plane of ethereal sophistication. Astor is a real beauty, and playing Gabin's true love she's both vulnerable and not, as Katharine Hepburn often was. (Had this film been in English, I suspect that her likeness would be familiar around the world to this day.) As the landlords, Sokoloff and Prim radiate distinct yet significant threat.

But Renoir's greatest gift was his extraordinarily limpid directorial style. In The Lower Depths he draws attention to himself more than usual, primarily through the use of some very amusing camera work; when Jouvet is introduced, for instance, the camera circles his unapologetic -- even amused -- form as he is upbraided for his debts, and a pair of extraordinary tracking shots bracket a disastrous visit to a restaurant by our hero and his drunken girl. Yet even given these, the extent to which Renoir absents himself is remarkable. What director could show a similar restraint today?

The Lower Depths was also adapted to the screen by Akira Kurosawa in 1957, and both versions of the film, with a generous supply of extras, are newly available from the Criterion Collection. Of these, Renoir's take on the story gets my nod, but both versions have been hard to find, and I'm grateful to Criterion for the chance to compare.

Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths Criterion essay from Alexander Sesonske, December 30, 2003

Images Journal David Gurevich, Criterion Collection

Plumbing the Depths: Renoir and Kurosawa Do Gorky - Bright Lights ... Criterion Collection, Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2005

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

Les Bas-fonds (1936) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Journal DSH, Criterion Collection

The Lower Depths (1936) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Nathaniel Thompson, Criterion Collection

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

THE LOWER DEPTHS (Jean Renoir, 1936) Dennis Grunes

The Lower Depths (1936, Jean Renoir) Brandon’s Movie Memory

DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron, Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: The Lower Depths (1936) & The Lower Depths (1957) Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

About.com [Ivana Redwine] - The Lower Depths DVD Review Criterion Collection

Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Michael Belkewitch, Criterion Collection

DVD Authority Criterion Collection

I Found It At the Movies: 1936—Les bas-fonds (Jean Renoir ... Jeffrey Goodman from Moviemaker Blog, December 3, 2010

⚛ Jean Renoir: The Lower Depths (Les Bas-fonds) Atomized, March 31, 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: aliasanythingyouwant from United States

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Time Out London: Geoff Andrew

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (Une Partie de Campagne)

France (40 mi) 1936

Supposedly left unfinished, but filming was in fact completed, except that the producers wanted Renoir to expand to feature length; he was reluctant, other things intervened, then the war, and the film was finally released in 1946 with the addition of a couple of titles. It may be only a featurette, but this masterly adaptation of a Maupassant story is rich in both poetry and thematic content. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancé for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. The careful reconstruction of period (around 1860) is enhanced by a typically touching generosity towards the characters and an aching, poignant sense of love lost but never forgotten. And, as always in Renoir, the river is far, far more than just a picturesque stretch of water. Witty and sensuous, it's pure magic.

FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]

Jean Renoir’s cinematic gem (based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant) effectively conveys a world of innocence and loss within a span of only forty minutes. While not much happens narratively (a family goes to the country for the day; a young woman engaged to an insipid clerk [Paul Temps] develops a powerful yet hopeless crush on a man from a different social class), Renoir manages to use these simple elements to show how prescribed our lives are, and how escaping from our normal existence for even a day can show us what we may be missing — but ultimately can’t have.

Because Henriette’s mother is also (happily) wooed on this fateful day, Renoir is able to skillfully present a lifetime conflated into one afternoon: while Henriette is young, emotional, and naïve, the older Juliette sees her “fling” as a welcome (if temporary) break from her bourgeois existence; indeed, she considers it a game to try to cuckold her boring husband for the afternoon, keeping him busy with the faux-machismo of fishing while she pursues headier activities with a “real” man. In the end, however, life goes on as it inevitably will: the family returns to Paris; Henriette marries her clerk; and Rodolphe (D’Arnoux) is left behind as a mere memory of an alternate (yet ultimately impossible) existence.

Une Partie de Campagne - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Charles L. P. Silet from Film Reference

André Bazin, in his unfinished study of Jean Renoir, described Une partie de campagne as a "perfectly finished work," one that is not only faithful in letter and spirit to the Maupassant story from which it was adapted but also actually improved by Renoir's additions and refinements to the original tale. This is high praise, indeed, when one realizes that the film's completion was highly problematic. Many of Renoir's films have had checkered careers, but none was quite so confusing as Une partie de campagne . Renoir originally intended to shoot a 35- or 40-minute story which he would make, he wrote later, just as if it were a full-length film. Renoir chose a gentle, 19th-century tale and planned to spend a relaxed summer filming along the banks of the Loin near Marlotte, an area he knew extremely well. The entire experience should have provided him, as Alexander Sesonske has described it, with a "brief and pleasant respite in mid-career." Despite the rainiest summer in memory, an extremely volatile political climate, tensions on the set and the fact that the film sat for nearly 10 years waiting for its final editing, Une partie de campagne is a remarkably fine film, some say a masterpiece; Sesonske thinks that no Renoir film seems "more unstudied, more a pure flow of life caught unaware."

There are sound reasons for the film's critical success: it is a film of uncommon gentleness and beauty, and it forms less of a "respite" in Renoir's career than a concentration of his most important themes and images: the river, the countryside, the loving scrutiny of bourgeois life. Une partie de campagne forms a poetic centre for Renoir's French films. Rather than a sense of diversion, the film reflects a completeness. Renoir's rendering of his subject matter is incisive, his style mature, his vision complete; it is a seamless work of art. Many critics have called attention to the film's impressionistic quality, suggesting that it is a homage to the director's father, the painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. Indeed, impressionistic moments do grace the film—but for one to try to understand it as an attempt by the son to do what the father had already done with paint and canvas is to sadly underestimate the qualities of the movie. The "painterly" look of the films of Renoir fils have done much to strengthen his popular image as a director of surfaces, much to the detriment of his standing as a filmmaker of depth and perception.

The shortness of the film also has strengthened the perception of Renoir as an impressionistic filmmaker, and many critics today still respond to the film as incomplete, an interesting but unfinished experiment. The fact that Renoir left two scenes from the Maupassant story unshot has been used as evidence for regarding the film as a fragment, and considering Renoir's relative fidelity to the events of Maupassant's tale, it is an understandable, if mistaken, conclusion. Published versions of the screenplay for those "missing" scenes have further confused the issue. However, closer examination of the relationship between the story and the film will dispel such misconceptions. Renoir wrote in his autobiography, My Life and My Films , that when he was asked to increase the original footage to feature length, he refused because he felt that it would have been contrary to the intent of Maupassant's story and to his screenplay to lengthen it. Moreover, what many critics have failed to notice is that Renoir, although he adapted the events of the fiction faithfully, greatly altered the story's tone, which allowed him to drop the final scenes from the completed film without leaving the project incomplete.

Maupassant's tantalizingly brief tale is largely satiric in tone. He makes fun of the pretensions and foibles of his bourgeoisie often rather harshly; the natural setting is kept in the background; and the atmosphere of the country is diminished. Renoir not only places greater emphasis in the rural atmosphere and setting but also makes a film that by bringing such natural elements into the foreground turns Maupassant's rather strident attack on the Dufort family into a compassionate and understanding film about unrecoverable moments and the inevitable sadness of the loss of innocence and love. As André Bazin has noted, such changes do improve the original. The story is given a resonance, the characters motivation, and the ending a poignance lacking in the fictional source. As Pierre Leprohon has described it: "there is an overflowing tenderness, and extraordinary responsiveness to the existence of things, and a transformation of the commonplace into the sublime." In Une partie de campagne , Renoir has created a poetic compression of those things that he holds dear, which is one of the reasons the film evokes such fond memories and responses from its viewers. Although unhappy and somewhat ironic, the ending is nevertheless not unhopeful. Life and the river will both flow on and be renewed.

The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an ... Richard Armstrong from The Film Journal, 2002

I first saw Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne early on a late August evening in 1979. The director died that February, and the BBC was running a tribute to his work. Renoir's film chronicles a tentative love affair as it buds somewhere along the banks of the Seine over a single summer afternoon in 1860. As summer turned to autumn that evening, I remember being peculiarly aware of the thinning light.

Renoir's fleeting idyll nearly become one of the cinema's great 'films maudits', or lost films. Shooting began on the banks of the then-unspoilt Loing in that joyous Popular Front summer of 1936 by a happy crew of Renoir regulars, relatives and friends, but the production became so delayed by rain and bad light that Renoir had to move onto his next film. Partie de campagne was eventually abandoned. However, producer Pierre Braunberger so liked the footage he had seen that by 1946 Renoir's editor and former lover Marguerite Houllé-Renoir had reconstructed a viable print.

Although based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, in so many ways Partie de campagne is a quintessential Renoir film, and a tribute to the Second Empire world of his father, the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. A Paris ironmonger and his family, the Dufours, have a day out. They meet two young men Rodolphe and Henri. In holiday mood, M Dufour and his daughter Henriette's fiancé Anatole go off to fish, while Henriette and her mother go boating with the young men. Whilst Mme Dufour enjoys a carefree fling with Rodolphe, Henri and Henriette row to a secluded island where, to the song of a nightingale cock courting a hen, they sit alone together…

Suffused with the rhythms of nature, Partie de campagne is a sensuous and lyrical film. Notice how Renoir's nephew Claude's camera trails alongside the lovers as if enticing them to follow this affection wherever it leads. Later, to the strains of Germaine Montero's lilting theme tune, rain sweeps across the river, as ever Renoir's metaphor for the intricacy of experience. As critic Philip Kemp in his engaging commentary explains, the director's use of deep focus foresaw Gregg Toland's and you can feel that humility before the world that André Bazin so appreciated in Renoir. (It comes as little surprise that Luchino Visconti, who foretold the Italian neo-realism that Bazin loved, was one of Renoir's assistants). Others included postwar directors Jacques Becker - Touchez pas au grisbi - Yves Allégret - Dédée d'Anvers - and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who published photographs taken on the Renoir set.

Whilst Rodolphe and Mme Dufour play at love, Henri and Henriette find love itself, the camera catching their kiss as if closing in on a butterfly leaving the chrysalis. "Years passed with Sundays as bleak as Mondays. Anatole married Henriette, and one Sunday …", a title reads, priming us for the film's bittersweet ending. As Henriette, the dark-haired Sylvia Bataille's face lights up with girlish joy while her body seems to quiver with longing. Evoking the girl in Renoir père's canvas La Balançoire, the camera gets up close, involving us in Henriette's jouissance. As Kemp tells us, Renoir made Partie de campagne partly as an excuse to take close-ups of Bataille, an actress whose transitions from sadness to joy may remind contemporary audiences of the wistful Samantha Morton of Sweet and Lowdown (1999). As Henri, the doleful Georges Saint-Saëns looks forward to the tragic Jean Gabin of the French Poetic Realist films that so reflected the gathering storm of the late-30s.

As they waited for the weather to settle, the crew played cards and drank wine. In precious few films did a leisurely shoot and relaxed performances result in such serendipity. Additional footage and outtakes discovered decades after the film's release and included here courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française catch something of this ineffable spirit. Partie de campagne remains happy, funny, touching and sad.

A Day in the Country: Jean Renoir’s Sunday Outing Criterion essay by Gilberto Perez, February 11, 2015

A Day in the Country (1936) - The Criterion Collection

Partie de campagne • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, July 11, 2010

French poetic realism – an analysis of Renoirs “A day in the country ... Manuela Gilke, February 4, 2012

David Reviews Jean Renoir's A Day in the Country [Criterion Blu-ray ... David Blakeslee from Criterion Cast

Videophiled: Jean Renoir takes 'A Day in the Country' - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, February 15, 2015

'A Day in the Country' Hits Criterion: Jean Renoir's Universe of Emotions Peter Labuza from Film Stage, February 17, 2015

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

Partie de campagne (1936) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

"A Day In The Country" · Film Review Jean Renoir's “A Day In The ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

“A Day in the Country” Was Never Completed, But It Is A Classic ... Alex Bauer

Desire: A Day in the Country (1936) - Streamline | The Official ... R. Emmett Sweeney

A Day in the Country Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

A Day in the Country Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

A Day in the Country, Renoir, 1936 | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West, Criterion Blu-Ray

A Day in the Country | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

A Day in the Country (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Oktay Ege Kozak, Criterion Blu-Ray

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: Kirk Miller from Norwich, England

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User reviews from imdb Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

User reviews from imdb Author: Richard Burin from advicetothelovelorn.blogspot.com

Une Partie De Campagne (1936) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

Adaptation of the week A day in the country - The Guardian Andrew Pulver

'A Day in the Country' and 'Kiss Me, Stupid': Amour by the Seine and ... J. Hoberman from The New York Times, March 20, 2015

A Day in the Country Blu-ray - Sylvia Bataille - DVD Beaver

Partie de campagne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Renoir - Renoir : Partie de Campagne French language website

GRAND ILLUSION (La Grande Illusion) A 100

France (114 mi) 1937

La Grande Illusion Tom Milne from Time Out London

Renoir films have a way of talking about one thing while being about another. La Grande Illusion was the only one of his '30s movies to be received with unqualified admiration at the time, lauded as a warmly humane indictment of war, a pacifist statement as nobly moving as All Quiet on the Western Front. Practically nobody noted the irony with which this archetypal prison camp escape story also outlined a barbed social analysis, demonstrating how shared aristocratic backgrounds (and military professionalism) forge a bond of sympathy between the German commandant (von Stroheim) and the senior French officer (Fresnay); how the exigencies of a wartime situation impel Fresnay to sacrifice himself (and Stroheim to shoot him) so that two of his men may make good their escape; and how those two escapees (Gabin and Dalio), once their roles as hero-warriors are over, will return home reduced being working class and dirty Jew once more. The Grand Illusion, often cited as an enigmatic title, is surely not that peace can ever be permanent, but that liberty, equality and fraternity is ever likely to become a social reality rather than a token ideal.

Boston Phoenix [Chris Fujiwara]

With the discovery of the camera negative of Jean Renoir's 1937 Grand Illusion, we can now see this classic -- long available only in soft, contrast-deficient copies -- in a clear, crisp print with deep blacks and subtle grays. The new print makes the world of the film richer and fuller. "World" is a key word in discussing Renoir: his fluid, multilayered movies convince you that their architectural, natural, and behavioral landscapes are parts of wholes that recombine to infinity beyond the edges of the screen.

Set during World War I, Grand Illusion is about three captured French officers (Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, and Pierre Fresnay) and how they try to escape from German POW camps. Their adventures illuminate the enforced democratization of the war. Renoir shows people acting the way we want to think we'd act in their situations: that's why we're stirred when British officers in drag, apprised of a French military victory, break out with La Marseillaise in the middle of a theatrical performance, or when a German guard gives Gabin a harmonica, or when Gabin and Dalio hug each other goodbye before setting out on their final trek toward the Swiss border. As good as they become and as much as they love freedom, these men will go on killing each other -- that's the pessimism at the core of Renoir's humanism.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Candace Wirt

In the spring of 1937, master director Jean Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION premiered in his country to general acclaim. However, when the Nazis invaded only three years later, Joseph Goebbels declared the film to be "Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1." He seized the original negative, which finally resurfaced over fifty years later in a pile of boxes that traveled from Moscow to the Cinematheque de Toulouse. Renoir adapted GRAND ILLUSION from his friend Major Pinsard's reminiscences as a pilot during World War I. In the beginning of the film, Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) captures Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and his lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) and transfers them to a prisoner of war camp. At the camp, Boeldieu, Marechal, and their friends while away the time by gardening, playing cards, and performing theater. They also dig a tunnel to escape and return to the front. But, before succeeding, the Germans transfer them to von Rauffenstein's fortress, where they devise a new plan for escape. Although the rules are strict within the camps, the soldiers treat the prisoners quite well and, amazingly, a true camaraderie develops between them. This French filmmaker depicts the German soldiers--especially von Rauffenstein--and citizens as humane. It begs the question: Why did Renoir create this image of the German people in the face of Nazism? Why did he make this film? In watching GRAND ILLUSION, the viewer reflects on its title and the any number of things to which it alludes. The film remains known today for its expression of man's humanity, but is such possible in war? For me, the grand illusion is our humanity, which we have yet to realize.

Edinburgh U Film Society [Katia Saint-Peron]

Unfailingly, this movie by Jean Renoir (son of painter Auguste) earns near-top billing in every cinephile’s list of the greatest films of all time. Called “cinema enemy number one” by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels yet named by cinema maven Orson Welles as the first work he would rescue, if forced, for posterity, Grand Illusion can be all things to all people. That’s the beauty, not the folly, of this deeply anti-war movie – and the films of Jean Renoir in general. Renoir always makes you understand that everyone has reasons for behaving as they do. Everyone. Yet Renoir’s films transcend mere sociology: They’re astute and observational but hardly analytic and antiseptic. Renoir is the great humanist of the cinema, the one who shows the vast array of perspectives and the validity of individual points of view. As a result, we see in Renoir’s films how the variables of class, sex, nationality, religion, and disposition all contribute to the vagaries of who we are and how we see things. Set in a WWI POW camp, La Grande Illusion reveals the differences and similarities among the prisoners of various nationalities and their German captors. The director Erich von Stroheim plays the camp commander as a stiff Prussian aristocrat in a neck brace, an image that has become iconographic over the years. The seeds of many other movies can also be seen in Grand Illusion – The Great Escape and Stalag 17 obviously – but also such things as Casablanca and Black Mama, White Mama And in the virile good looks of Jean Gabin, we can see shades of Steve McQueen, “the Cooler King of The Great Escape. Although the film dates itself in some ways, by the latter half the film hits its real stride. This new print was struck from the original negative, which was secured for safekeeping behind enemy lines until well after the end of the war. Grand Illusion has never looked this lustrous. (In French, with new English subtitles.)

In 1916, two French aviators, Captain Boeldieu (an officer) and Lieutenant Marechal (a mechanic), are captured by the Germans after their aircraft has been shot down. They are taken to a prisoner-of-war camp where they share the fate of French, English and Russian soldiers of many different social backgrounds. To find a way to escape becomes their sole obsession. After a succession of narrowly failed attempts, the main characters of this episode of the Great War are transferred to a gloomy fortress from which escape is theoretically impossible. The commander of the fortress is a German officer of the aristocracy. Although he does his job thoroughly, he dislikes it, and has a critical view of the war. He fraternizes with the French officer whose tastes he shares...

La Grande Illusion is Jean Renoir's masterpiece, and is certainly his most famous and most popular film. Ever since its release, despite being banned in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it has enjoyed a considerable success and was hailed as one of the world's best films. Its strengths lie in an effective and harmonious blend of comical, satirical, dramatical and sentimental scenes, a solid performance delivered by a fantastic cast including Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay and Eric von Stroheim, and in the deeply human issues it focuses on. La Grande Illusion is more of a social study than anything else. In it, Renoir shows that people are less separated by their nationality - for which wars are fought - than by their social classes. Thus does Boeldieu find that he has more in common with his German captor than with his compatriot.

Renoir has been criticised for being over-optimistic by portraying only the good characters in his film. True, for all their different personalities, they are all a paragon of duty, honour and generosity, a little too perfect perhaps. However, the title he chose suggests otherwise and has a prophetic quality considering the film was released just two years before the start of World War II.

"One of the undeniably great films in the history of world cinema, Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion is an eloquent commentary on the borders that divide people, classes, armies and countries." - Virgin

100 films Lucas McNelly

The first World War and several French officers, among them Lt. Maréchal (Jean Gabin), Capt. de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), and Lt. Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), have been captured by German forces and escorted to a prison camp where they quickly go about the business of planning an escape. The obvious choice, seeing as how the Germans have provided rudimentary gardening tools, is to tunnel for freedom, but the day before the tunnel is completed, the prisoners are rotated and our three heroes moved to their new home--an old Bavarian fortress, high and impregnable. It is here that Boeldieu is reunited with Capt. von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), a pre-war acquaintance who laments that a man with such high breeding as Boeldieu should be subjected to such conditions. Rauffenstein is a kind warden but, as Boeldieu says "prisons are made for escaping", so they set about planning their early release.

Even if Jean Renoir's La Grande illusion is not the first anti-war film ever made, it is certainly one of the best for the simple fact that it assumes we understand how awful war is. There is no gruesome battle footage, no stirring calls for peace, and no indication that anyone in the film thinks the war to be a remotely good idea. But both sides accept it as something they must endure, much in the same way we view traffic jams--as a nuisance beyond anyone's control. When they talk of reaching neutral Switzerland there are no dreams of hiding in a small village until the fighting ends. They speak almost reluctantly of rejoining the fight, not because of any intrinsic desire to shed blood or an overt sense of nationalism, but simply because they haven't allowed themselves to consider an alternative. To stop fighting because they've escaped is to them as rational as quitting a job to avoid rush hour. Sure, it's possible and may even be an idea with merit, but it isn't at all practical.

Likewise, they could wait out the war in the German camps where they are permitted gardens, entertainment, and virtually unfettered access to parcels full of food and wine. As far as wartime lifestyles go, it is a pretty good one, and there isn't any shame in being a prisoner of war (in fact, it probably comes with a great deal of respect once the war is over), yet their singular focus is to escape. But why? Because it is sworn duty to fight, and nothing surpasses a man's sworn duty. Or, as James Donald put it in The Great Escape (1963), "it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they can't, it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability."

That being said, what makes La Grande illusion remarkable isn't the officer's sense of duty, but rather Renoir's exploration of humanity in the midst of war. A major theme of the film's first half revolves around war's ability to realign traditional class structures. That is, it levels the field, for there are no aristocrats or peasants in foxholes, only soldiers (Of course, you could argue that aristocrats don't end up in foxholes nearly as often as peasants, but that's an altogether different issue). Still, there's a natural tendency to cling to those old labels, even in a concentration camp. Rauffenstein, recognizing in Boeldieu a fellow member of high society and wishing to not be viewed as a "German barbarian", affords Boeldieu certain liberties not available to the likes of Maréchal and Rosenthal. He invites Boeldieu to join him for dinner and is willing to trust his honesty, rather than employing the usual methods of searching a prisoner's quarters. They form a sort of friendship based on a mutual civility, enemies finding a small corner of kindness in the brutality of war. But this being war, Boeldieu is forced to use this kindness as an opportunity to facilitate an escape for his countrymen and fellow officers. It is a selfless act that is both daring and grand. Once again, duty reigning supreme.

In the end, you realize that on so many levels La Grande illusion isn't about war at all, but instead is about humanity's ability to connect with each other despite their numerous differences, that two people in a room, stripped of their titles and their nationalities and their wealth and everything else, are simply two people in a room and they must learn to see each other for who they are, not what they are. It matters little if you're French or German or British or American because all that is superficial and man-made, just like the lines on the map that determine where you are. Are Maréchal and Rosenthal any more free recovering in a German farmhouse then they would be in Switzerland, or are they just on the wrong side of an imaginary line? Perhaps it's fitting that in World War II, when the Germans invaded France, Goebbels had the film confiscated in an attempt to destroy it, but Frank Hansel, a Nazi officer, managed to smuggle it to Berlin and preserve it for future generations. A brave and selfless move by Hansel, to be sure, a case where life imitates art and a German saves the legacy of a Frenchman, even though they are on different sides of an imaginary line.

Grand Illusion by Pauline Kael (link lost)

In form, La Grande Illusion is an escape story; yet who would think of it this way? It's like saying that Oedipus Rex is a detective story. The great work transcends the usual categories. La Grande Illusion is a perceptive study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during Word War I. The two aristocrats, the German prison commander von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) and the captured French officer de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), share a common world of memories and sentiments. Though their class is doomed by the changes which have produced the war, they must act out the rituals of noblesse oblige and serve a nationalism they do not believe in. The Frenchman sacrifices his life for men he does not really approve of—the plebian Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and the Jew Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio). These ironies and ambiguities give genuine depth to the theme—fraternization, and the illusions of nationality.

La Grande Illusion had an immediate, idealistic aim. Hitler was about to move into Austria and Czechoslovakia: another war was imminent. Renoir hoped to reawaken in the German people the spirit of comradeship that had developed toward the end of World War I, when he had been in a prison camp. "I made La Grande Illusion because I am a pacifist," Renoir said in 1938, but already his hopes for the film had been destroyed. The new Nazi nationalism was more frenzied and irrational than the nationalism he had argued against. Goebbels had already banned the movie in Germany; by the summer of 1940, the Nazis were in Paris, and the prints were confiscated.

By then Renoir had fled France, and he thought that La Grande Illusion, having failed in its purpose—to guide men toward a common understanding, having failed even to reach the men he was addressing—would be as ephemeral as so many other films. But La Grande Illusion is poetry: it is not limited to a specific era or a specific problem; its larger subject is the nature of man, and the years have not diminished its greatness.

Although the message of La Grande Illusion is in its hope for international brotherhood, compassion, and peace, it is also an elegy for the death of the old European aristocracy. It's rare for a man who aligns himself with the rising working classes to perceive the beauty and elegance of the decaying elite and the way of life that is finished no matter which countries win the war. Compare Renoir's treatment of the career officers with, say, Eisenstein's in Potemkin, and you have the measure of Renoir's humanity. Eisenstein idealizes the proletariat, and cruelly caricatures the military; Renoir isn't a sociologist or a historian who might show that there were heroes and swine in both groups—he simply isn't concerned with swine. His officers—von Rauffenstein and de Boeldieu—were at home in the international sportsmanship of the prewar world, but the skills, maneuvers, courage and honor that made military combat a high form of sportsmanship are a lost art, a fool's game, in this mass war. The war, ironically, has outmoded the military. These officers are commanding men who, in their terms, are not even soldiers; the fighting itself has become a series of base humiliations. They have lost sympathy with the world; they have lost even their self-respect. All they have left is their sense of the rules of the fool's game—and they play by them. Von Rauffenstein's grief at his slaughter of de Boeldieu is so moving and painful because von Rauffenstein knows the stupidity and waste of it. When he cuts the sprig of geranium, the only flower in the fortress, it is for the death of nobility—and his own manhood. (Von Stroheim had used the geranium in the fortress scene of Queen Kelly—but the flower wasn't cut off, the whole picture was.) Von Rauffenstein and de Boeldieu are in a great romantic tradition: Cyrano had his plume, they draw on their white gloves, perhaps the district officer in Kenya dressed for dinner even when his only guests might be Mau-Mau. They go in style.

Maréchal, the mechanic who has become an officer, has no sense of style—he is uneasy in the presence of urbanity and polish; but he is the common man raised to his finest qualities: he has natural gallantry. Perhaps it is not going to far to suggest that Renoir is a bit like Maréchal, with his joy in life, his survival power. Renoir gives more of himself than an aristocrat would think proper. He has none of that aristocratic reserve, the attitude that what you don't express is more important than what you express. But, unlike Maréchal, Renoir is an artist: he celebrates the life that Maréchal lives.

To a generation unfamiliar with the young Gabin and the young Fresnay, a generation that thinks of von Stroheim in terms of his legendary, ruined masterpieces, the performances of these three actors are fresh and exciting—three different styles of acting that illuminate each other. The miracle of Gabin's performance in this type of good, simple-hero role is that you're not aware of any performance. With Fresnay and von Stroheim, you are, and you should be; they represent a way of life that is dedicated to superbly controlled outer appearances. Try to imagine an exchange of roles between, say, Gabin and Fresnay, and you see how "right" the casting and acting are. This is true, also, for the lesser roles: a few words and we know the worlds of these characters, who speak in their own tongues—French, German, or English, and who embody their backgrounds, classes, and attitudes.

In cinema there is the artistry that brings the medium alive with self-conscious excitement (Eisenstein's Potemkin, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane) and there is the artistry that makes the medium disappear (La Grande Illusion, De Sica's Shoeshine). La Grande Illusion is a triumph of clarity and lucidity; every detail fits simply, easily, and intelligibly. There is no unnecessary camera virtuosity: the compositions seem to emerge from the material. It's as if beauty just happens (is it necessary to state that this unobtrusive artistry is perhaps the most difficult to achieve?). The characters, the dialogue, the fortress, the farm, the landscape, all fuse into the story and the theme. The result is the greatest achievement in narrative film. It's a little embarrassing to state this so baldly, but La Grande Illusion, like Renoir's earlier, but very different, Partie de Campagne, is just about a perfect work (in fact, I can't find a flaw in it). There was no reason for Renoir to tap this vein again. His next great work was the tragi-comic carnal chase, La Règle du Jeu, which accelerates in intensity until it becomes a macabre fantasy.

It is not difficult to assess Jean Renoir's position as a film director: he is the master of the French school of naturalistic cinema. Even the best works of Feyder, Carné, Duvivier, Pagnol, don't have the luminosity of the great Renoir films. (It is one of those ludicrous paradoxes of fame that, even in film reviews, Renoir is commonly identified as the son of the great Impressionist, as if his own light, which has filled the screen for almost four decades, were not strong enough to prevent confusion.) How can his special radiance be explained? Perhaps it's because Renoir is thoroughly involved in his films; he reaches out toward us, he gives everything he has. And this generosity is so extraordinary that perhaps we can give it another name: passion.

Grand Illusion Criterion essay by Peter Cowie, November 22, 1999, also here: Criterion Collection film essay [Peter Cowie]

J. D. Salinger, Movie Lover Lillian Ross from The New Yorker, February 3, 2010, also seen here: remembrance

La Grande Illusion The Film Sufi

The Tour of the Fortress in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion – a Scene Analysis The Film Sufi

Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion | AHA James J. Sheehan from Perspectives on History, March 2008

World War I film La Grande Illusion | New Republic David Thomson, June 27, 2014

La Grande Illusion film review • Senses of Cinema March 18, 2016

Jean Renoir's pacifist masterpiece La Grande Illusion turns 80 - BFI Pamela Hutchinson from Sight and Sound, June 8, 2017

Grand Illusion | Criterion Collection | Foreign Film | Movie Review | 1937 Matthew from Classic Art Films

The Grand Illusion: The Genius of Indirection | Fiction and Film for ... Jay Winter

Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion / La Grande Illusion ... - A Sharper Focus Norman N. Holland

Grand Illusion | the fifi organization Jason Toews, April 5, 2009

#73 (tie) – La Grande Illusion (1937), dir. Jean Renoir | Fan With a ... S and J from Fan with a Movie Yammer, September 1, 2013

La Grande Illusion - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Robin Wood from Film Reference

Renoir All Over Again Stuart Klawans from The Nation, November 4, 2002

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

culturevulture.net Tom Block

Grand Illusion (1937) - Articles - TCM.com

Grand Illusion | The Nation Richard Griffith from The Nation

About.com Home Video/DVD Review Ivana Redwine

Jean Renoir Triple DVD Box Set | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Raging Bull James Cobo and Mike Lorefice, also seen here: La Grand illusion (Grand Illusion) - Jean Renoir Film Movie Review

Grand Illusion - TCM.com Felicia Feaster from Turner Classic Movies

The Miracles of “Grand Illusion” | The New Yorker May 11, 2012

La Grande illusion (1937) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

La Grande Illusion Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television

Grand Illusion Film Commentary by CGK

Top 100 Directors: #56 - Jean Renoir (The Grand Illusion review) Erik Beck

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1938 [Erik Beck]

Armchair Oscars [Jerry Dean Roberts]

Jean Gabin Movies: French Film Icon - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares

Grand Illusion - Jean Renoir | culturazzi.org Stephanie Lundahl from Culturazzi, January 10, 2010

Film Freak Central - La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection ... Bryant Frazer, October 2, 2012

Grand Illusion Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Gotterdammerung Branislav L. Slantchev

Passport Cinema [Andrew Guarini]

Wilmington on DVDs: La Grande Illusion « Movie City News Michael Wilmington, August 1, 2012

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

LA GRANDE ILLUSION (Jean Renoir, 1937) Dennis Grunes

Review for La grande illusion (1937) Harvey S. Karten

Erasing Clouds [Dan Heaton] disillusioned

David Perry's Xiibaro Reviews: Grand Illusion

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Criterion Confessions: GRAND ILLUSION - #1 Jaime S. Rich

The Criterion Contraption: #1: Grand Illusion Matthew Dessem

Grand Illusion - Films on Disc Stuart J. Kobak [Special Edition]

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Review: Grand Illusion Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: Grand Illusion Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

Grand Illusion - AVRev.com Bill Warren, Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson, Criterion Collection

La Grande Illusion Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Jeffrey Kauffman, Criterion Blu-Ray

La Grande Illusion Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

La Grande Illusion (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Christopher McQuain, Criterion Blu-Ray

La Grande Illusion | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jaime N. Christley, Criterion Blu-Ray

Eye for Film : La Grande Illusion Movie Review (1937) Amber Wilkinson

Classic Film Preview » A Question of Balance David English

Combustible Celluloid film review - Grand Illusion (1937), Jean ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Review for La grande illusion (1937) Ted Prigge

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

That Cow - Review of Grande illusion, La (1937) B. Kiefer

UTK Daily Beacon [Albert Dunning]

Oscar Vault Monday – La Grande Illusion, 1937 (dir. Jean Renoir ... Cinema Fanatic

DVD Times Gary Couzens also reviews LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE and LA BÊTE HUMAINE

Grand Illusion | Movies | EW.com Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly

TV Guide: Grand Illusion

Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams

Why I Love... Renoir's 'La Grande Illusion' - Telegraph Director Mike Newell

Baltimore City Paper: Grand Illusion | Movie Review Andy Markowiitz

Laramie Movie Scope: Grand Illusion Patrick Ivers

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris]

Grand Illusion Movie Review & Film Summary (1937) | Roger Ebert [Great Movies]

New York Times (registration req'd) [Frank S. Nugent]

Renoir's Vision for a United Europe in 'Grand Illusion' - The New York ... The New York Times, May 10, 2012

DVDBeaver - Full Review [Gary W. Tooze]

La Grande Illusion Blu-ray - Jean Gabin - DVD Beaver

LA BÊTE HUMAINE

France (100 mi) 1938

Renoir’s take on the Emile Zola novel, with Jean Gabin in a brilliant performance as the train engineer, Jacques Lantier as an eccentric with murderous impulses, and Simone Simon as his lover. An interesting mix of film noir and French realism.

La Bête Humaine Tom Milne from Time Out London

Stunning images of trains and railway lines as a metaphor for the blind, immutable forces that drive human passions to destruction. Superb performances from Gabin, Simon and Ledoux as the classic tragic love triangle. The deterministic principles of Zola's novel, replaced by destiny in Lang's remake Human Desire, are slightly muffled here. But given the overwhelming tenderness and brutality of Renoir's vision, it hardly matters that the hero's compulsion to kill, the result of hereditary alcoholism, is left half-explained.

La Bete Humaine | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Jean Renoir's generous sensibility seems at odds with the sterile determinism of the Zola novel on which this 1938 film was based. Jean Gabin is an epileptic train engineer drawn to the stationmaster's young wife (Simone Simon). The couple murders a man who tried to seduce her; Gabin witnesses the killing and begins an ambiguous emotional blackmail. Fritz Lang remade this film in 1954 as Human Desire, and as with Lang's other Renoir remake (Scarlet Street, from La Chienne), the material was better served by Lang's Germanic obsession with destiny. But there is much of Renoir here, most beautifully in the opening scene with Gabin at the controls of his train, rushing through the countryside and into the city. In French with subtitles. 99 min.

Between his twin Elvis years of 1937 (Grand Illusion) and 1939 (The Rules of the Game), master artiste Jean Renoir crafted this brooding, fluid adaptation of Émile Zola's doctrinaire novel, expanding the palette of pre-noir "poetic realism" to include the hardscrabble locomotion of proletariat desperation and fashioning a national icon of working-class struggle in the process. The mechanics of Zola's disastrous, homicide-poisoned love triangle—between train engineer Lantier (Jean Gabin), his co-worker Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), and Roubaud's luscious kitten-wife Séverine (Simone Simon)—are nearly supplanted by the machinery of the trains (Gabin drove them himself, and the sequences are realistic enough to come with hand signals instead of dialogue), and of Renoir's mise-en-scéne, which comes at you in a subtle but relentless battery of transitional portals, doors, windows, movements, gazes, points of view, and secret spyings. If Fritz Lang used the same tale to tell a grim story about low-class American impulses 16 years later in Human Desire, Renoir characteristically saw to it that Zola's prejudicial class attack gave way to a sense of sympathy, bruised victimhood, and communal meaning. The DVD edition, which offers the cleanest access to the uncensored film since Hitler invaded Poland, comes with a Criterion tool kit that includes a fat booklet written by Geoffrey O'Brien, Sight & Sound writer Ginette Vincendeau, and production designer Eugéne Lourié; a filmed introduction by Renoir; interviews regarding adapting Zola; a slice from a '60s French TV show in which Renoir and Simon re-enact their prep dialogue for a famous scene; and more.

La Bête Humaine - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications R. F. Cousins from Film Reference

After the commercial failure of his politically committed film La Marseillaise (1937), Renoir accepted Robert Hakim's invitation to "make a film about trains" for Jean Gabin. Disappointed at the collapse of Grémillon's film project Train d'enfer , Gabin looked to Renoir who had so successfully directed him in the role of Maréchal in La Grande Illusion (1937). For Renoir a screen version of Zola's La Bête humaine represented another opportunity to adapt a greatly admired author whose fiction had previously inspired his silent film Nana (1926).

Reflecting the bleak tone of Zola's portrayal of a man driven by homicidal impulses, Renoir's film is untypically dark and fatalistic for his 1930s period, and with Gabin as the doomed hero, his version has considerable affinity with the deeply pessimistic contemporary Carné-Prévert films such as Quai des Brumes (1938) or Le Jour se lève (1939). The uncharacteristic mood is largely determined by lowkey lighting, and, equally untypically for Renoir, music which is external to the action. His camera too, is noticeably more mobile as it constantly relates individuals to their working environment. Bright daytime locations progressively give way to dark, nocturnal interiors or shadowy industrial landscapes, as the freedom of the fated protagonists gradually diminishes.

Although fidelity to Zola is implied by a quotation from the novel and a signed portrait of the author after the credit sequence, there are several omissions or shifts of emphasis in Renoir's screen adaptation. Whereas Zola's richly textured epic novel is partly a study of atavism, partly a portrait of the railway community, it is also a satire of the judiciary and an indictment of the corrupt Second Empire. The author's multi-layered poetic narrative explores the murderous instinct thematically through a number of minor characters and situations, but Renoir concerns himself only with the protagonists, discarding several narrative elements, such as the train crash, the train trapped by snow, and the sustained satire of the judicary with its overt political dimension. For a director intimately associated with the Popular Front, Renoir surprisingly resists the political potential, and plays down Zola's social contrasts. If in La Marseillaise he had explored ideas, in La Bête humaine , Renoir is more concerned with mood and action. For André Bazin, Renoir's adaptation provided a tighter plot and was more successful in integrating the triangular relationship between Séverine, Lantier, and Roubaud into an account of railway life.

Casting against type Renoir insisted on Simone Simon for the role of the flirtatious but frigid Séverine to play against Gabin's Lantier. Excellent performances come from Julien Carette as the stoker Pecqueux and from Fernand Ledoux as the once jealous, now broken, Roubaud. In only his second screen role, a rather melodramatic Renoir plays the poacher Cabuche wrongly accused of murder.

The sense of compulsion which permeates the film is established in the opening train sequence. The journey from Paris to Le Havre, as Alexander Sesonske has shown, is brilliantly distilled in four and a quarter minutes. Speed is conveyed not so much by cutting between shots as by the rhythm of movement within the shots. From the closeup of the train's roaring fire-box, suggesting the passionate forces at work, the camera records the train hurtling through the countryside, set on a track from which it must not deviate, with Lantier and Pecqueux working in complete harmony to harness the machine's formidable power, and to ensure punctuality. The closing sequence of the film, a return run of the journey with the men now fighting, expresses the idea of men unable to break free of predetermined patterns.

The images of the men working, the informative shots of the station yards, the ubiquitous sound of trains keep the presence of the railway to the fore, thus respecting Zola's documentary intentions. Character is intimately studied in terms of a working environment, whether on the train, in the yards, in the canteen, in the showers or at the lodgings. It is in these sequences with railway men functioning as a team and taking pride in their work that Renoir remains faithful to the values of the Popular Front. Throughout he enjoyed the invaluable technical cooperation of the French railways, and with the exception of Gabin's final suicidal leap from the locomotive, all the railway sequences were shot on location with direct sound recording.

Renoir represents Lantier's inner turmoil symbolically with the wind raging through his hair, while his psychopathic self is darkly reflected in a puddle as he reaches for a murder weapon, or, after he has stabbed Séverine, in a mirror where low-key lighting gives him a particularly monstrous appearance. Perhaps the most powerful sequence comes with Séverine's murder when a demented Lantier suddently turns on his mistress in an uncontrollable frenzy. The music of the railway ball floods the screen with its ironic song about flirtatious love and possession, linking and contrasting scenes of public enjoyment with a scene of private horror.

Acknowledging his debt to Renoir, Fritz Lang remade La Bête humaine as Human Desire in 1954. The most detailed study of La Bête humaine is found in Jean Renoir by Alexander Sesonske.

La bête humaine: Renoir On and Off the Rails Criterion essay by Geoffrey O’Brien, February 13, 2006

Vive Duvivier! Long Live Renoir! March 17, 2010

Deep focus: How the French birthed film noir | Sight & Sound | BFI Ginette Vincendeau, November 15, 2016

Train to Nowhere: On Renoir's La Bête Humaine - Bright Lights Film ... Ian Johnston from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2006

La Bête humaine, Jean Renoir • film analysis - Senses of Cinema Matthew Sorrento, November 2013

La Bête Humaine The Film Sufi

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

La Bete Humaine (1938) - Articles - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco from Turner Classic Movies

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LA BETE HUMAINE Film Society

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EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

DVD Times Gary Couzens also reviews LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE and LA GRANDE ILLUSION

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Baltimore City Paper: La Bête Humaine | Movie Review Bret McCabe

Movie Review - A Chump at Oxford - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; Zola's ... Frank S. Nugent from The New York Times

La Bête Humaine (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LA MARSEILLAISE

France (135 mi) 1938

La Marseillaise Time Out London

A heroically romantic interpretation of the events leading up to the French Revolution; its postulation of an alternative to nationalism vs monarchism is obviously closely related to the Popular Front period during which the film was made. But this is also something that, along with Renoir's sweeping emotional populism, tends to distance us from much of the film. However, even if you're not particularly attuned to Renoir's values (simplicity, nature, etc), he is always sufficiently shrewd in his analysis of the aristocracy for those sections of the film to have an air of authentic and haunting decadence. It is a relief, too, to see the lingering archaism of the earlier sections of the film swept away in an astonishing last third of quiet power.

La Marseillaise (1938) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

This film traces the early years of the French Revolution, from the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to the campaign to drive off the Prussian army in 1781. We see the effect of the Revolution on both ordinary people and on the royal court. The removal of the monarchy has a sad inevitability as a nation comes together and unites under the French tricoleur to the sound of that great anthem, La Merseillaise.

The only one of Renoir’s films that can truly be described as epic, La Marseillaise succeeds as both an accurate historical account of an important part of French history and as a reflection of the mood of the time. The late 1930s was a dark and uncertain time in the history of France, and this film, although strangely optimistic, seems to capture that feeling quite noticeably.

The origins of the Revolution and the rationale for the foundation of the French Nation are explored in detail. The absurdity and irrelevance of the royal court is placed side by side with the penury of the life of a French peasant. Whilst Marie-Antoinette and her courtiers are dancing the latest gavotte, a man can be hung for shooting a pigeon.

Renoir carefully avoids reference to the brutality of the Revolution and focuses on the necessity of a country united. It is a message that would have been well received by the cinema-going public at a time when Europe was on the brink of its worst conflict.

Unexamined/Essentials: La Marseillaise (Jean Renoir, 1938) Jaime Christley, August 3, 2009

Not usually hailed as his best film, although it comes between the two that usually are (The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion), Jean Renoir's sprawling, meandering, and for the most part bloodless depiction of the French Revolution - running parallel with the genesis of the title anthem - is far from unwatchable. Its schizophrenic nature is inscribed by two different kinds of camera movements. First, the pans and dollies that unite the gaze of a single character or a crowd with the space of action, a brushstroke by Renoir that is as unique as a thumbprint, the kind of movements he would employ throughout his career. Here, the camera is proxy for Renoir's mind as he thinks his way through the story - the Revolution through looking, collecting evidence, thinking, speaking, and participating. Second, there are the expectations of epic filmmaking during any era, which demand that money in must result in spectacle out. Here, the camera is mostly static as it takes in the costumes and wigs - and sits respectfully for the near-endless stream of expository dialogue - or else moves by crane to take in the sheer scale of the outdoor sets.

The plot, such as it is, refracts the history of the Revolution through one part action and four parts talk (by the aristocrats and revolutionaries alike) regarding how individuals think and feel, what they remember, and what they know. At about two and one quarter hours, it's a lot to take in, but it's made palatable by the enthusiastic cast, which never trespasses a northernmost border of what we'll call highly disciplined shouting. Renoir having directed for the Comédie-Française as well as for films, his sure hand in harmonizing even the most boisterous performers in the enormous cast (which is saturated with Renoir regulars) should come as no surprise. Renoir's brother Pierre (who played Maigret in the director's 1932 masterpiece, La nuit du carrefour) stands out as the unfortunate Louis XVI, whose progress through armaments now held by the republicans who would abolish his reign, his face reflecting a delicate confusion that gives way to dawning horror, is as touching a depiction of his grand finale as the unfortunate monarch is likely to get.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

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Marseillaise, la (1938) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

Movie Review - La Marseillaise - THE SCREEN; 'Marseillaise,' at ... Frank S. Nugent from The New York Times

THE RULES OF THE GAME (La Règle du Jeu) A 99

France (110 mi) 1939

The rules of the game are those which must be observed in society if one wishes to avoid being crushed. —Jean Renoir

‘Rules of the Game’ taught me the rules of the game. —Robert Altman

A scathing indictment of the French upper class, told in a manner and style that is uniquely its own, as this may be the best comedy ever made, a great human comedy focusing on affairs of the heart, also a satire on class relations, featuring an aviator, a national hero who breaks the rules. Renoir himself plays his best friend, Octave, a charming poet who seems to be everyone’s likable confidant. The aviator falls for a wealthy, married woman, Nora Gregor, believing his love is strong enough to lift him above society, above morality, which, of course, it’s not – nothing is, leading to a weekend invite with various guests at a hunting party, complete with the wife’s attendant, and her affair with an opportunistic poacher who spends most of the film fleeing from her husband in Buster Keaton-like chase scenes, which are entered into the mix with guests performing vaudeville-style theatrical entertainment, until ultimately – tragedy occurs.

The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]

One of Citizen Kane’s few equals, Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game is a gorgeous, gracefully astute critique of pre-WWII French aristocracy. Renoir, using luscious deep-focus cinematography reminiscent of Welles’ classic, details the facetious games of love played by both the upstairs (i.e. rich) and downstairs (i.e. servants) guests at a country manor party. A masterful rabbit-hunting scene symbolizes the nobility’s savage superficiality, yet Renoir’s even-handed characterizations manage to elicit both empathy and disgust. These snobbish fools believe they know the rules of the game, but one gets the sense that they’re not exactly sure what game it is they’re playing.

S.T.[R].O.B.E. by Peter WOLLEN (excerpt)

R, on the other hand, stands for Realism -- the other pole of the cinema -- for Roberto Rossellini, for Renoir and his Rules of the Game. I believe that Renoir's great film is actually about modernity -- its modern hero is an aviator, a kind of Lindbergh or Saint-Exupéry, who has achieved fame through the radio. He is a public figure, a celebrity, an avatar of a media-dominated society, of a new shrinking world. Due to a farcical misunderstanding he is shot dead at the end of the film and comedy turns into tragedy. His fatal flaw is that he can't help speaking the truth, whereas everyone else lives in a world of self-conscious artifice and dissimulation.

Bazin saw Rules of the Game as a realist film, largely because of its use of location shooting and depth of field in the cinematography. Like Citizen Kane, which Bazin also praised for its deep focus cinematography, Rules of the Game was a film maudit, butchered by its distributor, re-constructed and re-released under Bazin's supervision ten years after it was made.

Jean Renoir Peter Keough from the Boston Phoenix, July 2 – 9, 1998, also seen here: Grand Illusions - Jean Renoir at the Harvard Film Archive (excerpt)

Death makes a deflating appearance as well in Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (1939). To the strains of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, a wire-tangled radio reporter announces the landing of André Jurieu (Roland Toutain), who has just made a record-breaking transatlantic flight. He's a hero, but as his pal Octave (played by Renoir himself) tells him later, he doesn't know how to play the role. Asked by the announcer how he feels, Jurieu says he's never felt worse in his life; the woman he did it all for didn't show up to meet him.

That woman is Christine (Nora Grégor), wife of the bon vivant count Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), who's giving a big party at his estate. Even though Jurieu fails to heed the accepted rules of decorum (the role of impulsive romantic he embraces is about a century out of date), La Chesnaye invites him anyway, at Octave's urging. Perhaps, too, La Chesnaye is feeling guilty about cheating on his faithful wife with his mistress Geneviève.

And so they all arrive, plus a host of other vibrantly realized characters, to act out their dance of appearance and reality, artifice and desire. La Chesnaye, a collector of 18th-century automata, regales his guests with devices that, like cinema, simulate life. Real life intrudes: the slaughter of the estate's rabbits is made a sport (in a sequence that is perhaps Renoir's most brutally naturalistic -- and artificial), and a gun-wielding, cuckolded husband's outburst is seen as just another party game.

Consequences notwithstanding, perhaps it is. As The Rules of the Game and the rest of Renoir's oeuvre show, the human condition may be absurd, deluded, and tragically ironic, but it can also be as rich, limpid, and exultant as a Mozart opera when refined into a work of art. The same capacity for illusion that dooms us also redeems us.

"What is natural, these days?" a lady dressing for the evening asks her maid, who finds Madame's violet lipstick a bit too artificial. The year is 1939, the place Paris, after the Munich Conference's false promises of peace and on the eve of Hitler's deadly march across Europe. The lady's observation, tossed off in the first few minutes of The Rules of the Game, is like so much else in Jean Renoir's masterpiece, at once frivolous and poignant—a melancholy lament for a world gone awry, delivered in a tone so light you might think you had missed it.

The Rules of the Game follows the amorous exploits of a group of aristocrats invited to a hunting party at a French château. Their hectic intrigues find an uncanny echo in the affairs of their servants, upstairs and downstairs comically crossing paths on the way to a tragic conclusion. The film's dazzlingly labyrinthine script never mentions the coming war, yet its menace permeates a milieu that seems to have lost all moral compass, and where the ideal of happiness had been sacrificed to one of mere amusement.

And amuse themselves these people do—along with us. Their spineless yet sympathetic host, the wealthy, Jewish Marquis de la Chesnaye (brilliantly played by Marcel Dalio), when he's not attempting to rid himself of a cumbersome mistress, entertains himself with mechanical toys—player pianos, artificial warbling birds—that mirror his own vacuity. Meanwhile his beautiful, foreign-born wife (Nora Gregor, the stage name of an Austrian princess) must contend with the adoration of a dashing aviator (Roland Toutain)—a romantic hero thrust into a society devoid of illusions. (Renoir himself is unforgettable as the friend and hanger-on Octave, a failed artist haunted by a sense of missed opportunities.)

Shades of an 18th-century French farce—yet who can forget, in the thrilling scene of the hunt when white-robed servants beat the trees to flush out the game, that within a few years similar forests would be hunted for partisans and Jews? Renoir's artistic sensitivity seems to have endowed him with a kind of second sight. In the brutal threats of the château's Alsatian gamekeeper, jilted by his Parisian lady-maid wife, one hears an echo of the fascist desire to control both women and nature.

The Rules of the Game provoked something like a riot at its Parisian premiere. Never mind that the anti-Semitic and xenophobic press had a field day with Dalio's Jewishness and Gregor's thick Austrian accent. "People who commit suicide do not care to do it in front of witnesses," Renoir said of the French response to his film, which, beneath its frothy veneer, showed their society going down the drain. The film was cut twice, and its original negative was destroyed by Allied bombing. The occasion for this re-release is its complete restoration from a master print. It is required viewing, if only to understand the ideal that filmmakers from Robert Altman to Woody Allen have been after. And even if you think you know it, see it again for its newly rediscovered depth of field, and even more, for its infinite wellsprings of character and empathy.

Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]

TALK ABOUT BEING ahead of one's time. Jean Renoir's critically celebrated The Rules of the Game opened in Paris in 1939 to a hail of venom and fury--audiences jeered, spat and set fire to sheets of newspaper in hopes of burning the theater down. The film--a funny, ironic vision of the rich and their servants at play in a country house--is now considered one of the great masterpieces of cinema, but on the eve of the German occupation, any criticism of French society was considered unpatriotic. A half hour of footage was cut in hopes of excising whatever it was audiences found so vile, including major plot points, resulting in a truncated version that didn't make sense. The public responded with even more anger and bewilderment. Shortly after it was released, The Rules of the Game was declared "demoralizing" by the government and banned altogether.

To make matters worse, the master negative was destroyed by bombing and the only prints left in existence after the war were of the hopelessly butchered, shortened version. A glimmer of Renoir's genius was visible nonetheless, and interest slowly built in reconstructing the original. A batch of out-takes was discovered and after two years of editing with Renoir's help, a restored version of The Rules of the Game, with only one or two variations from the original, was released in 1959. It was instantly hailed as a classic and is generally ranked as one of the top ten films of all time. It's said that when one of the original crew members saw it, he wept at the sight of it restored.

Jean Renoir was the son of the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir and his films show the same pure delight in life and light as his father's paintings. The Rules of the Game is his most pessimistic work, but it still has the warmth and humanity that are a hallmark of all his films. The story concerns three love triangles--two among masters and one among servants.

Upstairs is the Marquis de la Chesnaye, a self-involved but good-hearted man who's so out of it that his only real passion is collecting mechanical birds. He's having an affair with a vapid society girl; meanwhile, his wife is being courted by an aviator who makes a solo flight across the Atlantic to get her attention. The romantic intrigue upstairs is mirrored by similar problems among the servants downstairs. Everyone converges on the Marquis' country house to do what the rich like to do: play games. They play cards, they hunt, they have parties and put on skits--all of life is a game. They're so engrossed with frivolity and masquerade that when the moment inevitably arrives for them to take off their masks, no one knows what to do with themselves. "It's a world where everyone lies," says Octave, a bumbling fool and the only character with any perspective, a role Renoir played himself.

Renoir pioneered the use of deep-focus photography, a method of filmmaking that allowed actors to be seen in relationship to each other and their surroundings without cutting back and forth. So modest and transparent is this technique that The Rules of the Game has an almost documentary-like feel. There aren't a lot of close-ups and people are often shown in groups. This made it easier for the actors to improvise, and the sense of realism and spontaneity Renoir achieved is nothing short of miraculous. There's almost no sense of artifice--these don't seem to be characters in a movie but actual people living their lives. Julien Carette is especially delightful as Marceau, the rabbit poacher who's always wanted to be a servant because he loves the clothes.

If all this hardly seems "demoralizing" by today's standards, keep in mind that Renoir felt obliged to include a disclaimer that read: "This film is intended as entertainment, not as social criticism." Surely he was stretching the truth a little bit. The Rules of the Game was originally conceived as a critique of fascism in the guise of a light comedy, and while the finished film rises above simple polemics, Renoir certainly manages to criticize a slew of social conditions, including the indolence of the rich and the casual cruelty of men. The hunting scene is especially chilling.

Though the plot of The Rules of the Game may sound melodramatic, it's the details, the kindness Renoir shows his characters and the generosity between them, that makes it so astonishing. Like all great works of art, it's subtle and complex and impossible to describe. You just have to see it. It's a goddamn masterpiece, for chrissakes.

The big picture Alex Callinicos from the Socialist Review, June 1997

Jean Renoir conceived La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) in the autumn of 1938, when the Munich agreement gave Europe a brief and shameful reprieve before the Second World War. As he listened to French baroque music, he devised a film as elegantly structured as a classical comedy that would remorselessly dissect a ruling class sleepwalking into catastrophe.

Renoir, the son of the great Impressionist painter, had, earlier in the 1930s, been quite close to the Communist Party. His lover of the time was a party member, and he even helped make a CP propaganda film for the elections which swept the Popular Front to power in 1936. Films like Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grande Illusion, and La Marseillaise reflect the hopes raised by the Popular Front.

By 1939 these hopes were dead. La Règle du Jeu focuses on the victors, the rich and well bred of Paris. It concentrates on a country houseparty given by a wealthy Jewish marquis, Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio). This is a somewhat embarrassing affair, since the dalliance of his wife Christine (Nora Gregor) with one of the guests, the famous airman André Jurieux (Roland Toutain), has just become public knowledge. Meanwhile the marquis is trying to shed his mistress, while his wife has other admirers, including her old family friend, the charming penniless idler Octave, played by Renoir himself.

If that weren't enough, a romantic triangle has developed below stairs, in the servants' hall. Christine's maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost) is bored with her husband, the uptight Alsatian game-keeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot). She's attracted to Marceau (Julien Carette), the amorous local poacher whom Chesnaye has decided to employ on a whim, much to Schumacher's fury.

If this sounds like a recipe for French farce, in a sense it is. The climactic scenes in which the quarrelling servants pursue each other through the marquis's fancy dress party, while the elegant, laidback Chesnaye finally erupts in fury and turns on his rival Jurieux, the hitherto chaste Christine decides to run off with someone, though she can't quite decide with whom, and various members of the houseparty keep fainting are farcical.

But it is farce of the most brilliant kind, choreographed like a ballet, very funny, and interwoven with more serious themes. At one moment, for example, the anti-Semitism many of the guests feel towards their host suddenly surfaces. At another, Chesnaye's obsession with collecting mechanical toys highlights the uselessness of his entire class. At yet another, Octave, dressed as a bear, admits despair at his talentless waster's life. The critic David Thomson calls the film 'the most dynamic juxtaposition of moods and feelings that cinema has achieved'.

Moreover, key moments reveal the iron fist beneath the velvet glove. In the most famous scene, the guests go shooting. Renoir's savage editing depicts a positive massacre of birds and animals carried out by these elegant ladies and gentlemen. This carnage is recalled at the end of the film when a series of misunderstandings leads to someone being shot. He rolls over, says the poacher Marceau (who should know), just like a rabbit. After this eruption of violence, order is restored, and appearances re-established. The marquis offers a few appropriate remarks, leading one of his guests to praise him, in the film's concluding words, for knowing 'the rules of the game'.

Yet La Règle du Jeu is more than a brilliant satire. As Octave, Renoir himself speaks the film's most famous line 'Tout le monde a raison' 'Everyone has his own good reasons'. The genius of the film lies in the way in which it ruthlessly depicts the gulf separating master and servant, rich and poor, but nevertheless is able through a rapid succession of sharp insights to grasp sympathetically every character's point of view.

The moments when the marquis and the poacher mutually commiserate about their love lives, and when, near the end, Octave and Marceau shake hands in farewell are not sentimental invocations of solidarity between the classes. They affirm simultaneously the characters' common humanity and the social antagonisms that divide them.

La Règle du Jeu went down badly when it was released in July 1939. One cinema in Paris where it was shown was nearly set on fire, and the more unpopular scenes were hastily cut. Within a year France had fallen to Hitler's Blitzkrieg and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime had taken power. After the portrait Renoir had painted of French society, this should have come as no surprise. He took refuge in California, where he spent the rest of his life. His greatest film, carefully restored by two admirers, was only shown in its original length in 1965, to great acclaim. In a France and indeed a Europe that is beginning alarmingly to resemble the 1930s, La Règle du Jeu still has plenty to say.

29 November 2003: Film-makers on film: Bernardo Bertolucci Bernardo Bertolucci on RULES OF THE GAME from The Telegraph interview with Mark Monahan, November 29, 2003

"I heard a lot about La Règle du jeu from my father," he says. "It was always one of his favourites. And then finally, in Italy, when I was 21 or 22, I saw a version that was something like one hour 15 minutes long, very mutilated. I don't know how many versions there are of La Règle du jeu. It's a movie that for so many people is number one, and yet you don't know which one is the original version. I was thinking, how can something that is considered a masterpiece be tortured like that?"

Although a definitive version is now available, the film's formerly fragmented status was a result of its troubled history, itself the result of its difficult subject-matter. Made and set in 1939, it covers a weekend of upper-class shenanigans in the country, veering between high farce and tragedy with startling speed and skill. Also, although the characters are a thoroughly dissolute bunch, Renoir (also starring as Octave, whose well-intentioned meddling has dire consequences) refuses to condemn them for it.

As such - bleak, morally ungraspable and depicting a country riven by class divisions - it was banned by the French government and then the Nazis, who burned many of the prints. Allied planes then accidentally destroyed the original negatives, and it wasn't until 1956, when various pieces of the film were found throughout France, that Renoir (whose canon also includes such subtle masterpieces as La Grande Illusion and Partie de campagne) was able to restore it to its former self.

When he finally saw the film intact, Bertolucci's reaction was immediate and intense. "I was thinking that it was a kind of miracle," he says, "the miracle of the culture of the 19th century and the culture of the 20th century getting together. So it was Auguste Renoir and Jean Renoir, father and son, meeting mysteriously, in an invisible way. La Règle du jeu was like the product of an incestuous relationship between them.''

Could he elaborate? "I think that Jean Renoir is very affected by his family world, you can see that in his movies, so there is a kind of fascination and irony about the past. It's a film that talks about the then present, '39, but it's also about certain past values. You can see that already in the epigraph in the beginning. I think it's from Beaumarchais…''

It is, I say - from his comedy The Marriage of Figaro.

"So, already at the start there's a declaration of admiration for old literature, and it's as if Renoir was unable not to love every character he created. And when you look at Renoir's father's paintings, these characters are covered with love. It's a feeling that I have very strongly, especially with Jean, because in a movie, this is more identifiable. Even the baddies in Renoir are in some way understood, and this is something that can come in somebody who is unable to hate his father.''

Bertolucci praises the film's serene conclusion (which he admits to having appropriated wholesale for 1900), Renoir's pioneering use of light, frame and focus, his warm, self-referential presence as a character ("He is the director, and yet he is unable to avoid the tragedy at the end").

"But," he says, "what really I find extraordinary is the hunting scene, because, since the film was shot in '39, there's the feeling of the war which is almost starting. You don't see people die but you see pheasants, rabbits… bang!"

The scene's eerie power, I suggest, stems also from the camera's lingering on the animals' death-throes. "There are a lot of details of shaking, little game dying," agrees Bertolucci, "and the intuition of what really is going on, or what will go on soon, is so strong that it is in a way stronger than seeing battle scenes in a film.'' Does he think this was deliberate on Renoir's part? "We ask the prophets, are they deliberate, when they are making prophecy?" he replies. "It's something that he couldn't help doing.''

Renoir's Spell Cameron Crowe on RULES OF THE GAME from The Observer, August 11, 2002

I'd just written and directed a movie called Say Anything and I next wanted to tell a story with an ensemble cast. I've always loved that kind of film. I mentioned this to a writer friend of mine who instantly said, 'Well, you've got to see La Règle du jeu again.'

I casually told him I'd never seen it. With the fevered devotion of a diehard fan, he instructed me: 'See it now. See it tonight. It's the world-class standard for ensemble films.' Then came his promise: 'It will change your life.'

Like a bad comic who promises 'you're gonna love this joke', advance praise like this is almost always a harbinger of crushing disappointment. But dutifully I found the film - and it promptly changed my life. It was as if I'd been waiting for ever for a movie like it.

What I like most about films is when they cast a spell over you, taking you into another world and introducing you to a group of characters whom you get to know over the course of a couple of hours. La Règle du jeu is a perfect example: it's so rich in detail you get lost in it almost instantly; it slips you into the lives of its characters. There's a game I play where I watch a character who is seemingly uninvolved in a particular scene. In most movies you see these kinds of incidental figures waiting around for their lines; here the actors are all completely in character, every little twitch matters and it's all there if you look for it. And the film is so well photographed.

The movie always surprises you with how funny it is. One of the truly great moments is when some of the characters are performing on stage, things around them are erupting in chaos and somebody says 'Stop the farce', to which another says 'Which one?' You're kept guessing what is a performance and what isn't.

I imagine that the actors operated like a troupe, improvising together, and on top of all the attention he paid to his characters Renoir also had the time to stage the action so well. It's almost like a ballet.

I love the opening scene where André arrives at Le Bourget airport having just completed a record trans-atlantic flight to impress Christine, the marchioness whom so many in the film fall in love with. It's so funny - almost Wilder- esque - because you expect the magnificent entry of a hero but instead the guy is a weak wreck.

And I can never get enough of Octave, the sad sack centre of the story, beautifully played by Renoir himself. Octave is my favourite type of character - the weary anti-hero with the weight of the world on his shoulders. It's always hard for me to take my eyes off Renoir because he carries the pain of the movie throughout, and yet still finds joy in his often ridiculous friends.

It's surprising he cast Nora Gregor as Christine: she's probably the least technically beautiful woman in the film. She seems so sad, like she hasn't slept in weeks, but then you realise she's racked with pain and indecision and it is the depth of this conflict that prompts men to fall deeply in love with her.

Lisette, Christine's maid, is a wonderful character too. Paulette Dubost, who plays her, is still alive, and made a movie a couple of years ago. Her character is the brightest light of all the women in the story. It is Christine whom the story spins around, but every time I see the film Lisette almost steals the movie.

With movies that accomplish as much as La Règle du jeu, you tend to feel a lot of huffing and puffing from the writer and director. This movie, though, seems effortless, never impressed with itself. Because its observations about human behaviour are so true it could have been made yesterday. I wish it had been made yesterday because I'd love to go to the movies this weekend and see something as deft, as ambitious, and new.

I've seen La Règle du jeu about 100 times - it drives my wife crazy, though she loves the movie too. I actually took frame stills from the title sequence and tacked them to the wall next to where I write. Putting them up there reminds me of the simplicity and depth of Renoir's storytelling.

So next time a friend tells you to seek out a film because 'it'll change your life'... don't roll your eyes too quickly. Their passion might be right on target or horribly misguided... but then, that's just one of the many themes packed into La Règle du jeu.

The Rules of the Game (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine Graham Fuller, Summer 2012

If Jean Renoir had never made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu), Robert Altman’s mordant Gosford Park (2001), scripted by Julian Fellowes, would never have existed and Fellowes may never have conceived television’s current British heritage phenomenon, Downton Abbey. The class tensions and amities in the series have often echoed and diluted those in Renoir’s magisterial 1939 classic. Downton has literalized the anxieties of aristocrats and servants with the approach of the Great War, while wanly exploiting upper-class sybaritism. Renoir also focused on frivolity upstairs and gossip and backbiting downstairs but sublimated the approach of World War II in visual metaphors—notably the massacre of wild game at the shooting party and the “Danse Macabre” skit with its dancing ghosts and figure of Death.

The shoot in the “Christmas at Downton Abbey” episode, during which the handsome Downton heir gleans from a distance that all is not well between Lady Mary, his true love, and her vicious newspaper baron fiancé, apes the shoot in Renoir’s film. Here, the Austrian marchioness Christine (Nora Grégor) believes she has spied her husband, Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), passionately kissing his mistress; in fact, their kiss signals the end of their affair. Soapy, explicit, and addictive, Downton may not be the greatest legacy of The Rules of the Game—after all, it inspired Truffaut, Resnais, and Chabrol—but its mass popularization of Renoir’s concept serves by default to emphasize the irreducible power, subtlety, and resonance of its luminous antecedent.

Released last November by Criterion for the first time in a Blu-ray edition as well as a superb two-disc DVD for the second time in eight years, The Rules of the Game was the fifteenth film Renoir made during the Thirties. For the filmmaker, both as a sociopolitical critic dismayed by contemporary French life and as a fluid metteur-en-scène who had hitherto experimented considerably in different styles and genres, it proved to be the zenith of his achievement. It was also the movie that more than any other attributed the coming war to the moral decline of Old Europe.

Primarily for its depiction of the bourgeoisie, the film met initially with outrage and Renoir was obliged by exhibitors to shorten it, from ninety-four to eighty minutes. Banned by the Nazis in 1940 and by Vichy in 1942, it was rereleased at eighty-six minutes in 1945, but not until André Bazin championed it in Cahiers du cinéma in 1952 did its reputation start to grow. Bazin died before seeing the 106-minute version restored by Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand in 1959, so his auteurist appraisal of the film—which takes into account its subversion of realism, its nonstar casting, and its symphonic quality—was based entirely on an incomplete cut. As for Renoir, who wasn’t involved in the reconstruction, he wept when he saw how close it was to his original.

After the films Renoir had made during his Popular Front period—Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), La Vie est à nous (1936), and La Marseillaise (1938)—the antiwar masterpiece La Grande Illusion (1937), and the poetic realist La Bête humaine (1938), it must have demoralized left-wing observers that he next chose to tell a story of romantic shenanigans among the rich, their friends, and servants. It was the oblivious decadence of that society—“the malady that gnawed at the contemporary world”—and the collusion of its members in excusing a killing that Renoir targeted. Decadence goes hand in hand with finessed or mechanical behavior, emblematized in planes, radios, and Robert’s ecstatic love of mechanized toys, that had supplanted spontaneity and natural feelings. “What is natural nowadays?” Christine is asked by her maid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), whose adulterous attraction to the poacher Marceau (Julien Carette) is based on his earthy sexual insolence.

Nothing if not prophetic, the film augurs collaborationism. The gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot), Lisette’s husband and a fascistic Alsatian who would have fought for Germany during World War I, is completely exonerated by Robert when he commits a murder at La Colinière, Robert’s estate near Orléans. As Keith Reader writes in his 2010 monograph on the film, “the tediously irrepressible bonhomie” of another of the guests, the General (Pierre Magnier), who concludes at the end that, for excusing Schumacher, Robert is “not short of class, and that’s becoming rare,” may “veil distinctly Pétainist sentiments.” For all its urbanity and farcicalness, the film was, specifically, an angry response to prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement on September 29, 1938. Renoir began writing the script the following month.

Renoir’s masterstroke was his diversion of his upstairs-downstairs comedy of manners specifically targeting bourgeois etiquette into an allegorical farce that lurches into tragedy. Only in retrospect is it clear that the killing of André Jurieux (Roland Tutain), a heroic aviator whose lack of social sophistication and adherence to an outmoded chivalric code causes him to breach the rules of the game played by the elite, is predestined—as the death of millions was foretold by the empowering of the Nazi Party.

The film begins with the arrival of André, following his record-breaking transatlantic flight, at Paris’s Le Bourget airport. Deliberately overdetermining the skein of references, Renoir knew that the French associated the airport with the future isolationist Charles Lindbergh’s arrival from America in 1927 and Daladier’s return from Munich. Though as morose as Daladier apparently was, André, too, is welcomed as a conquering hero. Sealing his eventual fate, he publicly announces his disappointment that Christine, whom he loves, hasn’t come to greet him; she fleetingly evokes Paul Reynaud, the vociferous antiappeasement finance minister who was the only member of the cabinet not to greet Daladier at Le Bourget. Along with duplicity, appeasement is one of the cornerstones of the amatory realpolitik of The Rules of the Game. André’s bohemian friend Octave (played by Renoir and serving as his onscreen surrogate), a childhood friend of Christine who floats freely between the classes and acts as a go-between, arranges for André to visit La Colinière.

This is where acts two and three unfold and where Robert’s upper-class mistress, Geneviève de Maras (Mila Parély), vainly attempts to rekindle their dying affair as Christine, pursued by André, Robert, Octave, and the opportunistic Saint-Aubin (Pierre Nay), loses her emotional bearings. She is Europa in disarray after Munich. A Jewish-Austrian actress, Grégor had fled Vienna with her husband, the Prince of Starhemberg, who was sought by the Nazis, and was cast by Renoir after Simone Simon had asked for too much money. Dalio, too, exemplified Renoir’s counterintuitive casting, his Jewishness affording the film its critique of prewar French anti-Semitism.

At La Colinière, Robert hires the wily Marceau, Schumacher’s nemesis, as a domestic; Lisette, possibly once involved with Octave, promptly begins a flirtation with the newcomer. On André’s arrival, Christine skillfully (and truthfully) deflates the speculation of the gossip-hungry that she has been sleeping with him by explaining that the hours they spent together before his flight were “under the all too rare signs of friendship.” Typical of a film in which interior scenes are primarily composed of deep-focus master shots, in many of which the camera pans, tracks, and dollies as it wanders around La Colinière like an unseen but all-seeing extra guest, Robert and Octave, behind Christine but on the same focal plane, radiate trepidation through their unhappy smiles and body language, as if she, like André at the airport, were about to crack the façade of propriety.

We next see the servants frankly discussing Robert’s descent from a Frankfurt Jew, a subject too delicate for discussion upstairs. The scene twists expectations when the chef denounces his previous employers who, though they did not entertain Jews, “ate like pigs,” and applauds Robert who, “half-caste though he is,” knows how a potato salad should be prepared. It’s less that the chef’s received anti-Semitism is dormant, however, than that for him the appreciation of food takes precedence over racial tolerance. As Octave says, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons”—not the benign humanistic platitude it is often thought to be, but a condemnation of self-interest.

The above conversation is enfolded into the first of three matching deep-focus shots in which Schumacher is bested by Marceau, the film’s Dionysian nature spirit. As the discussion of Robert’s Jewishness continues, Schumacher asks Lisette if she is free and is rebuffed. Leaving dismally via the stairs, he passes the jaunty Marceau, who Lisette seats on her right (as Christine inappropriately seated André at dinner). Marceau turns away when Lisette tells him she is Madame Schumacher, but after a cut the two exchange lascivious smiles. Next morning, Lisette finds Marceau polishing shoes and plays hard to get before they canoodle on the floor in the servants’ area, where Schumacher, approaching from a distance, catches them. Later, Schumacher chases Marceau from the same room after he’s trysted with Lisette. These rhyming shots typify Renoir’s use of deep space to establish emotional hierarchies: Marceau may be lowlier than Schumacher but his freedom from constraint raises him above his rival in the Darwinian scheme—ironically, since Marceau desires to wear a uniform.

The film’s two great set-pieces show the mass slaughter of game at the hunting party shoot—a virtuosic, rapidly cut montage prefiguring André’s killing and the coming war—and the masquerade held in André’s honor. The latter incorporates a show put on by guests, the climactic skit being their comic Walpurgisnacht, which triggers the collapse of the social order. Still believing Robert and Geneviève to be entwined, Christine leads away the lecherous Saint-Aubin, evading Octave and André. If the plummet into chaos symbolizes Europe after Munich, then Christine’s spurning of Octave when he appeals to her to help him out of his bear suit satirizes France and Britain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich.

Whereas André contains his jealousy, Schumacher acts on his, smashing through the “walls and barriers” that separate the classes by firing shots at Marceau as the party guests scatter; Robert’s professed hatred of such divides is borne out by his secluded tête-à-tête with Marceau, who behaves as if he were the superior. Robert, who’s slightly effeminate, unexpectedly slugs André. André proves a self-righteous bore who sabotages his conquest of Christine by suggesting she stay with his mother. She, the loyal wife, transfers her affections from Saint-Aubin to André, and from him to Octave, who disparages André. None of the principals is what he or she seems; ethics are flexible. The world is built on lies and false fronts. Only the boorish Schumacher is resolute. Outside, in the dark, he shoots André, believing him to be Marceau. With Octave and Marceau expelled from La Colinière, all the déclassé elements are finally removed, allowing their betters to continue “dancing on a volcano,” to use the phrase, coined on the eve of the 1830 revolution, that Renoir invoked when discussing the film.

Most of the DVD’s extras have been imported from the 2004 disc. Most precious is the excerpted 1966 Jacques Rivette TV documentary in which he reunites Renoir with Dalio at “La Colinière.” Renoir discusses Robert’s lack of purpose, Christine’s awakening to the brutality of love, and the scene in which he filmed himself and Dalio reacting to Christine’s speech about her friendship with André.

Also invaluable is the audio commentary written by Alexander Sesonske and recorded by Peter Bogdanovich in 1989. It describes how Renoir, breaking with naturalism, was inspired by Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne (1833) and Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778), a fierce pre-Revolution play. Not content with the love triangle of André-Christine-Robert and the interceding friend Octave, culled from Musset, he complicated the intrigue by adding a fifth wheel in Geneviève and blended in the downstairs triangle of Marceau-Lisette-Schumacher, with Christine acting as Lisette’s confidante and implied love object. Unfortunately, Bogdanovich was forced to read Sesonske’s text so quickly that this part of the commentary is confusing.

The new Criterion release also repeats interviews with assistant set designer Max Douy, clearly not a man to cross; the director’s son Alain, who assisted the cinematographer Jean Bachelet; and Mila Parély, who talks engagingly about playing Geneviève and suggests Renoir had a thing for Grégor. Douy died in 2007, Renoir fils in 2008, Parély this January. New to the 2011 disc is an interview with the authoritative Renoir expert Olivier Curchod.

All the expert opinion, critical analysis, and first-person accounts can’t explain how Renoir, working extemporaneously up to a point, unerringly pulled off the film’s theatrical realism. The extended farce of the second act is a miracle of emotional and physical choreography, while its poetic use of depth of focus preempts that of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland. How, too, did Renoir create such a rarefied milieu that, though it is three-quarters of a century old, still speaks to our own time, when “everyone has their reasons”? Somehow it was all in his head.

The Rules of the Game: Everyone Has Their Reasons Criterion essay by Alexander Sesonske, December 31, 2003

The Film That Changed My Life, Bernardo Bertolucci from The Observer, February 28, 2010

Revival Meeting Nuremberg & Beyond: A Film Restoration Roundtable, by Jerome Henry Rudes from Moviemaker magazine, November 16, 2010

“A Human Comedy of Sorts” August 14, 2009

The Film Sufi: "The Rules of the Game" - Jean Renoir (1939)

"S/Z" and "Rules of the Game" by Julia Lesage - eJumpcut.org Winter 1976-77

On Jean Renoir | Jonathan Rosenbaum May/June 1976

La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) – Offscreen Peter Rist from Offscreen, June 30, 2004

Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game Reconsidered ... Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2008

Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and La Règle du jeu: Landmark Cinema ... Aiyesha McInerney video essay from Pleasant Fluff, July 21, 2009

Rules of the Game, The (1939) - Classic Art Films Matthew, July 31, 2015

Film Review: Jean Renoir's “The Rules of the Game” — Top o' the ... Betsy Sherman from The Arts Fuse, June 8, 2017

The Rules of the Game | the fifi organization Jason Toews, August 30, 2009

Norman Holland on Jean Renoir's The Rules of the ... - A Sharper Focus

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

Verhoeven's Elle and Renoir's The Rules of the Game Peter Verstraten from Senses of Cinema, December 14, 2016

The Rules of the Game (1939) - Articles - TCM.com Brian Cady from Turner Classic Movies

Règle du Jeu - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Robin Wood from Film Reference

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] (8/10)

The Rules of the Game – Greatest film ever made. | Lisa Thatcher July 3, 2012

Film Freak Central - The Rules of the Game (1939) [The Criterion ... Jefferson Robbins

The Rules of the Game | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Bowen

La Règle du jeu (1939) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Harvey's Movie Review Harvey O’Brien

Out of the Past - Three French Films Released on ... - Senses of Cinema Geoff Gardner from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000

Images Movie Journal

Wellington Film Society - LA REGLE DU JEU Liz-Anne Bawden from the Wellington Film Society, 1976

What's the Big Deal?: The Rules of the Game (1939) - Film.com Eric D. Snider, March 30, 2010

The Poetic Realism of Jean Renoir | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith, July 7, 2011

New York Sun [Bruce Bennett]

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, November 2, 2006

La Règle du jeu (1939) Damian Cannon from Movie Reviews UK

Chimes at midnight: Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game ... John Lars Ericson from Blog Critics, February 27, 2004

filmcritic.com Jake Euker

Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir) Brandon’s Movie Memory

The Rules of the Game Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Sean Axmaker and Lang Thompson on Criterion Collection – 2 discs

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron [Criterion Collection] Special Edition, 2-discs

DVD Savant Review: The Rules of the Game Glenn Erickson, Criterion Special Edition, 2-discs

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Special Edition, 2-discs

About.com Home Video/DVD - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine] Criterion Special Edition, 2-discs

dOc DVD Review: The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) (1939) Mike Zimmer, Criterion Special Edition, 2-discs

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson, Criterion Special Edition, 2-discs

The Rules Of The Game - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of ... Matt Langdon, [Criterion Collection] Special Edition, 2-discs

The Rules of the Game Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Rules of the Game (1939) Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Rules of the Game: The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk ... Christopher McQuain, Criterion Blu-Ray

Movie Review - Rules Of The Game, The (1939) - eFilmCritic Ryan Arthur

THE RULES OF THE GAME (Jean Renoir, 1939) Dennis Grunes

rulesofthegame Dennis Schwartz from Ozu’s World Movie Reviews

Ill-Informed Gadfly [Ben Nuckols]

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Lang/Iain Harral]

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

I Found It At the Movies: 1939—The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir) Jeffrey Goodman from Moviemaker Blog, December 21, 2010

Jean Renoir (1894 - 1979) Jahsonic

GoneMovie.com

User reviews from imdb Author: Michael Moricz (MCMoricz@aol.com) from Astoria, NY

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: jawills from Vancouver, Canada

Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]

La Règle du Jeu Time Out London

The Rules of the Game: No 20 best arthouse film of all time | Film | The ... Steve Rose from The Guardian, October 20, 2010

The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009

Film Review: Russians join Battle of Waterloo -- Napoleon still loses Tony Mastroianni from the Cleveland Press

Rocchi's Retro Rental: The Name of the Game : SFGate: Culture Blog! James Rocchi from The SF Chronicle, March 4, 2008

`Rules' polished to original luster Kevin Thomas from The LA Times, December 24, 2006

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] [Great Movies]

The rules of Jean Renoir's "Game" | Far Flungers | Roger Ebert Omar Moore from Popcorn Reel, reprinted at the Ebert site from The Chicago Sun-Times, June 9, 2010

Movie Review - The Rules of the Game - RULES OF THE GAME - NYTimes.com Howard Thompson

FILM; 'The Film of Films': Renoir's Masterpiece - The New York Times Terrence Rafferty, January 18, 2004

A Man's World | L.A. Weekly Manohla Dargis from LA Weekly, August 25, 1999

The Rules of the Game Blu-ray - Jean Renoir - DVD Beaver

Jean Renoir-La Règle du jeu (1939) in AvaxHome photos

The Rules of the Game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Conversation Filmmakers Interview Jean Renoir Series

YouTube - Rules of the Game Trailer (Jean Renoir, 1939) (1:35)

TOSCA

aka: The Story of Tosca

France (100 mi) 1941 d: Carlo Koch Uncredited: Jean Renoir, for selected scenes

User reviews from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

This movie from Fascist-era Italy is not a musical version of Giacomo Puccini's operatic masterpiece but a straight dramatic narrative of the same story that had originated in Sardou's play. Puccini's music does figure in, however, with strategically placed arias on the sound track. Argentina-born Spanish actress Imperio Argentina plays the title role with diva-esque aplomb. Rossano Brazzi is perfectly cast as the strikingly handsome painter and revolutionary collaborator Mario Cavaradosssi. Michel Simon steals the show whenever he is on screen, as nefarious police chief Baron Scarpia, who is out to apprehend all opponents to Papal rule in this story set in early 19th-century Rome...and who has his eyes on Tosca for his own sexual gratification. He pays with his life, victim of Tosca's loathing and a well-placed knife.

The actual Roman settings, where the actions are written to have taken place, add a great deal of authenticity...Palazzo Farnese, the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle and the Castel Sant'Angelo from whence the double-crossed Tosca, having failed to save her beloved Mario, makes her ultimate leap. Carlo Koch directed the film begun by Jean Renoir. The great Luchino Visconti had a hand in it as well as assistant. The film ought to be better known and revived in museum series outside of Italy. It opened commercially in New York under the title "The Story of Tosca" in late 1947. Unfortunately it still remains an obscurity seen pretty much only on Italian television.

Movie Review - The Story of Tosca - ' Story of Tosca,' Italian ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

Anyone who has the least misgiving that the stories of great operas cannot be filmed for bold and exciting screen dramas, with the music but as marginal frames of sound, should see "The Story of Tosca," a picture produced in Italy right after the conclusion of the late hostilities, which opened at the Cinema Dante yesterday. For here is a brilliant cinema rendering of the popular Sardou play, "La Tosca," upon which Puccini based his famous opera, done in a realistic manner against actual settings within Rome and using key music—and a few arias—from the opera as a musical background.

True, the story of Tosca is one of the more violent of operatic plots and is keyed to contemporary sentiments in an uncommonly sympathetic way. Its tense and muscular drama of a singer who becomes involved in an intrigue of underground rebellion against the Italian princes in Napoleon's time and kills the hated policeman, Scarpia, in a vain effort to effect her lover's escape is clearly parallel to more recent political violences in Italy. And it renders the presentation particularly appropriate at this time.

But essentially this picture is effective because it is crisply and dynamically made, contrasting violently in its texture to the usual forgeries of operatic style. Its streets are the real Roman thoroughfares, its interiors are in real churches and palaces and, although its actors are in costumes, they behave reasonably like human beings. Furthermore, in pictorial composition and in cinematic movement and expressiveness, Carlo Koch, the director, has endowed it with the most modern documentary-fiction style. Smart to the tricks of graphic contrasts, he got real comment in his film.

That old master, Alfred Hitchcock, might look with admiration upon the sequence, for instance, in which the fugitive, Attavanti, is helped to escape from the chapel in the Church of Saint Andrea while a Te Deum mass is being sung and Scarpia and his plainclothes men are searching solemnly among the worshipers. Likewise, even the best of "tough" directors might envy the tension of the torture scene or the famous double-cross sequence in which Tosca stabs Scarpia to death, while the music of the Vissi d'Arte aria is played for the sound background. Gripping, too, is the execution sequence, overlooking the roofs of Rome in the gathering dawn, preceded by an ominous montage as the "E lucevan le Stelle" is plaintively sung.

Significant is the fact that the drama is played by actors of top rank who make no pretense of dissembling as operatic stars. Michel Simon is most arresting as the villainous Scarpia, a man of quiet and elegant manner concealing his cold and brutal heart. As Tosca, Imperio Argentina is impassioned and lustrous, while Rossano Brazzi is fiery as her lover and Adriano Rimoldi is warmly bravura as the fated fugitive. Other roles of less importance are richly and colorfully played, and the three or four arias on the sound-track are nicely sung by Ferruccio Tagliavini and Mafalda Favero.

Altogether "The Story of Tosca" is a picture of striking quality, well supplied with English subtitles to translate the Italian dialogue.

SWAMP WATER

USA (88 mi) 1941

Swamp Water | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This is commonly known as Jean Renoir's first American film (1941), although Renoir scholar Alexander Sesonske has established that Renoir's creative role in the project was severely hampered by producer Darryl F. Zanuck and that he didn't regard much of the film as his own. (The ending, for instance, was written by Zanuck and directed by Irving Pichel.) Nevertheless, the film has certain beauties and pleasures. Part of it was shot in Georgia's Okefenokee swamp, and the treatment of the small community living nearby is often pungent and distinctive. With Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, Walter Huston, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette. 86 min.

Swamp Water Time Out London

Renoir's first job in America for Fox: a rather sullen affair set in a Georgia swamp which harbours snakes, alligators, mud, and Walter Brennan, a fugitive criminal with whom the hero (Andrews) becomes strangely and melodramatically involved. As Raymond Durgnat points out in his Renoir book, it's a film with strong John Ford overtones in the casting, the regional subject-matter (post Tobacco Road and Grapes of Wrath), its music, and its script by the worthy but wordy Dudley Nichols. But Ford would undoubtedly have punched the story out with more action, more obvious emotion; Renoir is content to let the scenes lie there moodily, looking a bit drab and unbelievable for all the location shooting (quite a rare occurrence for this kind of Hollywood product at the time).

SWAMP WATER (Jean Renoir, 1941) Dennis Grunes

Walter Brennan had already won three undeserved Oscars when Jean Renoir, stranded in Hollywood during the war, drew from him the performance of a lifetime as Tom Keefer, a man hiding from the law in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp after having been sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. Regrettably, producer Darryl F. Zanuck so interfered with Renoir’s work on the film that Renoir disowned the result; indeed, Swamp Water would remain Renoir’s worst film—his only bad one, some would say.

The lead role of hot-headed young Ben Ragan, who finds and helps Tom, is played thinly by Dana Andrews; Tom is out searching for his dog, defying his father, Thursday, played poorly by Walter Huston, who has warned Tom to keep away from the swamp. Eighteen-year-old Anne Baxter, the granddaughter of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, launched her Oscar-bound career with a fine, sexy performance as Tom’s daughter, Julie.

Issues of loyalty and trust crop up between Ben and Tom, Ben and Thursday, and Ben and Julie as Ben makes his way to manhood; but the Saturday Evening Post serial by Vereen Bell that Dudley Nichols, no less, adapted may have been too flimsy to allow for any serious exploration. For that, consult instead Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped fifteen years hence.

Swamp Water is marginally atmospheric. Overall, it is an unbelievably bad film.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

Mystery*File [Steve Lewis]

Swamp Water (1941) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

Movie Review - Swamp Water - ----------- < 'Swamp Water,' With ... T.M.P. from The New York Times

THIS LAND IS MINE

USA (103 mi) 1943

This Land Is Mine Time Out London

Renoir's second American film, made in the same brutal year as Stalingrad and El Alamein, is one of his quietest and least startling, featuring Laughton as a timid village schoolteacher 'somewhere in occupied Europe' who muddles his way to martyrdom. Both Laughton - happier in this role than many - and O'Hara are fine, but the film's main attractions remain the elegant Renoir set-ups (some recalling La Bête Humaine) and the script's unusual ethical stance: not that Nazism was wrong because it denied free enterprise, but that it was wrong because it stood against the possibility of Socialism, human dignity, and political emancipation.

Should have been forgettable wartime propaganda, but pesky Renoir refuses to take the convenient sides and dish up the expected cardboard stereotypes. The head German is only doing his duty, so the real guilty people are the collaborators, for they allow the Germans to monopolize all the power and grant them the security they need to devote most of their troops to the unconquered territories. The hero is the one who appears to be a laughable coward, and for the most part vice versa. What's interesting is comparing this supposed pro French propaganda to the supposed anti French propaganda of Clouzot's Le Corbeau. In both cases there's essentially one who isn't rotten. Renoir doesn't paint such a bleak picture, create the corrosive atmosphere, but you could still argue whether he's condemning everyone or asking them to rise above the pack. It's a bit speechy and preachy, as expected from socially conscious Hollywood, but one of the few worthwhile WW films that came out during the war, and certainly beats the "anti-war" gorefests and blind flag waving that characterizes the studio releases since Gulf War 1.

This Land is Mine - TCM.com Eleanor Quin from Turner Classic Movies

In 1943, RKO Pictures released This Land Is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir and starring Charles Laughton. The plot centers around Laughton as a cowardly schoolteacher, struggling between his fears and responsibilities as a civilian living in a World War II-occupied town. Although the film's opening titles provide only "Somewhere in Europe" as its location, the setting is obviously Renoir's French homeland. A long-gestating collaborative effort between Renoir and writer Dudley Nichols, This Land Is Mine was, in the director's words, "specifically for Americans, to suggest that day-to-day life in an occupied country was not so easy as some of them thought." The film reunited Maureen O'Hara with Laughton (they appeared together in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939), this time as his classroom colleague and unrequited love. George Sanders plays O'Hara's betrothed and ultimate turncoat, and Walter Slezak is featured as the ranking German military official. As Laughton's overbearing mother, Una O'Connor effectively rounds out the supporting cast.

Originally titled The Children during its production phase, then changed to Mr. Thomas in honor of its schoolteacher hero, the film was eventually released as This Land Is Mine and was truly a joint effort between Renoir and Nichols. Having worked together on Swamp Water (1941), both men held each other in very high regard and eagerly sought another project in order to continue the collaboration. When signing the contracts with RKO, both men clearly defined their roles in the project; Renoir was to be in charge of the directing, the editing, and the story. Nichols had the authority of the script's dialogue. Curiously, Nichols was unable to write during the day; every word of This Land Is Mine was written at night by lamplight.

Renoir always had Laughton in mind for the lead role; the two first met on the set of Vessel of Wrath - known in the U.S. as The Beachcomber (1938) - and quickly found common ground: Laughton owned a piece of art painted by Renoir's father, Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, titled "The Judgment of Paris." The two maintained their friendship offscreen; Renoir married his second wife at Laughton's home. Having garnered critical acclaim in such films as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Laughton sunk his teeth into the part of the trembling teacher. Of his character he said, "My role stood for countless thousands of bewildered little people of Europe who have to face a master they hate and cannot understand." An actor of great intensity, Laughton ground the production to a halt one day when, while shooting an emotional scene in a prison cell, he broke off a piece of the set by gripping the bars over the window too roughly. He was unable to continue, explaining to Renoir that, "When Eugene's [Lourie, the production designer] set came away like that, I lost my belief in the whole picture!"

Renoir also had definitive designs as to the casting of the German commandant. As a crucial counter-character to Laughton's role, Renoir wanted his talented friend Erich Von Stroheim for the part. The actor, however, regretfully declined due to other acting commitments, and Walter Slezak was cast. Slezak actually ran into Laughton in Chicago prior to shooting, where they were both catching a train out to California. Slezak had a copy of the script with him that Laughton stayed up all night reading. During a stop in Albuquerque, Laughton--delighted with the writing--wired the head of RKO studios, Charles Koerner, with the following telegraph: "What a tremendous challenge for a tired old ham."

Having costarred in both The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Jamaica Inn (1939), Laughton and Maureen O'Hara were known for their on-screen chemistry; This Land Is Mine was no different. As was her forte, O'Hara transcended seamlessly between varying film genres, whether they were swashbuckling pirate flicks or Westerns with Wayne. Her work in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) established her as one of the most beloved actresses of her day. George Sanders, an actor best known for his portrayal of cynical rakes, is cast against type here as a wartime informer. He is best remembered for his Oscar-winning performance in All About Eve (1950) and for his eccentric suicide note that read: "Dear World: I am leaving because I am bored."

This Land Is Mine won an Oscar for sound, the only Academy Award ever bestowed upon a Renoir film. The director himself received an honorary award for film achievement in 1974, a belated gesture to a legendary filmmaker who was responsible for such masterpieces as Grand Illusion (1937) and Rules of the Game (1939). While making This Land Is Mine, Renoir found a possible explanation for the decidedly cool attitude the American film community had toward his films. In an interview he details how the desired effect of boots clomping on hard pavement could not be achieved; the sound department would not allow real stones to be used in the making of the set. Instead, cardboard was installed and the footsteps were dubbed into the audio. Of the situation, Renoir declared, "The incident enabled me to put my finger on the precise difference between French and American taste. The French have a passion for what is natural, while the Americans worship the artificial."

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

THIS LAND IS MINE (Jean Renoir, 1943) Dennis Grunes

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Movie Review - This Land Is Mine - 'This Land Is Mine,' a Moving ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

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THE SOUTHERNER

USA (92 mi) 1945

The Southerner Time Out London

A harsh yet human antidote to traditional Hollywood attitudes about 'real people', this is (with Diary of a Chambermaid) Renoir's most successful American film, loose, free-flowing, honest. A year-in-the-life of Zachary Scott, Betty Field and family, poor sharecroppers turned self-employed, both romantic and realistic in its investigation of courage and freedom, both accurate and impressionistic in its view of 'nature', so that you can smell the river and the dead rain after the flood that almost ends their struggle. (From the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry.

The Film Sufi: “The Southerner” - Jean Renoir (1945)

Renoir's exile from France during the war was, understandably, a difficult period for him, both personally and artistically. His brief stints with Fox, Universal, and RKO didn't allow him the creative freedom he needed, and it shows in his work. Of the half dozen American features with which he was involved, his favorite was this one, made for a small independent firm called Producing Artists. Based on a novel by George Sessions Perry, it tells the story of a poor cotton farmer (Zachary Scott) who, tired of working for a rich landowner, sets out with his wife (Betty Field), two kids, and irascible grandmother (Beulah Bondi) to grow his own crop on a piece of rented land. The film follows the family for a year as they struggle against poverty, sickness, the weather, and a malicious neighbor (J. Carrol Naish), to make a life for themselves.

Visually, The Southerner is among the most beautiful of any American film of that time. Renoir knows how to show nature as both harsh and soul-stirring. There is a vivid feeling for the rhythm of the seasons, the smallness of the human figure against the landscape, the stark poetry of the earth and of a man's efforts to tame it with ax and plow. His compassionate, clear-eyed view of character, perhaps his most salient trait as an artist, is also in evidence. Where a lesser director might opt for sentimentality, the people here are allowed to be weak, self-pitying, and foolish at times, as real people are.

The choice of title was unfortunate, I think, because the manners, accents, and mores depicted here are not Southern at all. Despite some uncredited help with the script from Faulkner, the characters sound vaguely, if anything, as if they hail from the Dust Bowl or the Midwest. Unfamiliar as he was with American ways of thinking, Renoir managed to capture the ideal lineaments of his dirt-poor human types through the actors, but missed the specifics that would make them come alive as residents of a particular American place. Scott does pretty well, especially when he is called upon to be vulnerable. Field seems too much the pretty and perfect wife. A friend played by Charles Kemper is meant to provide a contrast with the ways of a city slicker - some of his scenes come alarmingly close to condescension.

And yet, conceding the film's uneven and uncertain tone, it still manages to be more honest, more sensitive, more real, than most of the studio films being produced at that time, simply because of the personal touch, the style and visual sensibility that Renoir lends to the material. The Southerner doesn't really compare to his masterpieces of the 30s, or even most of his later post-American work, but in its own little way it has poetry, and is something of a testament to Renoir's genius, that could find a way to still flourish, in exile from his roots.

The Southerner - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Mirella Jona Affron from Film Reference

The Southerner was the third of Jean Renoir's American films (after Swamp Water and This Land is Mine ), the first of his independent Hollywood productions, and the object of controversy from the start. The debates that surrounded the film upon its release and continued long thereafter, disparate as they are in origin and intent, bear one upon the other in defining the film's central critical issue.

The Southerner recounts the struggles of a family to live in independence on the land, if not their own, at least not belonging to another visible presence. The enemies are, as one expects, the extremities of weather, and unyielding soil, illness and—less conventionally—mean-spirited, even hostile neighbors. If "the southerner" is the courageous Sam Tucker, he is also the dour, stone-hearted Devers, as well as the tight-fisted Harmie. The film's very title, in its generality (suggesting "the southerner" as a type) proved, perhaps as much as the story, a provocation.

The first of the controversies was local. Considered a sordid depiction of life in the southern states, the film was banned in Tennessee and attacked throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan announced a boycott. To these inhabitants, The Southerner presented in realistic terms a derogatory image of the people of that region. The second of the controversies was critical. James Agee, who knew the South well, objected that, on the contrary there was nothing realistic in Renoir's depiction of the region; Renoir had failed to convey not only the character of the southerner, but the speech, the gait, the facial expressions. To Agee, in spite of William Faulkner's well-publicized consultation on dialogue, the film rang false. Agee's was, as Raymond Durgnat points out, an objection based on the definition of authenticity borrowed from naturalism: from appearance to essence, from the outside in. Renoir had understood none of the codes of the region or its people.

Renoir's South was clearly not one of surface verisimilitude, but neither did his definition of realism depend on what André Bazin called "the crust of realism which blinds us." The direction of realism is from the inside out. The camera work, particularly in the exterior locations often shot in deep focus, captures the desolate landscape of a southern winter. A foggy river bank; Beulah Bondi, alone, stubborn and miserable, atop a cart in the pouring rain; and a hut hardly fit for human shelter are a few of the quasi-surreal images that translate Renoir's vision of rural America as a land of loneliness and isolation, without the comfort of neighbor or faith, depressed materially and especially morally. It was on the spirit of the place and times, not on the accent or gesture, that Renoir based and defined his portrait of "the southerner."

CultureCartel.com (Dan Callahan) review[4.5/5]

Jean Renoir is perhaps the greatest of all film directors. He is certainly the most lovable. Technically he was a master, but it is his wisdom and his compassionate heart that make him the candidate in the directorial pantheon to whom all others must bow. Most people know of or have seen his most famous French films, but his brief career in America has been a bit neglected. Yet I would argue that The Southerner (1945) and Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) are his greatest films, superior to Grand Illusion (1937) and Rules of the Game (1939) because they have been made by a man who has had to confront the full ramifications of Nazism.

Renoir is always called a “humanist,” that battered and now extinct designation. His optimism flourished before World War II, and his message, emphasized in Rules of the Game, is that everyone has their reasons. Renoir viewed his characters, even the most flawed, with an indulgent eye. But Nazism changed that, and when he went to America to make films, he dealt with this sadistic wrinkle head-on and wrestled it to the ground, emerging triumphant and, incredibly, none the sadder. This is why Renoir's movies have been and always will be so valuable.

The new DVD of The Southerner put out by VCI Entertainment (vcihomevideo.com) is not the best transfer one could hope for, but it is worlds better than my bootleg video copy from years ago. It's a film that every lover of cinema should own.

The Southerner opens, after a brief introduction of the main characters with family photos, on fields of cotton that look the sea or the sky. People work in the hot sun, and you feel the heat, just as you do in Renoir's Toni (1934), you hear the bird sounds and the smell the earth. You are there.

A man collapses—he is the uncle of Zachary Scott's Sam Tucker. Sam and his wife Nona (Betty Field) tend to this man, who is dying. “Grow your own crop,” he counsels before he passes on. This sequence has the powerful sense of life and death that Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) has. Indeed, The Southerner often evokes the Soviet cinema of the twenties, particularly Dovzhenko's. It's clear from the way Renoir shoots the landscape that he knows the earth is eternal and that people are just visitors.

After the man dies, we meet Granny (Beulah Bondi), a venomously cranky old woman who yells at her family as if she were yelling at God. Bondi's Lucy in Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), her other great film performance, is a sweet, slightly passive aggressive old woman. Here Bondi shows us the flip side of this characterization—her depiction of old lady rage is remarkably accurate.

When Sam and Nona take her to their rickety new house, where they intend to farm for themselves, Granny refuses to enter. She stays outside in the rain in her rocking chair, silhouetted against the enormity of the sky, ready for death yet raging at the dying of the light. If there's one image in The Southerner that stays with you, it is this haunting view of a defiant old woman nearly swallowed by the elements, yet still there, still fighting. “I'm not takin' it no more!” she howls. Life is inside the house with Sam and Nona and their family, while oncoming Death and change rocks on outside. It's a view of old age that is little seen.

“When ya all look down on my cold dead face, in that county pine box, you'll be sorry then—maybe!” says Granny (Bondi perfectly delivers the last word as a guilt-tripping afterthought.) “Ya keep on promisin' Granny. Ya don't deliver the goods,” says Nona, with tolerant black humor. Granny smiles lewdly when Sam and Nona bid her good night (the couple seems to have a warm sex life even in cramped quarters.) It's clear that Granny is so angry because she remembers her youth so vividly. This is felt most keenly when she gets up during a square dance and goes off by herself to see if she can remember the steps (she can't.) This heartbreaking cameo of despair is followed by a big laugh—Renoir glides from moment to moment effortlessly, to the point where he has no demarcation between tragedy and comedy. Yes, we are watching a film, with actors and sets, but Renoir makes films feel like life by stressing artificiality just enough for it to seem familiar.

Both The Southerner and the much darker Diary of a Chambermaid have a Hitler figure of sorts: here he is an embittered neighboring farmer named Devers (J. Carrol Naish) who thwarts the Tuckers out of spite—he's entirely believable in his wavering pettiness, not so much a villain as a bad apple that has to be dealt with slyly. “When ya got no money, ya work for them that's got it, that's the rule,” says Devers—fascism comes dangerously close to capitalism here, and it must be said that Renoir somewhat overstresses the left-wing agit-prop talk.

Scott and Field aren't the best actors in the world, but Renoir embraces their characters so warmly that it doesn't matter. In the ending of The Southerner, Renoir catches the spirit of perseverance so beautifully that it takes your breath away. To watch The Southerner you need concentration and openness and it repays you in bounteous aesthetic pleasure. Flashy, glib movies spoil us for a film this good, but its quality is readily apparent to anyone who is lucky enough to see it.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

The Southerner - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco from Turner Classic Movies

Tativille: From Catastrophe: Jean Renoir's The Southerner (1945) Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, August 8, 2008

THE SOUTHERNER (Jean Renoir, 1945) « Dennis Grunes

Southerner, The (1945) - full review! Classic Film Guide

Combustible Celluloid film review - The Southerner (1945), Jean ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

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Movie Review - The Southerner - THE SCREEN; 'Love Letters,' Drama ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID

USA (91 mi) 1946

The Diary of a Chambermaid Time Out London

In its own strange way, even more genuinely surreal than Buñuel's later version of Mirbeau's novel about a keyhole-peeking chambermaid whose arrival in the household of a decadent and eccentric aristocratic family wreaks havoc. What's so bizarre about Renoir's adaptation (scripted and produced by Meredith, then husband of Goddard) is the sheer artificiality of both setting and performances, emphasising the power struggles that develop as a theatre of deceit and delusion. Less bitterly savage than Buñuel, but equally sharp in its satire, it stands on an otherwise uncharted point between La Règle du Jeu and, say, The Golden Coach.

The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

In the early 1900s, a young chambermaid, Célestine, arrives from Paris to take up her new post at a country house in Normandy. Her employers are the Lanlaires, a pair of staunch monarchists whose mortal enemy is their eccentric Republican neighbour, Captain Mauger. Madame Lalaire plans to exploit Célestine’s charms to persuade her moody son, Georges, to stay at the family home. Célestine quickly discovers that she has four suitors – Monsieur Lalaire, Mauger, Georges, and Joseph, the Lanlaires’ funereal valet. She has no interest in love; all she wants is to marry a man with wealth so that she will never have to work again…

The Diary of a Chambermaid was the penultimate film made by French director Jean Renoir during his stint in Hollywood in the 1940s, a satisfying blend of farce and melodrama which is widely regarded as one of his best English-language films. It is an adaptation of the 1931 play "Le roman d’une femme de chambre" by André de Lorde and André Heuzé, which was based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau (a friend and sponsor of the director’s father, the painter Auguste Renoir).

The film stars Paulette Goddard, famously the side-kick and one-time wife of the comedy giant Charlie Chaplin (she starred in several of his best known films). At the height of her popularity and skill as a performer, the charismatic Goddard is radiant as the heroine of The Diary of a Chambermaid, showing her distinctive flair for pathos and comedy. There are some pleasing contributions from her co-stars, particularly Burgess Meredith (the film’s co-producer and Goddard’s husband at the time) as the mad flower-eating hedonist Mauger and Francis Lederer as the thoroughly creepy villain Joseph (who looks like something that just hobbled off the set of a German expressionist horror film).

Of the half a dozen or so films that Jean Renoir made in Hollywood, The Diary of a Chambermaid is the one that is most readily identifiable as his work and nearest to his previous French films. The film it most resembles is his 1939 masterpiece, La Règle du jeu, which was also concerned with the tensions between the ruling elite and the downtrodden lower orders. There are also echoes of an earlier film, Nana (1926) – both films depict an impoverished young woman determined to improve her lot by any means. Add to this the stylistic and textual similarities – Renoir wasn’t afraid to alternate between farce and drama, and in this he succeeds brilliantly. The chillingly dark final passages of the film (very nearly film noir) make a striking contrast with the hilarious comic sequences in the early part of the film. Renoir saw comedy and tragedy as two unavoidable components of human experience, and this can be seen in many of his films.

It is interesting to compare this film with Luis Buñuel’s subsequent version of Mirbeau’s novel, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1964), which starred Jeanne Moreau. This later film focuses much more on the darker, sexual aspects of the novel, exploring all manner of perversion and wickedness, against the backdrop of a world in moral and social decline (thereby allowing a greater evil – Fascism – to take control). Renoir’s interpretation is far more optimistic and comparatively whimsical (and let’s not forget he was subject to far greater censorship than Buñuel). He effectively uses the story as an excuse to revisit the societal and political themes of his previous films, such as La Règle du jeu and La Grande illusion. The film shows the evil which artificial social barriers can engender and concludes that Utopia (that universally sought Happy Ending) can only be achieved when all men (and women) have equal status.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID (Jean Renoir, 1946) Dennis Grunes

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THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH

USA (71 mi) 1947

The Woman on the Beach | Chicago Reader Don Druker

This elusive, nightmarish tale of a coast guard officer (Robert Ryan) and his near tragic dalliance with the fetching wife of a painter (Joan Bennett) is one of Jean Renoir's most explicit portrayals of sexuality (1946); but it seems to have undergone a mysterious obscuring in the studio's final editing. Bazin calls it at once one of the most sincere and one of the most hampered of Renoir's films--but it remains, apart from The Southerner, Renoir's most impressive American work.

The Woman on the Beach Time Out London

The last film from Renoir's wartime exile in America, considered too obscure, too erotic, and cut by nearly a third of its running time by RKO after a preview. What might have been is anybody's guess (not least because it freely rewrites the emphases of its source novel, Mitchell Wilson's None So Blind), but what's left is great Renoir: a tormented triangle involving a blind painter (Bickford), his passionate wife (Bennett), and a shell-shocked sailor (Ryan), all three of them outcasts in different ways. A film noir in mood, with terrific performances, wonderful use made of the dead-end settings (the lonely clifftop house, the beach strewn with dead hulks), and darkly elemental overtones to the emotional battle (Ryan's recurring nightmare of drowning; Bickford's cleansing by fire of his past). Fragments, maybe, but remarkable all the same.

Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) (link lost)

Like the waking dream that it is, you have to go with The Woman On The Beach.

Jean Renoir’s last American film is a brief but densely layered psychological study. As in The Southerner (to which the director’s sensitivity for landscape lent a unique lyricism), Renoir’s rhythm here is at odds with the expectations of a Hollywood film. With virtually no establishing sequences, soon after meeting, Ryan’s Lt.Scott Burnett and Peggy Butler (Joan Bennett) are engaged in a Deep And Meaningful in front of the fireplace of her beachfront home: "In a way we’re alike", the two strangers quickly conclude.

Dreams can work like that and if you accept, it’s easier to enter into the intertwined depths of these linked characterizations. Burnett is a vet suffering from shellshock and knows it, and is looking for understanding, not sympathy, while Peggy’s guilt over (apparently) ‘blinding’ her painter husband Ted (Bickford), ties her to him and their gloomy beachhouse.

Peggy’s fireplace speech explicitly talks to Scott of ‘ghosts’ and the need to stop fighting them head-on as you never win that way, but rather need to accept, and move on. Fittingly The Woman On The Beach reflects Renoir’s sense of disorientation at this time, and despite its lack of thriller elements is often described as film noir. (The sublimely moody cinematography by Greg Tover [The Day The Earth Stood Still] doesn’t hurt either.) Returning in 1945 to his beloved Paris after wartime exile in Hollywood, Renoir felt "disturbed by a sense of not belonging any more", according to John Russell Taylor (whose book Strangers In Paradise is an excellent account of Hollywood’s wartime emigrés). To Renoir, post-occupation Parisians exhibited an understandable mixture of defiance, wariness, shame and hostility. Going back to Hollywood for this American swansong, he distilled all of his confused reactions into this film.

As in a dream, the subconscious is externalised into the narrative’s reality and the washed up hulk where Scott and Peggy’s illicit love occurs is the lieutenant’s ghost made incarnate. But Ted and Peggy Butler’s relationship has ghosts too, even of happiness, as seen when they wistfully remember their time of ‘New York champagne’. Bickford has a craggy masculinity a la late Widmark and is effectively enigmatic, as we never know exactly where to fit his character. Neither does the young lieutenant, and the brinkmanship of Burnett’s ‘testing’ Ted’s blindness by imperiling the older man in a series of increasingly hazardous bluffs (pun intended!) is an amazing sequence, both in conception and execution.

As in Double Indemnity, we learn late in the piece that Peggy has been here before and is something of a serial seductress. Burnett’s goody two-shoes fiancée Eve (Nan Leslie) never stands a chance.

Ironically, given the vision/blindness ambiguity, paintings are the anchor holding Ted Butler back. When his final impulsive act destroys the self that had been, it becomes the concomitant break in the emotional logjam that’s been likewise holding all three of this triangle in thrall.

One has to hope that this obviously therapeutic exercise ended up working for Renoir too. The tantalising reality is that, after a disastrous preview in Santa Barbara, he (not the studio suits) recut and re-shot huge chunks of his original vision, approximately one third of which is now lost. Subsequently he reflected that "I was too far ahead of the public’s mentality". Years later, a different public prepared to trust this conductor can find much of enduring relevance and power in The Woman On The Beach.

The Woman on the Beach - TCM.com Bret Wood from Turner Classic Movies

When Nazi Germany's encroaching grip on Europe sent many of the continent's finest directors fleeing to Hollywood, Jean Renoir - who had already earned his reputation with films like The Rules of the Game (1939) and The Grand Illusion (1937) - behaved on the surface like most of his compatriots, dabbling in genres like westerns and the burgeoning new cinematic strain later termed film noir. While others like Fritz Lang excelled with dark, socially conscious thrillers, Renoir only made one bona fide contribution, 1947's Woman on the Beach for RKO. Lang's frequent noir muse, Joan Bennett (from The Woman in the Window, 1945, Scarlet Street, 1945, and the underrated Man Hunt, 1941), assumed the female lead as Peggy Butler, a married woman whose beachside idyll captivates traumatized WWII Coast Guard vet Scott Burnett (Clash by Night's [1952] Robert Ryan) - who's engaged to another woman. Peggy's blind husband, Tod Butler (Charles Bickford), a respected painter, is unaware of their attraction and enjoys the former soldier's presence; however, the married couple's relationship seems quite perverse considering Peggy was responsible for his blindness - which Scott believes may not be quite as incapacitating as appearances indicate.

Originally slated as a tantalizing project for famous horror producer Val Lewton under the title Desirable Woman (and loosely based on the Mitchell Wilson potboiler None So Blind), Woman on the Beach became Renoir's fifth and final American film when he was brought on at the request of Bennett. The cast went through several changes, with George Brent originally slated as the lead before Ryan came on board. As the prestige value escalated both behind and in front of the camera, the film evolved from a quickie programmer to an A-list project.

Bennett (who was fluent in French) and Renoir got along famously on the set; Renoir was particularly amused by the contrast between her vamp image and far homier off screen persona. As he wrote to his friend Paul Cezanne, "She spends the whole day knitting, and I find it really funny to think that this homey person is considered by the American moral groups to be the most dangerous sexpot on the screen today." In another letter to Marie Lestringuez he wrote, "She knows how to make fun of her screen personality and doesn't waste a single ironic allusion to her false eyelashes or any other artifices of make-up. The other actors, camera crew, technicians also form an excellent company, the sort that has me returning home from this adventure almost regretting that it's going to end."

Unfortunately RKO brass and preview audiences at a disastrous Santa Barbara screening were left cold by the film's refusal to play by the traditional murder-mystery rulebook. A frustrated and despairing Renoir returned to the editing room and then reshot numerous scenes at RKO's insistence for a drastic overhaul, which probably accounts for several noticeable inconsistencies in the dialogue. As he wrote in a letter to Alain Renoir, "There was a lot of bad blood and I worked like a galley slave editing and re-editing. Now I've decided to stick with the current structure, which will still take me another two weeks to complete." After working on salvaging the film for a full year, his opinion of the work had dwindled considerably: "It was this miserable plot which RKO decided to give me to direct. I accepted, I don't know why, no doubt in order to pay my taxes, and it added a few miles of film to our good city's annual output." Later admitting "I'm afraid I was too far ahead of the public's mentality" in his autobiography, My Life and My Films, Renoir fortunately managed to preserve the essence of a challenging, complex, and very adult drama bound to surprise anyone expecting the usual duped hero and deadly dame formula. When the film received its expected lukewarm reception, Renoir¿s contract with RKO was terminated and he had to abandon a proposed adaptation of Madame Bovary. Meanwhile Bennett rejoined Lang the following year for another widely misunderstood thriller, Secret Beyond the Door, and soon teamed with another legendary French director, Max Ophuls, for 1949's The Reckless Moment.

Though he possessed American naturalization papers, Renoir found the studio experience so disheartening he opted out of becoming an American citizen and attempted an independent distribution company, the Film Group, which was stymied by an inability to secure loans. By the close of the decade, with his studio career officially over, Renoir turned instead to an independent source for his 1951 masterpiece, The River, commencing a decade-long fling with wildly colorful impressionist films that reinstated his critical standing with the international community once again.

Film Noir of the Week Wheeler Winston Dixon

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir, 1947) - Mubi Glenn Kenny, September 15, 2009

THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH (Jean Renoir, 1947) Dennis Grunes

Arthur Shields and the Politics of Jean Renoir's The River • Senses of ... Antony Seller from Senses of Cinema, February 2, 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New York

User reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: ackstasis from Australia

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: writers_reign

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: st-shot from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico, USA

Woman on the Beach (1947) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

Movie Review - - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW - NYTimes.com

THE RIVER B+ 91

France India USA (99 mi) 1951

As literary an adaptation of a movie as you’re ever likely to see, quite unlike anything else, the last of Renoir’s American films and his first in color, an extraordinarily colorful film shot by the director’s nephew Claude on location in India using a documentary style, but also a rather stiff dramatic portrayal of the characters. Son of the great impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, this is a family that thrives on art and its observant portrait of class in society. An adaptation of Rumer Godden's adolescent coming-of-age novel of a young 14-year old girl growing up on the banks of the Ganges River in British colonialist India, this entire film plays out like a poetic reverie, a memory play narrated by the author’s thoughts, giving this a feeling of impressionist exploration of the nearby locale. Harriet (Patricia Walters), is a plain girl who is not particularly attractive, a kind rarely seen in the movies, yet she’s fond of writing in her diary, knowing much of it is actually well written despite her youthful age, describing her interior thoughts along with revelatory descriptions of the river, including the boats, the crowded marketplace, and people washing their clothes, all in harmony with the timeless quality of the river. This is her secret world, introducing European culture into the more Eastern philosophy of India where Buddha reigns supreme. Harriet lives with a large family where she is the eldest of 5 children, where her world changes with the arrival next door of a wounded war veteran, Captain John (Thomas E. Breen), who lost a leg in combat. His presence captivates the interest of not only Harriet, but her slightly older, more spoiled best friend Valerie (Adrienne Corri) and a mixed race daughter about the same age, Melanie (Radha), who has returned home after being educated in the West.

Looking very much like a Powell/Pressburger film, using plenty of close up shots, where all the principals but Melanie have blazingly red hair, this is largely an idealized portrait of a family, where the idea of happiness in a colonialist country must undergo some alterations due to the complexity of the experience, as British freedom is not Indian freedom. Without ever addressing the political divisions, Renoir instead simply shows a chilly relationship between the two cultures, where they don’t exactly mix despite living side by side with one another. Indians are the British servants, while others are neighbors, but none are featured players. Instead this plays out like a Vicente Minnelli production, where the highly colorful compositions are first and foremost, accented by Indian music constantly playing in the background, with a continuous stream of everpresent shots of boats and people on the river. Harriet’s coming of age is paralleled with India’s push for freedom as well, though never overtly, as Harriet’s father (Esmond Knight) is a local industrialist, obtaining his wealth and position by exploiting colonialist labor. But Harriet knows nothing about that, and instead has fallen head over heels in love with the Captain, as has Valerie and Melanie, though each perceives their future with him quite differently. Harriet is the most obvious, as she reads long expository passages from her diary which unravel in dreamlike sequences, much like a play within a play, where her vision of first love has a spiritual transcendence about it.

Using Satyajit Ray as an assistant director, the film is slow with long descriptive passages read aloud by the narrator as an adult looking back, which takes some getting used to, as the overall style of this film is otherworldly, where it all plays out like a dream. There are few films that present positive images from colonialist settings, but this is such an idealized family setting that it could just as easily be Judy Garland’s family in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944). This personal intimacy adds to the overall appeal of the film, as it allows the poetry of the narrative to register with the audience, along with the supremely lovely shots of the river and of life in India, reflected as a time capsule in dance, ritual, song, and the colorful costumes, adding an exotic element to their ordinary lives. Harriet’s mother (Nora Swinburne) couldn’t be more supportive and loving towards her children, where her nurturing role appears very much like the way mothers were portrayed on American TV in the 1950’s, safe, comfortable, wise, and all-knowing, but certainly playing the supportive role to the husband. Melanie’s confusion with her identity of being a dark-skinned Indian but educated in the West is never fully explored, as despite her noticeable intelligence, she obviously remains troubled. Valerie is the most impulsive, while Harriet wins our hearts largely due to her age, as nothing is as it seems at 14, where she’s temperamental, subject to turbulent mood swings, crestfallen at the least little disappointment, where her entire world feels like it’s crumbling apart. Little does she know that in a short period of time, her mind will be elsewhere, beautifully describing the poetry of the world around her, where as her mother points out, life goes on. This is a love letter to India where her romanticized visions will once again explode with the personal detail of the seething humanity surrounding her.

Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr

Jean Renoir's 1951 masterpiece, his first film in color. The story concerns a group of English colonialists living on the banks of the Ganges, but beyond that the film describes how the European mind gradually succumbs to the eternal perspectives of India. Renoir's images flow with the same still motion as his metaphorical river: entering or leaving the frame is a matter of life and death, but in the end it is the same. For Andre Bazin, this was the Rules of the Game of Renoir's postwar period, a film in which "the screen no longer exists; there is nothing but reality." 99 min.

Well-heeled with decades of kudos (and citations from the André Bazin army), Jean Renoir's The River (1951) makes a restored-print reappearance, ready to seduce newbies who've only seen it on video and for whom its Michael Powell–esque Technicolor vistas of Indian landscape, brooding with mottled shadow and glowing flesh, could be a revelation. (It was shot by Renoir's nephew Claude.) Adapting Rumer Godden's novel about a Brit-colonial girlhood spent on the banks of the Ganges amid swarming siblings, pure-hearted locals, and a certain visiting veteran (the forgettable Thomas E. Breen), Renoir fashioned what might be his sweetest movie about family and one of the post-war years' most serene cinematic statements. Many old-school cinephiles would trade most of the last two decades of movies for the courting scene on the dark stairwell, where the young pilot unconsciously swats the moths alighting in Adrienne Corri's thick, red hair. Still, Godden's story and narration are thick with clichéd exotica, and 21st-century viewers can be forgiven for being perturbed by the Euro-white condescension and pre-feminist ickiness on display. It may be minor Renoir in the end, but all considerations wither in the shadow of his optimistic humanism, an indomitable sensibility dedicated to the warm bounce and emotional intercourse of love-born relationships.

The River Wally Hammond from Time Out London

‘This is the story of my first love, growing up on the banks of a river’, young English writer Harriet (Patricia Walters) narrates as she starts her recollection of a childhood on the Ganges delta during the last gasp of the Raj. It could have happened anywhere, she adds, ‘but the flavour is Indian’. Shot on location in 1951, this adaptation of Rumer ‘Black Narcissus’ Godden’s semi-autobiographical novel was Renoir’s first excursion into colour – and not the least of its pleasures are visual, its gently idealised Bengal rendered in unostentatious but redolent muddy ochres and dappled greens by cinematographer Claude Renoir. The mores are those of a past age and from a spectrum of experience, from the brood who play tumbling sisters and errant nature-obsessed brother, to veteran Esmond Knight, as her affectionate jute-factory manager father. The acting may now seem creaky, but the feelings, thoughts and emotions are only too real. It was a transitional film for Renoir; freed from an unhappy Hollywood sojourn, you sense a requickened experimentalism and neorealist influence in his interweaving of documentary-style and dramatic footage. It’s a slight story that details the 14-year-old narrator and her two rivals’ reaction to the appearance of a dashing but melancholy war veteran – but it encompasses the whole cycle of life and is told with a stoic wisdom and simplicity that’s as beautiful as it is moving.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

Adapted from Rumer Godden's autobiographical novel, The River tells of childhood, young love, coming of age and the eternal cycle of life. Its central character (and the film's narrator) is fourteen-year-old Harriet (Patricia Walters), the eldest of five children. Harriet and her beautiful, slightly older friend Valerie (Adrienne Corri) experience the intensity of first love when Captain John (Thomas E Breen) comes to stay with their neighbours, a mixed race family with a daughter, Melanie (Radha), of similar age. Captain John, who has lost a leg in active service, captivates the three teenagers, each of whom develops romantic feelings towards this heroic and enigmatic young man.

Following several years of relative frustration in the United States, Renoir came to Godden's novel after reading a review in The New Yorker. Having acquired the film rights, he then found the doors of Hollywood slamming in his face because the story, though set in India, lacked elephants and tiger hunts. On the verge of giving up, Renoir was approached by businessman Kenneth McEldowney, who had tried to secure the rights himself. A deal was struck and Renoir, who had never been to India before, made a number of visits to Calcutta to research locations and assemble his crew. Delighted with the tropical vegetation of Bengal and the vibrancy of India's festivities and celebrations, he recognised that this would be the perfect opportunity to put his theories about colour photography into practice.

Rumer Godden who, though born in England, had lived most of her life in India, worked with Renoir on creating a new scenario and later advising on the shoot. While disliking Powell and Pressburger's studio-bound version of her earlier novel Black Narcissus, Godden greatly approved of Renoir's film with its genuine locations. It captured, as she later said, the essence of her book - "a hymn to life incarnated in the ever present river".

In the words of film historian Ian Christie: "The River has survived falling out of fashion to re-emerge as a touchstone for a certain kind of modernity in cinema ... It draws on the 'reality' of India but does so to immerse us in the spiritual drama of its central character." The bfi is delighted to introduce Renoir's poignant and poetic tale to a new generation of film-goers.

The River has been restored by The Academy Film Archive in co-operation with The BFI and Janus Films. Restoration funding was provided by The Film Foundation and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

BFI | Sight & Sound | The River (1951) Bryony Dixon, November 2004

“It is the story of my first love; about growing up on the banks of a wide river. First love must be the same everywhere but the flavour of my story would have been different..."

An older, wiser voice introduces Jean Renoir's 1951 adaptation of Rumer Godden's coming-of-age tale of a teenage girl living with her English family on the banks of the Ganges. I first saw this film on television, and was charmed by the story, which has all the elements of a 'first love' narrative: the arrival of a young man into a group of female rivals for his attention, the young people's embarrassing efforts to appear mature, the juxtaposition of the worlds of children and adults, the occurrence of real tragedy to impose a slap of reality on overheated imaginations. No one writes about the power of adolescent emotion better than Rumer Godden (think of 'Black Narcissus' and 'The Greengage Summer'). But I do remember being puzzled by the lack of engagement between the English and Indian worlds.

Here India seemed to be portrayed as if in a 1950s travelogue. Satyajit Ray, on meeting Renoir during his initial trip to Calcutta, expressed reservations about the lack of Indian characters in the script, but Renoir chose to follow the novel closely. The adult stories that weave through the narrative hint at the deeper problems caused by the exploitative colonial culture, but these are not explored. Acceptance of misfortune or circumstances denotes maturity - an attitude depicted as inherent to Indian culture but something westerners must learn - and this philosophy is embodied in the image of the river. But it's only when you see the film on the big screen that the metaphor becomes clear.

This was Renoir's first colour film and his last American film, shot entirely in India. A new restoration by the Academy Film Archive from original nitrate Technicolor elements, some from the bfi's own archives, revitalises Renoir's achievement and his nephew Claude Renoir's exquisite photography, making sense of the director's stated aim. "I shot ['The River'] so that I could either create a narration, that is, stay with a book-like tone, or else not tell the story and not have any commentary at all. During the little previews, when I saw that the documentary side got good reactions (let's say the poetic side), I decided to go with the semi-narrated form, which permitted me to present certain purely poetic parts without having to back them up with dramatic action and dialogue. The construction of the script was rather loose, rather easy, and allowed for the two solutions."

The River Criterion essay by Alexander Sesonske, September 4, 1989

The River Criterion essay by Ian Christie, February 28, 2005

Holiday Movies - Candy, Coal and Deneuve in Arnaud Desplechin's ... Dennis Lim interviews French director Arnaud Desplechin from The New York Times, October 31, 2008

The Film Sufi: "The River" - Jean Renoir (1951)

Bazin and “The River” as a Problem in the History of Film Theory, Part 1 Prakash Younger from Offscreen, July 31, 2003

Re-thinking Bazin Through Renoir's The River, Part 2 Prakash Younger from Offscreen, July 31, 2003

Arthur Shields and the Politics of Jean Renoir's The River • Senses of ... Antony Seller from Senses of Cinema, February 2, 2009

The River • Senses of Cinema James Leahy, March 10, 2009

Jean Renoir's River - Parallax View David Coursen from Parallax View, June 21, 2009

THE RIVER (Jean Renoir, 1951) | Dennis Grunes

The River · Film Review Jean Renoir's color masterpiece The River ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

The River - TCM.com Felicia Feaster from Turner Classic Movies

The River (1951) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen

The River (1951) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

Not Coming To a Theater Near You [Beth Gilligan]

The River (1951) Cinema Talk

ReelTalk [Donald Levit] Of Time and the River

The River (1951) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen DVD review, Criterion Collection

DVD Talk - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron

DVD Verdict Steve Evans [Criterion Collection]

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

About.com - DVD Review [Ivana Redwine] Criterion Collection

DVD-Dweeb.com Oliver Korioth

Film Threat - The River Phil Hall

Thirtyframesasecond [Kevin Wilson]

The River (1951, Jean Renoir) Brandon’s Movie Memory

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The River - Directed by Jean Renoir Travis Mackenzie Hoover from Exclaim!

River, The Review (1951) Andrew Pragasam from The Spinning Image

Chicago Public Radio: Jean Renoir’s “The River” Mihlos Stehlik from NPR, February 24, 2006, including an audio version

Jean Renoir's The River (1951) Chris Knipp from Filmleaf

Not Just Movies: Capsule Reviews: The River (1951), Caught, Bottle ... Jake Cole

The River | 2010 Seattle International Film Festival | Jean Renoir ...

Review of The River David Parkinson from Empire magazine

BFI Filmstore France

The River - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Christopher Null from filmcritic

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dougdoepke from Claremont, USA

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: william-t-archer from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: doctorlightning from United States

The River | DVD | EW.com Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly

Movie - The River (1951) TV Guide

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

The River Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The River Philip French from The Observer

Movie Review - - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'The River,' Jean Renoir ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

The River Blu-ray - Nora Swinburne - DVD Beaver

THE GOLDEN COACH (Le carrosse d'or)

France Italy (103 mi) 1953

The Golden Coach Time Out London

The first film in what came to be seen as a trilogy (completed by French Cancan and Eléna et les Hommes) celebrating Renoir's continuing love affair with the theatre. Magnani plays the lead actress in a troupe of commedia dell'arte players in 18th century Peru. The story (derived from Prosper Mérimée) revolves around her pursuit by three different lovers. Both story and characterisations are remarkably silly, in fact, but Renoir makes gold of the interaction between theatre and life, the distinction between them continually shifting with the plot. Exquisitely shot by Claude Renoir, this is one of the great colour films.

Le Carrosse D'Or - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Ronald Bowers from Film Reference

Jean Renoir regarded Le Carrosse d'or as a mere jeu d'esprit , but in fact the film, while one of Renoir's lighter efforts, has been greatly underrated. Its commedia dell'arte -inspired picturesqueness encompasses one of Renoir's lifelong themes—the disaffinity between illusion and reality, life and theatre, what people really are versus the roles they play. Most important to the creative sensibility of Renoir the artist, the film concerns the artist's duty to give, not take; by doing so he experiences his greatest power and true humanity.

The film is based on Prosper Mérimée's one-act play, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement which derived from a real-life Peruvian incident. Mérimée's play was also the inspiration for an episode in Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. On the surface, Le Carrosse d'or is a simple story of love, but Renoir gives it a Pirandellian twist with its confusion of identities while giving new meaning to Shakespeare's phrase, "All the world's a stage." The plot centers around Camilla (Anna Magnani), the Columbine of a troupe of travelling theatre players in 18th century Peru, and her three loves: the Peruvian viceroy, a matador, and a young Spanish nobleman/soldier. The viceroy has just incurred the wrath and envy of his court and the church council by importing a golden coach from Europe. As Renoir stated, "In Mérimée's play, La Périchole is an actress, and in my movie, Camilla is an actress. In the play and in the film the coach stands for worldly vanity, and in both works the conclusion is precipitated by the bishop." As was his practice, Renoir used his scripts as a starting point, then wove the plot around his own special view of life and human nature.

Here Renoir's point was to present a serio-comic masque, referring to the game of appearances, as a true reflection of human behavior. In a play within a play within a film, Camilla plays at love. She becomes the center of attention when the viceroy presents the coach to her as a gift, an act he hopes will dissipate the jealousies of his court. Camilla wears a variety of faces as she wavers among her three romantic choices: she can opt for the life of luxury with the viceroy; she can choose a simpler life among the Peruvian Indians with the faithful soldier; or she can elect a volatile relationship with the adored and fiery matador. But the theatre is her real life, her real love, and she astonishes all three lovers by presenting the coach to the Bishop of Lima so it can be used to carry the last sacraments to the dying. Renouncing desire, she stands alone at center stage as the curtain falls. When asked if she misses her three lovers, she replies, wryly, "Just a little."

Le Carrosse d'or is the first of Renoir's three theatre films of the 1950s—the others being French Cancan and Elena et les hommes. In each he fills the stage/screen with a spectacle of action, sets, and costumes, with a childlike glee at his powers of manipulation. In keeping with the commedia dell'arte flavor, he chose Vivaldi's music for its lightness of spirit, making the music an integral part of the film.

Renoir drew forth the finest performance of Anna Magnani's career with this picture and called her "the greatest actress I have ever worked with." Her Camilla is a brilliant tour de force. Le Carrosse d'or is a charming film, and while minor Renoir, it is a testament to his warmth, good humor, and sense of whimsy.

filmcritic.com Jake Euker

Jean Renoir’s 1953 The Golden Coach begins with the simultaneous arrival, at a remote, 18th-century Spanish outpost in Peru, of a coach made of solid gold – intended for use by the viceroy (Duncan Lamont) at official functions of the state – and a traveling Italian commedia dell’arte troupe whose star is the tempestuous beauty Camilla (Anna Magnani). Like the troupe’s manager Felipe (Paul Campbell) and the colony’s celebrity matador Ramon (Riccardo Rioli), the viceroy soon falls in love with Camilla. This colony, however, is one in which the Catholic Church holds the reins of power, and actors are not necessarily esteemed in clerical eyes. When the viceroy makes an extravagant gift of the golden coach to Camilla, turmoil ensues.

The Golden Coach was the first of a loose trilogy of films made by Renoir following his return to Europe from America, where he had worked during the war. The theme of all three films (the others are French Cancan and Elena and Her Men) is Renoir’s lifelong preoccupation with the ways in which the life of the theater mirrors that of the world beyond the proscenium arch, and in The Golden Coach this theme finds its most magnificent expression within the trilogy, and perhaps the most magnificent of any film. In this highly stylized and artificial world, the actors perform on- and off-stage, the viceroy and assorted nobility within the colonial government perform for their subjects and for one another, and the distinction between performance and life dissolves into a richly layered construction of artifice. The mechanics of the narrative click and whirl like clockwork, so that you’re caught up in the dynamics of this deconstruction of reality with an ease that belies Renoir’s supreme mastery. His drama builds gradually into theater – even the sets become more formalized – until, somewhere midway in the film, Camilla announces to her audience that act two has concluded; from that moment forward all the world is a stage.

It’s a wonderful conceit, and at its core is a performance from Magnani just as golden and gaudy as the coach that nearly coaxes her from the stage. As a commedia dell’arte comedienne, she’s perfectly cast – Renoir reports that the film was largely built around her – and she shades this central performance brilliantly as she interacts with the viceroy and his court, so that she never comes completely out of her stage character. In the perfectly conceived final scene – a daring blending of theater and reality that in other hands might have seemed archly experimental – she renounces the love of the men who are mad for her in preference of her true love: theater. Magnani, alone on a stage, and acknowledging that might always be, shows us a woman strong enough to make this decision even as she realizes that the choice, for show people like herself, is not entirely their own.

The Golden Coach, despite its preoccupation with the stage, is a distinctly cinematic experience. Like the other films in the trilogy, it’s shot in gorgeous color and it swims in its artifice, in its stagy sets, elaborate costumes, and the ever-present Vivaldi in the score. Visually, it’s dazzling. Its seamless conception largely masks its faults, chief among them a too-flowery screenplay (and one that sometimes states its themes too baldly) and wildly uneven acting in the supporting roles. Many will find it far too affected. (The film met similar complaints at the time of its release.)

But for those who are open to it, The Golden Coach provides a film experience unlike any other. The Criterion Collection has released the entire trilogy of films (including the English language version of The Golden Coach – the film was shot in French, English, and Italian versions simultaneously – that Renoir is said to have preferred) with a wealth of extras almost as extravagant as the coach itself. Renoir scholars, lovers of theater, and true cineastes are urged to take this ride.

The Golden Coach Criterion essay by Andrew Sarris, August 2, 2004

Jean Renoir’s Trilogy of Spectacle Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 2, 2004

Truffaut’s Changing Times: The Last Metro Criterion essay by Armond White, March 23, 2009

Entering Cinecittà March 11, 2010

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Le Carrosse d’or (1953) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

THE GOLDEN COACH (Jean Renoir, 1953) Dennis Grunes

The Golden Coach (1953, Jean Renoir) Brandon’s Movie Memory

The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d'or) James Kendrick, Criterion Collection

DVD Journal Mark Bourne reviews the Film Trilogy

DVD Verdict Review - Stage And Spectacle: Three Films By Jean ... Bill Gibron reviews the Film Trilogy

Images Journal Kendahl Cruver reviews the Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] reviewing the Film Trilogy

DVD Savant Review: , The Golden Coach, Elena and Her Men Glenn Erickson reviewing the Film Trilogy

User reviews from imdb Author: citykid from France

User reviews from imdb Author: Boba_Fett1138 from Groningen, The Netherlands

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

Movie Review - The Golden Coach - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; ' The ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

FRENCH CANCAN A 96

France Italy (102 mi) 1954

French Cancan Time Out London

Renoir's return to film-making in France after an absence of fifteen years is a nostalgic studio reconstruction of the Paris of his painter father. Despite its artificiality and meandering plot construction - with Renoir falling in love with some of his minor characters - it brilliantly evokes the world of the French Impressionists, building into a comic riot of colour and movement. The story is a backstage musical on the founding of the Moulin Rouge and the training of the famous cancan dancers. The climactic cancan scene is one of the finest dance sequences ever filmed, and worth the price of a ticket on its own.

FRENCH CANCAN (Jean Renoir, 1954) Dennis Grunes

Jean Renoir’s French Cancan, the best musical film of the 1950s and his first film in France since The Rules of the Game (1939), occupies the middle of his Technicolored studio-bound trilogy, in between The Golden Coach (1952) and Eléna et les hommes (1956). It is about romantic entanglements in 1880s Paris and the launch of the Moulin Rouge, with its revival of the boisterous, bawdy cancan.

Films whose frames suggest Impressionist paintings tend to be academic. Peter Bogdanovich makes this distinction: Renoir’s film suggests Impressionist painting, not specific paintings. Moreover, it coveys art and life’s interaction, the continuous translation of one into the other, their common ground of creativity and humanity. Nini, the laundress who comes to lead the cancan dancers, an advancement that requires sacrificing her personal life, exemplifies another kind of creativity: someone’s laboring on herself as though she were a work of art. We watch Nini re-create herself.

Jean Gabin is magnificent as Charles Zidler, the financially plagued impresario who founded the Moulin Rouge, who is here called Henri Danglard. We watch him in pursuit of his dream—a new way to please his soul and his beloved France: what Renoir wanted to do. Near the end, Danglard remains backstage on opening night as the cancan is performed, not watching, but listening and viscerally in sync, so that he can retain the dream.

Renoir immerses his camera in the dance so we feel we are a part of it—the dance of spirit on the floor, with its connection to all art, form releasing spirit, spontaneity, as in the birth of a child. The scene, more fragile than it seems, has passed, along with Renoir’s father, Pierre-Auguste, who epitomized it. His son’s final masterpiece gathers poignant affection for life’s fleeting moment.

filmcritic.com Jake Euker

The 19th-century Paris of Jean Renoir’s remarkable 1955 film French Cancan is a distillation of the Paris that exists within the genre of the screen musical. It’s a fantasy world in which laundry girls are propelled to stardom, absinthe is taken at sidewalk cafés, gentlemen live in hotels, and foreign princes slum alongside chorines in the still-unfashionable nightclubs of Montmartre. The film’s look is central to the romantic vision of Paris that we conjure when we think of musicals; it’s candy-colored, as sophisticated as a hat and tails, as light and sweet as meringue. Although An American in Paris had been released a few years before (Gigi followed by a few), French Cancan represents the most stylized vision of a certain dream incarnation of the City of Lights that had yet reached the screen.

Everything about French Cancan is, in fact, exquisitely French. (In this the film echoes its director’s wish to reconnect with his public, having left France for America following the public vilification of 1939’s Rules of the Game and having returned to his homeland with this film.) The movie tells the fictionalized story of the opening of Paris’s notorious Moulin Rouge, an event marked by the rehabilitation of the scandalous cancan, a dance of a previous era that revealed rather much more of the dancers’ lower halves than was deemed proper. In this fantasy Paris, an impresario named Danglard (Jean Gabin), magically gifted with the ability to spot talent among common working men and women and steer them toward their deserved fame, happens upon a young woman named Nini (Françoise Arnoul) who exhibits no aspirations, few inhibitions, and a real gift for dance. His attention to – and subsequent affair with – Nini arouses the mercurial jealousy of the statuesque belly dancer Lola (María Félix), whom he previously nurtured and with whom he is currently sharing a bed; add Danglard’s money man, also in love with Lola, Nini’s working class boyfriend, a prince who loves Nini, and assorted dancers, mothers, rival artists, and best friends, and you have a love roundelay of operatic breadth.

Love, of course, is France’s national preoccupation, at least so far as the big screen goes, but what makes French Cancan so especially Gallic is the sophistication of its details – not just the champagne cocktails and acres of lace, but the respect the man on the street accords such artistes as a whistler Danglard discovers, an aging dance instructor who still is made up like a chorus girl, the belly dancer who insists on royal treatment and whose criminal displays of temper are explained away as manifestations of passion and artistic temperament. This sophistication extends to Danglard’s romantic indiscretions; American audiences, in particular, may be surprised at the very non-Hollywood denouement of the movie’s central romance.

More than anything else, French Cancan is about the life of the theater and of those held in its sway. Its songs emerge in that context – before audiences at the Moulin Rouge and other nightclubs – and its abiding central conflict, for all its characters, is the tension of resolving the life of the stage with “real” life. Renoir suggests that, for those compelled to entertain, the distinction is hopelessly blurred; his Nini, whose story the film most closely follows, finds in the film’s finale that the stage is the only place in which she truly lives.

Renoir was, of course, among the very greatest of directors, and his French Cancan unfolds with a marvelous ease. The dance numbers are enviably clear, the characters sketched with a master’s economy. The film’s finale, in which the Moulin Rouge opens triumphantly with the much-anticipated cancan, is the sort of screen marvel of which no director today is capable: it’s frantic yet deftly controlled, personal yet grandly conceived, and it leaves you elated. It’s a true spectacle; Renoir suggests that, potentially, for those involved in theater, all of life is.

The Criterion Collection has made French Cancan available as part of a three-disc DVD set that includes two more of his contemporaneous films that examine his life-as-theater aesthetic: The Golden Coach and Elena and Her Men. A virtual galaxy of special features place the films in context and provide a wealth of supporting materials.

French Cancan Criterion essay by Andrew Sarris, August 2, 2004

Jean Renoir’s Trilogy of Spectacle Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 2, 2004

Brandon's movie memory » French Cancan (1954, Jean Renoir)

French CanCan • Senses of Cinema Rick Thompson, November 5, 2000

French Cancan (1954) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

DVD Journal Mark Bourne reviews the Film Trilogy

DVD Verdict Review - Stage And Spectacle: Three Films By Jean ... Bill Gibron reviews the Film Trilogy

Images Journal Kendahl Cruver reviews the Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] reviewing the Film Trilogy

DVD Savant Review: , The Golden Coach, Elena and Her Men Glenn Erickson reviewing the Film Trilogy

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

User reviews from imdb Author: david-1976 from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: marissabidilla from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: ackstasis from Australia

Movie Review - French Can-Can - Screen: 'French-Cancan'; Renoir ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

ELENA AND HER MEN

France (95 mi) 1956

Eléna et les Hommes Tom Milne from Time Out London

With Renoir at the height of his later artifice, this completes what was effectively a trilogy begun by The Golden Coach and French Cancan, exploring both the glorious innocence of the past and the power of theatrical illusion. A prancing ballet of love's surprises, set amid the military manoeuvres and Quatorze Juillet carnivals of France in the 1880s, it is sheer delight as Bergman's entrancing Polish princess (or goddess from Olympus) weaves her spell over destiny to inspire men to fame and fortune until - in a magnificent coup de théâtre - she is herself finally trapped and rendered human by love. Fantasy, yes, but hardly escapist in the astonishing pertinence with which it reduces the hawkish military and political ambitions of the day to derisory farce while demonstrating the infallibility with which love goes on making the world go round.

filmcritic.com Jake Euker

1956’s Elena and Her Men, the third in an informal trilogy of films Jean Renoir made upon returning from the U.S. and following his work here during the war, shares a common theme with its trilogy mates. This theme – the ways in which theater and life interact, and in which the territory of the first encroaches on the latter – in fact preoccupied Renoir throughout his career. In Elena and Her Men (unlike the other two films, The Golden Coach and French Cancan), the film’s principals are not stage actors. Their performances are given in the political and social arenas; Renoir concludes the trilogy, fittingly, with the assertion that all the world is indeed a stage.

Elena and Her Men tells the story of the title woman, a Polish princess living a life of high style in Paris despite the secret fact of her poverty. She’s widowed, and although men throw themselves at her, she’s unfocused romantically and takes these suitors on as projects rather than potential mates; she sees her work as assisting them in achieving their potential, and when they do, she moves on. Her ability is linked to the daisies she distributes to her men as charms, and these magical daisies infallibly do the job.

Elena (played by Ingrid Bergman, who works very comfortably here in French) has just finished one such project when a war hero named General Rollin (Jean Marais) makes a triumphant return to Paris, where the streets are ringing with his praise. Despite having just accepted a marriage proposal, for financial reasons, to a wealthy, older industrialist, Elena takes up with this hero and his best friend Henri (Mel Ferrer); both fall in love with her. When Rollin is called upon to assume leadership of France, Elena accepts his destiny as her next project. Meanwhile, romantic complications blossom everywhere: Elena’s fiancé becomes jealous, his son, although engaged to another, falls in love with Elena’s maid, a soldier does too, and Rollin’s jealous girlfriend follows her hero everywhere and watches his every move. This political and romantic intrigue soon reaches a dizzying velocity, and class distinctions, as well as the line of separation between public and private life, become hopelessly blurred.

It’s all very enjoyable, Bergman especially, and like the other films it’s beautiful to see and gloriously cinematic. But the resemblance it bears to Renoir’s great Rules of the Game is more than passing, and I think this detracts. Rules of the Game, made in 1939, was Renoir’s last French film before he left for America; a really searing social comedy about cultural mores, the film was met with outrage in France upon its release, and was subsequently banned by the Occupation. Elena and Her Men, while full of felicities, treats its similar material in a much more lighthearted way, and watching it it’s impossible not to speculate that Renoir, who was anxious to reconnect with his French public, had made in it a kind of Rules of the Game lite. Few critics or viewers would argue that Elena is on the same exalted par.

Still, the comparison being made is that of Renoir to Renoir, one of the very greatest of screen directors, and it may be that it’s only in this context that Elena and Her Men could be seen to be lacking anything at all. The Criterion Collection has made all three films available in a DVD box set – accompanied by a real wealth of extras, and produced with that company’s usual, peerless attention to quality – that restores Renoir’s full vision. Taken together, they’re a joy.

Elena and Her Men Criterion essay by Christopher Faulkner, August 2, 2004

Jean Renoir’s Trilogy of Spectacle Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 2, 2004

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

Elena et les hommes (1956) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

ELENA ET LES HOMMES (Jean Renoir, 1956) Dennis Grunes

EyeForFilm.co.uk Leanne McGrath

DVD Bits [Sarah Ward]

DVD Journal Mark Bourne reviews the Film Trilogy

DVD Verdict Review - Stage And Spectacle: Three Films By Jean ... Bill Gibron reviews the Film Trilogy

Images Journal Kendahl Cruver reviews the Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] reviewing the Film Trilogy

DVD Savant Review: , The Golden Coach, Elena and Her Men Glenn Erickson reviewing the Film Trilogy

User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: ackstasis from Australia

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

Movie Review - Elena and Her Men - Screen: French Import; Parisian ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

THE TESTAMENT OF DOCTOR CORDELIER (Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier) – made for TV

aka: Experiment in Evil

aka: The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment

France (95 mi) 1959

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier Time Out London

This is minor Renoir, 'Jekyll and Hyde' transposed to contemporary Paris. An early example of the TV/cinema hybrid, it was sufficiently a curiosity at the time to justify an irrelevant opening about Renoir arriving at the RTF studios to record a prologue. Shot fast using TV techniques (lots of cameras and mikes covering a single long take), it consequently looks flat and unatmospheric, while some of the performances are mysterious (Why is Vitold so manic? Is Bilis meant to be such a prig?). But the redeeming asset, indeed the film's entire justification, is Barrault in his Opale (i.e. Hyde) manifestation. Shambling, twitching, cocky and looking for trouble, turning ferociously on anyone weak who crosses his path, he is the epitome of aggression and the absence of pity. Forget March and Malkovich, Barrymore and Beswick: none comes within a mile of this chilling creation.

The Testament of Dr. Cordelier Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader

Jean Renoir's uncharacteristic free adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the great Jean-Louis Barrault (1959). Shot in black and white for French TV, this oddball horror comedy allowed Renoir to experiment with TV techniques, using multiple cameras and microphones to follow his actors from different angles at the same time. Barrault's performance in the title role—a retiring middle-class professor who, after inadverently releasing the fury of his own id, delights in such activities as abusing cripples on the street—is one of the most sublime, disturbingly funny, and complex actorly creations ever committed to film, and it illuminates many corners of Renoir's oeuvre in provocative ways: Cordelier's shambling walk can be traced all the way back to Michel Simon's Boudu, and, as Dave Kehr and French critic Jean Douchet have noted, the film is the dark mirror of the Dionysian fantasy of Picnic on the Grass, made the same year; here liberation from repression leads to nightmare rather than utopia.

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A large house in a respectable suburb of Paris is the residence of Dr Cordelier, an eminent psychiatrist who has withdrawn from society to pursue his secret research into the functioning of the human brain. His lifelong friend, the lawyer Maître Joly, becomes concerned when Cordelier draws up a will in which he bequeaths his entire estate to a stranger, Monsieur Opale. When Joly discovers that Opale is a misshapen, sadistic brute, who willfully attacks children and women, he cannot understand why Cordelier defends him, allowing him sanctuary in his house. After Opale kills a colleague of Dr Cordelier, Dr Lucien Séverin, Joly has no other option but to confront Cordelier, convinced that he is under the influence of the evil Opale. In Cordelier’s laboratory, Joly discovers the terrible truth of his friend’s strange behaviour...

Jean Renoir’s first collaboration with French Television yielded this quirky yet faithful adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In contrast to previous cinematic adaptations of that novel, Renoir sets the story in a contemporary setting (France of the 1950s) and manages to make the good doctor (renamed Cordelier) more of a villain than his brutal alter ego (Opale). Whereas Opale’s violence is spontaneous, a thoughtless response to an uncontrollable impulse, Cordelier’s actions are far more calculated and wicked, and so it easier to sympathize with Opale than with Cordelier. In this respect, Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier is closer to Stevenson’ novel than most film versions.

One of the most striking aspects of this film is how it rigorously defines and contrasts the moral positions of the two principal characters, Cordelier and Opale. This is partly down to a well-written script, which allows us to get into the minds of both characters, but probably has much more to do with the performance of the film’s lead actor, Jean-Louis Barrault.   Throughout the film, it is hard to believe that both Cordelier and Opale were played by the same man. With very little make-up, Barrault manages to transform himself from a cultivated and charming man of science into a loutish, carefree monster – an extraordinary achievement even for an accomplished actor.

Renoir’s decision to have Barrault playing both characters so distinctively can be interpreted as a reference to the theories of Jung and Freud, that an individual is made up of two distinct personalities, one civilized, the other untamed – two forces in constant opposition   Renoir goes beyond this and, with Barrault’s skilful complicity, manages to convince us that neither of these two aspects of a person’s ego has moral superiority over the other.   In many ways, Renoir is re-treading ground he has already covered in his earlier masterpiece La Bête humaine (1938). In both films, good and bad character traits are shown to exist side-by-side in the same individual, but the conclusion is that such characteristics do not necessarily make that person good nor bad; they are merely two sides of the same coin.

In both content and form, Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier is in marked contrast to those films which most people associate with Jean Renoir (La Grande illusion, La Bête humaine, La Règle du jeu, etc.). However, when you consider the range and diversity in Renoir’s oeuvre, this film appears scarcely out of place – it isn’t even his first foray into science fiction.   One symptom of Renoir’s genius was his flair for innovation and experimentation. Not all of his more radical experiments were a success, but the fact that he was able to take a chance and try something different surely reinforces his standing as a director of great stature and importance. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier represents one of Renoir’s most daring experiments – to make a cinematic film using the techniques and processes of television.   This was, after all, a film which was intended to be released in the cinemas at the same time that it was screened on French television.

Renoir’s idea of merging television and cinema into one film is typical of the director’s imagination and daring. The film was recorded using the non-stop, multi-camera technique which was widely used for television dramas at the time. A scene would be pre-rehearsed and then shot in its entirety with several cameras and the minimum of recording breaks. This approach adds to the sense of modernity and disorientated atmosphere of the piece but it also weakens the film’s credibility, since its faults are more apparent. A number of scenes look rushed and amateurish and would have benefited from another take, and the pressure the actors were under does is palpably apparent in a few places.

The film’s production faults were so noticeable that even Renoir felt unable to defend it. Indeed, he believed that the venture was damned from the outset – a view which could only have been reinforced by the torrent of invective which film critics dished out once the film was released.   In addition, a dispute between the film’s distributors and the television company that produced it resulted in transmission of the film being deferred to 1961, two years after it was seen in the cinemas.

To this day, Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier remains one of Jean Renoir’s most obscure and underrated films; yet it also one of the most revealing about its creator. Not only does it show Renoir’s courage to take risks – even at a time when he was finding it more difficult to get financial backing for his films. It also shows us – as many of his earlier films did – his acute understanding of the human psyche, his fascination with all aspects of human nature – particularly that tragic inability of human beings to control their own destinies, in spite of their intelligence or status in society.   For those who are prepared to forgive the film’s imperfect presentation, this is an insightful and thought-provoking work, one which boldly addresses that universal conundrum about what it means to be human.

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. CORDELIER (Jean Renoir, 1959) Dennis Grunes

The Jean Renoir File – Part 3 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, April 14, 2015

Filmjourney Doug Cummings

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Testament of Doctor Cordelier Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Sean Axmaker, Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

User reviews from imdb Author: galensaysyes

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

Testament du Docteur Cordelier, Le (1959) - Film Review from ... Channel 4 Film

PICNIC ON THE GRASS (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe)

France (91 mi) 1959

Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe Time Out London

Often seen as a paean to Nature (and Renoir père - it was shot at Auguste Renoir's house at Les Collettes). With its odd tale of a future bureaucrat liberated from glacial rationalism through enforced submission to Nature's whims, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe is one of Renoir's most ravishing, and simultaneously most irritating films. Again and again, sumptuous photography collapses into cold argument.

Picnic on the Grass Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader

A delicious dalliance from Jean Renoir (1959), this satirical comedy about a stuffy scientist (Paul Meurisse) campaigning for the presidency of a united Europe on a platform promoting artificial insemination for everyone accidentally meets Catherine Rouvel in the country, and his idealism gets unwound. Adapting the TV shooting techniques of his previous film, The Testament of Dr. Cordelier, and using ravishing color, Renoir manages to inject an uncommon amount of feeling into all the frivolity and whimsy; the results are both absurdist and sublime.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The first dolly movement is stiff and literally drained of color, locked in boxed-in black-and-white sterility along with the TV reporter laying out the plot; then a switch to Eastmancolor, and a spacious circular pan tilted upwards toward tree branches, upon which the opening credits appear. The split between civilization and nature is rigged thusly, or would've been, if it weren't for Jean Renoir reaping absurdity and sublimity from the two opposites: "I favor the dictatorship of scientists," declares one member of Doctor Paul Meurisse's entourage, "I'm all for nature," goes another. Meurisse runs for presidency of the continent, with artificial insemination the proposed future of mankind; a bucolic lunch is arranged with Teutonic fiancée Ingrid Nordine plus assorted, repressed urbanites, held mainly for press coverage ("symbolic of symbolic union"). À la campagne of stripped muscle shirts, checkered dresses, and picturesque loafing, where peasant Jean-Pierre Granval believes in the equality of the sexes just so his wife can spray the grapevines for him; also the spot where Pierre Auguste spent his final days, the son playing loving tribute by presenting his own love for fleshy pinks and grassy greens. The mythology from the past sides with the forces of nature, so goat-herder Charles Blavette changes the weather through his pan-flute -- winds unchain the fauns and nymphs, mousy housewife Marguerite Cassan declares "I need an orgy!" and blooms into Catherine Hessling. The scientist, meanwhile, becomes beguiled by the figure ("Mediterranean, dolichocephalic") of farm gal Catherine Rouvel by the river; they disappear behind the tall grass to usher in the undulating fertility montage towards the wholeness of body and mind. Far from facile rehash of old themes, this is a no less experimental work than À Bout de Souffle and Pickpocket that same year -- the openness of Renoir's lambent style and the fragility of his idyll simultaneously illustrate nature and its transformation by art, the pun between evolution and revolution its lynchpin. An impressionistic incantation, an air-filled home movie by Renoir, and one of the few works to communicate the feeling of sunlight, its warmth and glow. With Fernand Sardou, Jacqueline Morane, Robert Chandeau, Micheline Gary, Ghislaine Dumont, Jacques Danoville, and Paulette Dubost.

Lunch on the Grass • Senses of Cinema Stuart Lord, July 25, 2003

The Jean Renoir File – Part 1 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, January 29, 2015

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

PICNIC ON THE GRASS (Jean Renoir, 1959) Dennis Grunes

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

User reviews from imdb Author: Aw-komon from San Diego, Cali

User reviews from imdb Author: allyjack from toronto

THE ELUSIVE CORPORAL (Le Caporal épinglé)

France (105 mi) 1962

The Elusive Corporal Don Druker from the Chicago Reader

Jean Renoir returns to the material of La grande illusion—French prisoners in German hands. Where Illusion showed international class solidarities that transcended nationalisms in World War I, The Elusive Corporal is about the solidarity of men—Frenchmen—facing a common ordeal. An ironic comedy of fake French heroics and real French heroism, the film is delicate and witty and features a delightful performance from Jean-Pierre Cassel as the corporal who keeps trying and trying to get back to Paris.

Le Caporal Epinglé Time Out London

A deceptively slight tale of the attempts by three Frenchmen to escape from a Nazi prison camp during World War II, this late addition to Renoir's impressively wide-ranging oeuvre is nevertheless suffused with the same warm and generous humanism as the great Règle du Jeu or Grande Illusion. Though the whole thing is played as a comedy, the scenes in the prison camp display Renoir's characteristically sharp eye for regional and class differences, even under the yoke of common suffering. The final parting on the bridge in Paris is a scene which will ring loud and true for anyone with the slightest sense of the value of freedom and friendship.

Le Caporal épinglé (1962) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

June, 1940. In a German prisoner-of-war camp in North-East France, three soldiers are united by their desire to escape and return to their ordinary civilian lives. They are a middle-class corporal, a myopic intellectual, Ballochet, and an ordinary working class man nicknamed Pater. After their first attempt fails, thanks to Ballochet losing his spectacles, the corporal and Pater try again – and again. Although the corporal comes close to finding his freedom, his good luck always runs out at the last moment. Ultimately, the three soldiers find themselves in a German disciplinary camp, but their resolve to escape remains as strong as ever.

Nearing the end of his film-making career, Jean Renoir returned to the subject of his most famous film, La Grande illusion, a powerful study of male conflict and camaraderie, centred around a POW prison break-out during World War I. Based on a novel by Jacques Perret, Le Caporal épinglé is concerned with a similar situation during the Second World War and is the closest that Renoir ever came to making a sequel to one of his films.

Although the setting and the characters of Le Caporal épinglé and La Grande illusion are virtually identical, there are some striking differences. The social and racial differences which divide men, so evident in La Grand illusion, have all but disappeared by the 1940s, and perhaps the things which most separate men are their philosophy on life and their cultural pretensions. In its way, Le Caporal épinglé is every bit as illuminating as La Grande illusion, both films illustrating perfectly Renoir’s humanity and his profound understanding of human nature. Viewed together, they show – perhaps more clearly than any other pair of films – how much things have changed between the two world wars. The prescience shown in La Grand illusion is more than borne out by what we see in Le Caporal épinglé.

Despite favourable box office receipts, Le Caporal épinglé met with very mixed criticism when it was released in 1962. There was almost universal praise for the fresh acting talent which the film revealed (in the form of Jean-Pierre Cassel, Claude Brasseur and Claude Rich) but also a fair amount of antipathy towards the director, whom many judged to be way past his best.   Certainly, Le Caporal épinglé does not have the genius and legendary character of La Grande illusion, but, a more modest and less stylised work, it does stand up well in comparison with Renoir’s lesser films. Where the film is funny, it is hilariously funny; where it is moving, it is devastatingly so.   Renoir’s capacity for drawing every inch of humanity out of each scene (by enabling his actors to give their best) is evident throughout this film. If the film has a fault it is Joseph Kosma’s overly intrusive music which takes away far more than it appears to add.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this film is Renoir’s decision not to cast an established actor in the principal or supporting roles. The director initially considered Daniel Gélin for the role of the corporal, then Robert Lamoureux and even Jean Gabin, before settling on Jean-Pierre Cassel (his first major role). Renoir’s capacity for spotting talent can be seen just by reading the film’s cast list: Claude Brasseur, Claude Rich, Jean Carmet, Mario David and Philippe Castelli – all virtually unknown at the time, but all destined for prominent acting careers. The film’s raw acting talent goes some way towards explaining its striking sense of freshness and modernity, allowing it to bear a favourable comparison with the films of the New Wave directors of the time.

After Le Caporal épinglé , Jean Renoir had a number of ideas for further films, but no film producer was willing to offer him financial backing and so these had to be abandoned.   Ironically, at the time when Renoir was being confirmed as one of the most important figures in film history, the commercial reality prevented him from making any further films for the cinema.   His final film (Le Petit théâtre de Jean Renoir) was made for French television in 1969, an ignominious end to an extraordinary filmmaking career.

The Jean Renoir File – Part 2 | IndieWire Peter Bogdanovich, February 20, 2015

Le Caporal épinglé / The Elusive Corporal Michael Grost from Classic Films and Television

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Sean Axmaker, Jean Renoir’s 3-disc Collector’s Edition

Movie Review - The Vanishing Corporal - Screen: An Elusive French ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

THE LITTLE THEATER OF JEAN RENOIR (Le petit théâtre de Jean Renoir) – made for TV

France (100 mi) 1972

Le petit theatre de Jean Renoir Dave Kehr from the Chicago Reader

This film, Renoir's last, looks so simple and effortless that it practically begs to be underrated. But the magic of Renoir's art was always in its invisibility, and Le petit theatre—a masterpiece, I think—is no exception. In a series of short sketches, Renoir recaps the stylistic progression of his career, from expressionism to naturalism, focusing all the while on his eternal theme, the vicissitudes of love. It's hard not to see something of Renoir himself in the old peasant whose story is told in the last episode. He relinquishes his young wife to a young man, as graciously and wistfully as Renoir, in his final film, turns the cinema he has loved all his life over to his students. And we are all his students.

Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir Time Out London

Renoir's last film, made for TV, displays all the effortlessness of a master, with Renoir introducing his four sketches as anecdotes that have amused him. In lesser hands, they might have become sentimental or misguided, rather than the light, deft pieces they are, full of charm and an awareness of civilised virtues. An old tramp and his wife retain their dignity and love in the face of hardship; a husband falls victim of his wife's electric waxer in a satire on some of the dehumanising aspects of city life; Jeanne Moreau sings a song from the Belle Epoque; an old man learns to accept his young wife's infidelity in a piece that affirms the positive virtues of country life as strongly as the second episode condemns city ways. Renoir proves once again that he is among the easiest and most relaxing of directors to watch.

The Little Theater of Jean Renoir Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader

Renoir's challenging and lovely last feature (1969) consists of three sketches and a brief song sung by Jeanne Moreau, with Renoir himself appearing to introduce each section. At the time of this film's release critics tended to glide over or dismiss everything but the final sketch, a warm account of an old man learning to accept his young wife's infidelity that summed up the generous and “realistic” manner that was all more conservative spectators expected from Renoir. But the film as a whole is a complex manifesto of his pluralistic approaches to both realism and style, and the other sketches—a highly artificial and sentimental fairy tale about a homeless couple and a bizarre, aggressive contemporary opera about a housewife's burning desire for an electric waxer—are essential. Indeed, what is most remarkable about Renoir's swan song is the subtle interaction between these facets of his vision. Far from being a grab bag of unconnected pieces, as most critics have contended, it's a musical suite in four movements, with each movement illuminating the others. If you want some notion of this great filmmaker's range and breadth, here's an essential key.

FilmFanatic.org

Jean Renoir tells a trio of semi-comedic stories: an elderly homeless couple (Nino Formicola and Milly) find comfort in each other and their memories on a cold Christmas night; a housewife (Marguerite Cassan) obsessed with waxing her floors accidentally causes the death of her husband (Pierre Olaf); and an older man (Fernand Sardou) must decide what to do when his beloved young wife (Francoise Arnoul) cheats on him with the village doctor (Jean Carnet).

Jean Renoir’s final, made-for-TV film is a gentle ensemble of short stories, ranging in tone from melancholy to satirical, yet all sharing an underlying concern with exploring the ties that bind couples together. The first heartbreaking vignette, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, is essentially an adult variation of “The Little Match Girl”: on Christmas Eve, an insensitive diner pays a homeless man (Nino Formicola) to stand outside the window of a restaurant and stare in longingly; as he explains to his friends, this spectacle should make them appreciate their food all the more. Formicola’s willingness to participate in this disturbing charade ultimately yields him a fancy dinner for two, which he shares with his beloved partner (Milly) while reminiscing about the past. While Renoir comes dangerously close to romanticizing poverty in this opening vignette, he nonetheless trenchantly demonstrates man’s ability to cope under the worst of circumstances, simply through the power of love and imagination.

The second story — dubbed by Renoir an “opera” of sorts — involves a chorus of singing onlookers commenting on the marital woes of Emilie (Marguerite Cassan) and Gustave (Pierre Olaf). Shrewish Emilie (who surely has OCD) insists that an immaculate floor is what every housewife yearns for, and threatens to go live with her mother unless her henpecked husband gives in to her request for a personal floor waxer; when he does, circumstances eventually become more and more untenable, until Emilie finally makes the ultimate sacrifice for her beloved new tool. It’s an openly satirical, strangely satisfying little morsel about the dangers inherent in loving machines more than humans. At this point, Renoir proudly announces that Jeanne Moreau will sing a song — which she does, shakily and to minimal effect; it’s best ignored altogether, and fortunately lasts just a few minutes.

The final vignette may be the most heartfelt and personal of the bunch. In it, Renoir tells the story of an elderly villager (Fernand Sardou) who is deeply in love with his beautiful younger wife (Francoise Arnoul), and she with him — but she’s feeling oddly restless and dissatisfied. When she realizes than an affair is exactly what she needs to satisfy her “itch”, she turns to a visiting doctor (Jean Carnet) who is equally smitten with both her and the gentle Sardou. Much like in Bertrand Blier’s Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), this vignette lovingly demonstrates that a willingness to flout societal norms can lead to unexpected happiness in love and romance. It’s a fitting capstone to Renoir’s long and illustrious career as a filmmaker.

Brandon's movie memory » Le petit théâtre de Jean Renoir (1970) December 23, 2010

Movie Review - The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir - The Riches Of ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

Requa, John and Glenn Ficarra

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS B+ 92

USA (100 mi) 2009

With a title that sounds a bit like the 60’s psychedelic love anthem I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS (1968), this was originally slated for iconic gay indie director Gus Van Sant until the financing fell through, eventually bailed out by French director/producer Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp after inexplicably languishing on the shelf for nearly two years after premiering at the Sundance fest in 2009. The writers of BAD SANTA (2003), in their first dual writer and director role, have concocted a ballsy, fearlessly irreverent, over the top satire based on a real life story where shape-shifting elasticman Jim Carrey is near brilliant in this multi-dimensional role of an ingenious conman Steven Russell who during the 1990’s invents various identities to lie and forge his way to success and happiness, meeting the man of his dreams, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), during a prison stint in Texas and taking him on a wild escapade of love, romance, and lavish extravagance before getting tripped up again by the law. This feels like a subversive take on Spielberg’s serial teen impersonator in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002), though seen through the delirious lens of a madcap gay romp. Easily the funniest and most outrageous film seen all year, there’s nothing bashful about the utter relish with which the directors, through Carrey’s explosively inventive narrative commentary, wholeheartedly embrace the subject of being gay.

Raised by a conservative family in New York, once Steven discovers he’s adopted, outed by his more favored brother, he goes the straight and narrow route, from the church organist and loving father of two kids in a Southern Christian family in Georgia where his wife, Leslie Mann, is sure that Jesus saves, to becoming a well respected policeman in the hopes of pleasing his birth mother who gave him up for adoption. But when she slams the door in his face, the realization that he’s gay, and that he’s always been gay kicks in, eventually moving to the strip in Miami Beach where he enters the life, becoming a sought after gay player, where to support his upscale lifestyle, never realizing how expensive it is to be gay, he’s forced to invent various financial schemes for quick cash. Within no time, he lands in a Texas prison for credit card and insurance fraud. The uproarious embellishment of what happens on a prisoner’s first day, to the catcalls and whistles of fellow inmates, is like a stripper burlesque review, where all watchful eyes are on the newcomer who is treated as a piece of meat. Russell’s explanation to a new inmate of how things work is priceless. But it’s here that he spots Morris, and the two make fast work in becoming cell and soul mates. The standout scene is a prison cell slowdance set to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are,” while all hell is breaking loose in the cell next to his, all perfectly captured by offscreen sound.

Balancing early flashbacks of his childhood with the frenetic need to impersonate various persons in positions of authority, including a judge and a bail bondsman, in order to get what he wants constructing a life together with Morris, Russell soon finds himself engineering a scandalously clever prison escape, eventually finding himself on the outside returning to the prison impersonating a lawyer with the early release papers for Morris, where Russell’s ingenious schemes quickly elevate their financial stature to an ultra rich lifestyle in the highest tax bracket, playing golf with CEO’s on weekends, and being shown off at gala society functions. The fast and loose Russell simply goes with the flow, a brilliantly ambitious con man pretending to be something he isn’t while greedily embezzling funds from the corporate world while the more conservatively nervous and uptight Morris, who’s forced to remain cooped up on the grounds of their lavish estate, suspects something is up, but hasn’t a clue where the gusher of cash is coming from. Their delusional romantic co-dependency is the stuff of legends, right up there with Billy Wilder’s Jack Lemmon in drag and millionaire Joe E. Brown in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959).

Their convincing love story is rather tame and conventional in comparison to the ever cheerful but boldly outlandish tactics by Russell, whose non-stop cunning and guile are simply fascinating throughout, where the everpresent tone of lies and deception are prominent parts of his continually altered and reconstructed personality, where he can slip into a new character at a moment’s notice with the ease of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, all part of his lifelong routine. Carrey displays the heart of a man with an unquenchable appetite to remain free. Of course, this doesn’t stop him from a lifetime of getting arrested, but like Chaplin’s Little Tramp, he’s a force that deceptively slithers his way out of situations only to be caught once again. Carrey is superb in the role, one of his career best, where he inhabits each new fake identity with compulsive finesse and easily charms and maneuvers his way through each land mine with the consummate skill of a career con artist. Irreverently entertaining throughout, this zany, madcap charmer becomes an electrifying adventure story digging ever deeper into the fraudulent world of illusion, where love is the sought after prize at the end of the rainbow, as elusive and constantly shifting as the impersonation antics needed to sustain a lifestyle of crime and comfort.

I Love You Phillip Morris Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Trevor Johnston from Time Out London

Policeman, husband, father, closeted gay man, out gay man, fraudster, prison escapee, fake lawyer, embezzler, prison escapee (again)… Georgia’s Steven Russell has led quite a life. He’s a subject ripe for documentary treatment, but it’s understandable why ‘Bad Santa’ writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have turned his wild CV into madcap comedy for their directing debut. Unleashing Jim Carrey makes a sort of sense, since his fast-talking energy might help us buy Russell’s credibility-defying exploits. Unfortunately, though, the bizarre true-life aspect gets swamped by Carrey’s ramped-up zeal, delivering a series of showpiece flourishes which dazzle at first but then prove wearing.

Still, you can’t accuse cast or filmmakers of lacking caution, since the treatment barrels through locations and chronology, and it’s eyebrow-raising to have Carrey and Ewan McGregor – as sweet-natured fellow jailbird Phillip Morris – playing frisky gay lovers. Such forthrightness definitely makes the movie culturally significant (and may explain why US distributors have been reluctant to handle it), yet for all that it never manages to match its robust humour with a convincing love story. Maybe we don’t quite buy Jim and Ewan’s hots for one another, maybe the writing makes Carrey’s character too much of a psychotic narcissist while rendering McGregor in terms of fluffy-bunny passivity, but either way it just ain’t happening. Loved the chutzpah, but the heart and the funny bone are left relatively untroubled.

I Love You Phillip Morris | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

I Love You Phillip Morris premièred at the Sundance Film Festival nearly two years ago, and its long, uncertain journey to theaters—with release dates announced and withdrawn ad infinitum—reveals a timidity that stands in stark contrast to a comedy that’s crazily, recklessly fearless. Perhaps America isn’t ready for a lusty gay relationship between two big stars like Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor—or for yuks like one where the former scoffs at the latter for spitting rather than swallowing—but the movie seems cheerfully oblivious to any squeamishness on the audience’s part. Making their directorial debut, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the writing team responsible for the filthy alternative Christmas classic Bad Santa, apply the same go-for-broke nastiness to a story of love and crime that fully warrants it. This is Catch Me If You Can with two middle fingers raised in the air.

Based on the book by Houston Chronicle journalist Steve McVicker, I Love You Phillip Morris marvels at the impulsive, diabolical brilliance of Steven Jay Russell (Carrey), a.k.a. “King Con,” a multi-talented con artist who frustrated and embarrassed detectives and jailers for years. In a breathless series of scenes, it’s established that Steven, upon discovering he was adopted, became so motivated to impress his birth mother that he fashioned a straight-arrow life as a Georgia policeman, and a respected husband and father of two. When he finally meets his mother and is shown the door, Steven embraces who he really is—gay—and proceeds to build a new life in South Beach on embezzlement and fraud. While in prison, he meets Phillip Morris (McGregor), a sweet but taciturn love object, and his criminal exploits are pushed to another level.

Beyond the aggressive black comedy, most of it funny and the rest compensated for via pacing, I Love You Phillip Morris examines the fascinating contradictions of a man who spun an elaborate web of lies in order to sustain a love that was fundamentally true. Carrey’s performance dominates McGregor’s, and properly so, since Steven and Phillip’s relationship is forged (and sabotaged) almost entirely by the force of Steven’s imagination. The film’s only major flaw is that the two actors are never fully convincing as a couple; when it comes time to feel the breadth of Steven’s love for Phillip, the emotions don’t materialize. Ficarra and Requa are more comfortable being bad: The nastier the film gets, the better it is.

"Nobody talks about this, but being gay is really expensive," narrates recidivist con man Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) in the gleefully cartoonish, occasionally transcendent I Love You Phillip Morris, which suggests both a middle-aged queer rewrite of Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and how one of Jean Genet's thieves might've aspired to an Out magazine photo-spread lifestyle in 1990s America. Employing sunny visuals and the editing rhythms of a fast-paced farce in counterpoint to an early scene of prone, sallow Steven in a hospital bed ("Love is the reason I'm layin' here dyin'"), the movie's fodder is the identification of gayness with post-closet consumerism and the eternal tableau of prison buggery, here transformed into fertile ground for true love. Carrey's cheerful criminal and the milquetoast sweetie (Ewan McGregor) he meets behind bars aren't hip bad boys from a Gregg Araki pastiche, but courtly smoochers to Johnny Mathis and chaste writers of smuggled, gushy letters, at least until, cellmates at last, Phillip tears at Steven's pants as he groans "Enough romance, let's fuck."

Written and directed by Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and adapted from a true-crime chronicle ("Really," insists an opening title), I Love You Phillip Morris gets off on gender-fucking the conventions of romantic and caper comedies while reaping subversive moments of tenderness from its committed central performance. Carrey, whose candidacy as one of the best film actors of the last 20 years may go unspoken due to anti-comedy snobbery, gives Steven's devotion to Phillip a rapt authenticity right from their moony meeting, attired in lemon-yellow jumpsuits, in their Texas prison's library. As stylized and wacky as the narrative is, Steven, whether ditching his fundamentalist wife (Leslie Mann) and kids, starting a career in fraud to support his lavish Miami nightlife, or feigning his way through a CFO position at a medical management company, is a man on a mission, his chicanery fueled by his concept of sexual liberation and then an idealized lover. (Paradoxically, some of Carrey's least effective scenes are the shtickiest, as when he stumbles through a court appearance posing as a lawyer; instead, his sneaky capacity to show Jack Lemmonesque sincerity beneath the character's guile prevails.) As shy, almost dainty Phillip, McGregor mostly yields the spotlight to his co-star; that he's the naïve, moralistic scold of the couple ("Did you do something?!" he nags when the police come knocking) is a pretty neat casting joke, given his history of studly bad-boy roles.

I Love You Phillip Morris saves its nerviest twist for the last act; let's just say it pulls a fast one re: mortal illness, that a con artist is bound to be an unreliable narrator, and that this reversal will probably feed accusations by gay-PC police that it feels like a queer story made into a smirky travesty by straights. Horseshit. The film has taken nearly two years to get U.S. distribution, and fear of humor-impairment among gays, liberals, and bigots undoubtedly was a major factor in the delay. From its opening image of little Steven seeing a dick in the clouds to the accompaniment of a psychedelic luau theme, Ficarra and Requa's movie steadily if unevenly permits its homo hero a vision of paradise, and that foundation fills the space between the sight gags and sex jokes with empathy. And the script economically delivers the go-to punchline of pre-Sarah Palin America: "Texas."

I Love You Phillip Morris | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge from Screendaily

The studio movie which the studios wouldn’t make, I Love You, Phillip Morris is a surprisingly conventional and sweet gay romantic comedy which isn’t as funny as you might expect from the writers of Bad Santa, but is inherently remarkable for being a true story. Obviously audacious for the gay romance at its core, it otherwise plays like a polished Hollywood picture starring Jim Carrey and will satisfy a certain percentage of his audience even if the gay elements turn off some of his Yes Man audience.

Financed by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, which stepped up when others balked, I Love You, Phillip Morris handles its gay characters with both sensitivity and irreverence, neither too politically correct nor off colour. The sexuality of Steven Russell, the extraordinary con artist played by Carrey, is central to the story, but first-time directors Requa and Ficarra and the actors play his gayness un-selfconsciously and honestly. In many ways, the film is as important as BrokebackMountain in breaking down barriers in mainstream cinema, although the level of US distribution has yet to to be determined after its world premiere last night at Sundance.

We are first introduced to Russell as a happy family man working as a cop in Georgia and living with his wife Debbie (Mann) and young daughter. But it doesn’t take long for him to confess in voiceover that he is an active gay man who is living a lie. After a car accident shakes him up, he comes out, moves to Florida and starts dating Jimmy (Santoro). But, as he explains, it’s expensive to live the gay lifestyle to the hilt and before long he is committing cons and frauds to pay for it all.

Committed to the state penitentiary, he meets the love of his life - a handsome blond, blue-eyed boy called Phillip Morris (McGregor) and Steven uses all his sway in prison so they get to share a cell. When he is released, he promptly pretends to be a lawyer to get Phillip out and the two start living together but soon he is back to his old tricks, conning his way to become CFO of a large company and embezzling millions.

When he is caught, Phillip leaves him in fury at his deceptions. Steven goes to prison but once behind bars, he commits the ultimate con to break out and win back Phillip’s love.

While this is certainly an adult film with plenty of ribald humour and sexual language, I Love You Phillip Morris is at heart a sweet romance with only a couple of glimpses of the two lead actors kissing and very little actual sex. Still, like in the recent Milk from Gus Van Sant (who was originally slated to direct this film), the film-makers don’t try to hide their characters’ sexuality and, thanks to unfettered performances from Carrey and McGregor. The relationship between Steven and Phillip seems natural and unforced.

The tone is always bright and perky, though the storytelling could have benefited from some more shading, especially as the convolutions of the true story produce a drag on the momentum in the third act. Nonetheless Requa and Ficarra have structured their screenplay cleverly, leaving the audience in the dark to the end as to Russell’s final, spectacular con.

Review: I Love You Phillip Morris - Film Comment Paul Brunick, March/April 2010

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s true-crime saga hustles viewers into a clever confidence game: a deathbed confession riddled with delayed revelations, bait-and-switch surprises, and unpredictable reversals of trajectory and tone. But what else would you expect from Steven Russo (Jim Carrey), a conman à clef based on an infamous real-life grifter and compulsive liar Steven Russell? Revisiting the subgenre of the screwball caper, Bad Santa and Bad News Bears scribes Ficarra and Requa have made a wildly successful directorial debut. These dudes could have made a career coasting on colorful vulgarities but have instead developed their past themes in revelatory ways. They’ve also provided Jim Carrey with his freshest, funniest role since The Cable Guy. (Suck on that, Tom Shadyac.)

When the film begins, Steven (Carrey) is a poster boy for the Moral Majority: church organist, deputy cop, dutiful provider for his daughter and wife (Leslie Mann). But after a near fatal car crash, Steven quickly reevaluates his priorities. “I’m gay,” he tells his family—and moves to fabulous Miami. Sewing a lifetime’s worth of wild oats, Steven starts “living high on the gay hog”—wining and dining, South Beach shopping sprees, weekends at tony hotels. “Being gay is really expensive,” he concludes. Prohibitively so for a high-school-educated produce wholesaler. So Russo pulls himself up by his patent-leather bootstraps and starts moonlighting: credit fraud, insurance scams, criminal misrepresentation.

Several warrants and one botched suicide later, he goes directly to jail. Enter inmate Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), cute as a puppy and twice as trusting. “I’m a lawyer,” Steven lies, proffering consultations on a pro boner basis. Cue the falling-in-love montage (Johnny Mathis crooning, the two jailbirds swooning), a sequence at once blackly comic in its juxtaposition of prison brutalities and yet as syrupy sincere as Penny Serenade, the Old Hollywood weepie glimpsed briefly on a rec-room TV. Steven promises Phillip he’ll go straight. Phillip swallows Steven’s beautiful lies as easily as his gifted chocolates—a pretty apt metaphor considering he’s diabetic. But old habits die hard. Steven Russo’s most outrageous crimes are still ahead.

I Love You Phillip Morris sharpens Ficarra and Requa’s Sturges-esque satirical vision of the American Dream. As hilariously risqué and sardonically incisive as ever, they’ve also refined their psychological portraiture in surprising ways. Billy Bob Thornton could toss off Bad-ass one-liners with ease, but the intentional flatness of his character was always a few degrees shy of sketch comedy. Steven is written with psychological complexities and emotional undercurrents nowhere suggested in the Thornton films. Carrey’s performance may be the most well-rounded and satisfying of his career, reconciling the schizophrenic energy of his physical comedy with the psychological grounding and realistic restraint of his dramatic work. Which begs the question: Oscar bait? Past Carrey roles have been the subject of speculation but the Academy has repeatedly passed him over. “It’s an honor to be nominated,” he joked one year, promptly breaking down in alligator tears. But this time around he has a secret weapon: the gayness.

One of the many things we homos have in common with Nazi-era Germans and the mentally retarded is our irresistible Oscar-baiting allure. “The Brokeback Mountain of American comedy” is a phrase that’s already popped up in several reviews. You can be sure that the publicists will Milk that angle for all its worth. But as far as the Academy goes, there’s good gay (a nobly suffering victim: self-hating, gay-bashed, or slowly dying of AIDS) and bad gay (sexually satisfied and guilt-free). So, for ex-ample: pounding a mustached muscle bottom as he begs, “Do it, man! Come in my ass!”? Way too faggoty for Hollywood—but then again, I would have thought that was also true for a star of Jim Carrey’s caliber. So maybe I’m wrong. A Best Actor nod for this performance would be the greatest gay Oscar moment since Sally Fields’s acceptance speech. Because then we would know that you don’t just tolerate us. Then we’d know that you like us. That you really like us.

“I Love You Phillip Morris”: Too gay for 2010? - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, December 1, 2010

I Love You Phillip Morris Liberates Jim Carrey's Libido | Village Voice Melissa Anderson,December 1, 2010

Jim Carrey Movie 'Too Gay' For Release? | Village Voice Michael Musto, March 24, 2009

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Armond White reviews I Love You Phillip Morris -- NYPress

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JamesBowman.net | I Love You Phillip Morris

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Black Swan, I Love You Phillip Morris, Night Catches Us | Film ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

HitFix.com [Alonso Duralde]

The Parallax Review [Matt Wedge]

I Love You Phillip Morris Review | Enough Romance. Let's F**k ... Dustin Rowles from Pajiba

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MovieMartyr.com - I Love You Phillip Morris Jeremy Heilman

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I Love You Phillip Morris Review, Sundance 2009 Peter Debruge at SpoutBlog, January 24, 2009

Andrew O'Hehir Jim Carrey's epic romance (in prison), at Sundance from Salon, January 19, 2009

I Love You Phillip Morris David Hudson at Sundance from The IFC Blog, January 21, 2009

Duane Byrge at Sundance from The Hollywood Reporter, January 19, 2009

John Anderson at Sundance from Variety, January 19, 2009, also seen here: Variety.com [John Anderson]

Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]

I love you Phillip Morris: a conman's story Elizabeth Day from The Observer, September 6, 2009

Film review: I Love You, Phillip Morris | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, March 18, 2010

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]

Independent.co.uk [Nicholas Barber]

DVD: I Love You Phillip Morris (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Ben Walsh

Sundance Day 4: Deals done, stars born Ty Burr at Sundance from The Boston Globe, January 19, 2009

Review: I Love You Phillip Morris - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Chris Faraone

'I Love You Phillip Morris': Strange but true - Philly.com Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

'I Love You Phillip Morris' review: Far from lovable | NJ.com Stephen Witty from The Star-Ledger

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I Love You Phillip Morris (B+) | Dallas-Fort Worth Entertainment ... Chris Vognar

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Timeline results for Alain resnais

Jim Carrey Stars in 'I Love You Phillip Morris' - The New York Times Stephen Holden, December 2, 2010

Doing Time, a Kiss Is Still a Kiss Dennis Lim from The New York Times, November 24, 2010

Resnais, Alain

The renewal of film form - New Wave - movie, voice, director ... Film Reference (excerpt)

An amateur 8mm filmmaker in his teens, Resnais studied briefly at film school and in the 1940s worked as a cameraman and editor. His first 35mm short film, Van Gogh (1948), was followed by other films about art: Guernica (1950), Gauguin (1951), and Les Statues meurent aussi ( Statues Also Die , co-directed with Chris Marker, 1953). Resnais, usually his own editor, edited Agnès Varda's 1954 innovative medium-length first feature La Pointe-courte , often considered a forerunner of the French nouvelle vague (New Wave). Resnais gained significant recognition for two later short films centered on memory: Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1955) juxtaposes contemporary color footage of an overgrown Auschwitz with black-and-white historical footage, while the commentary meditates on time, memory, and responsibility; and Toute la mémoire du monde (All the Memory in the World, 1956) explores the French national library.

Resnais's first feature, Hiroshima mon amour (script by Marguerite Duras), was shown out of competition at the 1959 Cannes festival. Both its story—a Frenchwoman's brief liaison with a Japanese man in Hiroshima in the present juxtaposed with her memories of a love affair with a German soldier in occupied France during World War II—and its form caused controversy. Resnais's film rethinks narrative time, inter-cutting present and past, with stylized camera work and a poetic, stream-of-consciousness voice-over. With Marker and Varda, Resnais formed the core of the Leftist and more modernist "Left Bank" group of the New Wave (the "Right Bank" group being formed by the former Cahiers du Cinéma critics).

Hiroshima mon amour was central to establishing the artistic credentials and commercial viability of the New Wave worldwide. Resnais's second feature, L'Année dernière à Marienbad ( Last Year at Marienbad , 1961, from a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet), proved even more controversial, with its subjective and opaque construction of time and narrative—critics argued endlessly about what it all meant. Resnais continued his thematic interest in memory and time with Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour ( Muriel, or The Time of Return , 1963, script by Jean Cayrol) and La Guerre est finie ( The War Is Over , 1966, script by Jorge Semprun). Some critics have found the systematic ambiguity and formalism of Resnais and the nouveau roman (new novel) writers he chose to work with too intellectual and lacking in passion.

Many of Resnais's later films, usually also collaborations with writers—for example, with David Mercer on Providence (1977) and Alan Ayckbourn on Smoking/No Smoking (1993)—have been admired, some critics arguing that his work after the 1980s has become more personal. Resnais has continued to make interesting films into his eighties, but his reputation rests primarily on his uncompromisingly modernist works under the nouvelle vague umbrella in the period from 1959 to 1966.

The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais (Book Website) by Haim Calev, Chapter One, Resnais' Preoccupation with Stream of Consciousness

An underlying theme in all Resnais' films is the mental functioning of the individual in an estranged world constantly jeopardizing his values. Striving to express this theme, he undertakes to overcome the limitations of narrative strategies based on external action, through a cinematic representation of the characters' stream of consciousness. Images and sounds well integrated in the structure of five of his feature films directly represent the mental flow in the protagonists' minds, as it actually occurs in the fictional 'here and now' on the screen. Resnais has often stated his objective:

"Film is for me an attempt, still very rough and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism. Nevertheless I insist on the fact that this is merely a small step forward with reference to what one should be able to accomplish some day. I find that once you descend into the subconscious, an emotion can be born... I believe that in life we do not think chronologically, our decisions never correspond to an ordered logic. We all have images, things that determine us which are not a logical succession of actions that would normally develop perfectly in a chain. It seems intriguing to me to explore this universe, from the point of view of truth, if not of morality."

Resnais has resolutely pursued the objective of fleshing out "the complexity of thought and its mechanism". A cinematic representation of mental functioning is effectively achieved in his practice through three distinctive strategies. Geared to specific expressive needs they reach a high degree of complexity and refinement.

An examination of these strategies, will demonstrate their effectiveness as tools for exploring the interior life of characters.* Resnais' achievements in expressing mental processes will be looked into as indications of the expressive potentialities of the film medium to cope with such representation.

*Resnais' concern with the interior life of characters is central in most of his films, even when no attempt is made to represent their stream of consciousness. The viewer is enticed to deduce the characters' mental processes through dramatic situations that provide almost laboratory conditions for their exploration. This is usually achieved through alienating devices such as fragmentary narrative structures, often combining various time levels, thus restraining the viewer's emotional involvement, and directing his attention to an analytical contemplation of mental functioning. Such is the case particularly in Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique, La vie est un roman and L'amour à mort. Even in Resnais' early short films his concern with mental functioning is prominent. The film on Van Gogh, in particular, depicts the exterior world only as transmuted by the peculiar vision of the artist, thus actually dealing with his mental flow.

Film Reference M. B. White, updated by Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Alain Resnais is a prominent figure in the modernist narrative film tradition. His emergence as a feature director of international repute is affiliated with the eruption of the French New Wave in the late 1950s. This association was signaled by the fact that his first feature, Hiroshima mon amour , premiered at the Cannes Film Festival at the same time as François Truffaut's Les 400 coups. However, Resnais had less to do with the group of directors emerging from the context of the Cahiers du cinéma than he did with the so-called Left Bank group, including Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. This group provided an intellectual and creative context of shared interest. In the course of his film career Resnais frequently collaborated with members of this group. Marker worked with him on several short films in the 1950s; Cayrol wrote the narration for Nuit et brouillard and the script for Muriel ; Duras scripted Hiroshima mon amour ; and Robbe-Grillet wrote L'Année dernière à Marienbad. All of these people are known as writers and/or filmmakers in their own right; their association with Resnais is indicative of his talent for fruitful creative collaboration.

Resnais began making films as a youth in 8 and 16mm. In the early 1940s he studied acting and filmmaking, and after the war made a number of 16mm films, including a series about artists. His first film in 35mm was the 1948 short, Van Gogh , which won a number of international awards. It was produced by Pierre Braunberger, an active supporter of new talent, who continued to finance his work in the short film format through the 1950s. From 1948–58 Resnais made eight short films, of which Nuit et brouillard is probably the best known. The film deals with German concentration camps, juxtaposing past and present, exploring the nature of memory and history. To some extent the film's reputation and the sustained interest it has enjoyed is due to its subject matter. However, many of the film's formal strategies and thematic concerns are characteristic of Resnais's work more generally. In particular, the relationship between past and present, and the function of memory as the mechanism of traversing temporal distance, are persistent preoccupations of Resnais's films. Other films from this period similarly reveal familiar themes and traits of Resnais's subsequent work. Toute la memoire du monde is a documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being. The film almost succeeds in transforming the documentary film into a branch of science fiction.

Indeed, Resnais has always been interested in science fiction, the fantastic, and pulp adventure stories. If this interest is most overtly expressed in the narrative of Je t'aime, je t'aime (in which a human serves as a guinea pig for scientists experimenting with time travel), it also emerges in the play of fantasy/imagination/reality pervading his work, and in many of his unachieved projects (including a remake of Fantômas and The Adventure of Harry Dickson ).

Through editing and an emphasis on formal repetition, Resnais uses the medium to construct the conjunctions of past and present, fantasy and reality, insisting on the convergence of what are usually considered distinct domains of experience. In Hiroshima mon amour the quivering hand of the woman's sleeping Japanese lover in the film's present is directly followed by an almost identical image of her nearly dead German lover during World War II. Tracking shots through the streets of Hiroshima merge with similar shots of Nevers, where the woman lived during the war. In Stavisky , the cutting between events in 1933 and a 1934 investigation of those events presents numerous, often conflicting versions of the same thing; one is finally convinced, above all else, of the indeterminacy and contingency of major historical events. And in Providence , the central character is an aged writer who spends a troubled night weaving stories about his family, conjoining memory and fantasy, past, present, and future, in an unstable mix.

The past's insistent invasion of the present is expressed in many different ways in Resnais's films. In Nuit et brouillard , where the death camps are both present structures and repressed institutions, it is a question of social memory and history; it is an individual and cultural phenomenon in Hiroshima mon amour , as a French woman simultaneously confronts her experiences in occupied France and the Japanese experience of the atomic bomb; it is construed in terms of science fiction in Je t'aime, je t'aime when the hero is trapped in a broken time-machine and continuously relives moments from his past; and it is a profoundly ambiguous mixture of an individual's real and imagined past in L'Année dernière à Marienbad (often considered Resnais's most avant-garde film) as X pursues A with insistence, recalling their love affair and promises of the previous year, in spite of A's denials. In all of these films, as well as Resnais's other work, the past is fraught with uncertainty, anxiety, even terror. If it is more comfortable to ignore, it inevitably erupts in the present through the workings of the psyche, memory traces, or in the form of documentation and artifacts.

In recent years, Resnais's presence on the international film scene barely has been noticed. While serious and provocative in intention, none of his films have measured up to his earlier work. However, in the early 1980s, he did direct two strikingly original films which are outstanding additions to his filmography.

In Mon Oncle d'Amerique , Resnais probes human responses and relations by illustrating the theories of Henri Laborit, a French research biologist. The scenario's focus is on the intertwined relationship between three everyday characters: a Catholic farm boy who has become a textile plant manager (Gerard Depardieu); a former young communist who now is an actress (Nicole Garcia); and a conformist (Roger Pierre) who is married to his childhood sweetheart. La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses) is a bewitching allegory contrasting the accounts of a rich man (Ruggero Raimondi) constructing a "temple of happiness" around the time of World War I, and a seminar on education being held at that location decades later. Resnais's points are that there are no easy answers to complex dilemmas and, most tellingly, that individuals who attempt to dictate to others their concepts of perfection are as equally destructive as those whose actions result in outright chaos.

Resnais's filmic output has been relatively small. He nonetheless stands as a significant figure in modernist cinema. His strategies of fragmented point-of-view and multiple temporality, as well as his use of the medium to convey past/present and fantasy/imagination/reality as equivocal and equivalent modes of experience have amplified our understanding of film's capacity for expression.

Alain Resnais - Film Comment Peter Harcourt, November/December 1973

For Alain Resnais, filmmaking is editing. It is less creation than selection and arrangement. It is an exploration of the world at one remove. All of Resnais’s films are dependent upon the initial shaping of experience by another artist, whether Van Gogh or Picasso (the subject matter of two of his documentaries) or Marguerite Duras or Jorge Semprun (the scenarists for two of his features). Unlike Godard or Fellini, Resnais does not appear to be exploring the world with his camera: he remolds the explorations of somebody else. To film is to interpret, to rearrange, to edit—to stand back and reflect. There is thus an air of detachment about his films that links him, in a way, with Antonioni, but more directly with Eisenstein.

The editorial act is the most intellectual part of any artistic process. Potentially, it is the most academic. Like all basically interpretative arts, it is dependent upon the creativity of someone else. One might even feel that it tends to hide behind the creativity of someone else, or to submerge itself in it (however we want to put it, depending on the evaluation of the work at hand). Thus we have the central paradox from which all considerations of Resnais’s work must begin: with so interpretative a director—a director who insists that he is really happier working as an editor than as a director, that he can scarcely think of himself as an auteur at all—what can we detect at the center of his work that binds it all together to enable us to speak of an Alain Resnais film?

In his Cinema One book on Resnais, John Ward has done a splendid job in relating Resnais’s films to a conceptual framework shared by Resnais with his chosen writers, a framework that relates back to Bergson but which Resnais probably comes to by way of Proust. And Roy Armes has documented the close working association that Resnais has generally enjoyed with his writers. In fact, Armes’s study is so detailed descriptively and so scrupulously documented that it makes much of what I might have wished to say about the surface characteristics of Resnais’s films redundant and unnecessary. Yet the question still remains when we contemplate Resnais’s work as a whole: Is Resnais a film creator in the same sense that Godard and Fellini so inescapably are?

To ask the question at all is to imply a negative tinge to any answer. Speaking personally, I ask it out of a sense of something distant and unseizable about his work as a whole. Much as I have come to admire his films, they are not films that instinctively appealed to me, nor are they films that even now I feel I deeply grasp. Is this an aspect of my own sensibility or is there something distancing in the films themselves? What, finally, lies at their center? Even with Ward’s book open before me, I still want to ask, To what extent are these thought patterns central to our response to these films? Or to what extent do they provide Resnais chiefly as Ward himself has said—with “credible dilemmas to build films around”?

Resnais believes in experiment. He is interested in achieving new cinematic forms. But unlike Godard, this interest doesn’t seem the result of disruptive internal pressures, forging new forms out of the necessity created by the many new things he urgently wants to say. Although the comment is simplistic, one might have a limited sympathy with John Russell Taylor’s parenthetical suggestion that Resnais “seems, unmistakably, more interested in solving intellectual and aesthetic problems than in film-making per se . . .” Resnais is obviously the kind of artist who waits to be filled by some experience outside himself, by something that he then feels he wants to make a film about. This too is in great contrast with Bergman and Fellini who always seem to be spinning their fantastic cinematic creations out of their own insides. Yet there is a consistency that runs throughout Resnais’s work, and not only the conceptual consistency analyzed by John Ward.

His early work in documentaries obviously encouraged Resnais to concentrate on perfecting the details of his craft, to concentrate, that is, on the more intellectual, the more abstract aspects of filmmaking. These abstract aspects of his work are the elements that link Resnais most strongly with the early Eisenstein. They serve as well to create a similar kind of problem.

The more a filmmaker becomes caught up in the abstractions of his own craft—a concern with rhythm, movement, and editorial design—the more his work might seem to detach itself from the subject matter of the film, appealing to us in its own right, like the rhythmic abstractions of music. So, like Eisenstein’s, Resnais’s films, whatever their subject matter, are in a sense partly about themselves. By raising the art of editing to the highest possible degree of imaginativeness, his films sometimes appear to be not only at one remove from life itself (as I began by saying) but even from the subject matter of the film he is editing. Just as the Raising of the Bridge sequence in October is as much about its own splendor as it is about a particular massacre, so in Resnais there is frequently a similar kind of abstract appeal.

Yet the situation isn’t simple. There are recurring themes that do have an effect upon us. Central to all Resnais’s work is his concern with sickness, often a moral sickness, and with degeneration and decline. In his first two professional documentaries, this concern is handled in a characteristically paradoxical way.

The black-and-white studies of Van Gogh (1948) and Gauguin (1950) both deal with men whose personal lives were literally sacrificed to their art. And yet—paradoxically—this personal degeneration was accompanied by the frenzied affirmation of the artists’ art. Out of instability came something external. Out of sickness, came a kind of health. The style of both these films does nothing to point the moral. The commentary simply describes the events in the artists’ lives with a clinical detachment as we look at the paintings—paintings greatly robbed of their power to affect us by being in black and-white.

Even at this early stage of Resnais’s career, we might notice the separability of the elements that make up his films. There is only the most neutral connection between things said and things seen, while the music follows yet another independent path, making its own kind of aesthetic appeal. The landscapes in the paintings of Van Gogh and Guernica are treated like landscapes in real life, as we move in on a detail or appear to track along an avenue of trees. Skillful though this is in terms of film, it is important to point out that this very skill to a large extent destroys the autonomy of the paintings, drawing attention instead to the films’ own movement and rhythm and to Resnais’s directorial skill.

The best example of this kind of spacial destruction leading to a fresh kind of temporal cinematic synthesis is Guernica (1950). In this film, Resnais combines the paintings of Picasso, the poetry of Paul Eluard, the voice of Maria Casares and the music of Guy Bernard to produce a film of his own. It could scarcely fail to have an effect! Yet the effect it does have, we can conclude from the supporting evidence of the rest of Resnais’s films, is very much the result of Resnais’s individual cast of mind. The theme of sickness is still there, but this time, as later with Night and Fog, it is more a social and political sickness that leads to a terrible destructiveness. And once again, there is the compensational beauty of creativity—initially of Picasso but then also of Resnais himself.

As distinguished an example of its kind as any film can be, Guernica repays careful study—not only for its own sake but as an indication of things to come. Whether or not Resnais is primarily concerned with solving aesthetic problems, like the innovator he is, his films certainly cause them for the spectator. Central to our response to Guernica must be the tension established within the film between what here we might call elements of poetry and elements of prose. Approaching the problem from a different angle, we might contrast the strong aesthetic appeal the film makes to us (the way it invites us to admire its own skill and authority) with the human implications of its subject matter—the seemingly gratuitous destruction of an entirely innocent town. As distinguished an example of its kind as any film can be, Guernica nevertheless can create for us a most uncomfortable emotion, an emotion which is the result of this element of beauty within the film.

Remember that girl’s hair caressing the lip of the rising bridge in Eisenstein’s October? A tinge of aesthetic emphasis which could be said to increase our sense of horror or, I think more plausibly, to deflect our attention away from it, making it seem bearable by turning it into art. In Resnais, this problem is pervasive. Yet, as it is a problem of perception, a problem of response, it is impossible to settle the matter with critical objectivity. It depends on how we feel at the time.

In my own contemplation of Resnais’s work throughout the years, I have moved from a position where I rejected critically this impulse to extract a feeling of beauty from such a subject matter to a position where I have come to feel that, finally, perhaps this is the only thing that Resnais could have done. Yet one thing I am sure of about this and his next film, Night and Fog: this aesthetic emotion that the films create, this detached and unangry contemplation of the horrors of war, these elements give both films a feeling of helplessness in the face of the problems that the films themselves so forcefully evoke. And it seems to me to be the same feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that makes the beauty of Je t’aime, je t’aime such an enervating experience.

In Resnais’s early work, however, this feeling of helplessness is best isolated in Night and Fog. Like Guernica, Night and Fog is less troubling from the hideousness of its subject matter than from the detached yet sensuous attitude that Resnais and his scriptwriter, Jean Cayrol, bring to it. The film has been assembled with such authority that we leave the cinema conscious not only of what the extermination camps have meant but also of what a splendid film Resnais has made.

Like Guernica, Night and Fog establishes a tension between poetic and prosaic elements in the film, this time emphasized by the use of color and implying as well a contrast between the present and the past. The present seems ‘poetic’ largely because it looks so beautiful, even if at the same time it seems wistful and sad. In his detailed analysis of the film, Roy Armes has referred to its “calm thoughtful rhythm.” This is indeed a striking characteristic of the film; but the question that seems most urgent concerns the nature of the thought that the film tends to provoke.

The commentary guides our responses, even if at a distance: giving us information, pointing out the discrepancy between the camps now—macabre tourist sites seemingly innocent of their past associations—and the actuality material that shows us how they really were. The commentary culminates with the key question of responsibility: “I am not responsible,” says the Kapo. “I am not responsible,” says the officer. “I am not responsible . . . Well then [a strong pause preceding the final question], who is responsible?” Alors-qui est responsable? This final question is immediately followed by a forceful major-seventh chord on the sound track—a string orchestra in close harmony, a most plangent, sensuous sound. Who, indeed, is responsible?

This rhetorical question is obviously intended to imply universal responsibility, an implication confirmed by the final lines of the film. We are all responsible, such a question seems to insist. At the same time, such an implication might seem to blur the historical issue. It might tend to discourage an accurate analysis of the actual situation in which actual people made actual decisions. It might tend thus to discourage precision of thought. Watchful we must be, the end of the film implies, lest a similar situation occur again; at the same time, the middle of the film might give us the feeling that there was nothing at the time that any individual could actually have done.

In this way, there is something religious about Night and Fog. There is something immensely troubling when we witness the horror that man is capable of (and it is part of the explicit purpose of the film to universalize this concept of man); and yet there is something oddly sensual in Hans Eisler’s music and in Resnais’s slow tracking shots along a series of crowded bunks or along a row of grim latrines. There is simultaneously a sense of immense human suffering in a particular place and time, and yet the sense as well that there is something beyond our grasp that we cannot understand.

There is even the sense of a kind of resurrection connected with it all. As in the earlier art documentaries, there is the paradoxical concern with affirmation within despair. Each prison camp became a kind of community, one of them sprouting a symphony orchestra, another a zoo. Even when the potentiality for life was at its lowest, the inmates continued to assert their humanity.

But man is unbelievably resistant. Though his body is worn out by fatigue, his mind continues to function and his bandaged hands continue to work. Spoons, puppets, monsters and boxes are made and hidden. Letters are written, notes are taken, memory is kept alive with dreams. One can think of God. One can even organize politically and argue with the common criminals about the running of the camp.

The final comments seem both a warning and a lamentation:

Who among us keeps watch at this strange observation post, ready to give warning of the approach of the new executioners? Are their faces really any different from ours? Somewhere in our midst there are still some lucky kapos, some resurrected leaders, some unknown informers. There are all those who didn’t believe it at all or who believed it only now and then … We who try to believe that it belonged only to a period in time and to a single nation on earth and who will not look around and who will not hear the whole world crying …

Yet, finally, what can we do? Like a religious confession, the film creates an experience that gives us the sense of our own sinfulness, our own moral implication in this most terrible crime in contemporary history. Yet it fails to give us a clear mental picture of the actual details that led to such a situation or any positive feeling of what specific action we might take to prevent its recurrence. Instead of intellectual precision, Night and Fog combines facts and rhetoric with sensuous sounds and soft colors to create a strong emotion that might lead many viewers to a sense of despair. Yet, in the paradoxical way of both religion and art, the film might also make us feel good by deceiving us into thinking that we have understood the problem because we have been so deeply moved by it. Thus, fully to come to grips with this particular film one would have to come to grips with an historical situation more important and more difficult than that contained within the film itself. The atmosphere of passivity leading to a sense of helplessness that characterizes Night and Fog becomes a defect when we feel from our sense of the world outside the film that what is needed is a more active, more energetic response to the problem.

With the exception of La Guerre est finie, Resnais’s films all lean toward an inactivist position as a result of the philosophical system from which they spring and as a result of the director’s concern with the ambiguities of the human imagination and the unreliability of memory. And indeed, Resnais’s next film after Night and Fog—one of the most distinguished documentaries of all time—has memory very much at its center: Toute la mémoire du monde (1956).

Since man’s memory is short (the commentary begins by assuring us) men write books and preserve them in vast public collections. Yet as the centuries flow by, these collections become huge prisons that confine one’s past, huge tombs in which man’s past records can be buried and hence forgotten. With the help of the music by Maurice Jarre, who gives this film the flavor of a Georges Franju documentary, Resnais creates an atmosphere throughout the film of dehumanized confinement. In a way that looks directly forward to Last Year in Marienbad, the depository of the past is seen as a great prison in which one can wander endlessly along extended corridors, with no certain sense of direction or observable goal.

This aimlessness is emphasized by Resnais’s cutting patterns. He frequently cuts abruptly to a tracking shot (say) of a man walking along a grilled passageway—a shot that we first experience as a kind of abstract movement and only secondarily are able to recognize as what it represents. Thus, the representational element in this film becomes less important than the film’s inner rhythms, its own sense of movement and design. At times, the film seems to be a kind of mechanical ballet, as we watch the intercrossing of a man with a book on his shoulder with a man pushing a truck, who, a moment later we see again silhouetted in a lift. If it is a marvelous film, it is so largely because its subject matter lends itself to this kind of treatment. As the cataloguing of books for a national collection does not possess the same urgency as the workings of a concentration camp, we can easily give ourselves over to Resnais’s unparalleled cinematic art, as we can again in 1957 with Resnais’s playful treatment of plastics in Le Chant du Styrene.

Throughout Toute la mémoire du monde there is the implicit question: what is the use of all this past? If the film is extremely formalized, there is also within it a probing seriousness. In spite of elements tugging in the contrary direction, there is, throughout, the basic feeling that the past is a promiscuous jungle, like the memory of man itself, preserving the trivial along with the most important, unable to select, to make value judgments. As the commentary explains: “Who can tell what, tomorrow, will be the truest witness of our civilization?” Unable to select, then, man must preserve everything—Les Pensees de Pascal along with Mandrake the Magician.

The theme is handled lightheartedly, yet the implications are serious; and as John Ward has pointed out, the books here are treated in the same way as the Jews in Night and Fog. They are stamped, numbered, inoculated, kept in a controlled environment, yet for the opposite purpose—to guarantee their continued life. It is as if our civilization valued its artifacts more than its citizens. At the same time, the overall movement of the film is a gradual struggle upwards, from the cluttered confines of the basement where we see even the relic of a bicycle apparently being preserved, up and out through the dome that covers the central reading room, a movement out toward life and fresh air, away from the death of the past. Perhaps if all these fragments eclectically preserved could be put together, they might add up to something which we could call happiness, the final words of the commentary try to persuade us. Yet the movement of the camera is away from this universal memory, away from what we have seen.

Only by remembering the past, can we make sense of the present; yet only by forgetting it, are we free to move into the future. As John Ward’s study repeatedly points out, our past is only helpful to us if we recreate it accurately through our imagination. Yet we tend to remember events according to our psychological needs, according to our mental picture of how it ought to have been. Thus, any two individuals will tend to remember a past event differently. From this sad fact follows the organizational motif of most of Resnais’s features, the motif of persuasion. Our own memories gain a certain validity, many of Resnais’s films tend to imply, if we can persuade someone else, especially someone dear to us, to accept our own ordering of the past as the accurate ordering. Just as man’s history is imprisoned in la Bibliotheque Nationale, so man’s individual memory seems imprisoned in his own subjectivity.

Put this way, these Bergsonian notions as deployed by Resnais and his writers do not offer a very comforting view of the world. They certainly don’t make it easy for us to have confidence in our own grounds for action. Thus, there is something recessive about all Resnais’s films. With the exception of Diego in La Guerre est finie (and even Diego fails to get free from his long established patterns of behavior), his characters are all obsessed with their past—unable to make sense of it, to free themselves from its torments.

Resnais biography biography and complete filmography from New Wave Film

Biography for Alain Resnais - TCM.com biography from Turner Classic Movies

Alain Resnais by David Ehrenstein biography from DVDBeaver

Alain Resnais: Biography from Answers.com extensive biography

Alain Resnais biography from Novel Guide

Alain Resnais Biography Encyclopedia of World Biography

Alain Resnais | French film director | Britannica.com biography

Alain Resnais | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie bio from Jason Ankeny, also seen from AMC here: Alain Resnais Biography

Alain Resnais @ Art + Culture brief bio

Alain Resnais - Zimbio Celebrity news

Alain Resnais Mubi

Analysis of several Resnais films Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Alain Resnais / director / realisateur / films James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Alain Resnais « Inner Worlds / Outer Space Melanie Menard

Restricted definitions - Art Cinema - actress, film, voice, role ... Film Reference

French film culture in the 1950s - New Wave - cinema Film Reference

"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"

Alain Robbe-Grillet - Writer - Films as Writer:, Films as Writer ... Roy Armes, updated by David Levine from Film Reference

Jorge Semprun - Writer - Films as Screenwriter:, Other Films ... Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Marguerite Duras - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... M.B. White from Film Reference

Marguerite Duras - Writer - Films as Writer:, Other Films ... Nina Bjornsson from Film Reference

Sacha Vierny - Writer - Films as Cinematographer (Features ... John Baxter, updated by Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Delphine Seyrig - Actors and Actresses - Films as Actress ... Rodney Farnsworth from Film Reference

Fanny Ardant - Actors and Actresses - Films as Actress:, Publications Dayna Oscherwitz from Film Reference

The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais (Book Website) by Haim Calev

Internationale Situationniste #3 “Cinema After Alain Resnais, December 1959

Last Year at Marienbad | News | The Harvard Crimson Raymond A. Sokolov Jr, September 24, 1962

article by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues et Jean-Louis Leutrat Repérages: photographies de Alain Resnais; texte de Jorge Semprun, 1974 (includes Resnais photos, article in French)

In Search of the American Uncle Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 2, 1981

Alain Resnais and MÉLO | Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader, April 15, 1988

Celebrating France's Directors Who Rode the New Wave G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, August 11, 1989

FILM; Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave Rolls In Phillip Lopate from The New York Times, November 22, 1998

Alain Resnais All Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, from Filmmaker magazine, Spring 2000

Resnais as Regionalist | Jonathan Rosenbaum originally published in Film Comment, May 4, 2000

In Search of Lost Time | Village Voice Elliot Stein on a Resnais retrospective, June 27, 2000

alain resnais--at the walter reade theater Time and again: the cinema of Alain Resnais, June 30 – July 18, 2000

FILM; Another Year at 'Marienbad' Stuart Klawans from The New York Times, July 2, 2000

Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation • Senses of Cinema Thomas Beltzer, November 5, 2000

Trying to Have Some Fun (QUILLS, SMOKING, & NO SMOKING) Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 15, 2000

Fantastic Metropolis » Alain Resnais Alain Resnais, A Beautiful Itch: His Movies, by Rhys Hughes from Fantastic Metropolis, October 15, 2001

The French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine, July 2, 2002

Rouge 1, 2003 Marcel in Marienbad, by Mark Rappaport from Rouge, 2003

Nuit et brouillard • Senses of Cinema James Leahy, May 22, 2003

Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite Kent Jones from Criterion essays, June 23, 2003

Alain Resnais Acquarello book review on Alain Resnais by James Monaco, 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Pas sur la Bouche (2003) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, May 2004

L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at ... - Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donaghue from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004

The Past Recaptured | Jonathan Rosenbaum Not on the Lips, March 18, 2005

Movies | Mixed doubles Mixed doubles, The Films of Alain Resnais at the HFA, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, April 15 – 21, 2005

Pucker Up: The Enchantments of Resnais’ Not on the Lips Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2005

Muriel: The Time of Return • Senses of Cinema Crissa-Jean Chappell, October 20, 2005

Alain Resnais - Google Books Result Alain Resnais, by Emma Wilson (214 pages), May 2006

Alain Resnais - Manchester University Press Alain Resnais, by Emma Wilson (214 pages), May 2006

"Restless Innovations from Alain Resnais" Dave Kehr from The New York Times, April 8, 2007

• View topic - Alain Resnais Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, April 24, 2007

Hollywood Mon Amour Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, June 8, 2007

Three Key Moments from Three Alain Resnais Films Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 22, 2007

Biographical Dictionary of Film No 19: Alan Resnais David Thomson from The Guardian, July 20, 2007

The Reverse Atomic Principle of Hiroshima mon amour Dr. Greg Hainge (University of Queensland) at the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, September 12, 2007

SARAH FRENCH From History to Memory: Alain Resnais' and Marguerite ... From History to Memory: Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, by Sarah French from The Melbourne Art Journal, 2008 (pdf format)

Dreaming of Harry Dickson Maxim Jacubowski from The Guardian, January 22, 2008

Alain Robbe-Grillet, 85, French Author, Is Dead The New York Times, February 19, 2008

Rachel Donadio on Alain Robbe-Grillet (The New York Times) He Was Nouveau When It Was New, February 24, 2008

The Greatest Film Ever Made? Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 1, 2008

Alain Resnais/Harry Dickson The Adventures of Harry Dickson, by Alain Resnais, essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 26, 2008

After the Revolution by Andrew Tracy - Moving Image Source Andrew Tracy from Moving Image Source, August 7, 2008

Sexism in the French New Wave Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film Quarterly, April 23, 2009

Salute Your Shorts: Alain Resnais' Documentaries :: Movies ... Sean Gandert from Paste magazine, June 2009

DVDs - Indelible '60s Memories - 'Marienbad' and 'Strangelove ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, June 18, 2009

Supernal Dreams: ALAIN RESNAIS – Movie Master of Time and Memory ... Lawrence French from Cinefantastique, June 24, 2009

Les Statues meurent aussi • Senses of Cinema Jenny Chamarette, September 14, 2009

Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left ... - Senses of Cinema Robert Farmer from Senses of Cinema, September 28, 2009

Cultural Apocalypse by Means of Comedy – Cartoon Patriotism, Cartoon Humanism: Alain Resnais’ “I Want to Go Home” (1989) Victor from Acting Out Politics, October 28, 2009

The Films of Alain Resnais In Time: The Films of Alain Resnais, BAM/PFA, Pacific Film Archives, November 6 – December 15, 2009

Vitalizing Addiction to Hate and to Fight Victor from Acting Out Politics, December 5, 2009

Movies: Harvard Film Archive to show 14 Alain Resnais films Mark Feeney from The Boston Globe, January 10, 2010

Alain Resnais and the Enigmatic Art of Memory - Harvard Film Archive including brief comments on films, January 15 – 25, 2010

French Cultures Festival website - March 2010 - Alain Resnais ... Resnais retrospective film notes, March 2010

Alain Resnais Shorts Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 19, 2010

Where the wild things grow: Alain Resnais' Wild Grass | Sight & Sound ... Adrian Martin from Sight and Sound, June 2010, revised March 3, 2014

Alain Resnais’ “The Wild Grass” (2010) – Warning Which Comes Too Late Victor from Acting Out Politics, June 26, 2010

Alain Resnais: vive la différence Gilbert Adair from The Guardian, June 22, 2010

Miriam Bale The Game, from Mubi, July 30, 2010

Chris Nolan Vs. Alain Resnais In The Battle Of The Movie Maps ... Brendon Connelly from Bleeding Cool, December 9, 2010

The Films of Alain Resnais - BFI June 2011 (pdf)

Notebook “Last Year at Marienbad” @ 50, by David Hudson from Mubi, June 25, 2011

French New Wave by Craig Phillips | All about Film Kimmi Kong, December 1, 2011

BEST ALAIN RESNAIS FILMS - Top 10 with synopses - New Wave Film Simon Hitchman, 2012

Marienbad YouTube video of song “Marienbad” by Julia Holter, January 2012

Cinema Scope | You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais, France) Blake Williams, 2012

On Alain Resnais Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 22, 2012

Jonathan Rosenbaum May 22, 2012

Parentheses in Time: L'Année Dernière à Marienbad</em ... Alex Ling from Screening the Past, August 2012

Arsenal Alain Resnais Retrospective, September 2012

Séance “C.M.” - Senses of Cinema extracted from Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image, by Gavin Keeney, September 19, 2012

Some Came Running: The discreet obscurity of Alain Resnais Glenn Kenny, October 10, 2012

How the 90-Year-Old Alain Resnais Preserves the Past While Forging ... Steve Greene from indieWIRE, February 22, 2013

Resnais’ Secrets Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 25, 2013

Joanna Di Mattia Hiroshima mon amour, from Senses of Cinema, September 2013

David Phelps Virtual Refractions 2.0: Notes on Alain Resnais’ “Vous n'avez encore rien vu,” from Mubi, October 15, 2013

Dave Kehr Alain Resnais, Acclaimed Filmmaker Who Defied Conventions, Dies at 91, from The New York Times, March 2, 2014

Richard Brody In Memory of Alain Resnais, from The New Yorker, March 2, 2014

The Telegraph Obituary, March 2, 2014

Alain Resnais obituary | Film | The Guardian Brian Baxter, March 2, 2014

Acclaimed French film director dies aged 91 Anne Penketh from The Guardian, March 2, 2014

Alain Resnais: 60 years of sensational cerebral film-making Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, March 2, 2014

Alain Resnais – a life in pictures The Guardian, March 2, 2014

Daily | Alain Resnais, 1922 – 2014 | Keyframe ... - Fandor David Hudson from Fandor, March 2, 2014

Catherine Grant Toute la mémoire du monde: In Memoriam, Alain Resnais (June 3, 1922 - March 1, 2014), from Film Studies for Free, March 2, 2014

R.I.P. Alain Resnais (1922-2014): Watch Essential Films Kevin Jagernauth (including a 1961 video interview) from The Playlist, March 2, 2014

Guy Lodge On the passing of Alain Resnais, the auteur who stayed playful to the end, from Hit Fix, March 2, 2014

David Ehrenstein Merci pour toute la memoire, March 2, 2014

Filmmaker “In My Film Time Is Shattered”: Producer Anatole Dauman Remembers Working with Alain Resnais, by Scott McCauley, March 2, 2014

Glenn Kenny Alain Resnais, 1922-2014, from Some Came Running, March 2, 2014

Noel Murray Alain Resnais, 1922-2014, from The Dissolve, March 2, 2014

Michael Smith Last Thoughts on Harold Ramis and Alain Resnais, from White City Cinema, March 2, 2014

A.A. Dowd R.I.P. French director Alain Resnais, from The Onion, March 2, 2014

Alain Resnais 1922-2014 | CINEBEATS Kimberly Lindbergs, March 2, 2014

David Hudson: "Alain Resnais, 1922 – 2014 The director ... Michael from Dialogic Cinephilia, March 2, 2014

Peter Labuza Resnais's Science Fiction, March 2, 2014

Ekkehard Knörer Cargo, March 2, 2014

David Thompson BFI Sight & Sound, March 3, 2014

Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory Entering History, which includes rare video footage of Resnais and Marker receiving the Prix Jean Vigo in 1954, by the Blind Librarian, March 3, 2014

Peter Cowie Flashback: Alain Resnais, Criterion essay, March 3, 2014

John Coulthart Marienbad Hauntings, from feuilleton, March 3, 2014, more here March 4: Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais

David Jenkins Eating Cat Munchies: Alain Resnais 1922 – 2014, from Little White Lies, March 3, 2014

moviegoing game (RIP Alain Resnais, 1922-2014) Ben Sachs from The Reader, March 3, 2014

Alain Resnais, 1922-2014 « Nerdist Whitney Seibold, March 3, 2014

Fernando F. Croce March 3, 2013

Carlo Chatrian Oui, je n’ai encore rien vu Brief thoughts on Alain Resnais, in the form of a thank you, March 4, 2014

The Essentials: 5 Alain Resnais Films You Should Know | IndieWire Jordan Hoffman, March 4, 2014

Alain Resnais Imagined the Whole Memory of the World | Village Voice Aaron Cutler, March 5, 2014

Alexandre Mabilon Criterion essay, Remembering Alain Resnais, March 6, 2014

Lesley Chow The Way Things Look: Farewell to Alain Resnais at the Berlinale 2014 (Feb. 6-16), Bright Lights Film Journal, March 6, 2014

Alain Resnais (1922-2014), a major figure in postwar ... David Walsh from World Socialist Web Site, March 12, 2014

Out of Darkness Into Light with Alain Resnais (1922-2014 ... Stuart Mitchner from Town Topics, March 12, 2014

In Memoriam – Alain Resnais (1922 – March, 2014) by ... Victor from Acting Out Politics, March 24, 2014

Love Unto Death: Alain Resnais (1922-2014) - doc films Daniel Frankel from DOC Films, Spring 2014

Adrian Martin We Made It This Far, from De Filmkrant, April 3, 2014

TSPDT - Alain Resnais

Eric Rohmer on Resnais from TSPDT

YouTube - Alain Resnais 1961 interview François Chalais interview with English subtitles (5:42)

Interview with Alain Resnais on MON ONCLE D'AMÉRIQUE (1980 ... Jonathan Rosenbaum interview, December 10, 1980

A Lesson in Modesty: Speaking with Alain Resnais | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum interview, December 23, 1980

In Search of the American Uncle | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum interview, May 2, 1981

England, my England Ronald Bergan interviews Resnais from The Guardian, November 27, 1998

Thomas McGonigle's interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet (Bookforum) Bookforum, Spring, 2003

Robbe-Grillet on Resnais (video, in French) (3:30)

EuroScreenwriters - Interviews with European Film Directors ... Venice Film festival interview, September 2, 2006, also seen here, Cineuropa interview by Camillo de Marco: Cineuropa - Interviews - Alain Resnais • Director At the Venice ...

Glenn Kenny "Hello, Glenn. I am Alain," interview from In the Company of Glenn, April 12, 2007

Human nature: Alain Resnais - Film - Time Out New York Nicolas Rapold interview from Time Out New York, June 14, 2010

Alain Resnais: vive la différence Gilbert Adair interview of Resnais from The Guardian, June 22, 2010

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

One of the twelve greatest living narrative filmmakers - Jonathan Rosenbaum (Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Critics, 1993)

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Alain Resnais - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Images for alain resnais

Alain Resnais Pictures - Alain Resnais Photo Gallery - 2010

VAN GOGH

France (20 mi) 1948

User reviews from imdb Author: Bob Verini from LA CA

The key events of Vincent Van Gogh's life are narrated (by Claude Dauphin in the French version, and by Martin Gabel in the English), and illustrated by the paintings, with appropriately heightened music score attached. That's it...and that's certainly enough, given the extraordinary interconnection of this particular artist's private life and his career. I have to say that it's extremely puzzling, not to say disturbing, that the entire film is in black-and-white, as if Van Gogh had made only charcoal sketches or woodcuts. Here's a short that cries out to be remade: Digital would make it easy to replace the B&W footage with color photography of the artworks, and both narration and score could remain as is. I was also dismayed that though the film has credits attached, Resnais's name does not appear on the English language print owned by UCLA and screened at the Motion Picture Academy last night. The audience seemed interested and moved, but surely they would have been more so if they'd known that this was an early work by the man who later employed many of the same techniques to memorable effect in "Last Year at Marienbad."

Alain Resnais Shorts Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 19, 2010

Resnais was making art shorts a decade before the official birth of the French New Wave, building up to his mindblowing first three features by practicing his filmmaking, not just by writing and dreaming. Le Chant du styrene and Toute la memoire du monde are both wonderful, and the latter looks forward to the themes and camera work of Last Year at Marienbad. Finally got my hands on some earlier shorts with subtitles, very exciting.

Van Gogh (1948)

This and Paul Gaugin tell abridged life stories of the artists with imaginative narration, the visuals composed solely of the artists’ works, using camera movement, zooms, fades and a musical cutting rhythm. Both artists lived in Paris but moved away, and worked over the same period of time (in fact, they knew each other).

On Van Gogh: “He was a preacher, but he preached badly. The violence of his faith frightened even the faithful. It was in the process of trying to find a way to express his love for mankind that he discovered himself to be a painter.” The film gets great mileage out of the artist’s descent into madness. Katy points out that the sunflowers lose some of their power captured in a black-and-white film.

Little about this online, besides that it won an Oscar. Auteurs: “The 1948 piece Van Gogh proved so successful in its original 16 mm form that it was subsequently remade in 35 mm, winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Academy Award.” It’s also the earliest listed Resnais film that I’ve ever seen anyone mention, although an article by Rhys Hughes confirms the earlier shorts exist.

E. Wilson in her Resnais book:
“Resnais’s aim is not merely to use Van Gogh’s art as material evidence, substituting paintings for snapshots of the artist’s life; more subtly he uses the paintings to show us the world apparently as Van Gogh saw it, to show us not merely the object world of nineteenth-century Holland and France, but to conjure the subjective images of that world perceived by the artist and captured by him on canvas. Resnais’s investigation in the film is not merely art historical therefore: he seeks already, as he will in his later films, to reveal the work and process of the imagination, the shots of reality that we view, distorted, in our mind’s eye.”

GUERNICA

France (13 mi) 1950 co-director: Robert Hessens

Alain Resnais Shorts Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 19, 2010

Maybe I didn’t like this as much as Van Gogh because I don’t like the artwork as much, didn’t figure out the painter’s style, or maybe because it seems a rerun of the previous film (artist starts painting, gets obsessive, flees the city, goes poor/mad). E. Wilson, the biography author, agrees and spends more pages discussing Guernica (1950) instead. She calls this “a largely pictorial film by contrast,” points out that in Statues he would be “more self-conscious about self/other relations, colonial and post-colonial tensions.”

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Guernica is a short documentary directed in 1950 by Alain Resnais before any of his feature films with Robert Hessens. (included on the Criterion release of Henri-Georges Clouzot's marvelous "The Mystery of Picasso"). I'd wanted to see it for decades and was disappointed. Picasso's painting protesting the Nazi bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 is in black and white, and I appreciate many black-and-white films, but not seeing other Picasso paintings in black and white. Similarly, I consider Paul Éluard one of the greatest of 20th-century French poets, but what he wrote to be read over Picasso images for this movie is IMHO overwritten (too exalted, not too melancholy) and too "poetically" declaimed by Maria Cesares and Jacques Pruvost). Its jump cuts and cross-fades adumbrated the "new wave," of which Resnais may or may not have been a member/exemplar. 3.1 stars

User reviews from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia, USA

Criterion DVD "The Mystery of Picasso" (1956) also includes "Guernica", a short documentary directed in 1950 by Alain Resnais before any of his feature films. Picasso's "Guernica" is one of the most famous paintings of the 20th Century which was created by the artist in response to bombing and destroying the ancient Basque town of Guernica by German aviation on April 27 1937 during Spanish Civil War. The painting is a passionate protest against war as well as the fascinating work of art. Resnains' 13 minutes short film is based on paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Pablo Picasso from 1902 until 1949 including "Guernica" and is set against the ode written by French lyrical poet Paul Éluard and recited by Jacques Pruvost and María Casarès. In his early short film, Resnais already uses his famous jump cuts and cross-fades. "Guernica" is a valuable feature which goes well together with the marvelous "The Mystery of Picasso" and adds to understanding one of the most prolific and mysterious Artists of the last century.

Salute Your Shorts: Alain Resnais' Documentaries :: Movies ... Sean Gandert from Paste magazine, June 2009

Guernica Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Guernica (1950, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, December 27, 2007

PAUL GAUGIN

France (14 mi) 1950

Alain Resnais Shorts Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 19, 2010

The opening narration summarizes: “A bank employee and head of family, well-to-do, middle-aged, comfortable, discovers that he has been lying to himself. He wants, indeed he must paint. From that point on, he devotes himself exclusively to painting, and after twenty years of poverty dies alone.”

Starts in 1883, just like the previous film. Instead of poor and insane, Gaugin ends up poor and sick in Tahiti, painting shirtless native women. The commentary on Van Gogh was written by co-producers Robert Hessens and Gaston Diehl, but this one is taken from Gaugin’s own writings. Produced by Pierre Braunberger, who assisted early works by Renoir (Charleston, La Chienne) and Truffaut/Godard, ending up with Terayama Shuji of all the weird people. I wish they’d done a Pierre-Auguste Renoir film in this series.

STATUES ALSO DIE

France (30 mi) 1952 co-director: Chris Marker

Alain Resnais Shorts Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 19, 2010

I’ve watched this before, but without subtitles. It is immensely improved when I understand the commentary – not that the shots and editing are anything short of excellent, but the movie is making all sorts of points about images, history, culture and colonialism which are sort of essential.

Statues Also Die (1953, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, August 29, 2006

Great picture quality on my downloaded copy, but forgot it had no subtitles. Movie seemed to show statues and masks in a museum setting, then as part of daily life, and finally in a large storeroom in a government building. Half an hour long.

Harvard Film Archive, or someone they’ve quoted, says: “This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.”

Chris Marker wrote the commentary, not a bit of which I understood. Actually I got the word “mask” a few times. Don’t think this will help Katy’s research any, but she graciously watched it with me anyway.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Alain Resnais passed through Van Gogh, Goya, Picasso and Gauguin in early documentaries, but didn't arrive at a questioning view of art until he and Chris Marker saw African figurines caged in Parisian glass booths. The exhibition is presented in inky darkness, the tracking camera throws a spotlight on each of the works: Miniature warriors arranged in a row, stony creatures facing each other, a shield with its mouth agape and a flat dish with protruding peepers. Masks, both of fertility and death, are the main motif (one skinny, elongated visage is regarded with a vertical pan, another is bulbous and floats towards the lenses), but their eyes appear dead -- the narrator (Jean Négroni) draws a direct line between the museum and the bazaar, yet the place is more like a cemetery, a site of images robbed of their meaning, "objets morts," phantoms. "Objects die when living eyes see them no more," and the deadening heft of French colonialism is felt as the spiritual value of the African statues gives way to shallow tourist contemplation. African footage shows a gorilla collapsing from a stomach wound, then the production of cultural talismans for shallow western consumption, with very ambivalent appearances by François Mitterrand and the Pope; the portrait of a black Virgin Mary heralds the end of original art, Sugar Ray Robinson in the ring suggests some kind of new beginning. Resnais took the various meanings in flux as his favored structure (along with the white mice for Mon Oncle d'Amérique), Marker took the museum for La Jetée, Sembene recalled the displaced masks for Black Girl's confrontational stinger. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. In black and white.

Les Statues meurent aussi • Senses of Cinema Jenny Chamarette, September 14, 2009

NIGHT AND FOG (Nuit et Brouillard)

France (32 mi) 1955

Nuit et Brouillard Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London

Cloquet's camera tracks slowly through a deserted, autumnal Auschwitz, with its rusted wire, dilapidated huts and silent crematoria. This muted Technicolor 'now' is intercut with the grainy monochrome records of 'then', as the commentary outlines the development and operation of the Nazi death camps. The achievement of Resnais' film is to find a tone appropriate to the desolating enormity of what took place. Cayrol's text presents the facts with a mixture of indignation, bewilderment and cool irony, complemented by Eisler's music, the austerity of which is cut with passages of great tenderness. The subtext for film-makers is that unless you're certain you can match the emotional and intellectual range brought to bear here, far better to leave this particular subject well alone.

Night and Fog Acquarello from Strictly Film School

There is a dual meaning behind the title of Alain Resnais' eviscerating holocaust documentary, Night and Fog: a reference to the arrival of interned prisoners into concentration camps under the cloak of darkness, and the subconscious suppression of knowledge and culpability for the resulting horror of the committed atrocities. Arguably one of the finest documentaries ever captured on film, Night and Fog opens with the fluid, horizontal tracking of an idyllic, seemingly impressionistic, barren countryside. But this is no ordinary remote open field. It is 1955, and this is postwar Poland, the site: Auschwitz. Using highly unsettling, archival footage recorded during postwar liberation contrasted against the stillness of the modern-day landscape, Resnais creates a powerful, haunting chronicle of cruelty, dehumanization, and denial of personal responsibility. As in his subsequent feature film, Hiroshima mon amour, Night and Fog is an examination of repressed memory. However, unlike Hiroshima mon amour where actions have individual, emotional consequence, Night and Fog is a scathing indictment of the conscious, deliberate obscuration of truth - an oppressive truth with moral and universal repercussions. In 1955, ten years after the end of World War II, the deflection of accountability are reflected in the Nuremberg trials, a defiance of personal guilt tempered by cowardice, as the narrator (Jean Cayrol), a concentration camp survivor, asks the fundamental question: Who is responsible? Even today, at the turn of the century, it is still a relevant question that is met with uncomfortable silence.

Nuit et brouillard (1955) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The Holocaust – two words forever etched on the consciousness of mankind. They resound in our minds like an implacable condemnation from a Celestial power, for a crime which rips the heart and soul out of man’s moral purpose. Not just killing, but meticulously planned and executed slaughter on an industrial scale. Men, women and children, young and old, rounded up, humiliated and butchered, like a cull of diseased cattle. How could it have happened? What evil entered the mind of Man and drove him to this act of ultimate depravity? Those who suffered may have left our world, but the evidence remains – writings and images that are a stark reminder to future generations of where hatred for one’s fellow man can lead. It must not happen again. We must never forget.

Commissioned by the French Committee for the History of the Second World War, Nuit et brouillard is widely recognised as the film which provides the most potent depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust. Even knowing about the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps is not enough to prepare you for the trauma of watching this film.

Nuit et brouillard is simply one of the most poignant and shocking pieces of cinema ever created. It is all the more effective for its subdued style of presentation, as sombre and as restrained as a documentary on any other subject. In contrast to what you might expect, there is hardly any emotion in the film’s narration. Yet it is a film which has an immense emotional impact on its spectator.

The film was directed by Alain Resnais, who earned a great reputation for his short documentaries in the 1940s and 1950s before emerging as a prominent director of the Nouvelle Vague, with such films as Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961). Whilst Nuit et Brouillard is rigorously framed as a documentary, it shows the stamp of its director very clearly, particularly his technique for merging past and present, suggesting the importance of memory in our waking consciousness.

Subdued colour photography of the now deserted concentration camps is inter-cut with harrowing archive footage depicting the fate of the deportees. The film is telling us that behind the ‘banality’ of our collective recollection of World war II, there lies a horror of unspeakable inhumanity that is scarcely imaginable.

The film ends with a simple question. Who is responsible for this? Perhaps we, the succeeding generations, are, if ever we forget the lesson of the Holocaust.

Nuit et Brouillard - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Robin Wood from Film Reference

Two closely related problems: How does one make a film about the concentration camps? and how does one write a reference book entry about a film about the concentration camps? The facts are too appalling to be aesthetically encompassed; any attempt to encompass them seems almost beyond criticism. The word that rises automatically to one's lips to describe what was done in the camps is "inhuman"; yet it was human beings who performed those acts. For both the film-maker and the critic, it is one's own "humanity" that is in question.

In making Night and Fog director Alain Resnais and his writer Cayrol confronted a problem that is simultaneously aesthetic and moral: how does one adequately represent the enormity of the camps without so overwhelming the spectator that the only possible response is a despairing impotence?—how to achieve and sustain a contemplative distance without softening or trivializing the material? Their solution, curiously seductive (and the strangeness of that word in such a context is deliberate), is ultimately unsatisfying. The failure lies in the fact that the kind of distance achieved is aesthetic rather than analytical; we find ourselves invited to contemplate, not the historical/material realities, but an art-object.

The film is built on a systematic pattern of related oppositions: present/past, colour/black-and-white, tranquility/horror, natural environment/buildings, footage shot for the film/archive material. Particularly stressed is the recurrent Resnais theme: importance of memory/difficulty of remembering. Nothing can mitigate the appalling impact of the newsreel material incorporated in the film, with the horrors carefully built up to, yet introduced almost casually, so that we at once expect them and are taken unawares. The problem arises from the attitude to the horror that the film, overall, constructs.

One omission—startling today, though no one seems to have commented on it at the time—is symptomatic in more than one way of the film's failure. One sequence carefully specifies the various coloured triangles that identified different groups of victims, distinguishing the Jews from other ethnic groups, political prisoners, etc. Presumably Resnais and Cayrol had very thorough documentation at their disposal, yet no reference is made to the pink triangle: the filmmakers surround the deaths of the (approximately) 300,000 homosexuals who died in the camps with their own "night and fog" of silence. A sinister enough comment on the "liberal" conscience in itself, this omission has implications that lead much further. The fact that the Nazis attempted to exterminate gays as well as Jews points to certain fundamental traits of Fascism that our culture generally prefers to gloss over for its own comfort. Alongside the demand for racial purity went the insistence on extreme sexual division: "masculinity" and "femininity" must be strictly differentiated, women relegated to the subordinate position of the mothers who would produce future generations of "pure" aryans. The reason why patriarchal capitalist society is so reluctant to confront this aspect of Nazism is clearly that it has its own stake in the same assumptions.

The problem, however, is not simply that Resnais and Cayrol cannot make that analysis (though it is a fundamental one); they really offer no analysis at all (with the result that they tend to repress the possibility of really understanding the camps). The final moments of the film are extremely moving: at the post-war trials, we are led through the whole hierarchy of camp authority; everyone denies responsibility; we are left with the question, "Then who is responsible?" Yet the implication is something like: "These things have always happened; they have happened again; they will always happen." Denied concrete material/historical analysis, we are thrown back on "the human condition." The answer the film (without much hope) proposes is eternal vigilance. Yet no "liberal" vigilance is going to prevent the recurrence of the camps (or related phenomena) until the fundamental premises and structures of our culture are radically transformed.

This account of Night and Fog is perhaps ungenerous, the problems inherent in the undertaking being so daunting. The film is intensely moving. Yet to confront the human monstrousness of the camps demands the utmost rigour from both the film-maker and the critic. Ultimately, the kind of "distance" constructed by Resnais and Cayrol seems less honourable, as a response, than the direct emotional assault of work like Schönberg's "A Survivor from Warsaw."

Night and Fog Criterion essay by Phillip Lopate, June 23, 2003

Night and Fog: Origins and Controversy Criterion essay by Peter Cowie, June 23, 2003

Night and Fog (1955) - The Criterion Collection

Night and Fog - Reverse Shot Light in the Dark, Ohad Landesman on Night and Fog, Spring 2004

Nuit et Brouillard / Night and Fog Stefan Herrmann, February 18, 2002

Nuit et brouillard • Senses of Cinema James Leahy, May 22, 2003

Night and Fog (1955, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, August 29, 2006

Dan Schneider on Night And Fog July 30, 2007

PopMatters Chris Elliot

DVD Outsider Slarek

DVD Times [Kevin Gilvear]

Movie Vault [Mel Valentin]

Alain Resnais (1922 - ) Jahsonic

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

Night and Fog Adam Suraf [Criterion Collection]

DVD Verdict: Night And Fog: Criterion Collection Mike Pinsky [Criterion Collection]

Night And Fog - DVD review (1 of 2) Yunda Eddie Feng from DVD Town, Criterion Collection

Images Movie Journal Derek Hill, also reviewing HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, Criterion Collection

Night and Fog (1955) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Lang Thompson, also reviewing HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, Criterion Collection

Night and Fog: the Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Jason Janis from DVD Talk [Criterion Collection]

DVD Savant Review: Night and Fog Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

dOc DVD Review: Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) (1955) Mark Zimmer, Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Guide Colin Jacobson [Criterion Collection]

Alain Resnais' Night and Fog: The Documentary Film as Narrator and ... Suite 101

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Widge

Night and Fog (1956) Starring: Michel Bouquet - Three Movie Buffs ... Three Movie Buffs

French Documentaries - Film Society of Lincoln Center brief film notes from Film Comment, March 2004

Matte Havoc DJ Heinlein

About World Film Jurgen Fauth

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Night And Fog Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Night And Fog ... TV Guide

Alain Resnais-Nuit et brouillard (1955) (Reupload) in AvaxHome photos from Avax Home

Representation and the holocaust - Holocaust - film, children ... Film Reference

Postwar propaganda - Propaganda - film, children, movie, voice ... Film Reference

Ann Hui on Night and Fog - Time Out Hong Kong May 7, 2009

Night and Fog (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

frontline: memory of the camps | PBS historical companion piece

TOUTE LA MÉMOIRE DU MONDE (All the Memories of the World)

France (21 mi) 1956

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, August 26, 2006

“All the memory of the world”. Twenty minute short on the French National Library. The long middle section is a class-filmstrip-type movie in that it tours the facility and shows how everything works, but with the gliding hallway cameras and poetic narration of a Resnais or Marker film. Posits the library as man’s collective memory, sort of like the library in that guy’s head in Dreamcatcher. Credits say “with the collaboration of… Chris and Magic Marker” and Agnes Varda, among many others. At the end, after comparing people to insects, over a shot of a hundred library visitors reading the books they’ve selected, it closes: “Astrophysics, physiology, theology, taxonomy, philology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology. Here we catch a glimpse of a future in which all mysteries are resolved. A time when we are handed the keys to this and other universes. And this will come about because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end, a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness.” Nice little movie.

Alain Resnais lowers the microphone into the frame a la Welles, a searchlight comes to life -- the Bibliothèque Nationale, out of Borges and Kafka, the camera glides around it for 20 minutes. The dome outside is surrounded by arches and pointed rafters, inside is every book printed in France, stacked in piles, guarded by statues, and wheeled around by "paper-crunching insects." Volumes are followed from the bulging bags brought in daily to the sorting assembly line, where they're identified, indexed, stored along millions of others in the catalog and finally imprinted on microfilm. Manuscripts by Pascal and Zola receive privileged close-ups, a canvas by de Chirico and vintage medals are also part of the treasure trove; a leaning tower of periodicals reveals a Mandrake comic-book at the very top (cf. Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451). "Who knows what will be the most reliable testament of our civilization?" The library is "a museum," a fortress, "Captain Nemo’s control room," a labyrinth, a penitentiary (words are "imprisoned" for the sake of Man’s short memory, "once labeled, the book cannot escape"). For Resnais, it is also an island of recorded stillness in a shifting world. People are dwarfed by the information, yet the information only comes alive once it passes "through the looking glass" into the hands and minds of readers. The style of Last Year at Marienbad is already formed, echoes are felt in All the President’s Men, Zardoz, The Serpent’s Egg, Brazil... Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. Music by Maurice Jarre. In black and white.

The Cine File: Toute la Mémoire du Monde Andrew Schenker, March 20, 2008

With its long tracking shots through cavernous library hallways and its skeptical corresponding text (courtesy of writer Rémo Forlani), Alain Resnais' short essay film Toute la Mémoire du Monde imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison "knowledge" in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory. Only in the act of individual selection - a single patron choosing a specific text - is there hope that this undifferentiated mass of knowledge can be redeemed, as the reader makes discriminating use of the collective national memory for the fulfillment of a constructive individual purpose.

Stylistically anticipating Last Year at Marienbad, Mémoire finds Ghislain Cloquet's graceful camerawork traversing a landscape every bit as static as the resort in the later film, while Maruice Jarre's score, built on ominous drumbeats and lyrical woodwind passages, plays behind the text with as much sense of foreboding as the feature film's famous organ charts. Then, the figures adopt similarly stylized poses to Marienbad's peripheral characters. When human movement does occur, it's confined to the mechanical gestures of library workers carrying out routine tasks, so that even two workers passing in the hallway walk by without any form of mutual acknowledgment. As in the later film, every hint of animated behavior is eliminated in favor of a flat, mannerist set of gestures, suggestive of a distinct effacement of personality.

Resnais maintains a tight correspondence between text and image throughout. As the narrator intones, "confronted with these bulging repositories, man is assailed by fear of being engulfed by this mass of words," the camera passes through endless piles of newspapers and manuscripts stowed away in an underground passageway which seem to defy any attempt to bring order to such an overwhelming mass of material. Then, Resnais manages to make the Bibliothèque seem at once immense and tightly constricted, as in a recurring image where he tracks in reverse through a series of doorways, all surrounded with wall-to-wall books. The endless number of identically claustrophobic rooms gives us both sides of the equation: the attempts of man to "imprison" (or more generously, organize) knowledge and the sheer mass of texts which make such a comprehensive task impossible.

Only in the film's final sequence does Resnais hint at any kind of redeeming function in the Bibliothèque's mission. He begins by following a library worker as he locates a specific title and delivers the book to the reading room, taking the viewer "through the looking glass" from the cramped stacks to the relatively airy public sections of the library. As the camera tracks overhead past a cross-section of humanity, a palpable sense of life creeps into the film for the first time. As the narrator notes, the book is redeemed "from an abstract, universal, indifferent memory," through the act of individual selection. If Resnais views the broader claims of the institution with some skepticism, at least on an individual level, he's willing to acknowledge the usefulness of the mission. As he passes across the roomful of readers and fixes his camera for the last time on a bookshelf, he gives final expression to the possibility that with knowledge redeemed at last from its prison, we are allowed to "catch a glimpse of a future in which all mysteries are resolved." That the Bibliothèque emerges from the film with all its mysteries intact means we're a long way from such a future, but it also means that Resnais has succeeded in giving cinematic expression to the irresolvable contradictions of France's great national institution.

Salute Your Shorts: Alain Resnais' Documentaries :: Movies ... Sean Gandert from Paste magazine, June 2009

User reviews from imdb Author: benoitlelievre from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

LE CHANT DU STYRÈNE (The Styrene's Song)

France (19 mi) 1958 ‘Scope

User reviews from imdb Author: (sjfasc0) from France

This cinematographic project is as poetic as it is technical in its depiction of the realm of plastics from its extraction from Nature to its final product in modern Civilization. The narration, thanks to R. Queneau, reminds of a mid 50's news real, as featured prior to blockbuster films in France, depicting the glory of Babylon lending a mechanical hand to the so-called imperfect aboriginals. Although this movie is closer to a dry documentary than anything else, a philosophic mind appreciative of essences and existenz will admire the exhaustiveness of the subject matter as well as the keen eye for detail.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959) - The Criterion Collection

Alain Resnais' Le chant du styrene is in form a simple industrial documentary, commissioned no doubt as a straightforward piece intended to explain the process of manufacturing plastic. Resnais, though, was clearly not content to produce the kind of author-less hack work that such a bills-paying project would normally call for. He dedicates the same artistry, intelligence, and depth to this as he had to his Holocaust documentary Night and Fog two years earlier. The film's close-up examination of the industrial processes behind plastics manufacturing is as abstract in its way as the best of avant-garde film. The opening sequence in particular, with its playful tableaux of brightly colored plastic objects on a black background, inevitably calls to mind the work of experimental animator Oscar Fischinger, whose visual symphonies of geometric figures and colored areas are a primary touchstone here. Resnais lends the same eye for composition and color to the many extreme close-ups that show the plastic factory's machines at work, making this a masterpiece of visual design first and foremost. Resnais is playing with light and color and movement, putting cameras right into the machines and observing gears turning at the most intimate levels. His camera's eye is as probing and intrusive here as it could be when confronted by the horrors of the Holocaust or Hiroshima. One suspects, seeing this, that the reason Resnais was able to face such catastrophes so calmly and with such intellectual rigor was the discipline that allowed him to approach each project with the same high level of commitment and thought. In this case, the film is primarily an abstract visual exercise, but it also takes a turn, in the final minutes, towards philosophical inquiry into the repercussions of industrial society. The narration suggests that the process of making plastic from the byproducts of coal and petroleum is akin to creating solid objects out of smoke — a reversal, perhaps, of the socialist slogan "all that is solid melts into air." The final shot of murky water is accompanied by the suggestion, in voiceover, that everything in the natural world could potentially be transformed into something else in the hands (and machines) of man.

Salute Your Shorts: Alain Resnais' Documentaries :: Movies ... Sean Gandert from Paste magazine, June 2009 (excerpt)

Resnais’ last short of the period was focused on plastics. It’s an odd subject for one of the fathers of modern documentaries to focus on and seems at first to be less ambitious than his last two works. In its own way it’s just as subversive, though. Asked by the Pechiney organization to “simply...show that it [polystyrene] was a noble material since its manufacturer was very complex, demanding a great deal of knowledge, because it was entirely created by man,” Resnais turned in exactly what its title, “Le chant du styrene,” would suggest: a song for polystyrene, IE: plastic. Needless to say, once again those who commissioned the work were a bit annoyed.

“Le chant du styrene” begins with an abstract set of images demonstrating the possibilities of plastic before launching into its central narrative of following a bowl back through its creation. Once again, this sounds mind-numbingly boring, but Resnais manages to capture interest this time through the use of color and the transposition made possible through editing. Focusing on such an inhuman substance, despite what its PR people want us to believe, allows Resnais to again comment ironically on the whole process as alien and mechanical whilst filming the short as lyrically as possible. Originally the narration was in fact going to be sung, and while Resnais abandoned this concept he left the narration in alexandrines (verses made up of 12 syllables) and had it read by the over-the-top voice of Pierre Dux.

The contrast between “Le chant du styrene” and Resnais’ other documentaries is that for once he clearly didn’t care about the subject. The experiment with narration is just one example—Resnais took this opportunity to put his style first because ultimately there was no substance to be found. Again, we have the tracking shots, but here they’re more punctuated with editing. In a way, the short works like a music video for Resnais, enabling him to let his style go wild with a visual emphasis on shapes and patterns, not to mention the wide assortment of colors that plastics afforded him. Most often described as a coldly intellectual filmmaker, the documentary finds Resnais at his most playful. The intellectual side is still there, as it takes a certain type of person to use iambic hexameter as any sort of joke, but it also hints at how much this subtle irony and play, whether through form or content, is almost always a central feature of his filmmaking.

Resnais’ shorts aren’t a good gateway into his filmmaking for the uninitiated, and neither is Last Year at Marienbad, for that matter. But they offer a valuable tool for figuring out his arthouse classic, not to mention being pretty damn good regardless of their context. If nothing else, they offer a lesson that in the right hands even libraries and plastics can be worth watching onscreen.

Le Chant du Styrène Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Chant du Styrene (1958, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, September 6, 2006

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Hiroshima My Love)

France (91 mi) 1959

Hiroshima, Mon Amour Time Out London

Hiroshima's mushroom cloud has probably inspired more glib statements and images than any other 20th century phenomenon. So it's particularly refreshing to find that it still has some meaning in Resnais' first feature, now almost thirty years old. Marguerite Duras' script - part nouveau roman, part Mills & Boon - centres on a Japanese man and a French woman coming together in Hiroshima, exploring each other and their past lives, both of which have been far from rosy. The woman was punished as a wartime collaborator after an affair with a German soldier; the man's whole life was shattered by the bomb. Duras and Riva revel masochistically in the woman's sad story (she had her head shaved in prison), but Resnais does his best to soft-pedal the novelettish touches, and presents a melancholy disquisition on the complex relationships between world calamities and personal histories, between the past, present and future.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A young French actress is making an anti-war film in the rebuilt Japanese city of Hiroshima, which was devastated in a nuclear bomb blast at the end of the Second World War. Here, she has an affair with a Japanese architect, even though both of them are happily married. The actress admits that she will soon have to fly back home to Paris, but she spends one last night with her lover. At a café, she recounts the story of her first tragic love with a German soldier during the war...

This is an exceptional film, marking Alain Resnais’ debut as a film director, after a decade of producing eye-opening short documentaries. Indeed, Hiroshima mon amour started out as a documentary about the reconstruction of Hiroshima, and the first fifteen minutes of the film uses documentary footage to great effect to set the scene.

As in many of his subsequent films, Resnais uses his unique approach of weaving memories and actual events to create an illusion of ghostly timelessness. Phrases are repeated again and again, the camera pans listlessly along lifeless scenery, and dialogue is played over documentary footage of the rebuilding of Hiroshima. The overall effect leaves a profound impression of regret and self-inflected torment, perfectly captured by Emmanuelle’s emotionally charged performance.

A central theme of the film is the necessity to come to terms with the horrors of the past. Both characters in the film (the actress and the architect) have painful memories of the war, and their liaison seems to represent some kind of rapprochement between East and West. "You are Hiroshima. You are Nevers" is how the film ends, suggesting that the torment of the Hiroshima disaster, like the painful love affair, will one day be forgotten.

Few films leave such a lasting impression as Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour. The stunning photography of contemporary Hiroshima, blended with bleak images of war-time France, is pure art, brought to life by a moving musical score. Whilst lacking the structure of the conventional film form, this film offers an experience that is supremely more satisfying and profoundly moving.

Hiroshima Mon Amour - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications M.B. White from Film Reference

Hiroshima mon amour was the first feature directed by Alain Resnais. Besides establishing the director's international reputation, the film was one of several released in 1959 signalling the emergence of a new generation of French filmmakers working in a modernist narrative vein. Indeed, the film is considered something of a landmark in the history of modernist cinema. The film is also seen as an exemplary instance of artistic collaboration. The scenario by Marguerite Duras, photography of Sacha Vierny, editing of Henri Colpi, and musical score by Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue contribute to its dense patterns of repetition and counterpoint.

In the film, an initially casual romantic encounter between a Japanese architect ("He"), and a French actress ("She") working in Hiroshima on a film about peace provides the basis for exploring the nature of memory, experience, and representation. The love affair is important primarily for the chain of memory it triggers, as the woman gradually discloses the story of her first love, a story she has never told before. During World War II, in Nevers, she fell in love with a German soldier. On the day the city was liberated, he was shot and killed. She was subsequently submitted to public disgrace, followed by a period of imprisonment and near-madness in her parents' home. She finally recovered enough to leave home permanently, arriving in Paris on the day the war ended after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This story is only revealed in stages, and establishes a complex of metaphoric relations between the past and present. The woman's first memory image is prompted by a direct visual comparison: the twitching hand of her sleeping Japanese lover resembles, and motivates a cut to, the twitching hand of the dying German soldier. This transition is a specific instance of a more complex network of comparisons constructed throughout the course of the film, a concise figure for the film's general pattern of development. A structure of metaphoric logic takes the place of the linear causality, clearly defined goals, and conscious motivation associated with dominant narrative.

For example, the German lover from the past and Japanese lover in the present are comparable as former mutual enemies of France. At the same time, we see the woman victimized in the past for her relations with the German. Her victimization is likened to the victims of the atom bomb seen in the film's opening sequence in a series of images—documentary and reconstructed—depicting the effects of the bomb. These images of destruction and deformity include loss of hair and burnt, distorted skin. Later, we see the woman's head shaved in the public square in Nevers to mark her illicit "collaboration" and her skin broken and bloody as she scrapes it on the walls of her parents' cellar. While the woman is thus "like" the Japanese, a victim of the war's end, she is nevertheless liberated from her private torture, allowed to go free, at the same time the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

Through the accumulation of images and narrative information, Hiroshima mon amour provides material for recognizing a complex network of comparison and contrast linking disparate events. As the film progresses, the terms of association become more abstract, a function of formal repetition, as tracking shots through the streets of Hiroshima are intercut with tracking shots through the streets of Nevers. Two places and times converge through the continuity afforded by the camera's point of view. At the same time the relationship between the man and woman in the present is infused with the potency of memory. The Japanese man asks the woman to stay in Hiroshima (not a viable option in any conventional sense, since she has a family in France and his wife is due home from a trip shortly), as she comes to emblemize the inconsolable memory of the past.

Yet her story, once told, transforms the experience and its memory into the order of history. The woman acknowledges this shift in value. She confronts herself in the mirror and addresses her dead lover, announcing her betrayal. At one point, she refers to the event as a "two-penny romance," a common, even trivial affair. This change is a function of narration; having been recounted, the experience has undergone a change in nature. This is one way in which the film explores the nature of representation in relation to experience and memory.

In the course of exploring this issue, Hiroshima mon amour clearly suggests that the mediated account, whether verbal or visual, is qualitatively different from, and supplants, personal experience. The very opening of the film promotes this view, challenging any easy equation of representation and experience. Images of the Hiroshima museum and its repository of documents are accompanied by a woman's voice saying she saw and felt everything in Hiroshima— the heat, the suffering, and so on. Voice and image seem to confirm and validate one another. But a male voice denies her assertions, insisting, "No, you saw nothing." The viewer not only wonders who is speaking, but also is forced to question the woman's certainty, and his own, about the nature of what he is watching. Seeing, in this way, may become misbelieving.

If the woman's narrative of her past displaces the event as pure experience, the initial recounting is not an easy task. Bringing the experience to the level of verbal presence involves the painful eruption of the past ("inconsolable memory") into the present. Temporal distinctions get provisionally confused, and past and present seem to merge, as she first tells the story to her Japanese lover. Her language involves shifts in tense and pronoun use, as past events are spoken of in the present tense and the woman replaces the "he" of her story (referring to the past German lover) with "you" (an apparent address to her present Japanese lover). In this way the nature and act of narrating emerge as a further concern of the film. If the process of narrative is a personal and difficult activity, merging the speaking subject with event, the product eludes the control of the teller. The woman's deeply personal experience, once told, counts as a public story to be judged in the context of narrative history.

For all of these reasons the film is seen to exemplify practices associated with modernist aesthetics. It rejects linear, causal narrative progression, constructs its characters as figures involved in the process of representation, and problematizes the nature of this process. The implications of this investigation extend beyond the characters in the fiction to include the film and its audience, as Hiroshima mon amour challenges the viewer to recognize the metaphoric relations that confer its coherence, and also to question the value and meaning of its own representations.

Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite Criterion essay by Kent Jones, June 23, 2003

The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris], pt. 1 November 24, 1960 (newsprint copy)

The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris], pt. 2

Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left ... - Senses of Cinema Robert Farmer from Senses of Cinema, September 28, 2009

The Reverse Atomic Principle of Hiroshima mon amour Dr. Greg Hainge (University of Queensland) at the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, September 12, 2007

Sexism in the French New Wave | Jonathan Rosenbaum April 10, 2009

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] includes a photo gallery

PopMatters Michael S. Smith

The Cinema Pedant Patrick

Hiroshima mon amour | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Hiroshima Mon Amour | Film at The Digital Fix Kevin Gilvear

Radioactive Lovers David Abrams from Culture Cartel

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, December 27, 2007

Hiroshima mon amour Matt Langdon from filmcritic

DVD Holocaust The Naked Kiss

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: Hiroshima mon amour Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

Night And Fog - DVD review (1 of 2) Yunda Eddie Feng from DVD Town, Criterion Collection

Night and Fog: the Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Jason Janis from DVD Talk, Criterion Collection

digitallyObsessed! DVD Review Dan Heaton, Criterion Collection

DVD Movie Guide Colin Jacobson, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Dan Mancini, Criterion Collection

Last Year at Marienbad - Last Year at Marienbad DVD Review Ivana Redwine, Criterion Collection

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Widge, Criterion Collection

MichaelDVD - Region4 DVD review [Steve Crawford]

David Reviews Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour [Blu-ray Review] David Blakeslee, Criterion Blu-Ray

Hiroshima mon amour Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Hiroshima mon amour Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

Hiroshima mon amour: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk ... Randy Miller III, Criterion Blu-Ray

Hiroshima Mon Amour | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jake Cole, Criterion Blu-Ray

Hiroshima Mon Amour | Film at The Digital Fix Hel-Harding Jones, Criterion Blu-Ray

The Films of Alain Resnais Mondo Digital

Hiroshima mon amour Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]

One Movie a Day David Webster

5 for the Day: Contrapuntal Narration Matt Zoller Seitz from Slant, January 6, 2006

Combustible Celluloid film review - Night and Fog (1955), Alain ... Jeffrey M. Anderson

Images Movie Journal Derek Hill, Criterion Collection, also reviewing NIGHT AND FOG

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Lang Thompson, Criterion Collection, also reviewing NIGHT AND FOG

Hiroshima Mon Amour Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Hiroshima ... TV Guide

New York Times [A.H. Weiler] (registration req'd)

Classic Film Club: 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour' Tom Huddleston from Time Out London, February 25, 2009

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Hiroshima Mon Amour Blu-ray - Emmanuelle Riva - DVD Beaver

Hiroshima mon amour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hiroshima mon amour - Alain Resnais | SPIKE opening two minutes of the film on YouTube (2:05)

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD A 98

France Italy Germany Austria (94 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

“For me the film represents an attempt, still crude and primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and of its mechanisms. But I stress that it is only a small step forward compared to what we should achieve... In reality we don't think chronologically; our decisions never conform to an ordered logic. We all have factors which determine our being but are not successions of logical acts following a perfect sequence.”

—Alain Resnais (Films & Filming, Feb. 1962)

To be or not to be: that is the question. This is a puzzling experimental film years ahead of its time, an exquisitely photographed existential reverie shot by cinematographer Sacha Vierny who literally explores the cavernous interior and geometric exterior of one of the more spectacularly palatial estates with his constantly roving camera, using equally oblique, rambling dialogue where actors resemble statues, all dressed in formal attire like fashion photo shoots, where they move slowly within a strictly defined space, usually to highlight the magnificent splendor of the onsite location of the New Schleißheim Palace, Oberschleißheim, Bavaria, Germany (Schleissheim Palace), the former summer residence of the rulers of Bavaria. This location was also used by Stanley Kubrick in PATHS OF GLORY (1957), again featuring the grandeur and immaculate opulence of the palace, including a highly ornate, marble-floored interior which was featured in the ballroom and courtroom scenes. (See also the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich.) Open to multiple interpretations, in my view Resnais uses this location as Salvador Dali would a dreamscape, a somber place where people are caught in a purgatory outside time, where they’re not really human, but the recollection of being human, a place where memory is constantly threatened with disappearing, the idea of being lost or forgotten. On occasion the black and white film is bleached white, where the faint outline of a shape is all that remains of a memory before it disappears from view. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum claims he has watched more repeated viewings of this film, also Tati's PLAYTIME (1967), than any other, considered among the all-time classics, but its utter detachment may leave many viewers completely cold.

There’s not much of a story, though it could be viewed as a ghost story, more likely it’s the suggestion of a memory, or a visualization of thought, thinking first one idea, then another, which is then analyzed from all angles through sight, sound, and speech. From the outset, while we listen to a repeating monologue that fades in and out of range that feels like a man stuck on the same page of his own diary, the camera moves slowly around the interior of the palace, gazing down endless corridors lined with statues, where the magnificent artwork and immense chandeliers are matched by the grand eloquence of huge marble stairways. The camera perfectly frames what we see offering a dazzling visual feast, especially a magnificent outdoor tableaux shot of people standing stationary on a gravel path, a shadow looming from each one, all set in a precisely configurated geometric pattern of perfectly sculptured trees, which strangely offer no shadows at all, outlining a neatly manicured garden. But what is a feast for the eyes is dramatically offsetting to the ears, as besides the constant drone of the single voice, it too is soon drowned out by the deafening, funereal sounds of a pipe organ (composed by the lead actress’s brother, Francis Seyrig) which plays throughout the entire film, like we’re subject to the mad ravings of a delirious funeral parlor organist (a stand-in for the director?). All the characters resemble the walking dead, dressed as they might be in their own coffins, where three central characters come into play. Giorgio Albertazzi is subject X, a man droning to himself in the opening who is in constant pursuit of subject A (Delphine Seyrig, who appears in a myriad of stunning costumes), yet she’s not sure she remembers him at all. He describes an elaborate series of meetings while on vacation in Marienbad last year where they had occasion to meet outdoors hidden underneath the overgrown brush of sumptuous gardens, stopping under each statue to happily declare their romantic intentions, where she was on the verge of leaving her husband, known only as M (Sacha Pito), who bears an eerie resemblance to John Carradine. After waiting a year, a challenge to his sincerity, he’s come to collect her, as they agreed to meet in this exact same spot one year later when she promised to run away with him, but now she’s not sure if any of this ever happened.

By the end of the film, we’re sure of even less, as after facing a state of perpetual ambivalence from A, X starts questioning his own recollections, though we see flashback images of their alleged meetings, even a photograph to attest to the truth, and a strange meeting in her bedroom where she’s dressed in a Bjork-like robe of white swan feathers, where on one occasion she resembles a panicked silent screen star about to be ravaged, where X is outraged in his recollection that nothing happened by force, but she may have been shot by her jealous husband who was lying in wait, where it is even suggested M may not be her husband. In another version of this same event she throws herself in his arms, but this image is disintegrating before our eyes, actually fading to white onscreen. But as she appears to be alive in the present, where that one photograph turns into a drawer filled with multiple copies of that same picture, one wonders if they might all be dead, if perhaps they’re all simply people’s recollections, alive only while someone remembers them. This might explain the continuous state of utter detachment from all of the characters. There are elaborate puzzles being played, including the most elegantly dressed players of pick up sticks one could ever imagine, perhaps accentuating the world of mathematical possibilities, suggesting there are an infinite number of variations of a thought, an idea, or a memory, all of which continues to keep changing over time, dwindling in significance over the years until eventually it fades from view altogether. Memories are held in near sacred reverence, but also suffer their own unique style of death. Time and memory are frequent Resnais themes, where in NIGHT AND FOG (1955), one of the most graphic depictions of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, he questions how long the Holocaust will continue to resonate in our minds, as time changes everything, frequently playing havoc with what we remember. According to Jonas Mekas in The Village Voice, “the film begins and ends in the brain of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the script,” as it’s literally an avant-garde exercise, where all could be real or imaginary, virtually dispensing with narrative altogether, where the viewer has the complete freedom to interpret what is being shown onscreen.

Download this essay David Bordwell from Film Art

When Last Year at Marienbad was first shown in 1961, many critics offered widely varying interpretations of it. When faced with most films, these critics would have been looking for implicit meanings behind the plot. But, faced with Marienbad, their interpretations were attempts simply to describe the events that take place in the film’s story. These proved difficult to agree on. Did the couple really meet last year? If not, what really happened? Is the film a character’s dream or hallucination?

L'Année Dernière à Marienbad Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Something of a key film in the development of concepts of cinematic modernism, simply because - with a script by nouveau roman iconoclast Alain Robbe-Grillet - it sets up a puzzle that is never resolved: a man meets a woman in a rambling hotel and believes he may have had an affair with her the previous year at Marienbad - or did he? Or was it somewhere else? Deliberately scrambling chronology to the point where past, present and future become meaningless, Resnais creates a vaguely unsettling mood by means of stylish composition, long, smooth tracking shots along the hotel's deserted corridors, and strangely detached performances. Obscure, oneiric, it's either some sort of masterpiece or meaningless twaddle.

Last Year at Marienbad Bryant Frazer

If nothing else, you can test your tolerance for the old-style European "art film" by watching this. Visually, it’s stunning, with geometrical checkerboard landscapes, painted shadows, and beguiling tracking shots that seem to last for minutes on end (thanks to cinematographer Sacha Vierny). Conceptually, it’s a mind-bender that represents important breakthroughs in cinematic representations of psychology. A woman and a man, named 'A' and 'M,' are vacationing when they're approached by 'X.' X claims to A that he first met her last year at a spa called Marienbad, where the two of them fell in love and she promised to run away with him if he could wait a year. A claims to remember nothing of the kind. Writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said he figures X was lying. Director Alain Resnais, on the other hand, said he worked under the assumption that X tells the truth, and A has forgotten him. The movie itself is puzzling and contradictory, a self-conscious work that seems only half-remembered even as it wills itself into being on the screen.

The Last American Hero to Law of Desire Pauline Kael

The characters, or rather figures, in this Alain Resnais movie are a tony variant of the undead of vampire movies-"We live as in coffins frozen side by side in a garden." This high-fashion puzzle movie, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is set in what is described to us as an "enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel-where corridors succeed endless corridors." The mood is set by climaxes of organ music and this distended narration; it's all solemn and expectant-like High Mass. The dialogue about whether the characters met the year before is like a parody of wealthy indolence. The settings and costumes seem to be waiting for a high romantic theme or fantasy; the people, pawns who are manipulated into shifting positions, seem to be placed for wit, or for irony. But all we get are pretty pictures. Robbe-Grillet says that the film is a pure construction, an object without reference to anything outside itself, and that the existence of the two characters begins when the film begins and ends 93 minutes later. It has a hypnotic effect on some people; others may be tempted to end it sooner. With Delphine Seyrig, Sacha Pitoëff, and Giorgio Albertazzi. The cinematography is by Sacha Vierny. The exteriors were shot at the chateaus of Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, and at other Munich locations; the interiors were shot in a Paris studio. In French. Distributed in the U.S. by Astor Pictures. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book I Lost it at the Movies.

Camera Journal [Paul Sutton]

In a baroque palace, a man tries to persuade a woman that they met last year.

Alain Resnais's film of shadowed figures standing still in an unshadowed formal garden is his least accessible and his most revived work. It had a profound impact on the British cinema; introducing a fractured narrative style in which past and present, and fact and fantasy, actuality and memory, are locked together by a dollying camera. The style became a hallmark of the films of Nic Roeg and Peter Greenaway and it was introduced into Hollywood films by John Boorman in his thriller, Point Blank (1967). Marienbad begins like a monochrome forerunner to Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', with a camera tracking through a magnificent house and looking up at the splendours of the gilded ceiling. We hear repeated snatches of detailed descriptions of the furnishings of rooms that mirror the mirrored rooms through which the camera is tracking. Organ music plays on the soundtrack even when, later, the scene is of a violin concert. We see close-ups of people watching a play and we cannot at first distinguish them from the players. The play ends. The audience chatter and are locked and unlocked and locked again in still poses as if frozen in time. Sometimes the conversation continues when the speaker is rendered immobile. Marienbad is a film of games played with cards, matches, checkers, and guns: a darkened shooting gallery strikingly photographed from a low-angle.

On Deleuze's Cinema Daniel Frampton (excerpt)

But time-image montage is found elsewhere in, 'the relation between the sequence shots or sheets of past and the short shots of passing presents; the relation of the sheets between themselves, each with the others . . . [and] the relation of the sheets to the contracted actual present which evokes them'.

But when we are placed in a certain sheet of time, that time, whether it is past, present, or even future, *becomes* present. Thus Deleuze finds that, in a film such as _Last Year in Marienbad_, the 'past', 'present', and 'future' are no longer in any semblance of succession, but are simultaneously implicated. The three characters occupy separate, and different sheets of time -- which for us become the different *presents* of the film, each sheet can then be 'contradicted, obliterated, substituted, re-created, fork[ed] and return[ed]'. Here, in peaks of *present*, the time-image shows its signifying power to push the ineffable, to make these once obviously *actual* places *de-actualized* in being related and aligned with virtual sheets of the past, for example, Resnais's tracking shots, always long and slow, defining and constructing continuums within his memory-ages. What are un-clearly 'flashbacks' in _Hiroshima mon amour_ Deleuze sees become more like recollection-images of an independent memory-world in _Last Year in Marienbad_, which leads Deleuze to surmise that Resnais 'attains a cinema, creates a cinema which has only one single character, Thought'.

What Resnais achieves is a utilisation of the concept and the feel of the past without impoverishing it by simply making it the object of flashbacks (even those in _Hiroshima mon amour_). Thus the sketches of sheets of past can just as viably be false recollections or imaginations, or a past that is forgotten but that we have been given access to -- an opening up of 'past', and therefore 'time' in the cinema, using cinematic Thought. The feelings of the characters can then also spread themselves over different sheets of past, forming an interlocking sheet of their own. As Deleuze writes, 'Resnais goes beyond characters towards feelings, and beyond feelings towards the thought of which they are the characters'. The players are thus the characters *of* thought, of cinema-thought, subservient to cinema-thought -- just as an actor is subservient to the author's words.

Last Year at Marienbad (British Release) (Region 2) Svet Atanasov from DVD Talk

In a remote but chic baroque hotel a man (Giorgo Albertazzi) attempts to convince a beautiful woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they once had an affair. The woman (who the narrator only refers to as A) is unsure, puzzled, yet visibly intrigued by the man's statement. Much of what the man utters seems to be true, much of it seems to be false. Did they ever meet? Did they have an affair?

Often referred to as the quintessential art-film Alain Resnais's L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad a.k.a Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is believed to be indirectly based on Alain Robbe-Grillet's (who also appears to be the film's screen-writer) novel La Jalousie a.k.a Jealousy (1957). Yet, the title of this film is a direct replication of Salvador Dali's most well known work.

Relying on a narrative where facts and fiction seem so closely intertwined that the main protagonist's statements often further complicate the structure of the story rather than bringing partial clarity to it Last Year at Marienbad is a most difficult film to categorize. Certainly I have often had trouble using one of the standard clichés that critics love stamping on films with provocative constructions. Is Last Year at Marienbad a romantic story gone awry, a provocative retrospective of a fictional relationship, or a film whose cinematic language was never meant to be deconstructed? I am unsure!

Filmed against a spectacular background of repetitive music tunes the quest of the main protagonist to rationalize a dream (and the presence of a woman his heart desires) Last Year at Marienbad is a stunning representation of one director's vision of cinema as the highest form of artistic expression. Revealing advanced camera-work, unusual technique of storytelling, and a groundbreaking use of narration as the only unifying segment in this fractured into little pieces film Alain Resnais has achieved perfection. Not because his film does not suffer from unneeded emphasis on philosophical issues that are far from being crucial to the story, it clearly does, but because the manner in which the unexplainable is addressed provides the viewer with the freedom to interpret what is being shown on the screen in a fashion very few directors that I know of have been able to achieve.

Many have argued that Last Year at Marienbad is a cinematic enigma that was never meant to be solved. The unshakable foundation of this most complicated story about yearning is as difficult to crack open as anything I have seen during the years. Many times I felt that the more I wanted to apply logic to what was shown to me the more I became uncapable of deducing the director's thought process. Was the man we meet at the baroque hotel a stranger, was he someone Alain Resnais knew, or was he the director himself attempting to recall a disastrous affair? Countless times I was certain it was him and Last Year at Marienbad a film that was meant for someone special, someone the French director could not have!

Yet, during the years my initial impressions of the film faded away and I fancied different theories, I looked for different explanations. As time went by I was less preoccupied with the story and its mystery and more daunted by its execution. After Last Year at Marienbad nothing was as artistically-refined yet intellectually stimulating as this black and white extravaganza from the early 1960s.

Asked to summarize his feelings about the effect time has had on cinema, its evolution, the French director would utter: I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film, you don't say, "I read an old book by Flaubert," or "I saw an old play by Moliere. How well said!! Forty five years have passed since Alain Resnais completed Last Year at Mariendad and I can hardly think of another film that changed my perceptions about cinema as much as his film did. Great cinema doesn't age, it never will!

Resnais Returns Andrew Sarris from the New York Observer

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, will be revived for the first time in decades at Film Forum for two weeks from Jan. 18 through Jan. 31 in a new 35mm Scope print. It was Resnais’ second feature-length film after his electrifying debut at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival with Hiroshima mon amour, from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, that placed him at the head of the Left Bank branch of the Nouvelle Vague along with Alexandre Astruc, Jean-Pierre Melville, Chris Marker and Agnes Varda. (The Right Bank contingent of the Nouvelle Vague consisted mostly of former critics of Cahiers du Cinema, a magazine situated in an office on the Champs Élysées. These included Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doniol Valcroze, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Pierre Kast.)

As it happens, I was doing my year in Paris in 1961 when Last Year at Marienbad opened at a Right Bank art theater on a direct line from my Left Bank hotel, the Hotel de Seine, across the Pont Neuf to my ultimate destination, the American Express lobby, where American cinéastes like me found a lifeline from home in the form of a timely money order, to make possible our seemingly aimless meandering in the streets of the world’s movie capital. Resnais was not then too high on my list of auteurs. I was too busy savoring the glories of Max Ophüls’ Lola montès; Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme; the endless revivals of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Josef von Sternberg; Claude Chabrol’s Les bonnes femmes; and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste. I was too deeply into the cinema of narrative to be overwhelmed by an avant-garde exercise in virtually dispensing with narrative altogether. It provided a conversation piece for students and cinéastes, and I saw people in cafes playing the film’s famous or infamous match game, which I finally figured out, but when I tried to get my solution published in a film magazine, by then nobody was interested, which is very much the story of my life in those years. I shall have to take another look at the film to see if it has stood the test of time.

Time and memory. These are the great themes of Resnais, and the two implacable antagonists of human existence. His Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955), is still the most emotionally powerful film on the Holocaust, and the question asked at its conclusion is how long will we remember the horrible spectacles supposedly inscribed in our consciences for all the days of our lives. We are getting answers to that question all around the world.

No such profundity and gravity is present in the comparatively playful Last Year at Marienbad. Its action, or rather, lack of action, takes place in a baroque universe where the human beings cast shadows, but the trees and shrubs do not. The nameless woman, played by Delphine Seyrig, is pursued by a man, played by Giorgio Albertazzi, who repeatedly insists that they met the year before in Marienbad. Seyrig’s live-in companion or possibly her husband, played by Sacha Pitoëff, remains impassive and unconcerned through all of Seyrig’s questions of what they were doing last year, and where. The situation would be somewhat comic, if the images were not so relentlessly stylized and insistently haut bourgeois.

I recall the Coco Chanel gowns that Seyrig wore throughout the proceedings, and I recall also becoming fixated on her gleamingly stockinged knees, which, I supposed makes Marienbad more sensuous than sensual. Several years later, while attending the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czechoslovakia as a member of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee, I was driven by the late Richard Roud to the real Marienbad, now Marienske Lazne, and it was not baroque at all, but Greek Classical. Then again, Karlovy Very itself was once the legendary Carlsbad in the glory days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The point that I am very slowly making is that time changes everything, and it often plays tricks with our memories.

To conclude: Sacha Vierny’s exquisite black-and-white cinematography would be unimaginable in color. Its very starkness depends upon a world in which there are only two chromatic possibilities and the mediating shadows linking them together. The eerie organ music accompanying the images was composed by Seyrig’s brother, Francis. Last Year at Marienbad is from another time in the evolution of the cinema. Its seductive interiors were reportedly shot mostly in Nymphenburg Castle in Bavaria, but this does not make it a fairy tale. Seyrig’s palpable mental anguish is very real and contemporary.

The Greatest Film Ever Made? | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 1, 2008

It’s too bad Last Year at Marienbad was the most fashionable art-house movie of 1961-’62, because as a result it’s been maligned and misunderstood ever since. The chic allure of Alain Resnais’ second feature—a maddening, scintillating puzzle set in glitzy surroundings—produced a backlash, and one reason its defenders and detractors tend to be equally misguided is that both respond to the controversy rather than to the film itself.

“I am now quite prepared to claim that Marienbad is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those who cannot see this,” proclaimed one French critic, even as others ridiculed what they perceived as the film’s pretentious solemnity—overlooking or missing its playful, if poker-faced, use of parody as well as its outright scariness. Dwight Macdonald, who admitted to seeing the movie three times in a week, confessed in Esquire that it made him feel like a dog in one of Pavlov’s experiments. In the Village Voice, on the other hand, Jonas Mekas claimed that “the film begins and ends in the brain of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the script” and added, “Its forced intellectualism is sick.” A few years later Noel Burch noted aptly, if unkindly, “There will always be an 8½ to serve as a refuge for those who are frightened by the prospects revealed by a Marienbad.”

Part of what might frighten a Fellini fan was Marienbad’s formalism, as well as its mysterious, obsessional mood. But who could even describe what was happening on-screen? Sight and Sound’s Penelope Houston came the closest: “The opening is entirely hypnotic. Like the beginning of a fairy tale, it draws us into an alien world, gives us no chance to get our bearings, hints at clues which may or may not turn out to have meaning. Slowly, through a mosaic of images and fragments of dialogue, flashes of single figures, static groups, conversation pieces, all framed with the heavy theatricality of the setting, the theme of the film begins to crystallize.”

Beautifully shot in black-and-white CinemaScope and set in an opulent rural hotel (or more likely several, dovetailed into a single labyrinthine set of interconnecting spaces), the movie centers on three upper-crust characters in formal or semiformal attire, identified in the script only as X, A, and M. X, the Italian narrator (Giorgio Albertazzi), tries to convince French fashion-plate A (Delphine Seyrig) that they’d met the previous year and had agreed to run away together upon meeting again this year, leaving behind A’s French husband, lover, and/or guardian, M (Sacha Pitoeff). All this could be real or imaginary, as perceived or fantasized by X or A—or us—in some indeterminate past, present, future, or conditional time.

Contributing to the confusion was Robbe-Grillet’s ponderous rhetoric, both in his high-flown, radical theories about the “new novel” (of which Marienbad was meant to be a prime illustration) and in X’s incantatory narration. In interviews they gave together, he and Resnais seemed to agree that their movie was about mental reality (without specifying whose) and persuasion. But their interpretations, including even their senses of the plot’s outcome, otherwise differed. For Resnais, X’s power over A was persuasive, a form of seduction; for Robbe-Grillet, it was basically rape. In his published screenplay, Robbe-Grillet even included a rape scene that Resnais refused to film, substituting a startling succession of overlit, subjective camera movements rushing repeatedly into A’s welcoming arms.

I saw this lush experimental movie at least three times the week it opened at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, when I was a college sophomore, and was as smitten as anyone. I still am. But I don’t think Marienbad’s effect on me would have been as powerful if I hadn’t spent most of my childhood soaking up commercial movies, just as Resnais did. Hollywood and its French counterparts are at the center of the movie’s glamour and beguilement, as well as its tricky mind games. If you watch closely you’ll catch a glimpse of a life-size blowup of Alfred Hitchcock, eavesdropping on hotel guests beside an elevator, shortly before X makes his first on-screen appearance. Quite a bit later, when M is with A in her bedroom, Resnais’ sequence of shots alludes to a scene between Rita Hayworth and George Macready in Gilda. A’s Chanel dresses (including one made of feathers) evoke Marlene Dietrich in her Josef von Sternberg movies, and no less evident is the ambience of silent French high-society crime serials like Fantomas and Les Vampires.

When X illogically appears twice within the same tracking shot—first seen playing cards with M and others, then approaching A, who’s been watching the game at a distance and from behind—the effect may be nightmarish, but it’s also not too different from a vaudeville gag in The Band Wagon, featuring Oscar Levant at both ends of a ladder. Even an allegorical game with matchsticks played repeatedly by X and M—a kind of puzzle within a puzzle—suggests the showdowns between heroes and villains in some westerns. Yet we’re never nudged to laugh at the campiness; Resnais never tampers with the film’s purity as a voluptuous experience.

Both Resnais and Robbe-Grillet were born in 1922, and shared a set of cultural references. (Though Marienbad’s settings and costumes confound any precise sense of period, the era of their youth—evoked so memorably in Resnais’ 1986 Melo—seems to dominate.) The biggest difference between the two men may have been their sexual sensibilities. Robbe-Grillet’s preoccupation with bondage and domination—which earned him the jokey epithet metteur-en-chaine (“the placer in chains”) and turned his late novels into programmatic porn thrillers—placed him closer to the aggressive X, while Resnais was clearly more in sympathy with A (and would use Seyrig again, no less memorably, in his next feature, Muriel).

The film is certainly about a battle of wills, but whether X or A comes out on top is far from certain. In Houston’s description, “fairy tale” is the crucial term, and Freudian resonances are never far away. What many have called cerebral in Marienbad is revealed to be highly emotional once one surrenders to the film’s dreamlike rhythms and sensual surfaces, its sudden, uncanny transitions, its rude shocks. And the haunting aftertaste is no less primal: “The film’s last shot is of the great chateau,” Houston noted, “and, with its few lighted windows, it no longer looks like a prison but like a place of refuge.” Despite the pretense of an adult drama of intrigue and infidelity, what lingers is a child’s frightened view of the strange goings-on.

Last Year at Marienbad: Which Year at Where? Criterion essay by Mark Polizzotti, June 23, 2009, also seen here: Criterion Collection film essay [Mark Polizzotti]

The Elegance of Sacha Vierny Criterion essay by Alain Resnais, June 24, 2009

Remembering Marienbad Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, by Peter Cowie, June 19, 2009

Back to Marienbad May 24, 2010

Do-ing the Marienbad November 19, 2009

PRESS NOTES: GO TO THE SOURCE July 3, 2009

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - The Criterion Collection

Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation • Senses of Cinema Thomas Beltzer, November 5, 2000

L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at ... - Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donaghue from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004

Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left ... - Senses of Cinema Robert Farmer from Senses of Cinema, September 28, 2009

"Last Year at Marienbad" 3-part essay by Dr. Jorn K. Bramann from Philosophical Films, Pt. 2: Philosophical Background: Descartes and the Solitary Self, concluding with Pt. 3: Interpretation of "Last Year at Marienbad"

World Cinema Review: Alain Resnais | L'Année dernière à Marienbad ... Douglas Messerli

Last Year at Marienbad | News | The Harvard Crimson Raymond A. Sokolov Jr, September 24, 1962

Parentheses in Time: L'Année Dernière à Marienbad</em ... Alex Ling from Screening the Past, August 2012

Alternative Film Guide [Dan Schneider] also seen here: LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD d: Alain Resnais

L'année Dernière à Marienbad - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... Joseph Milicia from Film Reference

Rouge 1, 2003 Marcel in Marienbad, by Mark Rappaport from Rouge, 2003

Film/Classic: Last Year at Marienbad - The City Review Carter B. Horsley

Last Year At Marienbad - Culture Court Pt 1 of 2-part essay by Lawrence Russell from Culture Court, June 15, 1999

Last Year At Marienbad - Culture Court Pt 2 of 2-part essay by Lawrence Russell from Culture Court, June 15, 1999

Self-Consuming Cinema: On "Last Year at Marienbad" | The American ... Ryan Ruby from The American Reader, October 2013

Sexism in the French New Wave | Jonathan Rosenbaum April 10, 2009

Cinepinion: Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Last Year at Marienbad (1962) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker, also seen here: Last Year at Marienbad on TCM - seanax.com

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

FILM; Another Year at 'Marienbad' Stuart Klawans from The New York Times, July 2, 2000

Last Year, Last Night | The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, May 21, 2010

A Cult Classic Is Reborn - The Daily Beast Bernard-Henri Levy from The Daily Beast, May 14, 2010

The House Next Door [Zachary Wigon] January 18, 2008

House of 1,000 Corpses | Village Voice J. Hoberman, January 8, 2008

In Search of Lost Time | Village Voice Elliot Stein on a Resnais retrospective, June 27, 2000

Alain Resnais Imagined the Whole Memory of the World | Village Voice Aaron Cutler, March 5, 2014

PopMatters [Marijeta Bozovic] April 25, 2008

Last Year at Marienbad < PopMatters George Tiller, June 18, 2009

The Video Station [A.I.]

Slant Magazine (Blu-ray Review) Eric Henderson

Confessions of a Pop Fan [Jamie S. Rich]

kamera.co.uk - film review - Last Year in Marienbad (L' Année ... Steven Yates

Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, August 25, 2006

Wings of Cinema: Last Year at Marienbad Review Erizu

Criterion Files #478: Last Year at Marienbad | Film School Rejects Landon Palmer

Pluck You, Too! [Thomas Pluck] also reviewing JEANNE DIELMAN

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

New York Sun [Steve Dollar]

Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray Review (UK Release) [Brandon A. DuHamel]

Popdose Bob Cashill

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Klueless Kael - Bright Lights Film Journal C. Jerry Kutner, June 22, 2009

The Marienbad Music Video - Bright Lights Film Journal C. Jerry Kutner, October 10, 2009, on YouTube (4:31)

Strictly Film School Acquarello, also seen here: kagablog » 1961. last year at marienbad. alain resnais August 26, 2010

The Daily Notebook [Miriam Bale] Mubi, July 30, 2010

The Films of Alain Resnais Mondo Digital

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] capsule review

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection, 2-disc

DVD Verdict [Ben Saylor] Criterion Collection, 2-disc

High-Def Digest.com [M. Enois Duarte] Blu-Ray, Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: Last Year at Marienbad Blu-Ray, Criterion Collection

DVDTown - Blu-Ray Review [Christopher Long] Criterion Collection

Last Year at Marienbad (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Jeffrey Kauffman, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Clark Douglas] Criterion Collection

Eye for Film : Last Year In Marienbad Movie Review (1961) Chris

About.com Home Video/DVD Review Ivana Redwine

Few There Be That Find It Person X

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

Siffblog [Kathy Fennessy]

Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings [Dave Sindelar]

filmguy

No Country for Ideology Zachary Wigon from The House Next Door, February 22, 2008, including an excerpt from the 1964 Susan Sontag essay from Evergereen Review: "Against Interpretation"

Chris Nolan Vs. Alain Resnais In The Battle Of The Movie Maps ... Brendon Connelly from Bleeding Cool, December 9, 2010

Alain Resnais's LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD previously at Film Forum in ... Film Forum

Last Year At Marienbad Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Last Year ... TV Guide

The Secrets of Marienbad Bernard-Henri Lévy from The Huffington Post, July 18, 2010

Last Year at Marienbad Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New York

His last year at Marienbad - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

Baltimore City Paper: Last Year At Marienbad | Movie Review Bret McCabe

Review for 'Last Year in Marienbad' Sid Smith from NBC Washington

Laramie Movie Scope: Last Year at Marienbad Patrick Ivers

'Last Year' on a dream-like set - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Last Year at Marienbad Movie Review (1961) | Roger Ebert offering inventive views, May 30, 1999

Movie Review - - The Screen: 'Last Year at Marienbad':Carnegie Hall ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

Last Year at Marienbad - Film Forum - Alain Resnais - Movies - New ... The New York Times

DVDs - Indelible '60s Memories - 'Marienbad' and 'Strangelove ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, June 18, 2009

Jim's Reviews - Muriel (Resnais / 1963) - JClarkMedia.com

MURIEL OU LE TEMPS D’UN RETOUR (Muriel or the Time of Return)

France (115 mi) 1963

Muriel Tom Milne from Time Out London

Not the easiest of Resnais films, but certainly his wittiest exploration of the vagaries of memory (teasingly set in Boulogne, a city largely lost under post-war urban developments). A spellbinding mosaic of images preserving, destroying, falsifying or testifying to the past, it sets two attitudes in opposition. A woman (Seyrig) attempts to ward off present tedium by conjuring the memory of her first love. Her stepson (Thierrée), treasuring some film of an atrocity he witnessed in Algeria in which a girl called Muriel was tortured to death, is determined to allow no escape from actuality. What both forget is that things change, that memory must feed on reality and vice versa. If her remembered love proves disappointingly remote from actuality, so his celluloid actuality turns out to need memory to bring it alive again. Impasse.

Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, March 17, 2007

Resnais at the Venice Film Festival described the movie as “recording the anger of a so-called happy civilization. A new world is shaping. My characters are scared of it and can’t deal with it. We witness a real impregnation of the world. Muriel invites us. The movie grows like a plant. The characters start to live away from us. Imagine a letter on a piece of blotting paper. The movie is this blotting paper. The audience is that mirror that allows the image to be seen. Muriel appeared in the middle of the ink stains.”

Helene to Alphonse: “Well, did we love each other or not?”

Bernard is the nephew, Marie-do is his girlfriend, Robert is his war buddy.

Italian movie Hands Over The City beat this one at Venice, along with Marker’s Le Joli Mai, Kurosawa’s High & Low, a Louis Malle, Billy Liar and Hud.

Muriel (1963) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Hélène lives in the French sea town of Boulogne with her step-son Bernard, running an antiques business from her apartment. One day, she invites a former lover, Alphonse, to visit her. He turns up, with a much younger woman who pretends to be his niece but who is in fact his mistress. As Hélène tries to re-kindle past memories with Alphonse, Bernard is still haunted by his recent experiences of military service in Algeria...

Widely regarded as one of Alain Resnais’ greatest films, Muriel is perhaps the most perfect distillation of the themes of time, place and memory which dominate most of the director’s works. Noticeably less abstract that his previous two films, which cover similar ground, (Hiroshima mon amour and L’Année dernière à Marienbad), Muriel is set in a world we can all recognise, with characters we can all identify with.   As a consequence, the film has an immediacy and relevance which possibly his earlier films (whilst still being undisputed masterpieces) possibly lacked.

Muriel is mainly concerned with two characters – a lonely middle-aged widow, Hélène (magnificently portrayed by Delphine Seyrig), and her traumatised step-son Bernard.   Both characters live in a present that is strongly influenced by the past and both expend a great deal of time and energy in trying to alter that past. Whilst Hélène’s past has become a fantasy (as she discovers when she compares notes with her ex-lover Alphonse), Bernard’s past, more recent, is a living nightmare, scarred by memories of the atrocities he committed whilst serving in Algeria (including the brutal torture of a girl named Muriel). Bernard attempts to alter his past by repeatedly watching a film of his army life he made whilst in Algeria and by gathering "evidence" to justify his current state of mind. He is no more successful than his step-mother, whose last-ditch bid to return to the past is ultimately thwarted when she turns up at a disused railway station.

As in many of Resnais’ films, the location plays a paramount role in the film. Here, the town of Boulogne-sur-mer is the perfect setting for a film where past memories intrude continually on the present consciousness.   In the haste to rebuild the town after the devastating bombings of World War II, the town planners created an uncomfortable melange past and present, picturesque old streets surrounded by ugly new development.   No town could better encapsulate the film’s meaning nor provide a more stark visual metaphor. Like the confused memories of Hélène and Bernard, Boulogne is a place where past and present sit uncomfortably side-by-side.

Muriel is an immeasurably fascinating and complex film which requires at least three or four viewings to appreciate its genius and subtlety. Resnais is magnificently served not just by his cast of actors (who give fine performances throughout) but also his technical crew. Beautifully filmed (this being Resnais’ first colour film) and cleverly scripted by Jean Cayrol (who previously worked with Resnais on his documentary short Nuit et brouillard), Muriel is unquestionably one of the most extraordinary cinematic achievements of the Twentieth Century.

Critic's Choice: New DVDs Dave Kehr from The New York Times, March 27, 2007

The French filmmaker Alain Resnais had two highly influential international hits in a row, ''Hiroshima Mon Amour'' (1959) and ''Last Year at Marienbad'' (1961), and then struck out with his 1963 feature, ''Muriel'' (''A very bewildering, annoying film,'' Bosley Crowther, The New York Times). From today's perspective ''Murial'' looks like the highest accomplishment of his early work.

The revolutionary style of those first two films, with their enigmatic, nonlinear narratives hopscotching through time and space, gave way in ''Muriel'' to a more naturalistic surface: characters with full names and complete psychologies, anchored in a particular place (the northern resort town of Boulogne-sur-Mer), and time (the politically tense early '60s, with the Algerian war raging off-screen as well as deep in the characters' psyches), and a story that seems to have a beginning, a middle and an end, exactly in that old-fashioned order.

But the smooth surface, as in Mr. Resnais's later films, proves to be only a thin veneer of rationality applied to the chaotic and contradictory jumble of memories and emotions that are, for him, the essence of human consciousness. The title itself opens the first gap: Muriel is not a presence in this film named after her, but instead a conspicuous absence.

She is, or was, an Algerian insurgent whose torture and death were witnessed by Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thi??, a nervous, remote young man who has returned from his military service to live with his stepmother, H?ne (Delphine Seyrig, sublime), in the cramped modern apartment that also serves as the showroom for her antique furniture business.

The plot is set in motion when H?ne receives a visit from the aging charmer Alphonse (Jean-Pierre K?en), her fianc?efore the Occupation, whom she hasn't seen since; Alphonse shows up with a young woman, Fran?se, whom he introduces as his niece but is clearly his mistress. As H?ne and Alphonse rekindle their relationship, Fran?se is drawn to the troubled Bernard, who is obsessed with the lost Muriel and the horrors of war she represents.

''Muriel'' is, then, a film set entirely in the present, which means, in Mr. Resnais's terms, that it is entirely concerned with the past. The dense screenplay is by the poet Jean Cayrol, a Resistance fighter and camp survivor whose work was the basis of ''Night and Fog,'' Mr. Resnais's momentous 1955 documentary about Auschwitz.

Boulogne itself is only a modern facade covering an old trauma. The city, a ''ville martyre,'' was almost leveled by Allied bombing in World War II, and its new buildings are just placeholders for the old, which continue to exist in the characters' memory. Bernard lives in the cave of his guilty conscience, H?ne in her rooms full of romantic antiques, surrounded by borrowed memories.

Alphonse ceaselessly talks about the hotel he owned in Algiers before the war drove him out, and only Fran?se, the innocent, seems to have any notion of a future for herself. (She wants to be an actress.)

Mr. Resnais evokes memories of the cinema too, casting Jean Dast?the handsome young boatman of Jean Vigo's masterpiece ''L'Atalante'' (1934) as a hermit who lives near a sea cliff. For Mr. Resnais, as for William Faulkner: ''The past is never dead. It's not even past.'' A major film returns, thanks to the good graces of Koch Lorber Films, and just in time to prove a memory background to Mr. Resnais's latest feature, ''Private Fears in Public Places,'' which opens on April 13 in New York.

Muriel: The Time of Return • Senses of Cinema Crissa-Jean Chappell, October 20, 2005

The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris] June 3, 1965, original newsprint

Filmjourney Doug Cummings, March 22, 2007

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

DVD Verdict [Jesse Ataide]

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty

Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: Adventures In Aspect Ratios with Alain Resnais' "Muriel" (1963) Glenn Kenny from Mubi, March 31, 2009

DVD Outsider Slarek

DVD Savant Review: Muriel, ou Le temps d'un retour Glenn Erickson

A Second Look At a French Classic - March 20, 2007 - The New York Sun Gary Giddins from The New York Sun

Muriel Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Polar Bear's Film Journal

dOc DVD Review: Muriel (1963) Jon Danzinger

Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella

MyReviewer - MoC Review [David Beckett]

The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]

Movie Review - Maniac - Screen: Dust of Nazism in Present-Day ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

The Power of Memories: 'Muriel' and 'Cemetery of Splendor' J. Hoberman from The New York Times, August 8, 2016

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

DVDBeaver.com [Christopher Long]

LA GUERRE EST FINIE (The War Is Over)

France (121 mi) 1966

La Guerre est finie Time Out London

Stylistically, La Guerre est finie is probably Resnais' most orthodox film, covering three days in the life of a Spanish exile in Paris involved in a plot to overthrow Franco. Working from a script by Jorge Semprun, Resnais explores his hero's doubts and insecurities through his relationships with two very different women: a mistress (Thulin) who represents potential stability, and a vivacious young student (Bujold) who offers him a new life. Perhaps it is the film's directness and obviously dated aspects (middle-age male angst faced with effervescent feminine adoration having become such a staple 'art movie' subject) that have made it seem a minor item in an often challenging director's career.

La Guerre est finie (1966) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Diego Mora is a long-serving member of the Spanish communist party, now acting as a clandestine go-between for activists living in exile in France and covert militants operating in Spain. At a border control on his return to France, he is nearly arrested, but he saved by his forged documents. Arriving in Paris, he meets Nadine, the daughter of a sympathiser, and then rejoins his former lover Marianne, who wants to settle down with him. Diego is frustrated in the way events are turning out in his country and voices opposition to plans for a national strike and terrorist activity. Inwardly, he seems to feel the war has been lost. Then he realises that he has caused the arrest of his colleagues in Spain and must return to his country to prevent further arrests...

The stylish ambiguity and other-worldliness, achieved through some stunning photography, in Resnais’ early films would appear inappropriate for a political thriller. Yet, in La Guerre est finie, Resnais’ most political film, the director applies his unique cinematographic vision to create one of the most startling political films of the Twentieth Century. The film is a radical departure from the standard fictional political drama and evokes a disturbing sense of realism, in spite of, or because of, the unusual nature of Resnais’ cinematography.

The script for the film was written by Jorge Semprún, a life-long member of the Spanish communist party, who was himself active in opposing the Franco regime which divided his country for over twenty years (following the Spanish civil war). There is no doubt that it Semprún’s intimate familiarity with the subject which gives the film is sense of authenticity. There is never any doubt in the mind of the spectator that this film is relating real-life events.

The film stars one of France’s best-loved personalities, the actor-singer Yves Montand. With his world-weary features and wistful persona, the actor is perfect for the part of Diego, and he gives one of his best screen performances.

As in all of Resnais’ films, particularly his early works, the film lacks a strong narrative thrust, something which will irritate viewers expecting to watch a conventional political thriller. Resnais makes little attempt to embellish the raw drama he is depicting in his film. Instead, he creates a unique portrait of a real-life political drama, or, more specifically, of one man who is caught up in such a drama. The film is much closer to Resnais’ evocative dream-like L’Année dernière à Marienbad than to the conventional political drama, having the artistry of the former but lacking the direction and momentum of the latter. In spite of that, La Guerre est finie is one of Resnais’ most provocative works, a captivating and haunting piece of cinema.

The War Is Over (1966, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, July 22, 2008

Resnais’s fourth feature, coming out the same year as Rivette’s The Nun. Watched this once before and have practically no memory of it, so this time I read the screenplay then watched again. By doing so, and by watching it alongside the other Resnais films I’ve seen this year, I’m sure I’ll remember and appreciate it more than I did before, but it also makes me wonder about the nature of Resnais’s art, because he has filmed Spanish writer Jorge Semprún’s screenplay word for word and shot for shot. Semprún describes flashback cuts and actors’ facial expressions, and there it is on the screen. The film isn’t as poetic and dreamy as Resnais’ other films of this period, but it definitely fits in with them, has a similar feel, plays like the work of the same artist. The book felt more tense, and the movie felt more melancholy, like a somewhat lighter Army of Shadows.

Story takes place across just a couple of days (not counting flashes-backs-and-forward) in Paris suburbs, two weeks before a planned protest and strike in Spain. Diego aka Carlos aka Domingo aka The Passenger (Yves Montand, halfway between his starring roles in Let’s Make Love and Tout va bien) returns from Spain to warn his underground anti-Franco activist organization (led by chief Jean Dasté) about the recent police crackdown in Madrid which led to the arrest of some operatives including one good friend. Diego wants to warn his other friend Juan away from returning to Spain, but Juan is already on his way to Barcelona. Diego was himself detained at the border, his false passport inspected by Customs official Michel Piccoli, which leads to complications later. Diego lives (on the rare occasions when he is back in France) with lover Ingrid Thulin (a Bergman regular who is wonderful in this movie) but he also half-heartedly messes around with a young Geneviève Bujold, daughter of the man whose passport he borrowed and herself a revolutionary, but with a younger group that practices impatient and violent means of returning Spain to her mythical (never existent) past Marxist glory. Diego and his group (incl. pro smuggler Jean Bouise, who later played Warok in Out 1) resent that Spain has become a symbol of the radical left but without any definite progress, that they’ve lost more and more comrades promoting these strikes and protests which are never as widespread or effective as intended. They continue their struggle, workmanlike but without much hope… a tone more fitting (in France) for the mid 70′s than the mid 60′s. Interesting that this came out right when Resnais’s contemporaries were about to turn to politics, then he followed it up with the much less political Je t’aime, je t’aime.

Writer Semprún later adapted screenplays for Costa-Gavras and wrote Stavisky for Resnais. He must be the only non-English speaker to receive TWO oscar nominations for writing. Shot by his regular guy Sacha Vierny with music by Giovanni Fusco, an Antonioni regular who died of a heart attack in May ’68.

The movie is called “stylistically orthodox” and “one of his most accessible films.” It’s not reportage-style realism, just straight drama, which never feels heightened by technique even though there are some signature smooth tracking shots and the love scene with Bujold is downright expressionist. I found the look and the camerawork to be more Muriel than Je t’aime, but of course the editing is completely unlike either of those.

Time Out: “Perhaps it is the film’s directness and obviously dated aspects (middle-age male angst faced with effervescent feminine adoration having become such a staple ‘art movie’ subject) that have made it seem a minor item in an often challenging director’s career.”

Harvard: “A series of premonitions told in flash-forward near the film’s conclusion make powerful statements about memory and aspiration, commitment and faith.”

A. Agarwal: “The film ends in inevitability. Thulin, the mistress whose devotion sometimes makes Montand uncomfortable yet at peace with himself, learns Montand is going to be sucked into a trap, and she starts out to let him know and save him from crossing into Spain. The film ends here, yet there’s a shadow of death over it. Either Thulin will not be able to save Montand, or she will be able to save him and Montand will quit this life and spend the remaining part of it trying to make peace with himself and his country.”

DearCinema Ankur Agarwal

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

dOc DVD Review: La Guerre Est Finie (1966) Jeff Ulmer

La Guerre est finie Acquarello from Strictly Film School

La Guerre est Finie Chris Dashiell from CineScene

LOIN DU VIETNAM (Far from Vietnam)

France (115 mi) 1967 co-directors: William Klein, Joris Ivens, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais

Far from Vietnam Tom Milne from Time Out London

Necessarily dated but still a fascinatingdocument, this collective protest against the Vietnam war begins with a graceful ballet of bomb-loading and take-off preparations aboard an American carrier, contrasted with shots of civilians in Hanoi hurrying to patheticallyinadequate improvised shelters. Suspected Vietcong sympathisers are beaten up; peace marchers in America are confronted by counter-demonstrators shouting 'Bomb Hanoi!'; General Westmoreland appears reassuringly on TV to state that 'Civilian casualties do not resultfrom our firepower; they result from mechanical errors'. All good, stirring stuff, edited into a remarkably coherent whole by Chris Marker. But the film goes on to probe the ambiguity behind the protest. Inherent throughout (but explicitly explored in fictional interludes directed by Renais and Godard) is the dilemma that, although this was 'the first war everyone can watch' and all of us were involved, the very remoteness (in every sense) of the conflict carried inevitable obfuscations. There is a certain amount of navel-gazing here, but at least the film acknowledges the sense of impotent frustration shared by many in trying to decide what to do.

User reviews from imdb Author: Bob Taylor (bob998@sympatico.ca) from Canada

In this year of Bush vs. Kerry, when the campaign turns on issues of patriotism and war service, it is fascinating to go back to the Vietnam war to see the conflicts that rent American society of that time. The genesis of the film is interesting: the French public had been asked to give up a day's wages to help the Vietnamese people; finding this insufficient, Chris Marker had the idea of making a sketch film to protest the war. The problem is that the project was a collective effort: there are no credits to indicate who filmed what.

Resnais's sketch has a funny story of a stock shot of war atrocity that has been used so often that technicians call it "Gustave," and viewers look for it. Otherwise this is a silly, talky timewaster. The Godard sketch is even less effective--he uses footage from La Chinoise, the film he was working on at the time. Godard must have spent all of one afternoon on this. The purely documentary scenes come off best. The footage from the 50's must have been shot by Joris Ivens; it's wonderfully atmospheric. I wonder if he also shot the film on the American aircraft carrier as the sailors load the bombs onto the bombers that will pulverize Hanoi.

The best scenes of all were shot in New York; they show protesters from both sides of the ideological divide yelling their lungs out across police barricades. Every group and sub-group that could be imagined is represented here, and sometimes it's really funny to watch. Pity about the lack of credits.

Movie Review - Loin du Vietnam - Film: 'Far From Vietnam':Six ... Renata Adler from The New York Times

THE narration of "Far From Vietnam" is of such serene banality and ugliness that it might have been written by a misprogramed spokesman for the military-industrial complex. But if the narration were cut—and I seriously think it is impossible for anyone concerned with facts, or words or the war to sit through it—the result might be interesting, a kind of rambling partisan newsreel collage. The film represents a collaboration by six directors (Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Joris Ivens and Agnes Varda) who wanted to do a work of antiwar (or more accurately, anti-U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese war) propaganda, without spending much thought or effort on it.

There is a fine short interview with Ho Chi Minh, in which he says Vietnam can wait as long as it takes, and an interview with Fidel Castro, in which he says that a guerilla war that has the support of the people is the only force stronger than the new technology. There is a very moving conversation between a Vietnamese lady living in Paris and Mrs. Norman Morrison, widow of the American Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war; it becomes clear why this strange gesture of most extreme nonviolence meant a great deal in many lives.

But there are so many easy ironies: A television commercial for Band-Aids juxtaposed with war scenes, with more television commercials in case anyone missed the point; a broken film from the defective camera of Michele Ray in Vietnam, with a suggestion that a broken film is what makes the best sort of statement about the war, "the cry that [Miss Ray] would have wanted to utter"; a sneaking endorsement of violence in the name of peace, or race, or poverty, or powerlessness — or, in fact, anything that is not U.S. foreign policy.

Shots of demonstrations in New York, in Paris, even clips of "La Chinoise." It is all too facile and slipshod and stereotyped—designed to enrage one cliché cast of mind against the Administration and another against the enragés. The movie has, in any case, been overtaken by events. The last thing we need now is political stereo-types in a rage. A broken film doesn't really make the best statement about anything. Or utter a cry.

The movie, which opened yesterday for a one-week run at the New Yorker Theater, was shown at last year's New York Film Festival.

JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME (I Love You, I Love You)

France (91 mi) 1968

Je t'aime, Je t'aime Tom Milne from Time Out London

One of Resnais' most underrated explorations of the tone of time and memory. Claude Ridder (Rich), a failed suicide, is visited by two men who invite his cooperation in an experiment (already tried with a mouse) to project him into the past to see if he can recapture a moment of his life (since he has no wish to live, and therefore has no future, he is the perfect subject). Indifferently he agrees, is whisked through a suburban no man's land to a laboratory, and - accompanied by the mouse as an experienced travelling companion - sets off on his weird, fairytale trip through time, only to become hopelessly lost. As the scientists frantically try to trace their missing guinea-pig, fragments of his past surface momentarily, recurringly. Beautiful, tranquil, but increasingly menacing clues to a love affair with a girl he may or may not have killed. The fragments remain teasingly uncertain, just out of Ridder's grasp, but his feelings lead him inexorably back to the key moment of suicide; and in the present, Ridder's body - the body of a man projected into his death - is found in the laboratory grounds. On one level a witty sci-fi adventure, on another a poetic apprehension of man's helpless entrapment by time, the film is perfectly summed up by the extraordinary last shot of the mouse, still caged by the glass dome in which it has travelled, standing with its paws spread out against the glass in mute appeal.

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

Of mice and time-travelers. Borges prefaces "The Secret Miracle" with a quote from the Koran: "And God had him die for a hundred years and then revived him and said: ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘A day or a part of a day,’ he answered." The human lab rat (Claude Rich) is an office drone who botches his suicide, emerging from the clinic medicated and sluggish but still a smartass: "Time passing? Try putting it in a filter." A listless patient is easy prey for nutty professors, and, in deadpan chunks of sci-fi argot that gradually reveal a limpid lampoon of Fantastic Voyage, the top-secret experiment is outlined. The time machine is an oversized pincushion-pumpkin doohickey locked underground, and a camera obscura, too -- Rich steps inside, collapses into a beanbag chair, and recalls, projects, splinters, and suffers the narrative. Originally meant to last a minute, the head trip dilates into a stuttering tour of an unglued consciousness, where the breakdown of the senses is attuned to the breakdown of a relationship. Alain Resnais and le temps, contemplating the human condition in countless fragmented shots that return helplessly to the image of the self in a glass cage, gasping for air. The girlfriend (Olga Georges-Picot) who wonders if cats were made in God’s image, swimming and drowning at the beach, a bed cozily occupied and then vacant: flashes of the mind when words won’t do, "time inside and time outside," dreams. A near-abstract quilt of echoing lines and harmonies, a wounded portrait of "Prometheus without his vultures," altogether dazzling, virtually unseen yet immensely influential. Groundhog Day and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind flow from it, Cronenberg envisions the giant headspace in a garage in Scanners, Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy renders tribute to the greeting-card gag. Cinematography by Jean Boffety. With Anouk Ferjac, Alain McMoy, Vania Vilers, Ray Verhaeghe, Van Doude, and Claire Duhamel.

Movie Outlaw [Mike Watt]

Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 6, 2008

Je t'aime, je t'aime Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

MysticalMovieGuide.com Carl J. Schroeder

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime (1967) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

STAVISKY, IL GRANDE TRUFFATORE (Stavisky, the Grand Swindler)

aka: Stavisky…

France (117 mi) 1974

Stavisky… Time Out London

Resnais' film about political destiny in France in the '30s is always thoroughly chilling, never merely elegant. The chill stems not simply from the cold precision of the images, but from the unshakeable implications of what he allows us to witness. On the one hand, and occupying centre stage, is Stavisky (Belmondo), swindler and entrepreneur; on the other, in the wings, is Trotsky, arriving in France, working, and finally exiled. Around them, sotto voce political machinations in which gradually and unmistakeably a grand design becomes visible - the breaking of the Left and the drift to Fascism. Stavisky's fall reveals him to be a pawn in a swindle of vaster dimensions than even he dreamed of, the fall itself a screen behind which other forces operate. Resnais conveys the atmosphere of moral degeneracy with a tact which makes it all the more insidious, through a film that is superbly paced.

Stavisky (1974) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

1933. Police inspector Bonny is conducting a private investigation into the influential impresario and financier Serge Alexandre. He threatens to expose his victim’s unsavoury past as the petty crook and swindler Stavisky. However, this is only one of Alexandre’s problems. The financier’s business empire is beginning to crumble through lack of funds and his former friends are deserting him. To escape ruin, Alexandre is forced to resort to ever more spectacular schemes, including issuing millions in false credit vouchers and laundering funds destined to support the approaching Spanish civil war...

Although not intended as a conventional historic drama, this film sheds some light on the enigmatic yet comparatively unknown character of Stavisky. A Russian émigré, Stavisky built an empire through a combination of subterfuge, fraud and false identity, becoming one of the most influential and powerful men in France in the period between the wars. His life was the perfect sham which took in businessmen, financiers and politicians of all persuasions, yet he was also the catalyst for some major changes in society in France in the 1930s, with implications extending much wider, as the film reveals.

Any attempt to reconstruct the life of this mysterious character would be a major undertaking, rendered almost impossible by the amount of distortion and pure fabrication which such a mythical figure has aroused. To their credit, the director Alain Resnais and his writer Jorge Semprún restrict the scope of the film to the last few months of Stavisky’s life, to his spectacular fall from grace, for which reliable sources of information do exist. Stavisky’s past activities are hinted at in the film in a rather vague, sometimes conflicting way, lending the character of Serge Alexandre the halo of an enigmatic second persona. As a result, Alexandre appears a complex, mysterious figure, defying his inevitable failure with heroic determination, yet displaying a tragic quiet acceptance of his inescapable doom.

Any film by Alain Resnais deserves close examination and serious critical appraisal. Although Stavisky is far from being his most original works, it is among his most technically accomplished. The elegant, fairytale-like photography recreates the artificial splendour of a flawed elite society oblivious to its impending demise. The typically Resnais device of the flash-forward constantly reminds us of the tragic trajectory the film is following. At the same time this emphasises the blind complacency of Stavisky and his entourage, and it heightens the tragic irony of Stavisky’s actions – everything he does can only increase the stakes and hasten his failure.

Better known for playing tough action heroes, Jean-Paul Belmondo would at first sight appear an unusual choice to play the role of Stavisky. However, his disarming charm and skill at playing the solitary outsider makes him the perfect choice for the part. Although his performance is unusually subdued and lacking in humour, it has a genuine pathos and tender quality about it. The pairing of Belmondo with Charles Boyer, another great French actor, who plays an impecunious Spanish nobleman, is exquisite, giving the film some moments of poignant reflection. Another acting legend, Gérard Depardieu, also makes a brief appearance in the film.

Other strong production values include an excellent script from Jorge Semprún and some enigmatic music from Stephen Sondheim (his first film score). Needless to say, the period detail (costumes, sets, etc.) is impeccable.

The film’s only fault is a sense of icy detachment which prevents the audience from really sympathising with Stavisky and his wife. This probably arises from the film’s broken narrative structure. For those who are not familiar with Resnais’ work, this could significantly weaken the film’s impact. Also, the sub-plot concerning Trotsky’s exile in France is a distraction from the main story about Stavisky. The suggestion that the Stavisky affair had a major impact on Trosky’s fate is an interesting observation, yet it could perhaps have been handled with much greater subtlety and effect without adding the distraction of an additional story strand.

Although Stavisky is widely regarded as one of Resnais’ best films, it had an unfortunate debut. When it was first shown at Cannes in 1974, the film was violently pilloried by the critics. Resnais was accused of prostituting himself to service Belmondo’s popular cinema. Although Jean-Paul Belmondo was the film’s producer, Resnais was oblivious of the fact when making the film and he denied being diverted by Belmondo. The critics won a partial victory, however, and the film was far less successful in France than it deserved, attracting just over a million spectators. Away from this debacle, the film proved to be a staggering success when it was released abroad, particularly in the United States and Italy.

DVD Savant Review: Stavisky Glenn Erickson

Retrospective: Stavisky... (1974) - rec.arts.movies.reviews ... Dragan Antulov

Stavisky… (1974, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, July 31, 2008

Stavisky (1974) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Strictly Film School Acquarello

dOc DVD Review: Stavisky (1974) Jon Danziger

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

User reviews from imdb Author: Aw-komon from Los Angeles, CA

User reviews from imdb Author: Bob Taylor (bob998@sympatico.ca) from Canada

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

Movie Review - Stavisky - Film Festival: 'Stavisky,' Moody Rogue ... Nora Sayre from The New York Times

PROVIDENCE

France Switzerland (110 mi) 1977

Providence Time Out London

At the centre of David Mercer's tendentious, scatological and wordy screenplay is the figure of a dying writer (Gielgud), a protean spider weaving his final malevolent fiction from the tangled fabric of patriarchal feelings and retributive fantasies about his family's independent lives. In the gentler and more sensitive hands of Resnais, eschewing as always absolutes and glib moral equations, this hackneyed central device leads, not into a predictable reality vs fantasy narrative, but into a haunted, haunting journey through the corridors of the unconscious mind. A painted backdrop against which real waves break; Saint Laurent-clothed characters posed theatrically in rooms so totally given over to deco chic that their three-dimensional reality seems cardboard; scrambled identities (one character taking on another's dialogue or face): through such devices Resnais creates the steps and sets of a kind of Freudian ballet that is also pure cinema. Past and future dissolved into a totally compelling present tense that can, paradoxically, only be approached through memory and imagination.

Providence | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Alain Resnais' first feature in English (1977, 110 min.) focuses on the imagination, dreams, and memories of an aging British novelist (John Gielgud) over one night as he mentally composes and recomposes his last book, using members of his immediate family—Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, and Elaine Stritch—as his models. Although David Mercer's witty, aphoristic script can be British to a fault, the film's rich mental landscape is a good deal more universal, with everything from H.P. Lovecraft's werewolves to a painted seaside backdrop providing the essential textures. Like all of Resnais' best work, this is shot through with purposeful and lyrical enigmas, but the family profile that emerges is warm and penetrating, recalling the haunted Tyrones in Long Day's Journey Into Night rather than the pieces of an abstract puzzle. The superb performances and Miklos Rozsa's sumptuous Hollywood-style score give the film's conceit a moving monumentality and depth, and Resnais' insights into the fiction-making process are mesmerizing and beautiful. This is showing in a 16-millimeter print, but later in the evening the Film Center will present 35-millimeter prints of Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and Muriel (1963). Along with Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Melo (1986), these three powerful works are Resnais' greatest features.

Providence (1977) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

In a dark old house, an elderly man rambles deliriously as he swigs glass after glass of white wine to ease the pain of his bowel cancer. In a dark forest, a squad of armed soldiers are in pursuit of an old man who is turning into a werewolf. One of the soldiers catches up with the old man and shoots him dead. The soldier – Kevin Woodford – is then tried for murder. Despite the forceful efforts of the barrister Claude Langham, the soldier is acquitted. Langham’s wife, Sonia, is drawn to Woodford and begins an affair with him, whilst her husband renews his acquaintance with an old flame, Helen, who resembles his mother and who is slowly dying. As the drama unfolds, it becomes clear that these are characters living in the feverish warped imagination of a dying alcoholic writer…

A recurring feature of Alain Resnais’ cinema is the way in which memory distorts reality and creates an alternative view of the world which, in the mind of the central protagonist, becomes every bit as real as the ‘true’ reality seen by an external observer. We see this in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), L’Année dernière a Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963), and even his powerful documentary of the Holocaust, Nuit et brouillard (1955). In Providence , Resnais takes this idea and carries it to its most extreme point, fashioning a bizarrely surreal and complex melange of melodrama, thriller and fantasy in which nothing can be taken at face value and where everything we see admits multiple interpretations. Here, the avant-garde director tackles subjects which have preoccupied philosophers for centuries: the existence or otherwise of an objective reality, and the relationship between an intelligent creation (i.e. man) and his – presumably – more intelligent Creator. And that’s just for starters…

Significantly, Providence is Resnais’ first English language film, and was scripted by a British writer David Mercer. The contrast between the highly artistic directorial technique of Resnais and the clumsily pretentious writing of Mercer could not be greater, but sometimes it is the biggest contrasts which make a great piece of art, and this seems to be the case with Providence . In the hands of a contemporary British director, Mercer’s tortuous dialogue would sound simply ridiculous, but with Resnais’ unique ability to distort meaning and apply layer upon layer of intrigue and mystery, the script serves the film well (although the excess of cheap toilet vulgarity is to be regretted).

To use a wine metaphor (appropriate, given how much of the stuff gets quaffed in the course of the film), it is Resnais’ direction that gives the film its impeccable provenance and fine vintage, but its body and character derives from its excellent cast. Most notably, there are some truly remarkable contributions from Dirk Bogarde and John Gielgud, two of Britain’s finest actors. Gielgud brings authority, humanity and a touch of sardonic humour to the film, reminding us of the great Shakespearean roles that earned him his reputation as a master of the dramatic art. Bogarde is likewise on fine form, giving a solid performance that reeks of bourgeois cynicism, sexual ambivalence and emotional frigidity. His is a character who is most definitely to be loathed and feared, not liked, in fact the total opposite of the Dr Sparrow character of the Doctor films that brought the actor fame in the 1950s.

However well it stands up in other areas, it is Alain Resnais’ direction above all else that makes Providence such a great film, and quite unlike anything that has gone before. It is clearly not a film for those who like their cinematic entertainment neatly packaged with simple narrative coherence and a straightforward linear plot. (It was Jean-Luc Godard who said that a film should have a start, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order. It not at all clear that Providence even satisfies this criterion.) For those who can appreciate complex, elliptically structured works with no clear interpretation, Providence provides a cinematic experience that is both rewarding and haunting.

The film’s two main themes – an exploration of the creative process and the fear of encroaching death – are interwoven with numerous secondary ideas – memories of the Holocaust, the Oedipus complex, the merits of euthanasia, the morality of the bourgeoisie, the importance of family, to name just a few. This is not so much a film as an exercise in fractal geometry – the closer one examines the film, the more detail one sees. It is also one of those films which appears to change its meaning on repeated viewings, fitting in with the typically Resnais notion that memory and the passing of time not only colour our experiences but can totally alter reality as we perceive it.

Providence has the artistic weight and psychological impact of Resnais’ previous great films, but it has something else, something much darker and much more sinister. The key to this, and indeed much of the film, lies in its final act, where the dying writer played by Gielgud emerges from his embittered night world and shares a pleasant sunny afternoon with his grown-up children. In the blink of an eye we are catapulted from a nightmare world of the imagination, which ends up being consumed by anarchy and human vice, into an apparently stable world of middle class calm and moral security – the exact reverse of the Paradise to Hell journey that we see in many of the films of Claude Chabrol (a New Wave contemporary of Resnais).

Yet there is something about this Resnais-esque view of Paradise that is even more unsettling than the Hell we have just experienced. Which of these two interpretations paints the more accurate picture of the world in which we live? Can we take seriously the saccharine-doused scene of marital fidelity, brotherly friendship and sweet father-son love? Isn’t it more believable that the two sons would be rivals, that the elder son would have a mistress and would bitterly resent his father’s slow and demeaning death? Surely the world shown to us in the first part of the film, the world apparently belonging in the mind of a solitary writer, is the world that is nearer to our own, a far more accurate portrayal of human nature? The second world, of calm, family harmony and stability, is surely an illusion, a distorted memory of a past that never was, could never have been. Which reality do we believe?

For such a complex and unconvential film, Providence was a surprising success for Alain Resnais. It was something of a sensation at the 1978 César’s ceremony, where it earned a total of seven awards. Notably, it won the César for the best film and best director, but is also picked up the awards for best script, best music, best sound, best set design and best editing – a remarkable tally for an English language film.

With its stunning visual composition and skilfully ambiguous narrative, Providence is unquestionably one of Alain Resnais’ most significant works, and one of those rare films which you can watch again and again with enjoyment and without a moment of boredom. Not only does it provide one of cinema’s most powerful and unsettling portrayals of the way in which the artist uses his mind to create a fantasy world, but it is also a film which repeatedly challenges our own notion of reality. The inference is that everything we see and experience is an illusion, the product of the distorting lens of our own warped minds – or – more disturbingly – the product of someone else’s mind…

Providence (1977, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, November 18, 2008

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Providence (1977; dir. Alain Resnais) Brett Gerry Films

Providence (1977) Howard Schumann from CineScene

New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby

MON ONCLE D’AMÉRIQUE

France (125 mi) 1980

Mon Oncle d'Amérique Tony Rayns from Time Out London

After the disappointments of Stavisky and Providence, Resnais here retrieves his position as a great film innovator. My American Uncle takes three middle class characters (two of them from well-defined working class backgrounds) and leads them through a labyrinth of 'stress' situations. The tone hovers between soap opera and docudrama, consistently pleasurable if hardly gripping. Then it introduces its fourth major character, Henri Laborit, a bona fide behavioural scientist, who discusses his theories of biological and emotional triggers. Shortsighted critics seem to imagine that the fictional material merely illustrates what Laborit says, although Resnais inserts some jokey shots of 'human' mice to demolish any such notions. His triumph is to create a new kind of fiction: a drama that not only leaves room to think, but opens up fissures that thoughts flood into, some prompted by Laborit, others by personal reflections, yet others by dreams. Inevitably, it ends in a riddle, and one which proves that surrealism lives.

Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

An eminent biologist, Henri Laborit, illustrates how behavioural theories about survival and social development pertaining to animals can be applied to human beings. He does this by making reference to the lives of three people: Jean, an ambitious writer and politician, Janine, an aspiring actress, and René, a country boy who ends up managing a textile factory. All three characters are placed in threatening, life-changing situations which, the professor claims, vindicates his theories…

What could easily have been a conventional drama about the pressures of modern living is magnificently transformed into a multi-layered film which is both compelling and entertaining, despite its unusual narrative structure. Although less distinctive than some of Resnais’ earlier films, it illustrates the director’s capacity to make great cinema that is provocative and innovative without alienating its potential audience. Not only does Resnais have something new to say, he actually manages to persuade us to listen to him, a knack that many other avant-garde directors lack.

The films switches between a documentary-style discussion of animal behaviour and a highly charged emotional drama with almost the same unsettling effect as someone switching between two television channels. The two styles differ so markedly that they genuinely complement each other and, remarkably, the drama appears that much more poignant and comic. The two strands to the narrative cross in a number of ways, including some surreal intermediate scenes where human beings actually become the laboratory white mice they are being compared with.

The human drama part of the film is itself split into three strands, which ultimately converge. This fragmentation of the narrative ought to be a distraction but it works to great effect, enabling Resnais to explore one of his favourite themes, the interaction of time, place and memory.

Mon Oncle D'Amerique - TCM.com Rob Nixon from Turner Classic Movies

Despite the title (literally, "my uncle in America"), none of Mon oncle d'Amerique (1980) takes place in the U.S., and except for one fleeting character, no one's uncle plays an important role in the story. The phrase refers instead to a common French joke that everyone claims to have a relative who emigrated to America and became rich and would one day return home to solve all their problems.

The problems are many – financial, emotional, medical, marital – in this study from director Alain Resnais of the lives of three different people (a business executive, an ambitious politician, and his mistress, an aspiring actress), but the tone of Mon oncle d'Amerique is lightened by wry humor and irony. In addition, the daily challenges and difficult choices the characters experience are offset by frequent "lectures" by real-life behavioral scientist and physician Dr. Henri Laborit and illustrated by footage of animals (including lab rats) engaged in their most basic modes of survival, as if to draw parallels between his theories and the human events unfolding on the screen. These parallels are not always clear or directly connected from scene to scene, but that's not necessarily the point of director Alain Resnais's film, which was scripted with much wit by Jean Gruault, a frequent collaborator with other French New Wave filmmakers such as Truffaut and Godard.

At the time of the film's inception, Dr. Laborit had been studying the brain for decades (a body of work Resnais initially planned to examine in a short documentary about the scientist), and it is his theory that we are ruled by primal functions in our brain and can only begin to understand our own behavior and motivations when we understand the basic chemistry and physiology we share with even the lowliest life forms. These interruptions of science make for a fractured but never muddled narrative that deftly juggles documentary and fiction, comedy and drama, while calling into question just how much free will each of us has as an organism who, in Laborit's words, "is a memory that acts."

Mon oncle d'Amerique was not Resnais's first experiment with the codes and language of cinema. With Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), he introduced a distinctive nonlinear approach to narrative that amplified his examinations of memory, perception, consciousness, and reality. Those two movies signaled a landmark in world cinema, but Resnais's subsequent releases had less impact over the next couple of decades. After the disappointing critical and commercial reception of Stavisky (1974) and Providence (1977), Mon oncle d'Amerique was a brilliant return to form, his most successful film in years and winner of numerous awards including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Film from the New York Film Critics Circle. Gruault's screenplay also received an Academy Award nomination. Time magazine's Richard Corliss called it "by far the best film of the year," and Andrew Sarris, in the Village Voice said it was "the funniest movie about the horrors of working since Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times [1936]."

Cinematographer Sacha Vierny shot Mon oncle d'Amerique and eight other films for Resnais between 1955 and 1984. He also directed the photography for Luis Bunuel's Belle de jour (1967) and later for several of Peter Greenaway's pictures (A Zed and Two Noughts [1985], Drowning by Numbers [1988]).

In the cast, viewers will likely be most familiar with arguably France's most internationally famous male movie star, Gérard Depardieu, a 15-time nominee (and twice winner) for the César Award (his country's equivalent of the Oscar®) and an Academy Award nominee for Cyrano de Bergerac (1990). Nicole Garcia, who plays aspiring actress Janine, still appears frequently in films but has also become a screenwriter and director. She's made six films so far, including Place Vendome (1998) starring Catherine Deneuve.

Mon Oncle D'Amérique | DVD Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Mark Boydell

Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, September 3, 2009

My American Uncle | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Pulpmovies Paul Pritchard

Vitalizing Addiction to Hate and to Fight Victor from Acting Out Politics

Alain Resnais - Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)-Cinema of the World Cinema of the World

The Films of Alain Resnais Mondo Digital

Interview with Alain Resnais on MON ONCLE D'AMÉRIQUE (1980 ... Jonathan Rosenbaum interview, December 10, 1980

A Lesson in Modesty: Speaking with Alain Resnais | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum interview, December 23, 1980

In Search of the American Uncle | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum interview, May 2, 1981

Mon Oncle D'Amerique Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Mon Oncle D ... TV Guide

Movie Review - Mon oncle d'Amerique - MON ONCLE D'AMÉRIQUE ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

LA VIE EST UN ROMAN (Life Is a Bed of Roses)

France (110 mi) 1983

Life Is a Bed of Roses Dave Kehr from the Chicago Reader

Alain Resnais, continuing in the playful/didactic mode of Mon oncle d'Amerique. A pedagogical conference, held in a whimsical castle in the French countryside, is intercut with flashes back to the revels of the original proprietor, a 19th-century visionary who uses his society friends in perception-altering experiments. Hard to recognize here the director of Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad: the material manages at once to be both precious and dry, the staging is unprofitably claustrophobic, and the structure less ingenious than arbitrary. With Geraldine Chaplin, Fanny Ardant, Vittorio Gassman, and Sabine Azema (1983, 111 min.).

La Vie est un Roman Time Out London

Resnais speculates on the utopian dream that life is infinitely perfectable, that human chaos, despair and horror can be spirited or educated out of existence. There are two stories, to correspond to each of these possibilities. In the first, set in 1914, Count Forbek (Raimondi), aristocrat, aesthete and visionary, erects a Temple of Happiness in which a select few will be drugged into a state of original innocence. In the second, set in the present, a gaggle of theorists (Gassman, Chaplin) have taken over Forbek's castle to conduct a seminar on the 'education of the imaginative'. Both enterprises come to grief, though in the process Resnais does realise his own utopia, a realm of vast imaginative possibility. A third story, a simple but charming fairytale on similar themes, is offered as 'objective' proof.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The three narratives are inexpressibly lyrical, and woven at once. A lavish maquette is unveiled circa 1914, next it is surrounded by flames and gunfire and inhabited by knights and maidens, maybe; one of the fairytale characters reaches outside and emerges from under tree roots into 1982, where the pre-WWI "Temple of Happiness" has become the Holberg Institute. The Exterminating Angel figures in the antique strand, where the guests of the Count (Ruggero Raimondi) are offered a new beginning after the war's devastation by trading their top hats for golden robes and druggy forgertfulness; Fanny Ardant pretends to drink the Kool-Aid and keeps a pragmatic eye on the "rebirth" ritual. The palace in the present houses a convention for professors seeking to educate children through imagination, an unseen chorus softly announces the entrance of the Italian guru (Vittorio Gassman), who disses the building's faux-Gaudí curves ("It isn't architecture, it's pastry"). Conferences nowadays are all about getting laid, it is said, yet the mere mention of romance is enough to change Sabine Azéma from Little Miss Prim to Jacques Demy warbler -- to illustrate the point, Geraldine Chaplin ("I am not a moralist. I am an anthropologist") decides to match her up with Pierre Arditi, another free-floating Pierrot. Alain Resnais watches it all with the wry detachment of Mon Oncle d'Amérique, once more baffling those who prefer their "alienation effects" free of emotional intensity. "Amour" and "bonheur" are echoed and sung about, psychobabble remains the same throughout the ages: The Count's search for a vanished harmony is as much of a faddish dead-end as the notions of happiness posited by the educators ("Double bullshit," Chaplin's daughter snaps). To Resnais it is dissonance that fuels creation, the revelatory extremes of fire and ice as opposed to the soothing evenness of the "tepid sweetness" Ardant rebels against. Utopia is folly, though human fluidity here is the stuff of both Wagnerian myth and Gallic farce. With Robert Manuel, Martine Kelly, André Dussollier, and Samson Fainsilber.

La Vie est un roman (1983) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside. He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome. In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children. Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world. Both are doomed to failure…

The relationship between times past and present is a recurrent theme in Alain Resnais’ cinema. Whereas his earlier films adopt an abstract, often bewildering, approach, his later films, and La Vie est un roman is a prime example of this, opt for the more direct path. In this particular film, past and present are represented by two completely separate story strands. Yet they overlap and have so much in common (the location, the quest for Utopia) that we feel we are watching the same story from two different perspectives. There is also a third story, less developed, involving some medieval dungeons and dragons type characters – utterly perplexing but strangely adding to the structure of the film.

Such a film could only be possible if it were created by a great director who had the services of an equally talented photography director. This film has both, and that is quite evident from the first five minutes of the film. Nuttyen’s camera work is not just impressive – it is sumptuous and captivating. It is often remarked that one of the distinguishing features of Resnais’ films is that the audience is spellbound from start to finish – once their attention has been grabbed, it isn’t released until the “Fin” caption comes up. Whilst La Vie est un roman is not in the league of some of Resnais’ earlier works, such as L’Année dernière à Marienbad , it is nonetheless a stunningly filmed piece of cinema.

The presence of such a strong cast is almost incidental, but the film is certainly enhanced by such actors as Ruggero Raimondi as the dangerously obsessed Count Forbek and Fanny Ardant as his cheating wife. The final scenes between these two actors are so charged that you feel anything could happen – and it does.

The icing on the cake has to be the eerie music which accompanies the film from start to finish. It is really very unsettling to have such music, which would seem to have been composed for a gory thriller, being played against scenes which appear mildly comic. Resnais seems to be reminding us that beneath the surface there lurks something quite unpleasant. The message is reinforced by the constant jaunts from 1982 back to the 1910s, in a strange and disturbing mélange of light comedy with gothic horror. The errors of the past manage to create a resonance in the present – a typically Resnais-esque notion of time and memory.

Four Alain Resnais Films on DVD — Cineaste Magazine David Sterrit from Cineaste, Fall 2008 (excerpt)

Looking for a minor piece of information about Alain Resnais recently, I typed his name into Google and was startled by the result—plenty of hits, but amazingly few substantial pieces of writing. He’s directed four dozen features and shorts, and he’s in postproduction on Les Herbes folles as I write. But from the way most critics still fixate on a handful of early films, you’d think he ran out of ideas after Mon oncle d’Amérique in 1980, or even La Guerre est finie in 1966.

Of course Resnais made his most brilliant contributions early on, including the 1955 documentary Night and Fog and his first four features: Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), and La Guerre est finie. And of course he made some disappointing movies, even some poor ones, in subsequent decades. But the current neglect of his oeuvre as a whole is scandalous. I hope the situation will start to change now that Kimstim and Kino International have released four neglected Resnais films from the Eighties—one flat-out masterpiece, one near masterpiece, one beguiling misfire, and to round out the series, the most God-awful movie he ever made.

The fascinating misfire among these films is La Vie est un roman, aka Life Is a Bed of Roses, released in 1983. It would take as long to summarize the plot(s) as it takes to watch the movie, but Gruault’s screenplay is basically a three-tiered affair. Some scenes center on a millionaire’s plan to build a Temple of Happiness, which is kept from completion by the outbreak of World War I; other scenes depict a group of present-day intellectuals who gather there for an eccentric educational conference; and the remaining scenes, plopped into the movie here and there, show a warrior contending with a king in a fairy-tale setting. All are luminously filmed by Bruno Nuytten.

The movie breaks into song from time to time—singers Ruggero Raimondi and Cathy Berberian are in the cast—and Resnais says in a DVD extra that he wanted to make a film that gives equal weight to speech and music but isn’t a musical or an opera; this reflects his offbeat notion that music is a great communicator of information as well as feelings. Resnais also explains the movie’s themes, which include the question of whether one can create happiness for oneself without bringing unhappiness to others, and whether the world actually contains any grownups, since people are usually guided more by childish impulse than mature deliberation. For more on all this, read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which is quoted at length in the DVD’s marvelously strange making-of documentary. Or have a double feature of Resnais’s movie and your favorite Kenneth Anger film; you’ll be surprised how much they have in common.

Love Unto Death | Life Is a Bed of Roses | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard

La Vie est un roman (1983, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, January 15, 2010

La Vie Est Un Roman | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

dOc DVD Review: Life is a Bed of Roses (La vie est un roman) (1983) Joel Cunningham

DVD Savant Review: Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film Glenn Erickson, 4 Films on DVD

Life is a Bed of Roses Review (1983) Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image

MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker]

FILM - '83 'BED OF ROSES,' FROM ALAIN RESNAIS - NYTimes.com Janet Maslin from The New York Times

L’AMOUR À MORT (Love Unto Death)

France (92 mi) 1984

L'Amour à Mort Time Out London

Azéma and Arditi are star-crossed lovers. When Arditi is 'resurrected' from a mysterious, fatal collapse, their love is intensified but confounded by his medical and spiritual status: is he a dead man? Has he been resurrected from an afterlife he doesn't believe in? Did he dream it? Cleric friends (Ardant and Dussollier) are enlisted to solve the conundrum, only to find their own beliefs compromised. It's shot in short, oddly stylised scenes, punctuated by mysterious footage of drifting plankton (make of that what you will). Both a discourse on love, life and belief, and a tale of extreme romantic love, it looks to be Resnais' most straightforward film to date. But there's a suspect, often humorous archness about it, to suggest he may be playing one of his biggest intellectual tricks yet.

L’Amour à mort (1984) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

During an archaeological survey, Simon meets and falls in love with Elisabeth. They share a few months of passionate love before Simon has a seizure and is proclaimed dead by his doctor. Miraculously, Simon is revived but he is changed by his near-death experience. Elizabeth is terrified of losing Simon for good, but Simon refuses to have any medical examinations. She seeks the support of her friends, Judith and Jérôme, both pastors, but they are unable to share her anguish and cannot understand the nature of her love for Simon…

Whilst not in the league of Resnais’ earlier cinematic achievements, L’Amour à mort offers a solemn and unusual meditation on the relationship between love and death. The intense performances from the four lead actors (Resnais’ dream team Arditi, Ardant, Dussollier and Azéma from the director’s preceding film La vie est un roman) is perhaps the film’s strongest selling point.

The film is far less satisfying than most of Resnais’ other films, although it does offer a distinctly unsettling experience. Unfortunately the somewhat abstract narrative, laden with trite references to scripture and the paranormal, punctuated by inexplicable musical interludes with images of black space, makes this a heavy and somewhat inaccessible film.

Love Unto Death Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader

Alain Resnais' film maudit in more ways than one, this haunting and rarely seen 1984 feature, his third and final collaboration with screenwriter Jean Gruault, is one of his boldest experiments in musical form. Resnais commissioned avant-garde composer Hans Werner Henze, who previously wrote the score to Muriel, to write a chamber piece consisting of 52 discontinuous short sections; until the film's final shot, when this music is finally combined with the action, it is performed exclusively between scenes, over a black background that is most often traversed by drifting motes resembling snowflakes. The plot, featuring the same actors as Resnais' subsequent Melo, is a love story about an archaeologist (Pierre Arditi) who is pronounced dead by a doctor in the film's first scene only to come back to life a few moments later; though he and his devoted wife (Sabine Azema) are atheists, they are subsequently preoccupied with the meaning and reality of death and how this will or won't separate them, which they discuss with a couple who are their friends and neighbors (Andre Dussollier and Fanny Ardant), both Lutheran ministers. A creepy film that was being written while Francois Truffaut (whom Gruault worked with often, on films including Jules and Jim and The Green Room) was dying, this recalls certain efforts of Ingmar Bergman in both its austerity and its morbidity; the music functions basically as a zone of meditation as well as a kind of metaphor for death and nonbeing—though many of these passages are quite brief and sometimes the motes are simply distracting. Powerfully acted, and certainly a personal and sincere project on Resnais' part, this is the kind of failure that to my mind towers over a good many inconsequential successes—indigestible on some level but impossible to shake off. This is its first Chicago screening, and likely to be its only one for the foreseeable future; it's also unavailable on video outside France. 93 min.

Four Alain Resnais Films on DVD — Cineaste Magazine David Sterrit from Cineaste, Fall 2008 (excerpt)

The masterpiece is Love Unto Death, aka L’Amour à mort, first released in 1984. Resnais has always insisted that writing and directing are two different jobs, and that he belongs to the latter profession, not so much creating material as interpreting stories developed for him by scenarists. His modesty is exaggerated, to say the least—he is a creator par excellence—but a gift for selecting first-rate screenwriters (e.g., Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet) has always been one of his best assets. L’Amour à Mortwas scripted by Jean Gruault, whose credits range from founding classics of the French New Wave—Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (1960), François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers ((1963)—to more recent works by Chantal Akerman and the Dardenne brothers. He and Resnais strike a perfect balance here, crafting one of the most intelligent films ever made on the subjects of love and death. Equally outstanding is the cast, headed by Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, and Fanny Ardant, who show up in most of these Kimstim/Kino films.

The main characters are a couple named Simon and Elisabeth, and their story begins at a joltingly high pitch: Simon is sprawled on the bedroom floor, apparently dying an agonizing death as Elisabeth looks on in horror. A doctor arrives, examines Simon, and pronounces him dead. Yet moments later the victim strolls down the stairs, as healthy as can be. There’s no explanation for what’s happened, but Simon and Elisabeth are happy to count their blessings and move on. At first, that is. As time passes, Simon is increasingly haunted by his experience, and becomes convinced that the miracle was a mistake—that death was his destiny that night, and that he’s now obliged to shuffle off his mortal coil without further delay.

Alarmed by this idea, Elisabeth pours out her feelings to their closest friends, Jérôme and Judith, a married couple who are Protestant clerics. The rest of the film carries two complementary storylines—one centering on Simon’s death drive, the other on Elisabeth’s superhuman loyalty—to their (il)logical conclusions, using the reactions of Jérôme and Judith as a rich philosophical counterpoint. More emotional meaning comes from musical passages by Hans Werner Henze, heard during breaks that separate the scenes, Brechtian style.

The film is clearly influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s work—especially the 1962 drama Winter Light, which also explores the lure of death and the ineffectuality of faith—but the spirit that I feel hovering over L’Amour à mort is that of Samuel Beckett, both verbally and visually. The movie is a chamber piece, like many of Beckett’s plays, teasing out its ideas with consummate focus and economy; and the ideas echo Beckett’s existentialist fixation on life’s absurdity in the face of mortality and oblivion. More specifically, it’s well known that Beckett had a major epiphany when he heard psychologist C.G. Jung lecture about the condition of feeling “never properly born,” as if the process of birth (literally or metaphorically) had somehow been interrupted—a syndrome Beckett instantly recognized in himself. Simon’s predicament is the flip side of this condition; he feels he hasn’t properly died, and must now carry the process to completion.

The brooding tones of Sacha Vierny’s cinematography bear out these Beckett parallels, as in a stunning moment when Simon and Elisabeth exchange their thoughts while hovering in darkness, their faces gazing past each other toward the obscurity around them; in a DVD extra, Arditi tells how strenuous it was to make this long, static shot, which required him and Azéma to pose for ages in a weirdly strained position. Their work pays enormous dividends, here and throughout the film. L’Amour à mort belongs to a rarefied genre that contains only a few superb specimens, Bresson’s The Devil Probably, Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, and Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry among them. It is a suicide procedural, and one of the very best.

Love Unto Death | Life Is a Bed of Roses | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard

DVD Savant Review: Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film Glenn Erickson, 4 Films on DVD

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Love Unto Death : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Chris Neilson from DVD Talk

MÉLO

France (112 mi) 1986

Mélo Time Out London

Resnais has preserved the theatrical conventions of Henry Bernstein's 1929 period piece, complete with interval curtains, stage lighting and enclosed sets. Why he chose this particular vehicle becomes clear as female anguish and the corrosive power of memory move centre stage. Settled hubby and violinist Pierre (Arditi) invites his more celebrated recitalist friend Marcel (Dussollier) to dinner. Pierre's wife Romaine (Azéma) falls for Marcel as he delivers a melancholy speech about faithless mistresses and the depths of his soul, and during their ensuing affair determines to prove him wrong. The grandly swooning passion, the petals of a rose pressed in a diary - the matter may be dated but the delivery is compelling. There is real pain and cruelty here among the Brahms duets.

Melo Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader

Alain Resnais' incomparable masterpiece is bound to baffle spectators who insist on regarding him as an intellectual rather than an emotional director, simply because he shares the conviction of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson that form is the surest route to feelings. In his 11th feature, he adapts a 1929 boulevard melodrama by a forgotten playwright named Henry Bernstein, and holds so close to this "dated" and seemingly unremarkable play that theatrical space and decor—including the absence of a fourth wall—are rigorously respected. Using the same talented quartet that appeared in his previous two films—Andre Dussollier (Le beau mariage) as a gifted concert violinist; Pierre Arditi as his suburban friend, Sabine Azema as the latter's wife, who falls in love with the violinist; and Fanny Ardant (in a smaller role) as her cousin—Resnais invests the original meaning of "melodrama" (drama with music) with exceptional beauty and power, cutting and moving his camera with impeccable dramatic logic to give their performances maximum voltage. His concentrated treatment of the 20s, while never less than modern, retrieves that era in all its mysterious density.

Mélo (1986) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Two old friends, Marcel and Pierre, get together one evening for a meal and to reminisce on old times. Marcel is now a world famous virtuoso violinist whilst Pierre has settled down for a quiet life with his wife, Romaine. From this first meeting, Romaine and Marcel fall madly in love and have an affair. Their problem is what to do about Pierre...

Mélo makes a striking contrast with Alain Resnais’ previous films in which, by and large, narrative is either lacking altogether or else achieved in an astonishingly original way, often through some phenomenal photography and unconventional editing.

Mélo adopts the conventional linear narrative form, almost to its absolute limit, to the point of actually resembling a theatrical performance. Resnais has taken a third rate 1920s melodrama and managed to create a remarkable piece of cinema - and he accomplishes this feat by apparently just shooting the film as a play.

Of course, Resnais being Resnais, things are not this simple. Because the narrative is so simple and unchallenging, it is not too difficult to see the genius that lies behind Resnais’ film. The question that you are forced to ask yourself is: why is such an ordinary story so enthralling. The genius lies not in the plot or the dialogue but in its visual representation. The photography is captivating, a feature that underpins much of Resnais’ cinema, and in this film it is the quality of the photography - under Resnais’ masterful direction – that is the film’s main strength.

Resnais is well served by his three lead actors (four if the include the impeccable Fanny Ardant), although you feel that the director could have fared almost as well with a cast of less talented actors. Indeed, it would have been an interesting experiment to see how well the film would have stood up with some less capable actors – although that was probably one risk Resnais was not prepared to take.

This is an astonishingly simple film, shot in a very small number of scenes, with little in the way of plot development. (The film itself was shot in just 20 days, with few re-takes.) However, remarkably, the film does not drag and does not feel over-long (even though it is almost two hours in length). Once again, Resnais has caused us to question our assumptions about what constitutes great cinema.

Four Alain Resnais Films on DVD — Cineaste Magazine David Sterrit from Cineaste, Fall 2008 (excerpt)

Almost as affecting is Mélo, a 1986 release that also reflects Resnais’s career-long interest in blurring the boundaries between cinema and theater, life and performance. The screenplay is taken directly from an eponymous stage play by Henry Bernstein, first produced in 1929. Arditi and Dusollier play classical musicians who are close friends despite their different lifestyles—one is a single-minded careerist, the other is a mellow suburbanite who loves married life as much as music. Little does the suburbanite know that his old pal and his pretty young wife are sliding into a passionate affair that will have grim consequences. Filmed entirely on theatrical sets, Mélo is lushly artificial in everything but its emotions, and the artifice actually enhances the feelings it conveys. One example is a scene where a grieving man recites a letter from a dead woman he loved; the camera moves tactfully away from him and the image fades to darkness while his voice continues to read, as if the film itself were journeying to the underworld at this moment.

Mélo is a more complicated title than it seems—derived from the Greek for “music,” it’s a French colloquialism for “weepy” and “schmaltzy,” and it’s also a term for “melodrama,” which originally meant “drama with music.” (M. Philippe-Gérard composed the movie score, but Brahms and J.S. Bach—another Bergman connection – are also heard.) Each of these meanings is germane to the subtly multifaceted film. In a DVD interview, Marin Karmitz says this was the twentieth movie he produced but the first he “produced right.” He’s a little off about the number—it was more like his thirteenth—but he’s entirely correct about the excellence of the result.

Alain Resnais and MÉLO | Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader, April 15, 1988

DVD Savant Review: Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film Glenn Erickson, 4 Films on DVD

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Mélo : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Chris Neilson from DVD Talk

M?lo Ross Johnson from digitallyOBSESSED

The IFC Blog [Michael Atkinson]

Review for Mélo (1986) Manavendra K. Thakur

Melo Trailer, Reviews and Schedule for Melo | TVGuide.com TV Guide

Movie Review - Melo - Film Festival; Alain Resnais's 'Melo,' From ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 5, 1987

Film: 'Melo,' a Drama From Resnais - New York Times Vincent Canby from The New York Times, January 31, 1988

I WANT TO GO HOME

France (100 mi) 1989

I Want to Go Home Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

To make a movie inspired by comic strip art has been a long term ambition for Renais; sadly, fulfilment of the dream seems too have come to late. Scripted by Jules Feiffer, this is a predictable tale of a boorishly xenophobic American cartoonist (in Paris for an exhibition of his work) and his estranged daughter (an unforgiving Franco-phile academic), who belatedly make friends thanks to unwitting intermediary Depardieu, a Sorbonne genius with a characteristically French love of pulp art. If it's meant to be funny, moving or an essay on the gulf between American and European mores, it fails; worse, however, the central characters are all so downright egocentric and unpleasant that they virtually drive you screaming from the cinema.

Four Alain Resnais Films on DVD — Cineaste Magazine David Sterrit from Cineaste, Fall 2008 (excerpt)

Now for the God-awful film in this set: I Want to Go Home, released in 1989 but never distributed in the U.S. even though the dialog is in English about half the time. Written by the legendary American cartoonist Jules Feiffer, it’s about a legendary American cartoonist (played by Adolph Green, the show-tune lyricist) visiting his estranged daughter in Paris, where she’s in the thrall of an intellectual played by Gérard Depardieu, the only cast member who manages to survive the picture’s overheated acting, stupid jokes, irritating cartoon interludes, and mean-spirited anti-French clichés.

I’d pass over this clunker in silence except that producer Karmitz aggressively defends it a DVD interview—not as an interesting failure, but as a major and enduring work of art. Sacre bleu! I suppose he deserves credit for sticking to his guns and predicting that history will vindicate the picture. Then again, George W. Bush thinks history will vindicate his presidency. It’s a toss-up which prophecy will come true first, but my money’s on the proverbial freeze-over in hell.

I Want to Go Home has a splenetic oddball quality at odds with the evanescent tendencies of Alain Resnais's later films. In an antic mood, the veteran filmmaker decides that a cartoonist's mind is no less tumultuous than a poet's, and gets acerbic comic-strip doyen Jules Feiffer and the weirdest cast available to weave a satirical view of Franco-American culture clash. Cleveland cartoonist Joey Wellman (famed MGM musical writer Adolph Green) travels reluctantly for an exhibition of his work in Paris, where his estranged, resentful daughter Elsie (Laura Benson) is trying to purge her American roots by studying Flaubert under the renowned scholar Christian Gauthier (Gerard Depardieu, struggling valiantly with his phonetic English). The cranky protagonist's creations, Hep Cat and Sally Cat, pop up in animated thought balloons to comment on the action; meanwhile, the live-action cartoons include Linda Lavin as Green's shrugging companion, Micheline Presle as Depardieu's randy mom, and John Ashton as a Gallic vision of Yankee crudeness, all brought together for a costume party that's meant as a Looney Tunes version of The Rules of the Game. Resnais's compositions are deliberately cramped to suggest panels in a comic strip, but where the same approach created a sustained feeling of strangeness in Robert Altman's underrated Popeye (also written by Feiffer), here it mostly feels tiresomely garrulous. A truly strange brew perpetually inviting disaster yet somehow always eluding the abyss, I Want to Go Home is an inexplicable item but an affable one, the work of a buoyantly tranquil artist amusing himself with a doodle.

I Want to Go Home (1989) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

An ageing American cartoonists, Joey Wellman, makes a visit to Paris to attend an exhibition of his work. He plans to meet up with his daughter, Elsie, who is studying at the Sorbonne, but she has little respect for her father and fails to keep the rendez-vous. By chance, Wellman meets and is befriended by a celebrated academic, Christian Gauthier, an admirer of his work and, ironically, the man whom Welmman’s daughter has desperately been trying to meet for the past few months. Although he is feeling increasingly uneasy with French culture, Wellman reluctantly agrees to accept an invitation to spend the weekend with Gauthier and his entourage…

Although pretty mundane when compared with Resnais’ earlier cinematographic achievements, this is nonetheless an entertaining satire, having the quality of characterisation and narrative structure we have come to expect of this master of French cinema.

Resnais’s motivation for making this film is his own life-long interest in strip cartoons, a hobby which has far more legitimacy amongst adults in France than probably anywhere else in the world. The main characters in the film are initially presented as almost comic-book creations who evolve into fully blooded human beings as the origins for their extreme behaviour is gradually unveiled. The best instance of this is the central character, Wellman, who appears at first to be the archetypal loud-mouthed American whose first day in Paris is his worst nightmare come true.

Wellman, brilliantly played by Adolph Green (the celebrated writer of the Hollywood classic Singin’ in the Rain), appears to undergo a major transformation in the course of his trip to France. However, what changes most is our interpretation of Wellman, how we ourselves see the peculiar little man. This is, if anything, a film about the folly of prejudice and preconceived notions of what is worthy of merit. Bugs Bunny and Madame Bovary are both, in their own way, works of genius.

The film is a little marred by some unnecessary comic ideas which appear rather silly and weaken the drama considerably – for instance the lame jealous boyfriend sequence culminating in an awful bedroom brawl. Also, some would lampoon Resnais’ curious decision to use a cartoon figure (the increasingly irritating Sallycat) to act as the conscience of the film’s main protagonists.

However, the film’s greatest source of irritation is its constant flipping between French and English, which results in the film appearing poorly dubbed, whether viewed in its French or English version.

However, for all its noticeable weaknesses, the film does have some extremely funny moments which, for some spectators at least, should just about make up for these negative aspects.

Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski]

Cultural Apocalypse by Means of Comedy – Cartoon Patriotism, Cartoon Humanism: Alain Resnais’ “I Want to Go Home” (1989) Victor from Acting Out Politics

I Want To Go Home | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

DVD Savant Review: Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film Glenn Erickson, 4 Films on DVD

Smoking And No Smoking | Jonathan Rosenbaum

CONTRE L’OUBLI (Lest We Forget)

Resnais segment: Pour Esteban Gonzalez Gonzalez, Cuba

France (110 mi) 1991 Omnibus project with 30 directors

Contre l'Oubli Time Out London

Produced for the 30th anniversary of Amnesty International, this comprises 30 'film letters' concerning 30 cases of human rights abuse in 30 countries worldwide (though Greece and the UK are the only Europeans in the dock). Even here - especially here - auteur principles apply, and the imaginative minimalism of Depardon (Colombia) or the lucidity of Resnais (Cuba) prove more effective as argument, never mind as cinema, than say the glib Hubert (Greece) or self-conscious Leconte (Russia) segments. Least substantial are the straight-to-camera monologues, though a distraught Anouk Grinberg is moving on the persecution of Aung San Suu Kyi. Biggest impact is made by Martine Franck's piece, in which Henri Cartier-Bresson bears witness to the murdered children of Mauretania.

SMOKING/NO SMOKING

France (277 mi) Smoking (135 mi) and No Smoking (142 mi) 1993

Smoking/No Smoking Time Out London

Resnais's double-barrelled screen version of Alan Ayckbourn's expansive stage cycle Intimate Exchanges immediately hits the stumbling block of language. Here are the emotionally stunted denizens of the English middle class; yet what we hear is the vernacular French of Azéma and Arditi grandstanding in five roles apiece. In short, if you're expecting a BBC-style adaptation, almost everything about these films will seem fake - which is precisely what makes them so captivating. Once you get used to dialogue in translation and the cartoonish view of Little England, what's on offer is a disarming, impish delight in storytelling. Each piece proceeds to travesty dysfunctional marriages and illusory dreams of escape before fanning out in a series of alternative destinies for its variably articulate protagonists. When the films are seen singly, the overriding concept is clear enough. Viewed in tandem, their criss-crossing content provides all sorts of contextual pay-offs. There are miscalculations in some of the broader comedy, and No Smoking is probably the more entertaining of the two, but this is Ayckbourn gone Cubist, and that you have to see.

The consequences of a housewife smoking or not smoking a single cigarette branch out into a dozen separate destinies and parallel universes, each with its own conclusion, in these two French features by Alain Resnais. Adapted and translated from six of the eight comic plays comprising British playwright Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges, they can be seen alone or together, and in either order. The project, a tour de force for two actors playing multiple roles (Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azema), succeeded at the box office when released in France in 1993, and as a unit the two films swept the Cesars (French Oscars) for best picture, director, actor, and set design. They've taken quite a while to surface here; some Americans are put off by the curiosity of “typical” Yorkshire residents speaking French and by the extreme stylization and deliberate artificiality of the sets. Not everyone will like this interactive experiment, but like every other Resnais film, Smoking (135 min.) and No Smoking (142 min.) are definitely worth checking out.

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

First and foremost, Alain Resnais' Smoking/No Smoking is a rigorous exercise in structure, a two-part, "interactive" story that begins with a woman's decision to smoke or not to smoke, then splits off into a total of 12 possible conclusions, six per film. Like a high-minded Choose Your Own Adventure book, the viewer circles back to certain points in the story when a single altered line or action changes the characters' fate. These "what if" film scenarios have become all too commonplace in the last few years, but they usually involve a single person's life forking in two directions (Sliding Doors, Me Myself I, The Family Man, et al), rather than multiple characters and myriad branches. Made in 1993, Smoking/No Smoking predates this trend by several years, but even if it didn't, Resnais' gamesmanship would still be incomparably sophisticated and challenging. But no matter his skills with a protractor, there are limits to film as architecture, especially over the long haul, when the gorgeous cascading structure—mapped out on paper, it looks like a weeping willow—loses its novelty and precious little nourishment remains. With each part running a little under two and a half hours (277 minutes in all), Smoking and No Smoking can be watched in either order, but due to the diminishing returns, it's common to prefer the first one you see to the second. Based on six of the eight playlets in British farceur Alan Ayckbourn's "Intimate Exchanges," which was originally intended to take place over separate nights, the production is staged on simple, deliberately theatrical backdrops. There are a total of nine characters—five women, four men—and all are played by either Pierre Arditi or Sabine Azéma, who are both remarkably adept at changing personalities as fluidly as their wigs. The major players are alcoholic headmaster Toby Teasdale and his unhappy wife Celia, but their shaky marriage introduces a number of possible romantic partners, including their housekeeper, their caretaker, his best friend, and his best friend's wife. The first scene in both films begins with Celia reaching for a pack of cigarettes, but like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, her decision to light up impacts the remaining course of her life. Smoking/No Smoking splinters into numerous fragments over time, following paths that are perfectly sectioned in fives—five days, five weeks, and five years. Perhaps best known for his French New Wave classics Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad, Resnais again proves his mastery of mind-bending puzzle structures, but form comes at the content's expense. Though disarmingly light and playful in tone, with moments of genuine humor and feeling, Smoking/No Smoking has a perfunctory attitude toward its characters that slowly creeps to the fore. Within its lovely blueprint, Resnais' project seems curiously uninhabited.

Resnais as Regionalist | Jonathan Rosenbaum originally published in Film Comment, May 4, 2000

Trying to Have Some Fun (QUILLS, SMOKING, & NO SMOKING) Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 15, 2000

Smoking / No Smoking (1993) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

SMOKING/NO SMOKING Eric Monder from the Film Journal International

The Flickering Wall Jorge Mourinha

User reviews from imbd Author: Joanna Lefort from London, England

User reviews from imbd Author: philipdavies from United Kingdom

User reviews from imbd Author: writers_reign

Smoking/No Smoking (1993) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

SAME OLD SONG (On Connaît La Chanson)

France (120 mi) 1997

Same Old Song Tony Rayns from Time Out London

Dedicated to Dennis Potter, this borrows his idea of having characters burst into lip synched song to express the feelings they cannot voice in ordinary conversation. This doesn't work quite the same way with French chansons as it did with Anglo-American standards (although there is a delicious moment when Jane Birkin, doing a cameo, 'sings' a snatch of one of her own songs), but the real problem is that Resnais remains fixated on the toothless bourgeois satire which has dominated his work since Mélo. The characters here - an unhappy salesman who writes radio plays on the side, a tourist guide, a ruthless property developer - are simply too banal for their romantic longings and mis-understandings to matter to most viewers. And that fatally weakens Resnais' point that clichéd passions simmer beneath the blandest exteriors.

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell from the Berlin Film Festival 1998

French master Alain Resnais has been making movies that are at once mischievous and magnificent for nearly half a century (a list that includes Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and My American Uncle), and what is perhaps most extraordinary about this extraordinary filmmaker is that at the age of 76 anyone would be capable of making a movie as light yet complicated, as sly yet spry, as the thoroughly enjoyable divertissement Same Old Song (Competition). Fans of "The Singing Detective" will recognize this premise immediately, and Resnais short-circuits that potential criticism by dedicating the film to the late Dennis Potter. The story involves a group of people in and around Paris and their tangled commitments, a narrative that is punctuated frequently by characters breaking into straight-faced snippets of classic French pop songs (Jane Birkin even pops up in one scene and does, you guessed it, a Jane Birkin song). While potential American distributors are bound to be nervous due to the limited appeal of the music clips, they're just the frosting on this delicious confection of miscommunication and yearning, as the lyrics of each song manage to be far more eloquent than the often banal but never boring characters. Delightfully unique, Same Old Song is a joy from beginning to end.

On connaît la chanson (1997) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Odile and Camille are two sisters living in Paris. Odile is frustrated in her dull marriage to Claude, who shows no enthusiasm in her desire to buy a new apartment. Camille, studying for a doctorate in an arcane subject, suffers from a panic disorder. The lives of both women are up-ended when three men enter their lives. Nicholas, an old flame of Odile, returns to Paris to buy an apartment for his family, although he himself has marital problems. Simon meets and instantly falls in love with Camille, keeping from her the fact that he is an estate agent who works for the unscrupulous Marc, who also has designs on Camille...

On connaît la chanson marked Alain Resnais’ triumphal return to mainstream French cinema in the late 1990s. The film, hugely popular in France, is wedded in the familiar Resnais themes of time, place and memory, but his approach here is much lighter and more accessible than in his earlier, more abstract works such as L’année dernière à Marienbad.

Resnais’ great innovation for this film is to intermittently weave popular French songs from the past fifty or so years into the dialogue. His inspiration for this were the television series created by the celebrated British writer, Dennis Potter ("Pennies from Heaven", "The Singing Detective", "Lipstick on Your Collar"). In these series, the main characters would express their innermost thoughts by breaking into song and dance, miming to a well-known song. Resnais, who offers this film as a tribute to Potter, uses the same lip-synching approach, but uses snatches of songs rather than complete ballads. It is an idea which works surprisingly well, giving the film some of its funniest moments, although non-French viewers who are not familiar with the songs may fail to appreciate some of the references.

The dialogue was written by Jean-Pierre Bacri et Agnès Jaoui, who wrote and starred in Resnais’ earlier two-part film, Smoking/No Smoking, the director’s most minimalist and controversial film to date. The duo also star in the film, alongside other regulars to Resnais’ films, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier. Sabine Azéma gives a particularly enjoyable performance as the driven and paranoid Odile who is heading for a spectacular fall.

Although the film fared well in France, and landed a remarkable seven Césars, it has not repeated its success abroad. Nonetheless, this is an entertaining romantic comedy, perhaps a little too complicated, but ceaselessly charming and with some very funny moments.

Same Old Song (1998) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com David Sterrit

culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere

DVD Times Noel Megahey

In his middle seventies, Resnais is still going full-tilt. Jeffrey M. Anderson from Combustible Celluloid

Vincent Merlaud

iofilm.co.uk Medusa

sameoldsong Dennis Schwartz from Ozu’s World Movie Review

England, my England Ronald Bergan interviews Resnais from The Guardian, November 27, 1998

San Francisco Examiner [Walter Addiego]

San Francisco Examiner [G. Allen Johnson]

DVDTown [Christopher Long]

NOT ON THE LIPS (PAS SUR LA BOUCHE)

France Switzerland (115 mi) 2003 ‘Scope

Not on the Lips Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader

Alain Resnais' best work since Melo (1986) is, like that film, an eccentric and highly personal adaptation of a 1920s French stage hit—in this case, a farcical 1925 operetta with a jubilant and inventive score by Andre Barde and Maurice Yvain. A happily married society lady (Sabine Azema) is terrified that her industrialist husband (Pierre Arditi) will discover that his new American business partner (Lambert Wilson) was her first husband; a subplot charts the coming together of two other couples (including Audrey Tautou and Jalil Lespert). The actors do their own singing, and the theatrical trappings of the original—including lavish sets and asides to the audience—are embraced rather than avoided. As lush as an MGM musical, this 2003 feature is both moving and very strange, with one of the funniest ever French portraits of a prudish American. In French with subtitles (often rhyming couplets). 117 min.

Pas sur la Bouche Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

It's arguable, of course, that the main problem with this filmed version of a 1920s operetta 'à la parisienne' by André Barde and Maurice Yvain is that such things don't travel, mostly due to the music. Think of Resnais' On connaît la chanson. That said, like much of his work of the last two decades, the film feels, for all the skilful craftsmanship, as irredeemably bourgeois as the world it depicts, not to say a little pointless. Knowingly, it's a faintly absurd farce. Azéma fends off various suitors out of love for industrialist husband Arditi, who believes marital bliss exists only if the man is the woman's first lover. He's unaware Azéma was once married, briefly and disastrously, to Lambert Wilson, a new American business partner he's invited to stay. Only her unwed sister knows. But will Wilson let on? Do we care? In France perhaps they did - the film was a hit - but this writer found the characters irritating, the plot predictable, the lyrics and music clever but forgettable, the 'wit' unfunny. With the exception of Wilson's eccentric turn, the performances are perfectly efficient as long as you like polished, hollow artifice - and Resnais clearly does, judging by the mise-en-scène's slow but steady shift from occasional bits of formal play to more emphatically heightened flourishes.

May Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

[The essay that had previously occupied this space can now be found here. I moved it because I wanted to attempt a slightly more focused review of the film.] For the time being, I've rated this film a 6/10 because I don't know exactly what to think about it. But days later, I'm still puzzling over it, and this tells me that whatever else the film may be, it is provocative. In fact, Not on the Lips scares me, because it so accurately presents the past (in this case, Paris 1925) as a closed door, something foreign and unimaginable. The original source material is a comic operetta about marital infidelity and intellectual fashion. Musically, it is filled with trite ideas, although the libretto does seem to entail some wit. It's frivolous and playful, and yet Resnais has masterfully transformed this object into a necrology. The dulled candy-colored sets, the too-burnished wooden banisters, and especially the high-sheen, lacquered performances (Sabine Azema and Lambert Wilson, in particular -- the former as a fading beauty whose guileless seduction belies the feeling of her own unremarked-upon age; the latter playing the American businessman as automaton, an anti-Yankee in-joke shadowed by a more sinister reliance on xenophobia and national typology) -- everything in this film as saturated with death. I'm reminded of Walt Disney's early cartoon in which skeletons bound around the graveyard, playing jazz by pounding on their own ribcages like xylophones. It's entirely possible that other viewers have seen Not on the Lips as yet another mild-mannered disquisition on middlebrow French pop culture, a quaint musical from another time, or at its most outré, a study on the dialectic between past and present (cf. Far From Heaven). This last option was my original guess, and intellectually is in keeping with late Resnais. But -- again, this could be a totally idiosyncratic reading, provoked by my own private musings on time, aging, and mortality -- Not on the Lips strikes me as something altogether more horrifying, a kind of ghost dance. I underrate it, I suspect, because this is my rather immature way of coping with just how excruciating this film is. The music, the performances and attitudes, are all supposed to be "bad," but not in some ironic fashion. The characters look into the camera and address "me," but they and I never actually connect. Resnais turns this fundamental fact of cinema into a literalized metaphor for incommensurate planes of existence, all either gone or actively fading. The film, then, is excruciating because it is killing me, turning two hours of my life into a leaden inching toward the grave. I have every confidence that Not on the Lips is a masterpiece, one which I am not even remotely equipped to grapple with.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Pas sur la Bouche (2003) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, May 2004

Paris 1925. The dialogue in this film is part sung, part spoken. Gilberte Valandray, a smart Parisian society lady happily married to industrialist Georges Valandray (Sabine Azéma), entertains several suitors, including Charley (Jalil Lespert), a young 'modern' artist - though she loves her husband, as she confesses to her sister Arlette (Isabelle Nanty).

Meanwhile young Huguette Verberie (Audrey Tautou) is in love with Charley and wishes to marry him, but he only has eyes for Gilberte. The arrival of American businessman Eric Thomson (Lambert Wilson) disturbs this cosy arrangement as he was Gilberte's first husband, unbeknown to her present husband who firmly believes in the importance of being his wife's first lover (this earlier marriage, having taken place in the US, was not legally valid in France, hence the deception).

Charley puts on a show in the Valandray home, in which all the main characters participate and the various relationships become further entwined. All is about to be revealed and Gilberte's reputation ruined as the six main characters end up meeting in the same apartment, spied on by the concierge Madame Foin. The situation however is happily resolved: Gilberte and Georges stay blissfully married, Huguette seduces Charley and Eric Thomson sweeps Arlette off her feet.

Review

That the director of modernist masterpieces Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) could make such a light and frothy concoction as Pas sur la Bouche could only surprise those unfamiliar with both Alain Resnais' more recent films - such as I Want to Go Home (1989) and On connaît la chanson (1997) - and his longstanding love of popular culture. Pas sur la Bouche is based on an operetta by André Barde, with music by Maurice Yvain, one of the masters of the genre in the 1920s and 1930s. Depending on one's attitude to this type of theatrical entertainment, the film will delight or exasperate (it delighted French audiences when it came out in late 2003, just as the original operetta Pas sur la Bouche! had been a triumph in 1925).

But there is no doubting Resnais' real and direct engagement with the form. His is not the posture of the high-art auteur bending down to, or 'reworking', a popular genre (à la Lars von Trier with Dancer in the Dark). With Mélo in 1986 Resnais had paid tribute to the 'serious' boulevard theatre of the 1920s and 1930s; here he offers homage to the comically frivolous productions of the period. The film follows the original operetta's three-act structure, and Resnais has hardly changed anything to the plot, in which the arrival of American businessman Eric Thomson temporarily threatens the bourgeois world of Gilberte and Georges Valandray, as he had been Gilberte's first husband - a marriage she kept secret because of Georges' obsession with being 'first'. Misunderstandings and double-entendres abound, as two other couples are involved, but all is resolved in the classic farce location: the gentleman's love-nest, where all characters are reconciled, after much banging of doors.

Pas sur la Bouche delivers the unadulterated pleasures of operetta in its post-World War I 'light Parisian' musical comedy incarnation: the familiar characters trapped in improbable yet inexorable imbroglios (naturally based on adultery); the music and the songs; the witty dialogue and innuendo: the art-deco settings and costumes, stylised yet darkly sumptuous in Renato Berta's photography.

But while he respects the operetta form in both style and letter, Resnais shows that part of the attraction is also its distanced nature - the modernist director has not entirely disappeared. This is true of a number of overt devices, such as the shot of empty chairs in the middle act, the direct appeals to the spectator and the way characters disappear at the end of scenes, spirited away by a trick of the camera - a neat cinematic transposition of the theatrical exit, as well as a wink to early cinema. The attraction is also, in a more profound sense, to be found in the genre's own intrinsic type of distanciation. As Roland Barthes once commented, the 19th-century vaudeville farces of Labiche and Feydeau were already 'modernist' in their knowing display and replay of their own narrative codes. Barde and Yvain's operetta took on this mantle with gusto, as does Resnais' film.

Part of the genre's knowingness and sophistication lies also in its discourse on gender. The French filmed operetta and filmed theatre of the 1930s already provided a surprisingly more advanced and certainly more explicit discourse on gender than the serious realist films, in particular those of poetic realism, in which patriarchal domination was naturalised. In theatrical comedies (musical or not), the oppressiveness of gender relations - the marriage imperative, the gender (im)balance of power, the double standards of adultery - rather than being hidden are the actual topic.

Pas sur la Bouche in this respect pivots around a song in which the husband crows about his need to be, and satisfaction at being, 'first', using surprisingly explicit images such as stamping his presence on his wife forever, like a metal imprint. The fact that he was not actually her first lover (and that he will not find out) makes him the traditional cuckold of vaudeville farce. At the same time the crudity of the metaphor, only partly hidden by the humour of the song, speaks volumes about masculinity. Virginity in women is no longer fetishised in western culture, but male fantasies of domination have not disappeared; in this way Resnais' film is modern under its archaic veneer.

Like the theatrical masters of the 1930s, such as Yves Mirande, Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol, Resnais uses his faithful troupe of actors, notably Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi and Lambert Wilson, with new additions such as Audrey Tautou and Isabelle Nanty (both from Amélie), Daniel Prévost (Le Dîner de cons) and Jalil Lespert (in a startlingly different register from his part in Ressources humaines). Resnais' challenging decision was to make all the actors sing their own songs, with admittedly uneven results. Nevertheless, all clearly relish playing their parts and communicate a delightful exuberance as befits the genre. Singers and musical arrangements also reproduce Yvain's musical sophistication. The closing song, in typical self-reflexive fashion, comments that this was light comedy but that the authors hope spectators were entertained. This reviewer certainly was.

The Past Recaptured | Jonathan Rosenbaum Not on the Lips, March 18, 2005

Pucker Up: The Enchantments of Resnais’ Not on the Lips Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2005

Not On The Lips (2003, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 10, 2008

Pas sur la bouche (2003) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Not on the Lips Michael Sicinski extended essay from The Academic Hack

Alain Resnais Acquarello book review on Alain Resnais by James Monaco, 2004

Not on the Lips Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Movie Review - Not on the Lips - eFilmCritic Peter Sobczynski

Movie Review - Not on the Lips - eFilmCritic Greg Muskewitz

Not on the Lips : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video John Sinnott from DVD Talk

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio]

About World Film Jurgen Fauth

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2004 George Wu

User reviews from imdb Author: pmullinsj from New York City

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign

User reviews from imdb Author: openthebox

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Auteur torture Philip French from The Observer, May 2, 2004

The Village Voice [Jim Ridley]

COEURS

aka: Private Fears in Public Places

France Italy (125 mi) 2006 ‘Scope

Private Fears in Public Places Jonathan Rosenbauam from the Chicago Reader

Alain Resnais’ 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, Smoking/No Smoking (1993). That film tried to be as English as possible, but this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British qualities, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy Muriel (1963) and Providence (1977). A bittersweet comedy of loneliness, shyness, and repression, it was shot entirely on cozy sets, with a continual snowfall outside, and its interwoven plots feature Resnais standbys Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Andre Dussollier, and Lambert Wilson. At 85, the director is not only a consummate master but arguably the last great embodiment of the craft, style, and feeling of classical Hollywood. In French with subtitles. 120 min. (JR)

Private Fears in Public Places Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

The French title – ‘Coeurs’ (‘Hearts’) – of Resnais’ latest is more suggestive of the film than that of the Alan Ayckbourn play which is its source – not only because the movie is wholly preoccupied by its characters’ emotional lives, but because it is arguably the most affecting film the famously cool, reticent octogenarian director has made.

Consisting of about 50 brief scenes – most essentially two-handers – it focuses on six Parisians. Nicole (Laura Morante) is seeking a bigger apartment, as her unemployed lover (Lambert Wilson) wants his own study; heaven knows why, given that he spends most of his time in a swanky watering hole, boozily bemoaning his lot to Lionel (Pierre Arditi), a patient barman with his own problems in the (unseen) shape of a terminally hostile bed-ridden father. This monster needs attention while Lionel’s at work, which is why he’s engaged the services of part-time carer Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), a deeply religious sort keen, perhaps, to convert her estate agent boss Thierry (André Dussollier) – the man, incidentally, who’s trying to find a flat agreeable to Nicole, and whose younger sister Gaelle (Isabelle Carré) is seeking romance through the lonely-hearts ads.

Actually, it’s not just Gaelle but everyone here – even Lionel’s dad – who’s afflicted in one way or another, by loneliness. Not that the movie’s remotely depressing; much of it is gently funny, while the superbly sustained aura of delicate artifice – this is a Paris where it’s always silently snowing, even, at one point, indoors – lends the characters’ repeated attempts to break free of their boxed-in lives the ritualistic magic of a fairy tale. The tenderness with which Resnais observes their efforts makes for genuinely enchanting entertainment.

Private Fears in Public Places [Coeurs] Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Well, that was weird. But again, I'm talking "weird" like Hong's Woman on the Beach -- comic, accessible-on-the-surface auteurist fare that could scan as a perfectly normal, even middlebrow entertainment provided you aren't a viewer predisposed to examine the spatial relationships in every shot. Once again Resnais is adapting an Alan Ayckbourne play, and once again (cf. Smoking / No Smoking) the film is hobbled somewhat by Ayckbourne's novice-level gamesmanship and lazily plangent, stiff-upper-lip sensibility. He's basically the British Neil Simon, with a few insights into human nature dropped in like bitter dollops amidst the sweetness. Resnais seems to like this fellow because, as with Not on the Lips, Same Old Song, and even back to the formidable Mélo, the play Private Fears in Public Places is conventional enough to allow the director to take certain odd formalist liberties. In the case of Coeurs, Resnais segments nearly every space of action as though he were slicing off cheese. A dense beaded curtain, a wire partition, and pane of frosted glass -- people and things are divided from one another by translucent force fields. Some, like the garish hotel bar, electrify the screen. (Even candy-colored Ozon is subdued by comparison. You'd have to go back to the Goodson-Todman game shows of the 1970s to find equivalent mise-en-scène.) Elsewhere, Resnais' characters' apartments are crammed with inscrutable paintings and anachronistic objets d'art. All this, and bright yellow or orange walls to boot. (It's like a cross between a mid-scale antiques shop and the lacquered domiciles of later-period Michael Snow.) In the midst of all this geographical and aesthetic fragmentation, Ayckbourne's words seem quaint, optimistically anchoring the world in good old fashioned common sense -- an odd role for language in a play even somewhat beholden to the rules of farce. Oddly bungled missed connections, old-time religion morphing into porn, and, strangest of all, what appears to be a May-December open marriage so chaste, I honestly thought they were brother and sister, and I'm still not 100% sure they aren't. Coeurs is, without a doubt, beautifully acted by Resnais' ensemble. (Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier are particularly fine.) Like your favorite relatives, it's never not wonderful to see them every few years. There's no question that the film is a joy, as well as the work of a true master. The only that gives me pause in all of this is that the material just seems too shallow, and that isn't just a niggling hesitation, even when the formal gift-wrapping is this exquisite. One final thought: why's this Resnais film getting full-on festival treatment (Venice / Toronto / New York) while the equally accomplished (I would say better) Not on the Lips got the shaft?

The ubiquitous snowfall that blankets Alain Resnais's Private Fears in Public Places is a king-sized box of Hollywood soapflakes. As glimpsed through plate-glass facades, postage-stamp windows and doorways that might as well be portals into the void, it's fake in a grand tradition of movie precipitate: the art- directed sifting that isolates Jane Wyman at last with Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows; the Yuletide blizzard that douses one set of romantic hopes and blesses another in the glorious finale of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. What these movies share, besides fragile and hard-won happiness—and the raw material for a snowball fight—is the use of blatant artifice to engage our imaginations and empathy; to find, through stylized heightening, something more real than sense-deadening "realism."

And so the snow falls, in Resnais's exquisite comedy-drama, on a Paris of color-coded soundstage interiors, some without ceilings or even a fourth wall. Six characters, either nearing or passing middle age, combine and recombine into couples, seeking the warmth of human connection against the chill outside. A pair of public spaces—a glass-walled real-estate office and a wowsers space-age bachelor pad of a hotel bar—are the hubs they orbit before retreating to the pitched battlefields of home.

The sets are deliberately artificial; the longing and isolation they contain are genuine. Coming from a director who made some of the most challenging and form-breaking films of the nouvelle vague era—particularly the memory-as-shrapnel meditations Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad—this quasi-farcical fugue on loneliness and the difficulty of forging new loves late in life seems almost quaint in its mixing of golden-age cinematic gloss and transparently theatrical design. But Resnais's mastery shows how avant-garde the movie equivalent of a well-made play can be.

That isn't a slap at the source material, a play by Alan Ayckbourn (who also provided Resnais with the Anglophilic diptych Smoking/No Smoking). Rather, it's a tribute to the pleasures of Ayckbourn's elegantly symmetrical construction and Resnais's nimble staging. In the office, timid agent Thierry (André Dussollier) shyly eyes his co-worker, a redheaded sprite named Charlotte (Sabine Azéma) whose devout faith doesn't rule out amateur porn. In the hotel, worldly barkeep Lionel (Pierre Arditi) dispenses Scotch and wisdom to Dan (Lambert Wilson), a disgraced ex-career officer turned mid-life layabout. Lionel hires Charlotte to nurse his bedridden, curmudgeonly father, represented by Claude Rich's off-screen voice and several airborne projectiles. Meanwhile, Dan's frustrated girlfriend, Nicole (Laura Morante), tries to resuscitate their dying relationship by finding a new apartment, with Thierry's help.

Resnais's last two films, Same Old Song and Not on the Lips (which went all but unseen in the U.S.), experimented with musical conventions. Private Fears in Public Places resembles a Vincente Minnelli musical with the songs elided, leaving the persistent ache of unexpressed desires. Where Minnelli's characters would open their hearts and throats in confidence to the viewer—eking out, say, some sliver of personal space in the close quarters of Meet Me in St. Louis—Resnais draws a curtain. The snowy dissolves that punctuate each scene strand the characters (and the viewer) in mid-emotion—none more painfully than Thierry's lovelorn sister Ga (a radiant Isabelle Carré), who pins a bold crimson flower to her lapel on a succession of luckless blind dates.

Visually and dramatically, the movie is partitioned into small sections. The script, adapted by Jean-Michel Ribes, consists mainly of brief two-character vignettes, some barely lasting a minute. No one— not Thierry, holed up in lust-struck thrall to a spicy VHS tape; not Lionel, secretly agonizing in a roomful of oblivious customers—keeps our company for very long. The effect, at times, is of channel-surfing among six stations of simulcast melancholy. Among Resnais's trash-TV referents here is the lowly soap opera, that boon companion to the lonely and housebound. (Every time a scene ends with a character staring wistfully into space, you may imagine an announcer's voice thanking Procter & Gamble for its sponsorship.)

But lowbrow plus highbrow does not equal middlebrow, and the breezy accessibility of Private Fears in Public Placesdoes not make it any less a work of art than Resnais's more difficult early successes. The effervescence of his direction disguises its formal rigor: the horizontal stripes that recur from set to set, subdividing apartments into compartments and walling off characters; the blocking that equates physical barriers with mental minefields; the coolly precise camera movements that shift the emotional focus within a scene. (The ravishing camerawork by Eric Gautier, who serves nouvelle-nouvelle-vague directors as heroically as Raoul Coutard did Truffaut and Godard, charges every ion of the pristine frame with tactile longing.) By the same token, Resnais's intellectual engagement in no way diminishes the charm of a flawless cast at work (veterans Dussollier, Arditi, Azéma, and Wilson are particularly fine) or of the unfashionable virtues of what gets disparaged as "civilized entertainment." Resnais is now 84 years old; perhaps it takes eight decades of living to make a movie this compassionate, this confident—and this young.

Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs) Lost in Space, Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, May 18, 2007

Transit: cine y otros desvíos | Catástrofes íntimas Intimate Catastrophes, (English and Spanish), by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, feature and video essay from Transit, January 2013 (3:08)

Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]

Private Fears in Public Places - Reviews - Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton, October 6, 2006

notcoming.com | Private Fears in Public Places Jenny Jediny

Private Fears In Public Places (2006, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, November 8, 2007

Armond White NY Press

Coeurs (2006) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Private Fears In Public Places (Coeurs) | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, April 12, 2007

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Ehsan Khoshbakht's notes on cinematograph including exquisitely chosen photos

Movie Review: Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs) - Monsters ... Ron Wilkinson from Monsters and Critics

dOc DVD Review: Private Fears in Public Places (2006) Jeff Wilson

DVD Verdict [Ben Saylor]

http://stylusmagazine.com/articles/movie_review/private-fears-in-public-places.htm Bill Weber from Stylus magazine

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

EyeForFilm.co.uk Jennie Kermode

Private Fears in Public Places Mark Asch from L magazine

Reel Movie Critic [Vittorio J. Carli]

Less Is Less: The 44th New York Film Festival - Bright Lights Film ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2006

Secrets of the European Union: Chicago's Tenth Annual EU Film Festival Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 1, 2007

Private Fears in Public Places | Film School Rejects Loukas Tsouknidas

Jindabyne - Zoo - Private Fears in Public Places -- New York ... David Edelstein from New York magazine (Page 2)

KQEK.com DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]

FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]

Glenn Kenny "Hello, Glenn. I am Alain," interview from In the Company of Glenn, April 12, 2007

Variety.com [Jay Weissberg]

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

J'adore Scarborough Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, July 6, 2007

Private Fears in Public Places Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, July 20, 2007

Film of the week: Private Fears in Public Places | From the Observer ... Philip French from The Observer, July 22, 2007

Northern lights Kate Kellaway from The Observer, August 7, 2005

Ayckbourn to quit Scarborough The Guardian, June 5, 2007

A Trip to Scarborough Alfred Hickling from The Guardian, December 15, 2007

Alan Ayckbourn's successor announced Russell Hector from The Guardian, June 4, 2008

After Ayckbourn: Chris Monks takes the reigns at Scarborough Alfred Hickling from The Guardian, April 30, 2009

Lost in space - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Chris Fujiwara, May 18, 2007, also seen here: Lost in space

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

'Private Fears' in solitary places - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas from The LA Times

"Restless Innovations from Alain Resnais" Dave Kehr from The New York Times, April 8, 2007

FILM REVIEW; Paris Believes in Tears (And Love and Real Estate) Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, April 13, 2007, also seen here: Private Fears in Public Places - Movie - Review - The New York Times

WILD GRASS (Les Herbes Folles) B+ 92

France Italy (104 mi) 2009

No matter, we shall have loved each other well. —Gustave Flaubert, L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869

A surprisingly light-hearted French comedy from the master of the nearly incomprehensible LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961), a bold existential reverie told with a striking geometric visual scheme filled with perfectly dressed characters looking like mannequins who exist in a purgatory of forgotten memories that are about to disappear forever. This film makes use of small, somewhat quirky overlooked moments that might easily be forgotten, yet they’re given a synchronous narrative structure where they become the highlights of the film, quite reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai’s charmingly upbeat use of the same sort of romantic structure in CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), where this film even looks like it was shot by Wong’s cinematographer Christopher Doyle, but it is Eric Gautier who provides a stunningly beautiful color palette that is so brightly lit, an impressionistic blur of neon-lit colors, that at times it takes one’s breath away. Since the narrative itself is minimal, a woman’s purse gets stolen and the man who finds her wallet is struck by the myriad of possibilities with the thought of returning it to her, which leaves plenty of room for character driven improvisation, something the French excel at. A comedic battle of the sexes ensues. The woman who loses her purse is the director’s live-in companion, Sabine Azéma, a flaming red-head some 27-years his junior, while the man who discovers the missing wallet is André Dusollier, who is the picture of manners, convention, and social grace. There seems to be a story within the story about his real profession that’s barely referenced, only alluded to, and then swallowed up by an entirely new train of thought, leaving all those possibilities behind in exchange for brand new ones. Through a whimsical narration that also includes people’s heads and thoughts popping up like an animated comic strip, this film has fun with its own conceptual design, as despite the occasional hilarity, the sequence of events are extremely well edited and there is a remarkable display of wit. For many this will be a bizarre little headscratcher bathed in the luminescent light of a budding love story that feels innocent and warmhearted enough, becoming a master class on cinema itself, but makes little sense.

While Dusollier wishes to make a personal impression after he returns the wallet, he ends up talking to Azéma’s answering machine every night, leaving revealing messages where he expresses an interest in meeting, but when they finally talk, she tries to put an end to that idea. So he starts writing her letters instead, including one that appears to be about 10 pages long, revealing his life’s story and his various thoughts of the day, as if she were his best friend. This all gets a bit tricky, but he’s consumed by her while she deflects his interest, though it’s clear he’s made some sort of impression, as she’s clearly enamored by his attention and misses it when she puts a stop to it. So she turns the tables and starts secretly following him, where the moment they meet is electric, like something out of pure fantasy, yet there it is happening before our eyes. She begins calling his home, where his wife (Anne Consigny) calmly answers as if this is nothing out of the ordinary, where they all seemingly become best of friends, yet the underlying motivations shift around and remain unclear. The pursuer becomes fascinated by the unknown, never knowing quite what to expect, while the pursued seems to love the attention, even if they’re already married and the pursuer comes to sit in their living room. The audience doesn’t really know what to make of this either, as the married couple seems perfectly content and not at all jealous, apparently pleased with each other’s happiness, where the added interest only seems to brighten up their lives. No one knows where any of this is going or where it will lead. What’s truly remarkable is the ease with which these veteran actors sink their teeth into their parts, as they’re a joy to watch simply to discover what they’ll do next, becoming instantly familiar characters, cleverly drawn and skillfully inhabited, with a series of movie references, including familiar movie music and title cards appearing on the screen, including several endings. But mostly what works is the thought process that leads us through this bounty of oddball experiences, looking through the cracks of our well-ordered lives, as there’s a refined intelligence behind it all and an uplifting spirit that feels remarkable, as if we in the audience are missing out on the choices we make in our daily routines, continually overlooking these deliciously small moments that when maximized seem to define our humanity. It hardly matters if we make fools of ourselves, what people remember is the effort, which is the proof that when we lived, we cared.

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5]

For those who like the tone of their films to be reflected in the hairstyles of their lead actors, the wayward shock of auburn-red frizz worn by Sabine Azéma in ‘Wild Grass’ is a good first step to unravelling this joyfully skittish farce from 88-year-old maestro Alain Resnais. Combining the verbose theatrical games of his ’80s films with the time, space and character manipulations of early classics such as ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, ‘Wild Grass’ also feels like Resnais’s ode to something like ‘Twin Peaks’ – a work which is inviting and gentle on the surface but inscrutable and strange the more you look at it.

It’s based on a surreal novel by French author Christian Gailly called ‘L’Incident’ and details the fallout of a preposterous romance that forms between antisocial house husband Georges Palet (André Dussollier) and dentist-cum-budding aviatrix, Marguerite Muir (Azéma) when her purse is snatched and he recovers it. Every frame is filled with blushed neon hues that look like they’ve been filmed through a smear of Vaseline. The kinetic camera hovers and glides around scenes, at one point even leaping over the top of a house. These stylistic elements – along with a dainty, midi-jazz score – lend the film a dreamlike quality. What’s it all about, though? It could be everything and nothing. There are allusions to psychosis, chaos, reincarnation, anxiety, communication and even the romanticised nature of cinema itself. It’s cheeky and confident, maybe one of the director’s finest, and its loopy final line is the cryptic cherry on this oddball gâteau.

Cannes 2009: So far, away (details, handheld, Antichrist, and meeting ... David Phelps from Mubi, May 22, 2009 (excerpt)

Finally, Alain Resnais’ Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass, but Folles also means mad) changed everything; it’s the one film whomever I talk to agrees is a masterpiece and the only one. At a small press conference with 12 journalists leaning in around a table, and a spry, boomerang-bent Resnais leaning back, Resnais told us that the film was inspired by Eisenstein (for the colors) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (for the comedy); that he knew he was on the right track when he saw Larry David was in Woody Allen’s new movie; that the logic of the film, as in Lewis Carroll, is largely based on puns (even English ones—the problems of a pant’s fly as a man flies a plane); that his camera imitates a plane; that he’s never seen The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which at the center of the film has almost the same ending as Resnais’ film; that Leo McCarey understood details better than anyone; that he and Andre Bazin were good friends, though at first he didn’t have much respect for Bazin, who never watched any movies; that at 18 in Provence, he argued with his friends whether cinema was an art form, since it can only show reality instead of interpreting it (as, contra Bazin, his friends insisted art must), and that he defended himself with the Kuleshov effect and invocations of the editing of Pudovkin and Lubitsch; that Abel Gance or von Stroheim would probably be thrilled by the possibilities of TV series like The Sopranos; that he’s read his films are about memory, but that’s not true; that they’re really about imagination (“but that includes a bit of memory, too”); that he doesn’t distinguish between a real apple and an apple painted by Cezanne (all his movies in a line?), but that he might prefer to eat the real apple, and might prefer to keep Cezanne’s.

Wild Grass - Film review Keith Uhlich from Time Out New York

Alain Resnais’s mind-bending new feature begins innocently enough: Dentist-cum-aviatrix Marguerite Muir (Azéma) goes shopping for shoes, luxuriating in a carefree day until a thief on in-line skates snatches her purse. Per the title of the novel (The Incident) from which the film is adapted, this is the event that sets Marguerite on a collision course with Georges Palet (Dussolier), a semischizoid suburbanite who finds her stolen wallet and develops a fervent obsession. What follows might best be described as a “stalker farce,” in which Georges and Marguerite play increasingly destructive games of one-upmanship. Multiple voice messages lead to slashed car tires lead to stern police warnings. And then the power roles shift…

Ever the pop-culture aesthete, Resnais makes wide-reaching references and allusions: He’s acknowledged Curb Your Enthusiasm as a partial influence, and includes an onscreen quote from Gustave Flaubert (“No matter, we shall have loved each other well”) that perfectly encapsulates the film’s delirious yet melancholy tone. Georges and Marguerite’s comically tinged dalliances are always counterbalanced by a sense of impending mortality. Indeed, the film has the feel of a final testament, much like the latest (or last) works of Resnais’s nouvelle vague colleagues Eric Rohmer (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) and Jacques Rivette (Around a Small Mountain). Yet death is not something to fear in this universe. The transformative finale suggests rather that it is something to smile at, cheekily, yet acceptingly. The journey may end, but the sublimity (and frequent ridiculousness) of our time on earth remains, forever and always.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Noel Murray

Venerable French director Alain Resnais has spent the latter years of his career indulging a yen for the frothy, as evidenced by Wild Grass, a movie so good-natured and ebullient that it’s impossible to tell how much of it is a put-on. André Dussollier plays a fiftysomething gentleman who finds a wallet on the ground, admires the pictures he finds inside, and plots the best way to get its owner to meet him, even though he’s already happily married and has a mysterious criminal past that would make a stalking charge risky. The wallet’s owner, Sabine Azéma, is a dentist and part-time pilot who spends about half of Wild Grass rebuffing Dussollier’s advances until—wholly and inexplicably—she changes her mind.

And here, a beguilingly hazy romantic comedy goes utterly bugnuts. What initially seemed like charming character eccentricities become more obviously random as the plot begins to zig and zag, as though Resnais were spinning a wheel to determine each scene’s direction. Wild Grass is based on a novel by Christian Gailly, but Resnais and his screenwriters were reportedly loose with the adaptation, taking the dialogue and the upbeat tone from Gailly, but playing around with the plot details and character motivations. Dussollier’s obsession with Azéma looks like amusing folly in one scene, and comes off as pathetic in the next. Resnais mixes comedy, melodrama, and even suspense, introducing question after question while building to a bizarre finale that makes the whole notion of moving plots forward with mystery seem frivolous.

Wild Grass might be some kind of dream-narrative, or it might be Resnais’ comment on the infinite possibilities of motion-picture storytelling. Dussollier is a cinephile, and his actions throughout the film seem half driven by the usual irrationality of a human in love, and half driven by his desire to be a more compelling movie character. Whatever it is, Wild Grass is so overtly artificial and aggressively trifling that it’s bound to put some viewers off, though it’s also so bright and funny that it’s hard not to be at least a little enchanted. Resnais’ music is so sweet, even when his words are nonsense.

Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London (link lost)

Now in his late 80s, and over six decades after he made his first film, Alain Resnais shows no signs of having lost any of the artistic audacity that made films like ‘Night and Fog’, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ and ‘Providence’ classics of modern(ist) cinema. With ‘Wild Grass’ (‘Les Herbes Folles’) he has quietly outdone such ’innovative’ fellow competitors for the Cannes Palme d’or as Park Chan-wook, Quentin Tarantino or (the Devil save us!) Lars Von Trier – besides making one of the most impressive and enjoyable films in the competition.

Taken from a novel by Christian Gailly entitled ‘The Incident’, the film explores with enormous wit, elegance and insight how one small, seemingly trivial event – the theft of a woman’s purse – can lead, by the most improbable and digressive of routes, to something comparatively very substantial and significant: a matter, in fact, of lives and deaths. The purse in question belongs to dentist Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), and it is found, devoid of money and cards, by Georges (André Dussollier), who we presently learn is undergoing a mid-life crisis that makes him indecisive, sometimes reluctant to perform even the simplest of tasks (such as phoning the owner of a stolen purse to reassure her that it’s been found), and prone to sudden outbursts of almost homicidal irritability.

The theft and discovery of the purse brings not only these characters together in a weird and wonderful story (related by a narrator sometimes reliable, sometimes not), but also Georges’ wife (Anne Consigny), a policeman (Mathieu Amalric), Marguerite’s friend and surgery partner (Emmanuelle Devos), and sundry others. In other words, it’s one of Resnais’ more discursive pieces, gradually broadening out from the obsessive and often perverse mindscape of Georges to include a range of idiosyncracies, all dealt with with such a light touch that eventually the film quite literally spirals off into the ether, as exhilaratingly as one of the countless crane shots that discreetly litter the movie.

What’s it all about? Ageing, passion, doubt, the need to let off steam, the desire to feel loved, the self-protective instinct; love, pain and the whole damn thing. If that sounds too much for one movie, remember how Resnais’ ‘My American Uncle’ contrived to suggest the workings of the world through the microcosm of a rat’s cage. This latest confection, light as a soufflé, effervescent as a glass of cold champagne, and bittersweet as chocolate, feels like a summation of all the best things in Resnais’ oeuvre.

micropsia: "Wild Grass", de Alain Resnais (The Auteurs) Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi, May 20, 2009

Some may remember the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for the ephemeral brouhaha of Antichrist, but time will be most understanding of all to Wild Grass, the new masterpiece by Alain Resnais. It has breathed life not just into the festival but into cinema itself, a true, effervescent delight as sad, hilarious, and wonderful as can be imagined, which is exactly the point. It is the ultimate Resnais film, an entire story, an entire cast of characters, and entire candy-colored film world all pitched as speculation. Maybe. If. Perhaps. It could be. Why not?

Above all a dance, a dream of sadness and a wish for fantasy, a pickpocketed wallet draws a forlorn married man (André Dussollier) to a lonely unmarried woman (Sabine Azéma), the possibilities of romance flitting between the chance that chance has put two strangers in strange contact with one another. It is the most melancholy Hitchcock film, the wise, post-irony comedy he never made, a thriller cum romance cum elegy with the bravura whip-pans, crane shots, and crash zooms of a De Palma film, told (with a wink) with the humor of 1930s and the insight of an 86 year old master. It is a menagerie of all past Resnais dove-tailing through the branching possibilities of fiction, imagination and possibility opening the void before us, and filling it with equal parts horror and delight.

Our hero is a killer (perhaps), a philanderer (could be), a happily married man (why not?), a fiction maker (definitely); in short, like the rest of us, he is a what if kind of guy. Dussollier, in an extraordinary performance that suggests a maniac as much as it does a lonely romantic, stalks Azéma through letters and messages, forcing on her a fantasy if not of his mind, than of the film's. Narrated by an anonymous man with access to everyone's thoughts and an eventual part to play in this film fogged over with a haze that blurs the boundaries between the darkness and the light, tragedy and comedy, Wild Grass roves and grows from flight. Flight not just of our wallet woman's Sundays spent at the aerodrome, but flights of fancy above all else, swathing the world an artificial neon-tinged miasma that must be a dream, one that feels like silks running through your fingers and looks like dissolved satin. This look—also to be found in the jukebox insides of Private Fears in Public Places—equates all things, this auteurs' instrumental explorations of time and memory taken the Nth degree, where anything can happen in a mad, sad, deliciously malleable world vacated by our old, stolid understandings of time's passage, of events’ linearity, our consciousness' limits, and the separation of fiction and life.

It could be the most generous film ever made, since anything is possible, and that possibility is as joyous in its romantic whimsy as it is a mournful in the complete uncertainty of every moment and sensation. And to embrace these sides of life's equation—and in equal parts!—one simply stands in awe not of Resnais' understanding but of his realization.

Where the wild things grow: Alain Resnais' Wild Grass | Sight & Sound ... Adrian Martin from Sight and Sound, June 2010, revised March 3, 2014

not coming to a theater near you review Cullen Gallagher

Alain Resnais Does His Carrot-Topped Muse No Favors in Wild Grass ... J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, June 22, 2010

Wild Grass | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Movieline (Michelle Orange) review [7.5/10]

The Kraken Wakes « Film Quarterly Rob White from The Film Quarterly, Fall 2010

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

DVD Talk (Casey Burchby) review [4/5] Theatrical review

Offoffoff.com review Joshua Tanzer

Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) Dan Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily

Slant Magazine review Andrew Schenker

Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

Les herbes folles Jaime Christley from Unexamined Essentials

Les Herbes folles (2009) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

NYFF Review: Alain Resnais's Wild Grass | Little Gold Men | Vanity ... Vanity Fair, October 5, 2009

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3.5/4]

St. Paul Pioneer Press (Chris Hewitt) review [3/4]

Boxoffice Magazine (Steve Ramos) review [4/5]

exclaim! [Erene Stergiopoulos]

eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [2/5] also seen here: DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Wild Grass (2009, Alain Resnais) Brandon’s Movie Memory, September 27, 2010

exclaim! [Joseph Belanger] also seen here: Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]

Screenjabber review Robert Barry

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England

Wild Grass: Resnais' Delightful Con Game Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 2009

Cannes '09: Day Seven Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 20, 2009

Cannes. "Wild Grass" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog

Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 20, 2009

New York Film Festival 2009: Director Alain Resnais ... - Village Voice Scott Foundas interview, September 22, 2009

Human nature: Alain Resnais - Film - Time Out New York Nicolas Rapold interview from Time Out New York, June 14, 2010

Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum

Duane Byrge at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2009

Jordan Mintzer at Cannes from Variety, May 20, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey

Wild Grass, Alain Resnais, 105 mins (12A) - Reviews, Films - The ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, June 20, 2010

War and whimsy in Cannes Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 21, 2009, also here: Peter Bradshaw

Film review: Wild Grass | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, June 17, 2010

Alain Resnais: vive la différence Gilbert Adair from The Guardian, June 22, 2010

The Boston Phoenix (Gerald Peary) review

Cannes '09 Day 10: Playing around Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 22, 2009

Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Alain Resnais Returns to Cannes, With a Comedy Joan Dupont at Cannes from The New York Times, May 18, 2009

After Days of Cringing at the Screen, a Reason to Smile Sweetly Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 21, 2009

Alain Resnais Explores Desire in 'Wild Grass' - The New York Times Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, June 18, 2010

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review June 25, 2010

YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET (Vous n'avez encore rien vu) C 72

France Germany (115 mi) 2012 ‘Scope

This is another of a recent series of aging filmmakers to express themselves through sheer artificiality, much like Manoel de Oliveira, 100-years old and still counting, and the recently deceased Raúl Ruiz, whose immersion into literary source material often leaves their films rigid and lifeless onscreen, so stark in execution that the viewer ends up spending a majority of time simply reading the subtitles, as these are films with non-stop verbiage, almost as if the filmmakers preferred stories that were read to the audience. While the last film of Resnais, Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) (2009), couldn’t have been more playfully energetic with its quirky story of near forgotten moments leading to a budding romance, intoxicating with its impressionistic blur of neon-lit colors, where it obviously had plenty of whimsical fun with its own conceptual design. Not so here, where you’ll be hard pressed to find any ounce of spontaneity or flair for life in this film, a re-enactment of French playwright Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice, where the story of Orpheus and Eurydice has previously been told quite impressively in Jean Cocteau’s magical surrealist film ORPHEUS (1950) and the spectacularly colorful BLACK ORPHEUS (1959), a Marcel Camus film that uses the lush backdrop of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, featuring the exotic delights of fabulous costumes, nonstop dancing, and wall to wall samba music. While the play itself was written during the Nazi occupation of France, this historical context is completely left out of the film, though one can infer this may have been the reason it lingered for so long in the director’s imagination.

In the opening interlude expressed in a montage of split screen images, a varied group of actors receive identical phone calls informing them that Antoine d’Anthac (Denis Podalydès), a friend and beloved theater director has died, requesting their visit to his country estate for the reading of his will. Once the guests arrive, all gracefully met by Marcellin (Andrzej Seweryn), they are treated to a video performance of the Jean Anouilh play, where as the actors recall their own performances, Resnais blends a mixture of theater, memory, and real life into his own film. While it sounds clever enough, what it amounts to is largely a filmed theatrical piece, using three different sets of performers, where Resnais interjects onto the screen two sets of older actors watching the movie who recall performing the play in their youth, where they are suddenly projected onscreen as the featured players alongside a video version of younger performers from La Compagnie de la Colombe which was actually filmed by Denis Podalydès. With a brief break between the first and second acts where all the assembled players light up and smoke, Resnais simply films the entire play, intercutting brief elements of another more modern Anouilh play, Cher Antoine ou l'amour rate from 1969. So while there is some interest in how the concept initially develops, there are no more surprises, and despite some of the best French stage and screen performers, there is little interest in the play itself, as it exists in a cautious, overly refined, and artificialized setting that accentuates the literary aspect of the play, adding little visual enhancement.

While there is some pleasure in watching great actors, with Sabine Azema and Anne Consigny as Eurydice, matched by a young and vivacious Vimala Pons, from Jacques Rivette’s final film AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (2009), and Pierre Arditi and Lambert Wilson as Orpheus, it must be said that the team of Azema and Arditi badly overact, adding a neurotic element that goes way over the top, turning this into an antiquated melodrama. Rivette is probably the most brilliant director incorporating theatrical performances into his films, but he also infuses his characters with intelligence and a probing curiosity, where one can’t help but take interest in the energizing aspect of their appeal, as they are literally teeming with life. But Resnais has made a film that only grows deadly boring after awhile, where the energy of the young and relatively unknown company actors consistently outshine the cadre of stars who never bring this piece to life, as it instead sits there onscreen like a stuffed shirt overly pleased with itself. Never invoking the dramatic power and tragedy behind the immortal play, where the all consuming power of love offers Orpheus a chance to bring Eurydice back from the dead, which initially comes from Greek mythology, revisited in various artistic forms for literally thousands of years, from Plato, Virgil, and Ovid to painters like Titian and Puissin, as well as music from Monteverdi, Gluck, and Offenbach, this can only be considered a minor version of a master work, a pale comparison to the legendary Cocteau film, the second of his Orphic Trilogy Films, which notably does make historical reference to the buildings in ruin after World War II, using them as the eerie setting for his underworld, where the Orpheus trial was made to resemble the German inquests after the occupation. While this was touted on the festival circuit as the swansong for Resnais, whose first film short was made back in the 30’s and first feature followed the war, there is yet another film already in post production, another collaboration with English playwright Alan Ayckbourn, his fourth film adaptation, where it will continue this obsession of aging film directors with literary works.

As its title suggests, at age 90 master French filmmaker Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Wild Grass) is indeed still full of surprises. Based on two works by the playwright Jean Anouilh, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet opens with a who’s-who of French acting royalty (including Mathieu Amalric, Michel Piccoli and frequent Resnais muse Sabine Azéma) being summoned to the reading of a late playwright’s last will and testament. There, the playwright (Denis Podalydès) appears on a TV screen from beyond the grave and asks his erstwhile collaborators to evaluate a recording of an experimental theater company performing his Eurydice—a play they themselves all appeared in over the years. But as the video unspools, instead of watching passively, these seasoned thespians begin acting out the text alongside their youthful avatars, looking back into the past rather like mythic Orpheus himself. Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Eric Gautier on stylized sets that recall the French poetic realism of the 1930s, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet is an alternately wry and wistful valentine to actors and the art of performance from a director long fascinated by the intersection of life, theater and cinema

Cannes 2012: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Alain Resnais' remarkable film-making career continues with his return to the Cannes competition at the age of 89. This is a quasi-theatrical contrivance based partly around Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice. Bruno Podalydès plays Antoine D'Anthac, a cultured and wealthy dramatist whose death is announced by telephone to his close friends in the opening sequence. These are French acting eminences, playing themselves: Michel Piccoli, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Lambert Wilson and many more. His lawyer invites them to D'Anthac's home and declares it is the wish of the deceased that they all watch a video recording of a performance of his play Eurydice, acted by a company of twentysomethings, La Compagnie de la Colombe. This was a play they had all been in, when younger, and the recording transports them back in time: they start reciting the lines, feeling the emotions, and we see them swept back into the roles.

It is a movie about memory and the persistence of the past, and like a lot of Resnais' recent work it mounts an interesting challenge to the realist consensus of cinema, to the convention that we must pretend that what is being played out on screen is actually happening. But despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull.

It certainly returns us to the great enigma of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth: by looking back at her in the underworld, he loses her. Perhaps Resnais is saying that the act of looking back is what is stifling – the past is not the past, its emotions and truths are vital now, and we can feel them truthfully by looking forward and living in the present. Perhaps. This is a stately and self-conscious piece of work, though with a quaint kind of elegance and poise.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! | review, synopsis, book tickets ... Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Time Out London: Geoff Andrew

Alain Resnais, just about to hit 90, seems untouched by age, at least as far as his films are concerned. ‘Wild Grass’, his last film, was arguably more audacious, lighter and more evocative of the carefree spirit of youth than the work of many younger directors, and this latest is no less adventurous, notwithstanding its subject matter.

Because, to borrow a pun from an earlier Resnais title, the twin concerns of his formally inventive adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s ‘Eurydice’ are ‘amouret la mort’: love and death. But if the director has any anxieties about what lies beyond the grave, he certainly isn’t revealing them. Playful,witty, as unashamedly theatrical as it is cinematic, the movie begins with a fabulous array of French actors – Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, Michel Piccoli, Lambert Wilson, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric and Hippolyte Girardot are probably the best known internationally – playingthemselves and being summoned by phone to the home of a recently deceased old playwright friend. There they are shown a video of drama students rehearsing the dead writer’ retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and as the actors, who have all themselves acted in the play at some point in their lives, watch the video, they start first to repeat the remembered lines, then to act out the parts with the other spectators, then to interact with the performers on screen. Then the house they are in becomes an ever-changing set.

There’s far more to it, of course; the movie isn’t just some shallow piece of clever formal flapdoodle. Like most of Resnais’s work, it concerns the constant, complex interplay between ‘reality’, memory, imagination and desire. Thanks to the choice of material, death also looms large, though not at all threateningly; the ghosts here are simply the feelings we have experienced. The film is touching, but more than that it’s wise, witty and thought-provoking. Whether Resnais will complete another movie remains to be seen, but if this were by any chance to be his swansong, with its distant and resonant echoes of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (made 63 years earlier), it would certainly be a lovely one.

Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy] at Cannes, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Todd McCarthy

The confluence of theater, memory and real life for a group of actors in an explicitly artificial world sparks rarefied aesthetic pleasures, up to a point, in You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet. Its contracted, slangy English title specifically insisted upon by the director himself, this reflection on the past, love and death through the prism of layers of theatrical endeavor is both serious and frisky, engaging on a refined level but frustratingly limited in its complexity and depth. Alain Resnais’ latest will appeal most to devoted fans but doesn’t approach the delirious heights of his previous feature, Wild Grass, in 2009.

Resnais and screenwriters Laurent Herbiet and Alex Reval have used two works by the eminent late French playwright Jean Anouilh, Eurydice and Cher Antoine ou l’amour rate, to provide a frame through which to assess the enduring viability of the themes stemming from Greek mythology and well as their emotional meaning in the lives of multiple actors who have performed the drama of a love story, that of Eurydice and Orpheus, that bridges the worlds of life and death.

Contriving the setup required to assemble the diverse thespians together brings out Resnais’ customary playfulness, just as it recalls his long devotion to the theater and the form’s useful array of artifice. In a beguiling opening interlude, roughly a dozen actors receive identical phone calls informing them that their famous theater director, Antoine d’Anthac, has died and requesting that they journey to his country home for a reading of his will and funeral service.

As the actors — all playing themselves — arrive, they are welcomed by the deceased’s elegant manservant Marcellin (Andrzej Seweryn) onto what is self-evidently a set of a large room strewn with black sofas. They are assembled, explains Marcellin, to watch video footage of a provincial theater company’s proposed staging of d’Anthac’s play Eurydice (actually Anouilh’s) to decide whether it holds up and if the estate should grant permission for its performance.

This fanciful setup establishes the terms under which Resnais’s entire film must be watched and even among viewers of specialized and foreign films, quite a few won’t be keen to embrace this intellectual conceit involving literary time travel between French theater and Greek myth (the fact that Anouilh’s play was written in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France, and had special meaning within that context is ignored).

The video, which Resnais engaged Bruno Podalydes to direct, features young actors performing in a bare warehouse and, altogether, amounts to roughly 28 minutes of material. But rather than an end in itself, it serves here as a springboard to stimulate the emotional memories of d’Anthac’s veteran actors, who are then seen playing their old roles once again, regardless of their sometimes vast age discrepancies with the characters.

For a while, the different pairings and performance styles holds the interest and even stimulates; revisiting one old production are Sabine Azema as Eurydice and Pierre Arditi as Orpheus, while another, regularly intercut, stars Anne Consigny and Lambert Wilson. Greatly enriching these impromptu flashbacks, or resummonings of dramas past, are Jacques Saulnier’s wonderful sets which, despite their color, deliberately evoke the poetic realism of French cinema in the 1930s and into the 1940s, especially in a beautifully rendered train station; in all respects, the film is technically immaculate. Further harkening back to that same period is Seweryn’s role as a detached impresario who orchestrates the proceedings.

Unfortunately, the film severely limits the richness of these reprised performances by providing no indications of the actors’ own relationships, now or decades before. The intense dialogues about love, lost and recaptured, could have achieved much greater resonance -- be it sincere, ironic, painful, wistful or whatever -- had the interpersonal histories of the actors been illuminated, with all their inevitable passions and rivalries. But Resnais is operating here on a more intellectual, game-playing level, constricting all responses to the brain and not the heart.

Furthermore, Resnais devotes a lion’s share of the final stretch to Azema (his wife) and Arditi, whereas, to be blunt, the beautiful Consigny and Wilson are much more enjoyable to watch. Azema provides Eurydice with a neurotic component that goes way over the top, drawing unneeded attention to the fact that this film is all talk, all the time.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet is an amusing title for a film by an 89-year-old director, one who has already announced another project. At the same time, there is something both gleefully self-effacing and egotistical about centering a film on a puppet master-like director who, from the grave, summons his associates to do his bidding.

Cinema Scope | You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais, France) Blake Williams, 2012

That Alain Resnais would endow his follow-up to his neurologically scrambled masterpiece Les herbes folles (2009) with the title You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet seems like a goad to premature eulogists. As Resnais would be turning 90 a fortnight after the film’s Cannes premiere last year, many journalists in attendance presumptuously deemed it to be the final entry in his storied seven-decade career, conveniently ignoring the fact that Resnais was in the development stages of another adaptation of an Alan Ayckbourn play (following the 1993 Smoking/No Smoking and the 2006 Coeurs). With Resnais now paired with Manoel de Oliveira on the notional shortlist of active filmmakers working in extremis—and after a Huppert-led jury perversely denied him a gilded branch in 2009 in favor of a makeshift lifetime achievement award—there was a wholly unwarranted air of the posthumous about You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, which is as eccentric and alive as its immediate predecessor.

Mortality, however, is very much on the film’s mind. During a four-minute overture, the cast of Resnais veterans (Lambert Wilson, Anne Consigny, Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, Mathieu Amalric, et al.) as well as a couple of newcomers (Hippolyte Girardot and Michel Robin), all playing themselves, are leisurely introduced in voiceover as they are each notified that their former director and close friend Antoine d’Anthac (Denis Podalydès) has died, and are invited by his faithful butler (Andrzej Seweryn) to gather for the obsequies at the departed’s Pantheonic mansion in Peillon. There, after the assembled throng is seated in front of the world’s most ostentatious HDTV wall-mount, the Butler (in the Study, with the Remote Control) presents a video in which their late friend asks them to watch a videotaped rehearsal for his new production of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice. As he had previously cast all of the gathered mourners in various productions of the piece, he declares that it is up to them to decide whether or not this final testament is worthy enough to be allowed a public performance.

From this point on, the majority of the film is devoted to a reverent recitation of Anouilh’s ’30s-set updating of the Orphic myth, featuring an ironical and promiscuous Eurydice as a member of a travelling acting troupe and a rebellious Orpheus who, though still possessed of his musical gifts, is quite far distant from his mythological forebear’s fauna-charming divinity. But the first 15 minutes of You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet are themselves derived from Anouilh’s 1969 Dear Antoine, or The Love That Failed, written nearly three decades after Eurydice, the later work here serving as a proscenium for the earlier. Resnais thus embeds the theme of senescence within the textual matter of the film itself—Anouilh wrote Eurydice at 31, youth receding; Dear Antoine at 59, dotage approaching—and in that intertextual contrast offers a sly mirror image of his own metatextual method. Dear Antoine marks a period when Anouilh had largely abandoned the revisionist classicism of his earlier modernizations of Greek mythology such as Médée, Antigone, and, of course, Eurydice, in favour of experiments with alter-ego protagonists, meta-structures, and coups de théâtre. While Anouilh’s formal tinkering is ultimately subsidiary to his plays’ larger concerns, it’s hardly difficult to perceive what initially drew Resnais to these works, or the productively dynamic tension—both formal and temporal—he divined in their juxtaposition.

Just as Resnais has the elder Anouilh answering to the younger—and apropos for a film that is very much attuned to the melancholic inevitability of generational torch-passing—so he himself hands part of his film over to a more youthful partner: French filmmaker Bruno Podalydès (brother of Denis, and whose Adieu Berthe also played on the Croisette last year), who directed the production of Eurydice that Resnais’ actors watch on the monitor. Given carte blanche by Resnais in his casting and staging of this effectively autonomous production, Podalydès (who also shot the scrappy late-night television program that appears in Coeurs) created a full-length adaptation of Eurydice that can most readily be situated within the aesthetics of avant-garde theatre, a mode decidedly unlike either Resnais’ or Podalydès’ prior work. Set in a large abandoned warehouse, with empty oil barrels comprising the majority of the props, Podalydès’ Eurydice features actors pantomiming performances on musical instruments that we hear but don’t see, and a gigantic pendulum perpetually swinging through the space like a wrecking ball. We see only brief segments of Podalydès’ effort, however, as Resnais’ baker’s dozen soon begin to reprise their respective roles from Eurydice, reciting their lines in sync with the actors in the video—the ghosts of performances past, as per the intertitles that Resnais swipes from Nosferatu (1922), coming forth to present themselves.

As Jonathan Rosenbaum once posited, Resnais’ films bear a likeness to sculpture in their “shapeliness” and “powerful multiplicity of meanings”; in You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, by contrast, Resnais reshapes Anouilh’s linear narrative into an epically Cubist structure, no additional vantage points necessary. As Resnais’ players who can recall their past lives break into their dialogue as if by reflex memory, they create a new, parallel dramatic plane to that on the television, sharing its time and space but evincing its own, entirely distinct aesthetic vocabulary. This isn’t only a matter of the contrasting production formats, Podalydès’ Eurydice shot in HD video while Resnais opts for celluloid (“I have an aversion to digital”): as the actors are summarily possessed by their former roles, the screening room becomes a spotlit stage, doors open onto railway platforms, and walls and floors glide inharmoniously around them courtesy of the most intentionally abject application of greenscreen this side of Cosmopolis (2012).

Yet despite the predictably loquacious proceedings, and for all of Resnais and Anouilh’s preoccupations with the incorporeal nature of consciousness and the passing of time, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet sees Resnais closely attuned to his players’ physicality. Within the magical, hyper-dimensional space he’s conjured, he orchestrates his actors’ movements in a manner akin to contemporary dance: the particularly expressive Azéma/Eurydice and Arditi/Orpheus heave themselves onto furniture, each other, and through wavering artificial spaces, then dejectedly drag, cradle, and discard one another in expressively heightened and operatic gestures, as if language has become wholly inadequate and bodily contact is the only means by which to express the earnestness of their emotions. To see actors of such wide-ranging generations embody characters written to be wistful, naïve, and immature—that is, young—is uncanny and affecting. “Our story is beginning,” whispers Anouilh’s Orpheus, eternally young in all his manifold (re)incarnations even when he speaks his ardour through raspy voices and wrinkled bodies, Resnais’ beautifully aged instruments gracefully, sublimely prolonging the radiance of callow romance.

How the 90-Year-Old Alain Resnais Preserves the Past While Forging ... Steve Greene from indieWIRE, February 22, 2013

Testament of Orpheus: Alain Resnais' "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" on ... Boris Nelepo from Mubi, June 4, 2012

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet - Reverse Shot Jordan Cronk, June 3, 2013

Alain Resnais's “You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, June 7, 2013

White City Cinema [Michael Smith] March 18, 2013

Review: Alain Resnais' 'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!' | IndieWire Peter Labuza, June 6, 2013

Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet | Film Review - Spectrum Culture Jesse Cataldo

Master filmmaker Alain Resnais, still elusive at 90 | Bleader Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader, March 21, 2013

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet - The AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet Contemporizes a Classic ... - Village Voice Calum Marsh, June 7, 2013

Some Came Running: The discreet obscurity of Alain Resnais Glenn Kenny, October 10, 2012

Screen International [Jonathan Romney] Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Last works and wakes: Alain Resnais in the underworld Amy Taubin from The Sight & Sound blog, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Sight & Sound: Amy Taubin

CANNES REVIEW: Alain Resnais' 'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!' is an ... Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Eric Kohn

Cannes 2012. Alain Resnais' "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" on ... - Mubi Daniel Kasman, May 24, 2012

SBS Film [Shane Danielsen]

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet : a strange rendez-vous - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Fabien Lemercier

The House Next Door [Budd Wilkins] at Cannes, May 22, 2012, also seen here: Cannes Film Festival 2012: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Cannes 2012, Day Six: Alain Resnais does his Prairie Home Companion, and amateur sleuths comb obsessively through The Shining. Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 22, 2012

The Academic Hack: Michael Sicinski February 01, 2014

EatSleepLiveFilm.com [Paul Risker]

Master filmmaker Alain Resnais, still elusive at 90 Ben Sachs from The Reader

FRR [Michael Pattison]

CineVue [Ben Nicholson]

Movie Farm [Paul Anderson]

The L Magazine: Glenn Heath Jr. May 21, 2012

The New York Post: Farran Smith Nehme

Letterboxd: Preston Wilder

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Alain Resnais’s YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET! » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 22, 2012

Variety [Peter Debruge] at Cannes from Variety, also seen here: Peter Debruge

Time Out New York: Eric Hynes

Metro: Matt Prigge

Sitting on the Croisette, watching the auteurs go by... Barbara Scharres from the Ebert blog, May 21, 2012

'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet,' by Alain Resnais - The New York Times June 6, 2013

Reygadas, Carlos

Carlos Reygadas brief bio from biosstars

The History of Cinema. Carlos Reygadas: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi reviews

Carlos Reygadas Piero Scaruffi photo stills

Review: Battle in Heaven - Film Comment Frédéric Bonnaud, January/February 2006

The Strange, Sublime Art of Carlos Reygadas - Harvard Film Archive November 4, 2007

The Evening Class: SILENT LIGHT—Dim Sum With Carlos Reygadas Michael Guillen, December 13, 2007

The Films of Carlos Reygadas | Secrets of the City Erik McClanahan from Secrets of the City, May 6, 2008

Guilt and Absolution: Carlos Reygadas's 'Silent Light' | The Nation Stuart Klawans, January 8, 2009

Silent Light | Carlos Reygadas - Film Comment José Teodoro from Film Comment, January/February 2009

Carnal Spirituality: the Films of Carlos Reygadas • Senses of Cinema Tiago de Luca, July 11, 2010

Cinema Scope | Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico) Tom Charity, 2012

The Other Mexico through the Cinematic Eyes of Carlos Reygadas ... Samuel Manickam from the Center for Mennonite Writing, January 16, 2013

Filmmakers You Should Know: 'Post Tenebras Lux' Director Carlos ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, April 30, 2013

Someone Else's Memories - The New York Review of Books Francine Prose on Post Tenabras Lux, May 1, 2013

Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in the Films of Carlos Reygadas Kerry ... - Flow Kerry Hegarty from Flow Journal, December 2, 2013

The Auteurs: Carlos Reygadas | Cinema Axis NinVoid99, May 7, 2014

Approaching Carlos Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux (2012 ... Troy Bordun from Photogénie, May 30, 2014

Director Carlos Reygadas at the Colombo film festival: But what is ... Saman Gunadasa from The World Socialist Web Site, November 18, 2014

Sex and Death in Mexico: The Films of Carlos Reygadas – Glasstire Richard Bailey, August 19, 2015

Death, time and the possibilities of renewal in Carlos Reygadas' Silent ... Ian Tan from Offscreen, April 2016

Carlos Reygadas interview by Peter Fraser, Close-Up Film Interview with Reygadas and lead actress Anapola Mushkadiz, 2005

'I am the only normal director' | Film | The Guardian Interview by Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian, August 22, 2005

Battle in Heaven - Interview: Carlos Reygadas • Director - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier interview, October 14, 2005

Film-makers on film: Carlos Reygadas - Telegraph Sheila Johnston interview on Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), October 29, 2005

Battle in Heaven: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas • Senses of ... Interview by Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, February 7, 2006

Errata: Reygadas on Battle in Heaven Robert Davis interview, January 1, 2007

Silent Light or Absolute Miracle: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas at ... Karin Luisa Badt interview from Bright Lights Film Journal, August 1, 2007, an excerpt seen here: Parisvoice - Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light"

The Carlos Reygadas guide to cinema | Film | The Guardian Phil Hoad interview, December 7, 2007

SILENT LIGHT—Two Questions for Carlos Reygadas - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen interview, December 15, 2007

Time Out London interviews Carlos Reygadas About His New Film ... David Jenkins interview from Time Out London, 2009

Redemption, Religion, and Reconsideration with ... - Village Voice Scott Foundas interview, January 7, 2009

Carlos Reygadas on Cinema « Hot Splice a collection of excerpts from recent interview by Adam at Hot Splice, March 25, 2009

Silent Light: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas — Cineaste Magazine José Teodoro interview, Spring 2009

Carlos Reygadas' films search for authenticity beyond reality - latimes Reed Johnson interview, April 24, 2009

The Disturbing Vision of Director Carlos Reygadas : "Life is Magic ... Karin Luisa Badt interview from The Huffington Post, August 28, 2009

BOMB Magazine — Carlos Reygadas by Jose Castillo Jose Castillo interview, Spring 2010

Cannes Film Festival: Loud Boos Don't Faze Carlos Reygadas - The ... Dennis Lim interview from The New York Times, May 27, 2012

Interview: Carlos Reygadas on Post Tenebras Lux | Feature | Slant ... Anna Bielak interview from Slant magazine, June 1, 2012

Carlos Reygadas: in defence of Post Tenebras Lux | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver interview, March 14, 2013

Interview with Filmmaker Carlos Reygadas: Mexican Auteur Brings ... Andrew Alexander interview from Burnaway magazine, April 19, 2013

“I've Never Understood a Traditional Screenplay:” Carlos Reygadas ... David Barker interview from Filmmaker magazine, May 1, 2013

Carlos Reygadas on Existence, the Flow of Perception and the ... Carlos Reygadas on Existence, the Flow of Perception and the Feeling of Being Embraced, Paul Dallas interview from Extra Extra magazine (Undated)

Carlos Reygadas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sexual Transgressions of Carlos Reygadas – Filmscalpel Tope Ogundare Video essay (3:20)

Reygadas: Maxhumain 1999 short film on YouTube (6:20), also seen here: Silent Light Director Carlos Reygadas Goes to the Beach, Works ...

JAPÓN A- 94

Mexico Germany Netherlands Spain (130 mi) 2002 ‘Scope

A terrific film, from the opening scene leaving the city and the traffic jam through the light in the tunnel into the open spaces of the country to the soft, percussive, ethereal music of Shostakovich, the last notes written to his final 15th Symphony, notes that evoke a sense of spiritual transport from one living reality to another, as if from life to death...

The film brings back memories of Carlos Castaneda, and various "other" ways of seeing things, specifically the scene when he gets drunk, and people become spherical shapes out of focus, bodies all in a blur, similar to Castaneda's imagery of seeing past the physical realities into the illumination the human spirit...

...the music of Bach always represents the sacred, and in that scene, the village oom-pa dance music interferes with his hearing of the sounds of the sacred, the two sounds briefly intermix in his mind until he violently smashes the radio, causing him to get kicked out of the bar...

...he is no longer a part of that town's reality

I also liked how there were two halves to this story, he was primarily the focus of the first half, up to the moment when he is on the cliff and about to take his life, instead he lies down next to the dead horse, seemingly discarding his old persona and all things earthly, in a Bressonian gesture similar to the final scene of AU HAZARD BALTHAZAR (1966), then the second half allows for his spiritual ascension thru the actions of Ascen, who willingly sacrifices what little she has for the benefit of others, even for her low-life relatives, in order that he (they) may be transformed. The final train sequence is perfectly choreographed to the music of Arvo Pärt, and his “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” the sequence ends with the swirling camera finally straightening itself out, finding the dead body of the women simultaneous to the ringing of the final church bell ending the music, all the rest is silence

Japon - Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores, Yolanda Villa Phase 9

The film follows a man who -cynical and disillusioned - leaves Mexico City for the remote countryside to prepare for his death. There he finds lodging with an old Indian widow, Ascen in her rickety home, overlooking a desolate canyon. Shot in bleached out colour using a process called Super Cinemascope, blown up from 16mm to 35mm, Reygadas combines stunning vistas of scope with the increased mobility of the hand held 16mm camera to create powerful visuals including the sweeping 360 degree pans of the film's dramatic denouement. Reminiscent of Tarkovsky - Reygadas seminal cinematic inspiration - JAPÓN's visceral style and natural sound design evokes the physical and emotional ties between the characters, nature and the landscape.

Japon Gerald Peary

The New Cinema of Mexico marches on with Carlos Reygades' Japon, but don't anticipate an audience-chummy film in the vein of Amores Perres and Y Tu Mama Tambien. This extremely demanding, often accomplished, first feature comes from a 32-year-old filmmaker who, as he has explained in interviews, moved from girls and soccer at age 16 to being obsessed by the cinema of Andrey Tarkovsky.

Japon demonstrates Reygades's ode of allegiance to uncompromising, spiritually mesmerized European masters, and more than anyone else, I believe, to Robert Bresson and his grim, minimalist, hell-on-earth brand of Catholicism. (Note Reygades's use of Bresson's favored piece of music, Bach's The Passion of St.Matthew) But there's some Bunuel, too, in the unsentimentalized grotesque peasant cast; and the almost-endless final shot, the camera whirling round and around the characters, reminds me of the concluding moments of Herzog's Aguirre: the Wrath of God.

Here's the tale: an unnamed fading, weather-beaten Man (Alejandro Ferretis, who has the fried, melancholy demeanor of today's Al Pacino) picks his way through rural, non-tourist Mexico in search of a tiny village at the bottom of a canyon where he can rest for a bit, compose himself, and then commit suicide. He goes down, down, down, but after reaching the crude town, he retreats and goes up a bit (directions are very symbolic), climbing to a house on the edge of the canyon where he can rent a bed. He will sleep in the barn of an aging, arthritic woman whose name is Ascen (Magdalena Flores). Ascen: Ascent!

Ascen is one with the angels, a person who is as humble as she is naturally charitable. Slowly, the Man, who is unreligious, seems to discover some crack of hope from the company of this pious old lady, whose meagre home is pasted with pictures of Jesus. Meanwhile, each time he tries to shoot himself, he lacks the will. Lying on his cot (it was the bed of Ascen's husband), he has eerie sexual dreams, and they involve Ascen. Ascen? We see her kiss an image of the Messiah smack on the mouth. Can her Christianity also resuscitate the Man through a sacrificial act of fornication?

Bunuel was an atheist, Bresson a devout believer, but both made cinema in which the do-gooders of the earth are defeated and crushed every time by the rabble. Reygades sets up Ascen as his Bunuel/Bresson sacrificial lamb, and all her kindness can't deter the slovenly, drunken, heathen villagers from literally knocking down her house. But is God watching? The filled-with-dead-bodies last shot of the movie can be read, I think, as the Lord taking his mighty revenge. For a split second, the Heavens reveal themselves: how Bressonian!

And the title, Japon? That is never revealed. It's the ultimate mystery in this most cryptic and yet compelling of Mexican movies.

Austin360 Movies: 'Japon' Reviews - Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis from The LA Times, May 15, 2003

There are all sorts of reasons we go to the movies -- to be soothed or excited or to hide out in the dark -- but at their most sublime, film transports us out of the here and the now. It sounds corny to talk about transcendence and the movies, especially when the medium and its rituals have become so desecularized, yet the promise that a picture will carry us away sustains the movie lover's faith. Some filmmakers give us dreams and false worlds in which we can find refuge. For others, though, like the young Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, the movies aren't an escape from the world but a way more deeply into it.

A blast from the art-house movie past, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky with a spiritual jolt of Robert Bresson, Reygadas' stunning first feature, "Japón," is about love, death, sex, faith, redemption and mankind's domination over nature, along with the great glories of 16mm 'Scope. The film takes place in a remote area in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, where the locals remain exotically untutored in the lingua franca of pop culture, the language that's enabled recent releases such as "Y Tu Mamá También" to cross national borders with ease. Yet what makes "Japón" most "foreign" (beyond its cryptic name) aren't the images of peasants drinking fermented agave juice or the miasma of Catholic and Indian mysticism that hangs over the story like mist, but Reygadas' determination that his movie aspire to the condition of art.

The film opens with a familiar snapshot of our dehumanizing world -- cars racing along a multilane freeway -- before cutting to a stretch of desert in which an unnamed man (Alejandro Ferretis) has suddenly materialized. Helped by some local bird hunters and leaning on a cane, the man makes his way down into a canyon, where he finds shelter in a barn owned by an old widow, Ascen (Magdalena Flores), with a face and a manner as impenetrable as the landscape. As a child, the man would visit the canyon with his grandfather. Now, carrying a backpack stuffed with some clothes, an old revolver and a heavy art book, with a portable CD player usually tucked into one of his pockets, he has returned to the canyon to kill himself.

What happens next is nothing and everything. After meeting Ascen (her name, she explains, stands for Ascension, "which refers to Christ ascending into heaven with no one's help"), the man quickly settles into routine. He walks along the mountain paths, sits baking in the blasting sun, shares meals with Ascen and watches the locals tend their sheep and cultivate their fields. One afternoon he passes a joint to the old lady. Another day he wanders away from the house into a bar, where he gets loaded on mezcal. He dreams of a beautiful woman on an expanse of beach, stares at a pair of copulating horses and points the muzzle of his revolver at his chest. In time, the opaque, solitary figure that entered the story with no name, no past and no psychology becomes recognizably human.

Thoreau retreated from civilization as an experiment in simple living and, living at Walden Pond, discovered a deeper sense of self. But Reygadas' urban exile travels from the city into the countryside sealed off from life and hope. From the moment he lands on this dusty moonscape studded by shrubs, cactuses and Joshua trees, though, he is enveloped in a world of twittering birds and buzzing insects, a continuous drone that's periodically punctuated by a cacophony of clucking, crowing, braying and bleating. Reygadas underscores the connections between the man and the animal world with a brutal lack of sentimentalism that can be very hard to watch and, in the case of a pig being slaughtered, horrific to hear.

It's unlikely that "Japón," with its screaming (unseen) pig, will ever be PETA-approved, and there's no denying that Reygadas betrays an exploitative streak in a close-up image of a quivering torn-off dove's head. It's a terrible image, yet as an index of our inhumanity, is it any less terrible than a cut of meat aseptically wrapped in plastic? A hunter has botched the kill, mortally wounding the bird. A boy who's retrieved the quarry holds the animal and forlornly tells the man that his hands aren't strong enough to finish the job. The man summarily rips off the bird's head. A short while later, after taking leave of the hunters, the man encounters a different boy aiming a slingshot at a tree. "Do you eat those birds?" the man asks, prompting the boy to lower his weapon.

That rebuke is the film's saving grace and central to its moral economy -- we are of the natural world, not above or beyond it. In Reygadas' wide-screen framing, faces loom as monumentally as the surrounding mountains, but they never take precedence over them. When the man goes walking one day and slips on a rock, a drop of his blood falls next to a beetle just before he and the bug are pelted with rain. The harsh beauty of the arid landscape makes a fitting backdrop for a religious allegory about a man whose gaunt cheeks and long, heavy nose give him the appearance of a Byzantine Christ. Yet while there are biblical parallels here, "Japón" fundamentally concerns a man who recovers his humanness by immersing himself in nature. The closer he comes to nature, the closer he comes to his own deeper self.

American movies tend to steer clear of topics like redemption, which is why, like Woody Allen, we're often more comfortable being "at two with nature." Today we seem embarrassed when movies bite off the big stuff -- like how to be good -- even if it's the big stuff that sends some of us to weekend services and still others onto a shrink's couch. We've become suspicious of ideas and deep feeling, and woe to the movie that takes itself seriously. Unlike a lot of young filmmakers, the 31-year-old Reygadas takes his ideas about the world and our place in it as seriously as his filmmaking ambitions. That makes him something of a throwback, but it also marks him as one of the most promising directors to hit the international scene in years.

André Bazin wrote that the world of Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini "is a world of pure acts, unimportant in themselves but preparing the way (as if unbeknownst to God himself) for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning." For Bazin, Rossellini's films were a way of seeing the world's glory. I think he would have thought the same of "Japón."

JAPÓN (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) | Dennis Grunes

Back to Nature | Village Voice J. Hoberman, March 18, 2003

(Trans)National Images and Cinematic Spaces: the cases of Alfonso ... 15-page essay, (Trans)National Images and Cinematic Spaces: the cases of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001) and Carlos Reygadas’ Japón (2002), by Deborah Shaw

The Other Mexico through the Cinematic Eyes of Carlos Reygadas ... Samuel Manickam from the Center for Mennonite Writing, January 16, 2013

The Tarkovsky legacy: Andrei Tarkovsky and his arthouse impact - BFI Japon listed at #7, Nick James from Sight and Sound, November 2015

All This Useful Beauty | Village Voice Mark Peranson at Cannes, June 4, 2002

Film Freak Central [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish]

DVD Times Noel Megahey

Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4.5/5]

Monsters At Play Christopher Hyatt

Offoffoff, the guide to alternative New York Mariana Carre-O’King

Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]

The Big Chiller Peter Rainer from New York magazine

Carlos Reygadas' Japón: immanent cinema? » Reviews and analysis ... Gravity 7

BBC Films review Tom Dawson

FILM REVIEW; A Tale of Harsh Lands and Hard Truths - The New York ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times

DVDBeaver dvd review Nick Wrigley

Japon (Carlos Reygadas) - the opening on YouTube (2:51)

Japón - Final (7:47)

BATTLE IN HEAVEN (Batalla en el cielo)

Spain (98 mi) 2005

Battle in Heaven Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

First off, following the scenic isolation of Japon, Reygadas surprised me with just how urban this film is. Mexico City isn't a "character" in this film, the way critics like to describe locales which impress their uniqueness upon the storyline. But Battle in Heaven does seem to stem in part from the day-to-day facts of living in one of the most economically stratified metropolises in the world. And whereas Japon partook of the physical world in order to generate elemental metaphors for its protagonist's mental anguish -- Remember the helicopter shot with the dead horse? I thought you would. --, the follow-up takes leaves from the book of Bruno Dumont, fixating on the sweaty carnality of the material world. Marcos and his wife are lower class and corpulent, and Marcos is exploring various faulty avenues by which to escape his station. This is not only economic; through his relationship (of sorts) with rich young Ana, Marcos appears to want to overcome not only his status as a social undesirable, but the basic rules of decorum. Reygadas seems to be taking the Dumontian fixation on the body into the Catholic realm, exploring its one-way insistence on the flesh as an instrument of suffering. Thematically the film is undoubtedly muddled, although its "shocking" final minutes are of a piece with its overall thrust. But Reygadas' primary accomplishment is his seemingly effortless generation of striking images. It overreaches, certainly (the last shot prior to the epilogue is the Mexican flag being lowered!), but it never fails to provoke. [SECOND VIEWING: My basic opinion of the film remains guardedly high, but this time around I think I see Reygadas' strategies a little more clearly. With his non-actors and general lack of affect, he's dipping into Bresson, but placing that approach in an incongruous context. Mexican religiosity is different, to say the least, from Bresson's chilly Jansenism. Plus, Reygadas (by admission) is equally in thrall to Herzog's expressionist gestures. So, when Marcos climbs the hill and stands, Caspar David Friedrich-like, against the sky, he can't have a Herzogian commune with nature and its sublimnity, since the adjacent hills have already been claimed by Christianity. Barring any spiritual or material satisfaction in this life, Marcos, naturally, prepares for the final battle in you-know-where.]

Review: Battle in Heaven - Film Comment Frédéric Bonnaud, January/February 2006

Above all, bodies and races: when I try to understand why this film has been so violently rejected, those are the first words that come to mind. To begin a film with a fellatio scene is nothing. That's been a permissible audacity for a long time. But if the guy is obese and half-caste, and the girl beautiful and white, well, that's a scandal: not that cock in that mouth! Anything but naive, Carlos Reygadas obviously knew exactly what he was doing, and the violent reaction of a portion of the critics at Cannes gave the measure of the provocation. In Battle in Heaven, it's this double linkage of ugliness/beauty and poverty/wealth that provokes the critical avalanche. Marcos is only a servant, the chauffeur employed by the parents of Ana, the young girl who tenderly sucks him off. To depict the poor fucking each other (Marcos and his even more obese wife) is acceptable, but miscegenation isn't. Reygadas knows it, so he decides to have fun and to push things as far as possible. But this provocation is far from gratuitous, and the mystery of Ana and Marcos's relationship lies at the heart of the film. "We still want to know why this pretty, young rich girl wants to suck off this fat, filthy guy!" one viewer—my mother no less—told me, particularly exasperated with the movie. And hereís the real scandal: the two have known each other forever! Marcos is Ana's oldest friend. He has been her driver since she was little, formerly taking her to school, now to the airport. She has confided her secrets to him, told him all the bad things about her parentsóheís a regular living diary, this Marcos. How long has he been in love with Ana? And for how long has he been the most stable element in Anaís life, the rich kid whoís so bored that she prostitutes herself to pass the time? I figured all this out myself, on the basis of several scraps of information. Reygadas doesnít try for a standard psychological portrait with the obligatory childhood memories and well-established sentimental relations, and he leaves it to the audience to fill in the blanks and imagine this curious love for themselves.

As a result, each sequence in Battle in Heaven becomes a unit that has to be decrypted and rearranged. No psychology here, just a comment on the state of a society with its superstructures (army, religion, police, football as a mass spectacle), its horrors that have become banal (the kidnapping of children), and a class divide that continues to deepen. Love is also subject to the relations of production. And this is an old story, not good to recall in this era of ebbing hope.

But what's most unforgivable to Battle in Heaven's detractors is the lyricism that is set free in the film. If Reygadas were a true young Marxist, heíd be given a lot more leeway. After all, he comes from a poor and oppressed country with a moribund film industry that once was glorious. And don't forget, Straub is also a lyrical Marxist. But he works with a noble high culture and makes it his primary material. In his films the bodies of the poor are always glorious; they stand firmly on their feet, endowed with powerful words. Whereas Reygadas makes a bit too much of it and can never resist going for an effect. He exercises a consciously popular lyricism, ultimately closer to Leone than Tarkovsky. The resulting beauty approaches bad taste and could easily be qualified as "the splendor of the mall." As with all seducers, and as Jean Renoir used to emphasize, it wouldn't take much for him to become odious. But how can you resist a filmmaker who uses an old Spanish saeta as if it was an unpublished Ennio Morricone theme? Is real beauty ever pure?

Battle in Heaven by Carlos Reygadas | Emanuel Levy

The fusion of art and graphic sex is an uncomfortable subject for testy critics and cinesnobs. They don't care to admit they've been aroused by some of the daring—sometimes titillating, if not always useful—depictions of sexual intercourse film culture has seen in the last decade: Yekaterina Golubeva sucking off Guillaume Depardieu in Pola X, Kerry Fox lovingly fluffing Mark Rylance in Intimacy, Chloë Sevigny's hungry mouth devouring Vincent Gallo's cock in The Brown Bunny, and Ricardo Menses getting expert oral treatment from a trick in O Fantasma. Imagine a theater fire during a screening of 9 Songs, specifically midway through any penetration scene between Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley. Would the men run for the exits or stay behind, choosing death so as not to have to relive that mythologized grade-school nightmare of walking up to the chalkboard while pitching tents?

Carlos Reygadas, the breakout director of 2002's moody and primitive Japón, understands this sense of unease. With his 2005 flamethrower Battle in Heaven he connects our discomfort viewing graphic sex to a daring critique of a country's complicity in a man's frustrated social situation. Reygadas provokes—calmly, not thuggishly—our contempt for his film's radical aesthetic patterns and explicit sexual nature, suggesting our anxiety with the text's essential unconventionality is tantamount to racism, bodyism, and anti-artism. Take the film's first image: a sexy, lean, and outré general's daughter, Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), performs oral sex on her driver, Marcos (Hernández), a fat, dark-skinned, unattractive proletariat man. I gather most would rather watch O'Brien and Stilley go at it in 9 Songs (or see Ana go at it with her ridiculously attractive boyfriend), but the point of Battle in Heaven is to confront us with the things we'd rather not see.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's final films took France's moral and spiritual pulse through their mystical dissections of the colors of the country's flag. In the 1960s, Vilgot Sjöman similarly examined a modern Swede nation with I Am Curious (Yellow) and its sequel I Am Curious (Blue). Now, Reygadas subjects Mexico to similar scrutiny, and though he shares Kieslowski's flare for mysticism and Sjöman's intellectual curiosity, he's more evasive than either man: he'll never admit to being explicitly concerned with the meaning of the green, white, and red that colors his country's flag. Like Lisandro Alonso, Reygadas practices a form of cinema absentia, conveying dramatic incident and moral terror through unconventional means. For him, what lies beyond the frame is often more important than what lurks within, and his totemic obsession with the close-up positions Battle in Heaven as a force that demands serious reckoning.

9 Songs was sexy but meant nothing. Battle in Heaven is unattractive but meaningful. The necessary information the audience needs to parse Reygadas's inquisition of an inextricable personal and political tragedy is revealed elliptically—through inflections of speech, frank displays of emotions, and the physical movement of Reygadas's camera and actors. The class rift between Ana and Marcos is not only obvious in the way they look and carry themselves, but is implicit in the way they fuck (like a sculptor chipping away at the statue of his own creation, Reygadas spots Marco's pain beneath his orgasmic expressions), the dialects they speak, and the revolutions they enact. Ana is confident, rich, and ostensibly bored, which might explain why she takes up prostitution—it's a little girl's "fuck you" to the daddy that isn't there. He's poor and, along with his wife, kidnaps a child that dies under their watch; it's an equally intense reaction to a more terrifying sense of emptiness.

Reygadas likens our disgust for his nonchalant sex scenes as a form of political reticence. Notice the differences between the film's two major sex scenes: in one, Marcos lies passive beneath the controlling Ana; in the other, Marcos fucks his wife from behind, their rolls of fat jiggling up and down. The less appealing sex scene (guess which one?) ends with a loving hug, the other with an extreme close-up of Marcos's uncircumcised penis losing its erection. Reygadas has a gift for weighty parallelism and Battle in Heaven not only comes with one but two sets of bookends: a pair of blowjobs. Early on, the Mexican flag is hoisted into the air; later, when Marco's fate has been sealed, the flag goes flaccid. Beyond these two scenes appears two recapitulations of the same oral sex scene. In one, Ana goes down on Marcos, his cock sheathed in a condom; in the second, no condom is involved, but the cock is clearly a prosthetic. To the very end, the film is committed to conveying a modern tragedy of personal and political negation through sexual pageantry.

Battle In Heaven (Batalla En El Cielo) | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Peter Brunette in Cannes

Following on the heels of his demanding but brilliant first feature, Japon, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas now bulls his way into the Cannes competition line-up to give us another exceptionally ambitious aesthetic effort. While it doesn't always work - and critical opinion is sure to be violently split - it's immensely striking and quite powerful overall.

Some distributors (and audiences) will be attracted by the film's plethora of nudity and its variety of sexual encounters, but presented as they are in Reygadas' trademark warts-and-all fashion, they will surely turn off those whose interests are primarily prurient. Discerning viewers able to transcend this level, however, will discover the same attempt to convey an authenticity of being that was the hallmark of Italian neo-realism. What Reygadas adds to the mix is an intense viscerality that seems utterly new.

The plot is simple and, frankly, not very believable, especially given the way it's tossed out at odd moments in random lines of dialogue. The film opens as the fat and not very attractive Carlos (Hernandez), chauffeur for a general, heads to an airport to pick up his employer’s beautiful daughter Ana (Mushkadiz).

She asks instead to be delivered to the brothel she secretly works in; Carlos reveals to her that he and his wife (Ruiz) have kidnapped the baby of a friend in order to extort ransom money. Alas, the baby has died and Carlos is wracked with guilt, though this does not keep him from having sex with Ana.

By the end, he has joined a religious procession, hooded and on his knees, to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Mexican national shrine, in order to seek spiritual relief.

For the most part the actors seem to be non-professionals, with the exception of Mushkadiz chosen for their expressive physiognomy and richly corpulent bodies rather than for any presumed acting ability. Like the neo-realists, Reygadas seeks to put being itself on display, and revels especially in the truth of the human body. To achieve this, he peppers his film with a steady stream of close-ups, as often on extraneous parts of the body - say, a waist or a shoulder - as on the more traditional face shots.

The religious longings expressed in the film recall Rossellini's similar mix of realism and spirituality in The Miracle and in Stromboli, which had the admittedly easier to look at Anna Managni and Ingrid Bergman at their centres.

At the same time, though, this ultra-realism results in a kind of hyper-artificiality that produces an obviously purposeful stylised effect. Here the prototype seems to be Antonioni more than Rossellini, and this is nowhere clearer than in a gorgeous shot late in the film when Carlos disappears into a bank of fog, like Monica Vitti in Red Desert.

Also like Antonioni, Reygadas relies on the expressive power of images, on the graphic meaning of shapes and forms, even if they are not clearly motivated by the narrative or psychological realism. Similarly, he is unafraid to insert overt (some might say heavy-handed) symbolism, like some bells that fail to ring, when needed.

The film is structured around a set of various oppositions. Starting with crowded cityscapes of an apparently unliveable Mexico City, it then moves in the second half into some breathtaking landscapes of the countryside. A 360-degree shot of the city is rhymed by a similar shot later in the mountains.

There is also an opposition between youth and beauty, on the one hand, represented by Ana, and old age and ugliness, on the other, represented by Carlos and his wife. The explicit sex scenes throw these oppositions so violently in viewers' faces that many will be revolted, but perhaps even more will welcome the turn away from the even more depressing unreality of Hollywood glamour.

Even more interesting is the socio-political critique that the film subtly sketches. Shots of the military are seen throughout the film, and all the religious images are accompanied by symbols of the state, principally the Mexican flag, in a way that recalls Eisenstein's linking of these two entities in some close-ups in Battleship Potemkin.

It's unclear, however, exactly what Reygadas' political point is, other than to imply that what we have seen in the first half of the film (kidnapping, prostitution, urban anomie) is somehow related to what we see in the second half, the pomp of state and religion (along with national football) intertwined to keep the masses from taking more forceful steps to end their misery. (The religious song we hear near the end expressly asks for 'peace' for the poor rather than justice.)

Many of Reygadas' effects are ostentatious, and it's clear that he does not lack for artistic self-confidence. For example, the very opening shot, a close-up on Carlos' face that gradually moves backward to reveal that he is being fellated by Ana, is accompanied by an overwrought passage in the musical score that calls too much attention to itself. At another moment, he seems to be taunting the audience by blasting Bach during a scene at a petrol station, only to reveal that the sound is coming from the station itself.

Still, the very gutsiness and ambition on display here are surely better than the tepid television movies that sometimes pass for art films at Cannes. Better to try for something and fail than never to try at all.

by Pedro Butcher Battle in Heaven, Pedro Butcher from Cinema Scope

The films of Carlos Reygadas can be seen as a tough reaction to the omnipresence of melodrama in Latin culture. Beginning on the radio and eventually ending up as a TV staple, melodrama became the force behind a genre-driven movie industry that grew in the ’40s and ’50s, achieving wide commercial success in South America and even the US, where some theatres showed exclusively Mexican films (like those of Emilio “Indio” Fernandez, who received a well-deserved homage in this year’s Cannes Classics section). Even a prestigious director like Arturo Ripstein, the last of the Mexican habitués in Cannes, used melodrama—though rationalized and re-elaborated—as the basis of his work.

But then came Japón (2002), Reygadas’ feature début, which pointed out possible new directions for Mexican cinema. As he has confirmed even more firmly in Battle in Heaven, the first Mexican film to compete in Cannes since 1999, tear-jerking naturalism is not his concern. By denying melodrama and, even more, its variations in the form of magic realism, Reygadas struggles to broaden the field of audiovisual expression in Latin America while searching for a personal language. And he also seems to bear his own influence, as seen in the Un Certain Regard entry Sangre, by Amat Escalante, his assistant director: in Sangre, watching telenovelas is as much part of a Mexican’s daily life as sex and meals, but the mise en sc è ne owes more to Reygadas than the rest of Mexican cinema.

Though Reygadas’ filmic influences are from the European tradition, it doesn’t mean he has closed his eyes to his own reality. While the more abstract Japón strived for universality, Battle in Heaven is very much Mexican and Latin American, reflecting some of its most complex issues with a very straightforward approach. If Japón was settled in a deserted, rarefied landscape where a man preparing to kill himself regains his will to live by designing a pathway from death to life, Battle in Heaven is an urban tragedy that, on the contrary, takes the road from life to death.

The film’s central character is Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), a private security agent who undertakes two terrible, violent acts. The first one occurs just before the film begins. With his wife, Marcos kidnapped a baby—from one of his neighbours, or maybe a relative—and the baby somehow died. The second violent act, which will initiate the process of his destruction, and is preceded by a foreshadowing 360-degree pan, is one of the most disturbing scenes in recent cinema. The first two-thirds of Battle in Heaven are shot mostly in widescreen, interior close-ups, to give greater impact to the final third, which frames Mexico City in beautiful, almost frightening wide shots. The megalopolis, with its population of 20 million and its monumental Our Lady of Guadalupe basilica, is the via crucis where Marcos will engender his brutal self-punishment.

Like Brazilian Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha, Reygadas translates Latin America ’s conflicted soul into cinemaby employing a particular baroque style. We should understand “baroque” in the sense of a relation of Heaven and Earth: he’s not talking about redemption, but about religion as a ritualistic, concrete phenomenon, directly related to the body. That’s why sex becomes so important for Reygadas. He starts Battle in Heaven with a much-discussed fellatio scene, accompanied by music of epic proportions. But what we see isn’t at all erotic. It’s much more an effort to isolate the body of his main character and, at the same time, penetrate the film’s heart: his relation with a young woman that will be decisive for the film’s conclusion.

Some could argue that Reygadas’ efforts aren’t at all new due to that strong European imprint—the most obvious influences being Bresson, Dreyer, and Tarkovsky. But the clash of Mexican reality with these directors’ formal devices, such as Bresson’s use of non-actors and his materialist approach, or Dreyer’s mysterious framing and dialogue, produces an almost “foreign”—yet never exotic—point of view. Tarkovsky, the most obvious presence in Japón, reappears in Battle in Heaven as a more discreet but beautiful reference, with the final shots of the church bells strongly alluding to Andrei Rublev (1969). And the sometime-Mexican Luis Buñuel is another inevitable reference, with the Belle de Jour-like (1967) female lead (a beautiful upper-class girl who secretly works as a prostitute) and the Viridiana-inspired (1961) approach to religious issues.

Reygadas once said that “the good cinema spectator is not the one that goes to cinema to escape from life, but the one that goes to cinema to live.” Cinema, for him, is not a closed system, but an interpretation of the world. Therefore, his set of "influences" reflect much more than a passion to the movies. They express a philosophical point of view. In Reygadas' hands, these references are more than empty postmodern resources; they are tools with which he tries to build a personal interpretation of the madness of the world in a Latin American context.

Battle in Heaven Bryant Frazier from Deep Focus

Silent Light - Notorious - Good -- New York Magazine Movie Review David Edelstein, January 11, 2009

The Other Mexico through the Cinematic Eyes of Carlos Reygadas ... Samuel Manickam from the Center for Mennonite Writing, January 16, 2013

New York Sun [James Bowman]

PopMatters Ryan Vu

My Blue Heaven | Village Voice J. Hoberman, May 17, 2005

Deeper Throat | Village Voice Michael Atkinson, February 7, 2006

DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish]

Battle in Heaven George Wu

The Agony of Ecstasy—Two Nights With Carlos Reygadas: Battle In ... Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, February 19, 2006

filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

Battle In Heaven | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

DVD Talk [Preston Jones]

Monsters At Play Christopher Hyatt

Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, February 16, 2006

Culture Wars [Dean Nicholas]

Cinematical [Christopher Campbell]

About.com [Jurgen Fauth]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Passport Cinema [A.J. Hakari]

Japón (2002) | Screens on High

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Cinema Scope | Global Discoveries on DVD | Conspicuously Absent ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 19, 2014

Carlos Reygadas interview by Peter Fraser, Close-Up Film Interview with Reygadas and lead actress Anapola Mushkadiz, 2005

'I am the only normal director' | Film | The Guardian Interview by Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian, August 22, 2005

Battle in Heaven - Interview: Carlos Reygadas • Director - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier interview, October 14, 2005

Film-makers on film: Carlos Reygadas - Telegraph Sheila Johnston interview on Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), October 29, 2005

Battle in Heaven: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas • Senses of ... Interview by Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, February 7, 2006

Errata: Reygadas on Battle in Heaven Robert Davis interview, January 1, 2007

Variety.com [Deborah Young]

Japon, Cannes film festival | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm

San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]

L.A. Weekly: Scott Foundas February 15, 2006

The New York Times: Manohla Dargis February 17, 2006

DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]

Battle in Heaven / Batalla en el cielo dir. Car... Promo Trailer (music Born Yesterday by Rob Dougan) on YouTube (3:25)

SILENT LIGHT (Stellet Licht) A- 94

Mexico France Netherlands Germany (144 mi) 2007 ‘Scope U.S. version (136 mi) Official site

Another challenging film that requires a great deal of patience, an artistic leap for this director, who has previously been unhesitant to show graphic sexual detail, to the extreme in some instances, but tones it down here to reflect the subject matter. Shot in ‘Scope, there’s a Bruno Dumont sense of detail and severity on people’s faces, which is shown with complete detachment. Without any backstory to describe where we are, opening in the cosmos before settling down to a time-lapsed sunrise, using long static shots with plenty of sounds of cows, we follow the minimalist rhythms of what appears to be a well run farm, with automatic milking machines for the cows where an older couple can easily complete their rounds within a few minutes of real time (a sequence deleted from the U.S. version), and we are introduced to roads cutting through a vast flat landscape of dried up corn fields and various people, most always surrounded by large numbers of well behaved children. A clue is the prayerful introduction to breakfast, as the parents as well as their family of six children sit silently in their own meditations for what feels like several minutes before the father concludes the silence with an Amen. With such abject politeness, the women wearing scarves over their heads, and everyone speaking in the same Germanic sounding dialect, we are as far removed from the bleak Sátántangó farm collective as we could possibly be, as everything here appears to be in proper order.

It turns out we are in a Mennonite community near Chihuahua in northern Mexico, where the family father Johan comes to visit his own father (a farmer and preacher), explaining that he has found a new love, but needs his father’s help to know what to do. But when the father (a preacher) starts preaching about the work of the devil, Johan cuts him off, “Talk to me like a father, not a preacher.” Words are exchanged, but certainly no recommendations or judgments, just simple words of kindness. Johan has been upfront with his wife about this all along, but he fears if he doesn’t make the right decision, he may lose them both, believing he alone is responsible for what has happened. Both appear to be kind-hearted men, strong and resolute, who are not used to having to face this kind of dilemma. This kind of thing just isn’t in their creed. The family goes about their business, as before, where the near angelic nature of the children is simply flabbergasting, as it would be near impossible to have to explain immoral conduct to those cherubic faces. But in a discussion between the husband and the wife, when Johan can’t give up this other woman, the reaction of his wife turns sour, believing she may be the one who will be excluded from her own children, which couldn’t be a worse fate (again, deleted from the U.S. version). Explaining peace may be more important than love, thoughts must run through her head like all the hard work, all that she’s endured, everything she’s ever lived or sacrificed for, despite her morally appropriate conduct, if God’s fate is that she loses her own children, it feels like a mortal blow in her eyes. Shortly afterwards, she is pronounced dead.

The black dresses and bonnets return as the community makes ready for the funeral, where young and old sit on benches sipping drinks in the room outside where the body is being prepared for viewing. Again, the innocence of children provides an extraordinary power to these situations, almost as if they are the eyes and ears of God himself. They bear witness to the lives that their families lead. Johan is a wreck and can barely contain his grief, while his children are still curious about the afterlife, whether or not their mother is at peace. From the outside of the house, the camera peers into the window as men move the body inside, where a reflection of the cornfields behind them is seen, as if the body is already being returned to earth simply by this double-sided reflection. In an interior static shot of the deceased, shot in a glowing white light, candles on each side, nothing more, an image of simplicity itself, enhanced by the spartan use of space, where there is nothing in the frame that is without purpose or that doesn’t need to be there, and where there couldn’t be a more devout image of holiness.

This image replicates that of a certain Danish master, Carl Dreyer, who explored similar territory in ORDET (1955). Dreyer believed human nature has a factor which has yet to be located, that notices activity outside our natural world. Our accepted habits unconsciously prevent us from seeing. Our sensibility has been so atrophied that we can’t see outside our own system – like religion – where people believe in their idea of faith only as an idea, while the meaning has been lost, and must be demonstrated through their actions. Only when we suspend the laws of nature do we accept or recognize something outside our experience. One of the factors inspiring Dreyer was Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein could not scientifically explain actions which he had no knowledge how to explain. For Dreyer, there are forces outside our sphere of knowledge that have an influence over us. With this film, Reygadas, like Dreyer before him, explores those unfathomable forces utilizing a similar austere style and has actually found a unique modern day community that views faith much like it was originally intended. The results are astonishing as the final time-lapsed sunset image returns the film back into the cosmos.

Planet Sick-Boy Jon Popick

Carlos Reygadas won Cannes' Golden Camera award in 2002 with Japón, and Light took home this year's Jury Prize for telling the very unusual tale of a Mennonite family near Chihuahua, Mexico. Patriarch Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) has been stepping out on wife Esther (Miriam Toews) with a fellow Mennonite named Marianne (María Pankratz), but is at least honest enough to be upfront about the affair. The situation isn't dealt with via screaming and hand-wringing. Nothing is thrown, including physical objects, or hurtful slurs. And if you think that's difficult to believe, wait until you see what happens when Esther dies. This is one slow moving train, as viewers of Japón might expect, but it's also gorgeous on both a visual and a spiritual level.

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [5/6]

There are some directors whose films burn with a passion for composition and the precise movement of their camera. There are those, too, who reject speedy editing and a quick pace in favour of creating space for contemplation and examination. Carlos Reygadas is both of those directors, and while he may not have wholly succeeded with his debut, ‘Japón’, or its follow-up, ‘Battle in Heaven’, both of which were striking but overshadowed by distracting flights of provocation – old people having sex! Inter-generational blow-jobs! – he has now made a much more mature, coherent and serious work, and one which is certainly the best yet from this rising star of thoughtful, artful cinema.

It’s impossible to prise apart the real, the spiritual and the elemental in ‘Silent Light’, a tragic drama of love, routine, adultery and God’s will that plays out in a community of Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites in rural Mexico and which owes a large debt to Antonioni and, more specifically, Dreyer. Paunchy, ruddy Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) and stick-thin, dowdy Esther (Miriam Toews) are arable farmers who live a life of routine with their three young kids in the presence of God. That same God leads Johan to Marianne (Maria Pankratz), his mistress, who his friend tells him is ‘the woman nature meant for you’. Their one, discreet sexual encounter is handled superbly by Reygadas who infuses this pivotal, ominous scene with a desperation, longing and spiritual gravity that echoes Marianne’s feeling that this is ‘the saddest time of my life – but also the best’.

Reygadas, again working with non-professionals, offers realism in front of the lens – the routines of eating, bathing and working are lent an extra fascination by the alien world of the Mennonites – and poetry within it. From the opening time-lapse sunrise, each sequence is carefully and pointedly constructed – and often with a breathtaking beauty, whether it’s the movement of a combine harvester through a field or a lingering shot of a flower after a lyrical, near-silent, beguiling sequence of kids taking a dip in a pond. Time and again, Reygadas’ fixed shots segue into dead-slow zooms, each of them suggestive of the import of the moment and the coming tragedy. When tragedy comes – Johan’s affair is not without repercussions of the most disastrous (or maybe even the most divinely willed) kind – it offers one of the most shocking, unexpected and daring finales in a long while.

The Onion A.V. Club (Scott Tobias) review

It isn't careless hyperbole to say that Silent Light—the third feature by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, who began with the art-damaged Japón and Battle In Heaven—begins with one of the most magisterial opening shots ever filmed. Without going into too much detail, which couldn't possibly do it justice anyway, Reygadas' camera catches dawn breaking on a new day in a Mennonite farm in Mexico. Like many of the exteriors in the film, it's so idyllic and beautiful that it would be easy to believe that these farmers—completely severed from the modern world in their dress, religion, and language (Plautdietsch, a German derivative)—had carved out their own piece of heaven on Earth. Then Reygadas cuts to the interior, and it's a different story: A large family sits solemnly at the breakfast table, praying quietly. But once they're done saying grace, the tension still remains, broken only by the sound of the pendulum's swing. After eating, the wife and many kids leave for the outdoors. The man, now alone, sobs in heavy jags.

Soon enough, it becomes clear that the husband (Cornelio Wall) has been having an affair with another woman (Maria Pankratz) and isn't inclined to end it, no matter the emotional wreckage it causes in the long term. His wife (Miriam Toews) knows about the affair, but can't do anything to stop it. Their ongoing miseries are set against a backdrop that's vividly realized, charting a way of life that's conspicuously out of place and out of time, yet appealing in spite of the terrible mess these characters are in. Reygadas, a filmmaker with an extraordinary eye for widescreen composition, takes his time as the seasons pass and the betrayals take permanent root.

Many have called Silent Light an extended homage to Carl Dreyer's 1955 transcendentalist classic Ordet, but the differences are telling. Both films are set in isolation among the religiously devout, and both close with a moment of divine grace that unmistakably connects the two movies. But where Dreyer's world is narrow, suffocating, and punishingly austere—not that there's anything wrong with that—Reygadas often proves himself a sensualist with more in common with Terrence Malick than Dreyer. Two magnificent scenes in particular—one where the lovers kiss with colorful lens flares swirling halos around them, and another long sequence where the family bathes in a pool—show just how removed Reygadas' sensibility is. At bottom, Silent Light is less about faith than matters of the heart, and in Reygadas' hands, the ache is bone-deep.

ScreenGrab: The Nerve Movie Blog - Indie Film News, Reviews and Gossip Mike D’Angelo, May 21, 2007 (11:30 am)

When I launched this year's wack experiment, I was hopeful that at least one Competition film by a well-known (at least to cinephiles) director would forego any sort of possessive credit at the outset, so that I could watch the entire movie without knowing who made it. Thus far, we've had several, but only by relatively or completely unknown filmmakers: Cristian Mungiu, Raphael Nadjari, Christophe Honoré (who's made several films, but I'd only seen his debut previously). Today, however, brought the film I'd been waiting for, along with confirmation that I know my auteurs when I see 'em.

The film in question is called Silent Light, though I didn't find that out until the end. And perhaps a minute into the stunning opening shot, during which the camera pivots and tracks, with infinite patience and delicacy, from the starry night sky into a magnificent sunrise on the horizon, I found myself wondering whether this might be the latest by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose two previous films, Japón and Battle in Heaven, were formally grandiose in a similar way. [Go here to read Nerve’s interview with Reygadas.] But then the characters were introduced - a Mennonite farm family - and they all spoke German, which made me doubt my initial impression. What's more, this new film was exquisitely simple and tender, with no sign of the overweening pretension and juvenile fascination with unsightly bodies (withered or corpulent) that marred the Reygadas films I'd seen, both of which I'd fairly hated. Still, no other name ever came to mind, and when the closing credits revealed that it was indeed Reygadas' work, I wanted to shout in triumph.

But I couldn't, because I'd just seen something very close to a masterpiece, and I didn't dare disturb the reverential hush that I assumed we in the Salle Bazin were sharing. (Applause was little more than polite, so I may well be alone in my awe — we'll see.) Much like The Banishment, which screened a few days ago to near-universal disdain, Silent Light is an unadorned tale of marital infidelity, with no real plot to speak of and an intense fascination with landscape and the contours of the human face. But it's tone and judgment that matters in miniature epics like these, and Reygadas, for whom this film represents a massive leap in maturity, understands the difference between sullen brooding and quiet anguish. There's no way to convey the power of Silent Light without describing each individual shot, and even then you'd be overlooking their cumulative power; I can only tell you that I was rapt from start to finish, despite being the sort of Neanderthal film buff who generally prefers traditional narratives to beatific tone poems. Because of the (deeply moving) ending, a certain Danish classic is sure to get name-checked in other reviews; I mention it here solely because I don't want to look ignorant, and I'll only add that I think the comparison wholly earned. This is the first film I've seen here since Dogville, four years ago, that genuinely and fully deserves the honor of the Palme d'Or.

Twitch [Michael Guillen] also seen here: The Evening Class

Cycles fit seamlessly within cycles in Silent Light, commencing with the gradual shift from a starlit night to a dawn punctuated with the awakening sounds of the countryside; an image Carlos Reygadas bookends in reverse to close his third incandescent film. It is as if to say that whatever the toil and torment of an individual life, whatever its sad and ragged cycle, it is subsumed by the larger rotational cycle of the earth, and witnessed by stars whose light has been rendered silent by traveling a vast distance. Even the light of our closest star informs and suffuses the landscape with tender loyalty, suggesting an abiding consciousness to everyday life. Silent Light is by far the best film I’ve seen at this year’s festival, marking a maturity in Reygadas’s vision and a striking purity of the cinematic image.

The cycles are reflected seasonally as well when Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) meets Marianne (Maria Pankratz) in a summer field of black-eyed susans. He has fallen deeply in love with her and believes her to be his “natural woman”, causing him to question his marriage of 20+ years to Esther (award-winning Manitoba novelist Miriam Toews). He is seduced as well by the idea that “a brave man makes destiny with what he’s got.” Snow has blanketed the fields by the time Johan consults his father for advice. He is anguished about being unfaithful to his wife, though he has never deceived her and has communicated his affair with Marianne, and troubled by the effect his affair might have on his six children. His father can’t tell him what to do but reminds him that the devil is implacable. Johan is quick to assert that we cannot rely on gods and devils to claim responsibility for human events; all implacability resides squarely within him and the needs that are his to feel.

Then, of course, there is the cycle of life and death. Reygadas reminds us that love can die from lack of care as easily as a person can die from the loss of love, struck down in the middle of nowhere by the weight of rain. Yet—with exacting difficulty and sacrifice—peace can restore love to life, and spirit—so frequently configured as a small butterfly—can escape through an open window into landscapes lit with telling silence.

Carlos Reygadas has achieved some remarkable accomplishments with Silent Light; not the least being his startling reminder of the polyculturalism of Mexico. Accustomed to the Spanish-speaking campesinos of his earlier films and their abject poverty, he turns his lens on Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites living in an affluent community outside of Chihuahua. He diversifies his compassion.

The movement of his camera has become even more eloquent. The dizzying effect of infatuation is felt as Johann rides his truck in circles around his best friend while singing a randy corrido. The interaction between landscape and individual is demonstrated skillfully by the shift of camera as a pickup turns a corner on a dusty road. The superimposed reflection of furrowed fields on a window through which we see a dead body is a further reminder of the polyvalence of image; of cinema’s chance at poetry.

The sun floods the wide sky in “Silent Light” like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within. A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico — and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals — the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Mr. Reygadas’s faith may be more rooted in his own gifts than in God, but it’s the sheer intensity of this belief — which he confirms with every camera movement — that invests his film with such feeling. This stubborn, passionate intensity is evident in the mesmerizing, transporting opener, in which the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.

If you haven’t fled for the exits (cowards!), you will be hooked, as much in thrall to the harmonious beauty of the images as to the foreignness of their setting. Yet strange as this world initially seems, with its quiet rhythms and obscure German dialect, its conflicts soon prove familiar: Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a farmer with seven towheaded children and a devoted wife, Esther (the Canadian writer Miriam Toews), has fallen in love with another woman, a neighbor, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Though tormented by the affair, Johan feels that Marianne is his truer match, the woman who will correct the mistake he made by marrying Esther, whom he also loves and from whom he has, with tragic, unintended cruelty, hidden nothing.

And so, while Esther waits on the sidelines of their life with her unquiet eyes, tending the children, keeping the house and driving the family tractor, Johan explores the limits of his faith and his faithfulness. He nuzzles Marianne on a windswept hill, yellow flowers bobbing at their feet, and makes sweaty love to her in a small, white room that looks like a chapel. (Afterward, a leaf enigmatically, portentously falls from the ceiling.) He seeks advice from his father (Mr. Wall Fehr’s own father, Peter Wall) and clandestinely finds Marianne’s hand while, in a moment of ordinary surrealism, they watch black-and-white television images of the Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel, drenched in sweat and emotion and warbling about bonbons and l’amour.

I’ve seen “Silent Light” three times — it had its premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival — and find it more pleasurable and touching with each viewing. After having wowed and appalled international audiences with bravura technique in his first feature, “Japón” (2002), and assaultive provocations in his second, “Battle in Heaven” (2005), which opens with the kind of sexual encounter that keeps nunneries in business, Mr. Reygadas has quietly altered his visual style to brilliant and meaningful effect. His silky camera movements and harmoniously balanced widescreen compositions still enthrall, but he now comes across as less committed to his own virtuosity and more invested in finding images — of children bathing, trees rustling, clouds passing — that offer a truer sense of the world than is found in melodramatic bloodletting.

Though “Silent Light” owes a strong, self-conscious debt to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s eccentric 1955 masterpiece, “Ordet,” another story about faith and love, the new film also recalls some of the more pastoral passages in Terrence Malick’s “New World,” yet another tour de force about love and faith (in other people, in the cinematic image). In one of the loveliest sequences in “Silent Light,” Johan’s family idles in and around a creek that serves as its communal bathing pool. As some of the children drift languorously in the water, their bodies modestly covered and blond heads floating like lilies, the parents tenderly wash the younger ones, scrubbing one child’s head with soap, massaging another’s feet with oil and exchanging small endearments and instructions.

It’s a gorgeous, innocent yet sensuous scene, a glimpse of the prelapsarian with a hint of the viper that Mr. Reygadas closes with a shot of a pink blossom, an image that begins as a blur of color and gently comes into focus. He holds on the image a few beats — much as he often does — not only because, I imagine, he wants us to appreciate its metaphoric resonance but also because he wants us to see its glory. There are a handful of ways to understand the meaning of “Silent Light,” words that I read as an allusion to love, but this is also very much a film about that ordinary light that sometimes still passes through a camera and creates something divine.

Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones) review

At its very best, Carlos Reygadas's new film has the richness of Malick or the transcendental simplicity of Ozu; at its occasional worst, it has the whiff of Lars von Trier. But make no mistake: this is a deeply considered, formally accomplished, beautiful-looking and unexpectedly gripping film from a director making a giant leap into the first rank of world cinema. On finally fading to black, it leaves behind on the blank screen, as if on the inside of a closed eyelid, a shimmering sense of having looked into something overwhelmingly powerful.

It is certainly a clear and satisfying development from Reygadas' enigmatic first feature Japón, and far superior to his ambitious but clumsy and overblown second film Battle in Heaven, a misstep whose silliness and shallowness it very much exposes. Silent Light has some sublime, meditative moments: moments of pure, unapologetic visual ecstasy that come close to repealing the cinematic laws of gravity.

Moving with unforced, almost geological slowness, Reygadas establishes, in a series of tableaux, the setting for a tale of forbidden love in a rural Dutch-dialect-speaking Mennonite community in Mexico, whose adherents wear the shawls and austere clothing of their northern European forefathers. The film begins with an audacious, extended shot of the sun rising, evidently achieved through time- lapse, but so slowly as to appear to be happening in real time - an impression subtly reinforced by the fading-in of the ever-present soundtrack of crickets, cicadas and lowing cattle.

Johan (Cornelio Wall) is a hardworking farmer whom we see at the beginning presiding over the saying of grace at a family breakfast. There are evidently tensions with his wife Esther (Miriam Toews); and we soon learn that he is having an affair with another woman, Marianne (Maria Pankratz) who is apparently unattached. It is a love triangle that is to cause agony and tears, but not precisely the messy anger and voluble recrimination that we might expect from another sort of movie, or indeed from real life.

Reygadas's vision is more stylised than this. The pain of infidelity is floatingly suspended in a kind of trance, but arguably this is how people can and sometimes do deal with the transgression and pain of infidelity: a reticent, middle-distance-gazing sort of trance that allows you to ignore the elephant in the living room.

I am not being entirely facetious when I say that the first mental port of call for viewers approaching this film might be Peter Weir's classic 1985 thriller Witness, in which Harrison Ford's tough cop finds himself hiding out in a Pennsylvania Amish community, and falls hard for Kelly McGillis's beautiful young widow. Many of Reygadas' group scenes of rustic peasant faces, in church, or eating breakfast in severe blondwood kitchens at the crack of dawn, do have a familiar look to them. But in Witness, the sexual transgressor was alien to the group, and recognised as such by a group of clerical "elders". Here, Johan is one of the group, is denounced by no such authority and never publicly disgraced as such, even when the affair leads to a terrible tragedy.

So there is no dramatic crisis imposed on the lovers from without, and the acting style is contained and even lugubrious - except for especially created emotional scenes - and this, I suspect, is a result of working with non-professionals. Like many contemporary directors, Reygadas has chosen not to encourage his amateurs to speak in the quick speech rhythms and overlapping dialogue of real life, but keep it as deadpan as possible. This avoids embarrassment and has a kind of consistency and formal calm.

It is admittedly a little unreal and weirdly passionless sometimes, and this is where I feel Reygadas' rather exotically imagined rural-religious community might have been drawn up with a view to camouflaging this technique. In the real world, the Mennonites probably speak quite as sloppily as the rest of us. At these points, I was also uneasily reminded of the far-fetched fictional Scottish religious sect in Breaking the Waves.

Having said all of this, Reygadas communicates in a superbly controlled cinematic idiom and conjures up a hypnotic address to the viewer. And he creates a fascinating context for a powerful exchange between Johan and his lover Marianne after they have made love for the last time. Peace is stronger than love, he tells her, and after they have given each other up, "there will be pain, then peace, then such happiness as we have never known". In the midst of his agony, Johan asks his lover, and us, to imagine a future after their love has ceased, and to have faith in it.

I'm not sure I can say quite the same thing about the ambiguously visionary miracle that Reygadas creates for the end of his movie, a miracle that occurs as a result of a form of spiritual meeting between the women: a meeting that is very much the work of a male director.

But like the rest of the film it has a terrific kind of self-possession, and shows a ringing confidence in the luminous strange world it inhabits.

The sheer ambition of Reygadas has always been startling; now he is developing a consistency, a maturity and a rigorous visual sense to match it. There are things here not to like and not to believe in, sure. But what a change from the mediocre and derivative stuff on offer elsewhere. Here is cinema to wonder at, to argue about.

Silent Light | Carlos Reygadas - Film Comment José Teodoro from Film Comment, January/February 2009

In the opening shot of Silent Light, we begin as if lost in the cosmos and end with our feet on the quotidian ground. Gradually transfigured by the rising sun, the world fills with life, materializing first as crude form, then delicate silhouette, then vast landscape rich with color and texture. Throughout the film, the emphasis is on firmly acknowledging the miraculous within the most ordinary of events, directing our attention not toward the virtuosity of the filmmaker but the splendor to which he bears witness. Yet there’s a sense, conveyed through the initial reeling movement and the subsequent creeping zoom, that the camera is selecting this particular bucolic scene from a vast galaxy of potential subjects. From infinite possibilities filmmaker Carlos Reygadas is making a choice—and the burden of one’s duty to make choices will become central to the film’s drama.

Set entirely within the milieu of a Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite community in Chihuahua, the narrative core of Silent Light is simplicity itself: a love triangle. Farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall) is married to Esther (Manitoba novelist Miriam Toews). Yet Johan loves another Mennonite woman, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), and the two of them are in the midst of an affair. With whom should Johan be? The mother of his children and the woman he’s already made a life with, or the woman to whom he feels perhaps spiritually drawn and with whom he shares a love of unprecedented intensity? Should he try to shape his destiny so as to honor the wonder of this overwhelming passion, or, as he proposes to a friend, does “a brave man make destiny with what he’s got?” In keeping with a religious system founded in pacifism, the emotional and moral negotiations are devoid of histrionics. By stripping away all of the usual social conventions inherent to adultery dramas, and by maintaining rigorous indifference toward the finer points of the community’s religious dictates, Reygadas poses these basic questions about love, respect, and responsibility in a manner that’s refreshingly uncluttered and emotionally direct.

By contrast, Battle in Heaven (05) is a labyrinth of metaphors and confrontational imagery punctuated with incongruous sexual matches and cryptic rehearsals of Mexican social, political, and religious rituals. But for his third feature, the director has opted for the path of least intrusion, with his camera hanging back and the mise en scène respectfully bearing witness to the proceedings. Where Battle in Heaven’s camera turns away from a sexual act to perform a leisurely 360-degree pan of the tranquil neighborhood beyond the lovers’ window, pointedly redirecting our gaze from the sensational to the mundane, Silent Light rarely introduces any perspective that doesn’t arise organically from the characters and the natural world surrounding them. Reygadas has coaxed extraordinarily committed, heart-searing performances from a cast of nonprofessionals and gives them the space to let moments of tenderness bloom, conflicts fester, tears well up. The closest he comes to forcing anything is occasionally allowing his camera to push in for a closer look, or conjuring a heavenly burst of dazzling lens flares in certain scenes of endearment.

In one of the film’s most graceful, sensually alert sequences, Johan and Esther’s children frolic in a swimming hole. The wandering handheld camera gradually makes its way from the kids splashing in the water to the parents affectionately washing one of their daughters. Johan compliments Esther on her soaping technique in what is unmistakably the past tense, an inadvertently cruel intimation of their marriage’s looming expiration. The hurt is all but palpable and Reygadas stays with Esther’s devastated reaction until she finally steps out of frame, leaving the camera to linger on a vibrant Monet thicket of tall grass and flowers in mellifluous rack focus—another gesture indicative of Silent Light’s formal elegance and restraint.

Before we get carried away praising Reygadas’s renunciation of shock value and ostentatious formal noodling in favor of a newfound artistic “maturity,” it’s worth noting that his new film is not slavishly tethered to a mandate of innocent observation and serene naturalism. In fact, everything in Silent Light is carefully calibrated so as to earn a bravura finale in which the sense of the miraculous implicit in the opening sunrise is made manifest.

It’s also an intriguing nod to the oral fixation that Reygadas has been obsessively cultivating since the get-go. Of all the transgressions that distinguish Japón (02), Reygadas’s impressive debut, the most poetic is also the most understated. As he calmly prepares himself for suicide in a remote mountainous village, the unnamed protagonist (the late Alejandro Ferretis, whose terrifically craggy face, tumescent eyes, and shock of dark hair remind me of Al Pacino) either dreams or imagines the arrival of a drop-dead gorgeous woman. Presumably the man’s lost love, she emerges from the sea, gazes at the camera, and then advances toward Ascen (Magdalena Flores), the elderly widow with whom the man is currently lodging. The vision ends with the younger woman, whom we may presume to be dead, kissing Ascen on the lips.

The gesture is provocative, but nowhere near as much as when the man finds himself seeking spiritual renewal through copulation with the beatific, diminutive, and wizened Ascen. (Ascen, not coincidentally, is short for Ascension.) The kiss shared by the two women has nothing to do with kink but everything to do with Reygadas’s singular logic of transcendence. Whether we take the act as a foreshadowing of Ascen’s eventual death or as the triumph of the vitality these women embody in the suicidal man’s eyes, the moment is clearly intended to be sacred and transformative.

Likewise, the ethereal blow job that memorably bookends Battle in Heaven is positively loaded with transcendental spunk. Before Silent Light, it was hard to figure out why Reygadas selected this particular act—comely young woman Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz) sweetly sucking off the middle-aged, overweight, impassive Marcos (Marcos Hernández)—to symbolize the pair’s troubled contract of redemption. Now however, in light of the series of oral transactions that play out in each film, it somehow feels all of a piece, this ongoing preoccupation with the lips and mouth as the means of sublime communion.

Maybe it’s a Catholic thing, a way of rehabilitating the ritual of communion. Maybe it’s founded on the notion of respiration as the essence of life. Or maybe it’s a matter of Reygadas assigning to the mouth the ultimate power of transmitting knowledge and guidance—the power of the Word, whether it’s audible or, as is generally the case within Reygadas’s scenarios, silent.

The burden of influence has weighed more heavily on Reygadas than on his 21st-century world-cinema peers, including those, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who arguably share his unusually earnest transcendentalism and penchant for attention-grabbing sex acts. The source of this problem lies partially in a critical handicap that confronts anyone discussing unconventional narrative films in terms that aren’t flush with comparisons. Yet, thankfully, Reygadas makes no bones about his points of reference, either in interviews or in the technique, image, and thematics of the films themselves. Japón is more than just a clever fusing of Kiarostami (the coolly enacted suicide quest, the acknowledgment of artifice) and Tarkovsky (extended shot duration, portentous traveling shots, the driver’s-seat view of an oncoming freeway that recalls Solaris), but there’s no mistaking the influence these directors exert on Reygadas’s film.

Alternately, the case can be made for Reygadas’s having found his own voice with Battle in Heaven simply because the film’s varied elements seem so inexplicable and resistant to broad comparison, while his use of largely nonprofessional actors constantly slips free of Bressonian dictums to invite moments of cultivated, if oneiric, emotion. Above all, Reygadas proves himself less a postmodern collagist than an adamantly personal filmmaker drawing upon an idiosyncratic palette of film history to incorporate whatever elements offer up the most juice—and ditching whatever confining aesthetic ideologies are meant to accompany them. Filmic precedents are finally just a toolbox, a means to an end.

Silent Light complicates matters, however, in mounting an overt homage, albeit one that’s sophisticated and engaging. Irrespective of the climactic moment that functions as a spectral link to Ordet, the ghost of Dreyer’s 1955 film begins to materialize within Reygadas’s atmospherics right from the first scene of silent prayer in Johan and Esther’s kitchen: the ticking clock, the farmhouse’s evocatively spare decor, the distinctive air of rural domesticity and God-fearing humility. Reygadas, who has referred to Silent Light as “Ordet’s little brother,” seems to embrace the notion that the two films are having a dialogue across time, space, and culture, veering off into their disparate realms from time to time before resuming the conversation and comparing notes—on the potency of true faith, the fulfilled promise of redemption for all, and the cinematic power of waiting, wondering, and awakening. Dreyer’s shadow aside, if Reygadas has ever subscribed to Bresson’s philosophy of narrative structure, it’s here in Silent Light, with its grueling emotional escalation leading up to a peak of exquisite release.

In the hands of a talented filmmaker with a clear sense of purpose, duration itself becomes a corporeal experience, and Reygadas’s honing of his long takes suggests he now grasps this. A car disappears over an incline, a garage stands totemically upon arid flatland, a father and son gaze out upon a blanket of snow searching for some means of imparting consolation. Striking a balance between the competing needs of rhythm, storytelling, and visual coherence, Reygadas and his editor Natalia López have paced Silent Light with remarkable tonal precision, pruning nearly every shot in a manner that encourages the mind to entertain a stray thought or two while maintaining a steady, languid focus on building the drama.

Each time I viewed Silent Light and arrived at its arrestingly touching mid-point scene—when Johan and Marianne decide to part, their hands sharing a final secret caress, before Johan retires to sit in a van with his kids and watch a Jacques Brel performance on a tiny television set—I longed for the film to end with this moment of melancholy heartache. I guess some naïve or cowardly part of me wants a love story to close cleanly, to adhere to the seductive wish-fulfillment of Leonard Cohen’s “True Love Leaves No Traces.” And Reygadas grants me my moment, grants Brel’s grainy, ghostly on-screen audience their applause, then fades to black. But, of course, Silent Light is far from over.

The protracted shots and scenes in Silent Light’s second half are cumulatively grueling, as they should be. As Dreyer did with Ordet, Reygadas makes you wait for the miracle—like the mourners attending the wake in the film’s long penultimate scene, those partaking of this story’s strange ritual must be patient, though anyone who’s stuck it out thus far must be in it for the long haul. This last section can be wearyingly painful, but the payoff is proportionately rewarding. And once the miracle has come and gone, Reygadas wastes no time basking in its afterglow: his camera quietly glides away, retreating once more through the theater of sun and earth and into the glittering darkness from whence it came.

Silent Light: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas — Cineaste Magazine José Teodoro interview, Spring 2009

The two features that precede Silent Light (2007) in Carlos Reygadas’s filmography, Japón (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), are characterized by flamboyantly enigmatic images of transgressions either sexual or political or, in some cases, both simultaneously. The unnamed middle-aged protagonist of Japón travels from Mexico City to a remote mountain village where, following a failed suicide attempt, he has awkward intercourse with Ascen, an elderly woman. Marcos, the obese, indigenous, working class protagonist of Battle in Heaven, is found in the film’s ethereal bookend scenes receiving oral sex from Ana, a young, white, attractive, upper class prostitute. Somewhere in the complex kidnapping drama that unfolds between these scenes, Ana, despite being Marcos’s lover and closest confidant, will be stabbed to death by Marcos in an act that might be construed as some sort of purging ritual for sins committed by both parties—though this interpretation could easily be countered
by several others.

How such images contribute to the narrative cohesion of their respective films is indeed left highly ambiguous, yet close consideration proves them to be far richer—if perplexingly proliferate—in significance than their sensationalistic and/or controversial veneer might imply. The films draw geometries—encompassing elements of socioeconomic despair, gender roles, nationalism, and religious repression and ecstasy—that reward scrutiny, however fragmented their meanings may seem. Nevertheless, these morally fraught, sometimes lewd or grotesque images have no doubt served to widen Reygadas’s audience beyond art-house devotees to include others simply curious to see the notorious work of this Mexican enfant terrible.

As if leery of becoming stuck with this reputation, Reygadas’s third feature appears to be an ostentatiously “mature” work. It possesses a narrative arc that verges on the classical, a relatively sober mise en scène, and an unabashed homage to a canonical film from one of cinema’s most revered masters. Silent Light traces the escalation of tragically disruptive effects stemming from an extramarital affair between a married farmer with many children and a single woman residing in a Mennonite community in Chihuahua. The religious and social customs of this rarely depicted people are regarded with the utmost respect. The sex scenes are rendered modestly and tenderly. The moral dilemma and spiritual unease of Johan, the film’s protagonist, is treated with due gravity. The allusions to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), initially subtle, eventually explicit, are clearly intended not as bits of iconoclasm or fanboy borrowings, but as an urging to read Silent Light as a fresh
contribution to a certain cinematic tradition.

Yet rather than impart the writer/director/producer’s desire to conform to more genteel tastes or prove him a tamed beast willing to compromise a fairly radical vision, Silent Light finds Reygadas’s imagination fiercely alive in spite of, or perhaps because of, the more severe constraints of the film’s narrative or imagistic palate. What most strikes the viewer familiar with Reygadas’s body of work, upon seeing the film’s first few scenes alone—which include a sublime, unbroken time-lapse sequence that moves from heaven to earth as the sun rises over a gorgeous pastoral landscape—is the artistic humility on display. Rather than imposing images of a contrived nature, the author of Silent Light can be seen as a filmmaker who has already developed sufficient confidence to simply bear witness to the everyday miraculous. Of course, the manner in which he does so is hardly artless, hardly without a great deal of strategy and selection. Yet all the creative choices here feel very
much invested in the service, as Reygadas himself explains below, of bearing witness.

Reygadas was present for the North American premiere of Silent Light at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. We had met two years before when Battle in Heaven screened at Toronto and had been in touch while he was in the midst of making Silent Light, so our conversation, conducted mainly in English, picks up where our last round of emails left off.

*****

Cineaste: The last I heard from you, you wrote that you were very busy searching for actors in the Dutch countryside, and I remember wondering, what in the world is this guy doing now? Silent Light of course answers this question, but it makes me wonder why you couldn’t cast your Mennonite actors in Chihuahua, where the story is actually set.

Carlos Reygadas: All of the actors are in fact from Chihuahua except for the two women. That’s because the people in Mexico willing to do the film just weren’t suitable for the characters. The Mennonite community there is only about 100,000 people. I didn’t see all 100,000 obviously, but believe me, I saw a lot of them. Really, the people who might fit these roles are very few. Besides needing to be of a certain age or look, they also needed to have a certain energy. And then they have to want to do it and be available for several months. A lot of Mennonite women have children by that age, so that makes it difficult to get a commitment. I decided I’d have to try casting in another Mennonite community so I came to Canada, and here I found just one. So then I went to The Netherlands and finally Germany and there managed to cast the other.

Cineaste: How did you know when you had finally found the right women for these roles? Did you have them go through anything like an audition process?

Reygadas: No, not at all. Basically I saw them, which implies feeling them. Feeling them and talking a little. It’s an intuitive thing. I just trust what I feel. I have no rules. Whenever I see the correct person I just know.

Cineaste: Was it difficult as an outsider to get access to the Mennonite community?

Reygadas: Yes, they’re very closed and have been that way for centuries. And apart from that, their religion does not allow the graphical reproduction of human beings. Painting is prohibited, so you can imagine their response to photography or cinema. It’s considered to be demoniac. It was a hard, five-year process, making several trips to speak to different people about the project, little by little. Many rejected the idea but a few didn’t, and that’s how I got in. Mainly it was because of Cornelio Wall, the main actor. He is a really cool guy. He has a radio program of country music every Saturday night. I went to the radio station and we had a good talk. He became my advocate. He gave me confidence and others trusted me because he trusted me.

Cineaste: From where did the idea for Silent Light originate?

Reygadas: My original idea was simply to talk about these issues of love circulating through the film. Is it honest, truthful, brave or legitimate to stop loving someone who you have loved so much and who still loves you? What do you do when confronted by these feelings? These are the core issues. Then the idea of making it in the Mennonite culture just came about because it seemed to be the perfect setting for the movie since there wouldn’t be any distractions, like class issues or preconceived notions about beauty. The setting just permitted me to the tell the story almost as if I were telling a child’s story like ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Every superficial element is excised and you’re left with the archetypes.

Cineaste: I’d avoided reading anything about Silent Light before seeing it, so I didn’t hear anyone talk about the ending and its relationship to Ordet. Yet what strikes me as interesting is that I thought about Ordet not at the end of the film but right at the beginning. There was something about those first scenes in the house, with the clock ticking and the morning rituals that already evoked Ordet. There’s a subtle, intricate kinship between these films, but I wonder whether or not you were actually thinking about Ordet very much while in the thick of conceiving the piece.

Reygadas: I did think about it. I knew I wanted to make a film about radical Protestants in the countryside who speak a Germanic language, so I knew there would be a connection, though the films are about two totally different things. Ordet is about a miracle, and this film is about love, basically. Eventually when I was building the story, figuring out how it would all happen, the idea of her coming back to life was the only way out. So I knew this was coming from Ordet, though it was also coming from Sleeping Beauty. Once I felt confident that the films were sufficiently distinct from each other I wasn’t afraid of some direct dialogue with or homage to Ordet, which is a film I love, and Dreyer is someone I adore and respect enormously. So yeah, it’s like a little brother to Ordet, but with a different essence.

Cineaste: For me the unifying element in your feature films is this concentrated search for a sort of sacred moment. There are many key scenes in your films that seem carefully designed to facilitate a process of transformation that holds transcendental implications, whether you’re capturing a man bathing with a family he might be leaving, someone’s failure to commit suicide, the aftermath of sex, or the rising of the sun. There’s an implicit desire to glimpse something that’s really beyond you.

Reygadas: I don’t do that programmatically. I don’t think consciously in those terms. But it’s very true what you’re saying. I feel that in the end that’s what I know I am ultimately trying to do. It’s definitely something beyond me, beyond us, that I care for, that I look for. I’ve always believed that you can only think of one film at a time, especially when you’re making them, that filmmaking is not a career, but that each time you’re serving a need and communicating this with each individual film. But the truth is that once someone has done this more than two times, he starts accumulating something like a body of work, and then the work gives you insight into what this person is about.

Cineaste: Staying with this idea of facilitating or serving, it also seems to me that the use of extended shot duration in your films has an increasingly clear purpose, which is to allow something to really happen on its own, or rather, in an organic way.

Reygadas: Maybe this comes from this idea that I feel more like a servant than an entertainer who knows and has mastered everything he’s doing, which strings he’s pulling or which buttons he’s pushing all the time. I just see myself as a servant who brings disparate things together so that through contemplation we can arrive at a place of feeling. Sometimes when I’ve criticized entertainment, or even narrative or character identification, people ask me why I could be opposed to such things. If that’s not the way, then what is? And I think it’s contemplation. It’s contemplation that I’m proposing, primarily as a means to a deeper form of entertainment, and secondarily as a means to knowledge.

Cineaste: Thinking about these long, unbroken takes and the vulnerable positions in which they place your cast members, particularly with regards to nudity and sexual acts, I’m curious how difficult it is to create a comfortable mood on the set, to get people to feel comfortable.

Reygadas: One thing I can tell you is that I do develop strong relationships that exist quite outside of what you see on the screen. A feeling of trust, total trust, is needed, the feeling that they are ready to give themselves to me and that everything will turn out right. They do it and they’re happy to do it and it just rolls very naturally. I’m not interested in giving psychological ideas to the actors about the characters they are to represent. I just want them to be themselves, to be there and give their energy, their uniqueness and say the words that need to be said in their proper moments, and then the whole thing builds up together through cinematic means. So it’s not difficult to create the atmosphere at all.

Cineaste: Now that you have this body of work to look back on, these three very distinctive features, do you have a clear idea of what your method of filmmaking is, or of what sort of film you want to create?

Reygadas: In a way, yes. As I told you, when you look back everything connects and you can see a totality. I do have a method, but I do not believe that that method is universally applicable even for me. I really feel that each time you need to think of a new way of doing things. Even though everything you’ve done accumulates, you need to pretend it doesn’t exist in a way. I just need to serve a certain need.

Death, time and the possibilities of renewal in Carlos Reygadas' Silent ... Ian Tan from Offscreen, April 2016

The Other Mexico through the Cinematic Eyes of Carlos Reygadas ... Samuel Manickam from the Center for Mennonite Writing, January 16, 2013

The Miraculous is Sublime in Director Carlos ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman, September 23, 2008

Guilt and Absolution: Carlos Reygadas's 'Silent Light' | The Nation Stuart Klawans, January 8, 2009

Silent Light - Reviews - Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin, September 18, 2008

Like Anna Karina's Sweater: NYFF Review: Stellet Licht (Silent Light) Filmbrain

Silent Light Bryant Frazier from Deep Focus

'Silent Light': Carlos Reygadas' Cosmic and Personal Drama of ... Colin Stacy from The Film Stage, April 25, 2017

Silent Light Emmanuel Levy

Magic Hour: Carlos Reygadas's “Silent Light” | IndieWire Kristi Mitsuda, January 6, 2009

Fataculture [Nick Plowman]

Reel.com review [4/4] Chris Cabin, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [5/5]

Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias

SILENT LIGHT Victor Morton from Rightwing Film Geek, with more thoughts on the opening shot here: more here at 4th capsule

The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth] September 25, 2007

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth] January 6, 2009

Talking Pictures (UK) review Alan Pavelin

Silent Light | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Silent Light (Stellet Licht) Peter Brunette at Cannes from Screendaily

cinemattraction (Tim Hayes) review

DearCinema Jugu Abraham, also seen here: Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: OhmyNews [Howard Schumann]

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [5/5] David Finkelstein

Eye for Film (Andrew Robertson) review [4.5/5]

Plume Noire review Moland Fengkov

Carlos Reygadas - Stellet Licht « Horses Think

Hot amnesia babe meets Mexican Mennonites - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, January 8, 2009

Avuncular American [Gerald Loftus]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont

The New York Sun (Martin Tsai) review

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review

Movie City Indie: Carlos Reygadas on the opening shot of Silent ... Ray Pride

Jam! Movies review Liz Braun

Variety.com [Scott Foundas]

Silent Light Facets Multi Media

BBCi - Films Kate Lloyd

Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [5/6]

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [5/6]

The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Liam Lacey

San Francisco Chronicle (Reyhan Harmanci) review

Silent Light Movie Review & Film Summary (2009) | Roger Ebert

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007) Opening ... on YouTube (4:49)

POST TENEBRAS LUX A 96

Mexico France Germany (120 mi) 2012

Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity.

—War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, 1869, quoted at a dinner party by Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro)

Carlos Reygadas makes challenging art films that play in film festivals, where you can count on extreme visualization and an austerity of form, where in this film he nearly disregards narrative altogether, feeling very much like a Godless Bruno Dumont film, as he examines many of the same themes evoked from the title, “After the darkness, light.” Impressively shot by Alexis Zabé, for the first time not on ‘Scope, strangely using a boxed 1:37 aspect ratio with refracted images on each side of the screen which has a dizzying way of expressing shadow images that suggest an everpresent duality of meaning. Told out of sequence, as if that hardly matters, suggesting it’s the overall whole that matters, not each individually selected piece, the film does suggest a good and evil scenario, also God, the Devil, and redemption, class differences, also crime and punishment, where once again nature is viewed at its most thunderous best, literally overpowering the people that populate this film. While there are likely moral and spiritual messages, they tend to get lost in the random order in which this film is told, where perhaps they are the hardest for each individual to discover in their own lives as well. While this may be the most challenging film of the year, many are instead taking the easy route, suggesting it is so incomprehensible that the odor of pretentiousness defines this picture. One must understand that similar charges were weighed against Andrei Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR (1975), for instance, yet many now think this may be one of Tarkovsky’s most hauntingly beautiful films. There is a dramatic, Dumont-like scene near the end that takes place in an open field, where the aftermath of rainfall can only be attributed to Tarkovsky, offering a baptismal-like cleansing that evokes John the Baptist, as if this mythical undertaking might wipe away the sins of the world.

The experience of viewing a film like this is certainly unlike that of seeing other movies, where in a similar manner of say Yasujirô Ozu, the director forces the viewer to alter their perception of what they’re seeing onscreen simply by the way he chooses to express it, where in Ozu’s case he uses a fixed point of reference where he’s simply observing life as it is, while with Tarkovsky or Dreyer, cinema is a means that transcends human limitations, like music, literature, or great art. Even before the viewer sets foot inside the theater, they know a Reygadas film will be visually spectacular, where nature manifests itself in a glorious, Edenesque simplicity, while also exploring the pathetic interior failings of mankind, pitting spiritual themes against the existential crises of men. Described as a semi-autobiographical film where reason barely intrudes, Reygadas has suggested this film is “like an expressionist painting where you try to express what you're feeling through the painting rather than depict what something looks like,” supposedly shot in Mexico, Spain, Belgium, and Britain, all places where Reygadas has lived, which might help explain the final shot of the film, which otherwise seems quite random, though the director played rugby for the Mexican national team. With this in mind, it may be useful to view this as one might an experimental film, perhaps even a video installation, where you’re not so much interested in what’s going on at any given moment as the effect it’s having internally as you experience it. All Reygadas films have premiered at Cannes, where his first film JAPÓN (2002) won the Caméra D’Or award for the best first feature, SILENT LIGHT (2007) won the Jury Prize (3^rd place), while for POST TENEBRAS LUX, Reygadas was awarded the Best Director at Cannes in 2012.

The opening of this film is as powerful as anything seen this year, where a small girl (the director’s daughter Rut) is wandering around a waterlogged open soccer field pointing out various animals like dogs, cows, and horses, while thunder and lightning flash across the sky, as man and nature commingle, but the most prominent effect is the incessant sound of dogs barking. A supernatural element follows, something along the lines of what we might come to expect in a Weerasethakul film, before a realist, more recognizable family scene reveals Rut is the younger sister to Eleazar (the director’s son), whose affluent parents are Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) and Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo), living in what resembles an architecturally designed house in what is otherwise a poor rural area of Mexico. The parent’s relationship revolves around old literary language, continually calling one another love, or my love, even though Juan has a vile temper, seen viciously beating one of his prized dogs (offscreen). Sometime later, the parents are at a wealthy dinner party, where Juan proudly quotes Tolstoy, generating mocking sneers behind his back, finding him pretentiously arrogant and snobbish. In stark contrast, the couple later enjoys themselves visiting a hip Paris sauna when trading partners was in vogue, where Natalia is a big hit literally offering herself to the somewhat lecherous clientele. Each of these scenes is an example of the disharmony in man, a fall from grace, where there are eventual consequences, even when expressed as a random act. In some mysterious way, man is ultimately punished, perhaps by God, perhaps by the Devil, but this film presents apocalyptical acts of damnation, followed by a Biblical cleansing. Whatever one makes of this film, there is little to suggest it is an act of extreme provocation, or an empty exercise of self indulgence, as claimed by some, as there were a scattering of boos at Cannes as well, instead one might suggest it’s a profoundly influential modernist and narrative free work that simply operates in a different cinematic vernacular, existing in a dreamlike plateau where humans often play a secondary role.

Cine-File Chicago: Mojo Lorwin

Although the telling can be distractingly complex, the story at the center of POST TENEBRAS LUX is simple and familiar: Juan, a wealthy young man, moves his wife and children to a large house in the country, where things turn out less copacetic than he'd planned. The first thirty minutes of the film are completely stunning: visually gorgeous, disturbing, moving, intriguing. Director Reygadas expertly manipulates our emotions by juxtaposing the innocence and beauty of Juan's children (played by Reygadas' own children Rut and Eleazar) against the pent-up brutality of their father and the unpredictable carnality of nature. Thirty minutes in, the film seems to be heading in a sort of art horror direction in the vein of Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST (2009) or Robert Altman's IMAGES (1972), an exploration of the terror of isolation and the psychological punishments reserved for those who try to have their Eden in this life. But then something happens--an ambivalence, perhaps, on the part of the director about the message at the core of his fable--and the film morphs into something looser, lighter and less focused. The original film continues, but its progress is repeatedly interrupted by another film, a superficial film more akin to Terrence Mallick's pretentious family saga TREE OF LIFE (2011) than any masterpiece of art horror. It's a shame, because Reygadas had a masterpiece of his own on his hands. Instead, he ends up with a flawed film, a beautiful attempt, well worth seeing, but as much for what it could have been.

Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 24, 2012

Some of today’s top Mexican directors refer to Carlos Reygadas as ‘the maestro’, and undoubtedly he aims high. His 2002 debut ‘Japon’ reminded many of Tarkovsky; ‘Battle in Heaven’ was proudly metaphorical and provocative; ‘Silent Light’ borrowed blatantly from Dreyer’s ‘Ordet’. His latest continues in the same emphatically serious vein: some claim it alludes to the films of the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and to Sokurov. The Latin title (‘after the darkness, the light’) evokes some sort of parable, and the overall thrust of the narrative, with its elements of crime and punishment, waywardness and redemption, dysfunctionality and diabolical intervention, verges on the spiritual and moralistic.

Lux may be present in the title, but lucidity is not the film’s strong point. It mostly seems to concern a comfortably-off couple and their young kids – the man’s at a point where he can only have sex with his wife with the help of internet porn and he’s prone to taking it out on the dogs. Though precisely which scenes are past or present, real or imagined, is left a little unclear, as is the significance of a red devil (pleasingly reminiscent of the Pink Panther, who’s mentioned elsewhere in the movie by one of the kids). His arrival in the couple’s home (or is it?) kickstarts what semblance of a story we get.

And semblance it is. The scenes – shot in 1:1.33 mostly with a short lens, which for some reasons ‘ghosts’ a lot around the edges – don’t so much hang together as puzzle as to their relationship with one another. A couple, depicting a rugby match in an English school, perhaps autobiographical, feel particularly redundant to the larger project in hand. There are moments that impress (most to do with the weather and landscape), but just as many that feel faintly absurd: a self-decapitation, especially. Yet again, one senses that Reygadas – instead of simply getting on with the job of making a film – has opted instead to go for an opus magnum that reminds us of cinema’s greats. And once again what is finally communicated is vaunting ambition and somewhat frustratingly vague achievement.

Post Tenebras Lux - Slant Magazine Calum Marsh

Fernando F. Croce wrote for Mubi recently that Post Tenebras Lux "is a film still locked inside its maker's head," and it's true that much of the meaning or import of the film can only be grasped tenuously and at some remove. That distance will likely be a significant, potentially insurmountable hurdle for many viewers desperate for more overtly explicated or tangible ideas. An impatient audience will assume, perhaps even correctly, that if Carlos Reygadas does indeed intend to illustrate with this film anything like a cogent message or thought, his methods here are frustratingly remote. As with many oblique works, a suggestion hangs in the air that the emperor has no clothes: One worries that not only is Post Tenebras Lux locked inside its maker's head, but that what remains locked there doesn't mean much of anything even privately.

It takes a rigorous close read to dispel such concerns—as well as, maybe more importantly, a willingness to defer to Reygadas and accept a certain central abstraction. Doing so reveals a film both rich and strange: It's haunting, abstract, monolithic, but half-there. It's a film that yawns and aches. One strains to even describe it: The narrative, such that it is, concerns a wealthy family in a poor neighborhood rent asunder from within and without. Immense social pressure bears down on the film. Class issues course through its veins, informing its drama—even, in a major way, inciting its action. And yet it works in miniature just as often and as poignantly. One of the most compelling images in a film full of major, unforgettable ones is of two hands drawn together in a car, held in tender close-up. It's also surprisingly personal, or, as some have put it, "private." Reygadas has described the glowing satanic figure who twice creeps into a family's home as based on how his father appeared to him in a dream, a contextual footnote that imbues a striking but ambiguous image with something closer to autobiographical import.

The family drama at the center of the film, an oblique story of self-improvement and sexual awakening that at times recalls Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, has a personal dimension that, even if confused through abstraction, is still emotionally coherent, which allows us to make sense of our feelings and, at times, feel quite moved. And so while much of Post Tenebras Lux operates at a seemingly unbridgeable remove, the emotional core of the film is always intelligible; specific images have a symbolic import suspended in ambiguity (I've already had much debate about even the intended effect of certain gestures), but in total the film has a transportive effect working above and beyond the details. The brief non-sequitur sequence that closes the film, for instance, seems immense and totalizing even though, frankly, it makes little narrative sense. That's the kind of unprecedented sidestep that could derail even a largely experimental film, and yet its immediate effect in the film is a resounding success. In short, one never feels that they actually need to know what's going on at any given moment. Giving yourself over to Reygadas and trusting him to deliver in the end is rewarding even without a clear-cut roadmap.

Cannes 2012: Post Tenebras Lux – review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 24, 2012

No one ever looked to Carlos Reygadas for a clear picture and straight story, but this maverick Mexican director may have surpassed himself on Post Tenebras Lux, a congealed Jungian stew that went down to a chorus of boos at the Cannes film festival. Upping the ante still further, Reygadas has elected to shoot large portions of his film through a bevelled camera lens, which refracts his figures, doubles the image and leaves the screen's borders blurred. I have no doubt he is deliberately setting out to vex us.

What is he saying? What does he mean? The festival has been an ardent champion of this fiercely talented 40-year-old, who was nominated for the Palme d'Or for 2005's Battle in Heaven and scooped the jury prize for the mesmerising Silent Light back in 2007. And yet Post Tenebras Lux must surely count as a major misfire, at once undercooked and overheated as it stirs its fevered brew of dreams and memory, symbols and sex.

Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) and Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) are an artistic middle-class couple with two adorable toddlers and a big house in the mountains that is tended by a team of unruly rustic handymen who operate out of a corrugated-iron hut in the valley below. At one stage, Juan and Natalia jet off for an up-scale sex holiday in Europe, where the rooms in the bath-house are named after Hegel and Duchamp. At another Juan hits his dog so hard that the animal dies. He feels awful about this, though his wife is sanguine. "You're doing it less and less," she assures him.

Along the way Reygadas throws in some arresting images and haunting scenes, such as the daughter's dream of the waterlogged field, or the CGI Satan, red as a tandoori chicken, who comes to spook the son. There is no doubt the director is leading us somewhere, all the way to the deathbed, where the light finally breaks through. If only the route wasn't quite so rocky and circuitous. If only he'd take those damn beer glasses off the camera lens.

At its best, in glimmers, Post Tenebras Lux can be tender, touching and even oddly thrilling in its bold imagery and determination to take the path less travelled. But it's an opaque, unforthcoming, exasperating work all the same. Reygadas's occasional child's-eye perspectives, together with the unexplained cut-aways to rugby games at an English public school (the director himself was schooled in England) suggest the story may be at least partway-autobiographical, a working-through of personal issues. The effect, however, is like sitting down in front of a stash of bespoke home-movies (beach trip, family dinner, reader's-wife erotica) shown out of sequence and with no context provided. Home movies, of course, are often out of focus too.

Review: Post Tenebras Lux - Film Comment Dan Sullivan, March/April 2013

Entrancingly beautiful and calculated to confound, Carlos Reygadas’s first feature since Silent Light (07), is as beguiling a cinematic object as one is likely to encounter this year. Met with boos following its premiere at Cannes last year (although it went on to win the Best Director prize), Post Tenebras Lux represents Reygadas’s attempt to make a personal work in which autobiographical content is lyrically transfigured and elevated to cosmic heights.

Every component of the film affirms its lofty artiness, leaving little doubt that Reygadas is intent on crafting a cinema whose metaphysical explorations are as revelatory as those of his forebears: Dreyer, Tarkovsky, late Godard, etc. While this might suggest that Post Tenebras Lux is irritatingly grandiose, through its weirdo plasticity and viscous materiality the film manages to be at once fully cognizant of its cinematic lineage and altogether different from its predecessors. Echoes of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Dreyer’s Ordet, and even Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees resonate throughout but always with a wholly singular timbre.

The narrative revolves around Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro, sporting a multitude of hairdos and levels of stubble), a moneyed, middle-aged man living with his wife, Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo, whose courageous performance is capped by a wonderfully awful rendition of Neil Young’s “It’s a Dream”) and their young children, Rut and Eleazar (played by Reygadas’s own progeny). The family resides in a large modern house (Reygadas’s actual residence) incongruously situated in rural Mexico. The opening sequence points the way to the ravishing confusion to come: Rut runs wild among a pack of dogs and several horses on a water-logged soccer pitch as the magic hour fades into night; the darting camera and staccato cutting yield a frenetic image of bodies in motion. Far more invested in the audiovisual rendering of physicality than in narrative, Reygadas aims to evoke pure sensation.

In interviews, Reygadas has been reluctant to sort out the scrambled chronology of Post Tenebras Lux or to explain how certain ostensibly unconnected scenes—a red rotoscoped Lucifer figure making two housecalls, toolbox in hand; English adolescents playing rugby in school; a visit to a French bathhouse sex club with rooms named after Hegel and Duchamp—fit together with the main action, or what they mean. He has elaborated on the film’s signature formal device: a blurring distortion at the edges of almost all exterior shots that causes figures to take on a ghostly aspect as they fall out of focus and sometimes become doubled. For Reygadas this technique approximates the experience of looking through an imperfect pane of glass, and the distorted images express the way in which visual perception is informed by a host of desires, however unconscious. Setting aside the symbolic dimension, the results are, more often than not, gorgeous.

Post Tenebras Lux is a film rich with sheer material presence, making good on Reygadas’s apparent intention to make the viewer truly feel the audible and the visible, but his pictorial gimmickry can only do so much aesthetic heavy-lifting. In the end this is a painterly meditation on the interplay of vision, memory and imagination, and a quasi-diaristic account of the impressions that set the imagination to work. It amounts to watching the dissolution of the boundary between life and art, through a glass darkly.

Cinema Scope | Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico) Tom Charity, 2012

Hand it to Cannes: where else do art films get booed? On the rest of the planet, your typically well-adjusted art-house aficionado understands to appreciate whatever challenges the filmmaker has set…or the viewer walks out. To be sure, there are walkouts here too, but a good many hardier souls take it upon themselves to sit, suffering, through a movie they despise, for the privilege of giving voice to their displeasure…As if the Salle Debussy were a gladiatorial arena, in which the jeers of the crowd can push Caesar’s thumb north or south, and condemn the object of derision into well-deserved obscurity.

Not so fast! Vilification is often enough the first step to vindication; from L’Avventura (1960) to The Brown Bunny (2003) there’s a long, ignoble tradition of films that were repudiated by the Cannoises on first sight, only to be resurrected in the next breath. The most noisily derided films have a way of becoming the hottest tickets. Lars von Trier seems to have calibrated his career to just this phenomenon. And this year, Leos Carax and Carlos Reygadas battled it out for the distinction of the festival’s most contentious Competition offering. (That is, if we don’t count the five Americans, which we don’t.) Holy Motors came away from the festival with nothing but distribution deals, while—in the pressroom—Reygadas was booed all the way to his Best Director prize.

Why the hate? Is it a coincidence that these two very different films were also the most experimental Competition entries? They share some common surrealist strategies: disruption, disturbance, graphic sex, sexy graphics…In the most general terms, both filmmakers are casting about for new ways forward, breaking from conventional narrative structures and pushing their mise en scène into unexpected places. Are we still so resistant to the shock of the new? Or is the opposite the case, that we’ve become all too familiar with the provocations of the avant-garde? Like von Trier, Reygadas is seen in some quarters as a phony, a self-aggrandizer specializing in sexed-up Dreyer and Tarkovsky knock-offs; a purveyor of pervy transcendentalism.

These twinned films maudit are markedly different though. Carax is consciously playing with formal tropes—serving up parodic, postmodern variants on the likes of The Phantom of the Opera and the hit-man movie, riffing on Cocteau and Franju, and exploring acting and performance as metaphors for employment and human connectivity. In contrast, at least at first, Reygadas seems to be groping in the dark, going off-map as he seeks to exorcize his personal demons. Back in 2010 he announced his intention to make an expressionist film “where reason will intervene as little as possible.” For many first-time viewers it seems he succeeded all too well.

If Post Tenebras Lux (Latin for “After Darkness, Light”) presents itself as a problematic film, part of the challenge is simply to connect the dots, to figure out what we’re seeing and how it relates to what we’ve seen before. While Reygadas makes it difficult with his achronological, non-linear structure, and the occasional “stray” episodes that defy narrative exegesis (notably two scenes involving an English schoolboy rugby team, which reportedly derive from the director’s memories of public school abroad), the film does coalesce around one affluent, young nuclear family who have retreated to the edges of a remote, rural community, and, in particular, on the man, Juan (Adolfo Jimenez Castro), and his strained relationship with his wife, Nathalia (Nathalia Acevedo). The domestic family scenes are in a register of low-key naturalism, and without the blurry halo effect that fogs many of the external sequences, an ethereal visual ghosting that gives the outside world a hallucinogenic—or just plain demented—quality: through a glass, darkly.

If the counterpoint between these modes is disconcerting, that can hardly be unintentional. If Reygadas had chosen to present the movie as the drug-addled reverie of a seriously wounded, possibly dying man, audiences may have found it easier to process. But whatever else it’s about, Post Tenebras Lux is surely concerned with the difficulties attendant on reconciling the private and the public worlds, the shifting solipsisms of the lover, husband, father, and his place in a larger political, environmental, and spiritual framework.

Like several of the younger generation of Mexican directors Reygadas is creditably class- conscious, and in its less obscure passages the film limns the social disconnect between upper-middle-class Juan and the darker-skinned peasants in the wider community, some of whom work for him. Ironically, Juan attempts to bridge the gap by attending a local AA meeting, but listening to the stories of the others makes his own porn addiction seem trivial in comparison. One of the men at this meeting, a drug addict who goes by the name of Seven (Willebaldo Torres), describes in some detail the expensive renovation work he’s carried for Juan. The same man drunkenly calls out his employer at a New Year’s celebration—and will later shoot him in the chest when Juan catches him stealing from the house.

Do we also see the spectre of Seven reconfigured in the supernatural aura of the bogeyman, a CGI Satan, complete with horns, spiked tail, a pronounced cock, and carrying a toolbox, who twice breaks into the sleeping Juan’s home? It’s hard to say for sure (Reygadas has said the toolbox is a memory of his father), but certainly he assumes larger-than-life, tragic properties in the film’s most stunning and contentious shot, an image so brazen and audacious it’s unlikely that anyone who sees it will ever forget it.

If Seven remains a cipher, we’re unlikely to empathize more deeply with the cold and angry Juan (though he may be a self-portrait on some level; this is a very personal film). His sexual hang-ups are further laid bare in lengthy bickering with his wife and then in a protracted and faintly satirical orgy where he watches as Nathalia is ravished by (French-speaking) strangers in the “Duchamp Room” of a sauna. We are also witness to Juan’s cruelty to animals in a scene where he sadistically beats his dog; his penchant for this abuse has apparently raised the suspicions of the local vet. In the past Reygadas’ films have been criticized for their numb but explicit sex and unflinching depictions of animal abuse; Juan seems to be the very embodiment of such criticism, though hardly deserving of his violent demise.

But in the spirit of the piece itself, let’s end with the beginning, which even the movie’s many detractors admire. This is simply an astonishing sequence, as striking as anything unveiled at Cannes this year. Shot in an open pasture hemmed in by mountains and clouds, it follows a toddler (Reygadas’ daughter Rut), apparently alone save for several head of cattle and a handful of dogs. As in the rest of the film, the frame is 1:33, and it’s our first exposure to the picture’s weird, intermittent ghosting effect. It’s like a home movie, but a home movie that’s been damaged somehow…not least in its pointed exclusion of a parental figure. A wide-angle lens reduces the animals to blurred, hulking shapes in the mid-distance. Above the mountains, thunder and lightning roll up on the gloaming. The animals sense tumult, danger; the little girl remains impervious.

We know thunder is an ominous portent in nature, and there is something disturbing about the vulnerability of the child alone in the thickening dusk. The sequence goes long—15 minutes or more—too long, maybe, but too long in a way that’s exactly right. Reygadas forces us to watch the lengthening shadows, and listen to the snorting cattle, the agitated barking of the dogs, and wonder about this barely verbal child, still delighting in the echo chamber of her first words—“Casa” is one—words that may or may not mean something concrete to her. If Reygadas set out to make an intuitive, pre-cognitive film, then this mysterious, intangible but profoundly resonant prologue comes closest to realizing that dream.

Keyframe: the Fandor Blog [Anna Tatarska] interview May 28, 2012

It’s been a long, strange trip for Carlos Reygadas, who won Best Director at 2012 Festival de Cannes. Who would have thought this individual trained in law (specializing in armed conflict) and once employed by the United Nations would realize that what he wanted to make films—and then become one of the most celebrated filmmakers of his generation? Reygadas, ever enigmatic himself, specializes in the mysteries of transgression. He crossed socio-political and sexual boundaries while merging reality and fantasy in Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005), and Silent Light (2007). His 2012 Cannes competition film, Post tenebras lux, immediately divided audiences, who greeted it with cheers and boos; schizophrenic reviews from the international critics followed. For this writer, it’s clear that Post… was the bravest, most innovative and visionary film in competition. In our conversation, Reygadas opens up about his working method, talks about how fear fuels human existence, and reveals how absurd he finds the imprinted human need for literal definition.

Keyframe: There is an urban legend saying that your crew consists of 11 people only.

Carlos Reygadas: Actually it’s even less. I can easily manage working this way; if my crew was larger, it would be terrible. I have one director of photography, his assistant, another guy doing the rest, sound-guy, Fernanda – my assistant director, a producer… Nine people altogether, not more. We do everything, all of us. Making films is not so difficult: Just take a camera, put it here, wait for good light, and little by little it will all come together. We do not think about what we do as ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cinema.’ You could say my cinema is hand-made. We don’t use any artificial lights, so we’ve mastered the art of waiting. The budget of the film was about 500.000 Euro. I shot for about three months. Parts of Post tenebras lux were shot in the mountains, so we’d ride horseback, with all our equipment, to the location and shoot there. No one is allowed to talk loudly while we’re shooting. There’s no screaming announcing subsequent takes and slamming the clapperboard. It distracts people, us, me. We always do tap de fin, only a delicate clap at the end, when the take is done. If you start screaming before the take I have no idea how people are supposed to be able to concentrate!

Keyframe: How much does the fact that ‘you all do everything’ make your films a collective work?

Reygadas: Zero. If the film is supposed to be artistic in the sense that it shares someone’s feelings and his perception of life, it has to be done by himself. Even though I work with these people that I love and that help me so much, I’m the only one responsible for the film. Everything good in it is my accomplishment, everything bad, my fault.

Keyframe: Some of the press materials name Post tenebras lux autobiographical. Is it true?

Reygadas: It’s not. I just said that in the beginning to get some funding. [Laughs]. These are my real children in the film, our children. [He nods at his wife Natalia, who's sitting right next to him and after whom the main female protagonist was named.] Those are our dogs… my dogs, actually. Those are not ours for a change. [Laughs]. We live in that land, so everything that happens in the film is very close to me. I’ve heard many of those conversations. I know these people very well. It’s all nearby. But the values of my characters and they way they look at the world are not at all autobiographical.

Keyframe: Your films are very often perceived as confusing or unclear, so much so that critics usually try to compare them to something first, to be able to start off the review. I’ve read that Japón was supposedly a variation on Tarkovsky, Silent Light was ‘clearly’ inspired by Dreyer, and in Post tenebras… Apichatpong Weerasethakul meets Aleksandr Sokurov… What is your response to that?

Reygadas: Well, on one hand I am flattered. Most of the films I like get bad reviews. Positive opinions are reserved for films that I do not enjoy. If many journalists hate it, to me it only means that there is a chance for such film to become something valuable one day. On the other hand I feel very sad, because I see how stupid the human kind can be.

Keyframe: I remember finding myself in the press room after the Post tenebras… screening among discontented journalists, scolding: ‘What is it about?’ ‘I don’t get it!’ Do we actually need to ‘get it’ at all?

Reygadas: Poor guys. ‘I understand the sea.’ [He points at the nearby shoreline.] ‘I don’t understand the sea, can you explain it to me?’ Or: ‘Look at the beautiful sunset!’ ‘I don’t understand it, let’s change the subject.’ Really, sometimes I am surprised, because I assume most of the journalists went to primary school, at least, and have read some books. I imagine that some maybe even went to university! I’m really astounded by the questions I hear from them. If you read Faulkner, James Joyce, you know that there are many things not designed to be understood on that level. When James Joyce wrote his books, especially Ulyssess, he was trashed by the journalists of that time. So, that’s why sometimes I find criticism flattering. Even in things that are supposedly meant to be understood, like literature, there are exceptions. Take Kafka’s The Castle, or better, The Metamorphosis: Who knows what really happens there? Does he really turn into a monstrous insect-like creature, or is it just the projection of his mind? ‘Oh, it’s just his mind. I really like the book;’ ‘Oh, it’s just his mind. I really hate it!’ It’s so stupid… why do I hear so many questions like that? Haven’t they ever read about history of art? How hostile the reaction of the environment was when abstraction or impressionist paintings started to emerge? How they’d preach those innovative artists, that things should be painted they way they appear, flesh should have a certain color, shapes should reflect real-life shapes… and these crazy people dared to paint skies green! And look at how they are perceived now. These ‘What is it?’ type question really surprise me.

Keyframe: So how do you construct your stories? Usually your plots are fragmentary, achronological, emotion-driven…

Reygadas: It is very subconscious. It’s like with a football player. Try asking him: ‘How do you do it?’ He won’t be able to name every stage of his decisive process, it’s very instinctive. It just comes to him, like it does to me. Think: Zinedine Zidane, great player. Do you think that before every attempt to shoot he processes the whole procedure in his head, like: ‘This kick is going to be a little bit of Pelé -style with a tiny touch of Maradona?’ No. He just does it thanks to his natural talent and the support of his experience, trained body, bone structure, muscle memory, the way he looks at life… I make films very instinctively, having in mind things I want to share. Post tenebras lux took me two days to write, however thinking about it lasted over two years… maybe not thinking, as this is a conscious process. I’d rather say it built up inside, without me even being fully aware of it. Then it just came out and flew. I trust that if I like something and feel it, some other people might feel the same way.

Keyframe: What was the emotional seed from which this project grew?

Reygadas: I felt an urge to share the love and fear we all feel for life. Fear is the main engine of the world we live in, especially in the western world. Some people have friends because they are pure and sociable, but most of us have friends because we are afraid of loneliness and lack of acceptance. A lot of people have a job because they need money, but many do it because they’re simply scared of being unemployed and being labeled outcasts. Most people spend holidays with their families not necessarily because of how much they love them—they are just afraid of being alone on Christmas Eve.

Keyframe: What you’re saying is in a way explanatory of people’s disappointment in your film. They might feel let down, because they need conclusions, assurance, they want to know in advance where is this journey going to end. Otherwise they don’t feel safe. But isn’t it about the journey itself? Because, once we die, everything is over—this is the conclusion, the journey’s over…

Reygadas: Exactly, that is one thing. And then, on another level, there are so many conclusions in this film. It’s a story about love, frustration, a family that carries on no matter what, about children who are pure and adults that cannot be pure or fully happy anymore, but nevertheless love each other very much and support each other till the end… It’s about the situation in my country, where people are being killed in the drug-related crimes, heads are being cut off, the land is bleeding… It’s about games we all play, since we are present in this world. It’s about a need to rebirth, about sex, about living close to animals that have been by our side since the very beginning and now we’ve drifted away from them. It’s about dreams and how we connect with our memories or [an] imagined future in our minds.

Keyframe: Future and past are displaced in your films. Instead of being grounded in certain moments, they freely float in the time and space.

Reygadas: Connecting with past or future is a very direct process that doesn’t use any codes. We can be here and start thinking about being in a swimming pool somewhere else. And such fantasies constitute a part of life, real life. Even though these things we portray in our thoughts might never happen. In the film we have this imagined future, where there is a Christmas party, and the protagonist dies in the end. The scene happens afterward in the film, but chronologically it’s earlier. People immediately get confused and wonder, how come he dies, if we’ve already seen him in his future, alive and kicking. But who says that the future has to happen? We think about it every day but it doesn’t mean it will come. You might have imagined yourself with children, I’m sure you have, most people do. Maybe you’ve been picturing yourself as an old person… what if you die tomorrow? Let’s hope not, but there is such possibility. That doesn’t mean these thoughts had not happened; they didn’t physically, but they are part of the reality, because they have already been conceived in your mind. The film is really coherent and objective on this level, not postmodernist or so in any way. On the other level, I fully agree with what you said. Things are not there to be understood. Most of the journalists are paid to judge. We are so proud of ourselves and we demand an explanation for every case, so we could understand and then judge. Whereas the truth is they should be kneeling down, feeling, receiving. I’m not saying the film is superior to them; but to be able to receive, one has to get down on his knees and accept. If you do that, you can get up afterward and say whatever you want. But if you don’t accept, you can’t judge. And these people very often don’t even try to accept. One journalist told me that she was a guest on the radio program, trying to pitch—the very word makes me angry—my film and she couldn’t. ‘So, what is it about?’ she asks me. ‘Thank you, that is the best compliment I could ever received’ was my answer. You can’t describe what my film is about? That’s excellent.

Keyframe: This need to describe and understand is sometimes a part of the critic’s job. Yet trying to pitch Post tenebras lux is pointless. If I had to describe it, I’d say that watching it I felt as if there were invisible hands reaching out from the screen, touching me gently on the face only to try to strangle me later…

Reygadas: Thank you. That is definitely a better compliment. [Laughs]. But you’re right. It’s definitely a matter of emotional characteristics of each viewer, and the ability to feel the film. You did, and some other people did as well. It’s not about watching the film either with your brain or your heart—they are both in consonance, that’s the truth. Claiming they’re not would be a pure relativism. Your brain is always there, rational and coherent, but always open. Reception of a film is more a matter of your own morals rather than brain or soul.

Keyframe: There are some very powerful, abstract images in your film—like the animated, fluorescent-red devilish faun figure that appears in the second sequence of it. Were you prepared for the whole spectrum of reactions they’ve caused?

Reygadas: This is very difficult to understand, but please try to, because if you do, you’ll get how people who make things for others work. I’m not a master of the ceremony, or an entertainer trying to lead people here or there, like I do with my children. I’d tell them stories and at certain point say, ‘and then the wolf came!!’—and in that moment they feel afraid. But I’m not doing that when making a film. I’m just giving you my thoughts directly, as if I opened an invisible window in my mind and you’d be looking inside. You look the way you want to and see what you are prepared to, or want to see, freely, in my head. I will not be your guide, showing you consequent rooms, explaining what the trip is about. I’m never thinking about how the audience will react once they see my film. I do it because I feel it. In the scene when one of the characters rips his head off, I felt the inspiration of the character. I knew there are heads rolling in my country so it seemed like a coherent image to me, that’s all. I’ve heard people laugh, and that was something I did not expect, to be honest. But it happened, and it’s OK with me. Later I understood where it was coming from. I’m not directing people like I was making a new BMW, or constructing a camera. Everybody reacts in their own way. I always respect the viewer.

Someone Else's Memories - The New York Review of Books Francine Prose, May 1, 2013

Approaching Carlos Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux (2012 ... Troy Bordun from Photogénie, May 30, 2014

“Post Tenebras Lux”: A perverse, dreamlike masterpiece - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, May 1, 2013

Carlos Reygadas's “Post Tenebras Lux": A Hazy, Inconsistent ... J. Hoberman from Blouin Art Info, April 30, 2013

Film of the week: Post Tenebras Lux | BFI Tony Rayns from Sight and Sound, April 2013

Post Tenebras Lux - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, May 3, 2013

The New Yorker: Richard Brody April 29, 2013

Artforum: Tony Pipolo April 29, 2013

Letterboxd: Jesse Cataldo May 8, 2013

Are the hills going to march off?: Post Tenebras Lux (2013) A Film by ... Carson Lund, June 29, 2013

Slant: Ed Gonzalez

Press Play: Glenn Heath Jr. May 24, 2012

Carlos Reygadas' 'Post Tenebras Lux' Is a Mess of Half-Baked Ideas ... Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 24, 2012

Cannes Review: Carlos Reygadas' 'Post Tenebras Lux' Is Singularly ... Simon Abrams at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 24, 2012

Post Tenebras Lux Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Movie Review: 'Post Tenebras Lux,' Directed By Carlos Reygadas : NPR Scott Tobias

Carlos Reygadas's bewildering Post Tenebras Lux - Chicago Reader Ben Sachs, October 25, 2012

Post Tenebras Lux – Carlos Reygadas Nadin Mai from The Art(s) of Slow Cinema

Cannes 2012: Day 8 - 'On the Road' + 'Post Tenebras Lux' | PopMatters Jordan Cronk

Cannes 2012, Day Eight: The director of Silent Light drops a bold curiosity and Bernardo Bertolucci makes his first movie in nearly a decade. Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 24, 2012

POST TENEBRAS LUX (Carlos Reygadas) PREVIEW - FilmLeaf Chris Knipp

Cannes Film Festival 2012: Post Tenebras Lux | The House Next Door ... Budd Wilkins

Little White Lies: David Jenkins May 24, 2012

The L Magazine: Nicolas Rapold April 24, 2013

TIFF 2012. Correspondences #3 on Notebook | MUBI Fernando F. Croce, September 10, 2012

TIFF 2012. Wavelengths (P)review: Part Two – The Features on ... - Mubi Michael Sicinski, September 11, 2012

Post Tenebras Lux, A Worthy Follow-up to Reygadas's ... - Village Voice Steve Erickson

New York Post: Farran Smith Nehme

'Post Tenebras Lux' review by Keith Uhlich • Letterboxd

DAILY | Cannes | Carlos Reygadas’s POST TENEBRAS LUX » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 24, 2012

Cannes Film Festival: Loud Boos Don't Faze Carlos Reygadas - The ... Dennis Lim interview from The New York Times, May 27, 2012

Interview: Carlos Reygadas on Post Tenebras Lux | Feature | Slant ... Anna Bielak interview from Slant magazine, June 1, 2012

Carlos Reygadas: in defence of Post Tenebras Lux | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver interview, March 14, 2013

Post Tenebras Lux: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Neil Young at Cannes, May 24, 2012, also seen here: Neil Young

Jay Weissberg at Cannes from Variety

Time Out New York: David Fear

Time Out Chicago: Ben Kenigsberg

Metro: Matt Prigge

The New York Times: Manohla Dargis April 30, 2013, also een here: 'Post Tenebras Lux' by Carlos Reygadas at Film Forum - The New ...

Rhodes, Hue

SAINT JOHN OF LAS VEGAS C 71

USA (85 mi) 2010

A lovable loser comedy starring Steve Buscemi, a compulsive ex-gambler living outside Las Vegas where he works in insurance claims, a dead end job that pays the bills and allows him to live a life of reasonable comfort in a suburban tract home where nothing noteworthy ever happens. Here he actually narrates a few days in the life where his life takes a strange twist as he goes on a company road journey that takes him straight into the heart of Vegas where he revives Lady Luck to see if it’s working for him this time, with decidedly mixed results. Working in a cubicle next to Sarah Silverman, a cheerful woman with an obsession for smiley faces, who is the voice of sunshine as she answers the company phone, he develops something more than a working relationship, or, it is at least suggested that a romance ensues. Strangely, there isn’t a single scene where the audience sees any evidence of this, as instead it’s all implied from long distance phone calls. As preposterous as this sounds, as the two would appear to have zero chemistry together, this mere suggestion is apparently all this director feels he needs to steer the audience towards a supposedly happy ending. This aspect of the film never gels, as Silverman is a comedian who never gets to do any funny bits other than talk on the phone, and she’s supposedly an alluring woman, but we never get to see any scenes with a romantic partner. All in all, a very underutilized performance.

On the other hand, this most likely attempts to be an homage to Vegas, home of some of the weirdest exhibits in the entertainment industry, which one after another are featured in this movie. Peter Dinklage is the penny-pinching dwarf that owns the insurance company, a man with a severe hatred of paying accident claims, so he hires a fraud unvestigative unit to lower his cash output. Buscemi teams up with Romany Malco as a salt and pepper version of Vegas’s own Miami Vice, except that these two have absolutely nothing in common and couldn’t be more awkward together. They go on a series of misadventures, each one more mysteriously weird than the last one, but none of it adds up to much. Buscemi meanwhile has recurring dream sequences which seems to parallel a slowly developing fantasy sequence that is interspersed throughout the film of hitting the jackpot lotto in a convenience store, both of which play on the idea of hitting it big and picturing himself with beautiful women fawning all over him. There’s nothing really different about anything onscreen except the extent that this filmmaker seems to struggle to make it look different. The Vegas concept film isn't really all that funny or especially worth seeing, but it does try to be different in a Vegas kind of way, but in an overly safe and conventional manner, which is what killed its potential to be patently absurd.

Time Out New York (Andrew Grant) review [2/5]

After he loses everything, compulsive gambler John Aligheiri (Buscemi) reinvents himself in New Mexico as an auto insurance adjuster. He soon begins dating a happy-go-lucky coworker (Silverman) with an unhealthy obsession for smiley faces. So far, so good. But when he’s promoted to fraud investigator, John is sent on assignment with the mysterious Virgil (Malco) to look into a dubious car crash that took place right outside of Las Vegas.

Loosely inspired by Dante’s Inferno and situated in the minimart no-man’s-land between the Southwest and Sin City, writer-director Hue Rhodes’s debut reminds you that, apparently, all that’s required to manufacture an Amerindie comedy is an open road and quirky characters. Not surprisingly, the road to paradise is paved with a series of contrived encounters with assorted oddballs, including a wheelchair-bound stripper, a man on fire, a group of Luddite nudists and a salvage-yard owner named (yes) Lucypher. Unfortunately, Rhodes refuses to explore the Heaven-and-Hell allegory, opting instead for a pointlessly nonlinear narrative overflowing with superficial walk-on characters. Though the credits include an impressive roster of names, this low-stakes poker hand feels like an undiscovered relic from the early ’90s, and that’s not a good thing.

Steve Buscemi cuts so droll and heart-wrenching a figure in Hue Rhodes’s deadpan road movie Saint John of Las Vegas that the plot—shaggy and inconsequential as it is—gets in the way. Buscemi plays the title role, a compulsive gambler who flees Vegas after a hair-raising unlucky streak and takes a desk job at an Albuquerque auto-insurance firm. He has the look of a man who’s escaped from cannibals in mid–head shrink: gray skin pulled tight, cadaverous hollows, eyes bulging in fear. High-strung as he is, though, Buscemi won’t be cast as the next Barney Fife. His voice is dry, world-weary, and his air of haunted fatalism gives him stature.

It’s too bad Sarah Silverman plays the dotty officemate who falls for him. I love her stand-up, but her acting is all hipster camp—and she and Buscemi don’t mesh. When John and a fraud investigator (Romany Malco) head back to Vegas to investigate a stripper’s injury claim, the film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss. One bit, though, is genius. John interviews a tow-truck driver (John Cho) who moonlights as a carnival human torch—only his torch suit has malfunctioned and the poor man has to sit behind his tent and wait for his fuel tank to empty. Every twenty seconds, in mid-conversation, he bursts into flames, and the interview stops until they die down. It’s so poetically apt. Their situations are different, but John and Torch share a stoic dignity. They hold on to hope even in a world that delivers regular scorchings.

In a better world than this one, the independent film movement would provide reliable relief from the imperatives of studio production. Yet low-budget indie features can be just as disheartening as their big-bucks brethren. A case in point is "Saint John of Las Vegas," a ramshackle feature written and directed by Hue Rhodes. Steve Buscemi is John, a compulsive gambler who leaves Las Vegas after many more downs than ups, and takes an office job in an Albuquerque auto-insurance agency. Romany Malco is Virgil, the firm's fraud investigator, and Peter Dinklage is the boss who sends both men out to investigate a questionable accident that may or may not have taken place near Vegas.

Mr. Buscemi can be touching without trying, and so he is; basset hounds have nothing on his hangdog demeanor. We're given to understand that John beats his gambling habit only through self-acceptance, but the writing is semicoherent at best, and the buddies of this meandering road trip are not only mismatched but dislikable. The first-time filmmaker displays an affection for the bizarre and picaresque. Among the characters encountered by John and Virgil are a stripper in a wheelchair, a militant nudist and, at a tacky carnival, a human torch who is suffering from some sort of burnout. What's most bizarre, though, is the apparent absence of direction. Actors intone their lines without energy or inflection, faces go slack, scenes drift toward vague conclusions. Giles Nuttgens' cinematography, on the other hand, is first-rate from start to finish. It makes the movie look like a movie.

The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Keith Phipps

Steve Buscemi has never had a movie-star face, but he’s always had the perfect face for Steve Buscemi: a wearied, disjointed visage with bags of disappointment beneath the eyes and an expression forever torn between lashing out in rage and retreating in fear. It’s a pleasure to see Buscemi take a rare lead role in St. John Of Las Vegas, the feature debut of writer-director Hue Rhodes. It’s doubly pleasurable to see him in a part so suited to his strengths, even though he ends up working double-time to anchor material that wants to float away in several directions at once.

Buscemi plays John Alighieri, a degenerate gambler living in exile from Las Vegas, a city he fears and loves, where he already exhausted his luck and then some. Removing himself from the action, he now works for an insurance company in Albuquerque, where he spends his days staring longingly at the smiley-face-obsessed woman in the cubicle next to him (an updo’d Sarah Silverman, bringing her usual sunniness without the underlying bite) and keeping his demons at bay by playing scratch-off Lotto tickets. With no experience in the straight world, he’s carved out a livable, if hardly ideal, existence. But a chance for escape, or at least a promotion and a bigger Lotto budget, comes when he’s asked to accompany a co-worker named Virgil (Romany Malco) on a fraud investigation. The only problem: That means returning to Las Vegas.

Those character names are two of several Dante references that end up feeling more puzzling than resonant, and they fit too well in a film that makes gestures toward profound themes, but never fully commits to them. Malco’s stoic reserve plays well against Buscemi’s visible unease as they make their way across the desert, but Rhodes doesn’t find much more for them to do than flit from one quirk-filled vignette (a lapdance from a wheelchair-bound stripper, an encounter with some angry nudists, etc.) to the next. Predictably, the best moments belong to Buscemi, whose performance is a model of understatement in a field of grotesques. Every loss registers as a quietly crushing surprise, no matter how much bad luck has preceded it. And with each “huh” of disappointment, a little of his soul slips away.

Big Picture Big Sound [David Kempler]

Boxoffice Magazine review Pete Hammond

User reviews from imdb Author: lazarillo from Denver, Colorado and Santiago, Chile

eye WEEKLY (Kieran Grant) review [2/5]

Rolling Stone (Peter Travers) review [1.5/4]

Paste Magazine [Michael Dunaway]

Variety (Andrew Barker) review

The Hollywood Reporter review Sheri Linden

Entertainment Weekly review [D-] Chris Nashawaty

Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Renshaw]

Richard, Jacques

HENRI LANGLOIS: THE PHANTOM OF THE CINEMATHEQUE B+ 90

France (210 mi) 2004

A sometimes humorous, more often times informative look at this mystique known as cinema. Everyone who’s ever fallen in love with films is reflected to some degree in this documentary, as it captures the unabashed zeal and spirit of fascination with the history of cinema as art, as represented by Langlois, a crazy-headed, lovable old eccentric with an insatiable appetite for films, co-founding the Cinematheque Francaise in the 1930’s, becoming one of the world’s first film preservationists by establishing France’s first national film archive, buying up and salvaging prints of films that would otherwise have been lost forever. Besides providing this invaluable service, which continued through the seemingly impossible circumstances of the German occupation, forcing Langlois to hide thousands of films that the Germans wanted destroyed, particularly American and Soviet films, his true calling seems to have been educating and inspiring the young New Wave directors who were fortunate enough to view his daily screenings from noon until midnight in the early 50’s, sometimes in small rooms, sometimes on staircases, wherever there was an empty wall. He became notorious in the late 60’s when the French government attempted to replace him, causing demonstrations and riots on the streets when an aroused public rose to his defense. This was a lot of fun to watch, the film clips, though memorable, are brief, the interviews are many, including among others, Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol, and while always interesting, it’s probably too talky, not sufficiently critical, and a bit too over-praising. It played with a ten-minute intermission.

Richard-Serrano, Magaly

ON THE ROPES (Dans Les Cordes) B- 80

France (93 mi) 2007 Official site YouTube trailer

Not nearly as memorable as the seedy world displayed in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone TV episode “Steel” (1963) where Lee Marvin was forced to step into the ring to fight a mechanical robot, this is not the kind of film that will impress most people, but it defies commercial elements with its low key depiction of the world of kick boxing as seen through the eyes of two young girls who are part of a small town boxing club. These aren’t star athletes that will make you stand up and take notice, instead there’s a deliberate anonymity which shines a different light on the sport. Made by a director who was a French boxing champion herself, what’s remarkable here are not showy performances or spectacular ring footage, but an unmistakable authenticity to the less than glamorous world behind the scenes where Joseph, Richard Anconina, runs a barely surviving family operation that includes his niece and daughter, Sandra, Stéphanie Sokolinski and Angie, Louise Szpindel, who have been raised like sisters. Fighting on the same card in different weight classifications, Sandra actually takes the title while Angie mysteriously shows no life in the ring and gets pummeled. The different fight results drives a wedge between them as Sandra starts getting overly cocky while Angie internalizes her defeat, where her growing detachment matches the indifference displayed by Richard’s wife Térésa, Maria de Medeiros, who hates the sport and shows little affection for her husband.

While there is extensive ring footage, it’s not accentuated nearly as much as the psychological interior damage that affects each of them. While Angie is the most obvious victim, where it’s unclear if she’ll ever fight again, to Sandra’s inflated view of herself which not only angers her boyfriend, another fighter, but shows little regard for Angie’s well being, thinking only of herself, to Richard, who doesn’t wish to show favorites or go behind a fighter’s back but has to run a business. Térésa is a side of the sport rarely seen, as she’s not actively involved in the sport but she’s a victim of collateral damage, where sexual indiscretions in the past may still cloud paternity issues giving rise to lifelong resentments. So while their business is hanging on a thread, so is everyone’s last nerve. While there is little cinematic imagination displayed and no dramatic moment that brings the audience to the edges of their seats, there is instead vivid, near documentary detail and deliberate pacing that exposes what goes on just under the surface, creating a mysterious ambiguity

especially at the end where it remains unclear whether what we’re seeing is actually happening or whether it is all playing out in someone’s mind.

Festival of New French Cinema Andrea Gronvall from The Reader

Lacking the raw vitality of Girlfight and the narrative heft of Million Dollar Baby, this 2007 drama about female boxers doesn’t add much to the sports underdog genre. The main characters are close-knit cousins from a working-class suburb: bantamweight Angie (Louise Szpindel), whose father (Richard Anconina) owns a fight club, and the heavier Sandra (Stephanie Sokolinski). We never learn why Angie throws in the towel during a championship bout, so her reasons for seeking a rematch are unclear; better delineated is Sandra, who’s driven by jealousy and ego to lose weight and vie for the father’s backing. I expected more insight from the filmmaker, prizewinning boxer Magaly Richard-Serrano; she settles for ambiguity when she could have made art. 90 min.

12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema Facets Multi-Media

Joseph manages a boxing club in a small suburban city while, at the same time, training his daughter and live-in niece for the French championships. Boxing is everything for this threesome and their lives are consumed by their passion for the sport - a passion that Theresa, Joseph's wife, does not share and does her best to endure. The defeat of one of the two girls throws the survival of the club into peril and shatters the family's equilibrium. Between the two young women, Angie and Sandra, who grew up as close as sisters, a dangerous rivalry begins to emerge, both inside and outside the ring. Filmmaker Richard-Serrano drew on her own personal experiences to make On the Ropes, as her grandfather was a boxer who ran a boxing club, her mother was one of the first female boxers in France and Richard-Serrano herself has twice been crowned the French women's boxing champion. Shot in her hometown of Vitry-sur-Seine, On the Ropes captures with warmth and honesty the struggle of a working-class family for whom boxing is everything. The French do not typically make films about boxing, and this is an absolutely unique look at an uncommon genre through the never before seen perspective of a teenage girl. These performances are so authentic that they have the ring of truth. Directed by Magaly Richard-Serrano, France, 2007, 35mm, 93 mins. In French with English subtitles.

Richards, Dick

FAREWELL, MY LOVELY

USA (95 mi) 1975

Farewell, My Lovely Time Out London

After Altman's intensive analysis of Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, it's hard to imagine another straightforward adaptation. Yet Farewell, My Lovely deliberately courts nostalgia with lovingly recreated '40s settings and film techniques recalling the thrillers of the time, besides the casting of Mitchum, who made his name in just such films. As such, it lies alongside the successful 1944 adaptation rather than the current Californian detective pictures, whose troubled introspections it lacks. The film's triumph is Mitchum's definitive Marlowe, which captures perfectly the character's down-at-heel integrity and erratic emotional involvement with his cases. Purists may find the script's tinkering with Marlowe's character irritating. But there are plenty of compensations: strong supporting performances, moody renderings of the underbelly of Los Angeles nightlife, and a jigsaw plot with Marlowe's chase through seven homicides to find an ex-nightclub singer, six years disappeared.

It was a hot night in my living room, the kind of night where the air feels like sandpaper. The cooler was grinding away like a Buick motor in need of an oil change, and I decided to pop Farewell, My Lovely into the DVD player. Robert Mitchum was playing Raymond Chandler’s tough-guy detective Philip Marlowe, and Mitchum was the tough guy’s tough guy. Maybe a stroll with Marlowe through 1940s L.A. would take my mind off the beads of sweat that were taking a constitutional down the back of my neck.

It’s so tempting to poke fun at Chandler’s overwrought prose, tempting enough that Mitchum himself took a poke in a classic Saturday Night Live sketch. Both the words and the manner are the stuff of another era. Marlowe is a relic. Heck, he was a relic 25 years ago, when Farewell, My Lovely originally hit theatres.

That doesn’t prevent it from being surprisingly watchable, in a pulp entertainment sort of way. The typically labyrinthine Chandler plot finds Marlowe working for recently released ex-con Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) to find his pre-incarceration sweetheart Velma. The search apparently leads to a catatonic mental patient, but soon Marlowe is up to his neck in bizarre circumstances. Another client turns up dead, the beautiful wife (Charlotte Rampling) of a political power broker is wooing him, and a Hollywood madame (Kate Murtaugh) has him kidnapped. So who, and where, is Velma?

There’s more tangled plotting where that came from, but that’s really not the point. Farewell, My Lovely is primarily a vehicle for Mitchum to slip on Marlowe’s world-weary persona like a comfortable pair of shoes — comfortable enough that Mitchum took on a remake of The Big Sleep a few years later, and comfortable enough that his laid-back performance seems perfectly appropriate. His interaction with the story’s colourful characters — Sylvia Miles as a boozy ex-song-and-dance girl; Murtaugh as the brutal madame; Harry Dean Stanton as a corrupt cop — keeps the film charged even when other factors conspire to grind the pace to a halt.

And conspire they do, a bit too often for comfort. For a violent mystery, Farewell, My Lovely suffers from a severe case of lethargy (most of which comes courtesy of O’Halloran’s performance, so impossibly thick it often appears that fellow cast members are about to remind him of his lines). If you can’t keep up with who’s doing what to whom, it’s not because Dick Richards’ direction moves too fast.

Still, there’s something bracing about the political incorrectness of Marlowe’s seedy world, where killing a “coloured” man is a misdemeanour and effeminate men are “fairies.” Even the saturated orange neon version of a film noir world works. But mostly, Mitchum works as a guy just trying to make his 20 bucks a day plus expenses. He may be reason enough to turn down the lights, pour a glass of bourbon and visit a world full of dames whose first and last names are Trouble.

Farewell, My Lovely Kent Jones from Film Comment, July/August 2010

Anyone who went to the movies in America during the Seventies will remember nostalgia as a key component of the era. The first half of the 20th century in particular was continuously raided by moviemakers great, good, and indifferent, mined for its coziness and shopworn splendor in stretches of pure scenic expanse. An army of excited cinematographers, production designers, researchers, and, yes, directors was ready, willing, and able to craft luxurious beds of pastness at the drop of a snap-brim hat, drawing from a store of collective expertise to realize extended glimpses of the Dust Bowl, Delancey Street in its heyday, or migrant farm workers on the prairie. In retrospect, such extreme cases as The Day of the Locust or The Great Gatsby seem like exquisitely appointed spaces that just happened to contain actors. Days of Heaven is, of course, exactly that, and Malick’s film now seems like a peak moment in a tendency that began with Coppola’s Godfather films and Chinatown and saw its final flowering with Ragtime, True Confessions, and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, where nostalgia reaches a frozen end point.

In The Evil Demon of Images, the joyless Jean Baudrillard railed against this strain in moviemaking: “We are entering an era of films that in themselves no longer have meaning strictly speaking, an era of great synthesizing machines of varying geometry.” Why? The predilection to stop the action and convert the frame into a window on a beckoning past had always been present in cinema. In the Seventies, aesthetic preference, technological innovation, and cultural longing converged, and we were delivered into a grand nostalgic interval in American moviemaking. Within a few years, it was all gone. Beautiful dreams of surrender were suddenly displaced by aggressive fantasies of control.

In this 1975 adaptation of Chandler’s second novel, there is something unhealthy lurking just beyond cinematographer John A. Alonzo’s neon-soaked shadows (a far cry from his exquisite Chinatown imagery) and production designer Dean Tavoularis’s extravagantly shabby hotel rooms, whorehouses, dance halls, and offices. The screenwriter David Zelag Goodman pushes Chandler’s action ahead two years in order to use Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak as a (questionable) structuring device. When the streak finally comes to an end in July, Robert Mitchum’s Philip Marlowe has witnessed multiple homicides, been beaten, drugged and kidnapped, and, as always, played as a patsy. “Nothing lasts forever” cries the script, a truth that both Mitchum and Marlowe seem to have figured out long before the opening shot. There are one too many layers of generic fatalism decorating the action of Farewell, My Lovely, but they do lend the film a certain sepulchral grandeur.

Mitchum was on a streak of his own in the mid-Seventies. Farewell, My Lovely came right on top of The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Yakuza, three great performances that turned out to be career-cappers 20 years before the end. Strictly speaking, Mitchum is miscast. He is too old, his body and voice are wrong, and his perspective is misaligned: as a human being, he has already found what his character is pondering.

At 56, Mitchum may have been wrong for Marlowe, but he was right for something else. Despite the fact that Goodman’s adaptation is tarted up with fragrantly kinky inventions of the sort that graced his scripts for Man on a Swing and Eyes of Laura Mars, the film plays out as the final, dying afterimage of a vanished era. Both here and in his Foreign Legion epic March or Die (77), director Dick Richards managed to perfect a narcotized “Old Hollywood” syntax, where everything is slowed down, emptied out, silenced. This is a film of rooms, street corners, and swaths of shadow through which actors move, of room tones in which voices appear and die away. An assembly of vivid supporting actors—Jack O’Halloran in the old Mike Mazurki role, a less-reptilian-than-usual Anthony Zerbe doing a Zachary Scott number, Sylvia Miles in the Claire Trevor/Gladys George slot, a depleted John Ireland in Ward Bond mode—go through their antiquated moves slowly, painstakingly, one step at a time, remembering a soon-to-be-forgotten physical and aural language. Strangest of all is the coupling of a vampiric Charlotte Rampling with a murmuring Jim Thompson of all people, two phantoms drifting decorously through the perfumed air.

Mitchum is the one who holds it all together. He gives the film a secret force, balanced between resignation and an inner need to keep the light from dying, inevitability aside. In fact, we are not watching Philip Marlowe but Robert Mitchum, confronting the end of both his identity as a leading man and the world that formed him as a star, with bravery and grace. Within this setting of lovingly crafted but excessively self-pitying nostalgia, Mitchum composed a poetic wonder. In an industry long addicted to phony valedictories, this genuinely great artist gave himself the real thing… on the sly.

notcoming.com | Farewell, My Lovely Lindsay Peters

The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] August 25, 1975, original newsprint (pdf format)

Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts]

Farewell, My Lovely Review (1975) Andrew Pragasam from The Spinning Image

Dragan Antulov

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Farewell My Lovely Review (1944) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Slant Magazine [Nick McCarthy]

Movie Review - Farewell, My Lovely - Screen: Detective Yarn ... Richard Eder from The New York Times

Richardson, Tony

LOOK BACK IN ANGER

Great Britain (98 mi) 1959

Look Back in Anger Mark Harris

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is very likely the best-known and most influential British play of the 1950s, helping to set in motion parallel movements in theater, literature, and film known as the "Angry Young Man" movement, "kitchen sink drama," and the British New Wave -- all of which I've been exploring lately. In the past couple of weeks I've read Osborne's play and seen the two versions of it that are widely available -- Tony Richardson's 1958 film with Richard Burton, and David Jones's 1989 television broadcast of the celebrated Renaissance Theatre production, directed by Judi Dench on stage and starring Kenneth Branagh. (It is unfortunate that the 1980 Lindsay Anderson film with Malcolm McDowell, once available on VHS, hasn't surfaced on DVD yet.)

The 1958 film is important and worth seeing, but problematic, too. It was probably inevitable that a movie version would "open up" the play, but this is a one-set play with all the claustrophobia that implies, and the claustrophobic quality is largely lost in the film. Like most of the key British New Wave films, it is beautifully shot (in black and white by Oswald Morris) and well directed, worthy on its own terms, but if you are loooking to understand the impact Look Back in Anger had in the theater, this would not be the place to start. Nigel Kneale's screenplay is a thorough re-writing of Osborne, with additional characters and sub-plots, and less of the cascade of language one finds in the play.

Richard Burton is surprisingly weak as the iconic Jimmy Porter, over-doing the odious side of the character, lacking in charm, and reciting the speeches as if memorized, not as if made up on the spot. The other actors are superior. Gary Raymond as Jimmy's buddy Cliff gives as perfectly pitched a male supporting performance as you will ever see. Claire Bloom takes the difficult role of Helena and invests it with as much believability as anyone could (but the conception of Helena and her role in the plot is the really glaring fault of the play). Mary Ure as Jimmy's wife Alison, repeating her role from both the original West End and Broadway productions, hadn't lost an ounce of freshness; her fragility touches a nerve and makes many of the important scenes between her and Burton more effective despite his studied approach. (Ure's own career trajectory as an actress, quite tragic, suggests a source for that fragility, but the important thing is, she could play it.)

The 1989 television version makes a marvelous contrast with the film. It is simply a rendering of the play, one set, small group of characters, and all. So the force of Osborne's dialogue is undiluted, and the sense of entrapment is powerful. Although the supporting performances are in general not as good in the film, that is more than made up for by Kenneth Branagh's extraordinary take on Jimmy Porter. He outshines Burton in every possible way: he's got the charm, the on-the-spot inventiveness, that constitutes the magnetic side of the character; he is more convincingly intellectual; he is verbally and physically completely fresh and untrammelled. It is little wonder, based on this performance (which we are lucky to have preserved), why Branagh took the London theater world by storm in the Eighties: he is astonishing.

I'd like to say the same of Emma Thonpson as Alison, since I am a huge Thompson fan. Yet this is not quite her part. She acts the heck out of it, but knowing Thompson in her other roles as we do, it is hard to accept her as a put-upon woman who can't give back Jimmy's guff as good as she gets it. You could believe that of Mary Ure's Alison; she seemed endangered by life. Thompson can't shed her natural projection of firm character, of backbone, sufficiently to make a convincing Alison.

BLUE SKY

USA (101 mi) 1994

Blue Sky Terrence Rafferty from The New Yorker

The last movie directed by Tony Richardson—he died shortly after completing it, in 1991—is a fitting end to his long, erratically brilliant career. The picture is set in the early sixties. Tommy Lee Jones plays a quiet Army scientist assigned to a nuclear-testing project; Jessica Lange plays his volatile wife, to whom he is utterly, incomprehensibly devoted. Both actors are extraordinary; Lange's performance might be her best. The action feels contrived and a little fuzzy in the last half hour, but the movie is so strong that its flaws don't seem to matter. Richardson frames his stars' work with a mysterious tenderness, as if to reward them for vindicating his lifelong faith in the actor's art. His direction is a touching embodiment of the movie's theme: the rigors and the joys of constancy. Also with Amy Locane, Powers Boothe, Carrie Snodgress, Chris O'Donnell, and Anna Klemp. Screenplay by Rama Laurie Stagner, Arlene Sarner, and Jerry Leichtling.

Richen, Yoruba

THE NEW BLACK B 85

USA (75 mi) 2013 Official site

It ain't necessarily so
It ain't necessarily so
The things that you're liable
To read in the Bible,
It ain't necessarily so.

—“It Ain’t Necessarily So,” by George and Ira Gershwin, from Porgy and Bess,1935

Equality never hurt anyone. —Irene Huskens

While stylistically the film breaks no new ground, featuring the typical talking heads documentary format, the film does a surprisingly good job in providing intelligent, in-depth comments from both sides of the issue as it tackles the subject of homophobia in the black community, and in particular a same-sex ballot referendum, Maryland Question 6, that was put to Maryland voters in 2012. We quickly learn that all previous initatives voted on by the public have failed, where democracy has been a tough pathway for advocates of gay and lesbian rights. Perhaps the most memorable setback was the California Proposition 8 (2008), which historically added a ban on gay marriage to the state Constitution at the same time the first black President in history was elected in the United States. It’s interesting how progress was euphoric in one instance, but heartbreaking in the other, often testing the views of the exact same voters. Blacks came under particular pressure as they were largely blamed for the referendum’s success, passing 52% to 48%, even though blacks only comprise 7% of the state, yet the perception was blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama but not for gay rights. The proposition was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in 2010, and sustained June 26, 2013 through the appeal process to the Supreme Court, thereby granting federal benefits to same sex couples who are married under state law. Unfortunately, this process is required to take place state by state, election by election, appeal after appeal, as there is no uniform federal same sex marriage policy. This lengthy process unleashes hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns both for and against, but ultimately it comes down to each individual voter. This film is an attempt to get inside the minds of a large section of black society, including gay rights activists, public figures, black organizers, families, and religious leaders on both sides of the issue, as a thread of social conservatism runs through black churches, often seen as the guidepost for local communities, as they lead the way on moral issues. The strategy of right wing white Christian groups was to drive a wedge between black gays and lesbians and the traditional moral center of the black church.

Perhaps most interesting are the historical implications of slavery, where black families came under siege by a white plantation system that often outlawed marriage, that notoriously separated family members, where marriage ceremonies were often performed in the secrecy of barns. Since the black church was the only institution to show any sympathy for the plight of protecting slave families, this network of churches was often the only way separated families could locate one another. Coming from such a hostile environment, the black church assumed the mantle of moral leadership during trying times, a position that it retains today, where one of the byproducts of segregation in American society has been the cohesiveness of the black church, serving as a strategic meeting ground and oratory platform during the Civil Rights campaigns of the 50’s and 60’s. Perhaps because of this personal identification with the Civil Rights Movement, many blacks don’t share a similar identification with gays and lesbians, as they weren’t recognized as activists or even participants during the struggle. Obviously gays and lesbians were part of the movement, but almost no one acknowledged their sexual orientation in those times, with the exception of Bayard Rustin and prominent American novelist James Baldwin, who became an exile writer in Paris. Perhaps because of the close association with slavery, sex was never mentioned in black churches, which were seen as sacred places and houses of God. This issue has caused a fundamental split within black churches, where activist Sharon Lettman-Hicks, Executive Director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition |, the nation’s leading black LGBT civil rights organization, is heard proclaiming, “This is the unfinished business of black people being free.” It’s interesting to then see Ms. Lettman-Hicks take us into her home where she’s throwing a party celebrating her husband’s 25th year in the American military, where family and friends gather around discussing gay marriage, where not everyone’s on board, some need special prodding, and a few are simply not yet ready to acknowledge that one is born gay, as they’ve been taught that God didn’t create gays and lesbians, maintaining their belief that this is a conscious choice one makes, like a lifestyle choice, as if anyone would rationally choose to be hated and discriminated against.

This focus on the family is an interesting idea, adding a poignant intimacy, as if you remove such a divisive subject matter and simply listen to the various points of view, what distinguishes this film is the elevated level of discussion about being black in America, where this is a fascinating dialogue on race, spoken with eloquence and personal conviction. The director offers a bit of a soulful swagger in the way the material is presented, where some of the musical choices offer their own commentary, where especially effective was jamie cullum - ain't necessarily so - YouTube (4:29), yet we’re listening to aunts and grandmothers and foster mothers right alongside the views of more celebrated black leaders and preachers, where the political becomes personal. Karess Taylor-Hughes was a student at the University of Maryland and one of the organizers in the campaign, seen going door to door, also keeping the troops in line on election day, but she also brings us into the home of her foster mother and reveals the emotional turmoil involved by announcing she’s a lesbian, where her foster mother is struggling to understand, but clearly she doesn’t, where this exact same moment is multiplied by the multitude of gays and lesbians that are faced with the same family rejection. Many of the black churches led the registration campaign to place same-sex marriage on the ballot, believing that is the quickest and best way to defeat it, where this issue is raised by gay advocates in a strategy session leading up to the vote, as those are all potential voters, but the consensus seemed to be to take the high road and not attack those religious conservatives that hold fast to their Biblical beliefs, as they’re simply too well integrated into the fabric of black America. Instead the appeal was generated by holding a broad-based public discussion, led by President Obama’s own evolving view on the matter, finally coming around as a supporter of same-sex marriage, so his image was plastered on all the political leaflets. Unlike California, blacks comprise 30% of the voters in Maryland, and despite a coalition of black churches that were adamantly against same-sex marriage, there was also a coalition of black preachers that endorsed the idea, believing God loves everyone, and that the church is “a place of inclusion, not exclusion.” In the black community, this appears to be an evolving issue, where not only President Obama, but legendary Civil Rights hero Reverand Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, one of the founding members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, condemned gay marriage when it came before voters in Ohio in 2004 when the state approved a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage by a whopping 62%. But in Maryland in 2012, the referendum to support same-sex marriage ultimately prevailed by a 52% to 48% margin, becoming another chapter in the long and epic struggle to achieve equality.

Chicago Reader JR Jones

The ballot initiative for same-sex marriage that was put to Maryland voters in 2012 supplies the narrative frame for this revealing study of the conflict between LGBT activists and black Christians. "This is the unfinished business of black people being free," declares Sharon Lettman-Hicks, one of the gay black women trying to whip up popular support for marriage equality in the state. Director Yoruba Richen seems to agree, but he respectfully entertains the point, made repeatedly by gay-marriage opponents, that the institution of the African-American family has been assaulted badly enough already by drugs, crime, poverty, and racism. The movie points out that no less a civil rights lion than the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth condemned gay marriage when it came before voters in Cincinnati; he doesn't come off as badly as President Obama, who's shown doing a complete 180 on the issue between 2008 and 2012.

THE NEW BLACK Facets Multi Media

The New Black tells the story of how the African American community is grappling with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in light of the marriage equality movement and the fight over civil rights. We meet activists, families, and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland, a state with a 30 percent African-American population, and coincidentally, it is geographically located on the historical border between the North and the South.

This remarkable film examines homophobia inside the black community's institutional pillar—the black church—and reveals the Christian right wing's strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political agenda. The New Black takes viewers into the pews and onto the streets as it tells the story of the historic fight to win marriage equality while charting the evolution of this divisive issue.

In this timely documentary, filmmaker Yoruba Richen says that she "wanted to show the real effects on people's lives" and also wanted to determine if the black community was more homophobic than other groups. Interestingly, she also discovered that LGBT African-Americans are often left out of the movement entirely and although positive changes regarding gay rights are happening, they may be slower than many prefer. "It's one step forward, two steps back, or two steps forward and one step back," Richen said. "But it's a conversation that's happening more than ever before."

Yoruba Richen's thoughtful The New Black confronts the struggle for gay acceptance that still exists within heavily devout black communities, observing both sides of the conversation with a non-judgmental and compassionate perspective. Featuring a balanced roster of black reverends, churchgoers, gay families, and marriage-equality activists, the documentary focuses on Maryland's 2012 referendum Question 6 regarding same-sex marriage. Considering the high population of African Americans in Maryland's voting districts, the choice to spotlight the diverging campaigns functions as an effective microcosm of this national values tug-of-war. Although the filmmakers' pro-gay-marriage position is never equivocated, the members of the religious opposition are never edited down to monstrous ciphers. Instead, Richen allows Bible-bound African Americans the space to express their faith-based reservations without layering on propaganda to smear the very human face Richen applies to the debate.

While The New Black does little to break free of the conventional talking-head documentary format, it prizes dialogue over acrimony and one-sided rhetoric. In a collection of scenes that take place at a family party hosted by Sharon Lettman-Hicks, Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition, Richen distills the conversation most saliently by observing differing opinions over barbeque and beers. Politically volatile family gatherings are usually unbearably transgressive, but this particular scenario thematically gets to the heart of the domestic discourse, which is a private matter that's been dragged into the public sphere. Late in the film, as the climactic tallying of the very-tight Question 6 referendum are tabulated, Lettman-Hicks notes that, win or lose, "the conversation has started in a healthy and constructive way." And as a doc that's more interested in discussion than competition, The New Black is keenly aware that the only way homophobic factions will ever come close to overcoming their religious beliefs is by understanding the human lives and relationships affected by anti-gay marriage legislature.

PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

Irene Huskens wants to get married. Now that she’s found “that person who makes my heart flutter and who makes me so excited I can’t wait to see them,” this captain in the Prince George’s County police department feels sure Leia Burks is the one. But for the moment, the moment in 2012 when she’s first interviewed in The New Black, she and Irene, and Irene’s two children, are waiting to see whether they can be married, or more specifically, whether the Civil Marriage Protection Act—signed by Governor Martin O’Malley and allowing same-sex marriage in Maryland—will be approved by voters on a referendum. While Irene understands the many emotions and competing traditions that shape the debate, she also sees that a basic belief is at stake: “Equality,” she says, “never hurt anyone.”

On its face, Irene’s assessment sounds utterly conventional. And as you watch her family make Pillsbury biscuits their suburban kitchen in The New Black, now showing at the Film Forum, you might be struck by how utterly conventional they look, the kids wearing t-shirts declaring their allegiance to a local football team or Marvel’s Avengers. But even as the kids look like so many other kids, they’re legally denied a crucial sign of equality, recalled by Irene as Leia’s son Marquis’ question: “When are you and mama getting married?”

Equality is framed differently by the campaign against Question 6, the referendum on the Civil Marriage Protection Act placed on the November 2012 ballot in Maryland. Opponents of marriage equality worry not only about preserving traditional marriage or their understanding of the Bible, but also that the movement for marriage equality is drawing lessons from civil rights history and activism. “Gays are trying to become the new minority,” says Pastor KZ Smith during an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. However provocative and odd its reasoning, Smith’s statement neatly summarizes sentiments voiced elsewhere in the film, by some black church leaders and congregation members, Marylander voters and Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values.

That Burress is involved in the Maryland campaign further complicates the many intersections of religion, generation, and race revealed by The New Black. For Question 6 proponent Sharon Lettman-Hicks, marriage equality is “the unfinished business of black people being free.” The executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC) brings her experience in grass roots organizing to build support for Question 6; even if marriage equality is not a first concern for all of the black community, she and her team draw a direct connection to civil rights: “Riding a bus in 1955 could not have been everyone’s most important issue back then,” proposes one organizer, but people could see it as one step of many towards equality.

On one level Sharon Lettman-Hicks’ organizing is set alongside that of Pastor Derek McCoy, executive director of the Maryland Marriage Alliance, campaigning against Question 6. He argues that marriage equality would damage black families in particular, and points to a long history of black families torn apart by US legal systems dating back to slavery. Both Lettman-Hicks and McCoy appear in scenes where they’re speaking to local assemblies or news reporters, but even as the film offers multiple views on the question, its use of personal stories tips its emotional balance. So, Lettman-Hicks brings Richen’s camera into her home, where she and family members exchange opposing ideas but don’t let these undermine either their commitments to one another as family or faith: a wide shot shows them praying together around a table, despite and because of their disagreements.

Or again, activist Karess Taylor-Hughes appears both on the job, knocking on doors and talking with voters (and sometimes not, as when she and co-campaigners have a door shut in their faces), and with family. She brings the film crew with her on a visit to Aunt Toni, who raised her, their conversation turning from the work she’s been doing to “the gay thing we’ve never really talked about.” Like the scenes at Lettman-Hicks’ home, this is an intimate moment transformed into performance by virtue of the camera’s presence, and here again, both women handle it with poise, each making clear her unconditional love for the other and also her understanding of the other’s lived realities and politics. When Toni hopes for grandchildren, Karees smiles and promises, “You’re gonna get some grandbabies, only when I can get the money for it.”

Performance is at the center of the film’s sophisticated presentations of the campaigns both for and against Question 6, performance as a mode of campaign, of living, of understanding. In most cases, it’s not performance as artifice, but performance as assertion and exploration. The film’s most vivid example may be a self-assured performance by the singer B. Slade, known as Tonéx during a rather infamous 2009 interview on The Lexi Show, formerly airing on the Word Network. When Lexi asks whether his “struggle with homosexuality” has led to resolution, specifically, “Are you ready for deliverance from being attracted to men?”, his answer is apparently unexpected. “I don’t feel the need for deliverance, so everybody can just breathe and relax on your show.”

The surprise on Lexi’s face in this grainy video clip speaks, however silently, to the power of perpetually shifting assumptions and perceptions. As The New Black shows repeatedly and so compellingly, the intersections of faith and identity, community and individuality, are constantly changing, over time and across places.

[NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY] Yes, Coming Out Matters - News ... Karess Taylor-Hughes from Ebony magazine, October 11, 2013

I come from a small town in Long Island with large African-American and Latino populations. It was a fairly socially conservative community, with more churches than clothing stores. But the most conservative experiences I had were at home. During my teen years, my foster mother was very religious and backed everything with the Bible. For her, sexual orientation and gender presentation were synonymous, so the more masculine I dressed, the more she associated me with being gay. At a time when I wasn’t even fully out to myself, I had to battle every day to scrape up the courage just to walk out of the house presenting myself as the person I was.

Courage is something that has always been inside me, but for a long time I didn’t know it was there. I struggled with the idea of coming out. I went through periods of depression, denial, self-hatred and even thought I was crazy or that something was wrong with me. Many times, I would push away the idea. Without the visibility of gay or trans-identifying people in my hometown, coming out was something I only saw on TV. Those actors and actresses never looked like me; they were always white, so I felt a disconnect. And the characters they played always had psychological issues or were shown in negative roles, so I didn’t want to be stereotyped like they were. I kept asking myself, “Who am I? What am I?”

Growing up, I learned that my country was built on the genocide of one group of people and the enslavement of another. Over the centuries, America has sought to rectify its wrongs, but only as a result of oppressed peoples fighting to make real the principle that all men are created equal. Our evolution in breaking down racial barriers began with individuals displaying dignity and courage. These folks realized that if they overcame their internalized oppression and fought for the rights they deserved, they could create a movement that benefited them and inspired others to join the struggle. They understood the importance of visibility, and came together to march, lobby, rally and document their experiences to encourage others. I longed for the courage they displayed and the respect they demanded. I soon realized that I, too, could have those things just by being myself and no longer being apologetic about who I was. I realized that if I wanted others to accept and respect me, I would have to accept and respect myself.

Using what I learned about the battles of those who came before me became my inspiration to work in support of pushing human rights even further. I dedicated myself to activism on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. The more involved I became, the more I noticed a lack of LGBT people making themselves visible in spaces occupied primarily by people of color. I saw a similar lack of people of color in LGBT spaces. I was sad to see the schism between the two, and didn’t understand why they had to be separate. Reflecting on history, I recognized that the 1960s fight for African-American civil rights was one that grew by inviting all communities to participate. I understood that my very presence would encourage more LGBT people of color to make themselves visible. I continuously put myself in spaces of color and saw that it inspired more individuals to come out. And in coming out—and becoming visible—they too began to realize they were empowering some folks to live freely and educating others about the presence of LGBT people of color.

The lesson I learned was that visibility is both strength and power. The award-winning documentary The New Black offers even more proof of this. The film follows the Maryland Marriage Equality campaign, where the visibility of people of color played a significant role in the passage of marriage equality for same-sex couples. It’s a testament to what I’ve seen again and again in my work: The African-American civil rights movement is not separate from the LGBT rights movement. It’s all one big movement—and one long story—with new chapters written every couple of decades. Over the past couple years, our current chapter has seen many liberating laws passed. As we celebrate National Coming Out Day, The New Black—which offers a real look at the way LGBT and communities of color can come together in support of civil rights for all‚seems especially relevant, and the story at its heart particularly resonant.

Having been out for years now, I can say coming out is quite a journey—one that is not easy for many people. “Coming out of the closet” is not a one-step event, but a process a person experiences throughout his or her life. I am out to people in all aspects of my life,

and I will have to out myself again and again as my circumstances, environment and the people in my life change. The act of coming out encourages others to take pride in who they are and helps the majority understand that there are people in this country who are not protected by our laws. National Coming Out Day emphasizes the importance of visibility, and reassures people who identify as LGBT that we will not be silent and do not stand alone. This celebration isn’t just for LGBT individuals – it’s an opportunity for those who support the LGBT community to also “come out” and show they’re proud to be allies. The more visible we make ourselves, the more we’ll give others the confidence to come out as well.

Karess Taylor-Hughes is originally from Long Island New York. At the age of 24, she already has years of experience working in political campaigns. She was a field organizer for Equality Maryland and The Human Rights Campaign. Karess currently attends Columbia University, where she is pursuing her Masters degree in Sports Management. She will continue to make progress as she pushes to increase more advocacy work for underrepresented communities.

The New Black: In the Fight for Marriage Equality, Black People Aren't the Problem Ernest Hardy from The Village Voice, February 11, 2014, also seen here: Village Voice

Nonfics.com [Daniel Walber]

Windy City Times Derrick Clifton

Dark MATTER Paradigm: AFROCENTRICITY vs. HOMOSEXUALITY . Andre Heath

"Gay Really is the New Black," New York Daily News columnist John McWhorter

The New Black / The Dissolve Noah Berlatsky

Film focuses on gay marriage in the black community - Politico Patrick Gavin

Film Threat Elias Savada

Film Journal Sheri Linden

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The New Black Director Yoruba Richen on Gayness in Black Life: It's a "Difficult Conversation" Ernest Hardy interviews the director from The Village Voice, February 12, 2014

Interview: Yoruba Richen On Intersectionality of ... - Blogs - Indiewire Nijla Mumin interview from indieWIRE, February 14, 2014

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Riches, Kenny

THE STRONGEST MAN B- 81

USA (99 mi) 2015 ‘Scope

The Strongest Man | Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

The hero of this indie comedy is a muscle-bound, childlike construction worker in Miami who's afraid of girls and whose prized possession is a gold-painted BMX bike; his best friend is a Korean-American named Conan who sports a ridiculous bowl cut and whose immigrant parents talk in 50s TV cliches. Writer-director Kenny Riches lays on the whimsy pretty thick, and his sub-Jarmusch deadpan style (inert camera, intentionally flat line readings) adds another layer of affect to the story. Some of the jokes work, like the out-of-left-field allusions to the acclaimed Thai art film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives or the hero narrating the film in purple Spanish. This might have made for an amusing short, given how little happens in the story. In English and subtitled Spanish.

At its core, perhaps The Strongest Man could best be described as a character study concerning one man finding his voice and coming into his own. Except, we never really get to learn terribly too much about him, despite an overabundance of omnisciently shared inner thoughts. This sophomore effort of director Kenny Riches attempts to convey an alternative perspective in its depiction of growing up in the US with immigrant parents, at least in what we’re accustomed to in these types of films about adolescent minded adults riding the fine line between fun and annoying. But the film’s tone fluctuates between buddy comedy, immigrant story, classist critique, character odyssey, and ultimately, romance, to the degree where none of these elements end satisfactorily.

Beef (Robert Lorie) works in construction with his best bud Conan (Paul Chamberlain). They’ve been friends since they were youths, with Beef’s family coming from Cuba and Conan’s from South Korea. Conan still lives with his parents while Beef entertains private notions of being the strongest man in the world, a title he dreams of sharing with grandchildren, a phase of life he’d prefer to get to without actually having children. Beef makes a bit of extra dough on the side by hanging gigantic pieces of art for the rich Mrs. Rosen (Lisa Baines), but he prefers spending his time doing tricks on his gold BMX. Mrs. Rosen’s niece, Illi (Ashley Burch), seems to have a crush on the burly man, but he hardly seems to notice. Tragedy strikes when someone steals the prized bike, forcing Beef to take a better look at his surroundings.

Newcomer Robert Lorie, who resembles a beefy version of Vincent Cassel playing Jacques Mesrine, centers a mixed cast of newcomers and seasoned character actors. He’s a likeable screen presence, but he doesn’t always match Riches’ sometimes silly tone, such as a ludicrous chasing down of a chicken reminiscent of a bit from “Orange is the New Black.” It’s an example of too much energy spent on a gag meant to imbue the film with a bit more context, not unlike the sacred gold BMX representing Beef’s lost happiness and glory.

The fateful instant happens nearly a third of the way through the film, and this rippling effect forces Beef to grow as a person, and so on. Only, the growing attraction with Ashly Burch’s Illi is never really in question, while their chemistry is painted in light, nearly inconsequential touches. The same can be said for his friendship with Conan, who seems around as a tangent simply relaying similar experiences as a generation removed from immigrant parents. “Do you dream in English or Spanish?” Conan asks early on in the film. It turns out Beef dreams and thinks in Spanish, one of the film’s more intriguing details concerning his character. But beyond his lofty self-image as ‘the strongest man,’ not much else is revealed about him beyond exposition regarding his ethnicity.

Riches’ depiction of the white, privileged upper class is all broad caricature, with Patrick Fugit appearing as a lispy German yoga instructor. If you’re white and foreign, it’s fashionable. Fugit’s handful of scenes wear thin quickly, as do Lisa Baines’ obnoxious bits concerning her revolving collection of ironic art, with center pieces of a dog pooping and a red neon sign reading “So this is hell.” Though not every ‘slice-of-life’ indie should adhere to formulaic norms, The Strongest Man can’t really be described with any sort of enthusiastic verbiage. Everything is quite alright, cheerio, but on the grand scheme of measurements, it flat lines.

The Strongest Man | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Jafarkas

Miami is one strange town. I can say this with a shred of authority, having spent the first two decades of my life there. Cinematically, it’s also one of the places that’s hardest to capture, unlike the New Yorks and LAs of the diegetic universe (navel-gaze much, film industry?). In the early days of cinema, it was always a place people were going, never a place they actually were; the Tony Rome sunshine noirs are fun, sure, but Sinatra probably did more interesting things in Miami when the camera wasn’t rolling. For the most part though, the media image of Miami is fixed in time around the 80s Art Deco crime sagas of Brian De Palma’s Scarface and Michael Mann’s pilot episode of Miami Vice. To Miamians, the cultural value of these relics is unquestioned, the way a medieval Roman Catholic felt about the shroud of Turin or a saint’s phalanx bone. In both these cases, though, outsiders used the city as the canvas for their unique stylistic vision — much the way that, around the same time, another pair of foreign artists, Christo and Jean-Claude, wrapped pink fabric around the islands in Biscayne Bay (look it up, it’s pretty awesome). These works brought people’s attention, and probably people themselves, to the city, but they weren’t really a product of the place.

At the very least, it’s refreshing that Kenny Riches’ The Strongest Man looks like a film that distinctly is a product of the place. As a homegrown piece of filmmaking, the film presents a form of Miami-ness that doesn’t usually make it to the screen (with apologies to Kourtney and Khloe’s taking of the town, obviously). I can also vouch a bit for the film’s hyper-locality, as midway through the credits I found out that the costume designer had gone to elementary school with me. The montage scenes, when the camera is sweeping along with its characters in the city, convey the city’s unusual energy. Riches manages to balance the bright colors in these scenes with enough of a dirt to suggest the unique dichotomy of Miami, even creating surreal, Lynchian-style debris monsters with glowing neon eyes to provide a nice visual metaphor. From a visual standpoint alone, Riches deserves attention for the image he presents of the city, at times turning it into a character itself.

Yet the films flaws emerge when its actual characters have to speak and interact. On any given day in Miami, you will experience two separate phenomena: you will see three of the most beautiful people you have ever beheld, and three of the weirdest, most oddly fascinating “in a world completely of their own making” people. Riches’ film definitely tries to capture the latter element of Miami’s human condition, which is a noble undertaking. The film follows a muscular Cuban-American construction worker named Beef (Robert Lorie) and his Korean-American best friend Conan (Paul Chamberlain) as they alternately try to find their spirit animals and Beef’s stolen trick bike. At the same time, Beef attempts to come to terms with his feelings for a wealthy neighbor’s (and part-time employer’s) niece, Illi (Ashley Burch). In choosing these characters, the film seeks to explore some of the stranger class and cultural dynamics of the city. Indeed, Miami is the kind of city where these different worlds could cross without questioning.

However, the film also tries to mine their psyches for emotional depths that probably aren’t there, while at the same time, playing them for their comedic quirks. Beef suffers from outbursts of brooding anger; Conan feels insecure about his status in life; Illi cannot escape her aunt’s patronage and support (though why she can’t never really comes across). Their dialogue often comes across as stilted, creating a low energy vibe that detracts from the visual style of the film. Lorie, who daylights as an artist, brings a lot to the film’s visual style as a physical performer, but throwing him into quirky, screwball type situations often plays to his weaknesses (a film that outwardly references Conan the Barbarian should understand why Arnold rarely speaks in those movies). The characters also over-explain the metaphors that define them without irony: a trophy represents Conan’s need to validate himself, a chair represents Beef’s feelings for Illi, whose own personal voyage back to Miami is represented by a thrift store sweater. Indeed, a German spiritual guru (Patrick Fugit), who at first suggests himself as a target for mockery, actually becomes the spiritual guide for the film. Sincerity may be the trend of the moment, but it needs to be earned.

This is a shame for a film that otherwise gets so much so well in trying to depict Miami’s cinematic identity. Some of the details really are spot on, such as Beef referencing ships that carry stolen bicycles to the Caribbean islands (though it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t include a shot of this sight). Tonally, Riches never seems to be sure where to go, or maybe wants to go too many different places. Sometimes he seems to want to be Wes Anderson or Jared Hess; other times he seems to want to be David Lynch. He shies away from taking a dark, psycho-spiritual journey, but never quite nails the freewheeling oddballs either. Ultimately, Miami is a city of contradictions: on the one hand, it is the superficial club wasteland most people know, but also a city with a vibrant art scene, a thriving chain of independent bookstores, and multiple arthouse cinemas. The Strongest Man makes a move in the right direction towards finally getting the city right.

Sundance Review: Beautifully Oddball 'The Strongest Man ... Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist

Los Angeles Times [Martin Tsai]

ScreenRelish [Cinemynx]

'The Strongest Man' needs to work out its issues ... - RedEye Matt Pais

Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: The Strongest Man

Kenny Riches and Robert Lorie talk about making 'The ... Interview from The Examiner, March 10, 2015

'The Strongest Man': Sundance Review - The Hollywood ... Boyd van Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter

'The Strongest Man' Review: Loser Comedy Falls Flat | Variety Dennis Harvey

'The Strongest Man' (unrated) | Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

REVIEW: 'The Strongest Man' a mighty visual feat Alexander Gonzalez from The Miami Hurricane

Richet, Jean-François

CRACK 6-T B+ 90

aka: Ma 6-T Va Cracker

France (101 mi) 1997

A young Communist filmmaker who grew up in the projects, still lives in the projects, makes a disturbing and uncompromising BOYS N THE HOOD film about various levels of gang violence. Young teenage boys would rather hang out on the streets than go to school, while older boys risk their lives in fights, turning to guns in order to send messages to other gangs who give them trouble, culminating in as explosive gunfight between rival gangs, interspliced with the incendiary lyrics at a rap dance club, leading to a full scale riot in the streets. We witness senseless cop killings of boys in both age groups, while the film urges the viewer to revolt and take arms against the government, instead of each other, which is a completely different ending than BOYS N THE HOOD, remorseless, exposing an under-the-surface, raw edge of anger and anarchy in a society that offers no future, not even the slightest existence of hope, where the daily creed is “act first, think later.” Of interest, this film was subsequently banned in France due to safety concerns, as its realism could potentially incite housing project riots.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (Richet) C+ 77

USA (110 mi) 2005

A remake of the 1976 John Carpenter film, which was itself a remake of Howard Hawk’s 1959 film RIO BRAVO, where Los Angeles becomes Detroit, where a black police rookie named Bishop who initially protected the police precinct becomes Bishop, a murderous drug lord now confined behind bars, wonderfully underplayed by Laurence Fishburne, while in both versions, unseen, unknown outside forces swarm around a rickety, nearly unmanned, about-to-close police precinct to get at a drug lord being held inside as well as any other witnesses to their crime, as it turns out the invading forces is a band of corrupt cops who don’t want this witness to name names at trial, so they feel they have no alternative but to wipe everybody out. In the course of the night, the police lieutenant protecting the precinct, now admirably played by Ethan Hawke, must utilize the manpower of the prisoners, as otherwise all would be lost, who in the process develop a mutual respect between cops and killers by saving one another’s lives. What we see is a battle of internal psychological turmoil mixed with the obvious outer violence of men attacking other men with assault weapons. It plays a bit like the final showdown in LA CONFIDENTIAL, good cops against bad cops, as bodies are nearly invisible in the swirling snow and night, making it hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. While well-made, tense and atmospheric, the film doesn’t hold a candle to the original which was much more of a low-budget urban horror thriller with unrelenting tension throughout, featuring Carpenter’s own original music.

Of interest, filmmaker Richet was introduced at Facets several years ago when Facets played his 1997 film, named at the time CRACK 6-T, now entitled MA 6-T VA CRACKER, which was an incendiary call to revolt, an in-your-face and ultra-violent street gangs vs. cops flick that featured various gangs from an urban housing project, a film that was subsequently banned in France due to safety concerns as its realism could potentially incite project riots. I recall Richet indicating he based that film on his own personal experiences growing up in a housing project, where he continued to reside at the time of the film’s release. His radical politics would be most closely aligned with Socialism, believing racial and economic inequity could only be remedied through programs of forced social equality. See what a young Communist filmmaker can do with huge amounts of capitalistic monetary incentive - - make an ordinary movie, completely lacking the life force that exploded off the screen in his first film.

MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT (L'instinct de mort) B+ 90

France Canada Italy (113 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

The 'ordinary' criminal who espouses a radical mode of thought, after all, has long exerted a certain hold on the literary imagination. Jean Genet, for instance, who was jailed for theft and male prostitution, was granted a presidential pardon thanks to pleas from Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel and Jean-Paul Sartre, and he was later canonized by Sartre in 'Saint Genet.' Eldridge Cleaver, who wrote ‘Soul on Ice’ while serving time for rape, was praised by Maxwell Geismar for eloquently illuminating the 'black soul which had been colonized' by an oppressive white society.

—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times book review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, 1980

I recall meeting the young French filmmaker at Facets after his first film, introduced by Milos Stehlik of course, where he had a whole host of young social activists around him, claiming to be a Communist filmmaker from the projects outside Paris, a man with an attraction to no nonsense subject matter, who has found his ideal subject in a 2-part film covering the life of French outlaw Jacques Mesrine, notorious gangster from the 60’s and 70’s dubbed “Public Enemy #1” by the newspapers while appearing frequently on the cover of Paris Match magazine “smoking cigars and toting a Kalashnikov, discussing his love affairs and describing the French government as inept and corrupt.” Dubbed the most popular man in France at the time, his legendary mythology, including multiple prison breaks, joins the ranks of the commercialization of revolutionary Che Guevera whose image is ablaze on T-shirts around the world. Mesrine is apparently revered by the young kids and hip hop rappers in those French projects today, where a T-shirt with him staring down the barrel of his gun represents his anti-authoritative stance. This film will only increase his popularity around the world. Vincent Cassel is an explosive figure as Mesrine, where we see his fate at the outset of the film, set up by the police in a Bonnie and Clyde moment in 1979 just before the bullets start flying. Everything else is seen in flashback mode. Cassel was nothing less than brilliant in LA HAINE (1995), a world of relentless violence, also set in a housing project, and here he is a dozen years later, still captivating and in full swagger, completely mesmerizing, giving the performance of the year, though the film was released in France in 2008, and to much of Europe in 2009. Not sure why the United States is the last to see it, but the film was snatched up by Music Box Films and released in two parts during the last week of summer.

Written by Abdel Raouf Dafri the year “before” he had a hand in writing A PROPHET (2009), much of Part 1’s L'instinct de mort was based on Mesrine's autobiography which he wrote while in prison where he presents himself as an existential gangster, calling himself a “kamikaze of crime,” where “stealing becomes a drug.” While you’d think much would be prone to exaggeration and self-idealization, however, the narrative fairly accurately reveals various stages in his life, where he flies around the globe moving around a lot, initially part of the French police presence in Algeria, allegedly in torture squads where he learned to murder and hate Arabs before returning to France where he became a career criminal, eventually traveling through Spain, Switzerland, South America, the Canary Islands, Canada, and the United States. Specializing in robberies, eventually turning to banks, one of his techniques was robbing multiple banks simultaneously, leaving the befuddled police detectives more confused than ever. In Canada, he teams up with Jean-Paul Mercier (Roy Dupuis), a radical Québec separatist, but both end up in prison where they are tortured. Mesrine was caught and sent to prison several times, where he was famous for making daring prison escapes, even attempting to break back into prison just two weeks after he escaped in order to help free other prisoners, something he promised to do before he escaped. Known as “the Frenchman,” he was capable of doing just about anything.

But in the beginning, opening with foreboding music from Eloi Painchaud and a mystifyingly playful series of split-screen shots from Robert Gantz, he’s seen as a suave ladies man always on the prowl for attractive women, where despite having one prostitute girl friend, Sarah (Florence Thomassin), he quickly replaces her with another, Sofia (Elena Anaya), eventually getting married with two kids, but he soon makes it clear in the most despicable fashion (a gun inside the mouth after punching her in the face) that his allegiance lies first and foremost with his gang of thugs, led by Gérard Depardieu as Guido, a fat lowlife gangland boss of some repute. Sofia disappears, never to be seen again, even leaving her children behind, as she knew he would track her down just to find them. She is soon replaced by a hardened prostitute looking for a way out, Jeanne (Cécile de France), wearing a multitude of disguises, a gangster’s moll that within weeks starts hoisting a gun around and shares in the duties of robbing banks, even a mob-owned casino, labeled as Bonnie and Clyde in the Canadian tabloids. Eventually they are caught attempting to extort ransom from a crippled textile billionaire Georges Deslauriers in a kidnapping scheme gone wrong, fleeing to the United States in Monument Valley scenes from Arizona reminiscent of THELMA AND LOUISE (1991), eventually captured and extradited back to Québec, where they are both sentenced, but Mesrine eventually leads an escape.

While the mood is tense and the pacing is adrenaline-laced, Cassel is hypnotic in the lead role, a one man show of personal magnetism where we follow him through a myriad of moods and temperament, where his range is extraordinary, the most beguiling man ever seen in one moment, tender even, a hopeless romantic the next, followed by ther actions of a merciless homicidal maniac, a man who can savagely kill another man with his bare hands and not even think twice afterwards. Not known for psychological reflection or pause, this is an episodic saga that moves swiftly through time leaving behind a trail of dead bodies in this film, so his murderous notoriety is not sugar coated. Despite Cassel’s knock-your-socks-off charm, there’s something ruthlessly unrepentant about his actions which makes the audience both love and abhor his behavior. But he crosses the line early in his life, especially with Sarah and his first wife Sofia, where the audience is clear about his wretched patterns of abuse. His reckless behavior endangers the lives of others, but he enjoys seeking out the thrill ride of being the center of public attention, obviously relishing the idea of taunting the police. The action slows and even drags a bit in prison, where the excessive brutality is inflicted on him, which is without any explanatory justification, as he’s already locked up in solitary confinement. Somehow one doesn’t associate excessive prison torture with the Canadian prison system in the 1970’s. This may be something of an exaggeration from his book and the part of the film that drags the most, as too much attention is paid to it. Afterwards, the train never gets back on track and the film can’t get rolling again, sputtering to a close, announcing the end of Part 1. It’s a disappointing conclusion, as we’re left somewhere in no man’s land, where the chip has been knocked off Mesrine’s shoulder, and Jeanne, from prison, has announced she wants nothing more to do with him. It’s perhaps the only static moment in the film, and it’s supposed to hold us until we can tune in again next week. Obviously, the way to see the film is one right after the other, but this is slowly doled out a week apart like Tarantino’s KILL BILL (2003-4), which was 6 months between Part’s 1 and 2, eventually becoming a single picture.

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5]

Vincent Cassel snarls and swaggers his way into the acting big league with a lapel-grabbing central turn in this arresting, two-part French true-crime biopic (the second instalment opens on August 28). As Jacques Mesrine – the jail-springing, wife-beating, bank-robbing, kidnapping, Arab-hating, anti-establishment poster boy of post-war France (who’s also quite handy in the kitchen) – Cassel injects a jolt of wild energy and ambiguity into what could easily have been another flatulent, apologist gangster epic.

We open on a portentous title card declaring that any man’s life is too varied to be caught on film. The movie traces Mesrine’s rise up the criminal ranks in his home town of Clichy, outside Paris, in the 1960s. The heat builds and he flees to America and is extradited to French Canada where he pulls off a dashing escape from a brutal maximum-security prison in 1972.

The filmmakers offer us a splintered, contradictory portrait of a man who we see one moment calmly accepting his redundancy from an architecture firm and the next forcing a pistol into his wife’s mouth. Yes, Cassel has bagged the ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ role that used to be reserved for Joe Pesci, but he plays it with a touch more depth, compassion and self-awareness.

On the downside, there’s a feeling that every scene strains to make a point. In one sweep, the film blames Mesrine’s behaviour on his brutal experiences in Algeria (where he assisted in torture), his over-lenient parents and the instability of the labour market. Yet, as the film gallops forward, a more interesting conflict develops, and our early reading of Mesrine as an over-confident, trigger-happy jester has to be rethought. This is in no small part down to Cassel’s textured and charismatic performance.

The pacing of the film is breakneck: scenes are so short that potentially fruitful characters like Mesrine’s rotund point man, Guido (Gérard Depardieu), and his kindly first wife, Sofia (Elena Anaya), get short shrift. The direction, too, from Jean-François Richet (‘Assault on Precinct 13’), is no-frills – the action is rudimentary and some moments resemble a TV movie.

But the cosmetic aspects of the film matter little: ‘Mesrine’ is about the personal ramifications of a life in crime. It’s about the inner loneliness of a mobster, the paranoia and pride that make if tough, even dangerous, to rely on associates and friends and how a simple public display of violence is all it takes to overtake your peers on the highway of immorality

Electric Sheep Magazine Mark Stafford, Pt’s 1 and 2

Thirty years after his death (he was shot 19 times in a brutal police operation), the facts of Jacques Mesrine’s life and criminal career read like the results of some fevered pulp imagination. Surely he can’t be real? An international criminal Renaissance man, murderer, kidnapper, a master of disguise, a bank robber who’d hit another bank over the road if the mood took him, who gave an interview to Paris Match while on the run, escaped from his own sentencing by taking the judge hostage, broke out of prison after prison, and on one occasion even returned to one to free his fellow prisoners? Mesrine seems to have been born from the 60s-70s zeitgeist, some weird Clyde Barrow/James Bond/Andreas Baader hybrid thrown up by the public subconscious. But nope, he did exist, Jean-François Richet and Vincent Cassel have made a 245-minute film about him based on his autobiography, and they have trouble fitting everything in.

Released in two parts, Mesrine is, for the most part, an exciting, if conventional biopic. Richet (who directed the efficient, but pointless Assault on Precinct 13 remake in 2005) has a ball with yer regulation gangster schtick. There are pulse-pounding prison breaks, tense shoot-outs, bank and casino robberies and car chases. There are piles of money and hot molls on tap (Elena Anaya, Cécile de France, Ludivine Sagnier). There are all kinds of exciting low-lifes played by great character actors (Gérard Depardieu, Roy Dupuis and a great turn from Mathieu Amalric). There’s a Schifrin-esque 70s score peppered with period pop as we hop from country to country over three decades. It’s a film of set-pieces and sequences, thrilling, and disturbing, and familiar. Everything you need is present and correct, it’s glossy, sexy, good-looking and halfway in love with its own roguish glamour. It’s hard to begrudge this, though, when the results are so much fun to watch.

To Richet’s credit, there is some grit in the oyster. Young Mesrine is seen in Algeria killing Arabs with a gun and full sanction given by the government he later postured against, and the first film especially depicts him as a nasty piece of work under all the surface charm, a racist wife-beater with a hair-trigger temper, ruthless and capable of vile acts of cruelty. He becomes transformed, after a fashion, by his own narcissism. An off-the-cuff ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ to some assembled journalists politicises him in the media and the public mind, and his criminal career is magically turned into a revolutionary one by the ferment of the times. Entranced by this romantic vision of himself, he starts to act up to this press-created identity, and in the second film becomes trapped by it. There is an intriguing ambiguity to this; we are never sure how much he buys his own outlaw clichés, and this is mostly Vincent Cassel’s work. This is probably the meatiest role he’s ever going to get, and he excels as a man playing the part of a superstar subversive who never quite convinces himself in the role. Full of bravado and populist rhetoric when cameras or an audience are watching, but an empty self-serving bastard inside, Cassel’s Mesrine is all strut and swagger, smiles that never reach the eyes and shifty glances to monitor reactions, utterly convincing as a man racing towards the grave because he has nothing to lose. It is his utter fearlessness, his permanent state of rebellion against everything and the ambivalence of his one-man attack on ‘the system’ that make him such a fascinating character. Cassel has described Mesrine as ‘a symbol of freedom and a terrible man’, which seems about right. I would have liked a little more of the terrible man, personally, but there’s enough here to chew on.

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Richet's Ma 6-T va cracker is a legend and his Carpenter re-make Assault on Precinct 13 is a fluent and explosive action update. Clearly an accomplished filmmaker with a flair for violence, he was evidently attracted by the sheer ambition of this project but also the complexity of a gangster who, flourishing at the time of the Red Brigades and Bader-Meinhof, came to think of himself as not just an outlaw but a revolutionary, who wrote two autobiographies, and thus provided material for film-making that would be both layered and epic.

This double biopic, part one in 113 minutes and part two 132 minutes, resembles Soderbergh's Che diptych. It too is neither a feature nor a mini-series, but a vanity project, a labor of love devoted to an ambiguous hero that's hard to market and unsuited to normal theatrical distribution patterns. Both parts are saddled with the biopic burden of a churning chronology and an ever-shifting cast. It's rather conventional and heavy-handed (though mostly successful) in its use of Marco Beltrami's loud surging studio music to augment excitement and heighten suspense. But it's at least as three-dimensional and logically structured as the Soderbergh project, and it has a star in Vincent Cassel who was made to play this role (Richet has said that there would be no Mesrine without him) and despite pell-mell pacing endows the protagonist with complexity. The film may be accused of jamming in too much incident and allowing too little reflection but I was impressed beyond expectations.

Richet's first part shows the formation of a super-outlaw. Mesrine's bank robberies and prison breaks are so spectacular and defiant that he's declared "Public Enemy No. 1" in two countries, Canada and France, officially one of the most famous and dangerous criminals in French history, a figure cops wet themselves over and women want to sleep with. Mesrine, both parts, is full of the sense of how intoxicating it is to live outside the law, and how deeply cinematic gangster life is. Vincent Cassel is charming, charismatic, and loyal to his accomplices as he is ruthless and violent, a complex and magnetic figure who keeps changing from one sequence to another.

The second part shows him playing the role, a media-savvy public icon who would seek front page coverage and give Paris Match an exclusive interview while on the run. Loud, kinetic sequences alternate with quiet ones. This is a great and challenging role for Vincent Cassel, the role of a lifetime, appearing in every scene over a nine-month shoot, 45 pounds put on, early sequences shot at the end with the weight gain. The cast is full of first rate actors, including Depardieu, Ludivine Sagnier, Amalric, Samuel Le Bihan, Olivier Gourmet, Cecile de France, and more. This is not only an impressive and expensive project with high production values and an excellent technical package. It's watchable and well done and at the end of Part One I was eager for Part Two.

Mesrine begins as an agent of De Gaulle's colonial ambitions as a soldier in the Algerian war. "The Marseillaise was playing when they put a gun in my hand--my hand developed a taste for guns." Like American Iraq war vets "Jacky," as his parents called him, came back to his well off upper bourgeois parents (they live in a château) unstable and hungry for violence. War has taught him to torture and murder. It's also left him with a racist hatred of Arabs. His father finds him a job but he prefers to work for a fat, tough crime boss named Guido (an excellent Gerard Depardieu, so submerged in his role he's almost unrecognizable).

Mesrine (pronounced "may-reen," not "mes-reen," as he later insists to cops and journalists) is fighting a war with the rich that may be a war with his own origins. A trip to Spain gets him a beautiful wife, Sofia (Elena Anaya). He's no good as a father, but he remains linked with his firstborn, a daughter, for the rest of his life. After a stint in jail, Mesrine gets a regular job to be there for his family. But he's laid off, and goes back to Guido. Sofia objects, and he beats her up. Sofia disappears, and the film drops that thread.

Escape from the cops leads Jacques to go to Canada with a new girlfriend, Jeanne Schneider (Cécile de France, also submerged and barely recognizable), met like the other women in his life in a bar. This one is not just a bedmate but a willing partner in crime. Denied immigration status in Canada and told to leave the country, Mesrine and Jeanne hide by becoming housekeeper and butler for a wealthy disabled man, but clashes with other staff lead them to lock him up and extort money from his son. This fails and they flee, but are extradited back to Canada from Arizona. Mesrine's subsequent hellish treatment in the Quebec Province SPC (Special Corrections Unit), worthy of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, is graphically depicted. This prison and escape sequence is anchors the film. With Jean-Paul Mercier (Roy Dupuis), his Quebecois accomplice from the extortion scheme, Mesrine breaks out in broad daylight. They immediately rob two banks and, keeping a promise, return to the prison armed to the teeth and attempt (unsuccessfully, but messily) to liberate the other prisoners. After this, Mesrine is declared "Public Enemy No. 1" in Canada. He has arrived. The storytelling in this first half is breathless but compelling. It is given particular coherence and focus by the vivid Canadian sequences and the prison escape.

Mesrine - Reviews - Reverse Shot Hollow Man, Julien Allen reviews Pt’s 1 and 2 from Reverse Shot

Rumor has it that the film rights to the life story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most notorious and popular tabloid criminal, were first offered to Jean-Luc Godard, shortly after the subject’s violent death in 1979. Godard supposedly didn’t want to make a film about Mesrine, but rather one about an actor who wanted to play Mesrine. In a typically Godardian flight of fancy he had envisaged Jean-Paul Belmondo sitting in a chair reading Mesrine’s autobiography out loud to the camera and . . . well, not much else. Belmondo, unsurprisingly, told him to forget it.

After 243 minutes of film, spread over two parts (Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1), the audience for Jean-François Richet’s much heralded and decorated 2008 movie (three Césars, including Best Actor and Director) could be forgiven for wondering wistfully how Godard’s version might have turned out. After an appearance at the San Francisco International Festival in April 2009, it struggles onto screens in New York and Los Angeles after a delay of two years, but this epic production, albeit competently directed and possessing a sense of grandeur, feels like a low point in contemporary French cinema, a Vichy-style surrender to the aesthetics and methodologies of Hollywood (brought to you by the guy who remade Assault on Precinct 13).

Yet it all starts so promisingly. The opening split-screen sequence, presenting the moments before Mesrine’s death, is intriguing in the way it disorients the viewer. Rather than the traditional approach (different camera angles of events in the same time frame played simultaneously) we soon realize that we are watching different improvised takes of the same shot, presented more or less simultaneously, with only marginal alterations to the positioning of the camera. The effect is distracting (because at first the lack of synching looks like a monumental error) and then unsettling, as it introduces an early suggestion of factual inconsistency and makes what appears to be a coded admission of unreliability. This is entirely apposite, as the screenplay is based on the various bestselling memoirs of Jacques Mesrine himself, a man whose recollection of the events of his own life was as distorted by a need to please his readership as it was by his own colossal ego. The question of what to believe (who is less trustworthy, the filmmaker or Mesrine himself?) remains one of the few points of interest in this bitterly disappointing film.

Otherwise, the Curse of the Biopic is well in evidence here. Surely now the most thoroughly discredited genre, the biopic will, unless done very well, nearly always sink into an episodic distillation of events and facts, presented in lieu of character development, with editors working overtime to cram someone’s colorful life into two hours (or in this case, four) without omitting anything that might be perceived as important. No depth, no time to breathe or consider, contextualise or recollect. Usually, as here, it amounts to a technical demonstration of slash-and-burn editing that contrives to produce a long film, which feels even longer.

There are ways around this problem: in his screenplays for The Queen and Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan manages to bypass this inherent defect of the genre by selecting only one crucial episode in a character’s life and developing our understanding by presenting their reactions to it. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly hit upon a unique first person storytelling conceit that grabbed the audience from the outset. Scorsese made Raging Bull (which feels like neither a biopic nor a sports film, but represents arguably the pinnacle of both genres) look and feel like pure fiction, by being unafraid to give La Motta Scorsese’s own voice, by being selective in the extreme about what to shoot, and dismissive of any perceived need to recreate the facts precisely as they happened.

But Mesrine plays it straight down the middle. We get the young Jacques’s spell as a soldier in Algeria, his debut as a petty thief, two kidnappings, four relationships, three jailbreaks, around twenty different wigs and facial hairstyles, and finally his pointless flirtation with an anarchist group. Richet even finds time at the end for an extended repeat of the opening split-screen sequence to tie both parts together (as in the dinner table scene at the end of The Godfather Part II), this time colored by an explicit presentation of the long-held theory of a French state assassination. The opening and closing sequences of the story, presented on their own, might have made a compelling short film. The remaining three and a half hours are certainly watchable, but much harder to digest.

Throughout this meandering tale, no opportunity for cliché is spurned, from the boilerplate—freeze frame on Mesrine’s face with a shutter noise cutting to a front page newspaper splash; Mesrine sitting, scowling, on the end of his bed while a half-naked prostitute wraps herself round him; a violent casino robbery juxtaposed with Mesrine kissing his little daughter—to the truly infantile: a Pretty Woman–style spending spree; Mesrine driving about through Paris’s Place de la Concorde singing along to Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Indeed, this poverty of ideas extends to the soundtrack: classical music fills the stately houses of both of Mesrine’s millionaire kidnap victims; Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” scores a ten-vehicle Arizona police chase right out of Thelma and Louise; and worst of all, the Clash’s “London Calling” plays over a shot of a London bus and a subtitle: “London.”

Likewise, the cinematography isn’t sheltered from such tedious box-ticking. Let’s hear it for circular dolly shots travelling around shotgun-wielding hoods (hasn’t Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz already deconstructed this Bad Boys 2 signature technique?), a drive-by shooting filmed like The Cotton Club and thus resembling almost every other drive-by shooting you’ve seen on-screen, and a helicopter shot of an enormous manhunt across the fields of France, just to show that no expense has been spared. One wonders if we’re supposed to find these things more engrossing the thousandth time we’ve seen them because on this occasion, they actually—at least in one form or another —happened? Or because the film is in French, so it must all be more meaningful than when Michael Bay does it?

Characters are not even properly introduced, much less developed. They tend to simply appear by Mesrine’s side from time to time until it becomes clear that they’re actually quite important. Given the budget available, French stars such as Cécile de France, Ludivine Sagnier (just two of the succession of preposterously attractive women who fall immediately and inexplicably under the spell of this self-serving, violent criminal), and Mathieu Amalric are all present and accounted for, playing roles crucial to the original story but butchered by anxious editing, lest they get in the way of the next action sequence. Amalric in particular had more depth written into his James Bond villain in Quantum of Solace than in the character of François Besse (in reality one of Mesrine’s most influential collaborators, but doing little more here than look perpetually angry or bored). The sight of Gérard Depardieu—a genuine colossus of French cinema, an actor of such subtlety and emotive power in his 1970s pomp (Blier’s Les Valseuses, Truffaut’s The Last Metro)—reduced to a grotesque caricature of a fat racist mob boss, with only the occasional raised eyebrow or nod of the head hinting at the greatness of his past, is particularly sobering. Like De Niro, who shared the screen with him in Bertolucci’s 1900, Depardieu’s acting has not aged well.

But the film does, despite all this crassness, manage to hold the viewer’s attention, principally through a combination of Vincent Cassel’s energy in the title role and the bewildering true events of Mesrine’s life. In particular, some of the methods Mesrine used (facts undisputed) to successfully escape custody beggar belief. So, considering the film’s fascinating subject, the noticeably high budget, and the perfectly sound direction, shouldn’t we simply accept it in line with its intentions? Truly, if the primary intention was to create a product distinguishable from a Hollywood blockbuster only in the language spoken by the cast, then we should concede that the film is a success.

Yet, a film with an ambition worthy of its subject would, at the very least, have taken the time to share with its audience its own reading of its central character. As befits the biopic of a tabloid hero—known to the public, but of whom the public actually knows nothing—we are left none the wiser by the end as to what motivates the man or why we should invest ourselves in his story. His bogus political affiliations and the occasional banal pronouncement (“the man who lives by violence is unlikely to die in his bed”) show Mesrine as something of an empty shell, preoccupied only by self-interest and the public’s adulation. Doubts will linger as to whether there wasn’t more to him than this. A generous reading is that in its sheer emptiness, Jacques Mesrine got the film-epitaph he deserved.

Cassel himself is left to carry some of the burden left by the lack of application by the director and screenwriter (reminding one of Roger Vadim’s approach to a scene that wasn’t working, which was to film more close-ups of Brigitte Bardot). This overreliance on the central actor to fill in, by his vitality alone, the gaps left in the script doesn’t provide the film with more purpose or meaning, any more than it helps Jacques Mesrine—at one point left to rot in his solitary Canadian jail cell—when he shouts louder and louder to attract attention: no one is listening. Furthermore, there is a real cinematic dishonesty at work in the deliberate confusion between Cassel the professional actor (a craftsman adept at transforming his appearance and accent) and Mesrine the professional criminal (whose success at duping the authorities owed far more to chutzpah and luck than thespian skill): we are invited to be impressed by Mesrine, but only Cassel’s skill is truly in evidence.

The critical and box-office success of Mesrine in France was perhaps to be expected but its consequent struggle for international distribution is heartening, as the film presents a commonplace and unimaginative picture of French cinema to the outside world. Béatrice Toulon of the French film magazine Studio remarked with glee upon the film’s opening that, “We now know that it isn’t only Hollywood that can make films like this.” Quite. But if you copy Hollywood so closely as to create a “product” that is barely distinguishable, then you’re just admitting defeat.

It’s widely known that François Truffaut was originally approached in 1965 to direct a biopic of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, but ultimately declined because his command of English was insufficient. Arthur Penn’s resultant masterpiece, Bonnie and Clyde, in its Romanesque eccentricity and forthright tackling of violence and sex, is rightly seen as an untouchable classic in France, emblematic of the New Wave’s ethos. Mesrine is the opposite—it borrows and steals from the familiar and it conforms to a formula that merely reassures the audience rather than challenges it. Most unforgivably of all, it’s a film that has none of the unpredictability, invention, or audacity of its subject. Like all the worst biopics in recent memory (Chaplin, Bugsy, Ali, Ray), it just doesn’t live up to its name.

About.com [Jurgen Fauth] Pt’s 1 and 2

Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochenski, Pt’s 1 and 2

Mesrine Takes a Hit | Village Voice Nicolas Rapold Pt’s 1 and 2, August 25, 2010

Vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm] Pt’s 1 and 2

Plume Noire [Fred Thom] Pt’s 1 and 2

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones] Pt’s 1 and 2, comparing the saga to Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES

Public Enemy Number One: Part 1/Part 2 (Mesrine: L'Instinct De ... Lisa Nesselson reviews Pt’s 1 and 2 from Screendaily

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [7/10] Pt’s 1 and 2

JoBlo's Movie Emporium (Chris Bumbray) review Pt’s 1 and 2

theartsdesk.com [Alexandra Coughlan] Pt’s 1 and 2

Slant Magazine (Simon Abrams) review

Mesrine: Killer Instinct | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey, Pt 1

Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One Noel Megahey, Pt 2

Mesrine (Parts One and Two) | Film at The Digital Fix John White

Phil on Film (Philip Concannon) review

Eye for Film ("Trinity") review [3.5/5]

Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]

The Onion A.V. Club review [B-] Tasha Robinson

Filmstalker

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2009) - Film Review Deborah Louise Robinson from Popcorn ‘n’ Candy

Rude Reviews ( Simon Cameron)

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban] Pt’s 1 and 2

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]

DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) review [4/5] Theatrical release

Screenjabber review Duncan Bain

Jean-François Richet interview for Mesrine The Daily Telegraph, August 6, 2009

Wanted! Vincent Cassel Benjamin Secher interview with actor Vincent Cassel from The Daily Telegraph, July 28, 2009

Film Threat - Seeing Double Mesrine: Interview With Vincent Cassel KJ Doughton interview from Film Threat, August 11, 2010

The Globe and Mail (Jennie Punter) review [3/4]

Killer, Robber, Master of Disguise ... and now the Biggest Movie Star in France Andrew Hussey from The Independent, July 12, 2009

Jacques Mesrine: Le grand gangster - Europe, World - The Independent John Lichfield’s extensive history of Jacques Mesrine from The Independent, August 3, 2009

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn] August 7, 2009

Taking the mystery out of mesrine - Film & Cinema, Entertainment ... P. Whitington from The Independent, August 8, 2009

Independent.co.uk [Nicholas Barber] August 9, 2009

Mesrine and the greatest gangsters Philip Horne from The Daily Telegraph, August 3, 2009

Graff jewellery raid: The charm of a rough diamond Novelist Jake Arnott examines our fascination with criminals and wonders why we find them so dangerously seductive, from The Daily Telegraph, August 16, 2009

The Irish Times review [4/5] Donald Clarke, Pt’s 1 and 2

The Boston Phoenix (Betsy Sherman) review

Philadelphia Inquirer (Steven Rea) review [3/4]

Philadelphia Daily News (Gary Thompson) review [B]

The Dallas Morning News (Cary Darling) review [4.5/5]

Chicago Tribune [Alexis L. Loinaz]

Jacques Mesrine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden reviewing Pt’s 1 and 2

The Indomitable Gaul! - World's Greatest Prison Escapes: Jacques Mesrine article from Do or Die magazine

MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY #1 B 85

France Canada (133 mi) 2008 ‘Scope

If it's director Richet's aim to demythologize and deromanticize Mesrine, then he succeeds, as after spending four hours with his neverending wiseguy act and his smart ass mug constantly plastered onscreen, we soon wonder what all the fuss was about and what it says about the decade of the 70’s that society was so mesmerized by his criminal exploits. For sheer guts and bravado, however, especially considering he broke out of prison several times and once from a courtroom, it’s hard to explain how such a trigger happy outlaw lived as long as he did, until the age of 43, most of it right under the noses of the police inside France. While the film attempts to make a connection that Mesrine himself grew enamored with his own public image, portrayed here as a larger than life figure, what doesn’t work is the director’s attempt to connect the outlaw to other underground left wing terror groups of the day, such as the German Baader Meinhof group or the Italian Red Brigade, as this film assumes the audience understands the historical context of the 70’s without providing any real useful information other than vaguely informative radio or television reports broadcasting in the background. Even his connection to Charly (Gérard Lanvin), a radical outcast that he recruits fresh out of Maximum Security Prison, is a seemingly random association that comes out of nowhere, yet they partner up and it prompts another one of those gangster tantrums where he expresses his allegiance to any man who has survived Maximum Security, which appears to be the only code that matters towards the end of his career.

Picking up after that chilling moment of his police assassination which we saw at the beginning of Part 1, the film then backtracks and reveals his exploits in France from 1973 to 1979, where he’s older and a bit larger, supposedly gaining 30-40 pounds for the role, which includes a bizarre courtroom charade which he turns into a spectacle where he presents a persona of a career bank robber, which he readily admits, but flatly denies any other wrongdoing, suggesting he’s more of a victim of circumstances who would never harm anyone. And while it is true that the man has a charming tender side, and no beef with the common man, he can be ruthless to anyone who crosses him or questions his authority. Part 2 introduces fewer characters and narrows the focus to Mesrine’s actions, as he robs banks, makes getaways, and engages in police shootouts and car chases, where the frantic pace picks up from the previous episode, but also turns this into an action movie that resembles a well designed Hollywood heist flick. Only Cassel’s powerful performance lifts this from more standard fare, as characters move in and out of the picture with ease, with few secondary characters playing any significant role. Ludivine Sagnier becomes Mesrine’s new eye candy, Sylvie, seen initially with a shot of her legs and hips swiveling down the street, another whorehouse pick-up that sticks around as his glamour girl, somehow attracted to the easy money and his devil may care attitude. Mathieu Amalric is François Besse, a fellow prisoner with a history of 3 breakouts, and together they mastermind another free-wheeling breakout, the kind that just doesn’t seem possible today. But Besse doesn’t trust Mesrine’s temperament, which he calls “a spinning top,” claiming it’s spinning so fast that he can’t even detect how dangerous his ideas are and how he puts his associates in harm’s way. A trimmed down Olivier Gourmet from the Dardennes brother’s films is the doggedly determined police commissioner who has to utilize the entire police force to bring this guy down. Mesrine uses more disguises here, moving in and out of mainstream life with ease, and agrees to a Paris Match magazine picture spread interview, which only enhances his legendary notoriety and turns him into a cultural icon. The scene of the film is watching Cassel in full wiseguy mode sing along to Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No, I Regret Nothing)” as if it was his own autobiographical anthem.

While Mesrine maintains a tremendous amount of swagger and charm, he also descends to a previously unseen level of brutality that is monstrous, cold blooded, and heartless, nearly kicking a journalist to death for having the nerve to use unflattering adjectives to describe him in the newspapers. While supposedly exploring his psychological dark side, Richet himself uses explotive imagery, a close up on the man’s bloody face, which he holds to accentuate his point, a needless excess that resembles the worst of Hollywood. Richet again repeats this same technique when Mesrine is actually shot to death, which is shown with meticulous detail from the police detective’s point of view this time around, where the long set up scenario had plenty of variables that could have gone wrong, but they were fortunate to move into position to carry out their mission, which was basically to execute a notorious bank robber and cop killer, even shooting him in the head from close range after he’s already dead. Richet again holds the close up shot on his bloodied face, which has the effect of cheapening the film itself, as this can only be described as graphically exploitive, as opposed to realistic. It is this kind of purposeless act on the director’s part, making poor choices, that suggests he doesn’t have the maturity level to do this subject justice, as the cast is there, Cassel’s performance is there, even the storyline is there, but there’s a surprising thread of superficiality that runs throughout this film, with only a few moments of rare originality, and most of that is Cassel himself. There’s very little inventiveness in the way this overlong two part story plays out other than the playful split screen opening, which was a delight. My guess is they soon realized they had money in the bank with Cassel’s gangbusters performance and chose not to cut anything, so they decided to split it into two halves, which was completely unnecessary, as it doesn’t remotely feel like the film is improved by the length. But like chop shopping a stolen car, selling the individual parts is more lucrative than the price of a single car, which is how they chose to release this film, in piecemeal, making it more profitable. This kind of thought process is regrettable, as this could have been more of a social exposé where Mesrine’s audacity was seen as a reflection of the turbulent times, including the use of documentary footage of the real Mesrine, but for whatever reasons, Richet chose to ignore this opportunity and simply make an action film that focuses on the exploits of single character, making it more style driven than historically relevant.

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5]

While ‘Mesrine: Death Instinct’ chronicled the ascendancy of Vincent Cassel’s cocksure French crim, Jacques Mesrine, this second chapter ditches the mechanics of his life story in favour of a ruminative, often unsympathetic inspection of his contradictory character traits (as reflected in an ever-changing wardrobe of disguises). The early stages hint at a ‘Heat’-like battle of wits between Mesrine and tireless police commissioner Broussard (Oliver Gourmet), but a last-minute escape from justice puts the spotlight back on Cassel. The film continues as a wandering account of how Mesrine’s various antics and encounters shaped him as a person. Unlike its more lively predecessor, this is more interested in dissecting the criminal mindset and proposes the theory that the acts of a felon prevent him or her from being able to maintain logical personal and political ideals. In one scene, for example, Mesrine violently forces a family to hide him from the cops, then, the next minute, he’s handing over loot in return for their services.

About.com [Jurgen Fauth] Pt’s 1 and 2

Vincent Cassel made his breakthrough as furious teenager Vinz in La Haine (1995), and ever since, he has played raffish criminals with particular glee, from Nicole Kidman's evil boyfriend in Birthday Girl to master thief "the Night Fox" in the Ocean franchise and Eastern Promises's decidedly less-than-master thief Kirill. Evidently, nonchalant lawbreaking goes well with Cassel's brand of Gallic swagger. But all the other crooks and bandits in Cassel's career were just a prelude to Jacques Mesrine.

From the early sixtes until his violent death in 1979, Jacques Mesrine committed a series of spectacular bank robberies, kidnappings, and implausible escapes from high security prisons. Based on Mesrine's autobiography with a script by Abdel Raouf Dafri and an a-list ensemble of French stars, director Jean-François Richet turned Mesrine's life into a two part biopic that gives Cassel four hours to explore the legendary criminal's deadly mixture of greed, charm, and murderousness. It's a perfect role for Cassel, and together, the two parts of Mesrine -- L'Instinct de mort and L'Ennemi public n°1 -- make one fiendishly entertaining movie.

We first meet Jacques Mesrine (the "s" is silent) as a returning veteran from the war in Algeria. At his mother's behest, his father finds him a job, but Mesrine is more intrigued by the "off the books work" his friend Paul (Gilles Lellouche) does for local crime boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu) -- and the lifestyle it affords: poker parties, prostitutes, convertibles. A few bald-faced burglaries and pimp smackdowns later, Mesrine finds himself married, wealthy, and in jail. Not long after after his release, his wife Sofia (Elena Anaya) leaves him with their three children, and Mesrine takes up with Jeanne Schneider (Cecile De France), a gun-totin' gangster's moll that spurs him to ever more daring heists, including his trademark two-banks-at-a-time robberies.

Richet tells Mesrine's increasingly incredible story in bold, vivid strokes that accrue complexity without ever seeming to slow down. It's probably inevitable that Mesrine will be compared to that other epic two-part biopic about a man determined to tear down the system by force, Steven Soderbergh's brilliant Che. But apart from the run time, great lead performances, and some pretty crazy beards, the two films don't have much in common. Che uses a seemingly objective distance to draw its portrait of the Argentine revolutionary, but Mesrine is every bit as greedy for attention as its main character: break-ins, break-outs, drive-bys, shoot-outs, road blocks, hostage situations, and kidnappings occur in such number and frequency that it's impossible to sneak to the bathroom without missing at least one felony and a bullet wound.

And then there's the women, the shifty sidekicks, and the ever-changing vintage disguises. In the second half, Ludivine Sagnier becomes Mesrine's fearless companion, and Mathieu Amalric helps plot his most audacious prison break yet. The wealth of incident and character is exhilarating, and in Cassel's performance, it's clear that Mesrine himself is intoxicated with his own recklessness. "Nothing is obligatory!" he shouts at his father, who collaborated with the Nazis. "Do balls skip a generation?"

Mesrine toys with the police, launches a frontal attack on a high-security prison, and feeds his hostages rabbit. In interviews with the press, he gestures in the direction of a revolutionary agenda -- these are the days of Baader-Meinhof and Aldo Moro -- but it's all bluster: Mesrine loves the thrills even more than the fame and money they earn him, and he has no illusions where it will all end. He's the most audacious Frenchman at the movies since Philippe Petit, but Richet doesn't let Mesrine get away with his self-mythologizing. For every grandstanding court room performance in which he tries to present himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, there's a sobering scene in which Mesrine exacts an ugly, violent revenge. The film accounts for Mesrine's undeniably seductive combination of charm and threat, but it won't let us forget that this fascinating man was capable of shocking cruelty.

Slant Magazine (Simon Abrams) review

A defensive preface begins Mesrine: Public Enemy # 1, even more protective than the one that kicks off Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the preceding half of director/co-writer Jean-Francois Richet's two-part biopic saga. Public Enemy # 1 starts with what reads like an embattled disclaimer: "All films are part fiction," it announces. "No film can faithfully reproduce the complexity of one man's life; each to his own point of view." According to this lofty mandate, Public Enemy # 1 shouldn't be judged as a historically meretricious account.

On the contrary, Richet (director of the surprisingly engaging Assault on Precinct 13 remake), overwhelmed by the idea that he must forge a narrative out of career criminal Jacques Mesrine's exploits, has allowed himself this catch-all escape clause. That preface allows Richet to make Public Enemy # 1 an unabashed action thriller, complete with canned romantic melodrama between Mesrine (pronounced May-reen) and the various loved ones he leaves in the dust. Richet's preemptive foreword is a brat's declaration of war: Movies aren't equipped to handle real life so screw verisimilitude—just sit back and enjoy watching Vincent Cassel's Mesrine shoot and rob people as if that were an anarchically heroic act.

To be fair, the first half of Public Enemy # 1 is spent building up Mesrine's ego so that during the second half he can become momentarily disillusioned but ultimately transformed into a Christ-like martyr. Richet and co-writer Abdel Raouf Dafri still cling to the pretense of ambiguity that made Killer Instinct an intriguing failed experiment, but here it's even more obviously an excuse to treat Mesrine, a murderer that fancied himself a gentleman robber, like a charismatic, possessed bandit that only killed policemen ("Dangerous, dangerous—that depends," he tells a female reporter. "With armed cops, yes. I have no limits then").

Richet and Dafri accordingly present anyone that gets in Mesrine's way as a chest-thumping, self-important enemy for the few minutes that these supporting characters get in Mesrine's way. There's the prosecutor that vainly attempts to deflate Mesrine's charisma to a rapt courtroom, Commissioner Broussard (Olivier Gourmet), the highly publicized officer that eventually kills Mesrine, even the nameless girl who, when Mesrine is cornered by the law, screams so shrilly that one sympathizes with Mesrine when he tells her to shut up and let him burn incriminating evidence in peace.

There are two key concessions Richet and Dafri make in their otherwise fawning portrayal of Mesrine. First, he wasn't a lady's man all the time: In one scene, he's trying to convince a colleague to bed one of two oblivious women instead of slinking off and masturbating frustratedly later. Mesrine argues, "You like salad and I like a pink taco." If this weren't Cassel in manic psychopath mode, that line would just sound stupid. Cassel is thankfully electrifying enough to sell us on that risible line. Nevertheless, this is after Mesrine greets a cabal of heavily armed cops with a smile and champagne glasses. He's not a murderous gangster: He's Don Juan and he will not be denied his pink taco.

The aforementioned champagne sequence doesn't end with a big shoot-out because, according to Mesrine, "There was a lady (involved)," referring to his disposable date sniveling in the scene's periphery. "Next time, no champagne, no ladies: just you and me, Broussard." (Spoilers!) That macho, Michael Mannsian promise isn't fulfilled by film's end: Broussard culls together enough cops to form their own soccer team for the purpose of assassinating Mesrine. According to the film's warped logic, Broussard is not an honorable man: After Mesrine is pumped full of lead, a lackey runs up to Mesrine's still corpse and shoots him one more time in the head just to be sure. This sequence ends with an extended shot of blood dripping down Mesrine's afro wig, a failed attempt at subterfuge and an impromptu crown of thorns for Cassel's sexy martyr.

The other main concession Richet and Dafri tentatively make is that Mesrine almost never thinks about whether his crimes were really intended to bring down a corrupt French government. "I exploit no one," Mesrine says to a magazine columnist during an interview while a mandolin plays mournfully on the soundtrack. Thankfully, one of Mesrine's colleagues is astute enough to point out that by buying fancy BMWs and Cristal champagne, Mesrine is supporting the system he publicly proclaims he's determined to destroy.

Mesrine is almost instantly relieved of the burden of this brief moment of clarity when that same crook brings an unflattering news article to Mesrine's attention. The piece claims Mesrine short-changed his past associates and hung them out to dry. Mesrine, being a man that's convinced his shit doesn't stink and is therefore incapable of telling lies, abducts the craven reporter and tortures him. According to Public Enemy # 1's logic, this presumptuous journo deserved a good thrashing: Mesrine is never shown ripping off his partners, therefore it couldn't have happened. In fact, before the reporter is savagely beaten, he flatters Mesrine by telling him that the cops are terrified of him, a line that is later confirmed when several cops hyper-ventilate before ganging up on Mesrine and gunning him down ("I nearly shit my pants," one quakes). There's nothing ambiguous about Richet and Dafri's lopsided, quasi-dialectical approach: It's just a way for them to give their antihero more rope to hang himself with.

Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochenski, Pt’s 1 and 2

Through a haze of gun smoke and whisky fumes, women and blood, Jean-François Richet’s four-hour saga wades into the world of a gangster who always understood the power of publicity. Lethally seductive, irresistibly energetic and dangerously charismatic – Jacques Mesrine would be proud of the films that bear his name. But is that a blessing or a curse?

After being discharged from military service in Algeria, Mesrine spent 20 years robbing, murdering and kidnapping his way across France and Canada. He was Public Enemy Number One, ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, symbol of the New Wave’s Oedipal energy and the rage of the Soixante-huitaires.

We know this because he told us. Mesrine left behind a confessional, L’Instinct de Mort, in which he boasted about his life and crimes. That book is the basis for Richet’s two films. The first, Killer Instinct, details the origins of Mesrine’s criminal career – from Algeria to Paris, and a fateful meeting with mob boss Guido (Gérard Depardieu). After marriage, divorce and with a mistress (Cécile De France) in tow, Mesrine fled to Canada, where the brutal prison system re-moulded him into a new kind of killer. Public Enemy sees an older Mesrine with a new lover (Ludivine Sagnier), a new partner-in-crime (Mathieu Amalric), and an ever more reckless belief in his own hype.

For Richet, the question is how to balance that hype with reality – to find the line between the demands of cinema and the hard facts of life. Too smart to tell us that Killer Instinct and Public Enemy are based on a true story (indeed, in Public Enemy, we actually see Mesrine in prison printing his own legend. “People like pace and action,” he says. “You have to give them what they want.”), he opens each film with a title card: ‘No film can faithfully reproduce the complexity of a human life… To each his own point-of-view.’

And yet the director’s point-of-view is hard to decipher. Richet has given us pace and action aplenty, but in doing so has glibly subverted the foundation of the biopic – its claim to truth – as well as his responsibility as a writer to remain faithful to his material. So Killer Instinct and Public Enemy are… what? Based on true fictions?

Instead of analysis, we get shoot-outs, bank-jobs and prison breaks. Mesrine was, after all, nothing if not a man of action. His escape from Canada’s Special Correction Unit in Killer Instinct is a thriller masterclass – testament to Richet’s tight control. But however entertaining the film’s frequent set pieces are, the noisy cycle of crime/prison/escape eventually proves underwhelming.

Mesrine’s criminal career coincided with the birth of the New Wave, but there’s little of that electrifying innovation here. Richet has an episodic, TV sensibility; albeit one that is distinctly French. Rather than finding inspiration in Arthur Penn or Howard Hawks, he looks to the hard-nosed aesthetic of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker’s rugged policiers. But fussy split screens, sudden zooms and steadicam simply serve to soften the jagged edges of those classics.

Both films are at their best when they reach for something more – when the political undercurrents of this fascinating period bubble up to the surface. Killer Instinct begins with Mesrine’s violent death at the hands of armed police in 1979 – an incident that still divides opinion in France. But the inevitability of his death isn’t played as a Bonnie and Clyde-style morality tale. In the France that Mesrine knew – a murky swamp of radical politics, state-sponsored violence and underground gangs – guilt and innocence were moving targets. The questions is: who are the real criminals here?

Mesrine belonged to a generation of men haunted by the memory of Nazi occupation, and forged in the colonial killing fields of Algeria. This combustible mix of emasculation and violence – brilliantly captured in scenes that follow Mesrine from the execution of an FLN terrorist to the bourgeois gentility of a family dinner – produced an underclass of disenfranchised men whose despair and hatred, once unleashed, was eventually turned against the state that had exploited and encouraged it.

French radio may talk of a ‘new and modern Algeria’, but it also gave birth to a new and modern criminal: well armed, well trained and able to exploit the volatility of a Fourth Republic in its final throes. Far from accepting its complicity, however, that Republic fought back, displaying its hypocrisy by assuming extra-legal powers to stamp out the dissent it had created.

All that simmers in the background of Richet’s films – dark hints at a sinister history that might have made Mesrine’s story so much more than another gangster flick. But a number of explosive set-ups (most obviously Guido’s affiliation with a right-wing terror cell, and his subsequent murder by the police) fail to pay off. Having raised the spectre of a fresh new take on the genre, Richet suddenly backs away.

Perhaps the problem is Mesrine himself. “If I have to train with the Palestinians,” he tells a journalist in Public Enemy, “I will.” But he won’t. Mesrine may have moved fluidly through a world of revolutionaries, but he wasn’t one of them. He remained untouched by history. The Mesrine of Public Enemy isn’t a communist or a fascist but a narcissist – his violence an extension of his vanity.

And yet Richet doesn’t strip him completely of sympathy. There’s always an out for Mesrine – some excuse to justify his actions, whether the murder of two state troopers in Canada (self-defence), his anti-Arab racism (cultural training), or a brutal assault on his wife (loyalty to his friends). Contrast that with the withering reproach reserved for the head of the SCU, or the hypocrisy of the lawyers and judges threatened by Mesrine’s anarchic brand of self-expression. “There are rules!” shouts Mesrine after his daughter’s life is endangered by an attempted hit. A similar sentiment is conspicuously lacking from a mouthpiece of the state.

This, of course, is exactly the kind of revisionism that Mesrine would have loved. So too the films’ charismatic lead. Though surrounded by a glittering array of talent, Vincent Cassel dominates the frame, even as the thuggish shoulders of Killer Instinct slouch slowly into the middle aged spread of Public Enemy. This is a physical performance, jaunty and restless, his lips curled into a mocking half-smile/half-sneer – the expression of a casual, careless disregard for the world. Even buried beneath period wigs and 40 pounds of fat, there’s no mistaking Cassel’s undimmable star power.

Though never less than entertaining, Killer Instinct and Public Enemy can’t escape the shadow of the films they might have been. Both earn their place in the gangster canon. But not even Jacques Mesrine can escape the constraints of cinema.

Mesrine - Reviews - Reverse Shot Hollow Man, Julien Allen reviews Pt’s 1 and 2 from Reverse Shot

The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Tasha Robinson

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]

Mesrine: Killer Instinct | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey, Pt 1

Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One Noel Megahey, Pt 2

Mesrine (Parts One and Two) | Film at The Digital Fix John White

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [4/5] Theatrical review

DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) review [4/5] Theatrical review, also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]

Filmstalker

Mesrine Takes a Hit | Village Voice Nicolas Rapold Pt’s 1 and 2, August 25, 2010

Vancouver Voice [D. K. Holm] Pt’s 1 and 2

Plume Noire [Fred Thom] Pt’s 1 and 2

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones] Pt’s 1 and 2, comparing the saga to Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES

Public Enemy Number One: Part 1/Part 2 (Mesrine: L'Instinct De ... Lisa Nesselson reviews Pt’s 1 and 2 from Screendaily

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [7/10] Pt’s 1 and 2

JoBlo's Movie Emporium (Chris Bumbray) review Pt’s 1 and 2

Electric Sheep Magazine Mark Stafford, Pt’s 1 and 2

theartsdesk.com [Alexandra Coughlan] Pt’s 1 and 2

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban] Pt’s 1 and 2

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Popcorn 'n' Candy [Deborah Louise Robinson]

Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]

Screenjabber review Duncan Bain

Digital Retribution dvd review Julian

Jean-François Richet interview for Mesrine The Daily Telegraph, August 6, 2009

Wanted! Vincent Cassel Benjamin Secher interview with actor Vincent Cassel from The Daily Telegraph, July 28, 2009

Film Threat - Seeing Double Mesrine: Interview With Vincent Cassel KJ Doughton interview from Film Threat, August 11, 2010

Variety (Jordan Mintzer) review

Variety (Robert Koehler) review

The Dallas Morning News (Cary Darling) review [4/5]

Killer, Robber, Master of Disguise ... and now the Biggest Movie Star in France Andrew Hussey from The Independent, July 12, 2009

Jacques Mesrine: Le grand gangster - Europe, World - The Independent John Lichfield’s extensive history of Jacques Mesrine from The Independent, August 3, 2009

The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5] August 28, 2009

Taking the mystery out of mesrine - Film & Cinema, Entertainment ... P. Whitington from The Independent, August 8, 2009

Mesrine and the greatest gangsters Philip Horne from The Daily Telegraph, August 3, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey, August 7, 2009, also including a slideshow of the all time top 10 gangster movies

The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu, August 27, 2009

The Irish Times review [4/5] Donald Clarke, Pt’s 1 and 2

Chicago Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review

Jacques Mesrine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden reviewing Pt’s 1 and 2, August 27, 2008

Mesrine: Attempting an epic with an anti-hero as the star - The New ... The New York Times, October 24, 2008

The Indomitable Gaul! - World's Greatest Prison Escapes: Jacques Mesrine article from Do or Die magazine

Rickels, Jiska

4 ELEMENTS B- 81

Netherlands (89 mi) 2006

There’s more to this than meets the eye, but this feels like an IMAX film, a near wordless documentary expressed without narrative form, with no one explaining what we’re seeing until the end credits which simply tells us where we’ve been, giving this an avant garde, experimental presentation, using unusual visual techniques shot by Martijn van Broekhuizen, most of them barely lit or darkened to extreme degrees, matched with an extremely provocative sound design that heightens the jarring noise of the machines that men use at work. The subject is the four primal elements, fire, water, earth, and air, each section only briefly introduced by a different narrator who makes cosmic pronouncements, each filmed in a different location around the world. Siberian firemen are flown into a burning forest, where a haze has already consumed the landscape in its entirety, where some of the best shots are widescreen at night showing separate trees burning, contrasted against a close up of one of those trees literally exploding before our eyes. In Alaska, fishermen are drenched on the deck of a small ship catching large quantities of enormous sized crabs, contrasted against their cramped, claustrophobic below deck sleeping quarters, which couldn’t look more uncomfortable. The underground German miner segment gets the closest, most extensive examination, apparently the filmmakers’ school graduation project, revealing a wretchedly hideous place to work, yet the steady stream of men working there is staggering. Again the contrast is the stark reminder of the dangers involved, accentuated by the horribly loud noises of the equipment used, and the men caked in dirt and grime, seen afterwards scrubbing each other’s naked backs in the shower room. Of interest, apparently they don’t trust one another, as instead of lockers for their clothes, they each hoist them up to the ceiling in a bag apparently so no one else can touch them. Finally we enter the pressure-designed scientific test laboratories for Russian cosmonauts who must survive the intense physical forces from the abrupt changes in atmospheric pressure as they lift off and re-enter from orbit. Again, from viewing these tests, men are forced to enter unbearably cramped quarters wearing space suits, then forced to sit there quietly and patiently as they are treated to nightmarish conditions. The image in Kazakhstan of a rocket rising from a completely desolate landscape is breathtakingly eloquent. Despite the visual feast, and the intent to connect everything and us together, viewers may feel this is excessively wearying as this is one of the more disconnecting documentaries in recent memory. Others may differ, as the stark, formalist nature of this film is at times unerringly stunning, but a year from now, I wonder how much of this anyone will remember?

Variety.com [Leslie Felperin]

Workers in four different countries are seen contending with fire, ocean waves, the bowels of the earth and space travel in debutante helmer Jiska Rickels' poetic docu "4 Elements." Although atmospheric and engaging at the very least on an anthropological level, pic isn't quite as technically polished or as visually breathtaking as, say, "Workingman's Death" or "Our Daily Bread," two recent docus about labor and landscape that "Elements" immediately calls to mind. Nevertheless, the film was well received when it opened IDFA, and inclusion in further fest programs looks as elementary as "one, two, three."

Each segment is themed around one of the elements, and opens with voiceover narration culled from either a folk tale or a primal creation myth that relates to the country in which the segment is set. However, the images that unspool are less stories with recognizable characters than bare-bones observations of workers getting their jobs done each day.

Opening sequence shows Siberian firemen dousing blazes in the forest. Helmer Rickels and lenser Martijn van Broekhuizen get close to many burning trees, but none of the conflagrations captured look especially out of control or dangerous. Later, the firefighters gather around campfires and tell stories.

Second, stronger sequence climbs aboard an Alaskan-based trawler gathering king crab. Various scenes suggest the disciplined life aboard thecramped ship, while the huge, moonlit waves outside adds a sense of majesty and awe.

Third segment about German miners working deep under the earth was the first produced, and was originally Rickels' film school graduation project. Images certainly conjure the claustrophobia of the mine, but by this point, the pic is starting to feel a little unvaried, and not entirely dissimilar to something one might see in an elementary school classroom.

Last sequence, showing astronauts in training at a Kazakh air base, reaches for a more abstract, unsettling atmosphere. At one point, a psychedelic effect is created by quick, strobing cuts between a spinning black-and-white pattern and an astronaut in a centrifuge, but the sleight-of-Avid doesn't disguise the fact the pic never really provides the airborne sequences one would expect to be the payoff here.

Shot on 16mm, many of the images have a grainy quality that enhances the informational film look. Still, van Broekhuizen's lensing is proficient, even in the most adverse conditions such as deep underground. Editing synchs with low, guttural humming noises on the pic's soundtrack, penned by eminent avant-garde composer Horst Rickels, who's also the helmer's dad.

Camera (color, 16mm-to-35mm), Martijn van Broekhuizen; editor, Kristian Claas; music, Horst Rickels; sound (Dolby Digital), Tom Bijnen; Jillis Molenaar. Reviewed at Intl. Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (competing), Nov. 24, 2006. Running time: 89 MIN.

4 Elements Ferdy on Films

Rickman, Alan

THE WINTER GUEST A- 93

Great Britain USA (106 mi) 1997

A visually beautiful, icy poetic look at one day in the lives of four pairs of Scots on the coldest day of the year. Some moments work better than others, particularly impressive are moments between Emma Thompson and her real-life mother, Phyllida Law, Best Film of the 1997 Chicago Film Festival.

The Winter Guest, directed by Alan Rickman | Film review - Time Out

This confident directorial debut is unashamed of its theatrical origins. Alan Rickman, who helped create (and directed) Sharman Macdonald's play in Leeds and London, wrote the script with the playwright, and retains Phyllida Law as the meddling Elspeth who tries to rekindle a relationship with her grieving daughter Frances (Emma Thompson, Law's real daughter). Set against the snow, wind and ice-blasted landscape of a Fife fishing village, it follows and contrasts the diffident, often quarrelsome relationships of four pairs of characters - two teenage boys playing hooky; two ageing 'funeral' junkies; Frances' son and an independent young woman; and the mother and daughter. The distraction of the Pinter-esque pauses and use of language notwithstanding, it's well acted (with child actors Murphy and Biggerstaff especially winning), sensitively directed and expressively shot (by Seamus McGarvey), but finally a shade too dramatically sealed up.

The Winter Guest - Adrian Martin March 1998

There is something naïve, even primitive about the introductory sequence of Alan Rickman's directorial debut, The Winter Guest.

Courageous old Elspeth (Phyllida Law) struggles through the icy streets of a small Scottish town, determined to reach her recently widowed daughter, Frances (Emma Thompson). As Elspeth inches along without her walking stick, almost falling, Frances tosses and turns violently in her bed – as if cursed with a premonition of the trying time in store for her.

The Winter Guest is about the difficult bonds of family and friendship. For all the mutual exasperation that passes between Elspeth and Frances as they spend their day outdoors, we come to appreciate the love and understanding that unites them.

They are contrasted with a local pair of old chums, Lily (Sheila Reed) and Chloe (Sandra Voe), whose own excursion reveals a different set of defences, sympathies and rituals.

Discreet glimpses of Frances wailing out her grief alone in the landscape, and Elspeth before a mirror longing for a man to touch her, suggest a tougher, more primal portrait of the mother-daughter relation, in the vein of Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). However, Rickman and co-writer Sharman Macdonald (on whose play the piece is based) minimise the potential for melodramatic power-plays or anguished soliloquies.

This film wears its inventory of wintry regrets lightly. Loss of health and beauty, disillusionment, loneliness, lack of success or recognition – all these terrors haunt the characters, but are balanced with an appeal to the ever-renewed cycle of life, to the laughter and small occasions for joy found almost every day.

The younger characters are especially appealing. Frances's teenage son, Alex (Gary Hollywood), undergoes a small courtship dance with no-nonsense Nita (Arlene Cockburn), in the process unburdening a few of his own weighty demons from the past.

Two boys, Tom (Sean Biggerstaff) and Sam (Tom Watson), wag school to exchange surprisingly wise, sardonic quips about the adult world – and, in one hilarious scene, check whether Deep Heat can augment a growing lad's penis size.

Rickman attempts to hide the project's theatrical origins by making a feature of the fearsomely cold Scottish landscape, and cutting mechanically between four different story threads. The sum effect, however, remains static and leaden.

At one point, Frances asks Elspeth to admire the pictorial movement in one of her still photographs. "If you want movement", the old woman advises, "make a film!" But not this film.

'The Winter Guest' Explores Relationships With Elegance - latimes Kevin Thomas

"The Winter Guest" is a beautiful, deeply moving film that teams Emma Thompson with her mother, veteran actress Phyllida Law, and marks an auspicious film directorial debut for actor Alan Rickman. It is not quite the picture you might expect when a celebrated star and her mother, also a much-respected player, are playing a mother and daughter. You are prepared for high drama, but "The Winter Guest" goes against all manner of theatrics--and as it turns out, this is all for the good.

It doesn't seem that way, however, at first. That's because just when Law and Thompson are working up some steam, Rickman cuts away to one of several other stories. But when all their strands start pulling together you appreciate just how effective the strategies of "The Winter Guest" really are.

The setting is a Scottish coastal town so cold that Law's Elspeth can remember only one other time in her life the sea has actually frozen over. When we meet her, she's trudging through the snow from some distance to visit her daughter Frances, who lives in a lovely old townhouse with her teenage son Alex (Gary Hollywood). Clearly, Frances has gone through some wrenching experience, and we soon realize her husband, beloved by his wife and son alike, has recently died.

Around the time Elspeth is finally arriving at her daughter's home, Rickman is already starting up parallel stories. A pretty girl, Nita (Arlene Cockburn), waiting for a bus across the street from Frances' house, is coming on to Alex; two elderly ladies, Lily (Sheila Reid) and Chloe (Sandra Voe), are also waiting for the bus. Later on, we'll meet two boys, Sam (Douglas Murphy) and Tom (Sean Biggerstaff), who look to be about 13, who are poking around the rocks by the sea.

Frances is not thrilled with the prospect of a visit by her mother. Elspeth is garrulous, opinionated, outspoken and, in a word, tiresome. She's also gutsy, canny and vital, with a passionate love of nature. She's too judgmental to be any real comfort to her daughter, but as the day progresses we realize just how physically frail Elspeth is; not surprisingly, she's in total denial in regard to it.

While proclaiming her independence and self-reliance, she is actually hoping for a chance to be closer to her daughter, who she fears may move to Australia. In any event, both Elspeth and Nita try to persuade mother and son to start letting go of the dead husband and father. Meanwhile, Lily and Chloe, who have nothing better to do than attend funerals, talk of death as the two boys, most engaging and authentic, talk of life.

In a highly affecting, wholly implicit way, "The Winter Guest," which Rickman and Sharman Macdonald adapted from her play, reminds us that no matter how much of a cliche it may be, people really do need people, whether they admit it or not. People also need people who do not necessarily need them in return, however, and in this instance Frances must come to a decision about her mother.

"The Winter Guest" is inevitably about love, friendship and responsibility. The frozen sea is of course a symbol of the state of the mother-daughter relationship, but at the end it acquires a different meaning: Life itself is like walking on ice with all its adventures and perils.

You can sense that "The Winter Guest" started out as a play, but its transposition to screen has been accomplished with an elegant ease, and its setting has much visual splendor. It's a virtual given that an actor as accomplished as Rickman will get the luminous portrayals from his cast that he does, but beyond this he displays an acute sense of pacing, of knowing when to pause and how long to hold a scene to let meaning and emotion seep in.

Law and Thompson are glorious together in this admirably understated movie. "You have great bone structure" Elspeth says to Frances. "You get it from me"--and indeed Law and Thompson are strikingly similar-looking beauties. We now also know where Thompson got at least some of her formidable acting ability, too.

JamesBowman.net | Winter Guest, The

The Winter Guest · Dvd Review The Winter Guest · DVD ... - The AV Club Scott Tobias

Winter Guest, The Review (1997) - The Spinning Image Enoch Sneed

Movie Martyr [Jeremy Heilman]

THE WINTER GUEST (1997) – FUNERALS. | ageing, ageism and ... Rina Rosselson, April 28, 2015

THE WINTER GUEST (film reception) | ageing, ageism and feature films Rina Rosselson, June 16, 2015

Film Scouts Reviews: Winter Guest, The Karen Jehne

Winter Guest : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Aaron Beierle

The Winter Guest by Pam Jenoff | Review | Historical Novels Review book review

The Winter Guest - Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com

The Winter Guest | Variety Deborah Young

Austin Chronicle [Robert Faires]

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

The Winter Guest Movie Review (1998) | Roger Ebert

New York Times [Stephen Holden]

The Winter Guest - Wikipedia

Ridley, Philip

THE REFLECTING SKIN

Canada Great Britain (96 mi) 1991

eFilmCritic.com ("the Grinch") review [5/5]

Set amid the golden corn of the '50s Midwest, Ridley's directorial debut (he scripted The Krays) confronts 'the nightmare of childhood'. Virtually ignored by his neurotic mother and ineffectual father, eight-year-old Seth (Cooper) creates a world of his own, imagining that reclusive English-woman Dolphin Blue (Duncan) is a vampire, and that the foetus he finds in a barn is his dead friend transformed into an earth-bound angel. Reality begins to seep in when Seth's father is accused of murdering children who have gone missing in the area, and Seth's older brother (Mortensen) returns from the Pacific with tales of a bomb that explodes like a second sun. The complex, non-linear narrative is almost operatic in its visual and emotional excess, employing exaggerated camera angles, saturated colours and an ultra-loud soundtrack to create a heightened, sometimes dangerously portentous reality. Admirably ambitious but, one suspects, a little overripe for English sensibilities.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Reflecting Skin (1991) John Kenneth Muir, December 19, 2009

Every now and then, a movie catches you by surprise...even as you're experiencing it.

Sometimes, a movie even seems to coalesce suddenly before your very eyes (and in your heart). And as it reaches that final, human crescendo, you're left unexpectedly breathless, overcome emotionally by the movie's impact.

Such a movie is Philip Ridley's bizarre 1991 effort, The Reflecting Skin. It's not an easy film to watch -- or even process -- and often it has been attacked for visual and thematic elements that some critics perceive as pretentious.

Writing in The Austin Chronicle, Steve Davis noted "The Reflecting Skin may befuddle you by what it's all about, but like a vivid dream, you'll have a difficult time forgetting it."

Time Out opined: "The complex, non-linear narrative is almost operatic in its visual and emotional excess, employing exaggerated camera angles, saturated colours and an ultra-loud soundtrack to create a heightened, sometimes dangerously portentous reality."

Most often, The Reflecting Skin is compared with David Lynch's films, and it has even been termed "Blue Velvet with Children" on occasion.

Many of the comparisons to Lynch's work are likely apt, but The Reflecting Skin is no mere imitator. It casts a singular, hypnotic spell. The film is legitimately haunting and affecting, and it's one of the few cinematic efforts I've seen (besides Menzies' Invaders from Mars [1953]) that visually captures the essence of childhood: the anticipation; the boredom; the excitement...the terror. Even the inescapable end of chidhood: the death of innocence.

Set in a lonely prairie town in post World War II Idaho, The Reflecting Skin tells the story of a boy named Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper). He's going to be nine years old soon, and life is...strange and mysterious.

For one thing, Seth's mother is brutal and draconian in her punishments (she force feeds Seth water until his bladder is literally ready to burst...).

For another thing, there's a strange but lovely new neighbor in town, the Widow Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan). After reading a comic book called "Vampire Blood," Seth becomes convinced that she's actually a vampire. Dolphin even confides in the boy that she's two hundred years old.

But then a mysterious black cadillac begins haunting the wind-swept, endless country roads, and Seth's young friends begin to turn up dead...murdered.

Seth's father, a closeted, repressed gay who was once caught kissing a 17-year old man, is linked to the crimes because of his past history, branded a pedophile by the police, and soon commits suicide (by swallowing gasoline and immolating himself). Life goes on for Seth and the murders continue too, exonerating his father too late.

Seth's older brother, the handsome Cameron (Viggo Mortenson) returns home from the war, the Pacific Theater specifically, to care for the troubled Dove famly. The troubled veteran (who has witnessed atrocities...) promptly falls in love with the Widow Dolphin. Seth tries to warn his brother about her: she's a vampire and will kill him. Bafflingly, Cameron is already losing his hair, and his gums have begun to bleed...

Cameron can't be dissauded in his passion for Dolphin. He and the Widow Blue plan to escape the isolation of the prairie town, and Seth grows ever more desperate to stop their flight from his life. But then the black cadillac returns and claims one finatl victim.

This time, because of the identity of that corpse, Seth can't deny "reality." There are no easy vampire myths to hide behind. No more easily-explainable monsters. Alone, he runs into a golden wheat field and screams at the blue, wide-open sky. Innocence is hell. Innocence is dead.

This synopsis only covers a portion of Reflecting Skin's unusual tapestry. I didn't mention the aborted fetus that Seth discovers...and mistakes for an angel. I didn't mention the man in the eye patch. Or the fact that all the corpses "returned" by the mysterious black cadillac are strangely immaculate...ivory white, but with no sign of wounds.

On first glimpse, Seth seems to live a beautiful, repetitive life. He plays among golden wheat fields, draped in an American flag...spending his days with his friends. At one point, Ridley orchestrates a low-angle shot of Seth running towards the camera, through the fields; the sky unmoving and permanent behind him. The effect of the shot is that Seth appears to running as fast as he can, but going nowhere. It's a perfect metaphor for childhood as it is lived: it seems to last forever. All one giant game.

But this perfect childhood existence is punctured by inexplicable invasions from adulthoood. Seth's Mother and Father are awash in secrets; alienated and judgmental. And Dolphin Blue sits by herself in her lonely house surrounded by artifacts belonging to her dead husband...even strands of his hair. "Nothing but dreams and decay," she tells the boy with glazed indifference. Then, Seth and his friends catch Dolphin masturbating...another strange, inexplicable "adult" thing.

As the movie points out (particularly with images), Seth attempts to process the murders, the mayhem, the sorrow and secrets of the adultt universe in a way a child legitimately would. Dolphin affects him in a strange way -- disturbs his young mind -- and so he interprets the unfamiliar in a familiar way: as a vampire. When this creature of the night threatens to "steal" his brother, that interpretation becomes all the more powerful. Seth must save his brother from an imaginary monster; a phantasm of youth....a fairy tale. But a vampire, at least, is something that a child can comprehend. Vampires have rules; and there are ways to kill vampires. Real life isn't like that.

Then, in a scorching, heart-wrenching moment, Seth's world crumbles around him. He is forced, by circumstance and violence, to learn that there are no vampires. This discovery, leading up to the film's climax, totally annihilates what remains of his innocent perception. At the end, there are no monsters, just other people.

So -- cast in shadow and silhouette -- Seth weeps and screams at his involuntary initiation into adulthood. This valedictory shot -- a lonely boy crying heavenward in a pastoral setting -- has been charged to be cliched or pretentious by some, but that's a cynical and unsentimental reading of an artistic composition. The final shot is a primal scream against forcibly growing up. Seth's realization that he has been thrust into a world without monsters and without magic is utterly heart-rending, especially if you have ever observed up close the innocence and wonder of a trusting, believing child.

At one point in The Reflecting Skin, The Widow Blue tells Seth that childhood is a nightmare and that "innocence is hell." But she goes on to tell him that "it only gets worse." She enunciates the humiliations and degradations of growing old. Losing hair; losing memory; succumbing to arthritis, senile dementia, and more. She ends the litany with a warning: "Just pray you have someone to love you."

Seth doesn't understand her warning at the time. In the magical cocoon of childhood, he can invent friends (the fetus angel for instance...), rely on others to care for him (even his brittle mother), and hope for the future. But when he crosses the threshold into adulthood, however, he starts to understand the lonely, spiritually-wounded Cameron, and the need to connect to someone real; something tangible.

"Sometimes, terrible things happen quite naturally," The Reflecting Skin informs us, and Ridley's movie contrasts views of beautiful (if overwhelming...) nature with images of human ugliness. So much of what occurs in The Reflecting Skin happens between the lines. We ask questions but don't get answers. With his hair falling out and gums bleeding (and history in the Pacific...), was Cameron exposed to the atomic bomb and suffering from radiation sickness? If so, the movie concerns the death of innocence on a much grander, even global scale.

The Reflecting Skin is a grim movie, one that charts the death of innocence as an inevitable but sad rite of passage. The movie is dark in a real way (not a faux, Hollywood way,) immensely powerful in emotional terms...and once you've seen it -- I promise you -- you'll never, ever forget it...

366 Weird Movies

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

Georgia Straight review

Moviepie.com review [8/8]

Lair of the Boyg [Jared Roberts]

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Riedel, Georgina Garcia

HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS SPENT THEIR SUMMER B- 82

USA (128 mi) 2005 ‘Scope

A film that’s been sitting on the shelf for three years after a brief release at Sundance, apparently never purchased, and now released in late Spring of 2008, no doubt cashing in on the popularity of America Ferrara from her TV show Ugly Betty. The film itself hasn’t got a whole lot to say, most of it overly simplistic at that, as if the world revolves around cars and fucking. But what it does offer is several terrific performances from three generations of Latina women, Lucy Galiardo as the church-reared 70-year old Grandma who suddenly finds a new attitude, Elizabeth Peña as her feisty fortyish daughter who is divorced from her womanizing tramp of a husband who is now bottom feeding on high school girls, and her teenage daughter, America Ferrara, who couldn’t be more appealing in the absolute bloom of her youth. These three are never less than outstanding, but the supporting cast and screenplay is fairly standard.

Opening on a park bench with old men reminiscing about their first cars, mixing in an exaggerated mythology about the first loves of their lives, this device feels clever at first, but grows increasingly stale over time, especially when the men never rise above stereotypical portrayals. Despite the fact this is an unglamorous, unsentimentalized portrait of small town life set in Riedel’s hometown of Somerton, Arizona, south of Yuma and close to the Mexican border, a town where pretty much nothing happens, the film only captures the surface, never venturing into anyone’s past and never providing the details essential in establishing the rhythm of small town life. Instead it feels more like a play with revolving sets, one for each woman, all of whom feel strangely out of touch with themselves and the world around them. Galiardo is a widow who has not felt the touch of love since her husband died. The same could be said for Peña, who of all things, works at the butcher shop in town, where she is as much on display behind the counter as the meat. Ferrara is 17 and never had sex, leaping at the first opportunity that comes her way, which is the first cute guy driving down the street cruising for girls, at first exhilarated by the idea, though the crudeness of young boys scares her at first. Each feels a bit off their rockers to the others, as if they are not themselves, but in a town where nothing happens, it shouldn’t be so surprising that each leaps before looking.

While the film occasionally veers into blunt sexual imagery, especially when women are alone, it also features the quick, fickle nature of women who can change their minds in an instant. All three in fact do change their minds, reevaluating what at first feels somewhat repulsive, growing more acceptable over time. What feels shortsighted is the casual nature of the sex, where prevention is not even a consideration. One might think that at least in the movies, teens and others might at least be portrayed as more responsible, setting a good example for young viewers in the audience who might identify with their lurid behavior onscreen, but sadly that is not the case. This story necessity as if it represents a cultural truth doesn’t add any appreciable social realism, which is instead provided by the authenticity of the performances by the women. Much of it told in a slow, languid pace, the film is appealing, especially in its depiction of loneliness and boredom and features several scenes with outstanding use of music, perhaps best expressing the fear of being stuck alone someplace where you don’t want to be, as much a state of mind as a dead end town, but it just never rises above the surface.

How this reviewer sorely wanted to enjoy How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer! Films about Hispanic women are rare enough these days, especially starring terrific actresses like America Ferrera, Elizabeth Peña and the glorious Argentinean veteran Lucy Gallardo. However, rookie writer-director Georgina Garcia Riedel’s helming hand is both unsure and all over the place and she enervatingly spins this slight, could-have-been-charming conceit over two hours.

A desolate Arizona border town provides the setting, where the venerable Dona Genoveva (Gallardo) scandalizes her daughter, Rosa (Peña), by suddenly buying a car and expressing a desire to drive toward an increased independence. Meanwhile, Rosa has her hands full, dealing with a sausage shop, a jerk ex-husband, a teenage daughter Blanca (Ferrera) with an itch to lose her virginity, and the attentions of local stud Victor (Steven Bauer).

In the first scene, Blanca has an encounter with a dimwitted local boy, obviously in love with her, to the derision of her less sensitive gal pals, and you immediately brace yourself over this timeworn device, hoary even back in the Italian Neo-realist days. A Greek chorus of aged Mexican men describing various memories of cars and girls provides an uncertain framework which unnecessarily interferes with and distends the dramatic narrative. More troubling is Riedel’s shaky use of the camera in too-protracted pictorial interludes involving Blanca and her teenage suitor, and an overall faulty sense of timing. Such infelicities mar the strong, sincere performances of her cast: A scene in which Rosa suddenly slaps Blanca reads onscreen as extremely amateurish when we know full well that these actresses are more than capable of carrying it off with supreme aplomb. And the odd on-again, off-again use of subtitles is annoying: The “Greek chorus” benefits from them, but when Rosa weeps at the sound of a sentimental ballad, the untranslated lyrics leave any non-Spanish speaker in total darkness.

What one salvages from the film are charming moments: Peña’s emotional panoply of doubt at being thrown once again into the perilous dating game; a daring bathtub masturbation scene (but again, overlong) involving Gallardo; and especially, the wide, radiant smile of Ferrara, a born natural performer if ever there was one.

Film Threat Daniel Wlble

It almost sounds like a parody of your typical Sundance feature: three generations of single Mexican-American women learn (or re-learn) to love and be loved under a sweltering summer sun. The ensemble drama in question is “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer” and it’s likable and textured enough for this jaded critic to cut it some slack in the originality department. As far as multi-generational chick flicks go, “Garcia Girls” is certainly far less trying than say, anything with “Ya Ya” in its title. Credit for this is mostly due to first-time writer/director Georgina Garcia Riedel, who skillfully weaves a rich web of loneliness, self-discovery, and desire, without ever sentimentalizing. Riedel’s debut feature is also greatly aided by a uniformly exceptional cast, including veteran Elizabeth Pena (always good) and America Ferrara (such a revelation in “Real Women Have Curves”).

As the summer blazes on in a sleepy Arizona border town, Dona Genoveva (a spirited Lucy Galiardo), the matriarch of the Garcia women, decides to buy a car on a whim, even though she can’t drive (doh!). When she enlists the help of a grungy old man from the neighborhood named Don Pedro (Jorge Cevera Jr.), long-forgotten pangs of desire begin to once again creep into her seventy-year-old bones. Meanwhile, the middle-generation Garcia woman, Rosa (Pena), is at first, equally at odds with her sexuality, having been recently divorced, that is until things start cooking at the butcher shop where she works. After a brief, ill-advised flirtation with a slimy, but apparently quite studly, married man, Rosa finds love in the least likely of places. As for the youngest Garcia woman, Blanca (Ferrara), she soon discovers burgeoning desires of her own, as she engages in a steamy romance with an older boy. It’s that completely meaningless, yet completely meaningful romance only possible in youth, as well as a source of great poignancy in the film.

The separate stories of the Garcia women are of course linked in all the expected ways. Invariably, each Garcia woman has a problem with another Garcia woman’s romantic entanglement and the sparks freely fly. However, as each Garcia woman slowly remembers, or in Blanca’s case learns, to once again embrace her unique sensuality, the tensions ease and life, in all its beauty and grace, resumes its normal course in their home. For a first film, “Garcia Girls” is an entirely respectable effort for Miss Riedel. Aside from an obvious gift for characterization and directing actors, she also displays a wonderfully nuanced focus on the banalities of small-town life. In fact, the setting of “Garcia Girls” may be the most memorable character in a film overflowing with them. In the end, this is a quaint little film that’s easily overlooked, but a savory, lazy-day treat if noticed and given a chance. Ebert, any open slots for your next Overlooked Film Festival?

Chicago Tribune (Jessica Reaves)

Georgina Garcia Riedel’s debut feature could have been a real dud—or at the very least, a chore. Saddled with more “serious” themes than a presidential campaign, this coming-of-age narrative tackles body image, sexuality, religion, gender roles, the immigrant experience and (whew!) dwindling economic prospects in small-town America. And yet, somehow, Riedel has spun this string of heavyweight issues into a subtly beautiful tapestry that’s both entertaining and deeply affecting.

The film follows three generations of women—played by America Ferrera, Elizabeth Peña and Lucy Gallardo—through one summer in their small Arizona town. It’s the kind of town where nothing much happens, on the surface, anyway. Everyone knows one another; gossip travels fast, and traffic moves slowly. In the dusty town square, the old men sit together kib itzing and elbowing each other as the women walk by.

Unlike so many of her peers who depend on music to do everything but deliver the dialogue, Riedel isn’t afraid of silence; early in the film there’s a solid minute of noiselessness as the camera lovingly pans the town, establishing the story’s visual reference points.

Blanca (Ferrera, whose backlog of pre-“Ugly Betty” independent films must be nearly exhausted) is 17, and therefore deeply bored by life (but not by boys) and unfailingly dismissive of everything her mother, Lolita (Peña), says. Lolita, divorced and frustrated, is similarly disinterested in her own mother’s wishes—and is horrified when Dona Genoveva (Gallardo) buys herself a dilapidated car. But stubbornness runs in the family, and soon the shy but charming Don Pedro (Jorge Cervevo Jr.) is teaching Dona Genoveva how to drive. (And let’s just say the clunker isn’t the only thing getting revved up. Wink, wink.)

Blanca, meanwhile, is engaged in some heavy flirtation with the recently arrived Sal, a bad boy with a pickup truck. (By this point, you’ve probably figured out that cars play a major role in this story—not just for the men, who discuss their automotive history in the same breath as their romantic pasts—but also for the women, for whom the cars provide a taste of freedom. Not to mention a convenient setting for many of the movie’s sexual interludes).

While some of the younger actors’ deliveries sound stilted, on balance the cast is wonderful, especially the leads. And even beyond the prodigious talents of Peña, Gallardo and Ferrera, there’s much to admire about this movie. The script is tight and believable; the arguments, slights and affection between the women feel absolutely genuine. And Dona Genoveva’s unfolding romance with Don Pedro is lovely to watch, as she vacillates between guilt and abandon.

For all its sexual heat, this movie feels incredibly innocent, almost like a throwback: There’s no violence, and the only real danger that surfaces is a pregnancy scare. Riedel, a first generation Mexican-American, has captured not only the wholesomeness of a vanishing American experience—iconic small-town life—but also its affectionate, claustrophobic intimacy.

blackfilm.com Kam Williams

eFilmCritic Reviews Chris Parry

Cinema Dave

Variety.com [Dennis Harvey]

San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]

Houston Community Newspapers (Gary Brown)

Riefenstahl, Leni

Riefenstahl, Leni Art and Culture

The film touted by critics as the most powerful propaganda piece ever was created for the Nazis -- it was also made by a woman. The bold and beautiful Leni Riefenstahl got her start as a ballet dancer in pre-war Berlin. When she saw an early Arnold Fanck film on mountaineering, she was literally swept away by its motion and energy. Soon she was acting in Fanck's films and learning to become a skilled mountaineer -- she even allowed two avalanches to fall on her head in the name of art. In 1932 she directed, produced, and starred in "Das Blaue Licht" ("The Blue Light"), a romantic film with Wagnerian undertones that is set in a fairytale landscape. Riefenstahl was meticulous in her work, planning shots to the letter, focusing intensely on picture quality, and editing in unusual rhythms appropriate to the subject. She also filmed on real locations instead of studio sets. She has called her acting in the role of Junta, a beautiful witch who is both hated and loved by the townspeople, a "premonition" of her own destiny: both women would face a shattering loss of their youthful ideals.

Riefenstahl, who was never a member of the Nazi Party, found favor with Hitler and was enlisted to make a film of the 1934 Nuremburg Party Convention. The result was "Triumph of the Will." Riefenstahl has since called it a "pact with the devil," but at the time she gave it the very best of her considerable talents. She employed 30 cameras and 120 assistants in the filming, inventing unprecedented techniques, such as hoisting a camera up a flagpole so it could shoot over an enormous crowd. Dramatic intensity, traveling shots (the crew filmed on roller skates), and creative camera positions characterize the film. Riefenstahl spent five months editing the film for 10 to 20 hours each day, treating it "like a musical composition." It won numerous awards, including a gold medal at the Venice Film Festival.

"Olympia" followed -- another incredibly beautiful documentary which covered the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The work was acclaimed in America as one of the world's ten best films. A tribute to the idealized human body, it took her two years to edit. Again, she employed brilliantly inventive techniques: digging pits to film athletes from below, attaching a small camera to a balloon for aerial shots. After "Olympia," Riefenstahl was sent to Poland to photograph the German invasion. However, she was so horrified by the atrocities she witnessed, she filed an official complaint and left immediately. She vehemently denies accusations that she used gypsy concentration camp inmates for her 1940 film "Tiefland."

In the aftermath of World War II, both the Americans and the French imprisoned Riefenstahl for her role in the Nazi propaganda machine. She never made another film, though she was released after four years. In 1994 a documentary film about her appeared with the title "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." The remarkably lucid 90-year-old Riefenstahl describes her filmmaking techniques and defends herself against the harsh accusations that have hounded her throughout her life. Riefenstahl claims she was essentially ignorant of inhumane Nazi activities -- for her, art and politics were two separate things. One significant question has been recently raised: why were male artists who tolerated or even supported Hitler -- including Salvador Dali, G.W. Pabst, and Céline -- able to successfully revive their careers, while Riefenstahl was not?

But Riefenstahl was not to be entirely repressed. At the age of 60, she went alone to Africa to live with the Nuba tribe for eight months. A book of the resulting photographs was published in 1973. At 70, she passed a scuba diving test and embarked for the next several decades on an entirely new career of underwater filming -- becoming possibly the oldest diver in the world.

Das Blaue Licht: The Art of Leni Riefenstahl website

Homepage of Leni Riefenstahl another website

Leni Riefenstahl: BIOGRAPHY

Leni's Rising Star yet another, also seen here: www.riefenstahl.org – a fanpage

Leni Riefenstahl - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum biography

Leni Riefenstahl - Director - Films as Director:, Films as Actress ... Louise Heck-Rabi essay, updated by Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Leni Riefenstahl – Biography biographical essay

Overview for Leni Riefenstahl - TCM.com biography from Turner Classic Movies

Leni Riefenstahl - Women in European History

Leni Riefenstahl: Biography from Answers.com

Leni Riefenstahl | Biography (1902 - 2003) Lenin Imports

Leni Riefenstahl biography from Books and Writers

Leni Riefenstahl | The German-Hollywood Connection | The German Way biography from the German Way

Leni Riefenstahl http://www.HolocaustResearchProject.org biography from the Holocaust Research Project

Leni Riefenstahl biography from History Learning Site

Leni Riefenstahl - Jewish Virtual Library biography from Jewish Virtual Library

Leni Riefenstahl biography from Holocaust Encyclopedia

Leni Riefenstahl About Now women’s history profile

leni riefenstahl is one of the most controversial artists of the ... profile from Design Boom

Leni Riefenstahl from Mubi

Leni Riefenstahl brief profile from NNDB

The religion of director Leni Riefenstahl

Bela Balazs and Leni Riefenstahl: The Blue Light. The Self-Staging of a Martyr (Undated)

Das blaue Licht article Luc Deneulin

Stills of Walter Riml, photographer of the film Das blaue Licht

Tiefland article Luc Deneulin

TASCHEN Books: Leni Riefenstahl - Africa

(a list of documentaries about and or with Leni Riefenstahl 1965–2004)

1990-2002 - Das Blaue Licht major Riefenstahl exhibitions around the world

Leni Riefenstahl 1936 Olympics Photo Book

olympiad film images

Leni Riefenstahl (German), 1902-2003 - Featured artist works ... photo exhibitions from Artnet

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, by Jürgen Trimborn

Leni Riefenstahl: Film Maker Extraordinaire or Nazi Stooge? Judith Keene, from the Australian National Centre for History Education (Undated)

TIME Magazine Cover: Leni Riefenstahl - Feb. 17, 1936 - Actresses ...

Cinema: Leni's Olympics - TIME Time magazine, May 3, 1948

Leni Riefenstahl in her own words - CBC Archives broadcast date: May 11, 1965

original Feb. 6 1975 article on-line Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag from The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975

Susan Sontag: Fascinating Fascism (1974), in: Under the Sign of Saturn UC Santa Barbara website, February 6, 1975

"Fascinating Fascism", a critical 1975 essay Susan Sontag in Under the Sign of Saturn, Farrar Straus Giroux, February 6, 1975

Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange by Adrienne Rich | The New York ... Adrienne Rich reply to Susan Sontag in The New York Review of Books, March 20, 1975

An Exchange on Leni Riefenstahl by David B. Hinton | The New York ... David B. Hinton’s response to the Sontag essay, with a response by Sontag, from The New York Review of Books, September 18, 1975

Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will David Culbert introductory essay, 1986 (pdf format)

The Fuhrer's Movie Maker John Simon reviews Leni Reifenstahl, A Memoir, by Leni Riefenstahl (669 pages), from The New York Times, September 26, 1993

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl > Overview - AllMovie (1993)

Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (review) Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 14, 1993

FILM VIEW; Just What Did Leni Riefenstahl's Lens See? Janet Maslin reviewing Ray Muller's Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, from The New York Times, March 13, 1994

Review/Film; After 50 Years on the Defensive, Still a Cinema Master reviewing Ray Muller's Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, from The New York Times, March 16, 1994

The Wonderful Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl (review) Roger Ebert, June 24, 1994

TELEVISION REVIEW; Too Brilliant for the World's Good Walter Goodman from The New York Times, July 5, 1995

Admire Her Art? (Her Camera Adored Swastikas) Alan Cowell from The New York Times, August 21, 1997

European Times: Potsdam, Germany - Hitler's film-maker is back on ... Imre Karacs from The Independent, January 1, 1999

Leni Riefenstahl - Welcome to Silent Movies Rare look at Nazi-era filmmaker: Retrospective examines Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic propaganda, other works, by Annie Thompson (1999)

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl - Bright Lights Film ... Lonesome Leni, by Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 1999

Feature on the Riefenstahl controversy Leni Riefenstahl: Documentary Film-Maker Or Propagandist? by Ellen Cheshire from kamera.co.uk, 2000, also seen here: kamera.co.uk - feature item - Leni Riefenstahl: Documentary Film ...

Move over Starling Duncan Campbell from The Observer, October 8, 2000

Foster defends Nazi film-maker biopic The Guardian, October 9, 2000

Don't be fooled by Riefenstahl's twisted genius Letters to the Editor from The Guardian, October 11, 2000

Riefenstahl downplays Hitler involvement The Guardian, October 20, 2000

The five lives of Leni Riefenstahl Nick Higham from the BBC News, October 23, 2000

Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia": Brilliant Cinematography or Nazi ... Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia": Brilliant Cinematography or Nazi Propaganda? Robert C. Schneider and William F. Stier from The Sports Journal (2001)

Books in Brief: Nonfiction; A Riefenstahl Anthology Ted Loos from The New York Times, February 4, 2001

Hitler's filmmaker to release new film BBC News, January 7, 2002

Still Making Films, Still Explaining the Hitler Connection Steven Erlanger from The New York Times, January 8, 2002

The triumph of a centenarian will Kate Connolly from The Observer, January 8, 2002

Leni Riefenstahl: Through a lens darkly Bob Chaundry from BBC News, August 16, 2002

Gypsies' fate haunts film muse of Hitler Kate Connolly from The Observer, August 18, 2002

"That Old Feeling: Leni's Triumph" Richard Corliss from Time magazine, August 22, 2002

Hitler's film-maker turns 100 BBC News, August 22, 2002

In the shadow of the swastika Christopher Jones and Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, August 23, 2002

THE SATURDAY PROFILE; At 100, Hitler's Filmmaker Sticks to Her Script Steven Erlanger from The New York Times, August 24, 2002

James C. Faris: Riefenstahl's Fascist Aesthetic: From Nazis to the ... The Nazi Who Won't Die – Leni Riefenstahl at 100, by James C. Faris from CounterPunch, September 11, 2002

Happy birthday, Leni Riefenstahl - Salon.com Ashley Fantz from Salon, October 1, 2002

World Briefing | Europe: Germany: Riefenstahl Inquiry Called Off The New York Times, October 19, 2002

Centegenarian Nazi film-maker escapes race hate charges The Guardian, October 21, 2002

Riefenstahl, 'Hitler's film-maker', dies at 101 Xan Brooks from The Guardian, September 9, 2003

Obituary: Leni Riefenstahl | Film | The Guardian Richard Falcon obituary from The Guardian, September 9, 2003

Film-maker Leni Riefenstahl dies BBC News, September 9, 2003

Obituary: Leni Riefenstahl BBC News, September 9, 2003

Meeting Leni Riefenstahl Bob Chaundry from BBC News, September 9, 2003

Online NewsHour: Hitler's Filmmaker -- September 9, 2003 Jeffrey Brown interviews Claudia Koonz, a professor of German history at Duke University, from PBS TV (transcript provided), September 9, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl, 101, Dies; Film Innovator Tied to Hitler Alan Riding from The New York Times, September 10, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl – The Independent Obituary September 10, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite film propagandist, dies at 101 Luke Harding from The Guardian, September 10, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl (obituary) Daily Telegraph September 10, 2003

Slavoj Zizek-Bibliography/Learning to Love Leni Riefenstahl/Lacan ... Slavoj Zizek from In These Times, September 10, 2003

Nuba Condolences For Leni Riefenstahl September 10, 2003

What they said about......Leni Riefenstahl Sandra Smith from The Guardian, September 11, 2003

Riefenstahl, the Nuba and me Julie Flint from The Guardian, September 11, 2003

"Leni Riefenstahl: Hand-held history" The Economist, September 11, 2003

'Fascism was mythic politics and Riefenstahl became its myth-maker' Peter Conrad from The Observer, September 14, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl—propagandist for the Third Reich Stefan Steinberg from The World Socialist Web Site, September 15, 2003

MFJ: A Thought About Leni Riefenstahl, Maya Deren, and Gay and ... A Thought About Leni Riefenstahl, Maya Deren, and Gay and Lesbian Film, by Sarah Schulman from MFJ, Fall 2003

Oscar Honors a Nazi Debbie Schlussel, March 1, 2004

Nazi-era photos spark Gypsy protest Paul Arendt from The Guardian, June 16, 2005

Riefenstahl's Heights and Wiseman's Follies: Allegories of Flesh in ... Riefenstahl's Heights and Wiseman's Follies, by Anya Meksin from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2005

New DVD's Three with Leni Riefenstahl, by Dave Kehr from The New York Times, November 15, 2005

Art of Justice: The Filmmakers At Nuremberg - washingtonpost.com Philip Kennicott, November 29, 2005

Film in the Third Reich - Harvard Film Archive February 5 – 26, 2006

New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, March 28, 2006

"Leni Riefenstahl on Trial" Carl Rollyson book review, Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, from The New York Sun, March 7, 2007

Triumph of Willful Blindness to the Horror of History Michiko Kakutani reviews two books on Riefenstahl, Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life and Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, from The New York Times, March 13, 2007

WHERE THERE'S A WILL | The New Yorker Judith Thurman from The New Yorker, March 19, 2007

First Chapter: ‘Leni Riefenstahl’ Jürgen Trimborn offers the first chapter of his book, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, from The New York Times, March 25, 2007

Leni Riefenstahl Books by Jürgen Trimborn and Steven Bach Clive James reviews two books on Riefenstahl, Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life and Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, from The New York Times, March 25, 2007, also seen here: Reich Star and here: On Leni Riefenstahl - Home | clivejames.com

Up Front from the Editors at The New York Times, March 25, 2007

Guilty as charged? Mia Farrow's accusation that Steven Spielberg is a latter day Leni Riefenstahl, by Mark Seddon from The Guardian, March 29, 2007

The Homoerotic Film of Leni Riefenstahl -- Outsports.com Gary N. Reese reviews Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life and Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, from Outsports, April 5, 2007

Leni: fully exposed Taylor Downing book review, Leni - The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (386 pages) by Steven Bach, from The Observer, April 29, 2007

"Leni: The life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach" Tom Dewe Matthews book review, Leni - The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (386 pages) by Steven Bach, from The Independent, April 29, 2007

"Hollywood tackles Hitler's Leni" Paul Harris from The Observer, April 29, 2007

Ill Will Charles Taylor reviews Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life and Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, from The Nation, May 7, 2007

'As pretty as a swastika' Simon Callow book review, , Leni - The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (386 pages) by Steven Bach, from The Guardian, May 12, 2007

"Fascinating Narcissism" Ian Buruma reviews two books on Riefenstahl, Jürgen Trimborn's Leni Riefenstahl: A Life and Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, from The New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007

Aryan Rhapsody Nazi Games, The Olympics of 1936, by David Clay Large, book review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft from The New York Times, July 8, 2007

The Will (if Not Triumph) of the Frau Neil Genzligner from The New York Times, January 11, 2008

The Relay of Fire Ignited by the Nazis Edward Rothstein from The New York Times, April 14, 2008

Hitler's filmmaker Sean O’Hagan paperback of the week book review, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach, from The Observer, July 6, 2008

Riefenstahl meets Maddin C. Jerry Kutner from Bright Lights After Dark, August 26, 2009

• View topic - Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938) Criterion forum, a film discussion group, Jun 29, 2010

Leni Riefenstahl goes to Africa « zunguzungu August 30, 2010

A Dual Biography of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl | The New ... The New Yorker, October 19, 2015

Leni Riefenstahl interviewed by Kevin Brownlow from Taschen Books (Undated)

Images for Leni Riefenstahl

Photographs of Leni Riefenstahl

Videos for Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE BLUE LIGHT (Das Blaue Licht)

Germany (70 mi) 1932

Stills of Walter Riml, photographer of the film Das blaue Licht

A majestic waterfall cascading down a rugged mountainside, a horse grazing in the clearing of a sun-dappled forest: cliché prose for cliché images, as Riefenstahl indulges her taste for wildly idealised Nature. She plays Junta, the outcast of the Dolomites, shunned by the locals as a witch, her only friends a boy goatherd and a visiting artist. She communes mystically with a crystal grotto, source of the Blue Light, associated with truth and purity. At least until the villagers desecrate it, prompting her to check out. Riefenstahl's affirmation of the occult has a certain morbid interest, but it's as a performer, posing leggily atop cloudswept crags, that she most compels attention - though a certain Thatcher-esque cast to her features is hard to rise above, once you've spotted it.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Already at the beginning, the sinister naiveté of Leni Riefenstahl's Beauty, given full fairy-tale format complete with leather-bound storybook. The geological pantheism is out of Arnold Fanck, but the mammoth slopes under Riefenstahl's fevered lens are even more ominously photogenic, Nature's challenge to mere mortals -- Christ-like martyrs are sculpted in rock to honor the village men who, hypnotized by the blue light emanating from atop Mount Cristallo every full moon, got lured to the precipices. Only raggedy mountain girl Junta (Riefenstahl), in a sleepwalking trance, reaches the peaks, reason enough for the townsfolk to tag her "witch" and form stoning mobs whenever she's around; earnest painter Mathias Weimann comes to her defense and ditches town for Junta's outdoors paradise, although the idyll together is extinguished as soon as the well-meaning clod locates the crystal mine at the top. Practically an universe away from the grime of Weimar crisis, Riefenstahl's Dolomite landscape is both etherealized and eroticized -- the phallic heights of Mount Cristallo can only be conquered by true female innocence, while tragedy comes through male invasion of a hidden cave. Locals lend their lifeworn mugs, but the camera is more interested in inhuman perfection, the volume of mist adorning low-angle vistas, and Riefenstahl's own physical splendor, lingered over profile and close-up. Her vision of beauty is one of pre-civilized purity, alpine vastness and animals hardened into mystical tableaux via ponderously ravishing composing and lighting, utterly untainted by the messiness of chance or human feeling. Her sparkling sanctuary violated, Riefenstahl's wild-child plunges to the depths below -- a commentary on the fragility of visual grandeur, or self-eulogy for the oppressive seamlessness of the filmmaker's mise-en-scène? Next stop, Nuremberg, for the answers. Written by Riefenstahl and Béla Balázs. In black and white.

Bela Balazs and Leni Riefenstahl: The Blue Light. The Self-Staging of a Martyr (Undated)

Das blaue Licht article Luc Deneulin

DVD Talk John Sinnott

The New York Times H.T.S.

VICTORY OF THE FAITH ( Der Sieg des Glaubens)

Germany (61 mi) 1933

User reviews from imdb Author: cstaeble from United States

Like all of Ms. Riefenstahl's work this is a disturbingly effective piece of propaganda. When I look at the low scores that some people have given this film I understand. If you are looking for meaning and social redemption, then this film deserves less than a one. However, Ms. Riefenstahl shows us here, as in her later propaganda, how Hitler and his brownshirts seduced the German people. Hitler was elected by the German people who sought a solution to the Great Depression, reparations, and the slight they felt after an ignominious defeat in World War One. When we see the effectiveness of modern spin machines at shaping public policy we must look at this documentary with eyes wide open. Here Hitler is neither a clown nor a caricature but a messianic messenger that is freely embraced. Look closely and feel the seductive embrace of fascism. Look again and look at yourself in the mirror. The spell is seductive and mesmerizing. The German people lost and were butchered as surely as they butchered their victims. The world may not survive another conflagration like World Word II. Look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are above the mesmerizing spell of the roaring crowd. Ask yourself if you are willing to defy the crowd.

User reviews from imdb Author: Joel Nelson (empire0iii@aol.com) from United States

Triumph of the Will is a remake of this film, Riefenstahls earlier effort. However only myself and a few others have seen this film in it's entirety as it is generally believed lost. It is a fantastic film in that one can truly see how Riefenstahl was developing her unique documentary style which would later result in Triumph of the Will, Day of Freedom Our Armed Forces and finally Olympia I and II. Sadly this film will probably never be released to the general public as it is heavily protected by the German Federal Archives and rights are administered through Transit Film Munich. Rating? Three of Five Stars!

trivia from IMDb

This film includes 'Ernst Rohm,' head of the Nazi Party "Brownshirts" and heir-apparent to the Head of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker's Party). In June 1934, suspecting a coup, Rohm and several of his lieutenants were assassinated under Hitler's orders. All references to Rohm were ordered to be erased from German history, which included the destruction of all known copies of this film. The film 'Triumph des Willens' (Triumph of the Will) was produced to replace it.

Director Leni Riefenstahl was visiting Great Britian in April 1934 to speak at major universities to discuss her documentary film techniques. It is during this visit that at least one copy of this film is known to have been duplicated. It was found after being in storage for over 60 years and is the only known surviving print. The opening credits appear to have been shot off of a screen projection, but the remainder of the footage appears to be a direct copy of a print.

DAY OF FREEDOM (Tag der Freiheit - Unsere Wehrmacht)

aka: Nürnberg

Germany (30 mi) 1935

User reviews from imdb Author: Atavisten from Tellus

Come you masters of war, you that build all the guns…

This is nothing but a prowess of the powerful German army right after the NSDAP seized power. It has quite a misleading title as there is not a image of freedom in sight, maybe that was directed at the Reichsparteitag day? Anyway, you get to see soldiers marching, cannons firing and cavalry galloping through "lakes". All made to look quite menacing and threatening, successfully so. There are machine-gunners who jump off quick driving cars (dont know how much this is sped up..) and setting up their machine guns in no time that was very impressive. Also there is some pictures of Nazi flags and the Führer with his associates, serving to glorify the party. All in all its very impersonal, we see a machinery at the party's disposal, nothing about freedom.

Oh, and those airplanes flying in sun-cross formation was very impressive, real or not.

"Day of Freedom" Synapse Films (Triumph of the Will) - Region 0 ... Enrique B. Chamorro from DVDBeaver

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (Triumph des Willens)

Germany (114 mi) 1935

Ken Kelman on Triumph of the Will -- Logos Fall 2003

Leni Riefenstahl's infamous masterwork sits with The Birth of a Nation in the pantheon's "outcast unclean" section. The filmed record of the 1934 Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day) festivities in Nuremberg, Triumph at once glorifies the individual Nazi and strips him of his individuality: Faces become geometric statuary, their lines as clean as Fascist architecture. Descending from the skies like a Greek god (an allusion that evidently sneaked by Riefenstahl's anti-classicist employers), Hitler is introduced as the literal embodiment of the German will ("Hitler is Germany. Germany is Hitler") and mounted atop giant podia like a stuffed moose. Riefenstahl's images, which owe much to Albert Speer's design and staging, have been aped (cluelessly) in Star Wars and (cannily) in Starship Troopers, but laid end to end, they're less threatening than dull, the endless sounding of one Reich-prescribed note. Shown in repertory with Ray Müller's endlessly fascinating, ceaselessly frustrating The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, a three-hour portrait that gives Riefenstahl ample rope to hang herself with. Still denying her support for the Nazis at 90 years of age, Riefenstahl (who lived 10 more years until dying in 2003) is too well-rehearsed to crack under pressure, but her circuitous logic inadvertently illustrates the self-insulating psychology of the totalitarian fellow traveller.

User reviews from imdb Author: Arch Snuggles Stanton (archstanton@ididitmyway.com) from Lycanthropeville, USA

Set aside your preconceptions, notions of political correctness, kick back with some nachos and enjoy the spectacle, pageantry, patriotism and just plain ole unmitigated evil of a bygone era. Yes, this is the "documentary" of the events of the Sixth Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress in 1934, featuring a cast of thousands, mind blowing special effects, and show stopping musical numbers, as well as (of course) Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess, Goering and assorted other Nazi superstars of the day. Get caught up in the wackiness as Hitler and Goebbels lead the German people around like neutered sheep on thorazine with an economy artificially over-inflated by military spending, appeals to mean-spirited patriotism and pathological xenophobia, and cheap military victories against third-rate opponents. The brilliant camera work and editing ratchet up the tension incrementally from the opening marches and speeches to the closing speeches and marches, creating a yearning and semi-religious awe for the realization of the full spectrum dominance of Nazi ideology. The legendary cinematic genius Leni Riefenstahl creates in the viewer an irresistible excitement over the images of mindless obedience to patently psychotic leaders and vulgar nationalistic narcissistic myopia. But politics aside, one can't help but admire the energy and skill that went into this classic; the sweeping vision, the epiphanic insight and the joy of marching along in human herds. In most versions, the "I'll See You In Poland, Baby" musical climax number has been left out of the final cut, but "Triumph of the Will" still pays off in sheer entertainment value despite the cliff-hanger ending. Unfortunately, during the production of the sequel, "The Nazi European Tour, featuring Adolf Hitler", about 50 million extras died, including most of the leads, and it was never completed. But fear not, I've heard from reliable sources that Hollywood plans to resume work soon on that unfinished masterpiece.

DVD Maniacs Elmore Barnes

Leni Riefenstahl’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is, in many ways, as controversial today as the day it was made. Shot during the 1934 Nazi Party Rally, it was designed to garner the support of the Germans. Through masterful craftsmanship, Riefenstahl creates a well-round, if false, image of her subject, Adolph Hitler, making him perhaps the century’s first political media makeover. This glorification was shown in its entirety, or in part, in every German theater throughout World War II, and helped to gather support for one of the most evil regimes in history. And, when one considers the destruction that followed, and the millions of lives lost, one can understand why it would be tough viewing for some.

The reason this propaganda cannot be as easily disregarded is its artistic vision. Riefenstahl, perhaps the only female director in film history comparable to Eisenstein or Griffith, truly understands the manipulative nature of film when put to good use, and understands that it can not only be used to construct fiction, but to reshape history. This reshaping of history was won her the label propagandist. Ironically, the only difference between Riefenstahl and most documentarians it that she knows intuitively that all films, fiction or not, are formed; No film can every really have an objective view regardless of how well it hides its mechanisms. Riefenstahls’ mechanisms are visible. Although she does stop short of using Sternberg lighting on her subject, through gorgeous camera and editing, she creates a Hitler who is both God (His first appearance has him arriving from the clouds) and Father (he wins the hearts of women and young children.)

This disc made me want to re-watch THE WONDERFUL, HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL, a three-hour documentary which covers her career from actress to eighty year old deep sea documentarian. That, with Triumph, would make for a lengthy, but rewarding history lesson.

Intellectualism cut off at the neck - The Film Journal ... Intellectualism cut off at the neck: The Body Politic-As-Aesthetic in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, by Christian Crouse from Film Journal

Feature on the Riefenstahl controversy Leni Riefenstahl: Documentary Film-Maker Or Propagandist? by Ellen Cheshire from kamera.co.uk, 2000

S Y N T H E S I S - Triumph of the Will vs. October Triumph of the Will vs. October, A Comparative Essay, by Constantin von Hoffmeister (Undated)

Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will David Culbert introductory essay, 1986 (pdf format)

Triumph of the Will (Special Edition) Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Scott McGee

DVD Journal D.K. Holm, Special Edition

Triumph of the Will : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Bill Gibron from DVD Talk, Special Edition

DVD Savant Review: Triumph of the Will Special Edition Glenn Erickson

Artful Propaganda Rachel Gordon from Culture Cartel

dOc DVD Review: Triumph of the Will: Special Edition (1935) Jeff Ulmer

Triumph Of The Will (Synapse,Special Edition,Windowboxed) - DVD ... Yunda Eddie Feng from DVD Town

DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson, Special Edition

HorrorDigital.com - Synapse remastered DVD [Jeremy]

"Triumph of the Will" (DVD) -- Thom Hartmann's Independent Thinker ... Thom Hartmann from Buzz Flash

Leni Riefenstahl | Triumph of the Will (1934) Lenin Imports

Movie Views [Ryan Cracknell]

Monsters At Play Carl Lyon

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Retro Pick: Triumph of the Will Zachary Wigon from Tribeca Film

Documentary-Review.com

Triumph of the Will Movie Review (1935) | Roger Ebert

Triumph over "Triumph of the Will" - Roger Ebert's Journal

'Triumph of the Will': Fascist Rants and the Hollywood Response - The ... The New York Times, March 3, 2016

DVDBeaver.com [Enrique B Chamorro]

Triumph of the Will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Triumph of the Will (1935) Mubi

The History Place - Triumph of Hitler: Triumph of the Will

Images for Triumph of the will

Videos for Triumph of the will

Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) on Video (1:50:30)

Triumph of the Will (Special Edition) | Watch Free Documentary Online on Video, please note it takes a full minute before the film starts (1:50:30)

THE OLYMPIAD

aka: Olympia Pt 1 (The Festival of the People) Fest der Völker (114 mi)

Olympia Part 2 (The Festival of Beauty) Fest der Schönheit (90- mi)

Germany (204 mi) 1938

Shane R. Burridge

Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Berlin Olympic games is considered to be among the greatest documentaries ever made. It's important both as a historical document and as an example of film-making technique, but while the grandeur of the event and the film's mammoth running time do infuse it with an epic sense, modern-day audiences may find their attention wandering. Hitler and Goebbels saw the spectacle of the games as an opportunity to show off the new Reich, but neither were responsible for employing Riefenstahl, who had made the jingoistic Nazi rally film TRIUMPH OF THE WILL a couple of years earlier. Riefenstahl's attachment to the project, via an Olympic official, ensured that the film of the event would not escape being viewed as a propaganda piece in itself, although this seems arbitrary insofar as the Olympics are a hype vehicle for every participating country anyway. Riefenstahl, who had previously directed and acted in features, puts a creative spin on her document and utilizes different technological innovations. She embellishes the events without changing facts, but lays herself open to charges of pro-fascist imagery - the opening sequence, for example, depicts buffed, nude athletes flexing their muscles against dramatic skies and has obvious Aryan overtones. But if this is the case, why would she include so much footage of black athlete Jesse Owens winning event after event and debunking the Aryan supremacy myth right before Hitler's eyes? Riefenstahl has always claimed her life's work as being artistically motived, and it's at least easier to believe this in OLYMPIAD than it is in TRIUMPH. Notice that there wasn't any of this fuss when a group of directors similarly fetishized athletic bodies in the 1972 Olympics movie VISIONS OF EIGHT.

OLYMPIAD is split into two parts, 'The Festival of the People' and 'The Festival of Beauty'. Part one focuses on track and field while part two looks at other events outside the stadium - but there's only so much running and jumping a viewer can endure. By the time the film returns to pentathlon and decathlon events already covered in the first half, it starts getting tedious. OLYMPIAD doesn't start off too excitingly (watching people throwing shot and hammers isn't too exciting at the best of times) but picks up once the races start - visually these are more involving because at a glance we can tell who is winning at any moment throughout the event, even if we don't know who they are. You'd have to assume that Riefenstahl did the best job she could editing the 400,000 feet of film she'd retrieved from the 30 camera operators stationed around the Games, and there are some interesting moments to be found. For example, the 1500 meters is filmed in one continuous take (it's odd seeing the New Zealand victor accompanied by sieg heils from the crowd); we see a shot of Hitler looking deflated after a German relay runner drops the baton when victory appears imminent; Riefenstahl inserts shaky close-ups of hands and feet as a marathon runner is on the home stretch, projecting to us his physical and mental exhaustion; the horses on a steeplechase regularly dump their riders into a ditch and a pond; and in the film's famous closing montage, Riefenstahl makes high divers appear weightless by filming them at dizzying angles and variable speeds. It's also interesting to see how much has changed since the days of the 11th Olympics - the stadiums and uniforms aren't plastered with crass product logos, the winners are presented with wreaths instead of medals, and the sporting equipment is simpler (e.g. non-flexible vaulting poles). It's disquieting to see competitors on the shooting range firing at human-shaped targets when we know that World War II was only three years away. Couple that with the final images of the flags of all nations bowing slowly to the ground and the smoke from the extinguished Olympic flame rising into an ominous sky, and you'll see why its impossible to view OLYMPIAD nowadays without irony.

Riefenstahl's Heights and Wiseman's Follies: Allegories of Flesh in ... Riefenstahl's Heights and Wiseman's Follies, by Anya Meksin from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2005

Matte Havoc DJ Heinlein

KQEK.com DVD Review - Parts 1&2 [Mark R. Hasan]

DVD Verdict - The Leni Riefenstahl Archival Collection [Jennifer Malkowski]

Documentary-Review.com

• View topic - Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938) Criterion forum, a film discussion group, Jun 29, 2010

Aryan Rhapsody Nazi Games, The Olympics of 1936, by David Clay Large, book review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft from The New York Times, July 8, 2007

Leni Riefenstahl 1936 Olympics Photo Book

olympiad film images

Olympia (1938 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TIEFLAND ( Lowlands)

Austria Germany (99 mi) 1954

New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin

LENI RIEFENSTAHL filmed ''Tiefland'' between 1942 and 1945 against a historical backdrop that becomes the only reason for not regarding this effort as utter foolishness. Unlike ''Olympia'' and ''Triumph of the Will,'' Miss Riefenstahl's legendary works of pro-Nazi propaganda, ''Tiefland'' makes no attempt to address the politics of the day. Instead, it casts Miss Riefenstahl as a saintly, castanetwielding Spanish peasant, loved equally well by a handsome mountain lad and the brutal, powerful ruler of the village.

If the character of the ruler suggests a reference to Miss Riefenstahl's links to the Nazi hierarchy, it also marks the film's lone reference to outside events. Otherwise, ''Tiefland,'' which is based on an opera by Eugen d'Albert, amounts to a mantilla-clad soap opera about the beautiful Marta (Miss Riefenstahl) and her starcrossed romances.

First seen performing an awkward gypsy dance, beaming innocently while dressed in an incongruously low-cut gown, Marta is swept off her feet by the insistent Don Sebastian (Bernard Minetti). She becomes his mistress, only to discover how wickedly he treats her fellow peasants, and eventually must choose between him and the purespirited shepherd Pedro (Franz Eichberger). Because Pedro has first been seen barehandedly killing a wolf that has menaced his flock of sheep, Don Sebastian is bound to fare badly when his adoration for Marta and the shepherd's collide.

The shepherd lives high in the mountains. This affords Miss Riefenstahl the opportunity, in her directorial capacity, to film mists and babbling brooks with a grace that recalls ''Olympia.'' But most of the film is set down in the village, where the Spanish characters speak in clipped German tones, and where Miss Riefenstahl's direction is considerably less inspired. Very little about the hearty, rather leaden ''Tiefland'' brings out the visual eloquence on which her reputation was made.

Tiefland article Luc Deneulin

DVD Talk [John Sinnott]

User reviews from imdb Author: Prof_Lostiswitz from Cyberia

User reviews from imdb Author: Robert from San Francisco

UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS (Impressionen unter Wasser)

Germany (45 mi) 2002

As Besson's Atlantis demonstrated, Nature's inclination to overstatement is specially apparent in the abundance of marine life. Riefenstahl's featurette (premiered in her centenary year) is the pick of her decades-long accumulation of undersea imagery. It's all a show: there's no commentary, and if you want to know what that weird looking thing is, with its fat, polka-dot face and racy yellow stripes, or whether those spectacularly arcing tendrils are animal or vegetable, you won't find out here. It's brief enough not to become tedious, but the Moroder-Walker score witters on, adding nothing but mild irritation.

User reviews from imdb Author: fred3f from United States

This film can be viewed on many levels.

First as a plea for preservation of the coral reefs. The director makes this plea in person at the beginning of the film. The beauty of the photography, the stunning variety of life that is shown and the incredible connection between human and aquatic life that Leni makes when she appears in the film, only serve to continue and strengthen that argument. After seeing this film, it would be hard for anyone to justify a jet ski park in this reef.

Next, it is a nature film, but unlike any nature film I have ever seen. There is no "story", there is no voice over, just music. We are presented simply with a selection of creatures living in the coral reef. The variety is incredible. Creatures of incredible shape and substance; Rocks come alive to reveal they are actually some form of life. Huge rays swim around and dance in an elaborate ballet. The beauty is beyond anything I have seen in similar films - and all of this is done without comment, leading the viewer to thoughtful reflection on the nature of life and form.

It is a work of art. Choosing from what was a huge amount of footage, Leni managed make a film that flows, astounds and keeps our interest without a single word of explanation.

Finally as a personal and perhaps a social document. As I was viewing this film, I could not help but think about her and the judgments against her. Leni has been reviled by so many. Even today the intelligentsia will not forgive her Nazi connections. If I lived through WWII I might feel the same way, but frankly, I am seduced by her art. It is seduction which I submit to because whatever wrongdoing she has done is in the past but her films raise us above the mundane and will continue to do so into the future. She always claimed to be innocent of wrongdoing. Was she completely innocent? Probably not; who is? She was always criticized for not admitting anything. But considering that she was faced with imprisonment, if I were in her shoes, I might not admit anything ether. I do believe that to a great degree she was not politically motivated and used her Nazi connections to help her make films which was her real goal. Her real crime may be simply ignoring politics, and if you are a political person, that is an unforgivable crime, especially today.

Seeing the different life forms and the different ways they acted, some harmless, some predatory, and seeing her swimming among them all, I could not help but think that she was, in her own way, making a comment. She seemed to be saying. Do you see all this life, all these different ways of living and being? They do not fit into your neat ideas of what life should be. Life knows no boundaries, and we as men and woman can not hope to fully understand it. As an artist I followed my instincts, just as these creatures do, in ways that neither I or you can fully understand. Seeing all this variety, how can you be so sure that you can fully know or judge me?

User reviews from imdb Author: Bobs-9 from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Rifkin, Adam

LOOK C+ 78

USA (98 mi) 2007

A disturbing, cautionary faux-documentary effort about the far-reaching ramifications of surveillance videos, which according to the film, captures most people on an average of 200 times per day, accumulating a mass of 4 billion hours of video tape per week. While it’s soon apparent that this isn’t “real” surveillance tape, as the camera angles are always perfectly centered, occasionally even zooming in for a closer look and the sound quality, usually absent on surveillance video, captures every conversation perfectly even as people are walking through a department store. Instead, the filmmaker imagines a perfect surveillance universe, as if it “could” capture just about everything, wondering what kind of world it might be, suggesting we are already heading in that direction. From the looks of it, that’s a pretty scary thought, as every major as well as minor indiscretion, from criminal behavior to practical jokes, not to mention everything spoken behind people’s backs well out of listening range, basically everything we spend so much time intentionally concealing, would become public property, effectively eliminating any opportunity to deny something happened when it’s captured on video tape. Cell phone cameras and YouTube footage have increased public awareness of incidents previously kept concealed for years, such as graphic sexual revelations, incidents of police brutality, or the credibility of someone’s alibi when time-stamped cameras verify where someone is at a specific place and time. While always shooting from the point of view of a surveillance camera, the filmmaker mixes amusing as well as deadly serious footage, interweaving various storylines together, actually toying with the audience’s prurient voyeuristic sensibilities with a series of sexual titillations, starting with minimal crimes but building to life-altering events, creating increasing drama along the way.

From two giggly teenage girls trying on thongs in a department store dressing room, each checking out the other’s buns, who are guilty of simple shoplifting, to a department store manager sexual predator who hits on every single girl under his supervision, pulling them into a supposedly vacant storeroom where he can’t keep his “little Tony” in his pants, screwing one after the other in a rather repulsive display of “hands on” managerial style, or from two slacker guys working a gas station mini mart who get stoned and dance frantically in the aisles knocking over merchandise while performing woefully blasé metal songs on an electric piano at the cash register, immediately coming to a dead silence if any customers enter the premises, to a Peter Lorre M-style pedophile that we see conscientiously following little girls that he likes, sometimes for hours on end, before that one moment he’s been waiting for happens when he can snatch a little girl undetected. Also woven into this thread is a geeky office employee who is relentlessly bullied and picked on by his coworkers, a nanny-cam that has its eyes focused on a new babysitter, a married man who conceals his affair with another man, highway murderers who kidnap ATM patrons and stuff them into car trunks, leaving them indefinitely abandoned, even killing cops along the way, guys whose lives mix with ordinary life completely undetected, or a high school teacher who is stalked by a highly motivated girl in his class who has nothing better to do than continually badger him with her exhibitionist sexuality, which eventually challenges his better judgment – all captured on Candid Camera-style video tape.

Despite the rampant misconduct captured on video tape, little is done to stop the abhorrent behavior, so it’s also evident that installing surveillance video cameras by itself offers little deterrence. The store manager and the slackers remain under the radar, undetected, the same goes for most criminal behavior which continues unabated for weeks and months, perhaps forever, suggesting there’s nobody watching the security video until “after” a crime has occurred. Only then are the tapes pertinent to a specific crime scene gathered up by the authorities and viewed. And therein lies the heart of the matter, as the audience, by being lured into watching these tapes, bears that societal watch responsibility. The audience becomes the Greek chorus off to the side commenting on the central action, even making judgments as the crimes escalate and become more horrific. We are forced to decide how we feel about what is certainly an increased invasion of our personal privacy, all supposedly for the greater good of a more secure society. Most of us do not wish to live our lives under the roving eyes of a police state, but what becomes evident is the role the public plays in all this, wanting to be protected from the bad guys and at the same time wanting a little peace and privacy. The tables seem to be tilted more toward the former. Since 9/11, security firms are obviously making a killing on the public’s obsession with expensive security gadgetry promising more protections. What’s missing is obviously not the electronic equipment which cannot take the place of human judgment, but the man hours needed to review and evaluate the massive collection of security footage, in other words, people looking out for other people.

Bob Matter, Facets Volunteer:

"Look" is not a great film. Under a more capable director it could have been much better. Nonetheless, I think it is still worth seeing.

The film is of that genre that starts out depicting several seemingly unrelated characters going about their everyday lives. As the film progresses, the story lines begin intertwining. What's different about "Look" is that each of these stories is brought to us from the perspective of a surveillance camera.

We are introduced to the characters' public personas, i.e. their behaviors in front of spouses, co-workers, customers, etc., and voyeuristically through the lenses of the ever-present surveillance cameras, to their private behaviors behind backs, behind closed doors, in back stockrooms, in elevators, in parking lots, etc., exposing their true nature. In an unusual twist one character's private life is in fact public, as he is secretly a child molester. Through security cameras we follow him from store to store stalking his next victim in a large shopping mall.

A minor touch I liked in "Look" was its toying with our prejudices. We are programmed to think black teenage boys wearing oversized coats are sinister. We fully expect them to brandish pistols and start robbing and shooting at any time. Recently we have been programmed to suspect young middle-eastern men carrying backpacks to be terrorists carrying bombs. And we expect immigrant-nannies to shake babies in their care to death and slam them against walls. The surveillance cameras in "Look" reveal those prejudices to be unfounded. Rather, the most onerous characters are white men wearing ties.

Perhaps the larger and most important issue brought up by this film is the explosive growth and prevalence of surveillance cameras in our lives today. Originally a tool of capital to protect its assets from theft on private property, the reach soon extended to surveillance of workers, then to the public sphere as crime-fighting and anti-terrorist measures. According to the filmmaker Americans are captured on surveillance cameras 200 times per day on average. Do we really want to trade our
privacy for the alleged security (and protection of capital's profits) these cameras afford?

Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]

Per its press notes, Look "poses the pivotal question: Are we always alone when we think we are?" Director Adam Rifkin's answer is a resounding "no," but that's about all his gimmicky film—in which a variety of narratives are told exclusively through the filter of surveillance and other real-world cameras—has to say on this supposedly significant issue. In this multifaceted tale, a teacher with a pregnant wife is seduced by a high school vixen, a pair of murderers kill a cop, a department store manager screws a variety of employees in the store room (where he also jerks off to online porn), a nerdy office worker is the target of practical jokes, and a lawyer and family man has a secret rendezvous with his gay lover while his wife and daughter are stalked in the mall by a would-be child abductor. The thread binding these unrelated folks is a common disconnect between public facades and private conduct, though the notion that people aren't always who they appear to be—and reveal their authentic selves when they're not around others—is hardly some sort of revelation about society or human behavior. Rifkin turns the tables on both his characters and audience expectations in pretty predictable ways, and his aesthetic stunt isn't always as consistent as it should be, so that security camera footage is sometimes authentically grainy, scratchy, and black and white, and at other times is HD camcorder-quality. Nonetheless, if he offers little insight into the reasons why we act differently when by ourselves (or why we, as film viewers, like to watch other people's confidential business), at least the director has some fun with his voyeuristic peeping-tom scenario, from a car crash that transforms into a John Landis cameo, to a sequence in which a convenience store clerk busts out his keyboard at work and plays a heavy metal tune written from the perspective of a criminal being electrocuted ("I am getting electrocuted/Cuz I killed all my family") while his friend boogies around the store, leaping over food racks.

The Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]

In the very first scene of Adam Rifkin's "Look," we watch (supposedly via surveillance camera) as two nubile teenage girls strip down to their thongs in a clothing-store dressing room, compare butt-jiggles, pretend to make out, discuss whether or not to get, um, a certain anatomical area bleached, and then "forget" to take off the stuff they were trying out when they put their own clothes back on. If you think that sounds like thoroughly disreputable grade-C trash, well, you'd be right. But it's well-made trash, a rare commodity these days. And it's also the beginning of a funny, filthy, dark-hearted ensemble drama that's something like "Crash" with no conscience and really evil drugs in its system. I liked it a hell of a lot.

OK, granted, there are some plausibility issues with a whole movie that pretends to consist entirely of surveillance images. Like the fact that, for the most part, surveillance cameras don't record sound. Doh! So when we watch one of the aforementioned mall hotties, Sherri (Spencer Redford), trying to seduce her upstanding, married-with-a-pregnant-wife English teacher (Jamie McShane) by slithering out of her underthings in the high school parking lot, we shouldn't really be hearing her nasty come-ons too, should we? Details, details.

While Sherri seeks to bag the wavering Mr. Krebbs, other stuff is going on in this grainy-cam view of west Los Angeles. A Kevin Smith-style pair of convenience-store doofuses argue about girlfriends and perform an awesome parkour-style dance number to a dance-metal song called "Electrocuted." ("I'm gonna be elec-tro-cute-ed / 'Cause I killed my whole fam-i-lee.") But aren't those friendly guys buying a carton of Parliaments and pints of brandy actually the Candid Camera Killers, who've been on a three-day carjacking spree and just shot a cop in full view of his own dashboard-cam? How awesome.

In and out of these people's lives also come a department-store Lothario with a truly impressive record of luring female co-workers into the storeroom, a high-priced defense lawyer with a new baby, a gorgeous wife and a hunky African-American male lover, and a hopeless workplace dweeb who has become the butt of endless, humiliating practical jokes. Just wait for the bad-taste male-stripper gag at the end of the movie that rubs your face in the miserable state of humanity! You'll love it!

No, seriously -- I recognize that praising this pseudo-experimental indie made by the guy who directed "Detroit Rock City" (and, what is far worse, wrote "Underdog") is close to embracing perversity for its own sake. But frankly, I'd rather see this assemblage of good-humored overactors delivering a quasi-comical, profoundly misanthropic essay on why life is Totally Fucked than sit through another earnest indie drama about people and their pain. Watch what happens to Mr. Krebbs after he gets into the front seat of that Nissan with the conniving nymphet! Now that's some human suffering.

The New York Civil Liberties Union reported last year that there are approximately 4,200 street-level surveillance cameras below 14th Street, and if the proposed $90 million Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (partly funded by the Department of Homeland Security) comes through, expect an additional 3,000 cams poised to catch your every crotch readjustment by the end of 2008. If such measures can capably thwart terrorist attacks, hurrah. But beyond all those busts, the distinction between "security" and "invasion of privacy" grows a murkier shade of gray. Are we actually any safer? Who's collecting the data? How long will our trip to the dry cleaners remain archived? And most dire, but never answered: Who watches the watchmen?

The average American is captured about 200 times a day via an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras recording over four billion hours of footage a week—or so shocks the opening title cards of actor-filmmaker Adam Rifkin's lurid ensemble drama, Look. Rifkin—who made his bones writing studio family comedies like Mousehunt and Small Soldiers, and directing moody indies like The Dark Backward and Night at the Golden Eagle—wasn't inspired by the critical questions above, nor by our Philip K. Dick nightmare-in-the-making, but by receiving an unexpected photo of himself in the mail, attached to a traffic ticket. "Who are we when we don't think anyone's watching?" he asks in his director's statement, seemingly more concerned with the dangers of YouTube than Big Brother.

Rifkin shot his feature entirely from closed-circuit viewpoints, mostly awkward God's-eye angles that faithfully mimic today's security-camera realities: from elevators and parking lots to police-car dashboards and public restrooms. The first sequence holds the most promise: Two ripe teen girls in a department-store dressing room strip to their G-strings, discuss getting their assholes bleached like porn stars, then shoplift. Intentionally played for titillation (we shouldn't be watching this!), it's the petty crime that warrants the voyeurism—or does it? From there, the intertwining plot threads get progressively more sensational: A student seduces her high-school teacher, a sales clerk bangs all of his co-workers and masturbates in the stockroom, a lurking pedophile stalks mall prey, and two misfits shoot a cop.

There's plenty of gimmick here, but no gravity, partly because Rifkin is too easily distracted by perverse office pranks and fart jokes, and often because the actors aren't savvy enough to hide their awareness of the camera from us—an extreme no-no for this gag. (In the actors' defense, why would they be? If ever there were a need for a docu-fiction hybrid, this is it.) Rifkin's flickering cameras are suspiciously smart, zooming in on the right details and picking up crystal-clear sound—so who's manning and editing this omnipotent point of view, and why isn't that role being given as much attention as those hotties on the other side of the lens? At least Brian De Palma's Redacted and George Romero's Diary of the Dead wield their peeping-tom filters for more ambitious purposes, and Michael Haneke's Caché teases and implicates audiences by drawing focus to the camera's eye. Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording.

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

There is no such thing as privacy. Stop kidding yourself. From the moment you leave the house to the second you step back in your supposedly secure abode, the world’s many Big Brothers are constantly watching you. There are cameras on street corners, lenses trained on you as you drive, fill up, or pay your daily tolls. Once at work, bosses monitor your computer, gauging Internet access for abuses and reading email to gain a managerial advantage. In the mall, every fitting room is monitored, every store a shoplifting prevention zone with more manpower than on a military base. Even our leisure is a source of surveillance, marketers and advertisers buying credit histories and charge plate purchases info as a means of making informed demographic decisions. Yet as writer/director Adam Rifkin points out in his intriguing new film Look, life goes on - and we seem oblivious to the fact that someone is constantly watching.

We follow five different stories here - a young high school girl, desperate to show off her sexuality, decides to target a teacher. A pair of ruthless spree killers murder various victims around town. They go unnoticed mostly, except to a gas station clerk, his on again/off again gal pal, and his slacker buddy. In the meantime, a high priced lawyer with a wife and kids sets up a Nanny-cam to keep the new au pair in check. Of course, when he’s away at work, he has the occasional lunch meeting with his hunky attorney boyfriend. Then there’s the department store manager who snorts coke, watches porn on his computer, and screws every floorwalking gal on his watch. Finally, a disgruntled insurance adjuster who’s the butt of every prank pulled by those in his office decides there’s only one way to gain control of his life - and it’s not a very pretty solution.

Like Short Cuts absent Altman’s metaphysical heft, Look is an oddly compelling little film. Rifkin, perhaps best known for his work as both a writer (Underdog, Zoom) and director (The Dark Backward, Detroit Rock City), takes the intriguing premise of life captured by surveillance camera and adds a few fictional twists to spice up the situations. Of course, no one will believe this is actual ‘caught on tape’ drama. The actors are obvious, everyone is miked for ease in understanding the dialogue, and logistical truths (how long would a store tolerate the outsized sexual appetite of such a supervisor/lothario) are pushed in order to puff up the running time. Still, any movie that lets the great Giuseppe Andrews preview a few of his masterful songs while playing a Clerks-like convenience store stooge has got to be doing something right.

It has to be said that not every story works here. The killers’ tale is interesting, and ends with a literal bang. And the teen sex queen and her desire to conquer her married (and soon to be a father) teacher has a nice level of lewdness and necessary law abiding…for both sides. Yet the whole narrative surrounding office dork Marty is too cruel and takes way too long to truly pay off, and the gay lover attorneys appear to be homosexual for the sake of something different, not an actual interpersonal dynamic. Still, we remain fascinated by Rifkin’s approach, wondering to ourselves how often supposedly private acts become part of a constant camcorder ideal. In fact, he’s careful to show both standard security footage intermixed with material captured on cellphones and other recording devices in order to emphasize the point.

Rifkin also found actors who walk the fine line between fake and fully aware. Andrews may sound like a mannered moron, but there’s a savant like specialty to what he does with a basically underwritten role. Similarly, Ben Weber is pathetic as Marty, just sad and clueless enough to earn our sympathy - that is, until his true side emerges. We’d love to know more about how Chris Williams’ George and Paul Schackman’s Ben ever got together, but they seem like a happy closeted couple. Indeed, all throughout Look, Rifkin’s attention to personal detail makes the frequently pat stories seem all the more real. In fact, one can easily see each scenario expanded and added to in a special edition DVD.

The most important thing the film establishes, however, is the theme of false privacy. When our school slut seduces her teacher, she’s shocked that it’s caught on tape. Our department story manwhore does things that no right minded person would ever attempt were they to know about the ever-present eye watching them. Look loves to push that concept to understandable extremes. The killers murder a cop, knowing full well it’s being captured on a windshield monitor, and every act in the convenience store - from singing to outright stealing - is preserved for future reference. This leads to the movie’s one minor complaint - the lack of realistic follow-up. Unless we are to believe that no one reviews these recordings, many of the situations repeated would have been legally nipped in the bud a long, long time ago.

Still, the human instinct to play voyeur matched by the morbid curiosity that comes when people are trapped in the act of being unbelievably inappropriate (to paraphrase one Candid Camera) makes Look a laudable effort. It may not be the landmark film that critics are cawing over - there have been other examples of the cinematic gimmick used here, including a crime thriller from 2001 created by Max Allan Collins entitled Real Time: Siege at the Lucas Street Market - but that doesn’t lessen the wonder in Rifkin’s approach. Indeed, in a new weird world order where we gladly substitute security for inherent rights, where we complain about the invasion but chalk it up to being protected, Look appears less like a stunt and more like a salient bit of future shock. Unfortunately, from what we see here, Orwell was right.

Filmcritic.com Norm Schrager

indieWIRE (Michael Joshua Rowin)

Film Journal International (David Noh)

Political Film Review

FilmJerk.com (Edward Havens) including an interview with Adam Rifkin here

Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson

New York Sun [Steve Dollar]

Screen International John Hazelton

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

Chicago Tribune (Maureen M. Hart)

New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz

Rikaki, Lucia

DREAMS IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (Oneira se alli glossa) B 87

Greece (68 mi) 2010 Official Blog

On a map, you can find the island of Cyprus is located south of Turkey, much closer to that country than Greece, yet both nations claim the island as their own. In 1974 under the Greek military junta, the Greeks carried out a coup d'état in an attempt to unite the island with Greece, but this was immediately countered by a follow up invasion by the Turks, initially landing some 30,000 troops on the island, followed by a larger invasion that eventually accumulated 37% of the island, evicting 180,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes, effectively dividing the island into separate north and south corridors. Located just 300 meters from the Green Line that splits the capital city of Nicosia into two parts is the Faneromeni school, initially a girl’s school founded in 1859 until the invasion shut the school down, re-opening again due to the rise of immigrant workers settling in an abandoned region of town. Today there are students from 21 different nationalities in a primary and high school, including a large refugee contingency from the former Soviet nation of Georgia, also Bulgaria, Iraq, China, Turkey, the Philippines, and local Cypriots, all of which adds a unique international challenge in teaching children to understand the concept of a global community. Encouraged to bring into the classrooms their own personal insight and observations from their own cultures, each student effectively becomes a living ambassador that helps expand not only the horizon of their fellow students but the teaching staff as well.

Lucia Rikaki was born in Greece, studying art history, film, graphic design and photography at the Darlington College of Arts in England, eventually staging theater productions, making 5 narrative films and 15 documentaries before dying of brain cancer late in 2011. Known by the students as “the lady with the camera,” she began by sitting on the stairs outside the school and asking children what takes place inside, allowing kids to be spontaneous in their thoughts and behavior, as often more than one thing is happening in each shot, as various children are carrying out their own personal agendas, which includes picking on, disagreeing with, harassing, and often ridiculing the various speakers seen on camera. While the school is openly tolerant of different nationalities, this can be at odds with the government practice of routinely arresting immigrant groups and placing pressure on them to confess when attempting to solve crimes, creating a rampant national xenophobia, which certainly affects the children’s parents, yet the condition is all but absent in the young minds of children. Guided by the personal observations of the students themselves, the director is an invisible presence in the school, capturing children at ease in the classroom, where their openness, one student after another, reflects an open society, even if it exists only within the safe haven of the school.

While the children are taught about cultural mistreatment, including sexual harassment and racial hostility, they are largely protected from it at school, though their home life may often be inundated with real life turmoil. The group setting of the school offers a kind of therapeutic alternative to real life, as kids can still play, draw, sing, and perform as a group in a classroom where teachers appreciate the effort made, especially in overcoming the various language and cultural barriers, where it’s obvious many kids of all age groups still struggle with language, which affects their confidence and participation level in class. The teachers are very hands-on and encouraging, making sure no one is left out, but it’s often difficult bringing out the personalities of the quietest students who remain shy. Still, the interaction between the students themselves couldn’t be more appealing, as they continually tease one another, not with insults or hurtful expressions, but with playful humor and laughter and recognition that they are all part of the same classroom where challenging one another is part of the learning process. It feels like an extremely European style of school, as so many have crossed various national borders to arrive there, yet the students are taught to live in a world without borders, where everyone’s cultural habits and customs are valued and respected, where they all take an interest in each other’s differences, where teachers and students alike are taught how to embrace friendship as a meaningful learning criteria, where learning how to help one another by being a friend seems wise beyond their years, but the world expressed by these kids is brimming with hope and optimism.

Collective Eye Films — Dreams in Another Language (educational)

The Faneromeni school was built in the town of Nicosia in 1859. With the Turkish invasion in 1974, the town was abandoned by inhabitants and the Faneromeni school stopped functioning. Years later, Immigrant workers started settling in the abandoned old town and gradually their children started attending the school. Today, there are over 46 teachers and 216 students from 21 nationalities that attend. Most of the students come from former Soviet Union countries, other from Iraq, Bulgaria, the Philippines, China and Turkey. The children not only learn but they also teach, encouraged by their teachers to convey elements from their civilization to other children. This is an original educational experiment, a creative game of coexistence in a town inhabited by new citizens and foreign workers that have been arriving from all over the world to seek a better future in Cyprus.

Dreams in another language Michael Cacoyannis Foundation

“Dreams in another language”
an awarded documentary by Lucia Rikaki
at Michael Cacoyannis Foundation
from October 14th until October 20th 2010.

A film, 216 children, 21 countries, 46 teachers, 80 hours of shooting material, 7 months of editing, a modern multicultural environment.

Michael Cacoyannis Foundation presents an extraordinary documentary by Lucia Rikaki entitled “Dreams in another language” from October 14th until October 20th 2010 at 20:30 and at 22:00 (Cinema Hall). The film has just been awarded at the 4th DocFest Chalkida 2010, with the awards of Best Film and Best Editing.

Does it really matter in which language a kid dreams? It shouldn’t, however, when life follows its own complexity, then dreams speak in their own language. A language that carries truth, humor, bitterness, puzzlement, tenderness, love. And the dreams are becoming space and power for life in whichever language, under whatever circumstances and they finally unveil when they find fertile soil.

A FILM FOR AN EXTRAORDINARY SCHOOL

The documentary by Lucia Rikaki approaches and monitors life at a very special school … A school that is located just 300 meters away from the Green Line that splits Nicosia into two parts. It is a traditional female school of the past times, that was built in 1859, at Phaneromeni, at the center of the old town of Nicosia, which after a period of abandonment, due to the Turkish invasion, nowadays is open again housing a primary and a high school. Having 46 teachers and hosting 216 students from 21 countries (Cyprus, former CCSR, Iraq, Bulgaria, Philippines, China, Turkey…), it was the inspiration for the director, Lucia Rikaki, who attempted to approach the individual characteristics of this educational venue, in relation to modern and emerging multicultural environment.

“Which wind brought us here? A colorful, very special school in Nicosia”

With the director’s words: “It happened to visit Cyprus once, in order to present my film “The Other” at an Education Conference. There I had the chance to meet extraordinary teachers from the Faneromeni School, who had undertaken the organizing of the conference as well. It was night when I firstly visited the school and standing there at the stairs of the building, they started explaining to me what is taking place behind the big doors. The script had already started being born in my mind.” This way was initiated the creation of a film based on the real stories of several individuals. “We worked mainly by instinct, with lots of love, we devoted endless hours of observation and discussion with children of all ages. I insisted on giving the speech to them, more than anyone else.”

"Filmmaker Lucia Rikaki dies, age 50"

Greek film director, documentarist, writer and producer Lucia Rikaki died in Athens on Wednesday after a long battle with cancer. She was 50 years old.

The Piraeus-born, UK-educated artist was a dynamic presence in the Greek visual media scene, producing awareness-raising documentaries, embracing the use of new social networking technology to bring young people into filmmaking, and organizing festivals such as Ecofilms and the Kos International Health Film Festival.

Her feature films are “Trip to Australia” (1990), “Quartet in Four Movements” (1994), “Dancing Soul” (1999), “Hold Me” (2006) and “What We Hold in Common” (2007).

As a documentarist, Rikaki shed light on socially sensitive issues such as immigration, education and the lives of the disabled in Greece, writing, directing and producing over 10 documentaries on related subjects, as well as “Comedy Nights,” a 2001 project based on the Greek stand-up comedy culture that Rikaki played a pivotal role in nurturing by organizing Greece’s first comedy club, at the 104 Center for Arts.

Rikaki also served as president of the European Producers Network, on the governing board of the Greek Film Directors and Producers Union and as cinema coordinator for the 3rd World Summit on Media for Children.

Lucia Rikaki is no longer in our midst | News Manolis Kranakis from Flix, December 30, 2011

The news about Lucia Rikaki’s death on December 28, 2011 at 50 years old has caused grief amongst everyone who knew her and her oeuvre.

Grief for a life cut short, especially for someone like Lucia Rikaki, who was brimming with energy until the end of her days. Suffice to say that her latest film was called “The Salvation Plan” and took place in the Sotiria hospital where she left her last breath. Restless and creative, like any true artist, Lucia Rikaki wasn’t just a filmmaker: her interests went above and beyond fiction and documentary films, embracing such diverse activities as film education, literature and stand up comedy, which she first established in Greece in 1995.

Born in Piraeus in 1961, she had studied art history, film, graphic design and photography at the Darlington College of Arts in England, and had worked at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and the Danish Ministry of the Environment. She returned to Greece in 1982 and founded Orama Films, staging theater productions and making films. In 2000 she established Tricky Trick Films.

Her filmography consists of a handful of shorts, five narrative films (“Quartet in 4 Movements” 1997, “Dancing Soul” 1999 and “Hold me” 2007, among others), more than 15 documentaries (“Words of Silence”, “Dreams in Another Language”) and a plethora of audiovisual clips that she continued to make even while hospitalized.

She was also the founder of the Rhodes International Film & Visual Arts Festival “EcoFilms”, which started out in 2000, as well as the Kos International Health Film Festival “Ippokratis”, established in 2009 and suspended by the island municipal authorities after two successful seasons.

"Lucia Rikaki biography"

Learn and talk about Lucia Rikaki, Greek film directors

Ripstein, Arturo

VIRGIN OF LUST

Mexico Spain Portugal 2003

2003 San Francisco International Film Festival Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack, May 1, 2003

This was the biggest surprise of a dismal festival. It’s so accomplished, so gorgeously stylized and deftly written, I can’t really understand how anyone could hate it. I suppose if you like strong narrative through-lines, Virgin will frustrate, since it is very much a film of dispersal. Characters and ideas come and go, move from center to periphery and back again, and the whole thing has a kind of all-over presence, like concepts and images suspended in a flotation tank. The visual design is impeccable, melding the shadowy mise-en-scène of film noir with the hazy colored interiors of Hopper paintings. Paz Garciadiego’s script continually amazes with sharp dialogue and cutting insights, and always resists simple allegory. Generalissimo Franco hovers as an idea, and as a real historical personage whose impact is felt on everything we see. But the film does not belittle its characters by making them mere functions of capital-H History. Toward the end, it did begin to feel a little meandering and overlong, but mostly it was a joy. Highlights: the opening and closing trailers, of course. Guy Maddin does 1940s Mexican melodrama? So totally awesome.

Ripstein, Gabriel

600 Miles (600 Millas) B- 81

Mexico USA (85 mi) 2015

Another potentially explosive story about the damning effects of gun smuggling across the Arizona border into the hands of heavily entrenched Mexican cartels, winner of the Best First Feature at the Berlin Festival, the director is the son of Arturo Ripstein, who worked as an assistant director on Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) before premiering 8 different films at Cannes, awarded the Mexican National Prize of Arts and Sciences in 1997, only the second filmmaker after Buñuel to do so, and the grandson of Alfredo Ripstein, one of Mexico’s most accomplished producers, often thought of as the founding father of the Mexican film industry. However, the eternally slow and laid-back style may actually be considered a non-theatrical approach, actually downplaying the drama, becoming a minimalist, overly detached road movie, much of it taking place in tight quarters inside a car, reminiscent of Locke (2013), though not nearly as unusual. Using a variety of styles, Ripstein may confound viewers throughout by muting expectations, literally draining all emotion out of the film and leaving the audience in a cinematically enhanced purgatory that extends over the final credits that may have more than a few viewers scratching their heads wondering what to make of this film. Offering an alternative to crass, over-hyped, over-produced filmmaking that would be highlighting the inevitable shootouts taking place between the various cartels in their struggle to control gang turf, this is a smaller budgeted, indie style of filmmaking that confounds expectations throughout right from the opening, where we see a couple knuckleheaded kids, Carson (Harrison Thomas) and Arnulfo Rubio (Kristyan Ferrer), hanging around gun shows and gun shops, showing the easy availability extended even to adolescents as they amass a stockpile of over-the-counter assault weapons. The trick, apparently, is moving from store to store, staying one step ahead of the federal trackers, where no questions are asked until one of them gets carded for buying cigarettes. Even so, the ease with which such high-powered weapons can be obtained is striking, where they simply blend into an existing culture that caters completely to the buyer, allowing Arnulfo to drive heavily loaded trucks filled with weapons across the border to designated drop off points in Mexico.

In a parallel story, Tom Roth as ATF agent Hank Harris is making similar rounds, only he’s screwing one of the attractive female sellers at a gun show in between serial number and registration checks, where he’s the guy supposedly watching the store. Apparently tracking these kid’s accelerated buying habits, Harris surprises Arnulfo at his vehicle in a parking lot, asking him to step out of the car, but Harris is himself waylaid from behind by Carson, who runs away after realizing the severity of what he’s done. Not thinking straight, and still young and naïve, Arnulfo ties him up and brings him to Mexico, hoping his uncle will know what to do, where the film slows to a crawl, narrowing the focus of the story, filled with extended moments of Arnulfo driving through the emptiness of the night with a badly beaten ATF agent handcuffed to the back seat, initially with duct tape over his mouth. What starts as a strange and precarious relationship of hostility and suspicion with barely a word spoken slowly develops into something more, as a nervous, anxious-ridden Arnulfo mouths to himself what he intends to say to his uncle, while Harris befriends the guy, helping to calm and reassure his frayed nerves, knowing his life might depend upon it. Slight windows into the motives and personalities of each man begin to take shape, where the audience is just as curious as Harris must be as to what Arnulfo’s intentions are, where behind the tough guy veneer is just a kid, which was also exhibited earlier in scenes with his friend Carson, who teased him relentlessly, causing him to act tough, showing a macho side, but this was covering an inner instability. Harris is clearly the adult here, though Arnulfo has the appearance of control despite his nervous demeanor, as the gun remains in his hand and the truck is driving in the direction he points it. This lengthy driving sequence, traveling 600 miles under cover of night with no sleep to speak of, strains the audience’s ability to stick with the mundane, as there’s not a lot of tension created, instead we’re often languishing in long stretches of silence and inactivity. It’s only as we draw closer to the final destination that the driver may begin to be overwhelmed by the mounting dread of what lies before him.

Surrounded by guards and enormous security, Arnulfo brings his captured prey directly into the heart of the beast, thinking somehow the agent’s knowledge of gun trafficking is a prized possession and may help his uncle’s business, but he’s blindsided by the reaction, as his uncle, Noe Hernandez, the drug kingpin from Miss Bala (2011), immediately chastises him for being so stupid, asking what was he thinking? His violent reaction reduces Arnulfo to tears, sobbing heavily, slumped in his chair at the kitchen table while his uncle nonchalantly washes the dishes. This portrait of family bliss is held onscreen for quite a while, literally burning the still image into the heads of the audience before erupting into a brutally shocking follow-up sequence, a jarring moment that accentuates the emotional torment Arnulfo is experiencing. While the poor kid goes through waves of emotion, perhaps no greater indignity is his uncle derisively calling him a maricón (fagot), a similar insult heard more playfully earlier from Carson, but in the macho Mexican culture there is no more demeaning insult, especially coming from an authority figure. The emotional unbalance that it causes triggers an unlikely scenario, like a world tilted on its axis, where it may never be the same again afterwards. The deliberate detachment of the subsequent scenes may startle audiences even more than the abrupt violence, especially the matter-of-fact way the world goes on, as if nothing has happened, where there’s a mirror image of the kitchen scene playing out in what may as well be an alternate universe, offering a perspective that literally shreds to pieces the audience’s expectations. It’s probably the rudely affecting ending that won this young director a festival prize, as it so goes against the grain of other typical films dealing with the ultra violence of drug cartels. The casual nature of the final disregard is stunning, quite a turnaround from everything that came before, though audiences are sure to be divided about the effectiveness. Overall the film may be too low key, minimalist, and unengaging for such a prolonged duration, that a quick burst of emotional flames that lasts for less than a minute may not compensate for the dehumanized feel that extends throughout this picture.

Best, Worst of the Berlin Film Festival 2015 | Variety

Peter Debruge: I’ve found two gems in my forays so far. The first is “600 Miles,” the feature directorial debut of Gabriel Ripstein, heir to one of Mexico’s great filmmaking dynasties. (His father, Arturo Ripstein, competed in Cannes three times, and it won’t be long before Gabriel finds himself at that stage.) If Daddy made hot, red-blooded movies attacking the Mexican establishment, then the son offers the cool, desanguinated alternative: a look at firearms smuggling between the U.S. and Latin America told in startlingly desensationalized fashion — a movie about illegal gun traffic with precious little shooting. Driven instead by tension and subtext, “600 Miles” benefits enormously from Tim Roth’s performance as an ATF agent kidnapped and taken south of the border. Roth met producer Michel Franco while serving as head of the Un Certain Regard jury, and agreed to star in this film and another which Rubio is directing, “Chronic,” which we’ll likely see at Cannes.

Fortitude Magazine Garry Arnot, also seen here: #EIFF2015 Film review: 600 Miles (600 Millas) - Fortitude ...

At the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the programme is categorised into strands that celebrate and showcase different aspects of cinema, and each year a different nation is chosen to represent the ‘International’ element of the festival. For 2015, Mexico is the country in the limelight and Gabriel Ripstein’s debut film ‘600 Miles’ (or 600 Millas in Spanish) is in the line-up, following its successful trip to the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.

The crime drama unfolds within the arms trafficking underworld as friends Carson (Harrison Thomas) and Arnulfo (Kristyan Ferrer) smuggle weaponry from Arizona across the border to Arnulfo’s Mexican drug cartel family. Unbeknownst to them, ATF agent Hank Harris (Tim Roth) is tracking them closely and when their paths inevitably cross, a vicious encounter leads to an unlikely road trip, simmering with threats and nerve-shredding tension.

The visuals really go a long way in building the suspenseful atmosphere that drives the plot forward. The plot structure is rather unnatural as sequences are sectioned off from one another and the unsteady nature of the handheld camera used adds to the unnerving tone. As development takes shape, some neatly executed tricks in focus and mise-en-scene plays up the divide between the two central characters in Arnulfo and Hank, as their relationship grows during their journey, careering to a definitive finale. The concept of placing antagonists in a confined space and waiting for the conflict is a tried and tested approach, but here it is carried off tastefully and with a continued unpredictability thanks to an interesting script and solid performances from both the genre mainstay Roth and fiery rising star Ferrer.

Successfully combining the gangland thriller and road movie bases, ‘600 Miles’ is an engaging hybrid effort that has underlying art house elements to boot. The slow-burning pace is obviously deliberate but becomes laboured until the introduction of Roth’s character around a third of the way through. Despite being a neophyte in his field, Mexican director Ripstein has a knack for implementing infrequent but shocking doses of violence, and seems to understand both the gun running environment in which he sets the project, and the greedy criminal minds that inhabit it. Working alongside Belgian cinematographer Alain Marcoen, best known for his collaborations with realism specialists Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, there is an intriguing inventiveness in their partnership that keeps the film well above average.

‘600 Miles’ got its release at the Berlin Film Festival back in February where it won the Best First Feature accolade.

FilmFracture [Kathryn Schroeder]

Simplicity. There a few films made today that act upon the word. They instead feel the need to fill space with the unnecessary, oftentimes to mask the problems that lie within the story being told. Mexican Director Gabriel Ripstein’s 600 Millas (600 Miles) takes the simplistic route to produce a film worthy of the art form. 600 Miles makes simplicity look like the best choice for a filmmaker, and viewers are sure to agree.

Using minimal sets and very few characters, 600 Miles is the story of a young Mexican man named Arnulfo Rubio, played by Kristyan Ferrer, who works for a Mexican cartel running guns across the border from Arizona to Mexico. He is new to this position, and his greenness is self-evident in the manner in which he repeats what he will say to the border patrol to himself while driving, and also in how he presents himself to other members of the cartel, namely his uncle. It is also most evident in his demeanor, as he tries to come across to his white American partner as being tough and brash but the eyes give everything away. Arnolfo is trying too hard, and the softness that lies inside of him comes through when one of his purchases go awry and he ends up with a hostage whom he should have left behind beaten, or killed—if he were a true cartel member.

Arnolfo is now in a bind because he has taken hostage Agent Hank Harris (Tim Roth from Selma) of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Arnolfo makes the decision to take Harris to Mexico where he believes he can help the cartel with their business based on what he knows. It is an obvious huge mistake by anyone watching, but Arnolfo is merely a scared young man who does not know how to be cruel. That is what makes 600 Miles absolutely enthralling to watch. The film takes an introspective approach to a man who is reconciling his choices, and building an unlikely relationship with someone whom he should have killed, and who would happily see him imprisoned. While watching 600 Miles you see Arnolfo move through waves of emotions, and the performance by Ferrer gives strength to an otherwise fragile character even when he is at his lowest, distraught point.

600 Miles is a character piece, and while Roth delivers a fine performance as Harris it is Ferrer’s Arnolfo that provides the real soul of the film. Every choice he makes, the conversations he has with Harris while on the road, and how he approaches those close to him after taking his hostage are all perfectly crafted on screen to give the viewer an inside look at the feelings and emotional torment Arnolfo is experiencing. Ripstein slowly develops the character to make way for his ultimate choice between good and evil, and the decision is one that will leave you suffocating because of its repercussions.

It is the choice that Ripstein and his writing partner Issa López made for the ending of 600 Miles that will leave you traumatized. To reveal exactly what happens would be criminal, but it must be known that the burgeoning friendship between Arnolfo and Harris, the manner in which they have forever become connected, and the way in which each has chosen to protect one another in various ways, shall forever be a haunting memory. 600 Miles ends just as it began, with simplicity, but it is the emotional resonance it creates that is anything but effortless on the part of the filmmakers. In a word, it is cruel, and at the same time a perfect choice.

600 Miles will make you wish Ripstein wrote the ending to every emotionally charged movie made today—it is that provoking.

600 Miles | 4:3 Lidiya Josifova

Gabriel Ripstein's Award-Winning Debut - Indiewire Jessica Kiang from The Playlist

600 Miles | Reviews | Screen Dan Fainaru

Sydney Film Festival Review: 600 Miles (Mexico, 2015 ... Chris Singh

Flickfeast [Kevin Matthews]

The Upcoming [Tim Mead]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Andrew Robertson]

Dog And Wolf Berlinale 2015 [Mark Wilshin]

The Healthy State of the Mexican Documentary at ... - Fipresci Joel Poblete

'600 Miles' ('600 Millas') - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer

Berlin Film Review: '600 Miles' - Variety Peter Debruge

600 Miles review - The Guardian Andrew Pulver

Ritchie, Guy

SHERLOCK HOLMES C 73

USA Great Britain Australia (128 mi) 2009

From the initial glimpse of this colorless grey vision of a filthy Victorian England, we’re forced to endure an exceedingly ugly picture, a world where the sun never shines and the inhabitants may as well be working under the oppressive yoke of the coal industry, where people are dressed in heavy coats that feel covered in soot from head to toe virtually all of the time. It’s not a pretty sight as we’re introduced to a shirtless Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes engaged in barroom fisticuffs with a guy much bigger than he, yet in his mind he conceives a way to quickly turn the tide in his favor, which is shown to the audience in slow motion before it happens as the idea comes to him, then shown again in real life. This is basically the take on this Sherlock Holmes movie, that he’s able to use his mental powers as mind over matter and literally will himself into becoming an action figure, where in slow mo or regular speed, he routinely outsmarts and outpunches his unsuspecting foils. Downey Jr. has always been an overbearing smart ass with a touch of mischief about him and here he’s given free reign to let loose as the world’s smartest man, an all too smug guy who loves to lord it over the rest of the human race, given a comic script here with Jude Law as his morally upstanding and incredibly uptight Dr. Watson who’s also a bit of a stubborn showoff, and between the two of them the competitive juices just flow, as they’re continually trying to out do and outperform the other, with Sherlock always getting the upper hand. These two are too smart for their own good, or so it reads somewhere in the margins of their offscreen directions. This playful verbal sparring match continues throughout the film and is something of a lifesaver, as at times it borders on that Wallace & Gromit British elitism that comes exceedingly close to farce, which says something about the tonal mess of this film, where the action flies fast and furious, but is presented so stupidly with obvious computer graphics in hyped up MTV fashion that it flies off the rails, but remains entertaining all the way.

The zany comedy gives this film needed energy and humor, as otherwise it is one of the most tasteless, dour, and unashamedly ugly films to sit through in quite some time, where explosions and high end special effects are meant to impress the audience with mind-numbing frequency. The always alluring Rachel McAdams is not billed as the most beautiful woman in the world and is instead introduced as the one woman in the world who has a history of outsmarting Sherlock Holmes, a woman who gets under his skin with her tendency towards theft and swindling, where it’s interesting that you can’t tell the difference between the law abiders and the law breakers, as their behavior looks identical when everyone appears dead set upon undermining their enemies. The arch enemy here appears to be a Lord Voldemort-style bad guy who dabbles in black magic and the occult, supposedly possessing the gift of the supernatural, making him a formidable foe against a total rationalist, but after a great deal of pyrotechnic display the film veers towards the swordplay last seen in THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the film is the mix of slow motion and fast motion utilized to break down the thoughts and various disguises of Sherlock Holmes who can suddenly appear to be all places at once. There’s a wasted love story of Dr. Watson that goes nowhere, but turning this into an action movie is just plain silly, especially as he’s spouting off his knowledge to whoever would listen, explaining his reasoning and giving away the plot in the process, where there’s a dark side behind the dark side, seemingly neverending, and for all practical purposes little headway is made to stop or even slow down the criminal activity that is spread throughout an entire corrupt empire. The picture of rampant criminal behavior suggests Holmes is needed for a sequel, a fact made all too obvious by this ineffectual and largely unsatisfactory ending that feels like we’ve been duped by a carnival barker whose house of cards all tumble down.

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]

Robert Downey Jr. makes a perfect Sherlock Holmes. Not only can he do a flawless British accent, but he also understands Holmes from the inside; they're both exceedingly clever, and both so insatiably hungry for creative and intellectual input that they can behave in self-destructive ways. Likewise, Jude Law makes a great Watson; he's better as a second banana than as a leading man, and he and Downey have great chemistry. This excellent heart and soul of Guy Ritche's Sherlock Holmes makes up for all the things it does badly. Firstly, it has one of the dullest Holmes villains of all time, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), who sneers a lot and wishes to take over the world (yawn). It also goes on far too long (128 minutes), doesn't have much to do with Arthur Conan Doyle, and too much of old London is either demolished or blown to bits. Rachel McAdams plays a modern-style badass Irene Adler, who is so awesome she scares even Holmes. It's all fairly ridiculous, but Ritchie knows how to play ridiculous, and the overall movie is a lot of fun.

Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [2/6]

Arthur Conan Doyle described his creation as a man of “peculiarities,” of a racing mind yet—my favorite—“the worst tenant in London,” a slob. The author never had the pleasure of witnessing Robert Downey Jr. claw his way out of the abyss, but you can’t help but think he’d be pleased with the casting. Into Sherlock Holmes’ digitized 1891 London steps Downey, who peps up his performance with so much attitude that you wish the whole schlocky movie spinning around him would just calm down and take notice. We see his Holmes get doused with a glass of red wine after surmising one too many details about the fiancée of his trusted aide, Dr. Watson (Law); the next moment is perfect. The couple abandons our soggy snoop at the dinner table and he continues eating alone, happily.

The movie, however, is not made by a loner, but rather, one imagines, a large committee of people-pleasers. (Even the blockbuster Iron Man feels more personally acute.) Strenuously, it’s established that Holmes is a brawler, a man of action prone to bare-knuckle bouts and gambling—as if the idea of a cerebral hero is somehow distasteful. (Conan Doyle gave his hero robust tastes, but calculating body blows in slow motion is taking the idea way too far.) The whirling, clamorous plot involves something to do with a black-clad cult leader (Strong) and another secret sect of city protectors; honestly, you won’t be able to explain it. This is the ultimate sin of the film, generically helmed by lad-auteur Guy Ritchie: Logic seems to be thrown out the window in order to make room for clashes on a partially completed Tower Bridge. It’s way too elementary.

The Onion A.V. Club review [B] Keith Phipps

“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so,” Sherlock Holmes tells his sidekick Dr. Watson at the conclusion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League.” It’s one of Doyle’s periodic hints that his hero uses his brilliance to placate a tortured psyche. Doyle’s most famous character has an unparalleled genius for detection, but he’s also kind of a mess, a drug-abusing weirdo kept from turning into a total recluse only by Watson’s friendship and a steady parade of mysteries making their way up the steps of 221B Baker Street.

Robert Downey Jr. sounds that self-destructive eccentricity as a keynote from his first appearance in Sherlock Holmes, and his twitchy, winning performance returns to it throughout the film. The interpretation veers sharply away from the tweedy expectations set by Basil Rathbone and others, but it’s as true in its own way to the source. Holmes is a man only fully engaged by life when it offers a direct challenge.

In all other respects, however, this is very much a Sherlock Holmes movie for the blockbuster era, a propulsive, noisy, visually immersive plot machine that pits Downey’s Holmes against a secret society and breaks up the investigation with a series of action setpieces. Fortunately, it’s a highly entertaining example of the form, directed with just the right amount of panache by Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels), whose showmanship finally finds the right side of self-indulgence. (Well, mostly. He does use a flatulent bulldog as a punchline.)

Jude Law co-stars as a wry Dr. Watson, whose impending marriage distresses Holmes in the moments when they aren’t investigating the apparent resurrection of a criminal mastermind (Mark Strong). Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler, Holmes’ flirtatious bête noir and sometime ally, and to Ritchie’s credit, he gives the trio a fair amount of witty banter between the mad chases and fisticuffs. But Ritchie’s cleverest flourish—slowing the film down and focusing on Downey’s face as he plots out a plan seconds before putting it into action—wisely relies on the strengths of both the hero and the man playing him. Called up in moments of need from the exile of his own thoughts, he’s able to see the world as it really is and bend it to his will.

Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review

Sherlock Holmes is another critique of filmmaking—if only by example. As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world's most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair—punctuated by occasional pratfalls and soigné bits of British understatement—unfolding in a gloomy London that seems a bootleg copy of A Christmas Carol's CGI set.

Arthur Conan Doyle's detective was, in essence, a master of the 19th-century scientific method, who used empirical observation and logical deduction to make sense of a chaotic universe; it's inevitable that his 21st-century avatar would be a buff superhero. In addition to being the smartest man on earth, the new Holmes is a master of barehanded fisticuffs—using strategies derived from lightning physical calculations. As played by Robert Downey Jr. with gloomy insouciance, Holmes is also something of a Bushwick boho. He wears shades and, rather than the traditional deerstalker hat, favors a porkpie job with the brim turned up.

Hollywood logic has further dictated that the movie be a bit of a buddy film, even a love story. Dr. Watson (Jude Law, batting his eyes a bit less than usual) is a good-looking bloke whose impending marriage drives Sherlock half-mad with jealousy. To complete the triangle, the unscrupulous queen of crime Irene Adler (played with game enthusiasm by Rachel McAdams) is hopelessly gone on the detective. "What if we trusted each other?" she plaintively suggests.

The wartime Holmes and Watson (Basil Rathbone and fumfering Nigel Bruce) battled the Axis, as well as the Spider Woman. A few near-subliminal references to terrorism notwithstanding, there's little attempt to make super Holmes topical. On the other hand, there's at least a residual trace of the detective as master of deductive logic. The movie opens with a raid on a Satanic ritual and, although it appears to go totally supernatural, is actually (and nonsensically) revealed as . . . something even less credible. The real mystery, however, is Downey. Whatever his personal demons, this actor seems immune from self-contempt; at least on the screen, he brings a wry conviction to even the most hackneyed part or ridiculously written role.

Guy Ritchie Butches Up His SHERLOCK HOLMES Todd Brown from The Showcase Blog

Hat? Gone. Cape? Gone. Pipe? Much more modestly sized. Abs? Rippling.

Welcome to the world of Sherlock Holmes as re-envisioned by Snatch director Guy Ritchie. This is a manlier Holmes than has been seen on screen before, one not shy to use his fists as well as his brains. And while purists will no doubt squawk at just how far removed from the staid, Masterpiece Theatre image of the detective Ritchie's version is the ironic truth is that -- given the pulp origins of the character and the fact that the bit most are squawking loudest about (that'd be the fighting) are actually specifically mentioned in the original source material -- this version is arguably as true to the lurid, populist spirit of the character as ever has been put on screen. Put aside the distinguished gentleman chomping on the stem of his pipe for a moment, please, and remember that the character as originally written in the late 1800s was a drug addict and habitual user of both cocaine and morphine. Polished and polite he was not.

But I digress.

We enter the story as Holmes and his trusty sidekick Watson -- also significantly more butch then we're used to in this version -- are leading a police raid on a Satanic ritual. A young woman is strapped to an altar, about to be sacrificed to the devil himself when our heroes swoop in to stop the ritual and capture the villain -- dramatically revealed to be Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), an influential nobleman. We learn that this is to be Holmes and Watson's last case together, that once Blackwood is hung Watson intends to be married and move into private offices -- an impending change that Holmes is not dealing with well. And so when Blackwood seemingly returns from the dead, Holmes seizes on the chance to rope his partner back in to active duty. Throw in a romantic interest, a secret society, underground pit boxing and a wickedly funny demonstration of what happens when the world's greatest deductive reasoner is also a fabulously skilled fighter -- hit here, then there, and strike there... yes, that'll work, off we go -- and you've got Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes.

Purely and unrepentantly a popcorn movie aimed straight at the masses, Sherlock Holmes fuses serial pulpiness with Ritchie's typical brash style and rapid fire dialog, gorgeous period design and producer Joel Silver's undeniable need to blow shit up. It's a recipe that could have spelled disaster -- and, honestly, one that does tend to bog down in the plottier moments, the plot being pretty ridiculous if you pause long enough to think about it -- but one that instead ends up being fabulously entertaining thanks to the brilliant casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson. Yes, Downey is basically doing Tony Stark here again and, yes, both characters are essentially riffs on the actor's own public image but when he does it this well I just don't care. And Law? Law hasn't been this much fun since the criminally under rated I Heart Huckabees and this could very well be the role that puts him back on the list of actors that the public at large actually give a damn about, a position he hasn't held for nearly a decade. And that's just the two of them operating separately. Put them together and you've got absolute magic. The chemistry between Watson and Holmes is absolutely bang on, the relationship one hundred percent believable, the pair complementing each other perfectly while also nattering on each others' quirks like an old married couple. The action may be what gets your attention up front but it's Holmes' fear that he is about to lose his long time friend to marriage that really gives the film its anchor.

Casting in other areas is mixed. Mark Strong is very good as Lord Blackwood but is given surprisingly little to do. Veteran Brit character actor Eddie Marsan is stellar as Inspector Lastrade, his moments on screen crackling with an energy perfectly complementary to Downey and Law's. Rachel McAdams, however, may be a lovely and talented girl but she never really seems comfortable here, though whether because she just never slid into the period or wasn't able to find her place amidst all the Ritchie-fied testosterone I cannot say. Hans Matheson -- soon to be seen in Clash of the Titans -- is just eminently forgettable as Lord Coward, a major problem for a role this prominent.

Great movie? No... it's not, really. The plot is far more complex than it needs to be and significantly sillier than it should be and there are some definite hiccups with a couple key performances but, that said, the core actors are brilliant and the action set pieces great fun. I don't need to be Holmes to know that this will almost certainly be one of the big hits of the Christmas season, big enough that it should easily prove to be the most lucrative films of either Ritchie or Law's careers and probably rank second to Iron Man in Downey's. If you're looking for popcorn, this brand is pretty tasty.

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [1/5]

The New Yorker (David Denby) review

DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review [2/5]

Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]

Twitch [James Marsh]

Film Freak Central review

filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [4/5]

Slant Magazine review [2.5/4] Ryan Stewart

ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]

Screen International (Tim Grierson) review

DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) review [4/5]

Eye for Film (Val Kermode) review [3/5]

The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]

eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]

One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C-]

Movievortex

CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [C+]

Entertainment Weekly review Owen Gleiberman

The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt

Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [3/6]

The Guardian (Catherine Shoard) review December 15, 2009

Andrew Pulver: Is Guy Ritchie trying to sex Holmes up? Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, December 15, 2009

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review December 17, 2009

The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Tim Robey

The Daily Telegraph (Marc Lee) review [3/5]

Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review

Austin Chronicle review [3/5] Marc Savlov

San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]

Martin Ritt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ritt, Martin

Martin Ritt > Overview - AllMovie Hal Erickson

American film director Martin Ritt started out as a Broadway actor. Ritt's stage role as "Gleason" in Winged Victory brought him to Hollywood for the film version, for which the studio publicity billed him, along with the rest of the male cast, by the rank he held in the Army (Private First Class Martin Ritt). A victim of the Hollywood blacklist, Ritt's career came to a standstill in the early 1950s. He reemerged, not as an actor, but as a director for the 1956 film Edge of the City. A favorite of actor Paul Newman, Ritt directed Newman in The Long Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962), Hud (1963), The Outrage (1964) and Hombre (1967). Other Ritt-directed films of note were Pete 'n' Tillie (1972), Cross Creek (1984), Murphy's Romance (1985), and, his last film, Stanley and Iris (1990). If there doesn't seem to be a central throughline in these films it was because Ritt steadfastly refused to be typecast as a director. One project that brought him immense satisfaction was The Front (1976), a comedy-drama of the blacklist years in which Ritt worked with fellow blacklistees Martin Balsam, Zero Mostel, Joshua Shelley, Herschel Bernardi, Lloyd Gough, and screenwriter Walter Bernstein. In 1985, Ritt made a surprising but delightful return to acting in the role of an excitable baseball manager in the otherwise disposable The Slugger's Wife (1985).

Martin Ritt - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Rob Edelman from Film Reference

As his roots in the Group Theater would indicate, Martin Ritt was a man with a social conscience. He had himself known misfortune: he was blacklisted during the McCarthy years of the 1950s, an odious practice that he poignantly attacks in The Front. Often, the characters in his films are underdogs, victims of racism or sexism or capitalism who live lives of quiet dignity while struggling and occasionally triumphing over adversity.

Most refreshingly, Ritt's films are inhabited by odd couplings, characters from diverse backgrounds who unite for a common good while in the process expanding their own awareness. In Norma Rae , for example, Southern cotton mill worker Sally Field and New York Jewish labor organizer Ron Leibman form a curious coalition as they unionize a factory. In a hilarious sequence that symbolizes the cinema of Martin Ritt, Field joins the Lower East Side and Dixie when she petulantly utters the Yiddish word kvetch while complaining to Leibman. (The director also deals with the hardships of overworked, underpaid employees in The Molly Maguires , set in the Pennsylvania coal mines of the 1870s.)

Blacks and whites regularly align themselves in Ritt films, from easy-going, hard-working railroad yard worker Sidney Poitier befriending confused army deserter John Cassavetes in Edge of the City to schoolteacher Jon Voight educating underprivileged black children in Conrack. In all of these, the black characters exist within a white society, their identities irrevocably related to whites. The exception is Sounder , released after Hollywood had discovered that black audiences do indeed attend movies; it was produced at a point in time when blacks on movie screens were able to exist solely within a black culture. Sounder pointedly details the struggles of a black family to overcome adversity and prejudice. Although he spent his youth in New York City, Ritt set many of his films in the South, including Sounder, Conrack, Norma Rae, The Long Hot Summer , and The Sound and the Fury —the last two based on William Faulkner stories.

While Ritt's films are all solidly crafted, they are in no way visually distinctive; Ritt cannot be called a great visual stylist, and is thus not ranked in the pantheon of his era's filmmakers.

Martin Ritt Profile - TCM.com biography from Turner Classic Movies

Martin Ritt: Information from Answers.com biography

Martin Ritt | American director | Britannica.com biography

Martin Ritt: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article biography from Absolute Astronomy

Martin Ritt Biography - Yahoo! Movies biography

Martin Ritt brief bio from World Lingo

Martin Ritt brief bio from NNDB

Martin Ritt - IBDB: The official source for Broadway Information Broadway Database

Martin Ritt Mubi

The History of Cinema. Martin Ritt: biography, reviews, links Piero Scaruffi reviews

Director Martin Ritt Throws Moviegoers a Curve by Pinch-Hitting as An ... Deirdre Donahue from People magazine, May 6, 1985

Martin Ritt; Directed 'Hud,' 'Norma Rae' - latimes Myrna Oliver, December 9, 1990

Martin Ritt, Director, Dead at 76 - Maker of Socially Conscious Films ... Peter B. Flint from The New York Times, December 11, 1990

Martin Ritt focused on social issues | Interviews | Roger Ebert December 16, 1990

Picking up the tab: the life and movies of Martin Ritt - Google Books Result written by Carlton Jackson (300 pages), 1994

Screening the Past Article book review by Mark Freeman, reviewing Martin Ritt interviews, edited by Gabriel Miller (213 pages), 2000

Martin Ritt: interviews - Google Books Result Martin Ritt interviews, edited by Gabriel Miller (213 pages), 2000

Martin Ritt: Interviews University Press of Mississippi, 2000

The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man University Press of Mississippi, November 1, 2000

Rutgers Focus - An actor's director Diane Cornell from Rutger’s Focus, January 19, 2001

Diary Of A Screenwriter: Writing 'Hud': A Conversation extract from William Baer’s book, Hud: A Conversation with Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. from Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2003, posted here September 27, 2013

Loving Tribute to Kazan Nearly Derailed by Politics | Observer Walter Bernstein from The NY Observer, December 26, 2005

Westerns of the Sixties: Hombre by Jake Hinkson - Criminal Element May 14, 2012

The Spy Who Liked Me | The New Yorker John le Carré, April 15, 2013

Martin Ritt Biography - Childhood, Life Achievements & Timeline July 26, 2016

Martin Ritt: On the Set With the Director of HUD, THE SPY WHO CAME ... Martin Ritt: On the Set With the Director of HUD, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, NORMA RAE, SOUNDER and more, from the Scott Rollins Film and TV Trivia Blog, March 1, 2017

TSPDT - Martin Ritt

Gerald Peary - interviews - Martin Ritt Interview by Gerald Peary, March 2, 1979

Martin Ritt Find a Grave

Martin Ritt - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

Images for Martin Ritt

THE EDGE OF THE CITY

USA (85 mi) 1957

Edge of the City | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

TV director Martin Ritt graduated to movies with this 1957 drama, itself an adaptation of Robert Alan Arthur's teleplay A Man Is Ten Feet Tall. A deserter from the Korean war (John Cassavetes) teams up with a black coworker (Sidney Poitier) to take on the mob boss of the New York City docks (Jack Warden). Ritt's work has never been of formal interest, but as Bertrand Tavernier pointed out, Ritt was one of the few socially committed directors of the 50s to follow his lights into the supercilious 80s (Norma Rae). With Kathleen Maguire, Ruby Dee, and Robert Simon.

Edge of the City Time Out London

Ritt's first feature, scripted by Robert Alan Aurthur from his own teleplay A Man is Ten Feet Tall. Cassavetes and Poitier become friends down on the waterfront. Cassavetes is the mixed-up, insecure white boy picked on by the brutal, bigoted foreman/union racketeer (Warden); Poitier the wiser, maturer black who defends him (at the cost of his life) in an attempt to teach him to stand up for the right thing. A worthy enough piece, well acted and making excellent use of locations on the New York docks; but when you get down to it, no less dramatically artificial than On the Town, and this boy Poitier is whiter than white.

Film Noir of the Week: November 2006 Curt, also seen here: Film Noir of the Week review

This movie was Martin Ritt's film directing debut, and along with Hud, these were his two best and most powerful pictures that he ever did. Edge Of the City is a courageous and brave film that deals with interracial relationships, with Sidney Poitier emerging as the hero among the cruel city dwellers. John Cassavetes, still a handsome young man, fresh from making Crime in the Streets, is a.w.o.l. from the army, living in a small, crummy room and toiling on the New York docks as a longshoreman. He hooks up with Poitier while working on the docks and they become close friends. Poitier introduces him to his wife, played by Ruby Dee, and they listen to bop records and dance in the living room and swill down beer. A very cool 50's hip scene. But after awhile things go sour working at the docks, especially for Poitier who runs afoul with Jack Warden, who plays a mean, brutal foreman that baits and goads Poitier into a fight. The both of them go at it with grappling hooks in a savage showdown brawl, with Poitier being overpowered by the Irishman Warden and finally losing his life in the battle.

Axel (John Cassavetes) wants to avenge his best friend's death even though by doing this, he knows he could be caught by the authorities as a deserter. Several other co-workers witnessed the fight, but they're all gutless and afraid of Jack Warden, knowing that if anyone snitched on him they could end up losing their jobs if they couldn't prove that he actually did the nefarious deed. After much soul searching, Cassavetes finally confronts Warden in a fight to the finish with hooks. The both of them go at each other in a very vicious battle, with Cassavetes winning out with a nasty slice of his hook to the head of Warden who goes down for the last time. This is an extremely well acted and directed film noir, with brilliant editing by Sidney Myers and smoky black & white photography that gives the viewer a sense of unrelieved visual distress while watching it. This movie is best seen at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. in the morning because the lateness of the hour gives this picture a more intense viewing experience.

Edge of the City - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

A hard-hitting urban drama filmed on the docks of the New York City waterfront, Edge of the City (1957) is a key film of the fifties for several reasons. First and foremost, it dealt with issues of race, which were rarely addressed in Hollywood films of this period (Stanley Kramer's Home of the Brave (1949) was an early exception). The film was adapted for the screen by Robert Alan Arthur from his television play, A Man is Ten Feet Tall, and focuses on Axel North (John Cassavetes), a guilt-ridden dock worker who feels responsible for his brother's accidental death. A black co-worker (Sidney Poitier) tries to draw Axel out of his depression but their friendship is jeopardized by Charles Malik (Jack Warden), a violent racist whose sadistic behavior brings about the film's tragic denouement.

Edge of the City marked the directorial debut of Martin Ritt, a former actor with Elia Kazan in New York's Group Theatre and a successful theatre and television director before he was blacklisted for past Communist affiliations in 1951. Due to the efforts of former Warner Brothers press agent turned producer David Susskind, Ritt's career was resurrected with Edge of the City and marked the beginning of a long, highly acclaimed film career which included Best Director Oscar® nominations for Hud (1963) and Norma Rae (1979).

At the same time, Sidney Poitier, cast in a supporting role in Edge of the City (he played the same role in Arthur's stage play), was on the cusp of major stardom and would earn an Academy Award® nomination the following year for his performance in The Defiant Ones (1958), directed by Stanley Kramer. Like Ritt, Poitier's political affiliations were under investigation during the fifties and his career could just as easily have been derailed without the considerable influence of playwright Arthur.

In his autobiography, This Life, Poitier recalls that prior to appearing in A Man is Ten Feet Tall, he was questioned by an NBC executive about his relationships with certain "undesirables" who said, 'You know there are those who feel that there are some dangerous people in this country. According to our information, you happen to know some of those dangerous people.'

'Who are these people - these dangerous people - that I'm supposed to know?'
'You worked with a man named Canada Lee for instance.'
'Yes, I did.' (By this time Canada Lee was dead.)
'You also know a man named Paul Robeson. As a matter of fact, you attended a salute for Robeson held at the Golden Gate Ballroom.'
'That is correct.'
'You spoke in a theatrical sketch that was in praise of Paul Robeson.'
And so he itemized a list of charges against me that questioned my loyalty. He put it to me that unless I repudiated those charges, I would not be able to play the part."

After agonizing over his dilemma, Poitier put his career on the line and refused to sign. "And then Arthur," Poitier recalled, "single-handedly, set in motion a colossal effort on the part of the creative forces (producers, writers, director) aimed at bringing about a workable compromise between the network, the advertising agency, and the Philo Company on one side, and me and my agent on the other." The resulting agreement allowed Poitier to accept the role in the television production of A Man is Ten Feet Tall without having to sign any repudiation of Robeson or Lee.

The play turned out to be a personal triumph for the actor and lead to his casting by Ritt in the film version. In fact, he was the only principal member of the original company who appeared in Edge of the City: Don Murray was replaced by John Cassavetes, Martin Balsam was replaced by Jack Warden, Hilda Simms was replaced by Ruby Dee, and director Robert Mulligan was replaced by Martin Ritt. Despite the changes in cast and crew, the film was universally praised by critics; Variety called it "a courageous, thought-provoking and exacting film....a milestone in the history of the screen in its presentation of an American Negro."

It was during the filming of Edge of the City that Poitier was signed for his next project; a controversial drama about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya entitled Something of Value (1957) with Richard Brooks at the helm. (Poitier had previously worked for him in Blackboard Jungle, 1955).

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] The Sydney Poitier Collection

Film Intuition: Sidney Poitier Collection DVD Review [Jen Johans]

DVD Savant Review: Edge of the City from The Sidney Poitier Collection Glenn Erickson

DVD Verdict- The Sidney Poitier Collection [Brett Cullum]

The Village Voice [Edwin Fancher] original newsprint (pdf format)

Top 100 Novels #71: Snopes [Erik Beck]

New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther

NO DOWN PAYMENT

USA (105 mi) 1957 ‘Scope

the passionate moviegoer: cinema obscura: Martin Ritt's "No Down ... Joe Baltake from The Passionate Moviegoer, November 16, 2008

Martin Ritt, champion of the social conscience, directed this tidy little 1957 expose of the queasy side of then-modern suburbia - a fine film that came and went without making much of an impression because of the double whammy of (1) being ahead of its time and (2) holding an all-too-intimidating mirror up to unsuspecting audiences who essentially looked away. No one wanted to see a soiled American Dream. Ritts' work here, written by the blacklisted Philip Yordan (fronted by a credited Ben Maddow), clearly anticipates the work of John Cheever.

Utilizing a young cast of at once attractive and talented newcomers/Fox contract players portraying four couples, Ritt's film seems to have been the inadvertent template for the silliness and rampant shallowness that pervade "Desperate Housewives," only Ritt's portrait is not cozy and funny but something more devastating. This is no facile soap opera. He uncovers an unease in his film's prefabricated housing development.

Joanne Woodward and Cameron Mitchell are teamed here as the blue-collar Boones; Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens are the clean-cut Martins, newcomers to the neighborhood; Sheree North and Tony Randall are the sophisticated Flaggs, and Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush the the rock-solid Kreitzers. Each character is finely delineated, particularly the men, with Randall's alchohlic contrasting with Hunter's educated goldenboy who, in turn, constrasts with Mitchell's rough-around-the-edges brute.

"No Down Payment," neglected for 50 years, is disturbing and at times corrosive - and not that far removed from the picture of America today. A nervy minor masterwork.

In Every Dream Home (A Nightmare) - Like Anna Karina's Sweater Filmbrain, January 12, 2006, also here: Filmbrain

One of the darkest portraits of American suburban life in the post-WWII boom of the 1950s is Martin Ritt's all-but-forgotten No Down Payment (1957). This near-masterpiece is one of the few films that dared to scratch beneath the veneer of the pristine, all-white housing developments that began to spring up all across America in the years following the war -- those private little communities unto themselves that maintained their own police force, businesses, and set of rules both written and unwritten. Rows of identical houses, situated so as to create an almost panopticon effect, thanks to the walls of windows and common back yards complete with doors in the fences separating houses. (Imagine Tati's Mon Oncle, just without the humor.) Privacy is limited, and everybody knows each other's business. On the outside, the families, like the houses themselves, appear identical but behind closed doors, dark secrets lurk.

The film also turns a critical eye on the then-new consumer culture - where everything was bought on credit and families found themselves rapidly becoming slaves to their mounting debt. (Early in the film, a gas station owner introduces himself to a new neighbor with, "Stop by the station. I'll give you a credit card.") Yet the no money down offer of the film's title isn't limited to cars, houses and furniture. Love, marriage, and trust are treated as mere commodities to be had on a try-and-buy basis, and many of the negotiations between spouses have a deal-like quality to them.

No Down Payment opens innocently enough with newlywed couple David and Jean Martin (Jeffrey Hunter & Patricia Owens) driving down a highway littered with billboards for housing developments, each with a promise of a new and better life. They settle on Sunrise Hills (A Better Place for Better Living!), and it's not long before they are invited to an impromptu barbecue party with their immediate neighbors. (An event that seems to occur nightly.) There we get to meet the trio of dysfunctional families:

· Herman and Betty Kreitzer (Pat Hingle & Barbara Rush) - The closest thing to normal. He runs a local furniture store, and she's a good Christian...that is until a Japanese family asks for her help in getting them admitted into the whites-only community.

· Troy & Leola Boone (Cameron Mitchell & an absolutely gorgeous Joanne Woodward) - White trash couple from Tennessee. He's a proud Jap-killing war hero who smacks his wife around and dreams of becoming chief of police in the community. Maintains a shrine to himself and his war heroics, and happy that he can eat steak every night. She's a bored young housewife with a questionable past who wants a baby.

· Jerry and Isabelle Flag (Tony Randall & Sheree North) - Jerry is the resident sleaze of the bunch. A used-car salesman who cheats his customers, cheats on his wife as often as possible, and has a severe drinking problem. ("I'm just a social drinker", he tells Isabelle as he's downing his second martini of the morning.) Jerry is like a Mamet character right out of Glengarry Glen Ross - a dreamer with countless get-rich schemes, but who is forever destined to sell second-rate crap to suckers. Randall, eternally identified with Felix Unger or the fop in a string of Rock Hudson - Doris Day films, is unbelievably magnificent here as the drunken letch.

Ritt plays quite a bit with our expectations. Many scenes begin with establishing shots of the community accompanied by musical cues right out of Leave it to Beaver. Yet usually within moments we are witnessing some uncomfortable or unpleasant confrontation. The whole effect is quite disconcerting, and seems to be indicative of Ritt's desire to subvert the domestic drama, so popular at the time. Blacklisted writer Ben Maddow's screenplay (fronted by Philip Yordan) fluctuates between sharp, stinging, rapid-fire dialog and eerie monologues that find the characters continually reminding and reassuring each other just how great life is in their little pre-fab paradise. At their regular gatherings the men proudly swap war stories, talk about job security and eating steak every night, while the wives remark at how similar they are to each other (sort of a precursor to The Stepford Wives). The world outside of their self-contained community is of little interest - 1957 was the year of forced integration and the beginning of the space race -- but such matters are not discussed in Sunrise Hills.

The arrival of the Martins into the community is the catalyst for many of the troubles that follow. As the only man who didn't see any action in the war, boyish David is viewed by the others with suspicion. (That he worked at Los Alamos on the bomb fails to impress the others.) They are jealous of his college degree, and his work as an engineer in automation doesn't do much to win them over. His wife Jean becomes an object of lust, and she must endure both Jerry's drunken groping and Troy's ever-increasing advances. But then again, she's the only woman in the community who proclaims that her man isn't just her husband, but someone she's actually in love with.

Many of the characters suffer from either repressed desire or a lack of fulfillment in their lives. The dream home isn't the solution to their problems, and the cracks in the facade grow larger until the film's final, devastating act that finds traces of civility wiped away. What begins with a drunken party where one character reveals too much ends with a rather nasty rape and a particularly gruesome death. Yet somehow, a happy(ish) ending emerges. (It is a Hollywood picture, after all.) It is quite shocking how the rape trauma is addressed, and how the focus is more on the husband's bruised ego than on the woman herself. Upon learning about the rape, his first reaction is to physically confront her attacker. When this fails (he's no match for the brute) he attempts to rationalize with his wife, who naturally no longer wishes to live next door to a rapist: "Violence comes into a lot of people's lives. You can get hit by a runaway truck. You can get caught in a fire, but that doesn't change you. You don't feel shamed by the fire, you just face it with the people who love you." Therapy, 50s style.

Yet even with its less-than-perfect ending, No Down Payment is still a major work of 1950s cinema that deserves greater recognition. Shot in Cinemascope (giving us a wider angle on its cramped spaces), No Down Payment is the antipode to Ozzie and Harriet - a booze and lust fueled excursion into capitalist ideology that gleefully shatters the illusion of the American Dream.

No Down Payment is not on DVD, though a beautiful letterbox print shows up occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel.

Martin Ritt's NO DOWN PAYMENT | Boiling Sand Doug Bonner, also seen here: Boiling Sand [Doug Bonner]

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

USA (115 mi) 1958 ‘Scope

The Long, Hot Summer Time Out London

A steamy, Freudian tale of family intrigue set in the deep South, based on a compilation of stories by William Faulkner. Welles is the tyrannical Varner, whose rejected weakling son (an excessively neurotic performance from Franciosa) seeks consolation in bed with his sexy wife (Remick). A suspected 'barn burner' and definite trouble-maker, Ben Quick (Newman) arrives in town, and is welcomed by Varner as a suitable heir to his empire. The sparks fly between Quick and Varner's schoolmistress daughter (Newman and Woodward together for the first time), but under her cold exterior beats a passionate heart, and predictably they are in each other's arms by the final shot. The ending is an unconvincing cop out, but it can't spoil the film's compulsive dramatic tension (or a marvellous comic cameo from Angela Lansbury as Welles' long-suffering mistress).

Self-Styled Siren

The June heat wave, and our temporary lack of a bedroom air conditioner, caused the Siren to wake up thinking of this movie.

Paul Newman is and probably will remain the definitive movie God of Sweat. Even Brando in his prime couldn't touch Newman. Opinions differ as to which film showcases Newman's glow the best. There's Hud, but he's playing a heavy. There's Sweet Bird of Youth, but despite Newman's having the best ab-exercising scene in Hollywood history that's really Geraldine Page's movie. There's Cool Hand Luke, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and he even glistens nicely in the endless, bombastic Exodus. I'm going to plump for this one, however.

From the opening scene Newman's special ability to shine is apparent, as he stands glowering while on impromptu trial for barn-burning. Off he goes, cast out of the town, and then you get the fabulous Alex North/Sammy Cahn theme song, crooned by Jimmie Rodgers. I can still sing parts of it: "The long, hot summer, seems to know what a flirt you are ..."

Allegedly this movie is based on The Hamlet and "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. Don't go reading those, however, thinking you will find anything remotely resembling this movie. It's more like someone cobbled together Tennessee Williams' first drafts, then threw in a dash of Oklahoma! and Picnic for good measure. Despite this weird pastiche of Southern, Western and Midwestern folkways, the script is very good indeed, full of dry humor and biting asides. The acting is pure 1950s High Method, except for Orson Welles, who steals everything but the wallpaper in a role that probably should have gone to Burl Ives.

I never fail get to a huge kick out of The Long, Hot Summer. Newman gets most of the best lines, such as when a potential lynch mob is approaching him and he says, almost plaintively, "Story of my life. Why don't nobody ever wanna talk to me peaceable?" The scenes with Joanne Woodward are full of sexual energy and incredibly romantic. The Cinemascope photography looks great, if you can see it letterboxed instead of the scan-and-pan travesties they usually show on American Movie Classics.

Despite the bizarrely happy ending, the film has a quality of sadness about it, perhaps because the countryside it shows us, before the hideous sprawl of strip malls and subdivisions took over, shrinks day by day.

DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson

Yet another overboiled soap opera from Jerry Wald, the producer of the gold mine Peyton Place, this all-star vehicle was concocted by folding a half-dozen Faulkner stories together. The result is reasonably well-written but still plays like watered-down Tennessee Williams. The efforts of a mostly-excellent cast bring the characters to life, and the real-life romance team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward bless the story with more than a little dignity. The verdict is, that for this kind of movie, The Long Hot Summer is not bad at all.

Ambitious, mysterious young drifter Ben Quick (Paul Newman) slips into Frenchman's Bend and directly into the lives of the family of local honcho Will Varner (Orson Welles) a bigger than life, domineering man with a King Lear complex. Practically being made a substitute son, Quick immediately earns the contempt of Will's real son Jody (Anthony Franciosa), who's not so dumb that he doesn't realize he's being pushed aside. Jody finds some compensation in the arms of his hot-blooded new wife Eula (Lee Remick). But Will, who is already carrying on with local floozie Minnie Littlejohn (Angela Lansbury) has plans for Ben Quick - to hook the young stud up with his virginal, schoolteacher daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward).

It's a hot summer in Mississippi, and you can bet that everyone who matters in Frenchman's Bend has but one idea on their minds - sex. In Picnic, William Holden's character tells a tall tale of being picked up by two women in a convertible looking for a good time. In Picnic, it's a characters' obvious self-serving fantasy, but The Long Hot Summer starts out in almost the same way, with borderline nympho Lee Remick half leaping into the back seat to be with highway bum Paul Newman.

Flexing his muscles and leading every conversation with the kind of vague sexual banter nobody gets away with in real life, Paul Newman is the dangerous stud stranger who prowls around the edges of Faulkner stories. Only here he's really a swell guy. Never mind that he takes advantage of his new boss's willingness to let him into his house like a fox into a chicken coop. Newman's Ben Quick mercilessly fleeces son Jody, but shows uncommon ethics when returning $60 to a sharecropper's wife cheated in a horse auction swindle.

The Long Hot Summer lumbers from setpiece to setpiece - the horse auction, the hunt for pirate gold, using Ben Quick's undeserved reputation as a Barn-Burner for its main tension device. Naturally, jealousy conspires to again frame the innocent Quick for another near-tragedy.

All of the characters are written and mostly played very obviously. Richard Anderson is completely colorless as Clara's gentleman beau. Lee Remick is very good as a brainless, sex-obsessed bride, but neither she nor Anthony Franciosa's dumb-cluck son go far beyond the words of the text. He's made to come off like the patsy in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Angela Lansbury received praise for her portrayal of the aging town slut with an eye for Varner Senior - a role similar to Marlene Dietrich's more honest Madam in Touch of Evil the same year. It's a change of pace for Lansbury, perhaps leading to her string of unpleasant or murderous females in the 60s.

Orson Welles is the prize turkey in this show. Given a bombastic, domineering Southern Colonel role to play, Welles turns up the volume, but wouldn't fool a ten-year-old. With a grotesque fake nose (usually the sign that Welles really wants to hide himself in the role) and a bizarre makeup concept that looks like someone threw a fistful of cinnamon in his face, Welles snarls and plots and makes impure suggestions to everyone around him. Just beginning to lose control of his weight, Welles slams his character around town in a jeep. He's supposed to be the rich, intimidating string-puller feared and respected by all, but he comes off as a phony Foghorn Leghorn imitation. The various hicks and rubes that comprise the population of Frenchman's Bend have to be made exceedingly stupid in order for Varner's character to work.

The script requires Welles' Varner character to practically pimp his bookworm daugher Clara off on the new man in town, and he stomps around demanding to know if she's made up her mind or not about which beau she's to marry. Welles is so intrusive, his next step would be to check Clara's underwear when she comes home at night (the movie feels that crude). Then for a conclusion, the script has Will Varner character perform a sentimental about-face, happily accepting a son who's just tried to kill him and fix the blame on another. To do this, Welles has to run around like Bozo the Clown for three minutes, spoutin' and a-fumin'. It isn't pretty. A pro like Edward Arnold (Come and Get It) could have made most of this show work, but not the crazy ending.

The saving grace of The Long Hot Summer is Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Newman brings class and some honest directness to the itinerant hunk, Ben Quick, and for at least this film drops most of his faux-James Dean posturing. This Quick knows exactly who he is and what he's up to, and he zeroes in on spinster Clara precisely because his good taste naturally leads him to quality. Joanne Woodward has to find a way to let Clara keep some dignity, which is not an easy task under the circumstances. This woman is abused by just about everyone in sight, particularly her father. Dimestore psychology will decree that she be attracted to a powerful man similar to Daddy, but we can tell that the attraction between Newman and Woodward is real ... and it works. Woodward's repeated turndowns are sincere, but they never fully slam the door; Newman's sleazy come-ons are almost flattering, and he's quick to back them up with real feeling. It just shows ya how some honest acting can prop up an obvious, unconvincing story, and bring it to life.

The Long Hot Summer ends with a double marriage on the way, a dimwit son welcomed back into the fold, and everybody in the Varner household happily in the sack with the right mate. It's a bizarre thing to be celebrating at the fadeout, and, if this were a book, certainly nothing William Faulkner would have put his name on. As a downgrade sexy 50s soap, it's not bad at all, mostly through the graces of its young romantic stars.

Fox's DVD of The Long Hot Summer is a glossy enhanced presentation that restores proper CinemaScope dimensions and stereo sound to this 1958 hit. An AMC Backstory piece on the film stays safely respectful of this easy-to-criticize potboiler, but puts across a lot of background info that's prudent to print, such as director Martin Ritt's rescue from the blacklist. Those interviewed (Newman, Woodward, Lansbury) say safe things about each other, with Welles made the easy target. Also included is a newsreel of the Louisiana Premiere (even though the film takes place in the state next door) and a trailer that appropriately makes the sex content seem even hotter.

Sarah Marshall, the Varner neighbor who gets half a scene with Woodward and featured billing, is actually an English actress, the daughter of Herbert Marshall and Edna Best. The same year, she played the femme lead in Roger Corman's Teenage Cave Man. I'm beginning to believe that the six degrees of separation in Hollywood should really center around Roger Corman.

In Which It's Getting Awful Long and Hot Out Here Swinging Dicks & Easy Tricks, by Eleanor Morrow from This Recording, December 18, 2009

THE LONG, HOT SUMMER + HUD - DVDs - FILM FREAK CENTRAL Travis Mackenzie Hoover

A Movie A Week: THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (1958) Will you shut up? I'm ... Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool News

CriticPlanet.org [Justin Smith] also seen here: Flickfeast [Justin Smith]

Apollo Movie Guide [Jamie Gillies]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Dindrane

DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger

dOc DVD Review: The Long, Hot Summer (1958) David Krauss

The Film Pilgrim [Vicki Isitt]

Movie Talk [Heidi Rice]

Film 365 (DVD)

The Long, Hot Summer Barrie Maxwell from The Digital Bits

DVDTalk - Paul Newman Tribute Coll. [Paul Mavis]

DVD Verdict- Paul Newman: The Tribute Collection [Clark Douglas]

TV Guide Review

“THE BLACK ORCHID” critique by Katherine Pulzone

Movie Review - - Article 3 -- No Title; The Screen: 'The Long, Hot ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

THE BLACK ORCHID

USA (94 mi) 1958

The Black Orchid Time Out London

A seriously bad tearjerker. Loren's life is in ruins - her gangster husband has died, her son has become James Dean - until she meets up with nice widower Mr Quinn, who shows her his farm and daughter. Cue for the daughter to go round the twist at the thought of Loren as a stepmother. One in a long line of clinkers (except for the masterly Hud) from Ritt, and a first script by composer Joseph Stefano, who got his act together with his next picture, which was Psycho.

The Black Orchid - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco from Turner Classic Movies

According to Warren G. Harris in his biography, Sophia Loren, The Black Orchid (1958), "had a curious history. Joseph Stefano, a young entertainer and composer from South Philadelphia, wrote the script just to prove that he could do better than most of the junk he saw on television. Stefano's semi-autobiographical story of an Italian immigrant who is forced to support herself and her young son when her gangster husband is killed, was submitted to various TV producers, but had no luck until it landed at Paramount's New York story department, which noticed similarities to Marty [1955], an Oscar®-winning film that had originated as a teleplay. Paramount wanted to turn The Black Orchid directly into a movie with Anna Magnani, but she had other commitments and it got passed on to [producer Carlo] Ponti for consideration." Ponti saw this as a vehicle for his wife, Sophia Loren.

Because Anthony Quinn was under contract to Paramount, Ponti was forced to hire him for the role of Frank Valente, the widower that becomes romantically involved with Loren's character. By her own admission, Loren acknowledged that she and Quinn did not have great screen chemistry together and had not been successful in the 1954 Italian film Attila the Hun (Loren later said it contained her most unpleasant moment on film – a scene where Quinn kissed her while eating a lamb chop). Ponti had marginally more control in his choice of director. Martin Ritt, also under contract to Paramount, got the job after Ponti screened films by several of Paramount's directors and felt that Ritt's style in films such as Edge of the City (1957) was close to the Italian neo-realists. Ritt could also shoot a film quickly and under budget, another plus in Ponti's eyes.

Ritt proved his resourcefulness by shooting the funeral and wedding scenes on the same day at St. Paul's Catholic Church in Westwood (a suburb of Los Angeles). It was a fast shoot, with production on The Black Orchid starting on February 3rd and ending in late March 1958. Most of the film was shot on the Paramount back lot's New York set, with the juvenile work farm scenes shot at an actual work farm near Los Angeles.

Ritt proved to be the director to subdue Quinn and Loren's tendencies to over-act. As Harris wrote, "Ritt fought to keep them under control to save their scenes together form deteriorating into unintentional comedy. In their only moment of passionate lovemaking, Ritt demanded seven takes before he was satisfied, reducing the sizzle a few degrees each time. "Finally, we were playing the scene so small it didn't seem to us to be like acting anymore," Quinn remembered, "But when we saw it in the rushes, it was as powerful as hell."

The Black Orchid opened in Washington D.C. on February 1, 1959. American reviewers liked the film but hated the script and what they considered racist portrayals of Italian-Americans. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times found fault with Loren's performance, writing in his February 13, 1959 review, "by far the more difficult to accept as a reasonable characterization, on the basis of how she appears, is the widow, played by Sophia Loren. Supposed to be the relict of a slain gangster, she blames herself for his fatal career and is nurturing her heavy guilt complexes with anxiety over a wayward son. This is a plausible person - or would be, if she were cut along the lines of some of the highly emotional women played by Anna Magnani. But put forth by cool and crisp Miss Loren in a stolid and dignified way, she is a psychological aberration and a curious fancy for the likes of Mr. Quinn. With her plainly slant-eyed hauteur and her Simonetta chic, she is not what you'd call a quite convincing representative of the immigrant school."

Ironically, the Venice Film Festival awarded Loren their Best Actress award for The Black Orchid. Her journey to Italy was potentially dangerous. Loren and Ponti had been married in Mexico in September 1957, a time when Ponti's divorce from his first wife had not been recognized by Italian officials and he was considered a bigamist. The charge would have landed them in jail if they'd set foot in Italy. Ponti believed that Loren alone would not be in any danger. As she later remembered, "Should we go or shouldn't we? In the end, we decided it would be too much like slapping our country in the face if we were to turn up there together."

Loren was greeted with a grand reception (arranged and paid for by Paramount), accepted the award graciously, and immediately boarded a plane back to Nice, France, where Ponti was waiting. "Receiving the award meant nothing to me until I could share it with Carlo. He was the one who had created me", she said. The Black Orchid may not have been what Ponti and Loren originally envisioned but their marriage was much more successful. They remained together until Ponti's death at the age of 94 on January 10, 2007.

The Black Orchid : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Glenn Erickson

dOc DVD Review: The Black Orchid (1959) Joel Cunningham

New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

USA (110 mi) 1958 ‘Scope

anime|otaku » Blog Archive » REVIEW: The Sound and the Fury (1959) January 13, 2009

The Sound and the Fury, written by William Faulkner, is universally acclaimed to be one of the best novels ever written by an American. It’s also recognized to be one of the best books of the twentieth century. Its intricate construction and its well-written streams of consciousness underlie a tragedy so total and so complete because the Compson members are unable and unwilling to love one another. From the man-child Benjy, to the selfish Jason, the family is torn from within because they remain inflexible in the face of cataclysmic change. Each of the featured characters end up tragic in their own unique way; it is arguable, however, that the least sympathetic tragedy among them was Jason’s. His tragedy, compared to Quentin’s and Benjy’s isn’t a moral tragedy: the novel itself suggests that Jason is extremely amoral and immoral, that he cannot love beyond a miserly notion for money. His tragedy was the most physical as compared to the torturous mental disintegration of Quentin and Benjy’s permanent entrapment into the mind of a retard. His was a tragedy he himself could rectify. Ultimately, his tragedy was that of an utter resistance to empathy and positive change.

The novel is one of the few films recognized everywhere to be unfilmable: what is there to capture in streams of thoughts? The first three chapters were narrative explorations to the thought processes of different members of the Compson family. How would that be filmable?

Director Martin Ritt’s solution, however, was to film what happened in the novel. The screenplay was also loosely based from the book, and with good reason. Aside from the difficulty of putting into film thoughts, The Sound and the Fury is a visceral and a visual portrayal of a bleak tragedy due to love’s absence: the Compson family is trapped in the past, and not one of the rose up to the occasion, save for the servant Dilsey (who ‘seed the beginning and the end’). Instead of an ineluctable tragedy, however, the scriptwriters opted to write a tragedy with a glimpse of hope.

For me, it made all the difference. I believe in the disjunction of novel from its corresponding film: being anally truthful to the novel would have made the movie boring, and quite unwatchable. There remains to be tragedy: in the end, Benjy is sent to a mental institution, and the Compson house remains to be destroyed slowly. But unlike the novel, Jason’s selfishness and miserliness has a purpose. His austerity aims to hold together the family that was falling apart. He may have been strict; he may have been abhorrently frugal; but with his frugality and his austerity he also showed to Quentin that she was also loved, in his own distant manner. This simple change of outlook and personality of Jason (decently played by Yul Brynner) held the movie together. While it could be edited in places and some scenes cut (the Dilsey moment near the end of the film was quite extraneous), despite everything, there was something to look forward to, and because of that the movie was a good rendition of the novel.

It’s not the best film ever; it’s not even a great film. But I thought its effort of translating the extremely difficult novel of Faulkner to the big screen was wonderful, and it was effort well spent. With that, I give an overall rating of 8/10 for the movie.

the passionate moviegoer: cinema obscura: Martin Ritt's "The Sound ... Joe Baltake from The Passionate Moviegoer, March 9, 2009

The Sound and the Fury by Katie Richardson « Obscure Classics March 12, 2009

The Sound and the Fury (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Movie Review - The Sound and the Fury - Screen: Down South; Sound ... Bosley Crowther

5 BRANDED WOMEN

USA (115 mi) 1960

User reviews from imdb Author: N.L. from Philly

From the same director who brought us "Norma Rae" this classic World War II "resistance band fights guerilla warfare against Nazis in the snowywoods" has an interesting twist: they're all women and decked out in leather bomber jackets, crew cuts and machine guns.

Jeanne Moreau, Barbara Bel Geddes, Silvana Mangano, and Vera Miles - all shaved, humiliated, and thrown out of their peasant villages for sleeping with the enemy - now have taken arms against that enemy, but the "real" resistance doesn't want them. So these women must fight the men who are against them AND the men who are supposedly on their side, as well as each other.

Melodrama, to be sure, but different enough and with a fascinating sub-text, that it has become a "guilty" pleasure.

Movie Review - Five Branded Women - Screen: Friends of Nazis:'Five ... Howard Thompson from The New York Times

PARIS BLUES B+ 90

USA (98 mi) 1961

An interesting match up here featuring Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as Ram and Eddie, two rising star American jazz musicians trying to make it in Paris, joined by two vacationing American girls in town for a couple weeks, Joanne Woodward as Lillian and Diahann Carroll, looking positively stunning as Connie, also starring trumpeter non pareil Louis Armstrong with a musical soundtrack written by none other than Duke Ellington and the uncredited Billy Strayhorn, including passages of “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” along with a wild jazz session called “Battle Royal” near the end with Armstrong. Wow—that sounds pretty much like royalty, especially considering the timing of this film, made between some of Newman’s greatest roles, THE HUSTLER (1961), SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), and HUD (1963), while for Poitier, this film came between A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1961) and LILLIES OF THE FIELD (1963). Add to this Italian actor turned French citizen Serge Reggiani, from Max Ophuls’ LA RONDE (1950) and Jacques Becker’s CASQUE D’OR (1952) as a drug-addicted guitar player. Despite the all star lineup, the film is weakened by a somewhat predictable script about Poitier escaping from America’s racism (never developed) and Newman’s desire to become a “serious” composer (never in doubt when we hear his jazz compositions, but there are serious doubts if he wishes to make a leap to classical, which is not made clear in the film, and frankly is not really inherent in the film’s character, where “Paris Blues,” the titled piece featured in the film that he spends all night working on is a jazz composition), where even though told in a realist style coinciding with the outbreak of the French New Wave, the frenetic energy exhibited in the musical nightclub sequences puts any storyline to shame considering the jazz authenticity on display throughout. It’s impossible not to be a bit overwhelmed by all the talent here which is kept to a cool simmer, with plenty of picture postcard shots of Paris and an outstanding musical soundtrack that provides what the film was really looking for, the love of jazz, where the somewhat contrived romance angle is purely secondary. Newman and Poitier play trombone and saxophone, actually performed by Murray McEachern and Paul Gonsalves from Duke’s orchestra, dubbed afterwards in American studios.

A rare treat here is also watching Newman and Woodward, who was pregnant here, married just three years earlier, working together in this their 4^th of ten films together, where they display a rare intimacy, much like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands working together, even though Newman plays something of a heel, a two-timing, egocentric musician wrapped up in his music and his career, where he always seems to have a chip on his shoulder. In a composite of several of their scenes together Paris Blues (1961) - Paul Newman - Joanne Woodward YouTube (10:30), including one of the scenes of the film, her “You’re never gonna forget me” speech coming just before the 9-minute mark of the clip, where she displays that irresistible smalltown charm where he lets down his guard momentarily before reasserting his self-centered demeanor. Poitier and Carroll are also wonderful together YouTube - Clips from Paris Blues YouTube (2:22), both in their prime, where Carroll never looked so dazzlingly beautiful, while also offering a piece of her mind as well, claiming it’s time for Eddie to stop running away and come back home. Both were romantically linked during the filming of PORGY AND BESS (1959), but because both were married with families, they tried to stay apart, brought together as onscreen lovers again, which was an excruciating ordeal for Poitier, whose wife and family were present for part of the shooting. Playing music until dawn, the two couples walk during the day through the streets of Paris, see the sights, take a river cruise, and fall in love in the City of Lights, where the picturesque backdrop couldn’t be more appealing, beautifully shot in Black and White by Christian Matras. One of the interesting aspects is how they met by chance, as Ram initially meets Connie on their incoming train. In something of a daring display of interracial romance, he’s actually more attracted to her, as expressed after their nightclub set when he ignores Lillian in favor of Connie. Coming from America, Connie’s not used to this display of racial openness and is taken aback, even as she sees couples embraced on the streets everywhere throughout the city, and the nightclub has several mixed couples as well. Given the time period, well before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two years before the killing of Medgar Evers, this is a major social statement in an American film, even if it is only suggested and remains undeveloped.

Ram is also carrying on an affair with the nightclub owner, Barbara Laage as Marie Séoul, who also interestingly sings a musical number. But Ram is the star of the show, as seen taking the lead solo on “Mood Indigo” Paris Blues "Mood Indigo" (1961) (3:30), where the subterranean nightclub atmosphere is filled with bohemian culture, almost always a packed house. The sequence of the film is the extraordinary appearance of Louis Armstrong, where the mood turns electric PARIS BLUES (1961) - Battle Royal (6:02), jamming with each member of the band. You can’t write this kind of exhilaration, it just happens, creating an explosive feeling within the club itself, a magical moment where everything is right in the world, exactly how Eddie feels when he realizes his true feelings for Connie. There’s an unfortunate storyline thread about birds, where we see them on rooftops, and in cages for sale on the streets, an all too obvious metaphor for the free spirit of a jazz musician, where being caged, unable to fly is paramount to death. This segment seems more appropriate for Ram, as he’s the one attempting to break through a barrier of free spirited jazz improvisation to composition, not at all an easy transformation, where Lillian’s affections feel like a cage for him, a stifling suffocation just when he needs to learn the art of writing arrangements. The wall to wall jazz music is simply extraordinary, as are the two couples in a rare display of realism instead of an overblown Hollywood romance. John Cassavetes was up for the Paul Newman role and was familiar with the script, attempting to match the music and spontaneity of this film with one of his own, released at the same time, Too Late Blues (1961), where Cassavetes wanted to throw in 17 new jazz pieces into his film, shot entirely in New York City’s Greenwich Village jazz scene, but the studio blocked his requests, forcing him instead to shoot almost entirely inside the studio. That film feels more reserved and suffocating, while Ritt’s film lives and breathes the streets of Paris, featuring the music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, where the feverish intensity of live music in jammed nightclubs couldn’t be more exhilarating.

The participation of Ellington (behind the camera) and Louis Armstrong onscreen is itself significant. The film effectively begins when Wild Man Moore (Armstrong, one of the few times in a film where he’s not playing himself), arrives in Paris, and it ends as he departs. Cheering throngs greet him at the train station when he arrives, where a band plays for him, leading Armstrong to join in an impromptu jazz moment. Ellington’s first musical soundtrack was Otto Preminger’s ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959), where only part of what Ellington and Strayhorn wrote together was actually used in the film, but he had the most control over the musical soundtrack in this film, where what one hears onscreen is exactly as they intended. Despite the overlapping careers of such great jazz legends as Duke Ellington (1899 – 1974) and Louis Armstrong (1901 – 1971), the two rarely encountered one another, but they stayed in the same hotel during the shooting of the film, discussing the possibilities of working together. They met again upon returning back home and arranged an RCA recording session on April 3 and 4^th, 1961, leading to an album released as The Great Summit, where the band was Armstrong’s, but the music was written by Ellington. A list of some of the great Ellington musicians heard in the film: pianist/composer Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, trumpeter Louis Armstrong and Clark Terry, saxophonist Oliver Nelson and Paul Gonsalves, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, drummer Max Roach, Sonny Greer, and Philly Joe Jones, trombonists Juan Tizol, Britt Woodman, Billy Byers, and Murray McEachern. Paris pianist Aaron Bridgers, the house pianist of the Mars Club, a tiny cabaret with an openly gay clientele, which may have been a model for the club in the film, appears as the pianist in Ram Bowen’s band, though the only piano heard on the soundtrack is either Ellington or Strayhorn. Strayhorn stuck around Paris and recorded an album with a string quartet of Parisian musicians, one of the few albums released under his own name, entitled The Peaceful Side. Strayhorn actually arrived in Paris a month before Ellington, directing the music in earlier rehearsals, largely for the benefit of the actors who play musicians, where the musical scores used in the film are in the Smithsonian Institute.

The film is based on a 1957 novel by Harold Flender, following the exploits of a black American saxophonist Eddie Jones in Paris who plays Dixieland or mainstream jazz, happy just to be working, appreciating the tolerance for blacks in Paris. He meets a black American schoolteacher on vacation, Connie, and falls in love. The novel introduces trumpet player Wild Man Moore, already based upon Louis Armstrong, who offers him a job that he at first refuses, but when he realizes he’ll be returning to America with Connie, he can hook up with the band in the States. The Ram Bowen character, the name a variation on the French poet Rimbaud, was originally based upon Benny, a pianist in Eddie’s band, who hooks up with Connie’s roommate Lillian so Eddie and his girl can be alone together. Benny shows Lillian the wilder side of Paris, including an all night nudist swimming club, which she finds teasingly provocative, but also crudely offensive, returning home alone. Lulla Adler adapted the novel, while Jack Sher, Irene Kamp, and Walter Bernstein provided a screenplay for the film, changing the leader of the band to Ram, including his desire to become a serious composer, receiving arrangement assistance from Eddie. Ellington was not aware of these script changes from the novel when he started working, believing the romantic couples would be Paul Newman and Diahann Carroll, and Sidney Poitier with Joanne Woodward, where the opening scene seems to be preparing the audience for a range of relationships from gay to interracial, a milieu intimately understood by the openly gay Strayhorn. In a similar scene twenty minutes into the film, a pan of the club audience couldn’t be more different, as gone are the same sex and mixed race couples, as by then the United Artist Studio executives lost their nerve and decided to drop the interracial angle. It wasn’t until 1967, well after Sidney Poitier was an established star, that Hollywood romantically linked a major black star with a white girlfriend in Stanley Kramer’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER. The mix of black and white in PARIS BLUES may as well be jazz and classical, as in a late scene with a musical publisher (arranged by Wild Man Moore), Ram’s music is not accepted as “serious” enough, suggesting it needs conservatory training, a typical and somewhat condescending view of those in the (white European) classical music community, which interestingly suggests (American black) jazz is not a “serious” art form, even if written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, a question they attempted to overcome their entire lives, though both Armstrong and Ellington’s entire discography would refute such a claim.

Paris Blues Block Cinema

One of famed director Martin Ritt’s (Hud, Sounder, Norma Rae) earliest films, Paris Blues stars Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as American jazz musicians living in Paris. After falling for two young women from the States on vacation (Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll), they must decide whether to leave the broader cultural acceptance of jazz, and the more tolerant racial attitude in France, or return to the US with their new loves. Paris Blues features a politically progressive story, a naturalist visual style, and powerful performances—signature elements for Ritt that continued throughout his career. Paris Blues also features a cameo by the great Louis Armstrong.

User comments from imdb Author: cappy-9 from new york city

Paris of the Beat-era is the city of blues and jazz, the city of romance and love. This is cool, and "Paris Blues" is real cool (great jazz, deep feeling, sparkling romance) but it is more than cool--it hurts. In the end, an ending tougher than Thelma and Louise (and maybe more feminist) and more genuinely surprising than the revelation in "The Crying Game," all the movie's stellar music and romance is thrown into question by Joanne Woodward's (Lilian's) "small present" to rising jazz star, Ram Bowen (Paul Newman). Music or Love? Why should one have to choose between them? But in this hidden gem of a film Ram Bowen seems to have to choose and the result is scary, sad, and tragic in a kind of secret way (men are usually shown to just throw this kind of loss off). But unlike the unsatisfactory tragic end of say "West Side Story," this ending is both strong and very adult.

Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Paris Blues (1961)

The jazz is hot, the romance is not so hot in Martin Ritt's ("Edge of the City"/"Norma Rae") film about American expatriates Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) playing in the same jazz band in Paris (filmed in Paris). The middlebrow drama never has a sense of where it's going and what it wants to say about music, racism or love relationships. Poitier nailed it on the head when he said "All wrong from beginning to end."

Ram Bowen is a trombone player and Eddie Cook a tenor man in the same jazz band. Ram is studying music and aspiring to be a "serious" composer, while Eddie escapes American racism to be in a city that respects the love he has for his kind of music. American tourists Connie Lampson (Diahann Carroll) and Lillian Corning (Joanne Woodward) are on a two-week holiday in Paris and begin a casual romantic fling with the two jazz men that turns more serious as the days go by. It becomes a question if Ram will leave his music to return home to be with Lillian and will Eddie also return home because his love for Connie is so great.

On the plus side there's the wonderful score by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong's amazing rendition of "Battle Royal." Otherwise it's dross. The film never gets around to probing America's racism that caused many blacks to seek shelter in the much friendlier confines of the City of Lights, as it instead focuses around the white Newman character's uninteresting problem if he's good enough to be a serious musician and still cut it as a jazz man. I got the blues after seeing this turkey.

Paris Blues - TCM.com Rob Nixon, also seen here: Paris Blues (1961) - Articles - TCM.com

By his own admission, Sidney Poitier was "miserable" during the filming of Paris Blues (1961). Yet it had nothing to do with the picture or the location; Poitier said he admired Paul Newman and enjoyed working with him tremendously. As a matter of fact, as filming drew to a close, they talked about staying on in Paris and working from there, a dream that never came true despite the actors' love for the city. So, Poitier's "miserable" state was due to some personal problems at the time. He and Diahann Carroll had met and fallen in love during the filming of Porgy and Bess (1959). Because they were both married with children, they tried to stay away from each other. Then suddenly, they found themselves in one of the world’s most romantic cities, playing lovers. The situation was unbearable for Poitier, who had his wife and family staying with him for part of the shooting. The two came close to ending their marriages in order to be together, but the pressures were too great. It was clear by the time the picture was in the can that their relationship could not continue.

On-screen in Paris Blues, their romantic fate worked out a lot better. The plot featured Poitier and Newman as American expatriate musicians living in Paris after World War II. Newman is studying classical music while earning a living playing in a jazz club owned by a woman with whom he is having a casual affair. Poitier enjoys life abroad as an escape from the racial hatred he experienced at home in America. They meet two young vacationing schoolteachers, Carroll and Joanne Woodward, and pair off. Carroll eventually convinces Poitier it's better to return to the States and face bigotry head-on rather than hiding out in a foreign country. They leave together with plans to marry. Newman gives up his bachelor status and casts his fate with Woodward after it becomes clear his classical music career is going nowhere. But at the last minute, he meets her at the train station to tell her he won╒t be going back to America with her after all. In real life, the situation was completely reversed. The couple had been married since 1958, the same year they co-starred in two movies, The Long Hot Summer and Rally Round the Flag, Boys!. Prior to Paris Blues, they also appeared together in From the Terrace (1960). They continue to have one of the longest personal and professional partnerships in Hollywood, and have acted together in seven other films. Newman also directed his wife in four feature films and one made-for-TV movie. This was the pair's second film under Martin Ritt's direction. Newman would go on to make four more films with Ritt, including his Oscar-nominated performance in Hud (1963). Woodward worked with Ritt on three previous pictures, including the screen adaptation of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1959).

Poitier had also worked with Ritt before, on the director's first feature, Edge of the City (1957), a movie dealing with tough racial themes. It was the experience of working with the liberal, socially conscious Ritt and the examination of race in that film that likely attracted Poitier to this project, in spite of his concerns about working with Carroll again. Poitier's beautiful co-star almost didn't take it for the same reason, but Carroll couldn't resist the script because although it was a contemporary love story, "it showed some social and political awareness and presented black people as normal human beings." Largely because of Poitier's breakthrough in the 1950s, black actors were beginning to be seen as viable stars for feature films (although some critics carped that with her appearance in this picture, Carroll was transformed into a boring, middle-class white version of a modern black woman). Still, things weren't entirely equal. In the Harold Flender novel on which the movie is based, the story centered only on a black jazz musician who falls for a black schoolteacher vacationing in Paris. For the screen, producers hedged their bets by adding a white couple and casting the very popular Newman and Woodward team. Some viewers have suggested that the film might have been an even stronger examination of race (and a more interesting love story) if the black man had paired off with the white woman and vice versa. There was even a rumor that that was the intention going into production but it's never been confirmed.

In spite of Paris Blues' star power and racial themes, it was not a success on its release and critics found more merit in the music featured in the film. Duke Ellington was commissioned to write the score, which won an Oscar nomination for Best Scoring of a Motion Picture. At least one biography of Ellington claims he went to Paris to work on it with longtime friend and collaborator Billy Strayhorn, but the composer of "Lush Life" and "Take the A Train" is not credited on the final film. Also singled out for praise was Louis Armstrong who plays a musician named Wild Man Moore, one of the few times in his film career (of more than 30 movies) that he did not play himself.

DVD Times - Paris Blues Clydefro Jones

Paris Blues: Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Music, by Krin Gabbard from Jazz Studies Online (pdf format)

Melissa Anderson on Paris Blues - artforum.com / film Hip to Be Square, July 28, 2014

Watch Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll Fall In Love In 'Paris Blues ... Sergio from indieWIRE

allmovie ((( Paris Blues > Overview ))) Michael Costello

Paris Blues / Martin Ritt / 1961 FilmsdeFrance

Paris Blues BAM Theater

filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]

Chicago Reader Pat Graham

Paris Blues Review TV Guide

DVDTalk - Paul Newman Tribute Coll. [Paul Mavis]

FILM; Jazz on Screen: The Sparks Are Eclectic Matt Zoller Seitz from The New York Times, April 13, 2008

Paris Blues - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia music soundtrack

Paris Blues | American Journalism Review Deborah Baldwin, free association essay on being an American in Paris, May 1995

YouTube - Clips from Paris Blues on YouTube (2:22)

Paris Blues "Mood Indigo" (1961) (3:30)

Paris Blues (1961) - Paul Newman - Joanne Woodward composite of several of their scenes together (10:30)

PARIS BLUES (1961) - Battle Royal Louis Armstrong (6:02)

HEMINGWAY’S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN

USA (145 mi) 1962 ‘Scope

19-year-old Nick Adams (Richard Beymer), bursting at the seams to leave the seemingly idyllic but in reality complicated, frustrated life he leads in the wilds of Michigan, suddenly realizes one day that none of his usual activities, like hunting with his loving, timid father, Dr. Adams (Arthur Kennedy), or picnicking with his best girl, Carolyn (Diane Baker), brings him any happiness. It's time to get away from home, away especially from his religiously zealous mother (Jessica Tandy), who cows her un-ambitious husband and treats her grown son as if he's still a boy. Leaving home without telling anyone, Nick soon discovers the perils that await an inexperienced boy lighting out on his own. He comes afoul of a vicious brakeman (Edward Binns) when he hops a train; he befriends a dangerous punch-drunk fighter (Paul Newman); he sees the effects of drugs and alcohol on a P.R. man (Dan Dailey) who can't "slide," he joins the Italian Army during WWI, falls in love, and returns home a changed man, ready to write about his experiences.

As quiet and thoughtful as his previous Newman picture The Long, Hot Summer was boisterous and crass, director Martin Ritt's Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man was unfairly maligned when it premiered back in 1962, with blame apportioned to not only the cobbled-together script of Hemmingway's Nick Adams short stories, but also to lead Richard Beymer, singled out as a particularly unconvincing evocation of the literary Adams. Fortunately, time has been a lot kinder to Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. Now removed from the context of premiering just a year after Hemingway's suicide, it doesn't have to "live up" to the actual works of the almost-mythical writer (which the movie shouldn't have had to do back then, either). It can exist on its own, and be judged against similar big-budget, all-star dramas from that in-between time in Hollywood history where the studio system was on its last legs. Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man is far from a perfect film. If anything, it's too short at its present running time (the exact opposite of much 1962 criticism of the picture), with some of the film's "guest star" sequences being entirely too short to have much of an impact (poor Diane Baker suffers the most from this cutting, but Kennedy - brilliant as always - and other good actors like Fred Clark, Dan Dailey, Juano Hernandez, and Ricardo Montalban just get revved up before they're yanked out of sight). I haven't read the Nick Adams stories since college, but I didn't see anything egregious in this adaptation of ten of those stories by Hemingway (indeed, Hemingway was consulted throughout preproduction on this film, with the script being penned by his friend and unofficial adapter for television, A.E. Hotchner). There's a spareness to the dialogue that resembles Hemingway, and if director Martin Ritt can't find equivalent visuals to channel the author's symbolism, he does make Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man look good (through the expert lensing of cinematographer Lee Garmes, on location in Wisconsin and Italy) and sound good (Franz Waxman delivers another beautifully-wrought soundtrack, similar to the quieter passages in his Peyton Place score). Produced by Peyton Place's Jerry Wald (he would die just a week before Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man premiered), the film has the professional gloss of a Wald picture, but it's relatively restrained and contemplative in comparison to some of Wald's more over-heated CinemaScope melodramas. And that introspective feel created by the soft, evocative lighting (the early scenes of Wisconsin-as-Michigan in autumn are stunningly beautiful) and the reserved dramatics, is further enhanced by Beymer in the lead role. He may not be entirely successful at getting across Nick's youthful naiveté at the beginning of the film, but he's quite good portraying the "changed" Nick towards the end, particularly in his final scene with Tandy, where he rejects her for the final time. As for Newman - since this film is included in this set on the basis of his extended guest shot here - he's nothing short of miraculous in the part of "The Battler." Having played the role several years before in a live TV production, Newman, complete with a rather convincing make-up job (oddly, he looks just like George Segal when he turns his head in close-up that first time...), is scarily in-tune with the addled boxer's fuzzy thinking, creating at the same time a sense of menace in, and pity for, the character in a manner wholly unlike anything Newman had done before in the movies. It's one of the single best bits of acting he ever did during his film career, and, despite the shortness of his screen time here, worthy of being included in this box set.

DVD Savant Review: Hemingway Classics Collection Glenn Erickson

DVD Verdict- Paul Newman: The Tribute Collection [Clark Douglas]

Baltimore City Paper (Lee Gardner) review

Movie Review - Ernest Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

HUD A 97

USA (112 mi) 1963 ‘Scope

This world is so full of crap, a man's gonna get into it sooner or later whether he's careful or not. —Hud (Paul Newman)

A moralistic western about an aging cattle rancher (Melvyn Douglas) and his good-for-nothing son (Paul Newman), with bleak overtones about the careless indifference for the incoming future, distinguished by career-defining performances, where Newman is absolutely brilliant as Hud, the angel who has fallen from grace and leaves behind a dark trail of self-centered contempt for others to wallow in. Patricia Neal, winning an Academy Award as Best Actress, making much more of the role than was written, is a housekeeper who fills dual roles as the absent mother, respectful and affectionate with widower Douglas and his parentless grandson, while also personifying a sassy seductive temptress in Hud’s eyes. Beautifully shot on ‘Scope in black & white by cinematographer James Wong Howe, where the most exceptional scenes of the film were shot on location, some outdoors at night, where the incandescent fireflies are each perfectly illuminated as they fly through the air during some of the more intimate conversations, but also over the opening credits, where long shots of a lone vehicle traveling across an empty expanse of a horizon were duplicated by David Lynch in THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999). The spare music by Elmer Bernstein also perfectly matches the downbeat mood of the film. Other than the terrific performances, where Douglas (Best Supporting) and Neal won Oscars, while Newman was also nominated, and was robbed, the award going to Sidney Poitier for his upbeat performance in LILIES OF THE FIELD (1963), what immediately stands out is the thematic resemblance to SHANE (1953), including the use of the same small kid from that film who yells out his name at the end, Brandon De Wilde, now grown up to a 17-year old idolizing teenager who follows Hud around everywhere. In each film, legacy matters.

This is the first Larry McMurtry novel, Horsemen, Pass By, to be adapted into a movie, and the bare bones setting matched with the lacerating dialogue speaks volumes, as the film continually surprises with worldly cleverness, as Hud is a wise ass who doesn’t give a damn about the past or the future, as all he can think about is today, right here and now. His smug attitude of defiance and self-certainty is linked to his closest companion, the everpresent bottle, where he continually prances around with an air as if he’s seen it all, been there, done that, and what it all amounts to in the end doesn’t mean squat. While his aging father agonizes over every decision, filled with the regrets that come with a lifetime of hard times, Hud just chucks it all as a huge waste of time and feels responsible for nothing and nobody but himself. Easy come, easy go. While his good looks and charm are enough to get what he wants most of the time, he’s not against using underhanded methods to get the rest. When the kid follows him around all the time, it flatters him and appeals to his sense of vanity, but he just as easily swats him away like a fly whenever he feels like he’s being a nuisance. In the same way that John Wayne played a loathsome character in THE SEARCHERS (1956), where his familiarity as the western hero was somewhat confusing to audiences, as it is here with Newman playing such a bitterly repugnant and cynical man without the slightest hint of scruples, yet it’s Paul Newman, one of the most principled men on the planet. This dual edge may be difficult, especially to younger viewers, as they so easily look up to this guy. His stud-like confidence and air of nonchalance is the stuff teenagers dream of, yet his despicable attitude toward others is blatantly crude and offensive. This also explains why this is among Newman’s best performances, as he’s utterly believable in this role, a perfect fit as if he was born to play Hud. He’s never looked more comfortable onscreen, and for that matter, neither has Patricia Neal. It’s simply a perfect fit of two minds racing similarly, feeling the same sexual tension, yet reacting to it in such different ways. As Neal points out, Hud is “hard” on everyone, the kind of guy who goes about everything in the wrong way.

Melvyn Douglas plays the Raymond Massey character in EAST OF EDEN (1955), a man with a minister’s scruples who painstakingly tries to show the young grandson how to do things the right way, even when it’s hard, in contrast to Hud who always takes the easy road. Hud drives a flashy pink Cadillac convertible that collects married women and whisky bottles in the back seat, while Douglas is the paternalistic character who has to deal with the most adversity. He steadfastly insists on abiding by the law and being morally upright. The good and evil scenario is perhaps a bit too obvious, but Douglas in his gruff voice as a grandfatherly old man is a real scene stealer and speaks from the gut, where it’s hard not to be moved by his life affirming moments onscreen, as he’s the real man who’s seen it all, who’s made something out of nothing, not the pretender like Hud who’s never helped a living soul in his entire life without asking for payment in return. Douglas’s message of hard love is the message of the film, as he’s given his grandson something that he can take with him wherever he goes, reminding him “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire,” while Hud pretends to be a bigshot, but he’s always a guy who’s too big for his britches. In the end, who has the most to show for their lives? Who leaves the most behind? Who has actually built a legacy? Hud is the kind of guy who is all show, who thinks he’s got what he wants, especially with the good looking girls who are actually married to someone else, but in the end it’s all an empty pipedream, where the devastating emptiness couldn’t be more pronounced. A few more years of hard drinking and he’ll be ready to pull up a chair in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. For all of Hud’s bitter cynicism, this is a surprisingly smart and deeply reflective film about ethics, individualism, and what’s become of the frontier spirit that built the West, well written, brilliantly acted, and given such naturalistic performances where these characters literally come alive on the screen, where one can see much of the same blisteringly raw and lonesome material of smalltown Texas used again in yet another major McMurtry work, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971).

Of note, during the free screening of a perfectly restored 35 mm print of the film at Block Cinema at Northwestern University (where all films winning an Academy Award are being restored on 35 mm prints), family members, including the two youngest daughters of Patricia Neal were present, Lucy and Ophelia, taking questions after the film. Patricia Neal attended Northwestern University and the family decided to donate all of her letters and personal material to the university for their archives. Neal was married to British author Roald Dahl, so the kids (there were three older children as well) were raised outside of Oxford in England. Neither had yet been born at the time of the film HUD, and their mother had a stroke while pregnant with Lucy, remaining in a coma for three weeks, having to relearn how to walk and talk, ending up with a healthy baby but a lifelong limp, working more sparingly after that. Afterwards, she became an advocate for rehabilitation therapy, where Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville, Tennessee has a wing named after her. She later divorced and moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where she died at age 84 from lung cancer.

Edward Buscombe from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

The modern Western directed by Martin Ritt is set in the featureless landscape of West Texas. Paul Newman is Hud Bannon, who cares for little in life besides drinking and chasing women. His view of life is undiluted cynicism: “You take the sinners away from the saints, you’re lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln.” Yet Hud is looked up to by Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde), his dead brother’s son who at seventeen admires his uncle’s easy charm. There is bad blood between Hud and his father (Melvyn Douglas), a rancher of the old school. Hud wants to drill for oil, but his father refuses: “I don’t want that kind of money.” Their housekeeper is Alma (Patricia Neal), divorced and approaching middle age, but too much her own woman to accept Hud’s advances.

When the father’s precious herd of cattle is suspected of having foot-and-mouth disease, Hud proposes selling them off before the disease is confirmed. The old man won’t hear of it, but the slaughter of the herd removes his will to live. By the end, Lonnie and Alma have gone too, leaving Hud to nurse his beer. It’s a brilliantly acted film that catches much of the feel of the dusty locale of Larry McMurtry’s original novel, Horseman Pass By.

Time Out review Tom Milne

Along with Hombre, one of Ritt's best films, less abrasive than it thinks but still a remarkably clear-eyed account of growing up in Texas to mourn the old free-ranging ways of the frontier days. Its focus is the antagonism between a sternly moralising, patriarchal ranch-owner (Douglas) and his free-drinking, free-whoring 'no account' son (Newman); the conflict between them, ambivalently observed by the two other members of the household, both emotionally involved with Newman - the ranch housekeeper (Neal) and a hero-worshipping nephew (de Wilde) - boils to a head over a government order to slaughter the ranch's entire herd as a precaution against foot-and-mouth, with Newman urging outlaw defiance and Douglas siding with the law. The film sometimes seems to be busting its britches to attain the status of Greek tragedy in delineating the disintegration of a heritage, with dialogue haunted by images of death and decay. But pretensions are kept nicely damped down by the performances (all four principals are great) and by Wong Howe's magnificent camerawork.

Never has an actor with such good looks ever used them to such cruel effect as Paul Newman does in director Martin Ritt's adaptation of Larry McMurty's novel Horseman Pass By. Newman's title character is "an unprincipled man," to quote his own father—Hud drinks too much, he womanizes, he sneers at everything and everybody around him, and he honors nothing, especially not Melvyn Douglas' flinty family patriarch. Yet Newman's charisma makes you stick with him through every venal act and every skipped opportunity to do the right thing—he's despicable, but you can see why he might influence Brandon de Wilde's fatherless nephew or cause Patricia Neal's been-around housekeeper to drop her dishtowel now and then. Stuck out on a cattle ranch on the stark Texas plains, this foursome follows Newman's lead through a dusty etude on loyalty, betrayal, and the tough breaks life dishes out, whether you play nice or not. The always underrated Neal is brilliant, Douglas proves a marvel of steady restraint, and Newman creates a rawboned icon of anti-heroism, and James Wong Howe's brilliant black and white cinematography makes the lonesome prairie they inhabit look even more lonesome than usual. An American classic.

CineScene.com (Kristen Ashley) review

Based on a Larry McMurtry novel, this is the story of a cattle rancher (Melvyn Douglas) and his son (Paul Newman) at the end of an era - when ranching was bigger than oil in Texas, just barely. The father, Homer Bannon, is the personification of all that is good, moral, and right, and his son Hud is just the opposite. The characters and drama are so complicated and good-naturedly ugly that you want to close your eyes and shut your ears, but you can't. You just can't.

If someone asked me to declare what was best about Hud, I wouldn't be able to do it. The crisp, fine writing (Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch)...the impeccable acting...the amazing, absolutely brilliant cinematography (James Wong Howe)...okay - I might say cinematography, but then I'll remember Douglas standing on the steps and I'll say acting, and then I'll remember such lines as "Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire," and I'll say writing.

As the story unfolds, Douglas, representing the past (the good old days of ranching, building things, growing things, nurturing things, being a man and standing up for yourself) is slowly edged out by Newman representing the present (oil, money, greed, corruption, selfishness) while Hud's 17-year-old nephew Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde), seduced by Hud while admiring and loving Homer, watches, hopefully representing the future.

The wild card in the deck is the housekeeper Alma (Patricia Neal), the only woman amongst these men...she is attracted and repulsed by Hud, nurturing of Lonnie and respects Homer. But when it comes to a head, she is the drama's catalyst, even though she really doesn't want to be. Her final confrontation with Hud (if you can call it that, since it is so good-natured on the surface, but boiling, tense and horrid underneath) is unbelievably brilliant.

Douglas, Neal, and Howe all won deserved Oscars. Hud really is a magnificent piece of work, and not as well known as it should be. It rocked my world.

Hud - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Based on Larry McMurtry's novel, Horseman Pass By, Hud (1963) is a contemporary Western in the same way that films like The Misfits (1961) and Lonely Are the Brave (1962) place the genre in a twentieth-century context. Set in a dusty patch of Texas where cattle and Cadillacs roam the plains, Hud resembles a modern Greek tragedy with its story of a conflicted family; a vain, pious ranch owner at odds with his oldest son's lack of morality and unprincipled approach to business. The tense relationship is occasionally aggravated or mollified by two other members of the household - young Lon who worships his rebellious uncle and the housekeeper, Alma, who knows trouble when she sees it. The resulting film went on to earn seven Oscar® nominations, including a Best Actor nomination for Paul Newman (his third), with Academy Awards going to Patricia Neal for Best Actress, Melvyn Douglas for Best Supporting Actor, and James Wong Howe for Best Cinematography.

According to director Martin Ritt, "Paul and I went into business together. I made a deal at Columbia and at Paramount with Paul, in which I was to direct two pictures, and he was to act in two, and the third was free." The first film under this arrangement was Hud and Ritt later admitted that Hud's character, a minor character in McMurtry's novel, was partially inspired by Clark Gable, specifically his performance in films where he plays a self-centered jerk who is eventually redeemed by the love of a good woman. While Ritt allows no such happy ending for Hud's character, the Gable model was a good starting point.

On location in Texas, Newman was a quick study for his part, living in the bunkhouses like the other cowhands and working the ranch to get the feel of the land and the local lifestyle. He also began coming to grips with his image as a male sex symbol. In Paul and Joanne by Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein, Newman said, "The first time I remember women reacting to me was when we were filming Hud in Texas. Women were literally trying to climb through the transoms at the motel where I stayed. At first, it's flattering to the ego. At first. Then you realize that they're mixing me up with the roles I play - characters created by writers who have nothing to do with who I am."

But there is no denying the on-screen chemistry between Newman and Patricia Neal as Alma, the seductive housekeeper with an earthy sense of humor. In her autobiography, Patricia Neal: As I Am, the actress admitted that, "Paul and I worked together beautifully. On the set he was an ace, thoroughly professional and completely in character at all times. In fact, he and young Brandon (de Wilde) would tear around the small Texas town at night, much the way their characters did." She also sang the praises of Mr. Ritt: "I just plain loved working with Marty. For the first time since working with Elia Kazan, I felt I could do anything a director asked."

Cinematographer James Wong Howe, who worked with Ritt on four films, prefers his work on Hud to the rest. In his interview with Charles Higham for the book, Hollywood Cameramen, he recalled, "there was one shot I liked particularly, in which Paul Newman and his young brother [actually his nephew] were standing in the backyard and the light was coming from the porch. They were drunk and they were near a water-trough. I used incandescent lights; I took condensers out for the interior arcs to flood them out more and get sharper shadows. I was very, very happy with that picture."

Despite all the accolades Hud received, some critics were quick to point out that most audiences were identifying with Paul Newman's character which was a disturbing realization, considering that he was such a despicable, no-good louse. Newman later commented, "I think it was misunderstood, especially by the kids. They rather lionized that character. But the whole purpose was to present someone who had all of the graces on which there is such a big premium in the U.S. - some kind of external attractiveness, a guy who is great with the girls, a good boozer - but, nevertheless, a man with one tragic flaw." Ritt, however, refused to take any blame for depicting Hud as an anti-hero, saying, "I kept getting mail telling me what a great guy Hud was and what a schmuck the old man was, and the kid was gay. What nobody realized was that Haight-Ashbury was just around the corner, and there's no way of topping history. What nobody realized was that kids were that cynical."

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

American Legends Interviews..... Bob Hinkle: Making of Hud American Legends recalls the making of the film and interviews the speech coach Bob Hinkle

In Search of Masculinity: Martin Ritt's Hud and John Schlesinger's ... In Search of Male Masculinity, also reviewing MIDNIGHT COWBOY, by Ann Barrow from Images Journal, also seen here: Images - In Search of Maculinity: Hud and Midnight Cowboy

Chicago Sun Times Foreign Correspondents [Michael Mirasol] A man with inklings of a soul, August 15, 2010

Nick's Flick Picks (Capsule Review)

Hud (1963) - Articles - TCM.com Rob Nixon

Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale

Movie-Vault.com (Carl Langley) review [8/10]

hoopla.nu review Mark Lavercombe

Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts]

The Spinning Image (Mary Sibley) review

Apollo Guide (Ryan Cracknell) review [86/100]

DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss

DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review

Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]

George Chabot's Review of Hud

Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez

Frank's Movie Log

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze

Movie Moments: "HUD" (1963) YouTube (3:28)

THE OUTRAGE

USA (96 mi) 1964 ‘Scope

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

A trial is held to figure out who was responsible for the knifing of a colonel in a nearby forest. The conflicting stories about the event from those involve cause a preacher to doubt his calling, but he tries to sort out the story with the help of a con man and a prospector who holds the missing pieces of the story.

Akira Kurosawa was heavily influenced by western (as in opposition to eastern) sources in his movies, including the Bible, Shakespeare, and westerns (as in six-guns). So it's no surprise that his work was more accessible to westerners, and several of his movies have been remade as westerns. This is perhaps the oddest choice from his oeuvre to be recast in such a way, though it certainly lends itself to this approach. And the story is certainly sturdy enough that it still holds interest even if it's not done as well as it could have been here. There are definite problems in this version; the text was largely adapted from Fay and Michael Kanin's stage version (some of the dialogue is identical), but in the attempt to adapt it to a western setting, it often resorts to western slang that is more corny than effective. Furthermore, many of the actors are saddled with distracting accents; in particular, Paul Newman's Mexican accident and Claire Bloom's southern twang often call more attention to themselves than is recommended. Laurence Harvey might have had the same problem, but since his character says very little during the proceedings, he is spared that embarassment. Another problem is William Shatner, though it is through no fault of his own. Shatner's vocal mannerisms have been the target of parody for some time, and this is one of those movies where those mannerisms are particularly prominent. Edward G. Robinson is great as the con man, and Howard Da Silva also does well as the prospector. The best scene of the movie is the cat-and-mouse game between Newman and Bloom right before the rape, a scene that benefits from the fact that no one is talking. Once again, as in RASHOMON, the fantastic aspect of this movie is that the testimony of the dead man is done via a medium, in this case, an Indian medicine man.

User reviews from imdb Author: Jugu Abraham (jugu_abraham@yahoo.co.uk) from Trivandrum, Kerala, India

I am familiar with Kurosawa's "Rashomon", which is original work interestingly remade in Hollywood by Martin Ritt. Those who have seen both works will be able to note the obvious virtues of the original. Yet, I saw this film with no prior knowledge of the fact that this was a remake of Rashomon.

What struck me within minutes of opening of the film was the unusual camerawork of James Hong Howe, that takes pleasure in close-ups and tilted shots that are reminescent of European cinema of the sixties. It is so far removed in style from Hollywood.

Reams of paper have used to write about Akutagawa's story immortalized by Kurosawa. So I have nothing to add on the brilliant story that obviously attracted Ritt and the playwrights Kanin.

What is unusual is Ritt's treatment. His choice of actors are interesting--Claire Bloom is a fine choice as she has a range of emotions to display with credibility; Laurence Harvey's role is limited even though he occupies a long screentime gagged and bound but he has to show scorn for a brief period the gag is removed without speaking--and when he speaks his face is not visible; Edward G Robinson is a perfect choice for a snake oil salesman and so on...

Ritt's use of the soundtrack is again non-Hollywood in style. He uses music and uses silence with great effect while characters talk to underline the emotions. Kurosawa did it to the extreme limits that makes it odd for the non-Japanese viewer.

Ritt is an interesting director. I have always admired his choice of subjects to film. I prefer his black and white films to his color projects because of the subjects that he chose to film--"Edge of the City" being one of my favorite Ritt works. The second reason I admire him is for his choice of actors, especially for the major female roles. He has derived great performances as he did here with Bloom.

This film will never be talked about because it is a remake of a classic. However, in my view it stands out as unlike John Sturges' "Magnificent Seven," which was also a remake of another Kurosawa work in Hollywood, this film adopted a different style closer to Europe and Japan. It is essentially a fine work of depicting a play on film somewhat like nuggets of celluloid gold found among the works of the American Film Theatre series.

DVD Verdict [Michael Rubino]

Hollywood was all over Akira Kurosawa from the get-go. Not in the "We revere you so much we're going to import your movies" sense, but in the "No good idea is too good for us to think we can do better but most likely ruin" sense. Quite a few of his more famous samurai action pictures have been turned into quite a few westerns with a variety of results. Yes, it's hard to believe, but one of cinema's greatest directors was treated the way Hollywood now treats foreign horror movies: grist for the remake mill. Though I knew that a ton of different productions had ripped off the basic Rashomon concept of one story told from multiple yet conflicting points of view, I didn't know anyone had ever had the cajones to remake the 1950 classic in its entirety. Turns out there was a stage version written by Fay and Michael Kanin, and it was even filmed for television twice (including once by Sidney Lumet) before Martin Ritt decided to turn it into a full-fledged film in 1964. The Outrage placed Rashomon in a remote outpost in the post-Civil War American West, and it's a surprisingly obscure effort given that it's both Ritt's and Paul Newman's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Hud.

Then again, maybe it's not so surprising. When I worked in video retail, a customer once told me that he had a theory that the more stars there are in a movie you've never heard of, the worse that movie is likely to be. In addition to Newman, The Outrage stars Edward G. Robinson, Claire Bloom, William Shatner, and Laurence Harvey. It's not exactly a Cecil B. DeMille Greatest Show on Earth ensemble, but that's a pretty solid roster. Not exactly no-names, though not exactly A-List--just as The Outrage is not exactly awful, but not really a classic either.

The story of The Outrage pretty much follows the Kurosawa model: three men gather in a desolated area and end up discussing four different versions of one terrible story. In this case, Shatner plays a preacher who is waiting for a train at a rundown station in hopes of catching the next trip out of town, his faith in humanity shattered along with his belief in the absolute. Waiting with him is the downtrodden prospector (Howard Da Silva) who wants to convince him not to go and a conniving huckster (Robinson) in hiding lest the people he ripped off find him. The day before there had been a trial for a crime perpetrated against a traveling couple. As the verdict stands, the notorious outlaw Juan Carrasco (Newman) raped Nina Wakefield (Bloom) and murdered her husband, Colonel Wakefield (Harvey). At least, that was how Carrasco told the story, but Mrs. Wakefield had a different version and a medicine man (Paul Fix) who heard the Colonel's dying testimony delivers a third. Though Carrasco's past crimes made him an easy conviction, the truth seems lost somewhere in all the variations.

Turns out, there is a fourth version, one known only by the prospector, who as far as the court knows only found the body, but who in reality tells the preacher and the con man that he saw the whole thing from the bushes. Yet, there are reasons to doubt his version, too, as his self-serving secrecy undermines his credibility. The con man's cynical worldview may be the truest of all, that humans are suckers and liars. It makes a certain level of sense, especially when you consider that each person's scenario is more favorable to them. Each teller of the tale is a winner of sorts in their own version. Yet, that is also the most obvious interpretation, and Kurosawa's Rashomon provokes a much deeper response. Truth is not merely subjective, it is also unknowable. How each of us lives is dictated by how well we can reconcile ourselves with that principle.

Martin Ritt and the Kanins (Michael Kanin is credited with adapted screenplay) don't entirely remove the grander meaning for The Outrage, but their fourth act ends up being a rather fatal misstep that comes across as far less convincing and far more blatant than Kurosawa's Rashomon. While the first three stories, the ones told by the bandit, the wife, and the husband, are fairly accurate to the Japanese film, the prospector's version is portrayed as first a broad Southern melodrama before descending into a slapstick fist fight between Paul Newman and Laurence Harvey. The rape is suddenly treated like a punchline, and the decision to change how the Colonel dies in the prospector's story also makes it seem like a cruel joke, a misfortune perpetrated by the indifference of the universe. If the prospector's tale in the real truth, life would then be a B-movie rather than a human tragedy.

The acting is all very good up until that last story, too, with everyone playing his or her roles with the appropriate gravitas. The switch is so severe for the prospector's story, you almost have to wonder if it was all cooked up following a rather wild party and everyone was too drunk to be operating such heavy machinery. Even Shatner kept most of his hammy tendencies in, though at times this early performance already shows signs of his trademark delivery (in terms of speaking style, he's kind of the Christopher Walken of his day). I'd actually give the top acting marks to Edward G. Robinson as the sharp-talking roadshow salesman. The veteran actor is the most comfortable up there on the screen of any of them, and his skills as a raconteur serve him well.

The Outrage is part of the "Paul Newman Film Series," the new line where Warner Bros. is apparently digging through their vaults for films maybe Paul didn't want on DVD while he was alive, in addition to ones he was likely a bit more proud of and maybe should have been released already, their dubious commercial appeal be damned (on one hand, we have the disastrous disaster pic When Time Ran Out...; on the other, his directorial effort Rachel, Rachel). I'd be curious to hear how Newman reflected on the time he played a Mexican, with dark make-up and all (what is that? tan-face?). To his credit and the credit of his Actors Studio training, he buries himself in the part with the same amount of respect he would give any other role. Though I suppose some could grumble about his accent and gruff voice he adopts (did he study Treasure of the Sierra Madre in lieu of a dialect coach?), he largely manages to avoid racial caricature. In fact, the writing seems to be informed by an awareness of how the Mexican people might have been viewed at the time and includes allusions to racism and shows Carrasco playing at being a stereotype to lure Col. Wakefield into his trap (indeed, even relying on the white man's greed). Beyond the voice and the make-up, I don't get the sense that Newman would have played it any other way if his character were a white bandit named Carson rather than a Mexican one named Carrasco.

If there is one compelling reason to watch The Outrage, it's the sure-handed direction that Ritt displays for most of the movie, as well as the beautiful photography by James Wong Howe (The Sweet Smell of Success). From the rainy railway station that provides the story frame, the waiting men looking like an early test version of the trio at the station at the start of Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, to the open desert and the way the people crowd into the town square to witness Carrasco's trial, Ritt and Howe use the wide open spaces of the West to show how remote this little pocket is, how isolated the pioneer is from polite society. They capture every gorgeous detail, every cactus and every raindrop, using the Panavision process to its full limits. In contrast, the little oasis where the crime goes down is softly lit, like a pocket dimension within the greater frontier. The Outrage is a gorgeous movie, tightly edited by Frank Santillo (who also worked with Peckinpah on his more thoughtful movies), an expertly constructed movie from start to finish.

But a technical triumph is still only as big a victory as the script allows, and alas, there is no way around the pitfalls of The Outrage. While the first sixty minutes are very good, if a bit unnecessary given the existence of the Kurosawa original, the final thirty are a terrible blunder. There is little reason to watch a flawed version of Rashomon when you can just watch Rashomon--and that you can take as the absolute truth in a world of wishy-washy opinions. Anyone who says different is either lying or wasn't really there!

The Outrage - TCM.com Rob Nixon

New York Times [A.H. Weiler] (registration req'd)

User reviews from imdb Author: joekiddlouischama from United States

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

USA (112 mi) 1965

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Without his customary good liberal message to hang on to, Ritt is forced to rely on pure professionalism, and as a result turns out one of his better films. John Le Carré's novel about betrayal and disillusionment in the world of East/West espionage is treated with intelligence and a disarming lack of sentimentality or moralising, while Burton gives one of his best screen performances as the spy out to get even with an East German counterpart. What finally impresses, however, is the sheer seediness of so much of the film, with characters, buildings, and landscapes lent convincingly grubby life by Oswald Morris' excellent monochrome camera-work.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) - The Criterion Collection

Self-consciously dour where the James Bond movies were insouciantly callous, Martin Ritt's grim The Spy Who Came in from the Cold plays like an anti-thriller companion piece to the director's acclaimed anti-western, Hud. Just as the earlier film mourned the disintegrating values of the modern American frontier with all the subtlety of a ton of bricks, Ritt's adaptation of John le Carré's bestseller extends that ponderousness to the international arena of East-West spy games. Secret agents are described here as "seedy, squalid bastards," and none is seedier or more squalid than Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), the weary brooder sent by British intelligence behind the Iron Curtain. Meant as his last assignment, the mission into East Berlin is slowly revealed as a complex, table-turning operation that involves Leamas's idealist Communist lover (Claire Bloom) and his vicious, Teutonic counterpart (Peter Van Eyck). Going against the grain of a genre known for sexy, violent thrills, Ritt crafts a sober, weighty atmosphere of moral crisis in which spies from both sides are bound by their ruthlessness ("You can't be less wicked than your enemies, can you?" Leamas's superior deadpans). The dangers of corrupt power struggles are not lost on the politically conscious Ritt; it's a shame, then, that his presentation boils down to a cloud of monotonous disillusionment, far less layered (and exciting) than le Carré's novel. Characteristically, Ritt's strongest work is done with the actors. In full de-glam mode, Burton is stripped of his ripe theatricality, booming voice and superstar glamour (Ritt contrives to have the actor play most of his first scene with his back to the camera). Shriveling into himself until he's a mortified lump, Burton's Leamas is more tragic patsy than swashbuckler, and his scenes with a jaunty East German officer (Oskar Werner, who livens things up) have sharp doses of suspicion, cynicism and sadness. Ultimately, the film collapses under its own unilluminating gravitas; its dreariness becomes not an antidote to Ian Fleming's flash, but its broken-mirror reflection.

Filmcritic.com Movie Reviews Chris Cabin

Tightly wound and understated to devastating effect, Martin Ritt's gloomy Cold War thriller The Spy Who Came In from the Cold opens, like Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, on a death along a border crossing. But whereas the death in Welles' film affords an opening to study morality and perversity in two very different types of detectives, the death in Ritt's film is indicative of a brutal political mindset that, though timely, also seems to be without end.

It's on that very border that we meet Leamus (the great Richard Burton), a lugubrious but attentive British spy who is waiting for fellow spy Riemeck to arrive from a mission in East Berlin. Taking nips of coffee and brandy in the West Berlin station, he watches as Riemeck is gunned down while crossing by agents under the eye of German master spy Mundt (Peter Van Eyck). Arriving back in Britain, Control (Cyril Cusack) informs Leamus that he has one more mission before he can retire or, as Control puts it, 'come in from the cold.'

The mission is to pose as a defector, one who might eventually be picked up by the Germans to spill government secrets. He takes a job at a small library where he begins a small romance with a Communist bookkeeper named Nan (Claire Bloom) and drinks like a fish so as to stage a brawl that lands him in jail, where he finds the attention of a company called The Link that recruits defectors. Leamus passes between the hands of low level agents, including an interrogator named Peters (Sam Wanamaker),and eventually lands with Fiedler (a very good Oskar Werner), a high-level Jewish spy who works for the East Germans.

In the John le Carré novel that Ritt's film is based on, the character of German mastermind Mundt had been set up in a preceding novel (Call for the Dead). The reader knew who was on the other end of the phone. One of the great enigmas of Ritt's film is that we see Mundt for only a few minutes, but he is ever present in the film's narrative. Leamus' assignment is to get Fiedler to turn on Mundt through a series of double-crosses that had been set up long ago by Control. But the film's powerful hold comes not just from the deceptions that the characters enact on each other but how deceit, in this world that they thrive in, is as natural and consistent as the ground they walk on.

When the film was released in 1965, Ritt had made his name on several '60s neo-Westerns made with his staple lead Paul Newman and would immediately return to both in 1967 with the white-Indian character drama Hombre. There are shades of this sort of ruthless restraint in his most popular film, 1963's Hud, but Spy remains a strange one-off for the New York native, seeing as he would go on to direct racial dramas (Sounder, The Great White Hope) and weepy romances (Stanley & Iris) until his death in 1990.

Whatever the reason, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains, along with Hud and The Front, one of Ritt's most invigorating and controlled works. In its realistic depiction of the world of spies in both intrigue and deception, the film feels like an honest corrective to the James Bond series: women as a sincere weakness rather than playthings, physical stunts replaced by the most complex of psychological war games, allegiance as a finicky state at best. The mood seems to have lived on in the world of the Iraq Occupation in a film like Ridley Scott's Body of Lies but while that film is naturally encumbered by the sound of everything exploding, Spy's whispers and hushed correspondences more convincingly echo a life where paranoia is an invaluable tool of survival.

The Criterion DVD includes a second disc which includes an interview with le Carre, selected-scene commentary, a 2000 BBC documentary about le Carre, an interview with Burton from 1967, and a 1985 audio interview between Ritt and film historian Patrick McGilligan.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: True Ritt Criterion essay by Michael Sragow, November 9, 2008

Press Notes: Move Over, Bond November 30, 2008

Portrait of a moment - Financial Times Antonia Quirke from The Financial Times, February 1, 2013

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold - TCM.com Jeff Stafford from Turner Classic Movies

Richard Burton in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD from The ... Glenn Erickson on the DVD from Turner Classic Movies

PopMatters [Marc Calderaro]

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The General, Douglas Fairbanks Silents, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Fighters, Real Money, Lady with the Dog Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2009

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) - Ferdy on Films Marilyn Ferdinand, also seen here: Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

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DVD Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: Criterion Confessions

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The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (Criterion) Jon Danziger from digitallyOBSESSED

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DVD Movie Central Gordon Justesen

KQEK.com [Mark R. Hasan] (English)

George Chabot's Review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller] also seen here: filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]

Crimespree Cinema: Criterion edition [Jeremy Lynch]

Anthony's Film Review

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) FilmTank.org, a fan forum, October 19, 2009

Global Discoveries on DVD: By Jonathan Rosenbaum Paragraph #2 from Cinema Scope

Spy Games: The top ten best spy movies ever made The New York Daily News, June 29, 2010

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) dir. Martin Ritt - Must See ... Must See Cinema, includes still photos

DVDBeaver.com - Criterion DVD Review [Gary Tooze]

BBC - Wales History: Cold War Wales James Roberts from the BBC Wales History Blog, December 15, 2010

DVD: 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' - SFGate Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle

Movie Review - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - Le Carre's Best ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

HOMBRE A- 93

USA (111 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

Mister, you’ve got a lot of hard bark on you walkin’ down here like this. —Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone)

Opening with a credits montage of iconic Edward S. Curtis (Images for Edward S. Curtis photos) photographic images of Native American Indians, this immediately appears to be a Western that sets the record straight about the historic misdeeds of the past. While it’s a bit amusing to see blue-eyed Paul Newman as an Apache Indian, complete with a dusty face and long hair, this is another one of his outsider roles, as who could be more of an outsider than a half breed, a white man who feels more accepted having been raised by Indians following a childhood kidnapping than he does among the whites? Newman is John Russell, informed that his biological father left him some property when he died, a boarding house currently run by Diane Cilento (Sean Connery’s ex-wife) in perhaps the role of her lifetime as Jessie, a still attractive, earthy, no-nonsense middle aged woman who freely speaks her mind. But when Russell, cleaned up and cutting his hair to re-enter the white world, indicates he has no intentions of keeping the property, Jessie takes the first stage out of town. In this respect, the plot resembles John Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939), only here the battle is not with renegade Indians out in the plains, but an internal moral struggle within themselves, a small community of citizens, especially after the stage is attacked by a gang of outlaws, one of whom was a passenger on the stage, Cicero Grimes, Richard Boone in one of his most deliciously evil roles. Russell is able to shoot two of the bandits before heading off into the hills seeking the high ground where the rest of the passengers quickly follow. Consequences ensue.

Other stage passengers include Fredric March as Dr. Favor, the government’s Apache Indian Agent at the San Carlos Reservation who is attempting to flee for the border with his wife in tow, Barbara Rush, and a satchel full of stolen government money meant for the Indians that he has pilfered through the years. Also riding is a naïve young couple known only as the Kid and his wife, along with John Russell and Cicero Grimes, driven by Martin Balsam as the stagecoach driver. Earlier in the ride, upon learning of Russell’s Indian past, Mrs. Favor reveals her racial hatred by asking the driver to remove him from the coach and ride outside. In another racial switch, two Mexican roles in the film are played first by a white actor, Balsam the stage driver and friend of John Russell, and second by black actor Frank Silvera brilliantly playing a Mexican outlaw, the one who continually calls out “Hey Hombre” and actually congratulates Russell on his good shooting for putting a hole in him. During the robbery, the bandits make it clear their target was Dr. Favor and his stolen money, relishing the idea of stealing “stolen” money, as if there’s some immoral justness in that, taking Favor’s wife along just for good measure. But as Favor grabs the money from one of the killed outlaws, they are soon tracked down by Grimes.

The psychological dilemma of the group mentality continually butts heads against the loner Russell who has the strength and know-how to survive in this desert wasteland, but the group reveals their weaknesses, as they want to eat the food and drink all the water, which Russell strictly rations. Still, they follow him because, as he bluntly puts it, “I can cut it, lady.” Russell, however, strips Favor of the money and firearms, instructing the Kid to shoot him if he goes for either one. And in a brazen move as they await to cross the desert by nightfall, Favor steals the water, guns, and money, leaving them all with nothing to survive, until Russell catches him in the act, sending him along his merry way with what he left the group – nothing except his life. But as they travel by nightfall, they reach an abandoned mineshaft with a small house up some stairs for protection, where they wait it out, knowing their trackers are nearby. First Favor shows up, alive, reuniting with the group, but then the tension mounts when the outlaws arrive and are willing to return the girl for the money, but Russell refuses the offer, leading to a giant sized Mexican standoff.

James Wong Howe, who filmed HUD (1963), does a brilliant job filming the desolate northern Arizona desert, shot in the Coronado National Forest, given a special prominence in the film, while the melancholic score by David Rose offers a reflective tone. The dialogue rich screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. (who collaborated eight times with Ritt) is adapted from an Elmore Leonard dimestore novel by the same name, while the character of John Russell is based on a real life incident that happened to Jimmy “Santiago” McKinn, captured by no less than Geronimo himself and the Apache Indians in 1885 and brought up as one of their own. Over the end credits, there is an historic photograph of McKinn as a young boy, where the camera zooms in for a close up before settling back into a medium shot where he is integrated back into the whole.

Ward Churchill from his book, Fantasies of the Master Race:

Probably the most extreme example of a white character being scripted to stand in for Indians will be found in Hombre (1967), a film in which no native people appear at all (other than a montage behind the opening credits). Instead, their culture is represented exclusively by a white man taken captive as a child and raised among them. At the end of the film, the character, played by Paul Newman, even fulfills the role of Hollywood’s “Good Indians” by sacrificing himself to save a white woman in distress.

Edward Buscombe from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Paul Newman is a white man kidnapped by the Apache as a child and brought up as one of their own. Having inherited property and reverted to white, he finds himself on a stagecoach to New Mexico along with an assorted group of travelers, who include Diane Cilento as a feisty widow, Fredric March as a corrupt Indian agent, and Martin Balsam as a Mexican stage driver. Halfway through their journey they are held up by a gang in league with another passenger, Richard Boone. Newman, demonstrating his Apache training, kills a couple of the gang, but sees no reason to offer assistance to the travelers, some of whom have made clear their hatred of Indians.

Martin Ritt’s Hombre displays much of the liberal sentiment that became commonplace in Westerns of the 1960’s and after, but the preaching takes second place to the tightening tensions between the characters as the cat-and-mouse game between the gang and their quarry is played out. Newman is excellent as the icily controlled John Russell, whose dual ethnicity gives him a special insight into racial prejudice, and Richard Boone as his adversary jovially cuts through the hypocrisy of the more respectable citizens.

Hombre, directed by Martin Ritt | Film review - Time Out Tom Milne

Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard which works a neat variation on the Stagecoach theme, this has Newman first outcast by the passengers who think he is an Apache, then elected as their guardian angel when they are menaced by bandits. White, but brought up by Apaches to believe that civilisation is hell, Newman very sensibly - but to humanitarian protests from his flock - starts coldly and calculatedly picking off the bandits one by one before they are ready for him. Developing its own liberal conscience, the film has Newman finally see the light - 'People must help each other' - so that he perishes (nobly rather than ironically) in making a doomed bid to rescue Rush, staked out by the bandits to die in the sun. Even so this is one of Ritt's best films, with fine performances all round, impressive Death Valley locations, and superlative camerawork from James Wong Howe.

User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: ackstasis from Australia

With the arrival of the Revisionist Western, filmmakers began to question the traditional nobility of the Western "hero." John Russell (Paul Newman) isn't necessarily a noble man. In an early scene, he watches indifferently as a decent soldier is threatened and bullied by an arrogant thug, Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone). Indeed, Russell is strikingly passive for the film's entire first half, receptive but indifferent to the plight of those around him. Russell was raised by a Native American tribe, and, having witnessed white society's racism first-hand, he has come to harbour prejudices of his own. 'Hombre (1967)' confronts the rottenness of the common man, and how the pervasion of sin can conceivably corrupt even the most steadfast of hearts into apathy (in this case, not only Russell, but also Cameron Mitchell's disillusioned Sheriff Braden – who's given a wonderful monologue on the hollowness of his career). Though director Martin Ritt surrounds the viewer with largely unpleasant characters, the film concludes with a blink of hope on the horizon, affirming that there are, indeed, certain human qualities worth fighting for.

The character of John Russell was based on Jimmy "Santiago" McKinn, who was captured by the Apaches in 1885 and assimilated into the tribe. A real-life photograph of McKinn closes the film, the boy's face oddly alien and unsettling. Newman plays the role with masterful restraint; there's always something going on behind those blue eyes, though his face scarcely shows it. The character is not all that dissimilar to Clint Eastwood's "The Man With No Name" in Leone's "Dollars" trilogy – both characters, laconic and enigmatic, wander like ghosts through the affairs of other men, searching for something or someone worth fighting for (these similarities are probably deliberate; Russell often goes by the generic name of "Hombre," which means "man"). Diane Celenti, as land-lady Jessie, characterises the smart, independent and sexually- aware heroine that also rose to prominence with the Revisionist Western, not unlike Claudia Cardinale in 'Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).' Richard Boone is deliciously wicked as a cocky, thuggish bandit, and ever-reliable performers like Fredric March and Martin Balsam round out an excellent, intimate cast of characters.

User reviews from imdb (Page 6) Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico, USA

First of all we have to note that of the two people playing Mexicans, Frank Silvera (an African-American) is better at it than Martin Balsam. I've always admired Martin Balsam as a character actor who invariably brings something a little extra to his roles, but he's miscast here. Silvera's Hispanic accent is unimpeachable. I know this because I myself have become fluent in the language since moving to New Mexico. Or rather, almost fluent. To illustrate, I was trying to follow a conversation in Spanish recently between my barber Luis and another customer. I happen to know Luisito raises fighting cocks, and I heard the word for rooster, "gallo", and the name of a nearby little town ("Hatch"), and the word "Bluebonnet," so, putting two and two together, it was easy to deduce that they were talking about Luis entering one of his guerreros named Bluebonnet in a cock fight in Hatch. Just to show off, I later asked Luisito if I should bet on Bluebonnet at the cock fight in Hatch. He looked puzzled and then said, "Ahhh, no. He was talking about butter!" That's what I meant by "almost" fluent.

Anyway, what we have here is a screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, directed by Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman. This is the same team that brought us the far superior "Hud". What a movie THAT was. This one doesn't deserve plaudits of the same magnitude. It's a good, tense, entertaining Western but the characterizations that made "Hud" so memorable are just not here. These are little more than stereotypes. Newman is the noble stoic Indian, part human, part wilderness. Frederick March is the corrupt financial officer, straight out of John Ford's "Stagecoach." Barbara Rush is the rich Eastern snob, looking fine and giving probably the most nuanced performance of her career. Diane Cilento plays the role of Pat Neal in "Hud," the earthy, warm, no-nonsense woman who's been around. Richard Boone is pure e-vil and does extravagantly well by the part of the fulsomely masculine, utterly heartless bandido. Of all the characters, Frank Silvera is probably the most likable although he's a thief and murderer. The guy is a philosopher.

None of the acting is bothersome in any way. The problem is that there is virtually no development. The characters begin as good or bad people and they more or less remain that way throughout. Oh, I guess Paul Newman starts off a little unfeeling, but he's given a good reason for it. What you see at the beginning is pretty much what you get at the end.

The dialog sparkled in "Hud." Here, it's sometimes fine and sometimes infelicitous. "We'd better deal with each other out of need and forget merit," is a line I don't expect from the character who speaks it. And this is unworthy of the writers: "If he tries to leave, shoot him once. If he tries to leave with the money, shoot him twice. And if he tries to leave with the water, you empty your gun." But Barbara Rush's description of her marriage to the older Frederick March is peerless. When she was his student at eighteen he read Browning to her. But now she's thirty-five and she listens to him cough up phlegm.

If you watch this -- and I certainly recommend you do -- and if you enjoy it, and especially if you enjoy the character of Diane Cilento, and if you haven't seen "Hud," you really should see "Hud."

User reviews from imdb Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

There has been no tougher or more formidable Western heavy than Richard Boone... He was a fine, respected actor and powerful presence, one of the screen's most efficient scene-stealer...

In 'The Tall T,' Boone was Randolph Scott's intelligent, embittered adversary, smooth as a rattlesnake and twice as treacherous; in 'Man Without a Star,' he wrapped non-conforming farmers in barbed wire; in 'Way of a Gaucho,' he was a mean, sadistic Major who persecuted Rory Calhoun; and in 'Hombre' he gave Paul Newman a rough ride: 'Well, now, what do you suppose hell is gonna look like?'

Not many of the serious Westerns of the late sixties can match the mood and authenticity of Martin Ritt's 'Hombre.' It is a suspenseful Western melodrama pointing up racial bias and hypocrisy, with a plot modeled on greed, nobility, prejudice and resignation...

John Russell (Paul Newman) has no emotion (except anger) and little vitality; he's totally alienated from mankind and is 'alienating' as well… Russell is a white man raised by the Indians, who call him "Hombre," and with whom he identifies…

Choosing to isolate himself from white society, which he despises, he lives on a reservation and looks and dresses like an Indian… But he's persuaded to cut his hair and return to civilization to take over some property… He winds up on a stagecoach with white passengers, who, learning his background, force him to ride with the driver… Not quite an Indian, and banished by whites, he's the classic outcast in no man's land… Ironically, Russell is the only one capable of rescuing the passengers from bandits and guiding them back to civilization… The drama depends on whether he will accept responsibility for his fellow man…

"Hombre," which reunited Newman with the "Hud" team (director Ritt, writers Ravetch and Frank, cinematographer Howe), resembles John Ford's classic Western, "Stagecoach": several people, whose personal crises are outlined, are thrown together, and their interactions provide a social commentary on avarice, bigotry and responsibility… But in Ford's film, those deemed worthless by society reveal their inherent nobility, and only one man, the absconding banker, is bad… Here, the embezzler of Indian funds—Favor (Fredric March), is not much worse than the others… Except for Jessie (Diane Cilento), an honest, earthy woman in the Patricia Neal-Hud vein, they're all helpless, coward1y or selfish…

In this context, Russell is an inversion of the John Wayne hero… He's strong and silent in the traditional manner, but instead of being the expected virile defender of the weak, he helps the others only when his own survival is at stake… He refuses to intercede when the malevolent bandit Grimes (Richard Boone) deprives a soldier of his seat; is willing to leave the helpless passengers stranded; indifferently sends Favor out into the desert without water; and declines to rescue Favor's Indian-hating wife (Barbara Rush), left by the bandits to bake in the sun…

Even though he acts out of a justifiable outrage, Russell is not meant to be a sympathetic character: the white man's mistreatment may have made him indifferently cruel, but cruel he is, nevertheless... Perhaps to soften our attitude, the filmmakers have him suddenly abandon his disengagement at the end, and perform the traditional act to rescue Favor's wife…

Newman's performance here is unlike any of his others… His style has been stripped away to the bare essentials; to call it underplaying would be an understatement… He imparts a sense of transcendent stillness; when he acts he does so suddenly, returning immediately thereafter to his relatively immobile state… He speaks laconically, in clipped sentences, with a solemn, deliberately monotonous, almost lifeless voice… In addition, his facial expression hard1y changes; at times it approaches an infinitesimal smile, but otherwise it is unsociable, severe, bitter, or inscrutably neutral…

At first glance, it seems that Newman is hard1y acting, and some critics called him wooden… Russell's inscrutable expression is a mask to cover his ingrained hurt, and suggests a man in a constant state of meditation or deep reflection on the chaos around him… Appropriately, the film opens and closes on close-ups of his face, and throughout, our attention is directed toward the blue eyes, which are constantly watching, thinking, judging, condemning…

Newman also frequently folds his arms as if protecting or insulating himself from the world—a natural defense mechanism of someone who's suffered a great deal of pain, and a physical equivalent of his psychological introversion… This is Newman's most completely self-sufficient, isolated, and inhuman loner, and he gives a performance that bravely risks complete alienation of the audience… And that's what happens; as in "Torn Curtain," the character is ultimately non-involving… But it's an extremely interesting piece of disciplined acting…

Martin Ritt puts the whole picture together in a straight, precise layout of plots, accumulating action that holds interest up to the big scenes... Of all the sequences which stay in the mind, perhaps the most memorable is that in which the Mexican bandit (Frank Silvera) painfully congratulates Russell as a sharp shooter: 'Hey, Hombre! A compliment on your shooting. You put a hole in me.'

Westerns of the Sixties: Hombre by Jake Hinkson - Criminal Element May 14, 2012

Film Review: Hombre - Native American Homepage Chris Smallbone

Film Freak Central review [Walter Chaw]

The Night Editor: Hombre (1967) March 29, 2009

PAUL NEWMAN AS ELMORE LEONARD'S LONE OUTSIDER: HOMBRE | Uranium Café

DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [2/5]

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Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]

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Needcoffee.com - DVD Review

Orato: 1967 Movie Hombre Paul Newman, Fredric March Star in Western William J. Flechner from Orato, August 7, 2009, also seen at Bukisa here: Paul Newman in Hombre (1967)

Western Classic Movies

Jimmy "Santiago" McKinn - Kidnapped by the Apache

Jimmy "Santiago" McKinn - Kidnapped by the Apache - Page 2

Edward S. Curtis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Elmore Leonard Website - Weblog

Elmore Leonard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hombre (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE TAINTED ARCHIVE: Hombre - Elmore Leonard

Book reviews: Hombre, by Elmore Leonard - by Barry Slater - Helium

Hombre by Elmore Leonard Fantastic Fiction

THE BROTHERHOOD

USA (96 mi) 1968

The Brotherhood Tom Milne from Time Out

Douglas, dressed up in droopy moustache and dyed hair, plays a board member of the New York Syndicate who has nostalgic memories of how much better things were done in the old Mafia days. Not surprisingly, he falls foul of the syndicate, flees into retirement in Sicily, and confronts the man sent to kill him - none other than the younger brother (Cord) he raised with selfless devotion. Ritt can do very little with the breast-beating which attends this tale of brotherly love and self-sacrifice. It therefore wends its way, slowly and stolidly, to the bitter end, pausing to allow Luther Adler to brighten things up briefly as a plump, greasy and rather engaging stool pigeon turned respectable.

DVD Verdict [Barrie Maxwell]

"Frank, I'm in! I've always been in, haven't I?"
"You don't know how long I've been waiting to hear you say that."

After the success of three films in the 1962-1964 period that were produced by his own company (Lonely Are the Brave, The List of Adrian Messenger, and Seven Days In May), Kirk Douglas stepped back from the production side of things to concentrate solely on acting for a while. Then in 1968, a tale of the inner conflicts of a mafia family piqued his interest sufficiently to reactivate his production involvement. The resulting film, produced by and starring Kirk Douglas, was The Brotherhood, released by Paramount in 1968. Paramount has now made the film available on DVD in a bare-bones version.

Frank Ginetta is a middle-aged Mafioso who has taken over the family business from his deceased father and remains loyal to the old ways. His brother, Vince, fresh from a university education and a stint in the army and newly married expresses his desire to join Frank in the business. At first, things seem to go well, but Frank is having problems with the other members of the Syndicate who want to branch into new areas that Frank feels are too risky. Vince sides with the Syndicate leading to violent arguments between the two. Meanwhile, Frank learns that one of the Syndicate members—Dom Bertolo—was responsible for the death of his father and many of his associates, and makes plans to seek revenge. The results of these actions will pit brother against brother in a deadly confrontation.

In light of the The Godfather and the sequels that would come later, The Brotherhood has a certain interest for the plot elements that are similar, not to mention one brief reference to the Corleone family. Some of these elements include: a younger brother who is educated with the intention of keeping him clear of the family business but gets involved of his own volition; a family head who resists new business lines; and a killing that forces a family member to retreat to Sicily—not to mention the usual intrigue, backstabbing, and intergenerational conflict. The difference is in the scope. The Brotherhood is a smaller-scale film that focuses on the internal workings of the Mafia as well as the home family relationships of its members. By focusing on the latter, the film also seems to be romanticizing what it implies to be the more admirable older, personal but more overtly violent ways as opposed to the newer, more insidious and impersonal methods. (I should mention that there are some brief scenes of violence in the film, but compared to current films, The Brotherhood is benign in that regard.) The story that frames these themes is a straightforward one with a nod to tragedy, but ultimately offers few surprises, so in the end, one's enjoyment of the film chiefly hinges on the quality of the performances.

Kirk Douglas's involvement in the production of a film usually resulted in him putting forth his better efforts on the acting side as well. Here, he plays Frank Ginetta and delivers one of his typically intense performances—perhaps a little too intense at times, but believable nonetheless. The contrast between his work and Alex Cord (as brother Vince) who is a much lower key performer works well in the film and makes the eventual ending very effective. (For some reason, seeing Cord made me think of the last film I saw him in—a clunker called Air Rage in which he was embarrassing. It's good to see that he wasn't always so bad.) The Brotherhood also benefits from a number of good supporting-player casting decisions. Irene Papas manages to avoid a mere window-dressing role as Frank's wife with an affecting performance in which she allows her expressive face to convey emotion as opposed to using mere words. Luther Adler does well as Dom Bertolo and it's a pleasure to see veteran character actor Eduardo Ciannelli as an elderly, deposed Mafia chief (one of his last roles). Other familiar faces are Murray Hamilton and Joe De Santis.

Direction is by Martin Ritt who, during a feature film directing career that spanned 34 years from 1957 to 1990, made a number of interesting films including Hud, Hombre, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Sounder, Norma Rae, and Murphy's Romance. The Brotherhood is an efficiently directed exercise that not only displays some nice location shooting in both New York and Sicily, but also does so with interesting camera placement and movement. One shot of Douglas approaching on foot along a long, deserted walkway by the water is effectively used to emphasize how isolated his character has become in the film, for example.

Paramount has delivered its usual fine transfer in this 1.85:1 anamorphic presentation. The DVD looks very good. Colours are rich and bright. Blacks are deep and glossy, and shadow detail is very good. This transfer doesn't show its age; there is only the very occasional speckle to see. Some minor edge enhancement is noticeable, however. That aside, Paramount is to be commended for how well The Brotherhood looks.

Dolby Digital 2.0 mono sound tracks are provided in both English and French. The results are actually quite dynamic, with the dialogue having some real presence to it. Lalo Schifrin's score is not particularly memorable so we don't miss much on that account by virtue of the mono track. English subtitles are included.

There is no supplementary content whatsoever.

The Brotherhood is an entertaining film that has extra interest by virtue of the inevitable comparisons with The Godfather. It scores with fine performances that don't try to make more of the material than is warranted. Paramount's DVD efforts with the film transfer are admirable, but even for that company, the supplementary material is poor (well, non-existent). A rental is certainly warranted, but a purchase is likely only for Kirk Douglas enthusiasts.

DVD Talk [Adam Tyner]

digitallyOBSESSED! [Rich Rosell]

All Movie Guide [Brian J. Dillard]

Boxoffice Magazine [Wade Major]

User reviews from imdb Author: John T. Ryan (redryan64@hotmail.com) from Chicago, Illinois, United States

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

New York Times [Vincent Canby] (registration req'd)

THE MOLLY MAGUIRES

USA (124 mi) 1970 ‘Scope

The Molly Maguires Tom Milne from Time Out

Less simplistic than most Ritt movies, this is set in the Pennsylvania of 1876, where the miners, Catholic Irish and surly, are at the mercy of their predominantly Protestant employers after an ineffectual strike to improve conditions. The nub of the film comes in the odd, abrasive friendship that springs up between Connery, leader of a secret organisation committed to acts of terrorism until the bosses submit, and Harris as an informer equally disgruntled but out for his own interests. Essentially two facets of the same personality, the pair are cunningly used to explore areas of ambivalence in the extent to which the actions of each are justified. The trouble, as so often with Ritt films, is that the situation remains interesting rather than involving. But at least this detachment means that one has the leisure to savour the textures of Wong Howe's magnificent camerawork.

Underrated Pick: The Molly Maguires - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, September/October 2013

Which side are you on? The law-and-order-era audiences for Martin Ritt’s 1970 period drama may have wanted to be told which side to take, but this story of violent underground resistance in a mostly Irish 1870s Pennsylvania mining town presents a tough choice: a) an undercover detective (Richard Harris) hired by company police to pose as a coal-pusher and infiltrate the titular rebel miners; or b) said group’s remorseless leader (Sean Connery, virtually silent for the first 40 minutes). There’s also c) other exhausted, underpaid miners, but their grey lives, livened by booze and murderball, are grim to contemplate, thanks to cameraman James Wong Howe’s stark rendering of coal-dusted landscapes and faces. Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein, blacklistees both, imbue their slow-burning tale of trust and betrayal with a hard purity of purpose—a big-budget militant film that doesn’t end by flinching (or star Sally Field).

Cannes 2009: Mining for Morals ("The Molly Maguires," Ritt) on ... - Mubi Dan Kasman from Mubi, May 15, 2009

Moustaches, miners, and anti-industry terrorism: we have our first masterpiece from Cannes. Martin Ritt’s 1970 The Molly Maguires, a breath of There Will Be Blood but focusing not on an individual character but individual ethics, shows the American of 1876 (or ’70?) as a police state of industrial oppression. The atmosphere—palpable and literal, political—is so simply a fact of the film’s world that we barely ever see the terrible conditions of the coal mine setting, nor the cruelty of its owners. Ritt treats the mine, its dismal town and their grave interiors—all coated physically and emotionally by the crepuscular pallor of coal dust—as a simple, wretched material inevitability of a capitalist country. This saves time: we understand with minimal exposition the state of labor, of living, of human beings in this world. This state becomes the stage for a drama of morality, with a magnetic, intelligently insular Richard Harris as a man looking for success in America by spying on the mine’s violently rebellious secret society for the police. The catch, so beautiful, is that the world is so naturally resigned to its repression by a police-industrial system that empowers those-on-top and marginalizes those-on-bottom that the actions of the terrorist miner gang—led by Sean Connery—and the decision for Harris to stay with the police or side with the locals, clearly has no real impact or importance except to the spirit of the individuals involved. So: we are left with the moral beauty of the miners, the swinging ambivalence of Harris—transforming Bogart’s middle-route persona for the Method acting of the ‘60s—and the force of the production design and James Wong Howe’s color photography, creating a world faded and deadened by dirt, labor, cyclical struggles, bloodshed, and a moral wilderness.

The Molly Maguires Steven Schoenherr

This film is a drama of Irish immigrants and coal miners in 1876 Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. The Mollie Maguires were a secret society of Irish miners who used violence against mine owners and officials. The Pinkerton Detective Agency hired James McParland to infiltrate the Mollies, resulting in the arrest of 20 leaders, who were tried, convicted and executed. McParland's testimony at the trials, and Allen Pinkerton's book on The Molly Maguires and the Detectives have shaped historical interpretations to the present day, painting the Irish as evil terrorists and the Pinkerton's as responsible enforcers of law and order. The Mollies themselves left no evidence or writings, and remain mysterious. Not until J. Walter Coleman's 1936 book The Molly Maguire Riots did historical interpretation become more balanced. Martin Ritt's film is based on Coleman and the 1964 book by Arthur Lewis, and is sympathetic to the Mollies. It was filmed in the late spring and early summer of 1968 at the only functioning 19th century anthracite coal mine remaining in America (until 1971), the Council Ridge Colliery at Eckley, Pennsylvania. "Martin Ritt was a postwar victim of the Blacklist and has a passionate sympathy for the downtrodden and victims of society. His 1979 film Norma Rae was based on the real-life story of textile union activist Crystal Lee Sutton in her fight against the J.P. Stevens Co. in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. His last film in 1990 was Stanley & Iris that focused on illiteracy. His 1963 film Hud portrayed Paul Newman as an "anti-hero" character, and won an Oscar for James Wong Howe's photography. In Molly Maguires Howe's photography again is a key part of the narrative, both realistic and abstract in presentation." (quote from Magill's)

The Molly Maguires were not simple gangsters, but practiced "retributive justice" using violence against violence in the industrial revolutions of the anthracite mining region of the 19th century. When mine owners hired thugs to assault and intimidate the miners, the Mollies responded in kind. They coexisted with the Irish fraternal organization, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) and the first coal miner trade union founded in 1868, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA), but they were a separate organization. When mine owner Franklin B. Gowen and the Reading Railroad began to buy and consolidate the anthracite mines, the Mollies responded with violence in 1875 Schuylkill County, mostly in rural areas rather than densely populated urbanizing areas such as Pottsville. There was also conflict between skilled British and Welsh miners and the unskilled Irish laborers, between nativists and Catholics. The first wave of Molly Maguire violence took place during the Civil War, as anti-Union Irish opposed the war effort of government officials. The labor activism of the Irish, trying to organize a union, was equated with treason, and after the war the formation of new police units continued the suppression of all labor activism. One of the main issues was mine safety, as accidents increased after the Civil War, such as the 110 killed in the Avondale fire in 1869 caused by poor ventilation and single entryways. After 1870, Gowen began to cut wages from the $50 earned per month by the average laborer. In 1873 Gowen hired the Pinkerton agency to suppress labor opposition, and undercover agents McParland and P. M. Cummings were sent into the coal mines. The "Long Strike" of the anthracite miners from Jan. to June 1875 failed, and the WBA trade union led by John Siney collapsed. Gowen spend $4 million in the Long Strike to defeat the union, and to destroy John Kehoe, successful saloon owner who opposed Gowen's political ambitions to control Schuylkill County.

Therefore, for political and personal and economic reasons, Gowen and the Pinkertons created the "myth of the Molly Maguire" According to Harold Aurand, "The myth that Molly Maguire was the enforcer for the Workingmen's Benevolent Association confirmed a long held suspicion that a permanent working class presented a danger to the Republic. From this perception the episode demonstrated how easily a gang of cutthroats or a demagogue could seize control of the workers. The myth simultaneously rendered the ensuing class war understandable while justifying the employment of violence against strikers. The Pennsylvania State Legislature, for example, condoned the shooting of strikers in Scranton during the 1877 strike by noting "many of the Molly Maguires, driven out of Schuylkill County. . .gathered in and about that city." The same myth justified the corporation's attack upon the social and political autonomy of the community. The Molly Maguires reputedly overawed local authority by violence, political corruption, and perjured testimony. Only the corporation, the Philadelphia and Reading, had the resources to break their sinister grip. By casting the corporation as the champion of law and order and the community as prone to corruption, the myth provided a rationale for the corporate take-over. But the myth not only served the interests of capital; it provided labor with a creditable method of protest. Absenteeism and sabotage were not readily available instruments of protest to the mine worker. The anthracite industry rarely worked more than half a year. Miners owned their own tools and other forms of sabotage carried great personal risks. A coffin notice, however, could, thanks to Molly Maguire, strike fear in the heart of any foreman or superintendent and therefore permitted the individual mine worker to protest in a meaningful manner. The fear generated by a coffin notice also could be employed to intimidate scabs.”

E L L I P S I S - The Accents of Cinema: THE MOLLY MAGUIRES (Dir ... Omar Ahmed, Jne 16, 2009

Revisiting Martin Ritt's 'The Molly Maguires' - International Policy Digest Peter Lee, November 5, 2013

DVD Savant Review: The Molly Maguires Glenn Erickson

dOc DVD Review: The Molly Maguires (1970) Jon Danziger

DVD Verdict Paul Corupe

Review for The Molly Maguires (1970) Shane Burridge

User reviews from imdb Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

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Random Movie Club Rich

Relive the Saga of the Molly Maguires | irishphiladelphia.com April 23, 2009

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

New York Times (registration req'd) Roger Greenspun

THE GREAT WHITE HOPE

USA (103 mi) 1970 ‘Scope

Howard Sackler's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a key work in the genre that one drama critic has defined once and for all as “middle seriousness”—e.g., The Elephant Man, Amadeus. This film version, directed by Martin Ritt, is plop in the middle too—provocative but never challenging. Mainly, this is James Earl Jones exercising his voice and Jane Alexander working her brow. With Lou Gilbert, Chester Morris, and Robert Webber (1970).

All Movie Guide [Michael Costello]

Based on Howard Sackler's play, which eventually found its way to Broadway and earned the author a Pulitzer Prize, this film version casts the James Earl Jones (The Last Remake of Beau Geste, Conan the Barbarian) and Jane Alexander (All the President's Men, The Cider House Rules), who also were the stars of the stage production, and their strong performances landed them much-deserved Oscar nominations. Loosely based on the real story of the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Johnson, The Great White Hope offers up an unflinching look at the racism and persecution that existed (and some might say, still does exist) in the United States for Black men that dared to succeed out of poverty to be the best in the country at anything. It's also a study about the difficulties of a man railing against societal pressures against him and his way of life, despite knowing in his heart that he is right and the rest of the world too rooted in prejudice to realize they are wrong.

In the film, the name of the fighter is changed from Jack Johnson to Jack Jefferson, who finds he is vilified wherever he goes after becoming the nation's first Black heavyweight champion. His opponents are terms as "great white hopes", who hope to gain the title, not just for themselves, but to restore it for their race where they feel it rightfully belongs. What really riles up the white public isn't that the champion is Black, it's that he flaunts it so fragrantly, mocking them for their beliefs, smiling even when taunted, and even marrying a white woman. When the Mann act, which disallows the transport of women to across state lines for "immoral purposes" is misused, Jefferson is sentenced for up to three years for the "crime" for relations with his woman. Jack escapes, leaving the U.S. for Europe in the hopes of continuing his career, but he finds prejudice exists wherever he goes, However, until he is defeated by a white man, he will always get his challengers, as the white promoters are determined to show Jack, and the rest of the world, that Jefferson isn't better than the best white man.

Sackler wrote The Great White Hope almost like a passion play, showing one man's descent into the nadir of human existence because of a public that can't overcome its own fears and hatred in order to learn acceptance, tolerance, and ability to change. Just as white America could not look past the color of Jefferson's skin to see him as just a man, neither could black America, who pinned their hopes, dreams and racial pride on the most successful and popular African-American of his era. However, Jefferson is no Christ figure, as Sackler made sure that he was seen as nothing more than a man, while the racist public are also not shown as pure evil, merely a product of the environment they were living in. although some acts are inexcusable even in that age of racial intolerance.

Watching The Great White Hope today isn't so easy, as the racial epithets and acts of sheer bigotry do make for some very uncomfortable realizations and remembrances of the ugliness of the nation's past. I suppose one of the more ironic twists is that the subject matter of the film was largely considered uncontroversial at the time of its release in 1970, but if it were made today, it would probably be much more dilute in its racial slurs and depictions of a racist society, perhaps to the point where it would have little impact. Due to its volatile content, it is rare nowadays to catch the film on television, but it is definitely worth seeking out for those who can keep an open mind, particularly among those interested in films dealing with heated racial climates.

Regardless of where someone comes down on the subject matter of the film, this is still a solid drama, with two magnificent performances from Jones and Alexander, This is Alexander's debut performance in a theatrically-released production, but it's certainly impressive, Director Martin Ritt is no stranger to controversial dramas about difficult subjects, and while this may not have been as flashy or as well received as similar efforts like Norma Rae and Hud, it definitely is a respectable effort that provokes much more thought than most films that center around the world of boxing, celebrity, and social status.

The Great White Hope is a film more interested in themes of social commentary more than it is about boxing, and in fact, the boxing footage is one of the weaknesses, with poor choreography, unrealistic delivery, and stiff presentation. Don't watch the film if you want to see a film about boxing. Do watch it if you want to see about one man trying desperately to be his own man in a world that hated everything he represented, It's a forceful and memorable film that shows us how far we've come in our society in terms of outward racial hostility, but also, how little we've progressed underneath the politically correct surface when a film featuring a love affair between a black man and white woman is something that continues to merit mentioning whenever it appears to this day.

Arctic Shores Contemporary Reviews: THE GREAT WHITE HOPE (1970 ... Robert S. Miller

Ersatz Ethos The Great White Hope opening Dec. 21 at the Music Hall Michael Sragow from The Harvard Crimson, December 17, 1970

The Great White Hope - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco from Turner Classic Movies

TV Guide Online

DVD Verdict [Christopher Kulik]

Movie Review - The Great White Hope - 'Great White Hope' Brought ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 12, 1970

Great White Hope: Not Great, Little Hope Against Johnson Wayne Rozen from The New York Times, July 3, 2010

SPORTS BRIEFING | BOXING; Seeking A Pardon For Johnson The New York Times, July 3, 2010

Pulling No Punches George Gene Gustines from The New York Times, December 24, 2008

Sports of The Times; In Johnson's Rise and Fall, A View Into Bonds's Plight William C. Rhoden from The New York Times, April 7, 2006

The Times’s 1910 Boxing Article John L. Sullivan from The New York Times, July 4, 1910 (pdf format)

SOUNDER

USA (105 mi) 1972 ‘Scope

Sounder | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Painfully honest, unpretentious, and blessedly simple, Martin Ritt's 1972 portrait of a black family trying to survive the Depression, the infinite cruelties of Louisiana sharecropping, and the pain of separation is moving without being mawkish, charming without being coy. Not the emotional blockbuster the PR department of 20th Century-Fox would have had it, the film is nevertheless rewarding and quietly powerful—with fine performances from Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks. 105 min.

Sounder Time Out London

Conscientiously made, with a script by a well-known black playwright and small parts filled in by locals, this attempts to go some way beyond the merely nostalgic in its recreation of the life of a black sharecropper's family during the Depression. Beneath the apparent resignation of the characters, there lurks a determination to beat the life they've been forced into. It even points, through the boys' discovery of an all-black school which teaches black history and black pride, to a militant future. But if you compare Ritt's film to Third World movies about oppressed people living in startlingly similar conditions, you notice what's missing: the feeling of bone-edge existence and incipient anger. Those films serve an immediate function, to change the lives of the people they're made about and for; Ritt's film must respond to the needs of an entertainment industry, and in its desire to be uplifting, leaves its characters one-dimensional without ensuring that the one dimension is heroic.

User reviews from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

There is a viscerally powerful moment in this 1972 film classic that still gets to me. It's the look of desperately aching relief on Rebecca Morgan's face and the palpable sound of her breathless anticipation as she runs down the long dirt road to embrace her husband Nathan Lee for the first time since he went to prison. I almost get as tear-drenched as she does. Whether tenaciously holding her family together or dealing cautiously with the powerful white community, Cicely Tyson plays Rebecca with a searing combination of emotional eloquence and subtle nuance. Yet, her performance is not the dominant factor of the film, as director Martin Ritt, a specialist in human dramas set in the South, has directed a wondrous ensemble piece focused on a family of black sharecroppers in Depression-era Louisiana. Based on a children's book by William H. Armstrong and adapted by Lonne Elder III, the movie is blissfully free of stereotypes or dramatic manipulation.

The plot is compact. Nathan Lee takes his son David Lee raccoon hunting with their aptly named dog, Sounder (he howls when he sees them). The family hits particularly hard times when Nathan Lee steals a ham for his family and is carted off to a prison camp for a year. David Lee sets out to find him and happens upon a school run by Camille, a kindly but firm teacher. She teaches him about important African-American figures in history, and he becomes desperate to go to school. David Lee returns home, and soon after, a maimed Nathan Lee returns as well. Not wanting to take advantage of Camille's offer to stay with her to go to school, David Lee is convinced by his father that school is the only thing he should pursue.

It is a rare thing, a family drama that does not patronize to its audience and remains compelling to adults, and it is especially shameful that the film rarely resurfaces for new generations to enjoy. Beyond Tyson, Paul Winfield is equally affecting as Nathan Lee, and in the pivotal role of David Lee, Kevin Hooks (now a successful TV director) brings strength to his plaintive performance. Effective in smaller roles are blues musician Taj Mahal as family friend Ike (he also provides the evocative period music), Carmen Mathews as the conflicted Mrs. Boatwright and Janet MacLachlan as Camille. Intriguingly, Hooks directed a 2003 Disney remake and cast Winfield as the teacher in his last role before his death. In need of a makeover and a treatment deserving of the film's quality, the 2002 DVD has a decent though not outstanding print transfer and a bare minimum of extras (photo galleries, cast biographies).

Let the Trumpet Sound The NY Press, May 3, 2005

Sounder is one of the greatest films ever made in this country, but guardians of film culture repeatedly choose to overlook it. That is, until the 1972 film shows this weekend (April 29-30) at the Tribeca Film Festival. Call its revival long overdue, perfect timing for a hopeless age, or the most worthwhile movie event of the spring. By any means necessary, see it.

Though it's strange for a film of this caliber to be relegated to a film festival's "family movies" section (perhaps a better positioning for The Godfather), that pigeonholing may explain Sounder's harsh neglect. Based on an award-winning children's book named after the pet dog owned by a family of black sharecroppers in Depression-era Louisiana, Sounder's emotional values stand in striking contrast to this week's trendy premieres, the Argentinian dysfunctional-family drama The Holy Girl and the French pampered-youth character study A Tout de Suite (see below). These movies shrewdly appeal to the young-adult audience's vain sense of worldliness, but Sounder reveals the world through heartening, domestic subject matter. Anyone who thinks they're above this has not understood how Sounder's classically simple story was transformed by its director, Martin Ritt.

Once a blacklisted actor, Ritt is best known for switching careers and becoming a director of the adult dramas The Long Hot Summer, Hud, Hombre and Norma Rae. After several early-70s flops, Ritt seized the opportunity to work for children's-film producer Robert Radnitz. Free to pursue his humanitarian convictions without succumbing to the box-office trend of blaxploitation, Ritt elevated Sounder so far above its apparent genre that just last year the popsters at Entertainment Weekly cluelessly described it as an animal-lovers' tearjerker.

Sounder is the most profoundly accomplished movie of Ritt's career. Accustomed to the studio style of big-name actors and a grandiloquent, widescreen format, Ritt simplified his technique. Key roles of the Morgan family were embodied by then little-known actors—father Nathan Lee (Paul Winfield), mother Rebecca (Cicely Tyson) and their son David (Kevin Hooks). The script was written by screenwriter Lonne Elder III, whose Off-Broadway landmark Ceremonies in Dark Old Men was a respected hit Off-Broadway in 1969. Thus, everything feels fresh, but Sounder never received adequate credit. (Oscar nominations for Best Film, Actor, Actress and Screenplay, but no wins. Oscar's favorite that year, the irresistibly lurid and violent The Godfather, changed movie history—perhaps not for the better.)

Ritt and cinematographer John Alonzo created gently encompassing and meaningful landscapes: As the Morgans walk home from a softball game, they pass a segregated white church whose intimidating structure gleams in the background. (Blues musician Taj Mahal gets off a keen riposte.) Through such imagery, Ritt and Elder's politics seem purified into naturalism. This American family drama has a visual clarity more in tone with such humanist European landmarks as De Sica's The Bicycle Thief and Renoir's Toni as well as Pather Panchali by Indian master Satyajit Ray. The rarity of such achievement may account for the antipathy of contemporary critics and curators. More than a decade later, the cognoscenti praised East Village hipster Jim Jarmusch's pared-down sensuality in Stranger Than Paradise. It began the disaffection of modern cinema, whereas Ritt's subtle technique is always elegant, exuberant. The famous homecoming scene where the father returns from prison (after stealing a ham to feed his starving family) pulses with each character's expression of strong emotion, culminating in an unforgettable icon: Nathan Lee's arms stretch across the breadth of the CinemaScope screen ,embracing his entire family.

This is good sentiment. Ritt and Elder exude affection while examining the taboo subject of American poverty, but they do so without the liberal condescension so long admired in the James Agee-Walker Evans book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ritt set a new standard—compassionately, but based on the urgent need that swept across the U.S. during the Civil Rights protests and riots of the 60s. Sounder dares to test liberalism and find it wanting. It's one thing for Renoir to assert loving insight; an American humanist has to divine the soul while critiquing political action. One great, complex sequence shows Mrs. Boatwright (Carmen Matthews), the white woman who hires Rebecca to do laundry, failing to get help from the hard-hearted sheriff. "You can't say I didn't try," she laments, but the sense of futility weighs on her face. When she visits the Morgans the next day with a map to outline the route to the prison where Nathan is held, Mrs. Boatwright's geography (her political foresight) proves pitifully shaky. Better than all of Driving Miss Daisy, this moment epitomizes the uncertainty of the white-black civil rights alliance. "That's all right," Rebecca assures her. "When the time comes we'll get there." That's Lonne Elder's recognition that the weight of the Struggle—the achievement of the Civil Rights social promise—rested on black folks' self-determination.

Sounder's political sophistication becomes sweetly apparent in the metaphor of David's lonely journey to find his sequestered father. Here the film reaches two empathetic peaks: first when David discovers a progressive classroom and defends a scared student, then when the teacher, Camille Johnson (Janet MacLachlan), presents him with books including W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folks, which she has committed to oral tradition. (Pauline Kael praised Sounder as "the birth of black consciousness on the screen," but it actually remains the finest testament of Hollywood's black consciousness.) Faith in education makes Sounder seem out of fashion today. David's reaching toward the world outside his Louisiana parish is unconnected to careerism. His father memorably outlines it as a way to "beat the death they got laid out for you."

Welcome Sounder to the pantheon. It's a reminder of what unites us as moviegoers and a species.

SOUNDER Review – Paul Winfield, Cicely Tyson d: Martin Ritt Dan Erdman from Alt Film Guide, also seen here: Alternative Film Guide [Dan Erdman]

Sounder - TCM.com Kerryn Sherrod from Turner Classic Movies

Oscar Vault Monday – Sounder, 1972 (dir. Martin Ritt) « the diary ... Cinema Fanatic

PopMatters [Jake Meaney]

DVD Town [James Plath]

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1972 [Erik Beck]

filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]

The first black renaissance - African American Cinema - actor ... Film Reference

Black Classic Movies

Classic Film Guide

User reviews from imdb Author: Wayne Malin (wwaayynnee51@hotmail.com) from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: movibuf1962 from Washington, DC

TV Guide Online

DVDBeaver.com [Gary W Tooze]

Movie Review - Sounder - Screen: 'Sounder' Opens:Story of a Negro ... Roger Greenspun from The New York Times, September 25, 1972

New York Times Holiday DVD’S, Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek, October 31, 2008

PETE ‘N’ TILLIE

USA (100 mi) 1972 ‘Scope

Pete 'n' Tillie

This starts out as one of those hard-boiled romances in which Matthau and Burnett, performing with characteristic professionalism, graduate from affair to marriage while Julius J Epstein's script supplies them with suitably grudging wisecracks. But then it gets taken over by a series of soap-style catastrophes: he screws his secretary, their baby dies, they separate, she's in a 'rest home'...but everything's really all right, of course. There's even a moment when you think she's going to marry campy Rene Auberjonois - unfortunately not. Often incidentally funny, though.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States

The main accomplishment of Pete 'n' Tillie is the skill put into it for hitting the symmetry amongst the hilarious and the heartbreaking, between moments of earnest gravitas and other moments of priceless high comedy and even slapstick. What happens in the story is supposed to happen. Life's like that. In one go, Pete 'n' Tillie is an entertainment feat, with its high comic panache, its dexterity with bittersweet dramaturgy and its star turns for its two tremendously talented leads. The special thing about this movie is the way it merges those two tonal styles, with even more subtlety and naturalism than the films of later periods.

Indeed, this is a sharp, surprisingly heartfelt and charming movie of the early '70s, with a skillfully lasting and subdued tone of melancholy. Writer-producer Julius J. Epstein has seized hold of priceless dialogue and a theme of togetherness. The title characters are two sardonically mileage-developing San Francisco pragmatists who meet at a party and like one another virtually in spite of themselves. Owing to their age, they're seasoned enough to realize that "love without irritation is just lust." They get going, wed, raise a bright son and experience a paralyzing family predicament whose subtle, poignant handling is the most appreciable thing about this offbeat love story beholden to George Stevens' superior Penny Serenade.

It's a straightforward comedy that soaks up tragedy without an awkward wrinkle. This owes to the always subtle, sophisticated and refined direction of Martin Ritt, normally helming much less sentimental material, shrewdly of course. Then there is Geraldine Page, as Burnett's well-heeled friend, whose succinct, horrified charade at a police station and the subsequent catfight pack that beautiful release of laughter after a tragic peak. Like most great comics, Burnett, held in rein by a somber, down-to-earth story, is impressive, even in graver moments that feel as if the material was contrived to the point of bathos. Matthau has given more cumbersome performances but none more disarming since The Odd Couple.

New York Times [Howard Thompson] (registration req'd)

CONRACK A- 94

USA (106 mi) 1974 ‘Scope

One of the more unforgettable films about the teaching profession, but also at gently exposing the racial divides of the 60’s, a small gem of a film that beautifully reflects the spirit and culture of the times, not to mention what is perhaps Jon Voigt’s finest onscreen performance, finding just the right note of charm, intelligence, and a beguiling Southern appeal as a new teacher assigned to the 6^th to 8^th graders in a single room schoolhouse on Yamacow Island off the coast of South Carolina teaching poor, uneducated black kids, none of whom even know what country they live in or what ocean sits just outside their doors. While these kids have repeatedly been called lazy and ignorant by the school principal (Madge Sinclair), and are familiar with the strap, no one ever challenged them to learn anything. Their curiosity is endearing, as immediately they wonder why this guy is so different from anyone else who taught them before, someone who actually challenges them to challenge what he is telling them. In a world where strict obedience is the school rule, Voight opens up a whole new set of doors they never dreamed existed, which changes the way they see the world around them. Voight is Pat Conroy, but the mispronounced Conrack sticks because that’s as close as most kids can come to pronouncing his name. The guy is cocky and headstrong, but never arrogant or full of himself, which is a pleasure to see, as he literally performs theatrically in front of these kids to hold their attention, moving around the room with glee, not afraid to rough-house with the boys at football, or turn unconventional, like teaching them how to swim on an island where none of the kids know how, or watch a movie for the first time, or listen to the music of a Brahms “Lullaby” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” where it’s such a pleasure to hear Voight extol the mysterious wonderment in the sound of death rapping at the door in the ominous opening chords of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, where the kids just sit in rapturous attention.

While it would be easy to question another story about whites holding the so-called answer for minority populations, which by now is so cliché’d that it’s nearly the norm in the movies, see DANGEROUS MINDS (1995) and FREEDOM WRITERS (2007), or even branching out into social commentary in DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990) or even AVATAR (2009), but Voight’s commitment to these kids is so startlingly convincing, not to mention bursting with energy and life, that he blows all the stereotype theories out the window because all he really wants is for these kids to experience life like the rest of us. He doesn’t want any backwater school system to hold them back because he knows what they can achieve. He’s the genuine article, a true believer, and the film is based on the actual teaching experience documented by Pat Conroy’s 1972 autobiography The Water Is Wide. In time, however, his unconventional teaching methods become too noticeable to overlook, so the administration (Hume Cronyn) tries to reel him in, refusing his request to allow the kids to take a field trip off the island (for the first time in their lives) and celebrate Halloween like the rest of the kids in America, a holiday they had never heard of before. Conroy buys them costumes, arranges for people to accommodate them overnight, and gains sufficient trust from the kids’ families to let them go, so he takes them anyway and their trip is a wonderful contrast to the only life that they know. The use of locations and real students is particularly effective in this film. When Martin Ritt was scouting locations for his earlier film SOUNDER (1972), he was unable to film in Georgia due to racist threats, and had to settle for Louisiana (What? No racists there?). When Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter heard about this, he offered to clear land for whatever project Ritt wanted to do next, so when Ritt informed him about Conrack, Carter gave Ritt an entire island to film on AND recruited kids from a local school to star in the movie. So the film brilliantly retains its regional authenticity all the way through, much like Julie Dash’s subsequent film shot on the islands off the coast of Georgia, DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991). While the film has such a memorably affirmative view of life, it’s also interesting how death also adds poignancy, reminding us what this film has to offer about getting every last breath out of life while you can.

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Ritt's taste for significant subjects and some heavy underlining of his themes is confirmed by this tale of a white, hip, long-haired, anti-Vietnam war teacher who takes a backwoods assignment which lands him in a one-room black school where he confronts ignorance and deprivation of a depth he had never dreamed existed. Mercifully, the potentially dubious aspects of the subject are mostly exorcised, in part by a strong script (adapted from the book by real-life teacher Pat Conroy), but largely by the engaging and persuasive performance Ritt draws from Voight (equally convincingly backed by the mainly juvenile cast). Conrack treads a line perilously close to Sounder, but avoids that film's mawkish contrivance.

Education Week: 'Conrack': Then and Now Jonathan Burack

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of revisiting an old friend. That friend was, and still is, one of my favorite motion pictures about education. The 1974 film "Conrack," directed by Martin Ritt, is the story of a young, idealistic white man who goes to teach a group of culturally isolated black kids on an island off the coast of South Carolina. The film is based on The Water Is Wide, Pat Conroy's autobiographical novel. In the film, Pat Conroy is played by John Voight—"Conrack" is the name the kids force him to adopt.

"Conrack" is still a thrilling and inspiring film. But revisiting it in 2001 was an odd and disorienting experience for me. I first saw the movie when it was released in 1974, at a time when I was myself involved in an alternative school in the Midwest. At that school, we were all striving (not too successfully, I fear) to embody and realize the same sort of educational vision that is so movingly presented in this film.

What's odd about seeing the film again now is to realize how old-fashioned and unacceptable as a teacher Conrack would be in the eyes of so many "progressives" in the field today, and to realize that his harshest critics would be the liberals and educational radicals who celebrated this film when it first came out. How the mighty have fallen.

What is clear from the moment Conrack begins to teach, for example, is that his approach is both teacher- and subject-centered. His passionate concern for his charges, and his visceral warmth in interacting with them, never once lead him to defer to their worldview or their uninformed impulses as guides for his own educational practice. Today, the triumph of student-centered rhetoric in the schools would render many of Conrack's moves deeply suspect.

His emphasis on facts, for instance, would be reviled today as a "drill and kill" stress on rote learning. He is constantly shouting out questions such as "What country do you live in?" "Who was the greatest ball player of all time?" "What's the longest river in the world?"—at one point, vigorously and relentlessly as his kids jog behind him on the beach. Far from boring them, the "drill" is inspiring, as in fact it can and should be in any good classroom. It takes on the musical cadence of call and response, infectiously pulling into the group's activities even the most withdrawn of Conrack's students.

It is true that the film offers little insight into the way in which Conrack's factual teaching was organized or how he contextualized those facts to make them meaningful. But it is clear how they function in the lives of the children he is teaching. They function as crystal-sharp beacons illuminating a world of which they have been kept ignorant. Conrack's tapestry of facts teases out the natural curiosity lying dormant in these children. It offers glimpses of the wonders that await those ready to work hard to learn more. In other words, the emphasis in the film on content over process is striking. Conrack, the quintessential radical teacher of the late '60s, is in this way presented as far closer in spirit to E.D. Hirsch Jr. than to the proponents of whole language, discovery learning, or constructivist pedagogy.

Worse still for Conrack's reputation today is his unabashed celebration of the best of Western civilization and the dead white males who made it. The most moving scene in the film, for me, is Conrack's playing of "a song" by Ludwig van Beethoven—the Fifth Symphony—after engaging the students with the idea that the opening notes are "death rapping at the door." His charges sit enthralled and overwhelmed by the music.

Today, Conrack would be raked over the coals for failing to use blues, rap, or at least Duke Ellington to awaken the pride and self-regard of his young black students. Likewise, for his constant quoting of ancient English poets, Isaac Newton, or even Paul Revere. True, Conrack does include several great African-Americans in his repertoire (at one point, it becomes clear that the kids have identified Jackie Robinson as the greatest ballplayer of all time). But Conrack fails utterly to make racial identity center stage, as the relentless drive to enhance self-esteem and rescue victimized pride would today dictate he should do.

In this sense, Conrack is far more in sync with the spirit of W.E.B. du Bois than with the precepts of the separatist form of multiculturalism so pervasive today, as is clear from this passage by du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk:

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

The film presents Conrack as a rebel, and the school authorities do come down hard on him for his anti-authoritarianism. And yet, Conrack is in fact deeply respectful of authority, the rules, and another current educational bad boy, competition. In an important scene, he angrily pulls the kids out of a free-for- all pileup on the football field. He scolds them bitterly for failing to understand football as a game of rules and a thing of beauty, played by gentlemen on a field of honor.

And as this scene and many others make clear, Conrack is also unhesitatingly forceful and physical with his kids. He hugs them, wrestles with them, and hurls them into the sea to force them to learn to swim. Today's harpies of political correctness would have had him up on child- abuse charges after his first day on the job.

At the same time, this movie hero is remarkably monogamous and old-fashioned when it comes to sex. He unswervingly endorses an abstinence-only stance in the one key scene where the issue is relevant, telling a 13-year-old girl that she'll be glad she refused to give herself to anyone but the one man who will one day prove worthy of the honor bestowed on him.

In short, the disorientation of the film for me was in the degree to which it makes clear how many liberals and '60s radicals who once praised this film now champion ideas that its main character would have rejected outright. The film forces one to a sad encounter with the fact that the "progress" of all too many progressives has actually transformed itself into the regress of retreat. Death rapping at the door, indeed.

Conrack and Its Critics | The Harvard Crimson Michael Sragow, May 15, 1974

"You can take any stupidity you like and say, there, that's a liberal for you. Word covers simply everything." --Wilfrid Sheed, Office Politics

FILM CRITICS HAVE been under such great pressures that it may be cruel to reprimand their insensitivity and silliness. The 60s, after all, were as tumultuous in New York film circles as they were in Washington, with no surcease of conflicts expected for the '70s. No sooner did beleaguered pundits establish film as art than they debated how it worked as art--whether it was visual, dramatic, or kinetic. The question "Are Hollywood directors really artists?," an extended corollary, took up a lot of print space from early on. Attacks later came from other quarters: what was film's relevance, its social responsibility? As that question now falls into cultural history's dustbin, sure to be reawakened at some future crisis, an entirely different medium--television--threatens to kill once and for all film's importance as art and communications.

Pity the poor film critics. Few have been able to keep their eye on the art they criticize, much less on the world that it reflects.

Conrack opened in New York a month ago. It received two pre-reviews. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael praised the freshness of the story: a young South Carolinian goes to isolated Yamacraw Island to teach illiterate black children. Kael loved the lustiness and poetic charm of the hero, Pat Conroy (known to his students as Conrack), who overcomes reactionary school officials and intransigent students and parents to give his class a sense of the world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic, applauded the film as entertainment, though he scored its faults more heavily than Kael; he singled out Jon Voight's performance and Martin Ritt's tactful, sympathetic direction, and noted that if the film relies on sentiment, organic, well-dramatized sentiment is always justifiable.

Then the post-premiere reviews descended, a deluge of chic critical epithets. Nora Sayre of The Times sniffed at the film's "liberalism" and "sentimentality," she felt that non-radical leftists have enough problems without such corniness. Newsweek's Paul Zimmerman asked, "Who needs a film about a white man who teaches blacks how to think?" (But if black children are taught to think by blacks or liberated whites, aren't the rednecks the only ones who lose?) And in Time, Richard Schickel compared Conroy's relentless idealism to Chinese water torture.

None of these reviews--as fuzzyminded as they were--presaged the visciousness of Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, or the pretentiousness of Eugenia Collier in the Sunday Times two weeks ago. Sarris attacked what he called "UNESCO-inclined critics," proclaiming that those who like Conrack (and other more-or-less "message" movies, including Sounder and Hoa Binh) are hopeless much-headed idealists, overwhelmed by uplift. But the critics Mad Andrew wrote about are figments of his imagination, since the only famous critics who praised the film (Kael and Kauffmann) are rigorous, not at all the "melting marsh-mallows" of his bile-ridden column. Sarris took potshots at the actual Conroy as well as at the film and its defenders, vaguely condemning him--though rhetorically denying it--for being young, energetic, individualistic, and anti-establishment. (Everything film critics are not, these days.)

Sarris was not as explicitly liberal-dumping as the others. But he did, consider the attitudes of the conservative school superintendent and the Yamacraw principal "realistic:" although what they counsel is the acquiescence of blacks before a racist society. Sarris was more concerned with savaging the do-gooder who confronts them. (I'd think even a New York conservative would find these sentiments uncomfortable.) Sarris's statement, "only the teacher has a private destiny, whereas the students are a clustered blob of oppressed humanity," betrays his critical carelessness. For Conrack is always exhorting his kids to learn, to achieve, "to be Caesar or nothing."

EUGENIA Collier's arguments were more persuasive. Her rightful concern for the film's neglect of native Sea Islands culture follows from her profession (she teaches black literature at a Baltimore college). But her professional disposition may well be the sole source of her criticism. Although she says, "the Sea Islands actually have a very rich folk culture," she reiterates her charge instead of proving her argument. According to Conroy's book, The Water is Wide (the basis for Irving Ravetch and Harriett Frank Jr.'s script) pollution from surrounding factories ruined Yamacraw Island and starved its hunters and fishermen. Frustration spurred violence that scarred all families. Perhaps Collier cannot believe that a black culture's "wisdom, strength and humor" could abide such adversity. Her contention that Conroy takes on "the White Man's Burden of bringing civilization to the uncivilized" misinterprets Conroy's purpose. When Conroy talks to his kids about general American history and culture (white and black--James Brown and Willie Mays get mentioned as much as Babe Ruth), his real aim is to encourage them to articulate and share their own thoughts and feelings.

ALTHOUGH JON VOIGHT performs wonders as Conroy--he is both sensitive and charismatic, full-bodied and full of wit--he doesn't have to carry the film. The 21 non-professional kids (all from the Georgia coast) act up a storm. When Voight's Conroy introduces his class to Brahms and Beethoven, or, in an effort to blow the lard from their brains, punctuates his classroom questions with a bike horn, we are gratified not only by the teacher's love and cleverness, but by the responses of his kids--abashed, suspicious, delighted, and finally openhearted.

The film does have problems. But they have little to do with race, liberality or mushiness. Ritt, Ravetch and Frank revel in the grotesque. The school superintendent and principal (glosses of groups of figures from Conroy's book) are educational Bull Connors. More interesting characters, like the island's hermit Mad Billie, and a fast-talking island slicker named Quickfellow, have neither history nor room for growth. The filmmakers also fail to develop some intriguing themes: Conroy must have influenced his children's lives beyond the classroom, but when their usually stand-offish parents strike to protest Conroy's dismissal, there is no explanation for the growth of their militancy. At times we see creators tug to pull their fable together: a midwife portentously tells Conroy, to "treat the kids right, and they'll do right by you," and he explains his work to the people of Beaufort, South Carolina (unbelievably) via sound van.

But to condemn Conrack for loose threads is like rejecting a lover for ugly toenails. At its best, the film embodies necessary humane values of a vigorous society: charity, strength and imagination.

According to Variety, Conrack is cooler box-office in New York than in other cities. You can't blame only semi-sighted, axe-grinding, propagandistic critics for its failure; the film has only one star, and little explicit sex or violence. But if critics were doing their jobs, rather than giving glib lip-service to politics, the film at least might have won the audience that flocked to Sounder. Conrack's makers took a story pregnant with social meaning and developed it in their own light, with unforced grit and soul; it would be scandalous if its poor showing kept others from doing the same. If filmmakers must fear being labeled "sentimental liberals" for telling the truth artistically, as they see it, the creative and critical arenas of politics and art have been debased.

Slant: Chuck Bowen

Obscure One-Sheet: Conrack (1974, Martin Ritt) Ned Merrill

Conrack--The Best Teacher Film I Have Yet To See. - Conrack ... shaolinxq from Epinion

David Sunga retrospective

User reviews from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

Conrack (1974 film) All Movie Guide

Channel 4 Film capsule review

The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review

Conrack (1974 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pat Conroy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Books by Pat Conroy | The Water is Wide

The Water Is Wide (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE FRONT

USA (95 mi) 1976

The Front Time Out London

Woody Allen, miscast in his first straight role (as a schnook who lends his name to blacklisted writers for ten percent of the take, eventually coming under scrutiny himself), struggles through a reenactment of the communist witch-hunting of the '50s. Although made by those who suffered blacklisting at first hand, the film pulls all its political punches, settling instead for sentimental narrative. Its suggestion that each individual can buck the brutality of political oppression by standing up against the bullies lies squarely in the great reactionary tradition: 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' replaces political analysis, and turns the film into an empty monument to the senility of American liberalism.

Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]

There's a moment very late in The Front where Howard Prince (Woody Allen, in an extraordinary dramatic performance), who's been fronting for blacklisted writers in 1950s Hollywood by putting his name on their scripts, is testifying to a House of Un-American Activities subcommittee. Having ruffled their feathers by turning their baiting non-questions around with non-incriminating non-answers, one of the committee members asserts, "We are not concerned at this time with anything other than the communist conspiracy in the entertainment world." When they request Prince to give them "just one name," even if it happens to be the name of a dead man (you can see the gears turning in Prince's head: "Why in the world would they even need the name of a dead man if not to make a public example?"), The Front's ultimate grasp of the truth of the nature of Hollywood McCarthyism is clear and devastating. The HUAC was nothing less insidious than a tool of the U.S. Government in an attempt to gain control of the rapidly pervasive entertainment industry and keep its messages in firm check, all the while maintaining plausible deniability and, thereby, superficially distancing themselves from Stalinesque state control. Perhaps because the film was written by, directed by, and included actors who were all blacklisted in the '50s, The Front takes this contemptible hypocrisy to the mat, and the film teems with a palpable sense of terror and outrage. Though it would be understandable if it resembled more of a writer's film than an auteur's, director Martin Ritt manages to add a visual sense of encroachment (his claustrophobia is an inversion of the agoraphobia in Alan J. Pakula's more celebrated All the President's Men) that enhances scriptor Walter Bernstein's layers of irony into a cinematic one-two knock-out. Bernstein smartly suggests how capitalism actually benefited from the oppression of suspected communists, and that the most bloodthirsty of prosecutors were actually capitalists in extremis, but doesn't dwell on them, giving full attention to the effect of the witch hunt on the world of entertainment. In this respect, Zero Mostel, who plays the genial clown Hecky Brown, represents the era's many crushed souls. Standing on a stage and belting out a showstopping number, all the while being hounded by a P.I. toady and witnessing his career crumbling around him, Mostel's panic and heartbreak give tragic resonance to the film.

The Front (1976) - Martin Ritt Foreign Movies DDL

Woody Allen as part-time bookie and all around schlemiel Howard Prince not only gets the girl of his dreams Florence Barrett, Andrea Marcovicci,in the end but also becomes a, though reluctant, hero as well.

Depicting the Red Scare in America circa 1953 and how it effected those in the entertainment world we first see Howard working as a cashier. Howard also takes bets on the side as a small time bookie, at a midtown Manhattan diner. Howard is then approached by his former school and now writer friend Alfred Miller, Michael Murphy. Alfred wants Howard to put his name on a number of scripts that he wrote and now can't get anyone on the TV networks to accept.

Alfred tells Howard that he'll give him 10% of what he gets paid for the scripts and that he has a number of other writer friends that are willing to do the same thing. Howard in hock with his bookie business takes the deal that Alfred, and his friends, gave him not knowing what he's really getting into. Howard is acting as a front for Alfred & friends, a group of black-listed TV script writers, and that can put him behind bars or even worse. Force him to rat on his friends in order to save his own neck. Before you know it Howard is the toast of the TV world with his writing getting rave reviews from the critics and having Florence, a script editor at the network where Howard works, thinking that he's the reincarnation of both Walt Withman and Victor Hugo.

What the movie "The Front" shows us is just how really ineffective the dreaded HAUC was in it's attempt to cleanse communists from off the TV tube and the movie's silver screen. Most of, if not all, of the people that it destroyed were nothing more that harmless dupes who for the most part didn't know the difference between communism from creationism. In fact the real communist subversives and spies came across as patriotic, if not more so, then the members of the HUAC themselves. The very fact that having any connections with a communist or pro-communist group would blow their cover had these real communist trouble-makers know enough not to be associated with them in order to throw off suspicion on themselves.

The saddest example in the film of the HUAC morbid actions was the case of Hecky Brown, Zero Mostel. Hecky used to be one of the top comedians in show business. Five years ago he marched in a May Day parade and that sealed his fate. Being told by HUAC honcho Hennessey, Remak Remsay, to rat on his friends who were with him at the parade then and who work with him now which Hecky refused or could't do. Hecky innocently told Hennessey that the only reason he marched in the May Day parade was to get close and romantic with one of the sexy marchers and thats all it, his marching in the parade, was about.

Forced to name names or lose his ability to make a living Hecky in the end couldn't bring himself to rat on his friends, including Howard. In no time Heckys career in show business was history. Broke alone with no means of supporting himself and his family poor Hecky checks into a midtown hotel room get himself good and dunk and then jumps out the window to his death.

Howard now realizing what he got himself into. Soon he'll have to face the HUAC and either talk or take long vacation behind bars for booking bets. Thats the only criminal charge that the committee could pin on him. Coming clean with Florence Howard tells her that he's nothing but a front and phony when it come to him being TV's best writer, as well him being a socially conscious intellectual. In fact he can barley write his own name much less an award winning TV or film script.

Howard tells Florence that when he's called to testifies before Hennessey and his goons on the HUAC he'll make her more proud of himself by what he tells them then all the phony-baloney BS that she believed about him in the past. Sure enough the next day Howard got the admiration and respect from Florence and everybody who ever knew him: by standing up to the HUAC and telling them just what they could do to themselves.

The Front Comm symp sitcom, by Michael Rosenthal from Jump Cut, 1977

The Front Comic Revenge, by Norman Markowitz from Jump Cut, 1977

The Front debated by Stephen Barton, Charles Perkel, and Michael Rosenthal from Jump Cut, 1977

The Front - TCM.com Eleanor Quin from Turner Classic Movies

The Year in Film: 1976 [Erik Beck]

Blogcritics [Ken Lyen]

The Front John Sinnott from DVD Talk

DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle

dOc DVD Review: The Front (1976) - digitallyOBSESSED Jon Danziger

GenX Movies also seen here: 70s-Movies

Minicrix [Anne Billson] reprinted short reviews listed alphabetically from The Sunday Telegraph

Movie Review - The Front - Screen: Woody Allen Is Serious in ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 1, 1976

CASEY’S SHADOW

USA (117 mi) 1977 ‘Scope

Casey's Shadow Time Out London

This tale of a small boy's substitution of a horse for his mother boasts several features which put it furlongs out in front of gush like The Champ: Ritt's solid feel for the milieu of the Louisiana horse-tracks, an interesting amount of the off-track dealings, but most of all Matthau's acidic performance as the boy's father, a Cajun no-hoper bucking for the big time, which always rescues the film when sentimentality threatens. Seems a shame to keep slagging off Ritt for his liberalism when he can turn in something as well-crafted and unpretentious as this. Nice New Orleans score, too.

DVD Verdict Bill Gibron

This crazy mixed-up family doesn't stand a chance of winning a million bucks.

Lloyd Bourdelle is a "coonass" Cajun (whatever the hell that terribly un-PC nickname means) who was once a successful horse trainer. But as age and an alcoholic thirst have tattered his reputation, the only mare meat he's been able to professionally prepare more than likely has ended up on some Frenchman's cheval and foie gras sandwich. Like cousin Oliver to that bunch of Bradys, Bourdelle is a jinx when it comes to thoroughbreds. Seems that every horse he gets his callused hands on degenerates into an Elmer's element before long. The arrival of a new colt, named Casey's Shadow after Lloyds' own annoyance of a youngest son, may change all that. Seems that even with the careless career choices of this "coonass," the horse thrives and prospers. Heck, it's even inching toward being a successful racing steed. It does attract the attention of high priced buyers from around the stallion circle. But Lloyd protects his pony, seeing it as his return to respectability and prosperity. When Casey the kid injuries Casey the horse, Bourdelle is warned not to race him. Liquored up Lloyd just can't control himself, however. Much to his three sons' selfish whining, this raccoon's rectum decides to run the stud in the Million Dollar sweepstakes anyway. It will take a miracle to keep this horse's hooves from splitting and its fetlocks from fracturing, but if he can win a few bucks, what does Bourdelle care? After all, Casey's Shadow was a happy accident to begin with. And don't most accidents end up in grievous bodily injury?

Casey's Shadow is a doorway film, a movie that wants to open up the audience's perspective and realm of experience to the unexplored, unknown regions of horse training, impoverished lower Louisiana living, and saddle sores. It doesn't want to have to explain any of it to you; it merely tosses you in, unprepared, and asks you to immerse yourself in the language, the nuances, and the details of the time and place. Problem is, after about thirty minutes ensconced in this grungy, gamy horse story stable, you're overwhelmed by the colt film's flop odor and need to step back into the real world for a cleansing breath of industrialized air. You just can't take any more of little Casey's irritating irresponsibility, Walter Matthau's Justin (by way of Woodrow) Wilson Creole accent, or the live horse birth footage. (Someone call Something Weird right now…time for an equine roadshow DVD pronto!) But Casey's Shadow wants you to hang around the fetid farmhouse a little while longer. It has even more colic inspired supposed humor to waft in your direction and the remaining hour and a half is equally fragrant. Billed as a quirky comic tale for the whole family but playing more like a hack act of faux Acadian desperation, there is very little to like about this story of impoverished people living like pigs. When a movie uses the throwing of a teenager into a bathtub filled with rancid dirty dishes and dark brown barf water as a hilarious hijinx, you know that the rest of the film can't be any more subtle. But you'd be wrong. Casey's Shadow's outlandish moments pale in comparison to its tone poem attempts at capturing the flavor and feel of the bayou. This is one gumbo that stinks of the glue factory.

The truth is, Casey's Shadow is not all that bad, it's just a tad unbelievable. Walter Matthau may have been an actor of uncommon ability and talent, but he has always given off an air of sarcastic urbanity. So what do the geniuses behind this movie do? They try and turn him into a dirty poor itinerate horse trainer living from one gambling wager to the next just to keep himself and his family in filth. Problem is, you never believe that he is. This is Henry Graham. This is Oscar Madison. This is Willie Gingrich. This is Miles Kendig, for friggs sake! And yet we get the scruffy face, the Mario Brothers moustache, and the hideous pickled Paul Prudhomme enunciation and we're supposed to stop and say "Whoo child. This be one mighty swamp rat I GAR-RONE-TEE." But it just doesn't work. Matthau is slumming here, picking up a paycheck for playing poor. Then there is the whole story of Casey and the horse. Matthau warns the child that mistreating the steed will potentially cost the family their ability to survive. The horse is their entire life and livelihood wrapped into one racing machine. Yet every chance he gets, Casey endangers the colt. Honestly, if you gave this kid a pistol and told him not to shoot this stallion, within ten seconds you'd have one horsehide riddled with bullet holes. This urchin's got a bronco endangerment streak that cannot be quelled. He's not satisfied with simply startling the steed. No, he must splint its shins and hyperextend his hindquarters. Combine this with the crass cutthroat antics of people plotting against this pony, and the unbelievable aspects just keep adding up.

Had it tried to be more focused and less yokel, Casey's Shadow may have worked. But it's also stuck in a formula that requires there to be a third act finale race, a huge event with everything on the line and a big lesson to be learned by all those rooting on either side. It tries to balance kid-friendly foolishness with teen heartthrob hunks to keep the Junior Misses itching their culottes. Then add on top the weird Louisiana dialects (Just what is a coonass? I'm afraid to ask) and Snidely Whiplash villains (both male and female), and the movie buckles under its own basic features. The air of authenticity that director Martin Ritt tries to achieve seems store bought, fashioned out of a Hollywood model of what indigent bog life is all about. Whenever a horse race comes along, you're assured to get slow motion close-ups of animal thighs pumping and Matthau's eyes glistening. And the missing mother family dynamic of the Bourdelle house is completely ignored, used merely as fodder for lame jokes and interfamilial squabbles. In the end, Casey's Shadow can't decide if it's a child-chiding flick (sure has a lot of curse words for Junior ears) or a slice of life look at the wild and wicked world of competitive horse breeding. Either way, it's too tactile for its own good while still playing by a set of rules that are as rote and familiar as any Tinseltown animalistic cliché-fest.

Columbia TriStar makes matters worse by panning and scanning poor Casey's Shadow into a grainy, jittery 1.33:1 full screen farce that completely undermines the locations and setting used in the film. Wide-open vistas become cramped picture postcards in this horrendous transfer, and any attempts at thematic compositions by Ritt are ruined in the constant sweep of the optical printer lens. The resulting zoom renders the image coarse and fuzzy. On the sound side, the Dolby Digital Mono is clean and crisp, with the music and dialogue mixed just right. Unfortunately, there are no bonus features on the disc, even though a scan of the Internet Movie Database shows that there was a making of documentary called, surprisingly, The Making of Casey's Shadow produced at the same time as the movie. It would have been nice to include this purposefully created publicity piece on the disc, or even gather up a few of the sons for a commentary track, but this would all pre-suppose that Columbia TriStar cared about how this title was handled. They don't (and their soft soap cover art which makes this movie look like Air Bud Goes to the Steeplechase shows just how off base they are here), and it's hard to say that Casey's Shadow is worth it. Maybe in its proper aspect ratio it comes alive. Perhaps with a load of bonus features the flaws in the film would seem less noticeable. But without the chimes and chimera, all that is left is one lousy horse and pony show. It's time to put this stupid steed out to pasture once and for all.

Casey's Shadow - TCM.com Paul Tatara

digitallyOBSESSED.com Jeff Rosado

The New York Times Vincent Canby from The New York Times, March 17, 1978, also seen here: Movie Review - Casey's Shadow - Film: Matthau in 'Casey's Shadow ...

NORMA RAE

USA (110 mi) 1979 ‘Scope

Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts]

Ritt's usual simplistic liberalism certainly dampens the labour relations angle to this tale of a Southern millworker finding herself as a union activist protesting against working conditions. Sentimental and facile, the film allows her far too easy a path to success in terms of her almost universal acceptance by fellow-workers, give or take a few token blacklegs. But far more successful is the way the film stresses her development as an independent woman; finding it painful as she undermines her husband's expectations of her simply as a washing, cooking, ironing, maternal sex-machine, she nevertheless ploughs firmly ahead, while never being portrayed as in any way an incomplete, irresponsible mother and wife. Nicely performed by a strong cast, especially Field and Leibman, it's often mawkishly soft, but surprisingly touching.

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel

Back in 1978, the real "Norma Rae" (Crystal Lee Jordan) did for the southern textile mill workers what Erin Brockovich did for PG&E's victims in Hinkley, California. Her courage caught the eye of 2 young Hollywood producers who made it their obsession to tell the stories of these blue-collar workers and the people who championed their plight.

The title character of Norma Rae is an amalgamation of small town women who risked everything for a better life. After many actresses turned down the role (including three that would later vie against her for that year's Oscar®), long-shot Sally Field plays the single mother who spends her days in the relentless, deafening din of a cotton factory, working the looms in numbing repetition alongside her mother and just about every other soul in her Alabama milltown. Drinking beer and sleeping around is about the only relief available, and Norma Rae is determined to have relief.

Ron Liebman is Reuben Warshawsky, a union organizer who shows up one day and begins his struggle to rally the workers together to fight for their own rights. Norma Rae's daddy (Hingle) sums up the sentiments of the town this outsider has come to liberate: "As far as I'm concerned, all of you people are Communists or agitators or crooks or Jews or all four rolled up together." But Reuben is a seasoned unionist and knows what he's up against; he sets up shop in his motel room and burrows in for the long haul. Over the course of an excruciating summer, Reuben wins the trust of the feisty young woman and together they begin the arduous task of convincing her fellow employees to take on the mill bosses. During this time, Norma marries divorcé Sonny Webster (Bridges) and adds his daughter to her responsibilities. In one classic scene, her new husband confronts her with his displeasure of her domestic negligence:

Sonny: Damn TV dinners, kids goin' around in dirty jeans... I'm going around - without - altogether!
Norma Rae: You want cookin'? You got cookin'. You want laundry? You got laundry. You want ironin'? You got ironin'. You wanna make love? Then you get behind me and lift up my nightie and we're gonna make love!

In the late 1970s, trying to pitch an unglamorous story that seemed like "Gidget Goes to Work" was an uphill battle itself. Sally Field, too, had her own sort of battle, trying to shake her teen idol image and make the move to more serious roles on the big screen. With her earnest and believable portrayal, she won the respect of her peers who presented her with cinema's Triple Crown: the Oscar®, Golden Globe and Cannes awards for best actress. Liebman could not be more natural in his role, and Beau Bridges seems to grow along with his character. Director Ritt treats his story as a documentary, weaving every element together into one continuous bolt of cloth.

"I know the first time you're in is bad. It comes with the job. I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club. I saw a boy of 16 shot in the back. I saw a guy blown to hell and back when he tried to start his car in the morning. You just got your feet wet on this one." - Reuben to Norma (after he bails her out of jail)

Only two decades later, Norma Rae stands as a historic reminder of conditions in our all-too-recent past. But it also serves to remind that organizers, represented here by Reuben Warshawsky, still risk their own safety to introduce union concepts to hesitant workers all over the world. One willful woman's struggle that leads 800 workers to stand up for their rights against oppressive conditions is larger than the O.P. Henley textile mill in one small southern town. This story is both intimate and universal, and continues to drive its message home.

DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)

When Sally Field starred in "Norma Rae" in 1979 she was more well known as both the fresh-faced character in the TV show "The Flying Nun" and the perky college surfer gal in "Gidget". And even though she had won an Emmy for playing the challenging role of Sybil (the woman with multiple personalities) the studios weren't sure if she was right for the part of Norma Rae. But director Martin Ritt -- by then a seasoned and well-respected Hollywood director -- stood up for his casting of her and she went on to win the Academy Award.

Norma Rae Witcher is a strong willed single mother who lives with her parents in a modest Southern home and works with them in a textile factory under less than quality conditions. She is in her early 30's, sleeps around with various men and has life that is at once arduous and dull.

Norma Rae's life changes when Reuben (Ron Liebman), an educated Jewish intellectual union organizer comes to town with the intention of setting up a union in the textile plant. Right away, he pegs Norma Rae – whom he calls, " smart, loud, profane, sloppy and hardworking." – as the kind of woman he wants to lead the charge. He helps her find her bearings and make the decisions that will affect not only her life but also the lives of the whole community.

Sally Field is convincing as the single mother working in a textile factory who uses her down home smarts to help organize the union. She brings a solid character to the screen that is not only fiercely determined but down-to-earth and slightly naïve, which are all the things that make her the right person for the job. It's a testament to the quality of the script (by Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch) that Norma Rae and Reuben don't develop a sexual relationship. Instead, Norma marries a simple but loyal good old boy (Beau Bridges) and develops a father daughter type relationship with Ruben that helps her grow as a person.

The film develops the characters, the small town setting and the circumstances under which all the people live before it gets outwardly political. This authenticity lends itself well to a convincing and intelligent message about the coupling of personal values with political integrity. By the end (in the film's most famous scene) Norma has "come-of-age" when she holds the "union" placard above her head for all to see.

This is a classic 1970's film that successfully blends a feminist component with the typical management labor struggle that have existed in factories and mills since the 19th century. It's an important subject but more than 20 years after it was made it continues to have a bad rap with mainstream audiences. Mainly because it is a feminist film, a pro-labor film as well as one that is very class conscious and takes place in a small southern town. All these things, though, make "Norma Rae" a unique Hollywood film since its kind wouldn't be made today. Last year's film "Erin Brockovich" is somewhat similar too but it doesn't quite have the straightforward, realistic feel. The DVD transfer and sound are not of the highest quality but, if you've never seen the film, it is worth a look.

Norma Rae Character, Culture, and Class, by Henry A. Giroux from Jump Cut, May 1980

Norma Rae and Textile Workers on Film Jackie Wolf from Jump Cut, May 1980

Norma Rae | The Nation Robert Hatch, January 5, 2009

Reviews -- New Internationalist Kathi Maio (final article), November 5, 1999

Crazy for Cinema

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1979 [Erik Beck]

Spirituality & Health (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)

DVD MovieGuide Colin Jacobson

MichaelDVD Region4 [Steve Crawford]

The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

BACK ROADS

USA (94 mi) 1981 ‘Scope

Back Roads Tom Milne from Time Out

Pleasantly old-fashioned romantic comedy in which two losers meet cute - he's a broken-down boxer, she a hooker angrily throwing him out after belatedly realising he's broke - then set off on a road movie odyssey through picturesque redneck locations in search of a new life. Very good on local colour but a bit sugary in its attitude to the central relationship, it would have been better taking a bleaker cue from Tommy Lee Jones' admirably dry performance.

DVD Talk [Scott Weinberg]

"They just don't make 'em like they used to" can mean a lot of different things when you're talking about the movies. It could mean that our modern movie stars don't exactly have the same class and mystique as those from the Golden Age, or it could mean that you prefer your horror movies aged and dry as opposed to frantic and sloppy. But right now I'm talking about the modern American comedy movie, and there's just no freaking WAY that 1981's Back Roads would make it through today's studio system.

Get this: Tommy Lee Jones plays a former boxer and general lowlife who makes his money by robbing drunks in grimy alleyways. Sally Field plays a past-her-prime prostitute who, yes, actually sleeps around (a lot) in order to pay for her next meal. And this is wide-release comedic character study from the fine folks at Paramount Pictures.

But don't mistake my comments for criticisms. What I'm trying (desperately and chattily) to assert is that Back Roads would never earn a studio green-light nowadays, and if it did, then the film would be stripped bare of all its seediness and grit. The end result would be something like Pretty Woman mixed with a few drops of The Sure Thing.

Jones plays a meandering pugilist named Elmore Pratt. One night, while trying to be slightly chivalrous, he hauls off and punches a guy who's irritating a local prostitute. Whoops, that guy is a COP and now there's big trouble afoot. Quickly deciding that Mobile, Alabama, might not be the best place to hang at this particular moment, Elmore decides to hightail it out of town - due west. California, more specifically. Realizing that she has nothing but trouble brewing on the homefront, Amy (the hooker) promptly decides to come along for the ride.

Thus begins the long and enjoyably rambling interstate journey of Back Roads. Directed with a consistently realistic tone by the great Martin Ritt, Back Roads is a road movie that's not really about the trip or the destination - it's about who you're traveling with. (Ritt and Field had worked together two years prior on Norma Rae, a movie that's earned a lot more press than Back Roads has. But I like this one better.)

As the mismatched duo jump from truck-stop to greasy spoon to railroad embankment, we slowly get the impression that their 'internal' journeys are a whole lot more important then their physical one. It's not like they're both going to hit the jackpot once they hit Los Angeles, so what's most important is that Amy & Elmore try to grow up (a lot) before they get there. And while there's certainly a palpable sense of sexual tension and perhaps even a reluctant romance brewing between the two, Back Roads is only about the "mushy stuff" inasmuch as it advances the characters' emotional growth. It's easy to feel a sexual attraction to your traveling partner; much tougher to actually put their needs before your own.

The two leads are just great together. It's performances like this one that allow you to forgive the modern-day Tommy Lee Jones and his perpetual snarling sleepwalk. His Elmore is rough, gruff, and difficult to admire. At the beginning, anyway. Sally Field delivers what's arguably the most overlooked performance of her career. It seems like it would be easy to create an "Oh, poor me" prostitute caricature, but Ms. Field's performance goes well beyond that. She's not a one-note "hooker with a heart of gold," but a wounded and hopeful woman who's getting a bit too old for her current profession.

Toss in a few great little supporting performances (a young David Keith steals several scenes as a horny sailor) and a surprisingly heartfelt screenplay by the late Gary DeVore and you're left with an early 80's oddity that's certainly worthy of a second look. It's not the newest or most unique "road story" ever told, but Back Roads is quite funny and unexpectedly endearing. Those who only know Tommy Lee Jones as a snarling ol' grouch should consider this one a must-see.

DVD Verdict [Bryan Pope]

Fulvue Drive-in [Nicholas Sheffo]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Movie Review - Back Roads - eFilmCritic Jack Sommersby

Channel 4 Film [capsule review]

Film4 Search results for Cross Creek

Movie Review - Back Roads - SALLY FIELD STARS IN RITT'S 'BACK ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, March 13, 1981

CROSSCREEK

USA (127 mi) 1983

Cross Creek | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Mary Steenburgen as novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling); the film follows her decision to leave the literary world of 1930s New York for the down-homeyness of the Florida Everglades. With Rip Torn, Peter Coyote, and Dana Hill; Martin Ritt (Sounder) directed (1983).

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

At once touching and weird, this feel-good version of Deliverance has Mary Steenburgen dropping everything to move to a tiny backwater bayou civilization in Florida called Cross Creek, where she intends to write fiction when she isn't busy helping the locals get their lives together. Nominated for four Oscars (it won none), this meandering trip into the world of moonshine and 'gator hunting features a stellar performance by Rip Torn which just about keeps the saccharine level at bay. (It is also, incidentally, the true-ish story of the woman who wrote the book The Yearling.)

Cross Creek Time Out London

Sporting a fancy line in hats and a dangerously overripe sensibility, writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Steenburgen) abandons her husband and journeys south to grapple with The Great American Gothic Novel. Stuck in a renovated backwoods shack, the local colour soon proves far more vivid than anything her imagination can conjure up. There's the suave hotelier who gets her jalopy back on the road, the doting black maid with an errant lover, and punting through the swampweed cackling balefully here's Torn as the resident rustic loon. Never one to stint himself when it comes to romantic overkill, Ritt piles on the slush with even more gusto than usual. Broadly - and self-consciously - signposted as The Stirring Story of a Woman's Struggle to Find Herself, the result suffers from a bad case of the cutes and a quite intolerable smugness.

Cross Creek Paul Brenner from All Movie Guide

Director Martin Ritt's bucolic rural environments of Norma Rae, Conrack, and Sounder, are re-visited once again in Cross Creek, based on author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' memoirs of her times on a remote Florida bayou. Mary Steenburgen plays Rawlings, author of The Yearling, who, in 1928, makes the abrupt decision to leave her husband and move to an isolated orange grove to concentrate on her writing. Rawlings buys a run-down house covered with cobwebs that she restores with quick dispatch. In these desolate surroundings, Rawlings pauses in her housecleaning to listen reflectively to the otherworldly noises of the swamp. But suddenly out of this loneliness, people emerge. There is Geechee (Alfre Woodard), Rawlings' devoted servant; Marsh Turner (Rip Torn), a liquor-guzzling swamp rat; Floyd Turner (Cary Guffey), a cute harmonica-playing boy; and Ellie Turner (Dana Hill), a little girl whose fawn becomes the basis of Rawlings' Yearling book. Rawlings becomes involved with Norton Baskin (Peter Coyote), the owner of the local hotel, and, as she settles into life on the bayou and her friendship with Norton and Geechee, she is inspired to begin writing.

StinkyLulu: Alfre Woodard in Cross Creek (1983 ... Stinky Lulu

"Actressing at the edges" emerged almost inadvertently as my descriptive catchphrase for what I'm most fascinated by in the Supporting Actress category. It evokes what I love most about watching certain performers on screen -- their ability to make the most of whatever they're given to do onscreen in ways that suit the character, the situation and the film. I love scenestealers, to be sure, but great actressing at the edges isn't really about yanking focus -- it's about transforming the limits of a role (nominal screentime, scripted cliches, banal stereotypes, etc) into unanticipated possibilities. And I can think of few better examples of someone turning such scripted limits into unforeseen performance possibility than...Alfre Woodard in Cross Creek (1983), approximately 17 minutes and 48 seconds in 20 scenes, roughly 15% of the film's total running time.

Alfre Woodard plays Geechee, housemaid to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Mary Steenburgen -- at her Steenburgen-iest), a newly divorced woman determined to make a new life -- and new career -- for herself in a rural community in Northern Florida called Cross Creek. Marjorie's arrival -- as an apparently wealthy and well-mannered single woman -- to the (literally) backwater community causes a flutter of interest, most notably that of Woodard's Geechee who arrives inquiring about job. Woodard's Geechee wheedles her way into a position as Rawlings's maid, mostly by pretending not to understand Marjorie's painfully polite demurrals as she gregariously chatters on and on. The combination easily erodes down Marjorie's feints at resistance and also lays the foundation for what becomes a foundational relationship for Marjorie's life in Cross Creek.

Among the handful of Cross Creek denizens that the film depicts as shaping the writer's vision of her world -- the poor white family who are in so many ways up the creek; the proud hired man and his pregnant wife; the moonshiner; the child whose choice to make a pet of an orphaned fawn became the inspiration for Rawlings's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Yearling; the hotelier Norton Baskin who would become her husband -- Geechee emerges as perhaps Rawlings's most intimate friend. As I understand it, the figure of Geechee in the cinematic treatment of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's story is a composite based upon lives of several maids who worked for the writer throughout her time on Cross Creek. I don't know enough about the Rawlings story to know which elements came from what, but this little bit of trivia amplifies what I admire most about Woodard's work in the role of Geechee.

The role of Geechee is laden with racial cliche. She's poor, unsophisticated, deferential, devoted to her white employer and provides some of the film's few flashes of comic relief. To her credit, and to the credit of the filmmakers, however, Woodard utilizes such cartoonish character traits as the broad outlines for what is a boldly independent characterization. Woodard's characterization establishes Geechee as utterly distinctive person. Her work in the role -- the flashes of contradictory emotion that complicate the meaning of her words and actions -- seems to actively resist the cinematic idealization of black servitude. Woodard's Geechee may be this white lady's maid but Woodard's performance reminds us at nearly every turn that Geechee is also a complex individual making complicated choices as a poor, single black woman making a living in the rural south.

Woodard's biggest scene elaborates Geechee's dilemma. Marjorie has fired Geechee's layabout ex-con boyfriend, and presumes that Geechee will be leaving with him. Woodard's Geechee confronts Marjorie on this choice, on whether Marjorie wants Geechee to leave and why Marjorie's not speaking up when she sees Geechee making a bad decision. Woodard handles this scene with acute insight. Geechee's challenge to Marjorie works largely because Woodard has already shown Geechee to be independent, strong-willed and fairly bold. Woodard textures this scene with complex, idiosyncratic emotions that amplify Geechee's clarity as a character, transformed -- not defined -- by her professional relationship with Marjorie.

Indeed, Woodard's presence in the film is one of Cross Creek's most clarifying threads. The film is one of those writerly pictures where people amble about making pronouncements about the way things are. And, with the exception of her two or three big head-butting scenes with Steenburgen's Marjorie, Woodard's Geechee is largely an ambient presence in the film -- part of the landscape of the film's tribute to Rawlings appreciation of this particular landscape and its denizens.

That said, Woodard's work in the role of Geejee is a near perfect example of what I mean when I say "actressing at the edges." There is no reason she needs to be this good in this role. The film certainly doesn't need Geechee to be as human, as complicated, as strange as Woodard makes her here. Plenty of the other supporting players do just fine in Cross Creek, floating on the buoys of familiar stock characters and delivering pleasant, effective but unremarkable performances. Yet, in nearly every scene, Woodard gives Geechee far more than the role requires while maintaining the necessary level of plausibility and the balance of the scene. Woodard invests nuance, texture and humanity in what was scripted to be a one-note role. Yet through the combined force of her charisma, empathy and intelligence, Woodard's performance permits us to hear and feel that one-note with uncommon depth and resonance. And that's what actressing at the edges is all about...

Production Notes on Cross Creek comments from actor Peter Coyote

Cross Creek - 1983 comments from actor Peter Coyote

Rosenman: Cross Creek James Southall comments on the musical composition by Leonard Rosenman

User reviews from imdb Author: Christopher T. Chase (cchase@onebox.com) from Arlington, VA.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Ruby Liang (ruby_fff) from sf, usa

StinkyLulu: "The Hired Man" - Cross Creek (1983) - Assorted ... Stinky Lulu

Cross Creek (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Movie Review - Cross Creek - FILM: 'CROSS CREEK,' A WRITER'S LIFE ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times, September 21, 1983

MURPHY’S ROMANCE

USA (107 mi) 1985

Murphy's Romance Time Out London

The bridge drives and soda fountains of picturesque small-town Arizona offer interminable pretexts for meetings cute and heartwarming romance between Field's divorced mum and Garner's corner-store pharmacist who dispenses homespun advice along with his prescriptions. From the same writer/director/star team responsible for Norma Rae, this cornball comedy comes on more as a depressing barometer of contemporary Hollywood. Boo to Field's ex-husband (Kerwin), a no-good boyo who roars into town on an Easy Rider bike, strums '60s folk songs, enjoys Friday the 13th. Hooray for Murphy (Garner) with his purse-lipped work ethic, blue grass fiddle, and solid old jalopy (adorned with no-nukes stickers as a token nod to liberalism). Field ploughs her now over-familiar furrow of plucky independence, and it's only the abrasive charm of Garner and Kerwin that redeems the film from terminal whimsy.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: roghache from Canada

This is a fabulously entertaining movie. Note that practically everyone reviewing it quite accurately describes it as 'feel good'. And it's not just a chick flick! My husband loved it and I'm hoping to get hold of it for my 18 year old son to watch.

It's not your typical comedy romance, with two attractive young stars dating in a traditional manner or having sex shortly after the opening credits. The romantic leads are both wonderful in this unusual tale, with Sally Field engaging as the young divorcée, Emma Moriarty. The amazingly charismatic James Garner plays the older widower, Murphy Jones, an affable, laid back pharmacist 30 years or so her senior. Emma has just moved to Murphy's small town to set up a horse ranch nearby with her teenage son, Jake. Murphy gives Jake a part time job at his drug store to help out the young widow, tries to send business her way, and even recommends some eligible town gents for her to date (though he clearly has his eye on Emma himself).

Barely has an attraction begun between Emma and Murphy when there's 'trouble in paradise'. Emma's sexy but ne'er-do-well ex-husband, Bobby Jack (Brian Kerwin), shows up, convinces Emma to let him stay with her & their son for awhile, and tries to rekindle the fire, so to speak. Of course Jake wants his dad back, so pressure is put to bear on Emma. Meanwhile, right in front of the ex, Murphy is carrying on a rather unusual courtship of Emma! He ends up staying for supper with the 'happy little family of three' nigh on just about every night, even joins them for a hand or two of cards. Bobby Jack is naturally not pleased with this turn of events, and the competition between the two of them for Emma's affections makes for some pretty witty dialogue and amusing scenes, especially at a local square dance.

Also, the contrast between the two men in terms of their inner character gives Emma cause for reflection...the charming but cheating, good for nothing Bobby Jack versus the easy going but hard working, caring, and principled Murphy. You're going to absolutely love Murphy's Romance! You just can't help it.

DVD Verdict Norman Short

Just when you think you've found the right guy, someone even worse comes along.

Murphy's Romance is an authentic little romantic comedy that moves at its own pace, much like the small Arizona town it is set in. The story is predictable but not formulaic, unpretentious but full of smiles. All told, a well made movie with fine directing, great performances, and witty dialogue. Columbia is releasing this fun little film now on DVD, though unfortunately not one of their best efforts.

Lets start with the people. Director Martin Ritt (Hud, Sounder, Norma Rae) has worked with two-time Oscar winning actress Sally Field (Norma Rae, Places in the Heart, Forrest Gump) before. It was their desire to work together again that in part got this picture made. Add in one of my favorite actors, James Garner (Support Your Local Sheriff, Maverick, My Fellow Americans) and there is the makings for a nice movie. Garner may be better known for his extensive TV work, such as the The Rockford Files and Maverick series. Even a young Corey Haim puts in a nice performance. The rest of the supporting cast is authentic and full of interesting people.

Emma Moriarty (Field) comes to a small ranch in Arizona to start a horse boarding and training business. In the small town nearby she meets drugstore owner Murphy Jones (Garner), and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine these two belong together. But first Emma needs to get her business of the ground, and deal with the pesky ex-husband who shows up.

Doesn't sound like a whole story, does it? Well, it is. What makes this movie work is the characters and the dialogue, along with a surprise or two. Garner's performance of Murphy is pure honesty and homespun realism. His views on life and people, along with the ability to mix gruffness and generosity make him a real person you'd like to know. He is eminently likable, but has his own way of doing things. From his pristine 1928 Studebaker out front with the "No Nukes" sticker on the window, to his willingness to force the town council to remove the parking meter from his storefront by getting (and paying) a ticket every single day til it is removed, he is irascible but funny. He doesn't take himself too seriously but acts like he does. Best yet, he gets some great lines in an overall terrific script. I'm not surprised he garnered (no pun intended) a Best Actor Oscar nomination for this role.

Sally Field gets to play her usual plucky, levelheaded role but this was a role that called for exactly that. Though times are tough for her, and she has some hard work and choices ahead, that level head and spunk brings realism and likeability to her character. She manages to combine vulnerability with a tough work ethic to bring off her role perfectly. Brian Kerwin (Mr. Jealousy, The Myth of Fingerprints, Roseanne) plays the ne'er do well and lazy ex-husband well, and manages to combine his sleaze with a desire to do better, despite the conflict of wanting to have fun over responsibility. He makes up the third leg of an awkward triangle.

Another reason the film works in how things happen rather than what happens. When Emma needs money to stay afloat, Murphy doesn't just loan her the money. He buys a horse, has her stable and train it, sees her expertise, and then drums up business for her with his knowledge of her ability. In this way she works for everything she gets, though with a helping hand when she needed it. When he sees Bobby Jack (Kerwin) easing his way back into Emma's life, he becomes a dinner guest every night.

Truthfully, I could go on and on about this movie. Nothing about it screams "special" yet it manages to find a place in my heart. The town, the people, and the movie as a whole seem like a place you'd just like to visit. The direction is well done, with full use of the widescreen for framing; this means forget about the pan-and-scan transfer on the flip side of the disc.

Speaking of the disc, I have to say this is one of the best mono soundtracks I've heard yet. Remastered into Dolby Digital mono, dialogue is always clear, the noise floor is very low, and even the music feels like it has a full range. The score by rock/pop legend Carole King sounds sweet with plenty of punch, all from a mono track.

All right, so the film is great and highly recommended. Now for the bad news. Though as usual Columbia has done an anamorphic transfer in the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, it has quite a few flaws. First and foremost of these is the grain. Fortunately it isn't always there, but many times through the film the picture becomes very grainy. There are a fair number of nicks and specks from the source print as well. From the digital end of the picture, motion artifacts are a minor but constant presence. On the good side, colors are mostly well done, except blacks in one scene about 17 minutes in. Truthfully picture quality varies from very good to rather poor depending on the scene. Fleshtones are natural looking at least.

Columbia doesn't go very far with the extra content either. Talent files for director Ritt, James Garner, and Sally Field, with pretty selective filmographies are the main extra. There is a leaflet of production notes inside the case at least. The theatrical trailer and three bonus trailers comprise the rest of the extra content. The bonus trailers are for Absence of Malice, My Best Friend's Wedding, and Sleepless in Seattle. None are in very good shape, though Sleepless is better than the others.

DVD Review - Murphy's Romance Greg Suarez from the Digital Bits

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Apollo Movie Guide [MaryAnn Johanson]

Steve the Movie Guy: Murphy's Romance

User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: jliu90 from United States

Murphy's Romance > Overview - AllMovie Hal Erickson

Brian Kerwin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Movie Review - Murphy's Romance - FILM: FIELD AND GARNER IN ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, January 17, 1986

Brian Kerwin| Bio

Playgirl - March 1986 Brian, looking like Bjorn Borg, from Crystal Chow’s article in Playgirl, March, 1986

Images for Brian Kerwin

Corey Haim's Official Website

Corey Haim - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Murphy's Romance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

YouTube - Murphy's Romance opening sequence “Running Lonely” by Carole King on YouTube (3:13)

Corey Haim Tribute RIP (4:11)

NUTS

USA (116 mi) 1987

Nuts Time Out London

A star vehicle in the tradition of those Susan Hayward biopics featuring major emotions and an unironed wardrobe. The question before the court is whether Claudia (Streisand) is nuts, and thus unfit to stand trial for manslaughter, or just bristlingly independent. A high-price hooker, she killed a client in self-defence, but her rich parents want her committed rather than risk a trial. She resists, snarling at shrink, counsel, and due process alike through matted hair. Lawyer Levinsky (Dreyfuss) is assigned the case, and grudgingly they work together towards getting Claudia her day in court, though she gets the big speech which wins the day. Why she is like she is gets explained, and it's plenty neat; Streisand's a star, which means your complicity is on call at all times. In the shade, Dreyfuss is terrific, banking down his natural cockiness. At the risk of sounding like the guy who went to Cleopatra to see the snake, Wallach, Whitmore, Webber, Malden and Stapleton lay on limousine service.

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] also seen here: Jonathan Rosenbaum

Before he was blacklisted in 1951, director Martin Ritt received much of his training in live television, and the virtues as well as limitations of 50s TV drama at its best are reflected in his movies. This all-star courtroom drama, adapted by Tom Topor, Darryl Ponicsan, and Alvin Sargent from Topor's play, centers on a hearing held to determine whether high-class hooker Claudia Draper (Barbra Streisand), arrested on a manslaughter charge, is insane or not. Richard Dreyfuss is her appointed lawyer, Robert Webber is the prosecutor, and James Whitmore is the judge; Eli Wallach plays her appointed psychiatrist, and Maureen Stapleton and Karl Malden portray her grief-stricken parents. While the movie holds one's attention throughout, and its liberal message is compelling, we are clued in to certain facts about the heroine so early on that the audience is never really tested along with the characters. What might have been a sharper existential confrontation of our received ideas about sanity merely comes across as an effective courtroom drama, with strategically placed revelations and climaxes. Streisand produced, developed the script, and composed most of the music for this showpiece, and her efforts, as usual, pay off, above all in her angry and lively performance.

DVD Verdict Bill Treadway

Sure. She's shocking. Outspoken. Explosive. Defiant. But is she "nuts"?

A dream project of Barbra Streisand's, Nuts is an intelligent, uncommonly good courtroom drama that runs deeper than one would expect.

Long out of print, Warner Bros. issues Nuts on DVD for the very first time.

Claudia Draper (Barbra Streisand), a prostitute arrested for murdering one of her clients, is the focus of a hearing. Is she mentally competent to stand trial for her crime?

Her parents (Karl Malden and Maureen Stapleton) say no and enlist the aid of a psychiatrist (Eli Wallach) to have her committed. Draper's attorney, Aaron Levinsky, says that she is competent and sets out to prove it.

It is not an easy task, as Claudia is not only very opinionated but she is distrustful and disruptive.

I remember one critic saying "Barbra Streisand didn't deserve any awards." That critic couldn't possibly be more wrong. Barbra Streisand absolutely deserved the Oscar for Best Actress in 1987; she wasn't even nominated. Considering the weak field of nominees that year, it's one of the major injustices Oscar is so famous for. It's a risky performance. She has to be plausible as both a woman of sound mind and a woman capable of being crazy. I realize what I said doesn't make sense, but when you see the film, you'll understand what I mean. Few actresses would be willing to take such chances, but Streisand succeeds by doing so.

Actually, the performances are all superb. In her commentary, Streisand mentioned casting actors that the audience would be comfortable watching on screen. Sometimes this strategy can backfire (as in
fluff like Around the World in 80 Days), but here it works, precisely because we think we know these actors pretty well. It makes the surprises in the screenplay more resonant (and this is a film loaded with surprises).

Richard Dreyfuss is excellent as Levinsky, the lawyer who has a daunting task ahead of him. Dreyfuss has always been one of our best and most underappreciated actors, and this is career best work here. He has to adhere to the expected protocol a lawyer must have, but he also feels for this woman and her situation. It's a tricky performance not every actor can pull off. Karl Malden and Maureen Stapleton exude warmth and seem like the typical dream parents. It's a good acting choice, considering the major revelation towards the finale. James Whitmore is the judge who must make sense of all this conflicting testimony. He keeps an even keel and resists overacting. Leslie Nielsen is the murder victim, and it may come as a surprise that the beloved comic actor of The Naked Gun is actually a good dramatic actor.

The film is based on a play by Tom Topor, which in turn was based on a true story. The screenplay by Topor, Alvin Sargent, and Darryl Ponicsan emphasizes emotions over plot, and that is a problem some critics had with the movie. I think they missed the point. Topor's play emphasized character, not the plot, and the movie accomplishes the same.

Is Claudia "nuts"? Or is she perfectly sane? Those are very good questions and a case can be made for both. I don't feel right giving it away, but I think the message of this film is a simple one: Who are we to judge who is crazy or not? It's not important if she's sane or insane. Basic human rights are at stake, and that forms the heart of the story. Critics who have dismissed the film have missed this very point.

The original director was Mark Rydell (On Golden Pond); he left the production after disagreements with producer/star Streisand. His replacement was Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae, The Great White Hope). Ritt was a much better fit for this material, as his specialty was focusing on great acting rather than the plot or flashy visuals. For this reason, he was often overlooked by the Academy when nominations were discussed. I prefer Ritt's style to the McGs of today, that much I know for sure. His direction is flawless, as he elicits great performances from the entire cast that transcend the material and remain in the mind long after the final frame.

Warner has issued the film on DVD as part of their "Barbra Streisand Collection." The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer could be so much better. Andrzej Bartkowiak's soft focus photography creates quite an amount of grain in the picture and required extra care for the transfer to DVD. After the good work done on Up the Sandbox and The Main Event, it was disappointing to see this film get the short end of the stick, especially since it is the more important film of the trio.

The sound is much better. Presented in a Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround sound mix, it sounds excellent with great clarity. This is crucial considering this is a picture in which the dialogue is extremely important to understand clearly. There is very little music in the film, which shows great restraint and care for the material on the part of Streisand.

The gem of this disc is a feature-length commentary track by Barbra Streisand. Everyone should listen to this excellent commentary track at least once. Ms. Streisand discusses everything from casting to performances to the actual production. Loaded with great information, it's two hours well spent. I can't wait for her commentary for Yentl.

A theatrical trailer in anamorphic widescreen features some spoilers. Watch this after you have seen the film. Entering into it fresh like I did will make it a better experience.

A stills gallery featuring behind the scenes photos contains the same problems as the gallery on The Main Event. For completists only.

Nuts - AVRev.com Tara O’Shea

Mark R. Leeper

Barbra Streisand Archives | Films | Nuts (1987) | Script ... Barbra Archives

Movie Review - Nuts - Film: Streisand In 'Nuts' - NYTimes.com Janet Maslin

STANLEY & IRIS

USA (104 mi) 1989 ‘Scope

Stanley & Iris Time Out London

Written by Harriet Frank Jr and Irving Ravetch, this free adaptation of Pat Barker's Union Street is relocated from Teeside to the industrial landscape of New England and turned into a worthy vehicle for two mature stars. All that remains from Barker's original seems to be the survival instinct of the average home-maker. Iris King is a cake factory veteran, recently widowed, who takes on the task of teaching illiterate Stanley to read when she inadvertently causes his dismissal from said confectionery establishment. We're talking quality here, Ritt being the man who directed Hud, Sounder and Norma Rae, the leads being De Niro and fellow double Oscar winner Jane Fonda, and the overriding theme of literal word blindness being handled with charm and dignity. The problem is that, given Fonda and De Niro's established images, one can't help thinking what is their problem; and the ending, despite good intentions, is American cinema at its tackiest and most hollow.

Stanley & Iris is a harmless little romance that's elevated slightly by the charisma of its two stars, Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. The two have a genuine chemistry with one another, and it's hard not to root for their characters to finally get together by the film's end. But the screenplay (by Harriet Frank, Jr and Irving Ravetch) constantly undermines the actors' efforts by infusing the story with melodrama and eye-rolling moments of convenience.

Fonda stars as Iris King, a recently widowed woman who - along with her two kids (played by Martha Plimpton and Harley Cross) - shares a small house with her sister (Swoosie Kurtz) and brother-in-law (Jamey Sheridan). Though Iris hasn't been in a relationship since her husband dies, she finds herself drawn to a shy cook named Stanley (De Niro). The two begin a tentative friendship hindered by the fact that Stanley is illiterate, and initially refuses to do anything about it. But after losing his job because of his inability to read or write, Stanley asks Iris to become his teacher.

There's a prevailing feeling of cuteness spread throughout Stanley & Iris, as the film's script puts the emphasis on individual sequences rather than the bigger picture. As a result, the film's pacing is off; the movie lurches forward in spots but then slows to a crawl in others. There are also several inconsistent elements in the story, particularly in terms of Iris' sister - who seems to figure prominently at the outset but disappears completely as the movie progresses.

Likewise, there are plenty of sequences that stretch the boundaries of credibility - the majority of which seem to have been included for the sole purpose of prolonging the moment in which Stanley and Iris actually become a couple. Yet despite such problems, the film remains fairly entertaining - primarily thanks to the ingratiating performances from De Niro and Fonda. Stanley & Iris is the kind of film one watches with their grandmother on a rainy Sunday afternoon; it's watchable, all right, but in an almost mind-numbingly toothless and inoffensive manner.

Peter Reiher

What is a "good script"? Or, mirror image, what is a "bad script"? Usually, when you hear someone say that a film has a bad script, what they really mean is that the film is derivative, that the dialog is poor, that there is no characterization, that it is predictable, that it fails to engage the viewers. Well, none of those things are true of STANLEY AND IRIS, yet it has a bad script, or at least a fatally flawed one, and that's what makes it a fair film, rather than a good film.

STANLEY AND IRIS deals with the relationship of two middle-aged working class people in a small Eastern city, certainly not a derivative situation. The dialog is true to character, sounds realistic, and even has a bit of poetry to it. The two principals are clearly defined, engaging characters, and some of the supporting roles aren't too badly drawn. While the major thrust of the story follows lines that many other films have followed, the path to the resolution is interesting and filled with nice twists. And, to some extent, at least, STANLEY AND IRIS does make us care about the lives of its major characters.

Where the script fails is in dramatic construction. Writers Harriet Frank, Jr., and Irving Ravetch have failed to provide a clear, relevant sequence of events, each leading from one to the next, that tells a story. In STANLEY AND IRIS, while succeeding scenes clearly have some dramatic connection to those that preceded, causality seems to be lacking. For example, we understand why, at one point, Stanley breaks off the relationship. And we see him begin it again. But why? The film shows us nothing that makes this change understandable. Perhaps we are meant to fill in the blanks by understanding the destiny of the plot. But the importance of these two people coming together is never great enough for the viewer to do that much of the work himself. If this were the only lapse, the film might not have seemed so choppy and arbitrary, but the whole movie is constructed that way.

Which is a pity, because STANLEY AND IRIS is not a bad film. Director Martin Ritt stages each scene rather well. As is his way, he also provides a sense of authenticity to the setting. As in SOUNDER and NORMA RAE, Ritt makes us believe in the people and the life they lead by not allowing false heroics or false tragedies, and by showing us generous slices of daily living that seem familiar, comfortable, and correct.

The photography is also good. It comes from a school of cinematography that prizes the beauty of realism, so there are no fancy camera moves, the lighting is naturalistic, and the shot selection is rather conservative, suiting the subject matter. But each shot is carefully considered and attractively lit, making the New England city considerably more attractive than it probably is in reality.

The main attraction of STANLEY AND IRIS was always the casting of Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda in the title roles. Unfortunately, while each of them does good work in isolation, and while there is no great clash between their styles, they simply do not mesh on camera. Their love is told to us, but the performers fail to show it. De Niro has never been especially good at expressing a nice, comfortable form of love. Grand, destructive passion, yes, but pleasant romantic love, no. Fonda can, but it takes two to do this tango. That major failing aside, the performances are quite good. De Niro has made at least one acting breakthrough here. Unlike his character in FALLING IN LOVE, Stanley is a fairly normal person who is likable and not dull. Fonda manages to submerge most of her glamour and charisma in a role that demands a certain plainness of appearance and manner.

Other than these two, there are practically no important characters in the film. Martha Plimpton repeats her sullen, pregnant teenager role from PARENTHOOD, with less material. (Actually, I believe STANLEY AND IRIS was shot first, so perhaps she repeated the role in PARENTHOOD, with more material.) Swoozie Kurtz has a few angry moments as Fonda's sister, but disappears totally from the latter half of the film. Feodor Chaliapan, memorable in MOONSTRUCK, has some nice moments as De Niro's father.

STANLEY AND IRIS has received some major critical dumpings, which I think weren't really justified. It doesn't work, but it's not a crime against cinema, either. It's a fairly entertaining 100 minutes or so with some good, professional work from all involved. Many critics seemed to have seized upon small points as a basis of their dislike of STANLEY AND IRIS, such as stating that Jane Fonda's body was too shapely for the part, or that Stanley's background made his problems seem unlikely. But I think that these little flaws are no more than symptoms of the overall failure of the script to construct a logical, dramatic story. If the pieces had all fallen into place one by one, as they do in a good dramatic film, no one would have objected to the small stuff. As it is, STANLEY AND IRIS is a well-intentioned film that can provide some pleasures, with only slight disappointment based on the potentials of all the talents involved.

Stanley and Iris : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video John Sinnott from DVD Talk

dOc DVD Review: Stanley & Iris (1990) David Krauss

Stanley & Iris | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman

jacques-rivette.com: Order of the Exile - DVD Beaver

Rivette, Jacques

"Didn't the cinema once reach a sort of state of grace, which it has lost today?" To which Rivette replied: "Yes... but since it is lost, it isn't worth talking about.

—Louis Marcorelles interview of Jacques Rivette, 1963

Jacques Rivette's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup – BOMBLOG Marlo Kronberg from Bomblog, October 12, 2009 (Excerpt)

In his book The Films In My Life, Francois Truffaut boldly pinned the blame for the nascence of the Nouvelle Vague movement on one man—a man who “of all our band of fanatics, (was) the most fanatical”—the fiercely transcendent critic-cum-auteur Jacques Rivette. The New Wave, according to Truffaut, had begun “thanks to Rivette.” Fifty years after the advent of the Nouvelle Vague movement I had the pleasure to sit in Alice Tully hall at Lincoln Center—in a polyglot sea of faces both young and old—and screen 81-year-old Rivette’s newest offering entitled 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup. Despite being a master director Rivette sadly never achieved the name-recognition of his Cahiers du Cinema cronies. His films are abstruse and tedious. He gleefully disassembles conventional narrative structure (a recurring Rivettean trope is the tenuousness of reality and the pervasiveness of theatre/performance) whenever he can, and has a penchant for making films that run well into 4 hour and even 13- hour territory. Most of his films have only known purest darkest obscurity—relegated to the forgotten history bins as soon as the projector light switched off at their initial screenings.

Mirror Mirror: The Films of Jacques Rivette Keith Uhlrich from Slant magazine

The received wisdom on Jacques Rivette, for supporters and detractors alike, is that his is a cinema of endurance. It's impossible to read an appraisal of this influential member of the French New Wave without mention of his films' extensive lengths; this, aside from a seemingly unvarying opening/closing credits font, is the director's distinguishing surface trait, and it no doubt induces equal measures exasperation and caution. Rivette's films don't so much move as imperceptibly invade—we need to arrive at their far-off finales to determine if the journey through them is worth it. It's about commitment, in other words, about dedication to against-the-grain ideas of cinema and artistry (heavy on themes of theater and performance) that don't always come off. I suspect that the wondrous Céline and Julie Go Boating is Rivette's apex: Even his most enthusiastic proponents (David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum among them) write of the later films with a slightly dutiful air, as if they're waiting around (slaves to a countercultural limbo) for some of the old magic to resurface. But I concede, with tempered but determined enthusiasm: Rivette is deserving of full consideration, a near-impossibility up until now as his films have very rarely been released stateside. We must therefore be grateful for the Museum of the Moving Image's near-complete retrospective, which is screening all but Rivette's most recent feature, Ne Touchez Pas La Hache (currently in post-production and scheduled for a 2007 release), and a few of his short films. Rivette's more popular works (e.g. La Belle Noiseuse and Va Savoir) can now be viewed in the company of his mystique-laden obscurities (e.g. Noroît and Le Pont du Nord), though the retro's prime offering is the barely-screened Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, a 12-hour plus magnum opus that has been referred to as the cinephile's Holy Grail. Check back throughout November and December for new capsule-review additions to this ongoing Slant Magazine feature.

Jacques Rivette: A Differential Cinema- Harvard Film Archive January 5 – February 19, 2006

For the past five decades, Jacques Rivette has produced an incredibly rich and prolific body of work cementing his reputation as one of the masters of the French New Wave. His name is often uttered in reverence along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, his comrades in the New Wave’s Gang of Four. His films have not been screened as widely as his peers however, largely due to a perceived inaccessibility attributed to their extended running times; many of these works run well over two hours, most notably the over twelve hour long Out One: Noli Me Tangere (sadly this version is currently unavailable with English subtitles). Yet these larger canvases afford Rivette the space to develop a complex interplay between fiction and reality in which his layering of a world within the larger world of his films is both reflexive and magical.

Rivette had no formal education in cinema. Rather, he spent hours at the Cinémathéque Française in the early 1950s, where he forged lasting relationships with many New Wave contemporaries including Claude Chabrol and Truffaut. During this time he experimented with the short film format while working as an assistant to such filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker. Along with Godard, Truffaut and Alain Resnais, Rivette began writing for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1952, where the critics collectively championed the auteurist aesthetic of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Anthony Mann. Rivette began production on his first feature in 1957, Paris Belongs to Us. Due to funding problems, it took almost four years to complete. Within this early work, Rivette studies the interactions among a group of stage actors, a frequent concern throughout his career. His next film, The Nun, was also delayed but in this case, it was the interference of censors which limited the film’s release. The Nun marked Rivette’s last project in which he employed more conventional narrative techniques. Beginning with L’Amour fou in 1969, Rivette’s experimentation with documentary techniques frequently featured improvisational performances from his actors. In the 1970s he embarked on some of his most ambitious projects, including the aforementioned Out One and a never-completed quartet of films titled “Les filles du feu” (later renamed “Scenes de la vie parallèle”) which he revisited in 2003 with The Story of Marie and Julien. This period also marked his greatest commercial success with Céline and Julie Go Boating.

Since the 1980s Rivette has continued to explore the complexities of the artistic process (Love on the Ground, La Belle noiseuse, Va savoir) as well as producing fascinating reflections on genre (Up Down Fragile, Secret Defense). In an early interview Rivette described the art of crafting a “differential cinema” which seeks to create a unique experience for the viewer outside of narrative convention. In this varied, essential body of work, Rivette has proven that he continues to welcome that challenge.

Film Reference G. C. Macnab

In the days when the young lions of the New Wave were busy railing against "Le Cinéma du papa" in magazine articles and attending all-night screenings of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis movies at La Cinémathèque, Jacques Rivette was quite the keenest cinephile of them all. He made a short as early as 1950, worked as an assistant director for Becker and Renoir, and wrote endless essays for Gazette du Cinéma and Cahiers du Cinéma , which he would later edit. If his films seem academic and acutely self-reflexive, we must remember that he is somebody who has spent an eternity theorizing about cinema.

Rivette's first feature, Paris nous appartient , clocks in at a mere 140 minutes, and takes as its theme the abortive attempt by a group of French actors to mount a production of Shakespeare's Pericles. Rivette's fascination with the play-within-the-film, a leitmotif of his work, is given an initial, and not entirely successful, airing here. The film seems stage-bound, literary, and rather earnest, something which Rivette himself would later acknowledge: "I am very unhappy about the dialogue, which I find atrocious."

After his second feature, La Religieuse , was briefly banned (although it did make money) on account of its perceived anti-clericalism, Rivette decided to abandon conventional narrative cinema. Unlike Godard, who never managed to fully overcome the cult of personality (even Tout va bien and his other post-1968 collaborations with Gorin are inevitably treated as the great Jean-Luc's personal statements), Rivette easily evolved a kind of collective cinema, where the director's role was on a par with that of the actors. He gave his actors the task of improvising his/her dialogue and character and let the narrative stumble into being. A haphazard and risky working method, Rivette found this infinitely preferable to rigidly conforming to a pre-conceived script. As a result, Rivette's films rarely appear polished and finished.

The subject matter of Rivette films is often rehearsal: they explore the process of creation, rather than the finished artefact itself. L'Amour fou , an account of a company's attempts to produce Racine's Andromaque while the director and his actress-wife have a break-up, stops short of opening night.

In Rivette's monumental work Out , which lasts a full thirteen hours but has only ever seen the commercial light of day as Ombre , a four-hour shadow of itself, Rivette takes his theory of Direct Cinema as far as it will go. Determined to make a film "which, instead of being predicated on a central character presented as the conscience, reflecting everything that happens in the action, would be about a collective," the director assembled a large cast of actor/characters, amongst them Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Leaud. The film opens as a documentary. Only very gradually does Rivette allow a fictional narrative to emerge through the interaction of the cast. He describes Out as being "like a game . . . a crossword."

Rivette commissioned Roland Barthes to write for Cahiers du Cinéma. Rivette share Barthes' well-chronicled suspicion of authors, and he is also a fervent "intertextualist": his films abound in references to other books and films. The Hunting of the Snark , Aeschylus, Balzac, Shakespeare, and Edgar Allen Poe are all liable to be thrown into the melting pot. He mixes 16mm and 35mm film stock in L'Amour fou , where he actually depicts a television crew filming the same rehearsals that he is filming: a case of Chinese boxes, perhaps, that goes some way to explaining his unpopularity with certain British critics. Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times described the director's 1974 film, Céline et Julie vont en bateau , as a "ghastly exhibition of incompetent pretentiousness" while David Robinson suggested that L'Amour par terre offered the director's "now accustomed fey and onanistic silliness."

It should be noted that both of the films attacked above offered strong parts for women. Rivette, more than most of his New Wave contemporaries, has provided opportunities for actresses. He is hardly the most prolific director, and the length of his films has often counted against him. Nonetheless, his clinical, self-reflexive essays in film form, coupled with the sophisticated games he continues to play within the "house of fiction," reveal him as a cinematic purist whose commitment to the celluloid muse has hardly diminished since the heady days of the 1950s.

jacques-rivette.com Order of the Exile

Biography on newwavefilm.com

Jacques Rivette biography from Turner Classic Films

Jacques Rivette: Information from Answers.com biography

Jacques Rivette • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Saul Austerlitz from Senses of Cinema, January 24, 2003

jacques rivette : definition of jacques rivette and synonym of ... Dictionary biography

Jacques Rivette - Filmbug biography

Jacques Rivette Movies, Filmography, Biography, Career, Awards ... bio from Film Directors Site

Jacques Rivette > Overview - AllMovie bio from Sandra Brennan

Jacques Rivette bio from Full Movie Review

Jacques Rivette bio from World Lingo

Jacques Rivette Resources film links

Jacques Rivette Mubi

Jacques Rivette - Director by Film Rank Films 101

Jacques Rivette James Travers reviews from FilmsdeFrance

Jacques Rivette Acquarello reviews

jacques-rivette.com: Filmography - DVD Beaver

The Jacques Rivette Collection Blu-ray - DVD Beaver 8-discs

"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"

Jacques Rivette, “The Act and the Actor” Jacques Rivette at age 21 from unpublished 1950 writings, from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

jacques-rivette.com: The Genius of Howard Hawks - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, May 1953, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: On Imagination - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1953, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: The Age of metteurs en scene - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, January 1954, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: The Essential - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, February 1954, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette's Classical Illusion - DVD Beaver Letter on Rossellini, by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1955, from Rivette’s website

Jacques Rivette on "Le conseil des dix" - DVD Beaver Rivette film ratings compiled from Cahiers du cinéma November 1955 – September 1966

jacques-rivette.com: The Hand - DVD Beaver review of Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, December 1955, from Rivette’s website

“culmination” of Eisenstein's - kino slang Andy Rector reprints Rivette’s review of Eisenstein at Kino Slang, from March 28, 1956

jacques-rivette.com: The Hand - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, November 1957, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: On Renoir: Select Commentary - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, December 1957, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: Mizoguchi Viewed From Here - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, March 1958, from Rivette’s website

Rivette on Les quatre cents coups - kino slang Andy Rector reprints Rivette’s review of Truffaut at Kino Slang, from May 1959

jacques-rivette.com: Qu'est-ce que la Nouvelle Vague? - DVD Beaver Noel Burch from Film Quarterly, Winter 1959

jacques-rivette.com: Death Taken Seriously - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1960, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: On Abjection - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, June 1961, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: The Kill - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, February 1965, from Rivette’s website

Jacques Rivette on "Le conseil des dix" - DVD Beaver Rivette’s film ratings from Cahiers du Cinéma, November 1955 – September 1966

jacques-rivette.com: Letter from Paris - DVD Beaver Gilles Jacob from Sight and Sound, Autumn 1968

jacques-rivette.com: Montage - DVD Beaver a discussion by Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, and Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, March 1969, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: La Religieuse (Review) (1969) - DVD Beaver Claire Clouzot from Film Quarterly, Spring 1969

AH! JE L'AI TROP AIME POUR NE LE POINT HAIR' - DVD Beaver L’Amour Fou, by Tom Milne from Sight and Sound, Spring 1969

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette and L'AMOUR FOU - DVD Beaver Peter Lloyd from Monogram 2, Summer 1971

jacques-rivette.com: Work and Play in the House of Fiction - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Sight And Sound, Autumn, 1974

jacques-rivette.com: Les Filles du Feu: Rivette x4 - DVD Beaver Gilbert Adair, Michael Graham, and Jonathan Rosenbaum from Sight And Sound, Autumn, 1974

DUELLE: Notes on a First Viewing | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film Comment, September/October 1976

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: For the shooting of Les Filles du Feu - DVD Beaver by Jacques Rivette, initially published from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977), from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: On Jacques Rivette (The Early Films) - DVD Beaver Peter Harcourt from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

jacques-rivette.com: The Spectacle of Negativity - DVD Beaver David Ehrenstein from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

jacques-rivette.com: Celine and Julie Go Boating ... - DVD Beaver Celine and Julie Go Boating: Subversive Fantasy, by Julia Lesage from Jump Cut, March 1981, also seen here: "Celine and Julia Go Boating" by Julia Lesage - Ejumpcut

jacques-rivette.com: Narrative Pleasure: Two Films of ... - DVD Beaver Robin Wood from Film Quarterly, Autumn, 1981, reprinted in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, 1998

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

jacques-rivette.com: "Le Pont du Nord" (Review) - DVD Beaver Fabrice Ziolkowski from Film Quarterly, Winter 1983-84

jacques-rivette.com: Rivette's Three Circles - DVD Beaver Gilles Deleuze from Cahiers du Cinéma, February 1989, from Rivette’s website

Celebrating France's Directors Who Rode the New Wave G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, August 11, 1989

The Choice Between Art and Life (LA BELLE NOISEUSE) | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 31, 1992

jacques-rivette.com: Around Painting and the "End of ... - DVD Beaver Thomas Elsaesser from Sight and Sound, April 1992

Critic's Notebook; Films Inspired by a Master of Literary Delicacy, by Nora Sayre from The New York Times, June 25, 1993

jacques-rivette.com: Paris s'en va - DVD Beaver translated by Andreas Volkert at Du, May 1994, from Rivette’s website

Hélène Frappat, “Rivette and Strong Sensations” Hélène Frappat on Haut Bas Fragiles from Cine-Files, Spring 2017, originally published as Rivette et les sensations fortes in Trafic, December 1995

jacques-rivette.com: Tih-Minh, Out 1: on the ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Velvet Light Trap, Spring 1996, also in Rosenbaum’s book Movies as Politics, 1997

jacques-rivette.com: Ragged But Right - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, July 26, 1996, also seen here: Ragged But Right [on UP DOWN FRAGILE] | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Lost and Found: Céline and Julie Go Boating, by Royal S. Brown from Cineaste, January 30, 1998

FILM; Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave Rolls In Phillip Lopate from The New York Times, November 22, 1998

Secret Défense • Senses of Cinema Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, October 2000

Film; In Its Fiery Pages, A French Revolution Dave Kehr from The New York Times, October 7, 2001

"Becoming Image": Deleuzian Echoes in Jacques ... - DVD Beaver Fabienne-Sophie Chauderlot from Eighteenth-century life, Winter 2001, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: "Carnal to the point of scandal:" On ... - DVD Beaver Kevin Jackson from Eighteenth-century fiction on screen, 2002, from Rivette’s website

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Va savoir (2001) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, January 2002

Va Savoir! (Who Knows!, 2001, Jacques Rivette) • Senses of Cinema Laleen Jayamanne from Senses of Cinema, May 2002

The French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine, July 2, 2002

Jacques Rivette: The Quotidian Made Fascinating essay and reviews of multiple Rivette films, including: Jeanne la Pucelle, Jeanne la Pucelle Soundtrack, Secret Défense (Top Secret), full review HERE, also Va Savoir! (Who Knows?), full review HERE, November 8, 2002

Hurlevent: Jacques Rivette's Adaptation of Wuthering Heights ... Valérie Hazette from Senses of Cinema, December 2, 2003

FIPRESCI - Documents - Reading - Chris Fujiwara The Comings and Goings of People in Space, a review of Jonathan Rosebaum’s Rivette: Texts and Interviews (1977), by Chris Fujiwara from Fipresci, 2004

Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story ... Michael J. Anderson from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004

BFI | Sight & Sound | Come And See David Thomson from Sight and Sound, October 2004

• View topic - Celine and Julie Go Boating and Paris Nous Appartient Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, May 6, 2005

• View topic - Jacques Rivette Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, June 10, 2005

• View topic - Jacques Rivette on DVD Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, September 10, 2005

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette's Classical Illusion - DVD Beaver Philip Watts from Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, September 2005

Series Details Rivette Retrospective, UCLA Film & Television Archive, September 30, 2005 – October 30, 2005

Slave to beauty | Books | The Guardian David Thomson from The Guardian, April 15, 2006

Cinemasparagus: La Belle noiseuse Craig Keller, April 24, 2006

My Gleanings: Jacques Rivette - 10 best films - Cahiers 1954-1966 Rivette’s Top Ten lists from My Gleanings, September 16, 2006

Mirror Mirror: The Films of Jacques Rivette | Film | Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich from Slant magazine, November 6, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 1 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 8, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 16, 2006

Paris Belongs to Us - Reviews - Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot, November 20, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 3 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 23, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 4 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 30, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 5: Out 1 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 7, 2006

d+kaz . Screening Log Aggregate: Jacques Rivette Daniel Kasman collection of comments on various Rivette films, December 11, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 6 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 15, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Weeks 7 & 8 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 21, 2006

The World as Narrative: Interpreting Jacques Rivette M.K. Raghavendra reviews Rivette on Rivette, Paris Belongs to Us, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Secret Defense, and The Storie of Marie and Julien from Phalanx: A Quarterly Review for Continuing Debate No. 2, 2007

Cinema belongs to him - Features Miachael Atkinson from The Boston Phoenix, January 3, 2007

The Nun - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot, January 16, 2007

Duelle/Noroît - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, January 22, 2007

Love on the Ground/The Gang of Four - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, January 30, 2007

Art Variables and Life Variables in La Belle noiseuse • Senses of ... Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2007

Jacques Rivette - nwFilmCenter Film retrospective with brief reviews, March 2007

Jacques Rivette and the Other Place, Track One - DVD Beaver Pt. 1 by B. Kite from Cinema Scope, Spring 2007

Paris nous appartient/Paris Belongs to Us • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

Céline et Julie vont en bateau • Senses of Cinema Alison Smith from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

Duelle • Senses of Cinema David Ehrenstein from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

La belle noiseuse • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

Jacques Rivette Retrospective The Fantastic Realism of Jacques Rivette, Melbourne Cinematheque, May 23 – June 6, 2007

Jacques Rivette: Va Savoir - Screening the Past Sam Rohdie from Screening the Past, June 21, 2007

Breathless: French New Wave Turns 50 Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

Noli me tangere: Jacques Rivette, Out 1 and the New ... - DVD Beaver Sally Shafto from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette and the Other Place, Track 1b Pt 2 by B. Kite from Cinema Scope, Fall 2007

jacques-rivette.com: La rose dans le caniveau: Magic in ... - DVD Beaver photos from Le Pont du Nord, Andreas Volkert from The Order of the Exile, September/October 2007

Pairs through the Eyes of the New Wave Gilles Rousseau from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

The New New Wave in French Cinema Dr. Joe Hardwick (University of Queensland) at Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, October 5, 2007

May 68: then and now Sylvia Lawson from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, November 9, 2007

• View topic - Jacques Rivette on DVD Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, February 11, 2008

A Certain Uncertain Je Ne Sais Quoi Dennis Lim from The New York Times, February 17, 2008

• View topic - Jacques Rivette on DVD Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, March 11, 2008

jacques-rivette.com: The World as Narrative: Interpreting Jacques ... The World as Narrative: Jacques Rivette at Eighty, by MK Raghavendra from Phalanx: A Quarterly Review for Continuing Debate No. 2, May 2008

Plus ça change: French New Wave directors are still tearing up the ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, August 24, 2008

Global Discoveries on DVD: By Jonathan Rosenbaum Cinema Scope, Winter 2008

James Naremore, “La Duchesse de Langeais“ James Naremore excerpt from Films of the Year, 2008, Film Quarterly, Summer 2009, republished in Cine-Files, Spring 2017

(Visual) Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, 10/27 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, October 27, 2009

(Visual) Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, 12/29 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, December 29, 2009

(Visual) Quotes…, 1/13 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, January 13, 2010

(Visual) Quotes…, 1/19 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, January 19, 2010

(Visual) Quotes…, 1/25 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, January 25, 2010

(Visual) Quotes…, 2/1 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, February 1, 2010

(Visual) Quotes…, 2/3 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, February 3, 2010

(Visual) Quotes…, 3/19 stills from Rivette films, from Cinemadison, March 19, 2010

In "Permanent Revolution": Jacques Rivette's Out 1: Noli me ... In "Permanent Revolution": Jacques Rivette's Out 1: Noli me tangere, by Mary Wiles from the Australian Journal of French Studies, April 1, 2010

The Humanists: Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse (1991 ... Colin Marshall from 3 Quarks Daily, April 12, 2010

Scenes From A Career #6 - The Mystery and Magic of Jacques Rivette The Blue Vial, July 10, 2010

The Game Miriam Bale on the effect of Last Year at Marienbad on Rivette, from Mubi, July 30, 2010

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Jacques Rivette by Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax book review from Senses of Cinema, October 7, 2011

L'amour fou: A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and Oneiric Reverie ... Mary M. Wiles from Senses of Cinema, December 19, 2011

Jean-Pierre Léaud Out 1 film analysis • Senses of Cinema Daniel Fairfax, July 11, 2014

Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages on Notebook | MUBI Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin from Mubi, August 7, 2014, accompanied by a visual essay: Paratheatre - Plays Without Stages (From I to IV) (7:35)

Where to begin with Jacques Rivette | BFI Craig Williams from BFI Sight and Sound, initially published November 23, 2015, revised February 22, 2016

Jacques Rivette, French New Wave Director of Enigmatic ... New York Times obituary from Dave Kehr, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette obituary | Film | The Guardian Donald Bergan from The Guardian, January 29, 2016

Film director Jacques Rivette, stalwart of the French new ... Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, January 29, 2016

Postscript: Jacques Rivette - The New Yorker Richard Brody, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette, film director - obituary - Telegraph January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette Dead: French New Wave Filmmaker Was 87 Rhonda Richford from The Hollywood Reporter, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette Dead: French New Wave Director Was 87 ... Variety obituary from Boyd van Hoeij, January 29, 2016

Tributes to French New Wave Master Jacques Rivette, Dead ... Sam Adams from Criticwire, January 29, 2106

RIP Jacques Rivette, film's paranoid master - The AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, January 29, 2016

Daily | Jacques Rivette, 1928 – 2016 | Keyframe ... - Fandor David Hudson, January 29, 2016

The Film-Play's the Thing: RIP Jacques Rivette 1928-2016 Catherine Grant from Film Studies for Free, January 29, 2016

French New Wave Director Jacques Rivette Dies at 87 - The ... Nick Newman from The Film Stage, January 29, 2016

Celebrate Legendary French Filmmaker Jacques Rivette With His Films Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette, French New Wave film director, dies at 87 ... The Washington Post, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette, Titan of the French New Wave, Dies at 87 Charles Bramesco from Screencrush, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette, 1928-2016 | Flavorwire Jason Bailey, January 9, 2016

The Death of Jacques Rivette as Cinemasparagus Turns 10 Craig Keller from Cinemasparagus, January 30, 2016

Jacques Rivette: 1928-2016 | Balder and Dash | Roger Ebert Patrick Z. McGavin, January 30, 2016

Culture - French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette dies ... France 24, January 30, 2016

Jacques Rivette's 1970s cinema • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, July 2016

Out-ward bound: Jacques Rivette's Out 1 in the Arctic circle | Sight ... David Thomson from BFI Sight and Sound, February 1, 2016, revised July 11, 2016

Jacques Rivette, 1928–2016 | Obituary | BFI Jonathan Romney, February 1, 2016

Jacques Rivette: Pioneer of the French New Wave who was ... John Leman Riley from The Independent, February 1, 2016

The Genius, Mystery, and Surprising Accessibility of ... Glenn Kenny from Flavorwire, Fenruary 1, 2016

An Always Uncertain End: Jacques Rivette's "Love on ... - Mubi Evelyn Emile from Mubi Notebook, February 2, 2016

Locarno Blog. (Three Reasons For) Remembering Rivette ... Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian from Mubi, February 3, 2016

The View Beyond Parallax… more reads for the week of February 5 Bruce Reid from Parallax View, February 4, 2016

Jacques Rivette [chapter from FILM: THE FRONT LINE 1983] → Jonathan Rosenbaum posted “Jacques Pierre Louis Rivette,” a chapter from his 1983 book, February 8, 2016

Where to begin with Jacques Rivette | BFI Craig Williams from BFI Sight and Sound, February 22, 2016

The Revenant: Revisiting Rivette — Photogénie — Cinea Tom Paulus from Photogénie, March 29, 2016

Paris is a Soundstage • Jacques Rivette • Senses of Cinema Miriam Bale, July 8, 2016

Jacques Rivette's 'Hurlevent' • Senses of Cinema Mary M. Wiles, July 10, 2016

Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, “Out 1 or Suspended Meaning” Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Roland-François Lack, “Mapping Out 1: Thirteen Cartographic Footnotes” Roland-François Lack from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

“Scenes from Parallel Lives”: Jacques Rivette and Marguerite Duras Mary Wiles from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Douglas Morrey, “Some Thoughts on Acting in La Bande des Quatre“ Douglas Morrey from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Richard Neupert, “Jacques Rivette’s Homage to Louis Lumière: To Pastiche and Beyond” Richard Neupert on Lumière et Compagnie from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Three Houses With Neither Beams Nor Rafters: Jacques Rivette's ... Three Houses With Neither Beams Nor Rafters: Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round from Crime Serial to Surrealistic Fable, by Samm Deighan from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

'The Jacques Rivette Collection': Three Proto-Lynchian Dream Teases ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, June 15, 2017

Deaths of Cinema | Metteur en scène: Jacques Rivette, 1928–2016 Matías Piñeiro from Cinema Scope, Summer 2017

TSPDT - Jacques Rivette

jacques-rivette.com: Interviews - DVD Beaver a listing of Rivette interviews

jacques-rivette.com: Interview: Roger Leenhardt with ... - DVD Beaver Louis Marcorelles interviews film critics and filmmakers Roger Leenhardt and Jacques Rivette from Sight and Sound, Autumn, 1963

jacques-rivette.com: Time Overflowing - DVD Beaver Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, and Sylvie Pierre interview Rivette at Cahiers du Cinéma, July 27 1968, from Rivette’s website

Interview with Jacques Rivette, April 1973 - DVD Beaver Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-Andre Fieschi and Eduardo de Gregorio interview Rivette from La Nouvelle Critique, April 1973

Jacques Rivette on Out 1 and Céline and Julie Go ... - BFI Carlos Clarens and Edgardo Cozarinsky interview Rivette from Sight and Sound, Autumn, 1974, also seen here: jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette, Interview (1974) - DVD Beaver

Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette - Film Comment Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, and Gilbert Adair interview from Film Comment, September/October 1974, also seen here: jacques-rivette.com: Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette - DVD Beaver

jacques-rivette.com: The Director as Psychoanalyst - DVD Beaver Interview with Jacques Rivette by John Hughes from Rear Window, Spring 1975, and Autodialogue (1978), a self-interview by John Hughes from Film Comment, May/June 1978, reprinted at Rouge, 2004

jacques-rivette.com: Interview with Jacques RIvette - DVD Beaver Serge Daney and Jean Narboni interview Rivette from Cahiers du Cinéma, May/June 1981, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: Press Conference (extracts): Cannes 91 Jacques Rivette interview from Cahiers du Cinéma, June 1991

jacques-rivette.com: The Captive Lover - DVD Beaver The Captive Lover: An interview with Jacques Rivette by Frédéric Bonnaud, originally appeared in Les Inrockuptibles, March 25, 1998, reprinted at Senses of Cinema in September/October 2001

jacques-rivette.com: Comments on "Don't Touch the Axe" - DVD Beaver Press Conference Berlinale 2007, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette Interview - L'art ... - DVD Beaver Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste Morain interview at Les Inrockuptibles, March 30, 2007, from Rivette’s website, also translated in English by Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus, December 21, 2007 here: Cinemasparagus: Jacques Rivette: March 2007

An interview with Robert Fischer on Jacque Rivette's 'Out 1' David Heslin interviews Robert Fischer, a Munich-based film historian and founder of production house Fiction Factory that supervised the Carlotta Out 1 DVD project, from Senses of Cinema, July 11, 2016

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Images for Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Themes and style in the works of Jacques Rivette - Wikipedia

Part 1 Serge Daney (subtitled) interview with Rivette on YouTube (7:13)

Part 2 Serge Daney (subtitled) interview with Rivette on YouTube (7:19)

Jean Renoir Discusses His Art With Jacques Rivette | The New Republic Video interview (subtitled) from YouTube (7:49)

LE COUP DU BERGER (Fool’s mate)

France (28 mi) 1956

Le coup de berger Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Jacques Rivette's first foray into “professional” filmmaking was this very uncharacteristic and relatively conventional half-hour 35-millimeter short. The plot, which involves the complex trajectory of a fur coat, dimly suggests Max Ophuls's Madame de . . . ; Rivette himself narrates the anecdote in terms of chess moves, one of which serves as the film's title. Claude Chabrol, who coproduced, also collaborated on the script with Rivette, and in some respects it now looks more like part of his work than Rivette's; Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut put in cameo appearances (1956).

Le Coup du Berger Keith Uhlrich from Slant magazine

Jacques Rivette’s short Le Coup du Berger has quite the pedigree. The film was co-written by Rivette and Claude Chabrol, assistant directed by Jean-Marie Straub, and features cameos from fellow New Wavers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, but the initial excitement in seeing these names grouped together is tempered by the film itself; this is clearly an apprentice work for all involved. Jonathan Rosenbaum has quite rightly suggested that Le Coup de Berger (which the subtitles translate as Checkmate) is more Chabrol's film than Rivette's. Aside from the occasional languorous long take, Rivette is present only in the literal sense: He calmly and coolly narrates the proceedings (an unfaithful marriage roundelay that follows a cheating wife's ill-fated attempt to retrieve the fur coat gifted her by a lover), likening the characters' actions to moves across a chessboard. The attitudes and settings, on the other hand, are all Chabrol: Even at this early stage he's poking holes in the bourgeois barricades, especially evident in the film's vaguely condescending use of classical music to counterpoint and heighten the overall sense of pettiness, which the movie then proceeds to frivolously tsk-tsk. The whole thing is shallow and obvious in ways that Rivette's features never are.

User reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United States

Claire (Virginie Vitry) is a chic young Parisian woman married to a somewhat older husband, Claude (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze). As this 28-minute trifle opens, she leaves her husband playing baroque music at the piano, telling him she is off to see her sister, Solange. In reality she meets her lover, Jean (Jean-Claude Brialy) at his apartment; after some idle chatter and love-making he tells her a story of the shriveled heads that the Jivaro indians used to give their lovers as tokens of affection but as she shivers in disgust, he gives her a mink instead. How will they hide it from her husband though? An elaborate scheme involving hiding it at a bus terminal where the husband himself will find it and bring it home is concocted but alas the husband is wiser than they think...

A playful and charming little piece seemingly indebted to noir in its conspiratorial storyline and photography - though much lighter than true noir, co-written by Rivette with Charles Bitsch and Claude Chabrol, who appears in a cameo in a party sequence at the end along with Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, this is Rivette's 4th and last short (28 minutes) before he turned to features. It's his first in 35mm with sound, and the photography (black and white) and mise en scene are quite accomplished if for the most part unspectacular. Several of his trademarks do show up here, including the interest in games and play-acting, conspiracies and young love; also in its use of diagetic sound - as far as I can tell all of the music in the film is by the baroque composer François Couperin, but it is heard as part of a typical mimetic sound-scheme, played on the piano in the first scene, and played on record in later scenes. The film is framed as a story of a chess-game, narrated briefly at various points by the director who comments on the story in a droll, ironic manner that reminds me more of early Godard than of Rivette's other work.

Certainly not a great work but a fascinating and entertaining enough little piece that should be seen by all lovers of the director's work. Part of an indispensable South Korean DVD (with subtitles in English) called "Their First Films" which also has early shorts by Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Melville etc, mostly in very good to excellent prints. The picture, sound and subtitles on the Rivette are probably as good as you could reasonably hope for.

Le Coup du berger (Rivette) Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus, December 30, 2010

Behold "the night of the third full moon..." — ?... a phrase from Jacques Rivette's earliest surviving/released film, the half-hour-long Le Coup du berger from 1956... a phrase which joins full-circle with the last image that will ever be signed "Rivette," the one at the close of his 2009 small, gentle, precious masterpiece 36 Views of the Pic Saint-Loup / A brief word about the title: "le coup du berger" translates literally as "shepherd's mate," which refers to a particular chess stratagem — I know nothing about chess (despite my love for Nabokov, for Kubrick, but that's the way it goes), I've devoted at least fifteen minutes, three times, to trying to learn the moves and how anyone even wins, but I've forgotten the moves every time and have never been able to make sense of how these moves all add up into a rule-set or a winning move — obviously I'm just not wired for the game — anyway, my understanding is that the "shepherd's mate" is the French term for something referred to as the "scholar's mate" in the U.S. and England and whatever — I learned this years and years back from someone, I can't remember whom, who in any case also struck out the caveat that the translation of the title in English as "Fool's Mate" was a false equivalency based on a misunderstanding of what the specific set of moves was, and he swore that le coup du berger — the shepherd's mate — was in fact equal to the scholar's mate, and not the fool's mate, and if whoever said this was who I think it was I take his word for it / Anyway, the cuckolded husband in the movie, Jean, is played by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (one of the founders of the Cahiers du cinéma... of course the film contains the requisite shot of a yellow Cahiers, laid on a nightstand and sporting a Magnani cover): thus, when we encounter the character portrayed by the same actor in 1971's Out 1 (one of the movies in the diagram I might draw showing the power-relationship among the works I consider the three greatest films ever made), we witness him hunched over a chessboard / Claire [Virginie Vitry] mentions to her husband Jean the ticket she claims to have found by chance... Jean (blankly suspicious of Claire's goings-on) claims to have no interest in the matter... this ticket would unlock the compartment in the station where she and her lover Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy) have 'planted' a fur that Claude has amorously gifted Claire — the idea being, with this ticket announced as merely 'found,' she can retrieve whatever 'turns out to have been left' inside the station-locker — from then on, she'll ostensibly be able to wear the fur around her husband with impunity / As Claire spins the yarn to Jean back in their apartment, his gaze shifts to the wall where hangs a painting built around his wife's body's nudity / Upon retrieval of the fur by the couple, Jean delivers the crushing blow: "A rabbit-skin." / Claire returns to Claude later on to tell him... that the suitcase was empty / And so the camera dollies back in wide long shot as Claire says goodbye to Claude, the long dining room table become an abstract figure, a gameboard / Cut to: — the evening party at Claire's and Jean's — the attendees include Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Robert Lachenay, etc. / Claire's sister (Anne Doat) arrives with the fur / Jean has played the winning move / — Rivette's film deals in admirably clear, 'contiguous' geography of space, despite its character austere and bourgeois, alternating shots held for a long duration with those that only fleetingly show, an effortless and unpretentious shuffle between master-shot and insert / My personal favorite among the film's lengthier shots appears within the party scene, where a young '56 Truffaut, cigar dangling from his mouth in the manner of miston pantomiming grown-up, begins to chuckle, overcome by the camera's presence.

Le Coup du berger (1956) Adam Gai from FilmsdeFrance

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 16, 2006

PARIS BELONGS TO US (Paris Nous Appartient) A 98

France (141 mi) 1958-61

A stunning film achievement, shot on weekends with no money and no sets, actors donating their time, Claude Chabrol donated leftover film stock, arguably the most mature, fully realized first film of the French New Wave. Anne, a student at Paris, becomes involved with a group of amateurs trying to stage a performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles, while at the same time learning from an expatriate American that a sinister international conspiracy is responsible for the recent deaths of several acquaintances. Anne becomes convinced that the next target is Gerard, Pericles’ director. Despite her best efforts to stay near him, he commits suicide. Next, a composer dies, and a Fascist conspiracy seems to be lurking in the background, or is it merely the outcome of her own personal despair? The real star of the film is Paris, itself, using documentary film styles, real Parisian locations, and a gritty, aggressive camerawork to reveal the city as a living force, as a representative of the modern, urban lifestyle, and in this case, representative of death and disappearance. Rivette uses a maze-like narrative to create a world where characters enter, then disappear, often without a trace, in much the same way that thousands of strangers enter our perception and consciousness every day, only to disappear without a trace. A work of total originality and inventiveness, with an amazing depth and independence of vision, Rivette creates a world tottering between fantasy and reality.

Paris Belongs to Us | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette's troubled and troubling 1960 account of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters—a student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company rehearsing Pericles—as the student tries to recover a tape of guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu; Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film's title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy: “Paris belongs to no one”). With Jean-Claude Brialy. In French with subtitles. 140 min.

Cine-File Chicago: Michael Castelle

The official inaugural nouvelle vague movie in some parallel dimension (but rather more obscure in ours) is not BREATHLESS but this first feature by Jacques Rivette, co-written by Jean Gruault (who also worked with Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais) and shot by Charles Bitsch (an oft-uncredited assistant director for Godard) sporadically between 1957 and 1960, with an outrageously large and varied cast (including Godard himself, with a brief, amusing cameo as a outdoor-café layabout). The general vibe is a mix of noir paranoia and bohemian inconsequentialness, as the naïve young protagonist Anne (Betty Schneider) explores the literary and dramaturgical subcultures of her brother Pierre's arty acquaintances (including the blacklisted expatriate American writer "Philip Kaufman," not played by Philip Kaufman) while simultaneously trying to solve a rather dubious mystery involving the death of a young Spanish guitarist. The pace is slow and reflective, and the consistent, jarring currents of global conspiracy in this otherwise-recognizable underground of writers, students, and aesthetes reminds the viewer just how equally conspiratorial even the most conventional Hollywood B-movie plots could be, with their molls, murderers, and mad scientists. Highly recommended to anyone interested in observing cinéphiles becoming cinéastes.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

"This is one of cinema's nearest equivalents to Kafka." — Robert Vas

This twisting, enigmatic tale is like an intriguing game to which no-one tells you the rules. Anne, a student from the provinces, becomes involved with her brother's circle of arty Parisian friends. An innocent outsider, she finds herself sucked into a mystery involving an American political refugee (a victim of McCarthyism), a self-destructive femme fatale, and a Spanish activist who recently committed suicide - or could it be that he was murdered? Gradually, Anne becomes convinced of the existence of a vast, malign conspiracy.

Rivette's disquieting film, suffused with sexual and political tension, is as much about its setting - a long-vanished Paris full of fleabag hotels and corduroy-clad intellectuals - as about its story. It features guest appearances from fellow New Wave directors Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy, a striking musique concrete score, and wonderful cinematography, which manages to be luminous and ominous at the same time.

Paris nous appartient was a long time in the making. Rivette, a prolific contributor to Cahiers du cine?ma during the 50s, started shooting it on 16mm in 1957 and completed it slowly over a period of two years, as money allowed. Receiving its premiere in 1961, Paris nous appartient successfully captured the mood of paranoia and uncertainty of that Cold War period - a mood that persists today. In the words of critic David Thomson (Sight & Sound): "Paris nous appartient is a very alarming movie, steadily mindful of how easily the fragile, fragrant world could end."

PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT (Jacques Rivette, 1960) Dennis Grunes, September 17, 2009

Fascism continued after the war to be the principal shadow of murder (and self-murder) stalking the world and individuals in it; Paris Belongs to Us, written by first-time director Jacques Rivette and Jean Gruault, is the most terrifying political thriller ever made—one that expands the stalking shadow even while teasingly explaining it away. Encompassing a vast “organization” that may or may not exist, but certainly exists in the mind of Philip Kaufman, whom McCarthyism has driven to Paris from the U.S., this shadow remains a shadow and yet something substantial enough to affect and even determine several lives we see or hear about, leaving a trail of deaths whose final explanations are by no means certain, merely instead the most recent “explanations.” The film’s brilliant “conclusion” may confuse; but that’s the point. “Evil has many faces.”

Rivette evokes a stark and fluent black-and-white 1957 Paris, one that closes open-endedly on an elusive, haunting image of birds flapping across the Seine. Student Anne Goupil investigates the apparent suicide of Spanish radical Juan, whose death insinuates a spiritual or other connection between Franco and Richard Nixon, who (listen closely) is discussed in the background of one scene. In the process Anne takes up a role in a theater group’s production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, thus launching Rivette’s delight in the interactivity of play and reality, artifice and life. The Shakespeare comes and goes, but the “reality” surrounding it is increasingly revealed to be, in a sense, “staged.” Inward threats meet outward ones, or create them, or are created by them in a vision of floating paranoid realities complicated by a series of relationships, including romantic ones, but also Anne’s relationship with older brother Pierre, which seems inordinately restrained but becomes the tragic center of her life.

Time Out Trevor Johnston

Rivette beat Nouvelle Vague colleagues Godard and Truffaut into production when he started shooting this debut feature in 1958, begging and borrowing resources over the two years it took to finish. Such piecemeal origins are evident in the film’s occasionally scrappy visual quality, but as a harbinger of Rivette’s unique cinematic concerns and a time-capsule of Left Bank Paris, it remains a fascinating artefact.

We’re in the realm of corduroy, pipe-smokers and print dresses as a group of intellectuals circulates between parties in tiny apartments, theatre director Gianni Esposito rehearses his no-budget production of Shakespeare’s ‘Pericles’, and student Betty Schneider ponders the connection between her neighbour’s disappearance and the suicide of an avant-garde guitarist much admired by this social circle. Fugitive American writer Daniel Crohem serves to heighten anxieties by suggesting the dread involvement of an all-powerful yet mysterious cabal.

While the paranoia’s very much of its Cold War era, the thrust of Rivette’s doom-laden quasi-thriller is about our need for connections and explanations to make sense of our world, and how our uncertainties filter through into artistic expression. It’s territory he’s since reworked obsessively and, though admirers will appreciate seeing how those preoccupations emerged fully-formed, the uncommitted might surmise mere vagueness in the attempt to frame the essential slipperiness of meaning. Although fragmented rhythms make the film seem longer than it already is, the images of Parisian streets eventually take on a haunting quality of threatening unknowability. By no means this great filmmaker’s best, it’s still an auspicious beginning to the monumental oeuvre to be revealed in the NFT’s much-needed major retrospective.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The Paris streets of Jacques Rivette's feature debut are the same glimpsed in À bout de Soufflé around the same time, yet they might as well be from Mabuse's Berlin -- indeed, Rivette explicitly links his paranoia to Lang's late into the film by running a clip from Metropolis at a cinephile party. Among the guests is the young heroine (Betty Schneider), a student who, in between investigating an activist-guitarist's death and taking a role in a stage production of Shakespeare's Sophocles, can only ponder, "Am I going crazy, or is it the whole world?" "Both, kid," is her brother's (François Maistre) reply, and in the film's deliberately obscuring structure of muddying riddles, suicides, and vanishing citizens, that's as valid an answer as any. Are the warnings of the American writer (Daniel Crohem) real or ravings? Is the theatre director (Giani Esposito) in danger? What's with the dead man's fiancée (Françoise Prévost)? Who are "They"? Ultimately, the film's thoroughly modern horror stems from the awareness of how much shakier the certainties of the world are than we think, and how vulnerable people are to them -- the vagueness of Rivette's conspiracy-phobia looks back to Hiroshima and McCarthyism, and ahead to the ominous overview of Watergate-era American thrillers. Yet the fragility of order, where a malevolent cabal may or may not be watching your every move, is but one facet of the director's surveying of a world where the lines between reality and fantasy (or, more specifically, reality and theatre) have become scarcely less than blurred. Though not as popular as the maiden efforts of his Cahiers du Cinéma comrades-in-arms, and too schematic next to Rivette's later variations on the same themes, the movie remains a Nouvelle Vague launchpad (Truffaut helped finance it, Godard and Chabrol turn up in bits, and I'm pretty sure I spotted Jacques Demy somewhere). Even the rough transparency of the mise-en-scène, the amateurish bareness of its images, helps evoke the movie's melange of naturalism, melodrama, mysticism, and, above all, its sense of mystery. In black and white.

Paris Belongs to Us Keith Uhlrich from Slant magazine

Paris Belongs to Us is technically the inaugural feature of the French New Wave, conceived in 1957 by Jacques Rivette and his co-scenarist Jean Gruault, filmed in snippets from 1958 - 1960, and only released stateside several years after the one-two punch of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (which features footage from the unfinished film in one of its scenes) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. It's a decidedly unfriendly and depressive concoction: a black-and-white travelogue through Paris's bohemian underground, viewed primarily through the eyes of Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), a fresh-faced student who finds herself enveloped in and practically destroyed by a powerful, though seemingly nonexistent conspiracy. Viewed at some remove from the countercultural forces that no doubt inspired its creation, Paris Belongs to Us plays exceedingly turgid in the moment, as its many characters orbit in and out of each others' lives, spicing up their monotonous existence with make-believe complots that eventually lose their fictional luster, to the point that the real and the imagined become indistinguishable. The unexplained disappearance of a neighbor and the suicide of a musician (both actions tellingly happen off-screen) are the inciting incidents that propel Anne through Rivette's Fibonacci-spiraled mise-en-scène (which incorporates, among other things, a play-within-production of William Shakespeare's Pericles, a film club presentation of the Babel sequence from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and a hilariously lascivious sidewalk café cameo by Godard himself), though we never feel her paranoia so much as observe it at a distinct distance. More than anything, the film seems a hermetic time capsule from a lost world, with Anne acting as a microcosmic stand-in for the Nouvelle Vague's own ideals and aspirations. Her desire and need to effect change, so strong at the film's outset, is ultimately dulled and defeated by its end, fulfilling the ominous pronouncements of the opening credits epigraph credited to Charles Peguy: "Paris belongs to no one." In this way, Rivette was perhaps more of a prognosticator than he realized, anticipating the downfall of the very movement he was involved in before it had effectively begun.

User Reviews from imdb Author: chaos-rampant from Greece
27 June 2011

We have a rather intimidating tappestry here at first sight, about a web of Parisian lives connected to each other and informed by a bunch of nested references. To a mysterious suicide and a missing sound tape, to a staging of a Shakespeare play as mirror of the film we are watching, to shadowy conspiracies supposedly pulling the strings of what we see from a higher, unseen level.

So we have a film-within, as often with Nouvelle Vague, but also a film without. Or better yet, the film we are watching as devised by unseen minds above shaping its world. Bridged by actors (and non-actors) who act parts knowingly or unknowingly, who may be chess pawns moved in turn by other pawns. The idea is that eventually we never get to find out how much of what we saw was this game and whether or not the game was imagined or masking a sinister plot.

So far so good, a complex film in which to superimpose the various grids. Yet at the same time not so complex after all, rather obvious in how it handles us the various keys.

For example; describing the play he's staging, the director says that he welcomes the challenge of bringing order to the convoluted mesh of different roles, that the world of the play is chaotic but not absurd. Does anyone have doubts that we're watching a surrogate Rivette describe the film? Then the stuff about conspiracies. The idea is of course that they may or may not be true, yet in getting there we are treated with naive politics about money ruling the world, a policed, monitored world.

In the finale we get some rather interesting insinuations about where the mind conspiring for answers in the face of an uncertain world leads us. When anything is imagined to be possibly true, nothing is.

The one notion that holds some actual power in all this, is precisely the one that is not explicit. A film noir plot elusively unraveling in the background of so much distraction, about a mistress and her ex-lover arranging murders as suicides. Why, to what end, again open ends. We may or may not imagine this, but this ambiguity is ours.

We would later find in the films of David Lynch and Raoul Ruiz all this situated back in the imaginative mind, where all our fanciful storytelling begins and where the illusionary images (bent by desire) we use to represent reality are born. In more cinematic ways, more fluid. This maintains the appearance of an ordinary world, it's talky, and the camera is not adventurous. It's never really dangerous, except until too late, or passionately engaged in its codas.

But one of the places this mode begins is here, in nascent form. Earlier yet, it was film noir, which the film references and even innovates in an important way, ingenious for its time (by making the noir plot the vague inference, and the karmic forces of noir the explicit reference and actively recognized by the characters). Although it often appeared clearcut and about a simple crime, it was riskier stuff in the right hands.

(A few more words on this: with noir we view a threatening cityscape where cast upon it are shadows of the mind, illusions of desire about a woman or money which in turn distort what is perceived of reality. With the post-noir landscapes (such as in Lynch), we experience instead the world of the mind - now the shadows are inverted, they're pieces of reality which seep back as filmic devices, which the mind arranges into a movie plot that sustains the illusion! This is for me one of the most fascinating journeys available in cinema, from Shangai to Inland Empire, and Rivette's film may not have refined as much but it's an important link in the transition.)

Paris Belongs to Us: Nothing Took Place but the Place Criterion essay by Luc Sante, March 08, 2016

Paris Belongs to Us (1961) - The Criterion Collection

The Sunday Matinee – Paris Belongs to Us Joel Bocko from Wonders in the Dark, January 2, 2011

Paris nous appartient/Paris Belongs to Us • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

jacques-rivette.com: On Jacques Rivette (The Early Films) - DVD Beaver Peter Harcourt from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

jacques-rivette.com: The World as Narrative: Interpreting Jacques ... The World as Narrative: Jacques Rivette at Eighty, by M.K. Raghavendra from Phalanx: A Quarterly Review for Continuing Debate No. 2, May 2008

Paris nous appartient – 1961, Jacques Rivette Allan Fish from Wonders in the Dark, January 4, 2011

Paris Belongs to Us - Reviews - Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot, November 20, 2006

The New Yorker: Richard Brody December 03, 2015

'Paris Belongs to Us' Sets the Blueprint for Things to Come | PopMatters Stephen Mayne, April 6, 2016

Don't Watch That, Watch This: Trust Netflix at Your Peril | Village Voice Michael Atkoinson, April 21, 2016

Paris nous appartient (1960) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Paris Belongs To Us is an eerie gem of the French New ... - The AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Movie Morlocks: R. Emmet Sweeney

Why Jacques Rivette's debut is an anti-New Wave classic - Little White ... Adam Cook from Little White Lies

MUBI's Notebook: Christopher Small December 16, 2015

Blu-ray / DVD: Jacques Rivette's 'Paris Belongs to Us' - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, Criterion Blu-Ray

Paris Belongs to Us Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Paris Belongs to Us Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

Paris Belongs to Us | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard, Criterion Blu-Ray

Paris Belongs to Us: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review ... Justin Remer, Criterion Blu-Ray

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 1 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 8, 2006

Brooklyn Magazine: Jordan Cronk

midnight rambling Frank Pan from Doorknob on a Train, March 11, 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: Christos Dimitrakakis (olethrosdc) from Martigny, Switzerland

User reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United States

Channel 4 Film [Tom Dawson]

The Independent [Anthony Quinn]

Paris Nous Appartient Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Paris nous appartient Philip French from The Observer

Criterion Blu-ray of Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us - DVD Beaver

Paris Belongs to Us - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE NUN (La Religieuse)

France (135 mi) 1966

La Religieuse Time Out London

Unlike the shadowy, possibly non-existent conspirators of Paris Nous Appartient, the heavies in Rivette's second feature are all too identifiable. An adaptation of Diderot's novel of the 1750s, its litany of woe begins with poor Suzanne being rejected by her parents and forced to become a nun. She's beaten, starved and pestered by lesbians, but eventually manages to flee the convent with the aid of a rapist priest. She winds up in a brothel, where she ends it all by jumping out of a high window. Visually uninteresting, with a 'bars' motif that's so redundant as to become irritating, it's further handicapped by Karina's depthless, unaffecting portrayal. The French censors banned the film for over a year, thus generating both notoriety and goodwill, neither justified.

Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Denis Diderot's novel La Religieuse is thought of, in some circles, as the director's concession to France's "Cinema of Quality," which the New Wave adamantly railed and revolted against. But the subject matter is too lurid, the mise-en-scène too Minnelli (at best) and Wyler (at worst) for me to concur. No bones about it, The Nun is a mess—a garish potboiler first and a harsh critique of religious institutions last. But it is never less than involving and is anchored by Anna Karina's simmer-to-boil-and-back-again lead performance as Suzanne, the bastard daughter of faded aristocrats who is effectively sacrificed to a corrupt, 18th-century religious hierarchy. More icon than actress, Karina bravely allows the constrictive period garb to engulf her natural vitality. When she lashes out at the cruel forces surrounding her, she is feral, possessed, but little more than a puppet fighting, with unhinged futility, against unbreakable strings. Indeed, the tortures Suzanne undergoes (ostracized by her fellow sisters at one convent, sexually harassed by the head nun at another, finally forced into a no-way-out life of prostitution) wouldn't be out of place in a low-grade exploitation film, yet Rivette and cinematographer Alain Levent masterfully visualize her journey as a series of static, psychologically charged tableaux. Key to the film's pervasive sense of paranoia are its varied, though tonally similar settings; it makes little difference whether Suzanne is trapped in the sterile gray confines of an unfurnished, water-logged cell or frolicking in a gleaming Technicolor garden (mocking Eden)—all the world's a cage and the only escape (the punchline to the cruel joke of existence) is self-imposed death.

La Religieuse – 1966 Jacques Rivette « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish, January 7, 2011

It was Rivette’s second feature, after the puzzling Paris Nous Appartient, and eschewed the nouvelle vague in favour of something altogether more structured, indeed rigorously so. “This film is a work of imagination”, the opening caption informs us, “not a portrait of religious institutions, 18^th century or other. It should be viewed from a double perspective; history and romance.”

Based loosely on the Diderot novel of the period, La Religieuse is set in the mid 1700s and concerns Suzanne, the third daughter of a once wealthy couple effectively impoverished by providing dowries for their eldest two daughters. As their third daughter, and now aged seventeen, she is being sent into the cloisters as a nun as they cannot afford another dowry to marry her off. The overriding reason for this disfavour compared to her elder siblings is that she’s only a half sister to them, the illegitimate offspring of her mother’s amorous affairs, and as such with no chance of succour after her mother’s death. After initially refusing to take her vows, she accepts only to not recall taking the vows themselves and causing an unholy scandal by trying to accuse the convent of cheating her into taking her vows when not of sound mind.

Diderot hasn’t been the most popular of authors on screen, the only other film of note from his work being Bresson’s modernised Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. It’s not perhaps coincidental then that the film La Religieuse most resembles is Bresson’s preceding debut film Les Anges du Péche. It’s certainly light years from the simplicity of Zinnemann’s The Nun Story, and it’s helped immeasurably by the period detail. There’s undoubtedly a Bressonian feel to Rivette’s view of history. Everything is reduced to the simplest tangibility, with the entire psychosis of the protagonist summed up perfectly in the very first scene, indeed in the very first shot of Karina through bars between the supplicant chapel and the visitor’s gallery, and the parallel to a condemned man being taken into the execution chamber in front of interested parties is hard to dislodge. From this moment on, Karina is not only doomed to be suffocated in the sacrosanct cloisters of the convent, but to wishing herself dead in turn. Buffeted from the cruelty of one convent regime to the salacious advances of a lesbian superior in another, then helped escape by a degenerate monk who intends to rape her, reduced to begging and taken into a brothel before jumping to her death, it’s a life that, like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, sees virtue punished most cruelly and the heroine served up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of morality. Indeed some of the cruelty on display in the convent sequences remains hard tack for the devout even now, with the nuns acting like habited kapo in an 18^th century Sobibor, and it’s all the more shocking for being so understated.

Visually, the film is an absolute pleasure to look upon, with the stained-glass performing wonderful tricks of the light inside the convent, a couple of truly ethereal sequences bathed in moonlight, and an ethereal carpet of leaves in the gardens to symbolise the autumnal feel of the piece. Karina drew mixed reviews at the time, partly because contemporaries had problems disassociating her with the very contemporary films of Godard, yet she is more than adequate in the role, while Presle and, especially, Pulver, are unforgettable as very different matris excellens. Forty years on, it’s now rather unfashionable, overtaken in his pantheon by others, yet no discussion of Rivette’s masterworks is complete without it.

La Religieuse (1966) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Suzanne Simonin is forced by her parents to enter a convent at the age of 16. Traumatised by the harassment she receives from her Mother Superior, she starts to rebel and is transferred to another convent. Here, things are not much better and she finds herself the object of desire of another Mother Superior, a closet lesbian...

A haunting portrayal of repression and religious hypocrisy, Jacques Rivette’s beautifully rendered adaptation of Denis Diderot’s unfinished novel presages the director’s later Joan of Arc diptych and helped to establish him as one of the leading lights of the French New Wave. The subject of the film and the scandal it provoked were appropriate for the time at which it was released, on the eve of the massive youth rebellion of May 1968. Although set in the 18th Century, the film proved to be highly relevant for the late 1960s.

The irony is that La Religieuse, a modest and austere historical drama, would most likely have passed without much furore if various pressure groups (including associations of parents of children in private education) had not put pressure on the Catholic Church and the French government to have the film banned, even before it was made. Jean-Luc Godard had previously mounted a stage production of Diderot’s novel in Paris, with Anna Karina in the leading role, and this had not aroused the slightest whiff of scandal. Despite growing opposition to the film, Rivette succeeded in completing it, but permission to have it released in 1966 was revoked early that year. An outright ban on the film’s distribution was imposed by Yvon Bourges, the secretary of state at the French Ministry of Information.

What then ensued was a fierce battle between the artistic intelligentsia, led by Jean-Luc Godard, and representatives of the Catholic Church, who were convinced the film was both blasphemous and defamatory. Recently appointed Minister of Information, André Malraux failed to prevent La Religieuse from being shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966 and his actions served merely to widen the gulf between a government that was now appearing authoritarian and out-of-touch and an increasingly fractious youth culture. Although the ban was lifted in 1967, the film was rated with an 18 certification, which remained in force until 1975. When La Religieuse was released in July 1967, it was a notable box office success, thanks to the widespread publicity surrounding its banning.

Those who saw La Religieuse when it was first released must have been surprised by its content, because there is nothing in this film to provoke scandal of the kind that the Catholic Church feared. Faithful to Diderot’s novel, the film makes no direct comment on contemporary issues and is remarkably restrained, playing down the lesbian theme and making it clear that it condemns misguided individuals, not the Church or the Christian faith. La Religieuse is actually a highly moral film of the kind which the Catholic Church should have endorsed, since it asserts the self-evident truth that only those who have a genuine vocation are fit to dedicate their lives to their religion. It is hard to see how such an innocuous work could become the object of a reactionary backlash. Indeed, this backlash says a good deal more about the Church and its supporters than the film itself does.

In her most memorable screen role, Anna Karina gives a remarkable and nuanced performance, offering a heart-wrenching depiction of crushed resistance which must have resonated with her audience. Through her association with the directors of the French New Wave (in particular, her then-husband Jean-Luc Godard), Karina became closely identified with the liberated modern woman of the 1960s, and so her casting in the lead role of this film was an inspired and appropriate choice. Karina’s Suzanne Simonin represented a free-thinking younger generation that had grown tired of being oppressed and dictated to by an intolerant establishment. Suzanne’s act of rebellion would be played out for real across France in the spring of 1968, bringing empowerment to the younger generation and an early end to the De Gaulle presidency. Both on screen and off, La Religieuse demonstrated that there is no greater stimulus for revolution than repression.

jacques-rivette.com: La Religieuse (Review) (1969) - DVD Beaver Claire Clouzot from Film Quarterly, Spring 1969

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

"Becoming Image": Deleuzian Echoes in Jacques ... - DVD Beaver Fabienne-Sophie Chauderlot from Eighteenth-century life, Winter 2001, from Rivette’s website

jacques-rivette.com: "Carnal to the point of scandal:" On ... - DVD Beaver Kevin Jackson from Eighteenth-century fiction on screen, 2002, from Rivette’s website

The Nun - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert from Reverse Shot, January 16, 2007

The Nun (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vague Visages: Justine Smith March 10, 2016

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Film Notes - LA RELIGIEUSE Kevin Hagopian from the New York State Writer’s Institute

Flicks - April 2008 Chris Dashiell from CineScene

Tuesday Foreign Region DVD Report: "La religieuse" (Jacques Rivette,1966) Glenn Kenny from Mubi, October 12, 2010

Some Came Running: Nun but the brave Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, October 12, 2010

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 16, 2006

User reviews from imdb Author: jandewitt from Hannover

User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

User reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United States

Jacques Rivette - La Religieuse / The Nun (1966) | AvaxHome still photos

Image of the day. Anna Karina, Behind The Nun Daniel Kasman from Mubi, November 25, 2010

Movie Poster of the Week: "La religieuse" Adrian Curry from Mubi, May 28, 2010

Movie Review - Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

Denis Diderot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Denis Diderot profile from Books and Writers

JEAN RENOIR, THE BOSS – made for TV

France, from "Cinéastes de notre temps" Documentary TV series 1964 – 1972

Portrait de Michel Simon par Jean Renoir ou Portrait de Jean Renoir par Michel Simon ou La direction d'acteurs: dialogue (1966) TV episode (97 mi)

Jean Renoir le patron, 1re partie: La recherche du relatif (1967) TV episode (94 mi)
Jean Renoir le patron, 2e partie: La direction d'acteur (1967) TV episode (97 mi)

Jean Renoir le patron, 3e partie: La règle et l'exception (1967) TV episode (75 mi)

User reviews from imdb Author: allenrogerj from United Kingdom

This is a review only of the central part of this three part film: a hundred minutes of conversation between Renoir and Michel Simon, star of Boudu and La Chienne and three of Renoir's other films. The two old men had not seen each other for ten years, but they obviously enjoyed their meeting and the whole film consists of an after-dinner chat between them, talk of how they made films and how others make films, anecdotes, laments for the way the world and humanity have changed, praise for Shakepeare and Rabelais, dogs and cats they have known, of the Roman emperors ("cons" in Renoir's opinion) while the rest of the crew sit across the table and egg them on.

User reviews from imdb Author: mla195 from Paris, France

It is always a great emotion to watch Michel Simon, perhaps the greatest french-speaking comedian ever, whether he appears in Carné's or Duvivier's pre-war masterpieces or in mediocre films by third rate directors. But it is actually the same emotion to watch him in the role of Michel Simon. As noted by Sacha Guitry in the prologue of La Poison, with him there is no reason to stop filming as no one knows when he starts or stops acting. Guitry was perhaps the only established director to trust Michel Simon and offer him major roles at the end of his career which Jean Renoir certainly did not, and this is why it is particularly painful to watch his hypocritical demonstrations of friendship and interest. Renoir's idea was probably to entertain his court of young admirers (Rivette et al.) by showing them some old freak. But in spite of his endless but insignificant talking, Renoir just does not exist in front of Michel Simon.

Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: Changing Direction

In 1966 Jacques Rivette made a three-part TV documentary titled Jean Renoir, the Boss, and its 90-minute centerpiece has rarely been seen since. “A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue,” screening on DVD this week at Alliance Francaise, is a missing link that’s key to understanding Rivette’s work. It’s a raw record of the after-dinner talk between one of the world’s greatest directors and his greatest actor, both in their early 70s, punctuated by clips from the five films they worked on together–Tire-au-Flanc (1928), On Purge Bebe (1931), La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), and Tosca (1941). It also includes occasional remarks by Rivette, the documentary’s producers (Janine Bazin and Andre S. Labarthe), and the stills photographer (the distinguished Henri Cartier-Bresson). The joy Renoir and Simon clearly share at being reunited is complemented by Rivette’s determination to exclude nothing, so that the “direction of actors” applies to him as much as to his two principals, each of whom can be said to be directing the other. For both Renoir and Rivette, direction requires a profound open-mindedness, alertness, and acceptance.

Don’t think you know what this documentary is doing if you’ve seen only clips from it, such as those included on the DVD of Boudu recently released by Criterion, which treats Rivette’s film as raw material to be plundered. The full version–edited by the legendary Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore), a post-New Wave figure as uncompromising as Renoir and Rivette–is as radical in its own way as Boudu.

Rivette made Jean Renoir, the Boss just before he transformed the style of his fiction features, and Renoir’s influence is apparent in his newfound openness to actors’ ideas. Paris Belongs to Us (1960) and The Nun (1966), Rivette’s first two features, were both meticulously scripted in advance. But in L’Amour Fou (1968), Out 1 (1971), Out 1: Spectre (1972), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), improvisation and chance play a major role. L’Amour Fou intercuts rehearsals for a stage production of Racine’s Andromache, shot by a real 16-millimeter documentary crew headed by Labarthe, and a fictional narrative in 35-millimeter about a growing rift between the play’s real director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his fictional wife (Bulle Ogier), an actress who starts to go mad after she leaves the production. Kalfon and Ogier helped develop their own characters, and in the two versions of Out 1–a 13-hour serial made for French TV that the network refused to show and a radically different 4-hour theatrical feature edited out of it–all the actors were invited to help create their own characters and dialogue. (Rivette’s role consisted largely of arranging meetings between the characters that fit the narrative framework he’d devised and determining how to shoot these encounters.) In Celine and Julie Go Boating–lamentably, the only one of these films readily available in the U.S.–he continued to use his main actors as screenwriters, hiring another writer to help organize their input.

Celine and Julie is a transgressive comedy, as is Boudu, a film in which Simon plays a carefree, amoral, anarchic tramp in Paris. He’s saved from drowning then disastrously adopted by a liberal bourgeois bookseller, but eventually he, without regret, goes back to being a bum. Renoir and Simon fondly, even proudly, recall the shock waves Boudu produced when it first came out–some Paris viewers even ripped out theater seats. When it finally opened in the U.S. in 1967–about two decades before Paul Mazursky did his toothless Hollywood remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills–many people still found it shocking. At the press screening in New York the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, the key American gatekeeper for art movies at the time, walked out in a huff before the end and went on to complain in his review that films of this kind gave foreign-movie distributors a bad name. This was during the height of the 60s counterculture, when battle lines tended to be clearly drawn, but it’s not clear we’re more tolerant today, especially given that the 13-hour Out 1, Rivette’s greatest work, has yet to receive a single screening in the U.S. and that Criterion, the most serious DVD label handling art films, thought it was just fine to offer only snippets of his aesthetically radical documentary about Renoir.

Jean Renoir, the Boss was made during the richest period of Cineastes de Notre Temps, a remarkable long-running French TV series devoted to filmmakers. All the best programs in this series–including ones devoted to John Cassavetes, Samuel Fuller, and Josef von Sternberg–imitated the styles of the directors, and Rivette’s program was no exception, suggesting the extraordinary freedom and generosity of Renoir. Curiously “The Direction of Actors,” unlike the more conventional installments before and after it, wasn’t broadcast on French TV at the time. I asked why when I was editing a small collection of Rivette’s writings in English translation for the British Film Institute in the mid-70s and was told it was because Simon said things that were obscene or potentially libelous. Having finally seen the film, I find this explanation ridiculous. There’s one slightly off-color joke/anecdote that’s potentially libelous–I won’t repeat it here–and it’s told by Renoir, not Simon.

I suspect one reason French TV refused to show “The Direction of Actors” in the mid-60s is the same reason it refused to show Out 1 a few years later–its style and attitude, especially its radical humanism. This film takes the position that anything a good actor says or does is automatically interesting–the same position that helped create Boudu in 1932 and Out 1 in 1971. Whether or not one agrees with that position, it’s a privilege to look through the eyes of someone who does.

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 16, 2006

Time Out London: Tony Rayns

FILM FESTIVAL; PORTRAITS OF RENOIR AND COCTEAU Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 5, 1985

Film: 'Jean Renoir' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, November 20, 1987

L’AMOUR FOU

France (255 mi) 1969

Rivette's claim to the status of a key innovator in contemporary cinema began with this film; it marks the beginning of his distrust of the mechanisms of fiction. A theatre director (Kalfon) mounts a production of Racine's Andromache starring his wife (Ogier), under the mechanical eyes of a TV documentary unit. Wife cracks under the strain and withdraws; director's former mistress takes the part. The field is thus cleared for confrontations betwen husband and wife, between theatre and TV, between ordered passion and mad love. All confrontations duly occur (plus a clash between 16mm filmstock for the theatre scenes and 35mm for the rest), at a length that exceeds all obvious expectation - and thus begins to reach areas that conventional movies don't touch. Finally, even the pretentious title is justified by the shattering, improvised ending, which sees Kalfon and Ogier demolish each other and their apartment.

L’Amour fou (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Sébastien is directing a theatrical production of Jean Racine’s version of the Greek tragedy Andromaque, in which he also plays the lead role of Pyrrhus. During rehearsals, which take place in front of a film crew, Sébastien’s relationship with Claire, his wife and lead actress, begins to deteriorate. The situation worsens when he has to replace her in the play with his former mistress.

The film which established the reputation of New Wave director Jacques Rivette is this remarkable four hour epic, a film which says more about the process of film-making than perhaps any other work. In a similar vein to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, the film sets a crumbling marriage within the context of the artificial world of a theatrical production. As this intimate drama unfolds, it brings in wider societal concerns, reflecting a world of growing insecurity and declining morality. Despite its length, the film is a compelling work which offers an extraordinarily lucid insight into the relationship between a director and his actors, making this potentially Rivette’s most personally involved piece of cinema.

L'Amour Fou | 1969 | Film Review | Slant Magazine Keith Uhlich

L'Amour Fou is a transitional work for Jacques Rivette, the bridge to the superb Out 1 and its equally masterful re-edit Spectre, relying heavily on its director's newfound love of improvisation to achieve its aims and effects. The result is a mish-mash of ideas and situations both brilliant and inane: a good stateside comparison, coincidentally created around the same time, is John Cassavetes's Faces, which, like L'Amour Fou, is a jagged-edge black-and-white psychodrama prone to rather unbelievably grand gestures in constrictively intimate settings. Were I more of a Rivette-head, I might be able to forgive L'Amour Fou's frequent lapses into overextended contrivance masquerading as on-the-fly/fly-on-the-wall spontaneity: the numerous switches between 16mm and 35mm footage (anticipating Atom Egoyan, for better and for worse) hint at an aesthetic conversation that never coalesces into anything particularly profound. It is, instead, a successive series of disconnected actorly moments performed, primarily, by Jean-Pierre Kalfon as playwright Sébastien and Bulle Ogier as his live-in girlfriend Claire. L'Amour Fou's best scenes are its early ones where Claire holes up in the duo's apartment while Sébastien spends an increasing number of hours at a Paris theater, rehearsing a never-to-be-performed production of Racine's Andromaque. An extended passage where Claire effectively disappears from the film (only to abruptly resurface as an attempted suicide) as well as a later, incredibly sustained sequence where the lovers exhaust their rekindled passions by destroying the home they both share are two more standout moments among too few. These scenes are spread thin over the film's feels-every-minute-of-its-four-hours run time, and their impact is further dulled by a good bit of nails-on-chalkboard filler (the rehearsals are particularly extraneous, little more than a conceptual dry run for Out 1's much more insightful examination of performance and how it extends, often violently, beyond the stage). Claire's hilarious, boredom-laced interlude with a Russian doll is itself an all-too-apt metaphor for L'Amour Fou: much energy exerted for increasingly diminishing and hollow returns.

L'Amour fou (Rivette) Craig Keller from Cinemasparagus, December 7, 2006

The screenings in the Museum of the Moving Image series "The Complete Jacques Rivette" (something of a misnomer: there will be no complete versions of 'Jean Renoir, le patron,' 'L'Amour par terre,' 'Jeanne la pucelle,' and 'Va savoir') mark the end of a cinephile-era. The most legendary of Rivette's films — 'L'Amour fou,' 'Out 1,' 'Out 1: Spectre,' and 'Merry-Go-Round' — will have been screened in New York at long last, and in good prints at that. So what's left for me now, as movie-mad groundling scouring the augurs of his heroes? Pretty much nothing, beyond a most-complete-version of Feuillade's 'Tih Minh,' and Godard's 'Six fois deux' and 'France/tour/détour/deux/enfants,' which I'm much more likely to see on a DVD before any kind of public screening hits town. With all the aforementioned films almost certainly taking their residence in my nervous system someday — a feeling probably akin to that of the dead in the next world finally getting a chance to be reunited with the deep souls they knew on earth following THEIR respective, and long-expected, expirations — I'll have "seen it all," all of my own personal "cinephilic holy grails" in any case, as Dennis Lim, or someone, has coined. And speaking of coin, the DVD releases are impending, in due time, in due time... And the screening room at Moving Image is already one step further from the cacophonous, bewildered spaces of Anthology, where 'Spectre' came beamed like an artifact in all its pinkness and pops, true archaeology... And yet, something comparable to my excitement for this weekend's screening of 'Out 1' has already arrived with yesterday's release of Lynch's 'INLAND EMPIRE,' which I'll see for a first time next week... — The cinema that moves me most deeply contains the pain and the glory of the Crucifixion. In its form and vision of a world it scars me and turns my gaze upon my own past and future.

Such is the case with Jacques Rivette's 250-minute 'L'Amour fou' ('Mad Love', 1968), which I am able at last to assert as one of The Great Films. The time in my life when I needed this film and both 'Out 1' and 'Céline and Julie Go Boating' most, during a period of crisis, has passed, but the promises made by "the literature" (Rosenbaum, Hughes, Martin, Frappat) have all held true. Much of what I "imagined" them to be, great and secret shows, happened to conform to the actuality of the films, all present there in their images, intimations, forms, ideas — in their aesthetics and in their experiential principles — so either I had a few manic flashes of prophecy or Rivette is the filmmaker who has turned out to be as weirdly in touch with the disposition of me, one spectator, as he has proven to be with his actors on- and off-set. 'L'Amour fou,' 'Out 1: Spectre,' and 'Céline and Julie Go Boating' will always remain mysterious, profound enclosures of self so long as I live, even if they are no longer, strictly speaking, wholly "imagined" films. (Still, there will always remain that one bout inaccessible: Léaud's on-screen breakdown at the end of the work-print of 'Out 1,' although maybe this is the form it's best that prized, diabolical piece of movie assumes.) However, until 'L'Amour fou' becomes available to anyone who wants to see it, and at any time, I'll share some description, clarification, reflection, of a moment, which is to say four hours, in time:

-The print. Beautiful. And the subtitles were good. I think everyone said a silent prayer that the opening '60s-era logo for New Yorker Films implicitly telegraphed: "...who no longer hold the rights for video versions of the film."

-Aspect ratio. The film was screened in 1.66:1, and the compositions looked dead-on. In her book 'Jacques Rivette, secret compris,' Hélène Frappat lists the screen format as 1.85:1, so... I don't know? Hopefully any digital release will take a 1.66 frame, rather than a 1.85, is all I'm saying.

-The opening credits. The first appearance of Rivette's signature opening-credits "design template," which is to say all titles/names/words are announced in a white, Janson-esque font on top of black. The percussion on the soundtrack foreshadows the opening of the long version of 'Out 1,' wherein the body exercises metamorphose into (gradually make themselves known as) dance.

-35mm and 16mm. When I was younger and had read about the film, I had either misread descriptions of the way in which the varying film-stocks interacted within Rivette's film, or I had read descriptions which were not written clearly enough for the "uninitiated" to understand. My confusion took the following route: The film switches between 35mm and 16mm footage? Does this mean two projectors are needed to screen the film? Does this mean it's in the lineage of the same materialist processes that make Godard's own Un film comme les autres so reviled by audiences? It was only later that I realized — and yes, seeing the film confirmed this — that the 16mm footage has been blown up to 35mm, and is incorporated into the montage. The film, then, is, as Frappat succinctly describes: "35mm." Also note that the film, and all its footage-as-shot, is black-and-white. (It also contains some of the most gorgeous cinematography of the 1960s; I'm thinking particularly of the close-up on Bulle Ogier's face while she reclines in the bathtub.)

-What one might talk about when one "talks about 'L'Amour fou'." First it might do to sketch out the premise: Jean-Pierre Kalfon is directing, rehearsing, a stage-performance of Jean Racine's 'Andromaque' with a group of young and beautiful actors (which includes that freckle-shrapneled john from Godard's '2 or 3 Things I Know About Her'). His wife (although the fact that they're not just a "couple," but married, isn't made explicit until around the 2h30m or 3h mark), played by Bulle Ogier (who, if I might interject another parenthesis, has never looked more beautiful than in this film in which her hair is cut in simple bangs, her costume is unadorned, and her eyes are so fetchingly mascara'd), descends from the stage during the opening rehearsal and leaves for home; Kalfon's direction to his wife, who has been cast in a primary role, fails to penetrate. Effectively having left the production for good, Ogier thereby assumes the role of homemaker and paranoid idler throughout the duration of the film. 'L'Amour fou' is thus the document of Ogier's and Kalfon's relationship discord inside their apartment (not "marital" discord — whatever legalities are involved between the two, their relationship is something beyond the traditional assumptions inherent to the term), set against, and existing within a fluctuating state of exchange with, the tumultuous rehearsals inside the barren theater — which are being filmed the entire time by a crew headed by André S. Labarthe.

Bon. This is where things get complicated, and interesting. As such, I'll attempt to be as clear as possible with, however, no guarantees of success. — In 'L'Amour fou' and 'Out 1: Spectre,' Rivette posits freedom and liberation, but the overriding frameworks represent absolute Control. Which in turn represents the structure, the entity, that most terrifies his characters, who flinch at shadows and break down in frustration. The montage of 'Out 1: Spectre' is punctuated by black-and-white still images — photographs, if you will — of the film's characters in conversation, in solitary motion, etc. The images often do not correspond to any scenes, situations, present within 'Spectre' itself; and these still images also "predict" situations that take place later in 'Spectre' while seeming not to originate from any shot that exists within 'Spectre.' The appearance onscreen of each still — accompanied by a loud electronic hum, and occurring at times seemingly key, at other times seemingly at "random," at their "own," in varying rhythm — arrives like an apparition that foretells fates and doom; that describes paths not taken, exhilarations and tragedies unknown. Yet these stills do not exhibit their own sentience nor (perhaps the opposite now, to arrive at the same ultimate idea) do they register an absolute blankness, a non-sentience. Who "shot" these stills, after all — when, and how? Rivette has described them as expulsions of sorts, hailing from some computer-brain outside the film-world, and indeed, they register as the prophecies of an extra-filmic intelligence, one which — most disturbingly, given the concerns of the "plot" and of the characters — has the ability to consider and enact permutations to the fiction; to variously control and concede to the fiction which it has nevertheless set in motion.

In 'L'Amour fou,' the extra-filmic intelligence or entity — which, let me reveal if it's not already clear, is not just Jacques Rivette, but a subconscious within and around Jacques Rivette — sets about juxtaposing Rivette's own 35mm film footage, shot under his own direction, with the 16mm footage of the rehearsals shot by Labarthe, and thereby ostensibly "not under" Rivette's direction at the time of the shooting. To further complicate matters, Kalfon — in character, no less, as a Kalfon-not-Kalfon — is "really" directing these actors (whom Kalfon himself, the "real" person, has chosen): for the production of 'Andromaque' that they rehearse in 'L'Amour fou' is meant actually to be produced and performed in front of a general audience. To summarize: Rivette directs Kalfon, who in turn directs his rehearsals under his "own" auspices, which Labarthe-not-Labarthe (for he too is a character in the "diegesis" of Rivette's film) then captures on film, and which the 16mm announces stylistically as "documentary footage."

More profoundly than in perhaps any other film, 'L'Amour fou' provides a discourse (but, make no mistake, a discourse with a real story, this isn't mere cold "meta-text") on where the border exactly, or non-exactly, runs between fiction and reality in cinema, theater, and life. (More on this below.) In the shuffling of 35mm and 16mm footage, the film asks: "Who is filming the truer fiction?" "Can we see, either somewhere in the magnified grains of the 16mm image, or in its synchronized real-time cut-backs to the more expansive 35mm footage, the precise moment where the reality drops off and the fiction takes over, or vice-versa?" As a result, Rivette's fictional framework internalizes Labarthe's documentary framework, and the juxtaposition of the two stocks created in the editing process (where the entity exerts his influence!) subsumes even the 35mm footage shot by Rivette himself. A "super-story" thus results in which the documentary footage (like the revenant-stills of 'Out 1: Spectre') appears seemingly at the volition of the extra-intelligence, in dynamic rhythm and proportion (the latter the result of the duration of the footage used between each cut), and given the context of its positioning vis-à-vis the 35mm footage the very method of inserting the 16mm footage comes to mean different things at different times. (Particularly in the second half of the film, in which the couplings of footage stand in as metaphorical representations of the two very different and very similar people making up the Kalfon-Ogier duo; recall nuances of earlier conversations between couple and actors; throw Kalfon's direction into relief against his personal relationships with the actors and professional/personal relationship with Labarthe and his crew; provide a glimpse of where the various sexual affairs that take place between Kalfon and his actors begin and end; echo the "needs" expressed by Kalfon and Ogier "in character" during the razing of the apartment; and so on. As Jonathan Rosenbaum so often draws a connection between the concerns of both Rivette and Thomas Pynchon, I would contend that these footage-juxtapositions and their eventual proliferation of meaning beyond one's initial and naturally cursory sense that they "attempt to penetrate deeper into the reality of the rehearsals" underscore certain similarities with Pynchon's narrative aesthetic. Namely with regard to the way in which Pynchon tends to advance his fiction in each novel; no matter how similar the "trajectories" of his books, the reasons why his narratives progress the way they do changes from 'V.' to 'Gravity's Rainbow' to 'Mason & Dixon' to 'Against the Day.') Because such a technique could so easily come off as arbitrarily, thoughtlessly employed meta-wank, or as the repetition of an idea whose one-time expression would have been times enough, the shifting, constant renewal of "meaning" becomes the very validation of its existence — an assertion, or implicit proposal, that parallels the dreams, hopes, and terror of 'L'Amour fou''s protagonists. A dialectic between formal elements, control and non-control, fiction and reality — a series of recursive nestings and escapes given hilarious (the nearly-sold-out audience at Moving Image howled with laughter and appropriately so!) and terrifying acknowledgement in the scene in which Bulle Ogier pulls apart one matryoshka doll after another after another after another, until she's left with a pebble-sized peasant. She later reconstitutes the shells into a towering Gaudí-esque cone on her nightstand, and like Rivette in his film makes (discovers?) something of mystery and wonder in all elements...

Yet perhaps the grand mystery of Rivette's cinema, one which supersedes and indeed envelops that of the liminalities of fiction and reality, is the relationship between creation and destruction, their own liminalities, and their vicinity to (and masked pantomimes as) the main gestures of life: love and self-fulfillment. Creation and destruction are after all the base elements of existence: the beginning and the end, generation and degeneration, alpha and omega. How to organize oneself, how to find structure amid chaos, reverse (deflect, distract?) what Pynchon calls "entropy"? Through fiction, through play. The work of theater encapsulates and recreates the "play" of childhood abandoned in adulthood. It lends order to the chaos it allows, to the chaos it creates. Human beings come together and separate, make love and fall apart.

-The climax. That's why the destruction of the apartment by Kalfon and Ogier near the end is so amazingly moving, particularly in retrospect. It's a scene that really must be seen to be understood, and that being after hours of having watched during the rehearsals a type of "formalized" theater take shape contrary to its best, quasi-sentient efforts. I won't make an attempt to describe the apartment-"wreckage" other than to say it's the purest expression of manic elation in movies, and the melancholy that follows is of a desperation that knows not yet what it has effected, is the fear that does not know its incarnation harbors still worse.

I would also mention that this "destruction" scene does not possess the kind of emotional tenor I had been expecting from my readings of Jonathan Rosenbaum. (Although since, sorry, I don't like to know the plots of films before I see them, it's possible I missed something in a skim.) For anyone expecting a recreation of the most violent freak-out imaginable in the 1967 disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard's and Anna Karina's marriage, you will not discover this — but something else instead.

Note however, that earlier on, the blood is real.

jacques-rivette.com: Letter from Paris - DVD Beaver Gilles Jacob from Sight and Sound, Autumn 1968

AH! JE L'AI TROP AIME POUR NE LE POINT HAIR' - DVD Beaver L’Amour Fou, by Tom Milne from Sight and Sound, Spring 1969

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette and L'AMOUR FOU - DVD Beaver Peter Lloyd from Monogram 2, Summer 1971

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: On Jacques Rivette (The Early Films) - DVD Beaver Peter Harcourt from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

jacques-rivette.com: Narrative Pleasure: Two Films of ... - DVD Beaver Robin Wood from Film Quarterly, Autumn, 1981, reprinted in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, 1998

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

Movie Review: Jacques Rivette's L'Amour fou - Mr. and Mrs. Natural ... Alan Dale 6-page essay from Blog Critics, March 13, 2007

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

L'amour fou: A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and Oneiric Reverie ... Mary M. Wiles from Senses of Cinema, December 19, 2011

L'Amour Fou – 1969, Jacques Rivette « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish, January 11, 2011

L'amour fou (1969, Jacques Rivette) - Also Like Life - Film Production Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures, January 29, 2007

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Findings from a rare screening of Jacques Rivette's masterpiece, L ... Matt Thrift from Little White Lies

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Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The New Yorker [Pauline Kael] from 5001 Nights at the Movies (pdf format)

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Excerpts from Jacques Rivette -- L'art secret Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste Morain interview Rivette at Les Inrockuptibles, March 30, 2007, from Rivette’s website, also translated in English by Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus, December 21, 2007 here: Cinemasparagus: Jacques Rivette: March 2007

'L' Amour Fou' - The New York Times Roger Greenspun, October 10, 1972, also seen here: Movie Review - - Film Festival: Complex 'L' Amour Fou':4-Hour Work ...

L'amour fou - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OUT 1 B+ 92

aka: Out 1, Noli me Tangere

France (775 mi) 1971 co-director: Suzanne Schiffman

Born in Rouen in 1928, Rivette interestingly met his fellow Parisian cinephiles in much the same way as others do around the world, by coming to the city at the age of 20, frequenting screenings, and simply running into the same faces, usually finding themselves sitting together in the front row of the Cinémathèque Française, where Rivette actually sat next to Jean-Luc Godard for several months before Godard finally introduced himself. Casual acquaintances eventually became good friends, where Rivette, Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer began writing film criticism for French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, hired by noted critic André Bazin in the early 50’s, still considered an influential film magazine to this day, Cahiers du Cinéma's Top Ten Films. While Rivette’s retention of knowledge about films in post-screening debates was legendary, he was considered the most aggressive and well-written of the new group of writers, eventually becoming editor of the magazine in the early 60’s, where unlike his contemporaries, who flourished in their new successful careers as heralded French New Wave filmmakers, he continued attending films regularly at the Cinémathèque well into the 70’s. While Godard holds the distinction today in critical circles of being considered a “radical” filmmaker, challenging conventions, integrating Marxist ideology and existentialist philosophy into his works, it was Rivette who experimented most severely with narrative form, particularly the use of duration along with a loose, improvisatory style, where three of his first five features are organized around theatrical troupes in rehearsal, becoming unrelenting challenges to audiences. Bearing some similarities to Godard’s equally audience unfriendly, loosely experimental political satire LA CHINOISE (1967), a departure of the ways for Godard, a renunciation of “bourgeois” narrative filmmaking altogether, including a similar use of two prominent actors that appear in both, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, Rivette’s emphasis is less on the political and more on the expansive use of screen time. Using a near journalistic cinéma vérité style, featuring the continual use of long takes, what’s uniquely peculiar is the lack of any coherent storyline developing, even after several hours into the film, where instead the director seems more invested in an experimental sense of extended abstraction, literally toying with the idea of loosely connected characters that each get involved in parallel subplots that only become recognizable over time. While this is a highly effective approach in Kieslowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), nearly four hours shorter than Rivette’s mammoth 13-hour film, Kieslowski uses more conventional storytelling techniques, while Rivette’s film stands alone as a clinical examination of the art of filmmaking itself, literally making a behind-the-scenes film about performers improvising extended performances that push the limits of endurance, yet little by little, the director introduces new characters and allows other seemingly real-life events to intrude into this artificially constructed reality, continually altering the mindset of the viewers watching the entire events unfold over a prolonged period of time. It should be stated, however, that this is an endlessly challenging film and one of the most difficult to experience, where there is seemingly little reward for the effort, as Rivette’s film is entirely minimalistic, where it’s simply people going about their daily lives and routines, where often nothing in particular stands out, yet it’s exhaustive to endure, even broken up into segments, or seen over the course of several days, as it was never meant to be seen all at once. Nonetheless, this is also one of those films that stays with you afterwards, that has an afterlife, that continues to dwell in the mind and affect one’s overall outlook, as other films may seem overly conventional afterwards.

Although he made his first short film in 1949, and at least according to Truffaut, his short film LE COUP DU BERGER (1956), featuring uncredited appearances by Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard, ushered in the spirit of the French New Wave, yet Rivette was the last of the Cahiers crew to receive recognition, where it was four years after he started shooting before the release of his first film PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), while his second feature THE NUN (LA RELIGIEUSE) was not released until 1965, but was banned due to the religious content, even though it premiered at the Cannes Festival in 1966, having to go through a lengthy court process to get the ban lifted, losing the better part of a decade on these two films. It wasn’t until the release of his more than four-hour third feature, L’AMOUR FOU (1969), where a disintegrating relationship is balanced against the workings of a theatrical group, that the public finally got some notion of how he operated as a director, and his reputation was solidified. Finding uniquely novel approaches to explore the age-old question of truth, that film was pivotal in Rivette’s career as a precursor to his vast 12+ hour opus OUT 1 that followed two years later. Influenced by the political turmoil of the May 1968 protests in France, Rivette began working with large groups of actors to develop characters, then allowed events to unfold organically on camera during production. Not so much a film as an experience of sheer originality, almost like a unique “happening,” never seen before or since, the film was shot entirely on 16mm over the course of six weeks in April and May of 1970, with each of the actors developing their own characters in some detail, specifically Michael Lonsdale, Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Michèle Moretti, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, where Lonsdale had been working independently with his own loosely knit theater group in Paris with Peter Brook, so it was a natural extension of what he had already been doing, while Michèle Moretti was intrigued by the Aeschylus play Seven Against Thebes, finding it distant and unapproachable, reduced to a series of vocal exercises and physical movements. Berto chose a character in contrast to anything she had previously done with Godard, a kind of secretive con-artist that exists in the margins who would eventually die tragically. Léaud had a similar character, playing the opening segments as a deaf mute, but eventually exposed as a fake. Bulle Ogier’s character goes by two names, Emilie and Pauline, yet is mystifyingly absent from much of the film, largely because she was working on other projects at the time. With these vague outlines in mind, perhaps five or six completely different stories, Rivette had to somehow pull all the collective forces together, which he decided to do through the Balzac trilogy History of The Thirteen (Histoire des Treize), three short novels following the exploits of an unscrupulous secret society in 19^th century France, where Berto proclaimed, “How strange, it’s like being in a cloak and dagger story.” This narrative device allows Léaud, who was initially little more than a fringe character, to become the driving force between an elusive web of mysteries, where Rivette, like Balzac, constructs several loosely connected characters with their own independent stories whose shadowy subplots weave amongst each other and continually uncover new characters with their own subplots. Whether there are answers to these mysteries are apparently unimportant, as the mysteries, in and of themselves, provide all the intrigue.

Almost lost to viewers is the role the city of Paris plays in the film, perhaps imagined as a fictionalized place of random encounters or a mysterious, labyrinthian maze, suggesting infinite secrets. One should be reminded that in May, 1968 the city was shut down by riots and massive student demonstrations combined with lengthy worker strikes nationwide that involved nearly a quarter of the entire population of the country, with universities and factories occupied by strikers for several weeks and the government temporarily brought to its knees, with revolutionary sentiment in the air, eventually quelled by the police, leaving in its wake graffiti sprayed all over the walls and sidewalks of the city, with slogans like, “Be realistic. Demand the impossible!” or “Politics is in the streets.” It was a telling moment in history, where capitalism and the conservative values of the old guard were challenged by a younger generation ushering in a new era of hope and idealism about the future, where citizens challenged notions of equity, fairness, freedom, racism, and social justice. But as quickly as these hopes were raised, the spirit of the movement was crushed, new elections were held with voters overwhelmingly endorsing the existing authoritarian regime. It is in this aftermath that OUT 1 was born, rising out of an extended period of optimism and youthful exuberance, filled with an ecstatic yearning for greater artistic freedoms, but equally suspicious notions about the prevalence of darker forces within that prevent these freedoms from ever occurring. Yet throughout it all, the city is beautifully preserved in a carefully sketched time capsule, with its cultural heritage evoked through a seemingly endless stream of cinéma vérité images shot by Pierre-William Glenn, using a near documentary style where the locations shift around to various parts of the city, where viewers get a continuous glimpse of Paris in the year 1970.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club, November 5, 2015, Unique and monumental, Out 1 is the most paranoid movie ever made

As strikes and riots shut down France in May of 1968, slogan graffiti spread like kudzu over the sidewalks, one of the best-remembered being: “All power to the imagination!” Jacques Rivette’s monumental Out 1 is set almost exactly two years later, in a hazy “What now?” where imagination is just about all people have left of those earlier days—and the thing about imagination is that it’s solitary and private, and not much of a substitute for the high of thinking everything is about to change for the better. Uniquely ambitious, Rivette’s film (technically a serial) spends nearly 13 hours stitching paranoia, loneliness, comedy, and mystical symbolism into a crazy quilt big enough to cover a generation. And though its first-ever American release is bound to dispel some of the air of sacrament and mystery that has surrounded Out 1 for decades, perhaps it will now be better seen for what it is: the medium’s most indelible portrait of an era of lost ideals and a funky, one-of-a-kind vision of individuals searching to be part of something bigger and more meaningful than themselves, even if only as a delusion.

Partly inspired by dream-like, silent-era Louis Feuillade serials like Les Vampires and Fantômas, Out 1 plants many of the best French actors of its time into a plot that can only be explained with Venn diagrams and flowcharts, involving two scam artists, two experimental theater troupes, two Ancient Greek plays, a boutique shop, a secret society modeled on Honoré De Balzac’s History Of The Thirteen, and cryptic messages decoded through Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting Of The Snark.” This is 1970—the real 1970, not a tasteful recreation—and people wear neckerchiefs, shearling coats with toggle buttons, gypsy prints, leather jackets, and pants with flared legs. Shot largely handheld on 16mm, Out 1 could pass for a documentary on what it meant to dress and live hip in the streets and unevenly painted bohemian spaces of Paris in that era. In stretches, it has the off-the-cuff luster of color street photography, with cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn’s frames bursting with the purples, pinks, and greens of fabric and paint, made tactile by the fuzz of film grain.

At the same time, it could just as easily pass for a documentary about itself, given Rivette’s taste for including flubbed takes, camera noise, crew shadows, and curious bystanders. This slipshod quality could be interpreted as a further homage to silent film, specifically the rough location shooting of the ambitious French movies of the 1910s. (One of Feuillade’s most paranoid movies, the short Erreur Tragique, actually uses this as a plot point; it’s about a man who becomes convinced that his wife is having an affair after spotting her in the background of a movie.) Could be is the operative phrase here, because these are really just side effects of a mind-bogglingly complex project being shot very quickly and cheaply. Generally, these would be left on the cutting room, but they are included here, part and parcel with characters who read sinister meaning in coincidence and nonsense.

Out 1 can sometimes seem too real (see: an acting troupe’s intensely physical improv exercise, shot in a single take that runs almost half an hour), but it’s mostly about the unreal: the world of theater, or maybe the world as a theater, full of masks and assumed identities, with actors playing actors, rehearsals doubled by small-time cons, and characters fading away into their obsessions. Here, that old prop of paranoid logic, the blackboard covered with obscure references and circled words, becomes a window into a character’s yearnings, the dots connected because each link represents a step closer to fulfillment, if not closure. At one point, filmmaker Éric Rohmer appears in an extended cameo, wearing one of the most fake beards ever committed to celluloid. Out 1 is the kind of movie that invents its own dimension, and here, a bad disguise constitutes reality. It’s all make-believe and play—and one can’t help but wonder whether the riots of May ’68, which hang over the movie like an overcast sky, were too.

Beyond all other considerations, what remains unfathomable is the degree to which this entire theater piece is a work of uninhibited improvisation, a cinema of liberation, which is really like throwing oneself into the storm of the abyss without safeguards or lifejackets. What’s particularly impressive is the way Rivette handled the different facets of the film, from the improvisation, the theater, the personal problems, and the relationship issues, where this technique creates a theater of extreme anxiety for the actors, who are challenged to fill the empty spaces, as nothing happens in so much of the film, with characters finding themselves alone in front of a camera, which is the real crisis throughout that needs to be overcome. But this is apparent from the outset, where no audience is prepared for what follows, as we’re introduced to rival theater groups, each preparing for different Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, one in a cavernous warehouse space led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale) rehearsing for Prometheus Unbound, while the blazingly red-headed Lili (Michèle Moretti) is leading her group preparing for Seven Against Thebes. The opening 45-minutes or so is simply watching backstage rehearsals in progress, with the camera weaving in and out of their physical space, where the amount of real time spent with these groups, and the meticulous documentary detail that the audience is exposed to is not only repetitive, but strains one’s degree of concentration. There is never a question of establishing the audience’s interest, which is of little consequence, but instead it’s all about the process, where characters are introduced, theater directors are identified, acting methods are chosen and practiced, where there is little attention paid to text readings, instead what we witness are physical acting exercises and vocal techniques, where the audience is perhaps involuntarily forced to adapt to the relentless rhythm of lengthy rehearsals. Where this all leads is anybody’s guess, but the experimental style alone will separate ardent cinephiles from more typical film lovers, as they’re in it for the long haul, while others may simply be scratching their heads. The entire film is broken down into eight episodes, usually shown four at a time over the course of two days, where each of the episodes begins with opening titles listing one name to another, such as “From Lili to Thomas,” followed by “From Thomas to Frédérique,” followed by a handful of black and white still photos (shot by photographer Pierre Zucca) that summarize the previous episode, breaking into the final moments of that episode still in black in white before seamlessly transforming into the new episode which is completely in color. The titles alone change the point of emphasis to those featured characters (though they are more likely the first and last characters seen in each segment), which has a way of leading the audience into multiple mindsets throughout. Juliet Berto is Frédérique, an attractive hustler who tends to hang around bars and café’s, always pretending to be penniless, waiting for someone to nobly rush in with their pocketbook and rescue her from her fate, a girl that is not above going to a hotel room with a man who has designs on sleeping with her and then picking their pocket before anything happens. Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is the male version of a similar con artist, a young man who walks up to outdoor café’s playing a few dissonant notes on the harmonica, handing out cards revealing he is a deaf mute, aggressively soliciting money, where if patrons don’t cough up, he’ll stand and play louder and louder until eventually they pay him to simply go away. Emilie (Bulle Ogier) is a middle class, single mother of two, whose husband has been strangely missing for six months without a word, who also runs a hippie boutique (where she’s known as Pauline) that rarely sells anything, and is more of a front for an underground newspaper.

Eventually dozens of characters are introduced, but not all at once, as it’s not until three or four hours into the film that motives or storylines even begin to surface, where only bits and pieces of narrative strands develop outside the continuing premise of theatrical exercises, which become obsessive bordering upon pretentious after awhile, spending endless amounts of time rehearsing, always with the utmost seriousness and sincerity, though arguments and disagreements do erupt, yet there is little evidence they ever come remotely close to actually staging a performance. Instead it’s more of a reflection of time slipping through our fingers, possibly even a diatribe on idleness, featuring multiple characters leading restless but meaningless lives of no significant value. Perhaps to no one’s surprise (since he is the poster boy of the French New Wave), Colin becomes the central focus of the film, where on successive occasions he is handed a series of cryptic messages by a member of Lili’s group, Marie (Hermine Karaghuez, who, by chance, is the last figure seen in the film) and strangers who are either unseen or quickly vanish out of sight. These messages speak incoherently about Balzac’s History Of The Thirteen and Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical poem The Hunting of the Snark, where he becomes obsessed, bordering on delusional, with deciphering hidden clues, reading them over and over again, writing them on a blackboard, analyzing variations and notable consistencies, literally dissecting them for hidden meanings or clues, which leads him to believe they are from an underground group known as “The Thirteen.” (So it’s only appropriate that the running time of the film approaches 13 hours.) Driven to know more, he visits a Balzac professor, none other than Éric Rohmer, in an extended scene that is reduced to comic absurdity, as his character is still mute, making a mockery of communication and the sharing of academic ideas. The professor is more interested in correcting the inappropriate spellings and grammatical usages in the messages than the discovery of any inherent meaning. Nonetheless, Colin’s persistence pays off, as his clues lead him to an address, using the opening words to each of the five lines of the Lewis Carrol poem, which turns out to be Emilie’s shop known as “L’Angle du Hasard,” which translates to “chance angles” or “Corner of Chance,” which may as well be the narrative structure of the film, as instead of following a straight line, there are continual asides throughout, some of which are dead ends while others are key to the film’s growing intrigue. Up to her usual tricks, we see Frédérique wandering into the home of a complete stranger, an upscale businessman playing chess with himself, Etienne (director Jacques Doniol-Lacroze), where her appearance constitutes a dreamlike presence, yet the minute he steps out of the room, she rummages through a desk drawer looking for money, but instead finds a collection of old letters that she stuffs into her purse hoping to find a buyer, but only Emilie expresses any interest, and that is because several of the letters are written by her missing husband. But these letters allude to a secret underground group named the Thirteen, suggesting the existence of a secret society of powerful individuals (which may exist in the present or the past) who are the true rulers of Paris. With both Colin and Frédérique in possession of coded notes, these characters meet only once and eventually cross paths at what is likely the exact geographic centerpoint of the film (in both the long and short versions), where Colin is seen leaving the boutique just as Frédérique is arriving, but they do not acknowledge one another. Quoting from James Monaco’s The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette:

“This was the diagram,” Rivette explains. “For example, a sequence was decided upon for Lonsdale and Léaud, because of the work each had done in previous films. We thought it would be amusing. It was only after that we searched for the reasons why, which were very arbitrary.” Since Berto and Léaud had worked together in two films by Godard, “it was hardly worthwhile for them to meet.” To emphasize their ignorance of each other, then, their paths cross in the exact middle of the film. “It is this scene which pulls, in fact, the rest of the film,” — the knot where all the threads meet.

Other characters also figure into the action, as Lili’s group gains a new member, Renaud (Alain Libolt), who provides a needed thrust of energy, slowly exerting more influence, changing the group dynamic, eventually squeezing Lili out. Their fortunes become exuberant when one of the members, Quentin (Pierre Baillot), wins a millions francs at the racetrack. But as they prepare for a jubilant celebration, Renaud runs off with the winnings, with the group developing an elaborate plan to find him, fanning out to heavily populated metro stops and circulating his picture in flyers asking if anyone recognizes him, with repeated shots of the Place d'Italie, with troupe members stopping traffic or pedestrians as if it has become the center of the universe. Their high hopes, however, grow to ultimate despair. Colin soon begins to talk, continually pacing out in front of the boutique, developing a fascination with the owner Pauline, assuming the role of a reporter before professing his romantic interests, while unknown to him, her missing husband Igor may be the ringleader of the Thirteen, while also old pals with Thomas. This information surfaces when Thomas takes a trip outside Paris to a small coastal town in Normandy near Deauville to visit Sarah, Bernadette Lafont from Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), who happens to be living in a seaside home owned by Igor. The Thirteen may have had revolutionary origins in the late 60’s, perhaps abandoned after the failed French revolution of 1968, as it had been dormant for several years, where chance encounters revived an interest, although motives between Igor and Thomas, and other members of the group, which includes Sarah and Pauline, also a highly successful lawyer named Lucie de Graffe (Françoise Fabian), remain unclear. Instead Thomas persuades Sarah to return to his theater group, as it needs a new source of invigoration, but instead she causes a rift within the group and the play is eventually abandoned, much like the other theater group, where we learn Thomas had been with Lili both personally and professionally for seven years, and their split resulted in the separate groups. Sadly, one of Frédérique’s gay friends that she meets occasionally in a bar is Honeymoon, Michel Berto, who was in fact married to Juliet Berto, but he inadvertently figures into her death, as he develops a crush on Renaud. Frédérique mistakenly believes Renaud is part of the secret group and follows him, catching him off-guard, where she is accidentally shot and killed. While the film can be maddening, and a bit infuriating to experience due to the slowness of things to develop, but Juliet Berto is a revelation throughout, as she is in Rivette’s later film Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974), a joyful and enchanting spirit that is the heart the film, who dies tragically and senselessly, adding a feeling of mourning for a spirit of something that is lost. Part of the film’s mystery is the unusual rhythm established, with multiple shots through mirrors, where logic is all but absent, instead as events unravel, it’s as if characters are leading the audience down the rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll into a world of pure imagination, continually hovering between a choice of order and chaos, where human dilemmas are hidden within a network of seemingly random occurrences. What all these connecting pieces have to do with one another remains unknown, but certainly one of the most extraordinary shots of the entire film is an extended take of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Colin walking down the crowded city streets while remaining completely in character. The mix of reality and fiction that Rivette is looking for merges seamlessly in this breathtaking shot.

Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 11, 2014, Jean-Pierre Léaud Out 1 film analysis • Senses of Cinema

Jean-Pierre Léaud strides down the middle of a narrow Parisian street, declaiming a few lines of nonsense poetry, which he repeats several times over in circular fashion, such that one soon loses track of any sense of a beginning or end to the passage in question. As he cycles through the words, Léaud undergoes a strange metamorphosis. From an actor reciting lines belonging to his character, he is transformed into an altogether more mysterious being. Sometimes halting in frustration at his efforts to recall the next line, sometimes becoming stuck on a single word (“équipage”, most notably), ingeminating it in the manner of a scratched vinyl record until he manages to press on to the rest of his monologue, the text he utters assumes the quality of an incantatory spell, sending its enunciator into a state of trance-like hypnosis. As the scene progresses, Léaud’s locution becomes more violent, frenzied even; the expression on his face pained. His hands flay about wildly, and his whole body bobs up and down in line with the cadence of the verses he vocalises. It is as if he is consumed, mentally and physically, by the words he is to speak, as if they form his entire universe, a shell from whose encasement he cannot break free.

Léaud is seemingly oblivious to the world around him – he even appears to pay no heed to passing traffic at an intersection, in spite of the evident danger this poses – but in this scene the “outside world” possesses a degree of plenitude rare in the cinema. Numerous bystanders gawk languidly at the actor (and the crew filming him), while others hurry out of the way to avoid being caught by the camera. Roadside stalls sell fruit, posters advertise cola or call for the withdrawal of American soldiers from Vietnam, tinny music and the cries of children spill out onto the soundtrack, at times competing with Léaud’s soliloquy for the viewer’s aural attention. Most remarkably, midway through the scene two young boys take to following Léaud. Palpably transfixed by the surreal event unfolding before them, they alternate between lurking at a safe distance from the strange man and boldly approaching him, persistently clinging to his side as they periodically peek their heads into the frame.

This miraculous scene, caught by a prowling, handheld 16mm camera in a continuous, nearly three-minute long take, comes close to the end of the sixth episode of Jacques Rivette’s 12-and-a-half hour opus Out 1: Noli me tangere. Filmed in May 1970 on the Rue Tiquetonne (a sinuous street situated in an erstwhile working-class neighbourhood just north of Les Halles, in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement), the scene, in this viewer’s experience, is one of the most emotionally intense in the history of the cinema. Its haunting, perturbing quality can no doubt be ascribed to the singular confluence of factors produced by Rivette’s “direct” shooting style, effacing the boundaries between the fictive and the real, the planned and the improvised, the controlled and the unpredictable. But credit, too, must go to Léaud’s inimitable performance, which, in like fashion, resides in an interim zone between acting and sheer, unmediated delirium. In this film, perhaps more than any other, Léaud merits the term bestowed on him by Deleuze: “professional non-actor.”

Rivette was not happy by the conventional scripting in his film debut PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), so he abandoned script entirely for L’AMOUR FOU (1969), resulting in a significant increase in running time, spending four hours with a theater company rehearsing a 17^th century Racine play Andromaque, where real life issues start intruding into their theatrical performances, where the work is a unique blending of fiction and reality. He decided to throw caution to the winds for his next project, where the unprecedented length may have originated with a nine-hour screening of a rough cut of Jean Rouch’s LITTLE BY LITTLE (1970), which was later cut to four hours, while the current release is barely more than 90-minutes. The experience had a profound effect on Rivette, “Nine hours from end to end of Jean Rouch is just fabulous,” as he wanted to capture a similar immersion into the expansive world of OUT 1, where he collected over twenty-five hours of footage, the final version reduced in half, while also reconfiguring the entire work into a smaller, more condensed fashion in OUT 1: SPECTRE (1972), which runs just a little more than four hours. To convey how utterly different each experience is from the other, Colin doesn’t receive his strange messages until nearly four hours into the film, while in the shorter version this happens in less than fifteen minutes. Initially OUT 1 was shown only once at a special screening over two days in an overnight excursion to Le Havre, on September 9-10, 1971, after which it was unseen for the next twenty years until a German restoration in 1990, becoming more of a mythological legend than a reality. The North American premiere wasn’t until the fall of 2006 in Vancouver, where it was attended by about twenty people, but by the time it got to New York it was sold out. There were no English subtitles on the existing print, so a projector had to be set up screening them just below the screen, so there was a continuous problem with synchronization. It was restored again for a 2015 release that included English subtitles just prior to a Blu-Ray release in 2016. Overall the film feels like a radical experimentation and meditation on art, politics, and the importance of living, where the radicalism of the era is represented by Rivette not being afraid to try something so uniquely different. By comparison, what we witness today is the utter capitulation of the bourgeois class, where our collective behavior resembles the habits of sheep, where we have become the messenger for the capitalist agents, buying into their age of consumerism, literally feeding the system with our habits and practices. Léaud’s Colin was manipulated into becoming a potential messenger of one small underground cell that had otherwise been dormant for years, with repeated cuts to shots of cars passing by and pedestrians on the street, a metaphor for all of us, as we’re all implicated, where we become a repository for failed projects, broken relationships, and lost dreams. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has described the film as a rumination on the lost ideals of the 60’s, “a bohemian reflection on the aftermath of May 1968.” Accordingly, the two theatrical groups may represent a kind of utopian ideal, searching for a communal philosophy that was in harmony with their own collective consciousness by representing their dreams of a better life. While both Colin and Frédérique are outsiders living only for themselves, as the film progresses, they both want to belong to something, as Colin searches frantically for meaning from the group of Thirteen, but may inadvertently find love instead, while Frédérique’s discovery of a secret conspiracy leads her to think about something larger than herself, even if it dooms her in the process. Rivette avoids any overtly political references, instead brief associations and chance encounters grow into something larger, only to drift away again, where the dissolution of the theater groups, and the failure or ineffectiveness of the group of Thirteen, leads to an overall sense of disillusionment. Perhaps the film’s greatest strength lies in its ability to confront failure, with the director wise enough to anticipate the film’s own uncertain fate, where fiercely devoted groups with ambitions to change the world through the power and originality of their art have to acknowledge by the end that their grandiose visions and expectations remain largely unfulfilled. Accordingly, the film itself may as well be a stand-in for memory, as it lingers in ours long afterwards.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, and Gilbert Adair interview the director from Film Comment, September/October, 1974, Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette - Film Comment

ADAIR: How much was the spectator’s comfort a consideration in Out?

RIVETTE: To begin with, we never really envisaged making a twelve-hour film. We had the idea of dividing it into parts to be shown on television—which, I realize now, would have been a disaster. The ideal form of viewing the film would be for it to be distributed like a book on records; as, for example, with a fat novel of a thousand pages. Even if one’s a very rapid reader—which, as it happens, isn’t my case—one never reads the book in one sitting, one puts it down, stops for lunch, etc. The ideal thing was to see it in two days, which allowed one to get into it enough to follow it, with the possibility of stopping four or five times.

ADAIR: What were the reactions at Le Havre, when it was shown that way?

RIVETTE: Of course, length changes everything. And the reactions were more emphatic, subjective, and individual than for a film of normal length. Some people left before it was over, some arrived after the beginning; and among those who followed it from beginning to end, there were some who wanted to see it as a test of endurance, others because they gradually got interested. But in any case, it was impossible to judge. After you’ve gotten over the hump of the first four hours, you mainly feel inclined to stay and see it through. But that’s a facile solution, because all of one’s criteria for what is good or bad disappear, and one is experiencing purely the duré. There are some sequences which I think are failures, but after a certain number of hours, the whole idea of success and failure ceases to have any significance. Some things that I couldn’t use in Spectre are all right in the longer version. The whole actor-spectator relationship is totally different in Out, because there the actors are much more actors than characters. There are many more scenes where the sense of improvisation is much stronger, even to the point of admitting lapses, hesitations, and repetitions. There are some of these in Spectre, but relatively few, because we treated it much more as a fiction about certain characters. In the longer version, the dramatic events are a lot more distant from each other, and between them are long undramatic stretches.

* * * * * * *

Jacques Rivette R.I.P. (1928 – 2016)

Rivette died on January 29, 2016 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 87, in his home in Paris. French President François Hollande praised him as “one of the greatest filmmakers,” while film writer, historian, and former Cahiers du Cinéma editor Jean-Michel Frodon was quoted as saying, “[Rivette] will incarnate, probably more accurately than any other filmmaker linked to this movement, what we might call the spirit of the New Wave: his radicalism, his taste for experimentation, his intense relationship both with the history of the art of cinema and the dynamics of the real world.” Richard Brody, from his January 29, 2016 in memoriam essay from The New Yorker, Postscript: Jacques Rivette - The New Yorker:

Jacques Rivette, who died today, at the age of eighty-seven, was both the most open and the most reticent of French filmmakers. Of his openness, I had the good fortune of personal experience—I interviewed him in 2001 by cold-calling him. (His number was in the Paris phone book.) He answered his own phone, responded to my questions generously and cheerfully, and invited me to call him back. I did so a few months later, he picked up the phone again, and he was again equable, good-humored, and patient. Of his reticence, he spoke to me frankly yet indirectly, telling me that he made only one autobiographical film (“L’Amour Fou”).

Yet even if Rivette’s specific experiences are reflected by design in only one of his movies, his oeuvre, his body of work is as personal and as distinctive as that of any filmmaker. His films reflect something bigger than the practical details of one person’s life; they represent an effort to capture the fullness of an inner world, a lifetime’s range of obsessions and mysteries. Yet these private speculations and wonders—ranging from the belief in magic to a love of cities and maps, a horror of political violence and an intimation of deep conspiracies, an ardor for romance and a feeling for the real-world obstacles to its fulfillment—take on a public, social, and sociable cast, in both senses of the word. Rivette loved his actors and built most of his movies on the basis of their contributions to the substance of the film, whether in improvisation or in the script. He loved actors as such, and set many of his movies in the theatre, where the confrontation of director, performer, and the public occur immediately, without the mediation of a camera (except, of course, his own, to take a stand on these fraught transactions).

Rivette brought worlds out of himself because he saw himself in the world. He was the most dialectical of filmmakers, the one whose ability to displace his inner life into an abstract, seemingly arm’s-length framework was most sophisticated and accomplished. That’s because his powers of abstraction were the most formidable. Jean-Luc Godard has credited Jacques Rivette with the founding text of the French New Wave, a piece titled, “We Are No Longer Innocent,” published in the house organ of Eric Rohmer’s Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin in February, 1950. In it, Rivette sought to sweep away the familiar visual rhetoric and conventions of movies in favor of a new and personal way of looking, one that’s particular to each filmmaker—and which is a vision of the world:

[T]he universe of the creator is only the manifestation, the concrete flowering of this gaze and of its mode of appearing—this gaze which is itself only the apparition of a universe.

At the age of twenty-one, Rivette (who had made one film, in Rouen, and was about to make another, in Paris) issued a theoretical framework that’s perfectly congruent with the features that he’d eventually make:

“The natural expression which, in an artificial and conventional language, means complying with conventions and artifices, requires—in this lawless, always improvised, and created language—always an adventurous attempt, a continual improvisation, a perpetual creation.”

Rivette was a consummate cinephile, a critic of profound and famously peremptory insight, as well as a virtual walking encyclopedia of cinematic knowledge. (In a ciné-club’s Monday-night trivia contests in the early nineteen-fifties, he annoyed the audience by answering most of the questions and winning most of the prizes; as a result, he was limited to five per night.) His films bear the paradoxes of his ambitions—joining the paranoid precision of a Fritz Lang and the flowing openness of Jean Renoir (to whom he devoted three feature-length analytical portraits, in 1966), the love of the closed space of the theatre and of the limitless possibilities of the city.

For that matter, his best work is of the theatre and the city, in which characters turn the city into a virtual stage for a plotted private spectacle, thus imprinting public—and often nearly anonymous and workaday—places and spaces with the overflowing idiosyncratic fantasies that his characters (and, in turn, his camera) bring to them. He titled his first feature “Paris Belongs to Us”; it’s a seemingly metaphysical conjunction of a theatre’s Shakespeare production and a political conspiracy.

He returned to the theatre in “L’Amour Fou,” and again for “Out 1,” his nearly thirteen-hour drama about the intersecting fortunes of two theatre companies in Paris and the grand and petty conspiracies and romantic bonds that link them. In 1974, he made one of the most original and influential movies of the time, “Céline and Julie Go Boating,” in which two women (played by Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier) meet ultra-cute in Paris, move in together, share and swap identities, and become involved in an elaborate game of alternate realities in an isolated mansion.

Rivette’s New Wave confrère François Truffaut may have made “The Man Who Loved Women,” but in “Céline and Julie,” Rivette revealed a different sort of love for women—he saw them as masters of imagination, as the creators of secret alternate realms that remained a mystery to him and that he could approach cinematically by recruiting actresses to construct their own stories, their own plots, their own scripts, and enacting them with an unusual theatrical freedom.

The result is another thirty-five years of movies of paradox (his last film, “Around a Small Mountain,” is from 2009).

Filming Berto and Labourier in “Céline and Julie,” Rivette managed to avoid grasping them with a male gaze, but he doesn’t have a female gaze, either. His direction, in their presence, as often in the presence of the improvising actors in “Out 1,” became self-effacing to the vanishing point. Yet the worlds on-screen remained unmistakably his own, the realms of fantasy and gamesmanship of realities and identities were seemingly images of his inner life, and even when the images were neutralized, the film was indelibly personalized. The director of paradox embodied paradoxes: only Rivette could make films that were simultaneously almost anonymous and yet confiningly hermetic, simultaneously open and closed to a fault. Rather than becoming an innovator of cinematic form, Rivette seems to have stepped away from cinematic form and distanced himself from the very notion—as if his life were so fused with that of the cinema that he dared himself to back away from it, with the precipice behind him.. The higher paradox is that even these movie’s apparent faults clashed only to rise to a higher artistic virtue. Rivette may be the master of movies which blast through the notion of being good in order to be great.

Rivette’s tension of fantasy and reality, of city and theatre, of freedom and constraint, of societal conflicts and intimate drives, of actorly disinhibition and directorial vision, finds its supreme form in “Le Pont du Nord” (North Bridge), which had long been rare, was nearly lost, and is now, happily, available on DVD. So are “Out 1,” “Paris Belongs to Us,” as are his cold howl on modern solitude “Secret Defense” (which features some of the most majestically lyrical scenes of the Paris Métro ever filmed) and the mournful romanticism of young women in a theatre troupe and their directorial mentor (Bulle Ogier), but not the whimsical street-musical “Haut Bas Fragile” (“Up, Down, Fragile”).

Yet, strangely, Rivette’s most conspicuous influence isn’t a film but a piece of criticism—an article that he wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1961, “On Abjection” (here, translated and annotated by David Phelps). Its subject is the movie “Kapo,” by Gillo Pontecorvo. Rather, Rivette’s essay is about the subject of Pontecorvo’s film and the sense of responsibility with which an artist should approach such a subject:

The least that one can say is that it’s difficult, when one takes on a film on such a subject (the concentration camps), not to ask oneself certain preliminary questions; yet everything happens as though, due to incoherence, inanity, or cowardice, Pontecorvo resolutely neglected to ask them.

Most famously, Rivette cites one scene in the film and one shot in it (the last in this clip, in which Pontecorvo moves the camera to reframe the woman who dies on the electric fence) and says, “This man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.”

There are things that should not be addressed except in the throes of fear and trembling; death is one of them, without a doubt; and how, at the moment of filming something so mysterious, could one not feel like an imposter? It would be better in any case to ask oneself the question, and to include the interrogation, in some way, in what is being filmed; but doubt is surely that which Pontecorvo and his ilk lack most.

Rivette’s article has become a touchstone for discussing any film in which atrocities are committed (political atrocities—it’s rarely mentioned, to the best of my knowledge, in relation to horror films or gangster films). For instance, it was cited often in regard to “12 Years a Slave” (I discussed the connection soon after the film’s release) and the reference often comes off, in the telephone-game of critical influence, not as a call for a critic’s own consideration of the directorial psychology reflected in a particular shot or scene but as a taboo on realistic representation and a call for aversions or elliptical stylistic strategies. Rivette is, rather, saying something simpler and yet more elusive: directors should think about what they’re filming, should feel what they’re filming with the full force of experience, and if they do so, their images will be appropriate to the enacted events. It’s a call to directors to be humans before serving as artists—and to critics to watch movies with a comparable alertness to human, not aesthetic, experience, including the human experience of conjuring the presence of directors themselves. Rivette, as a crucial advocate of so-called auteurs, was an advocate not of artistic demiurges or abstract creators but of people who reveal and test their character by directing films. His kindness and generosity, at a personal level, are entirely consistent with and inseparable from his art.

I just re-read “On Abjection” for the first time in a few years and was jolted by Rivette’s reference to a series of “false problems” and “dichotomies.” The ones that he cites have in fact proven central to his films—and his essay comes off as his own self-justification, in advance, of his entire body of work. Such a degree of self-consciousness and self-awareness in an artist must have been a torment or, at least, a burden. It may help to explain why, throughout his career, he risked the radical depersonalization and self-effacement of his art, why he pursued unconscious resonances, irrational wonders, metaphysical mysteries of life and death.

Rivette, Jacques - Film Reference G.C. Macnab (excerpt)

Out 1: Nolie me Tangere (1971) Aaron from FilmsdeFrance

Out 1 is like a more avant-garde Thomas Pynchon, or Honoré de Balzac on drugs. A true piece of art, it’s unpredictable, a darkly epic tragedy one moment, and a hysterically unsettling comedy the next. This pantheon of a film creates it’s own trippy, jagged landscape, laws and time. Its symbolic insanity creates a confusing, enigmatic, experimental ride that lasts thirteen hours. It may call for some coffee and blankets for some, but for those who truly love films, you’ll find a massive, tremendous and complicated masterpiece to enjoy.

There is no way to explain this electrifying film. Jacques Rivette (the director) and Suzanne Schiffman, inspired by Honoré de Balzac, came up with nothing but a scenario. They rounded up the most talented actors of the French New Wave, and then let them improvise the next 13 hours, with nothing but that scenario. The result? An otherworldy, bizarre fairy tale, juxtaposing interweaving lives and social classes, told through a hallucinogenic roller coaster of madness, forming a sort of cinematic post-modern architecture.

This is definitely the most experimental (and one of the best) films of the French New Wave. Rivette’s twelve and a half hour magnum opus has gained fame (and notoriety) for it’s length and rarity. It’s truly a miracle to witness, and possibly one of the greatest experimental works of art, of any kind, of the 20th century. Experimental films may never be the same again, and you may never look at films in the same way either.

OUT 1: Noli me Tangere - Indiewire

Jacques Rivette's near-mythic 13-hour serial, Out 1, begins in the constrictive certainty of routine: While two dueling theater groups rehearse plays by Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound), two solitary individuals (Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Léaud) wander the Parisian streets, hustling the populace for cash. Rivette establishes a clear dialectic at the outset: each character or collective inhabits their own space, which we come to know intimately over a successive series of very long takes. It's practically four separate films in one, but the boundaries begin to blur in the climactic moment of the first episode (there are eight in total) when Berto's sleepy-eyed con artist Frédérique nonchalantly pulls out an antique revolver. As per the individual episode titles (for example, "From Lili to Thomas"), this soon-to-be-smoking gun is as much a promise of transference as release, but think of it also as the catalyst that propels us (characters and viewers both) through Rivette's enigmatic narrative roundelay, which takes on some darkly conspiratorial shadings with the second installment introduction of the mysterious, Balzac-derived shadow group The Thirteen. The group's intentions, as well as its members, are never entirely clear; they're a fictional construct as ephemeral as any of the two theater troupes' increasingly off-point improvisations (the play, it would seem, is not the thing), but even as the plottings become quite intentionally muddled, the persons involved—and their connections to each other—come more crisply into focus. Out 1 is an extended anthropological discourse, a dissection of the dashed dreams and hopes of a counterculture destroying itself from within due to a misunderstood threat from without. Yet it is also a vivid document of a particular moment in time, ultimately hopeful in its belief that the human comedy, whatever its fallacies and failures, is always granted continuance.

Difficult Becomes Popular [Chicago Reader blog post, 12/08/06] Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's interesting to see how some of the most difficult and challenging examples of art cinema have become increasingly popular over the past decade. Back in the 60s and 70s, Robert Bresson was virtually a laughing-stock figure to mainstream critics, and someone whose films characteristically played to almost empty houses. Yet by the time that he died, a retrospective of his work that circled the globe was so successful in drawing crowds that in many venues—including Chicago's Film Center—it had a return engagement. Much the same thing has happened with Andrei Tarkovsky—another uncompromising spiritual filmmaker, and one whose films are even tougher to paraphrase or even explain in any ordinary terms.

I'm just back from a trip to the east coast where I was gratified to find, when I turned up to introduce a screening of Jacques Rivette's 252-minute L'amour fou (1968) in Astoria's Museum of the Moving Image, that the film was playing to a nearly packed house. (Incidentally, this galvanizing love story about the doomed relationship between a theater director and his wife, played by Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier, has never looked better to me, though I've been a big fan since the early 70s.) Virtually everyone stayed to the end, and there was a lively and enthusiastic discussion afterwards. Better yet, Rivette's other major experimental work, his over 12-hour Out 1 (1971), was screened for the press in Astoria last week, and I'm told that over a couple of dozen members of the press turned up for the event. The public screening scheduled for this weekend was sold out several days ago, and A.O. Scott reports in today's New York Times that a return engagement is already being planned for early March. (I'm told that the only thing preventing a Chicago screening is the hefty cost in this case of having to use laser subtitles—which appear below the screen rather than within the film frame, and have to be carefully coordinated to remain in sync.)

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago John Dickson

My first awareness of this 12-hour beast, which lived only in my imagination for 11 years, was through stills of Jean-Pierre Léaud in front of a chalkboard, and Bulle Ogier looking in a never-ending wall of mirrors. It was something that kept popping up in books. I could never find a copy and I had vague ideas about what it actually was. I avoided most descriptions of its “plot.” I'd rather dream about it until it was materialized in front of me. Unlike most filmmakers of the “French New Wave,” the films of Jacques Rivette existed mostly in obscurity. You could find a VHS copy of CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, and maybe a few DVDS of his later work, but the majority of his films before the 1990's was, and still is, extremely hard to come by (unless you're internet savvy). Rivette first unleashed OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE on the public in 1971, just three years after the events of May '68 had come and gone, leaving their fragile memories worn across every face, hallway, and locked door. Films like Godard's MASCULIN/FEMININ, Eustache's THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, and Garrel's L'ENFANT SECRET, were a few films that arrived at places deemed unattainable, convincing one of all those perceived “hidden qualities” that cinema uses to allow us a few glances behind the veil of real experience; films that could render ideas, images, and sounds in ways all too personal to seem born of reality. With OUT 1, this cinematic mystery/intrigue reached its zenith. The plot involves two experimental theater groups working on productions by Aeschylus; one is doing Seven Against Thebes, the other, Prometheus Bound. These groups will prepare their productions through various exercises, pulling the most personal feelings of reality out through the mechanics of presenting a false reality, all the while discussing personal ambitions, relationships, and art. Meanwhile, we will watch Jean-Pierre Léaud waking up in dreams, arriving at numbers and clues through books by Honoré de Balzac and Lewis Carroll, wandering Paris with his atonal harmonica wails, and the conviction he is about to uncover a conspiracy hidden within the day-to-day goings-on in Paris. You'll see Juliet Berto assuming the role of a thief straight out of a film by Louis Feuillade, fleecing various men around the city (including Cahiers du Cinema founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) and possibly stumbling upon the same discoveries as Léaud. Eric Rohmer is also going to try and help explain the “keys” of the film to you. It'll take awhile (no shit) for these characters to convene, and even longer for the film to arrive at its conclusions, but eventually, groups will dissipate, forming smaller groups, as a few truths rise to the surface. Hoping for a conventionally satisfying payoff is a waste of time, but so is assuming this is a mere work of pretentious buffoonery, whose creator brandishes its great length like a jam-band playing at a crappy music festival. Its staggering runtime may be there to trick you, but not like a gimmick would; the “trick” in this film is the trick on which all of cinema is based. It will return your filmic expectations to zero, detoxifying any “accumulated errors.” Filmmaker Claire Denis has described viewing this film on the big screen as something close to “an acid experience.”

Film of the Week: Out 1 - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, November 12, 2015

Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 is one of the legendary “impossible objects” of modern cinema, and for a long time was one of the great (almost) unseen films. The result of six weeks’ shooting and six months’ editing, it was originally shown only once, in a work print, in Le Havre in September 1971 (reputedly, the projector broke down). It later resurfaced in the late Eighties and early Nineties, and has even become available on DVD, but there’s no substitute for immersing yourself in a big-screen projection, which is now possible thanks to the film’s restoration.

It’s worth defining exactly what Out 1 is and isn’t. Sometimes known as Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (although the subtitle never appears in the credits), this is an eight-episode, 773-minute fiction film; it was originally intended as a TV serial, but was turned down by French broadcaster ORTF. It shouldn’t be confused with Rivette’s later four-hour re-edit of some of the same narrative material, under the title Out 1: Spectre (so called, apparently, because that film was a sort of “ghost” of Noli Me Tangere, which means “touch me not”). And while the complete Noli Me Tangere was never actually a TV serial, it has the shape of one: it arguably offers the first-ever case of a “Previously on…” sequence, with each episode (starting with the second) prefaced by a series of black-and-white stills from the preceding episode.

Prospective viewers hoping to lose themselves in the drift, the immensity, of Out 1 should be warned of Rivette’s original intention, as he told Le Monde in 1971, to make a film that would “function like a bad dream . . . one of those dreams that seem all the more interminable because you more or less know that’s it’s a dream.” Out 1, given the vaguely hippie-ish milieu it is set in, could also be called a bad trip, not just because of its hallucinatory bending of time and causality, but because of its rueful melancholy; it’s a story about things, people, and communal causes falling apart, arguably a lament for France’s failed utopia of 1968.

There was never a script, more a kind of “chart” of possibilities, with coherence supervised by Suzanne Schiffman, credited as co-writer. No stranger to improvisation—notably in the two films that came either side of Out 1, L’Amour Fou and Céline and Julie Go Boating—Rivette gave his actors freer rein than he did elsewhere, allowing them to create their own characters and stories. It was the very personality of the actors that generated these possibilities. For example, Schiffman persuaded Rivette that Jean-Pierre Léaud wouldn’t excel at improvising, that he needed an instrument and a text to work with: thus, his character Colin ends up playing the harmonica and trying to decipher scraps of paper that seem to be encrypted with references to Balzac and Lewis Carroll.

The film plays out between two communities: two theater groups led respectively by Lili (Michèle Moretti) and Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), both attempting to rehearse Aeschylus plays. Both companies seem, however, to have thrown their texts away and instead practice a very Sixties form of freak-out exercise, influenced by the likes of Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and possibly, in Thomas’s case, a Bacchic touch of Viennese Actionism. Some of the theater sequences last as long as 40 minutes, and to be honest, whenever I’ve revisited Out 1 on DVD, these are the parts I’ve skipped; but, for the sake of the whole durational thrust of the film, you should be prepared to live through them once.

More intriguing, and providing the real spine of the film, are the parallel investigations of two eccentric loners (both of them defined as “out,” excluded from the social circuits they investigate). There’s Colin (Léaud), originally billed as “the deaf-mute,” although he eventually starts talking; he’s first encountered wandering round cafés offering customers a “message of destiny” and blasting them with tuneless harmonica, with the blank-faced aggression of Harpo Marx (possibly a joke about Bob Dylan’s own reedy blasts being taken as oracular broadcasts).

The other loner is Frédérique, played by Juliet Berto: a piratical, gypsyish, sexy yet oddly child-like grifter and petty thief, who—if you’re inclined to read Out 1 this way—might be dreaming the whole thing up in her lonely attic room, “writing” the intrigue from her end of the detective work just as Colin is writing it by decrypting the mysterious sheets of paper he has been given. Frédérique’s route leads her through the Paris underworld; Colin’s leads him through an “underworld” of arcane meaning, seemingly to be deciphered by reference to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Balzac’s vast novel cycle the “Human Comedy.”

The slender thread that both outsiders follow has to do with a supposed “Thirteen,” a secret conspiracy evoked by Balzac in three novellas (one of which, The Duchess of Langeais, Rivette later adapted as Don’t Touch the Axe, in 2007). Certain characters in Out 1 appear to be members of a modern-day Thirteen, although they turn out to be neither terribly sinister nor very formal as an organization—more a vague grouping of friends knitted together by interpersonal intrigues and fallings-out. The two sleuths’ independent investigations simply serve, on one level, to bring them into contact with assorted characters, sometimes in episodes which connect with the plot, sometimes in stand-alone encounters. Frédérique certainly has many of the latter, not always quest-connected, and one of the film’s great joys is Berto’s skittish duets with figures including Jean-François Stévenin (also the film’s AD) as a sub–Wild Ones biker who turns nasty on her; a pair of comic pornographers (one played by film historian Bernard Eisenschitz); and Honeymoon (Michel Berto), a rueful middle-aged man whose unrequited love for a young Adonis later threads its way into the story, bringing the whole a certain unexpected closure of sorts.* As for the French literary subtext, Eric Rohmer—very funny and nervy as a desiccated Balzac specialist—turns up as Colin’s advisor on the Thirteen, his words serving to notify us that the very idea of a conspiracy can be patently no more than a device to create an impression of order and design beneath chaos and contingency.

Perhaps the closest thing to Out 1 in 20th-century French literature is André Gide’s hugely self-reflexive experimental novel of 1925, The Counterfeiters, also built on the premise of a conspiracy. The novel explores the possibility that a novel might be driven by the autonomy of its characters, who develop according to their own rhythms and drives, and sometimes exert a fascination on the author that he might not be able to account for or control. In the book’s last sentence, the novelist character Édouard says he’s curious about a marginal character called Caloub—who just happens to have been mentioned in passing on the very first page. So the novel loops back on itself, Möbius-style. By the same token, the final shot of Out 1 is of Marie (Hermine Karagheuz), a member of Lili’s troupe, whom we’ve barely paid attention to so far—except that she, mysteriously, was the very person who started the narrative ball rolling by placing a message in Colin’s hand. Is she about to plant another communication (and thereby perhaps instigate the Out 2 that Rivette once planned)? Or is the final image as seemingly arbitrary as all the Parisian street shots that appear throughout the film? To quote the title of another Rivette film, Va Savoir—“go figure.”

What forcefully asserts itself in this final shot, however, is the pre-eminence of the arbitrary: we know that the film could have ended with a shot of any other character. The contingent, the unforeseeable and uncontrollable, is a privileged element in much 20th-century experimental art—in music and painting as much as in film and literature—and Out 1 honors it to the maximum. But giving actors their head as much as Rivette does here brings a particular urgency to the idea of fictional characters controlling their own fates: here, the characters genuinely emerge as a result of the performances evolving in particular ways.

The most extraordinary example of that is the case of Sarah (Bernadette Lafont), a writer enlisted by Thomas to help bring new life to his production. Sarah hovers on the fringes of the action for a long time, seemingly benign and unfocused. By the final two episodes, however, she has become something else, an apparently sinister, foreboding presence who, without warning, starts speaking backwards on the soundtrack—an eerie touch of Twin Peaks years avant la lettre. The final episode features a long scene between Sarah and Emilie (Bulle Ogier), sitting on a bed together, speaking seemingly inconsequential dialogue spiked with repetitions: “Why are you looking at me like that”, “Why don’t you go to bed?” But the scene becomes intensely ominous and troubling, partly because it’s largely shot in a mirror, to eerily distancing effect, partly also because of Lafont’s impassive sotto voce delivery and implacable blank stare—performance effects that profoundly inflect the scene in a way that couldn’t possibly have been predicted, either by script or by direction.

Mirrors, in fact, become increasingly evident in Out 1, and in this final episode, two mirrors facing each other on opposite walls create a visual effect that suggest the fiction potentially spiraling off into infinite parallel dimensions. Out 1 may be very much a film of its time, but it has a peculiar currency now, in that today’s mainstream storytelling media, increasingly over the last decade, have become very much fixated on the possibilities of infinite narrative expansion: comic-book series that can spin off new hordes of characters, initially discrete movie fictions that can be rebooted over and over again, TV series that can be spun out regardless of coherence to keep a good thing going as long as is profitable.

But there are more serious versions of this dream of narrative elasticity and variety. Out 1 has literary and theoretical affinities both with Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (about a fiction that can theoretically accommodate all contingencies) and with Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch, which invites readers to plot their own zigzag course between chapters; more recently, Out 1 finds echoes in the populous and very non-linear longer novels of Roberto Bolaño. As for cinema, the filmmaker currently following Out 1’s principle of contingency to audacious extremes is Lav Diaz, whose (usually hyper-extended) fictions genuinely follow the lead of their actors: if one player chooses to leave, or happens to go to prison, Diaz simply lets their character drop out of the action, and follows whatever new path emerges as a result. Watching Out 1 today, you certainly don’t feel that its adventure, like so much Sixties experimentation, leads towards a glorious but quixotic blind alley; it’s still one of the most artistically exciting films you’ll see. In all kinds of new ways that might not have been apparent even 10 years ago, it feels strangely close to us today.

* Honeymoon is, incidentally, the only gay male character I can think of in the Nouvelle Vague canon—unless I’m missing some in Chabrol, perhaps?

Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette - Film Comment Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, and Gilbert Adair, September/October, 1974

Last June, I invited two of my friends—Gilbert Adair and Lauren Sedofsky—to join me in an interview with Jacques Rivette. All three of us had been dazzled by Céline et Julie vont en Bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating), to the point of considering it the most important new film we’ve seen in years, and it seemed exciting to extend our folie à trois to a meeting with the director.

Rivette arrived at my apartment in early afternoon, and with disarming directness put himself entirely at our disposal. When I presented him with a copy of the May-June Film Comment, he leafed through it with interest and asked about the commercial fates of the last two Altman films in America. He explained—always in French—that he’d recently become interested in Altman after viewing The Long Goodbye, and had already seen Thieves Like Us twice. Throughout the afternoon, he spoke of cinema as a devoted moviegoer, someone who “keeps up” as strenuously as he did when he was a practicing critic, and continues to have precise and articulate opinions about what he sees. (For whatever it’s worth, I’ve seen him more often at Cinémathèque screenings over the past five years than all other local directors I know combined.)

Rivette might be the slowest of the New Wave directors to attain recognition, but historically he is the first of the important Cahiers critics to have embarked on a feature film. Paris Nous Appartient (Paris Belongs To Us) was released in 1960, the year after Breathless and The 400 Blows, but it was made between 1957 and 1959. An anguished portrayal of a milieu of outsiders—an impoverished but ambitious theater group, a paranoiac American expatriate, and other marginal figures occupying seedy one-room flats—Paris is the most oppressively Langian of Rivette’s films, oscillating between poetic visions of grandeur (cf. the title) and alienated nightmares of despair (reflected in the opening epigraph, “Paris belongs to no one”).

The frustrated search for a Master Scheme that motivates the heroine of Paris is partially echoed in the efforts of Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina) to find meaning in 18th-century convent life in La Religieuse (The Nun), Rivette’s second film. Ironically, it was the banning of this film by the French Minister of Information in 1966 (a decision eventually reversed) and the ensuing scandal that first introduced Rivette’s name to a wider public. But as often happens in such cases, it was a reputation essentially based on a misunderstanding. The real scandal came one year later, when Rivette abandoned traditionally constructed cinema to embark on the seminal adventure of L’Amour Fou, a 252-minute fresco with Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon that was shot in day-to-day collaboration with cast and crew, and then edited to juxtapose love with madness, 16mm with 35, and theater rehearsals with domestic psychodrama.

Every Rivette film has its Eisenstein/Lang/Hitchcock side—an impulse to design and plot, dominate and control—and its Renoir/Hawks/Rossellini side: an impulse to “let things go,” open one’s self up to the play and power of other personalities, and watch what happens. Rivette is explicit about this distinction in the last part of our interview, but all his films display some measure of both aloofness and interaction. The tension felt is one between outsider and insider, voyeur and participant, the “plotting” of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse and the “acting” of Renoir’s Dr. Cordelier (in the role of Opale). In Paris, it is Mabuse who maintains the upper hand: not only the characters but most of the actors portraying them seem to be suffocated by the machinations of the script. In The Nun, Anna Karina’s acting as well as her role describes a heroic attempt to discover freedom, and the depth of her performance already marks an advance in Rivette’s development. But it is only with the volcanic creations of Kalfon and Ogier in L’Amour Fou that he truly finds his métier, reformulating his aggressiveness by displacing it from script writing to editing, and seeking to make the shooting in between as free and open as possible.

“Someone like Rivette, who knows the cinema much better than I, shoots little; one doesn’t speak of him, or hardly ever… If he had made ten films, he would have gone a lot farther than I.” My records don’t tell me when Godard said this, but it is more than relevant today when we consider that next to Godard’s two dozen or so features Rivette has made, to date, only six. The relative durations of the oeuvres is less disproportionate: by rough calculation, Godard’s is about thirty-seven hours long next to Rivette’s twenty-eight. But taking into account the length of time spent by Rivette between films, the two careers are not really comparable. Rivette has embarked on a tournage only five times, but the entire output of some of his contemporaries—including Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer—contains less radical development than the distance separating any two Rivette projects. Six steps in all, but each step has been a giant one: even, to judge from reports, the one taking place between Out and Spectre. (It is relevant that after the completion of the former, Rivette devoted something like a year to the editing of the latter.)

The three features Rivette has made since L’Amour Fou are described below by my colleagues. Unquestionably, it was the experience of Out and Spectre that made Céline et Julie possible; perhaps, it’ll be the audience’s experience of the latter film that will help to make the earlier two accessible, materially as well as conceptually.¹ Together and separately, these three films are almost certainly the most significant events in the French cinema since the May Events in 1968.

Lauren Sedofsky: Out/Spectre is very much a work of its time. It tends to turn the overwrought canons of modernism on their ears in its ironic acceptance of Flaubert’s complaint that “We have too many things and not enough forms.” It is precisely a desire to maintain “too much,” the excess which overflows any closure, that informs Out and its shorter reorganization, Spectre. Rivette’s six weeks of shooting and some thirty hours of rushes were harnessed by a particular relation between chance and design which makes his effort an extraordinary cinematic instance of the “open work.” The design for Rivette consists in a totally arbitrary framework on which chance may play in its infinite variety. Like the arbitrary parameters of 16mm camera, 35mm camera and the theater in L’Amour Fou, which generate infinitely rich cross-references of representation, the choice of actors in Spectre and their freedom to invent their characters, to improvise their own definitions, leads naturally to a series of encounters and a system of exchanges.

To set these elements in motion, Rivette employs an animating device, Balzac’s Histoire des treize. Only through the messages from Balzac and Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”—gratuitously received by Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a sham deaf-mute, and leading to his suspicion of a utopian conspiracy—can the actors projections begin to interact. Colin’s attempts to decipher these messages, which parallel the spectator’s desire to penetrate the film’s mechanism, ironically reactivates, however feebly, the connections between a number of paranoid universes. Further complications are brought about by the blackmailing venture of Frederique (Juliet Berto), another marginal character whose monetary interests accidentally lead her to conspire against the seeming conspirators.

If Rivette’s work is “open” by virtue of the special concept of the film as a group venture, it is also “open” by virtue of a recognition of the implicit infinity of editing potentialities. Spectre is a film en marge created out of the same material as Out, but one third its length and intended to be as different as possible. In its difference, it proposes to the spectator a plural vision, a tolerance, not of shifts in time and points of view already common in cinema, but of thoroughly independent “cuttings” of reality, no one of which is more privileged than another. To this extent Rivette participates in a contemporary acceptance of phenomenological incompleteness. In Spectre he works actively against all totalizing principles, including his own, thereby dissolving the plot (understood as conspiracy and narrative).

More radical still is the extent to which Rivette has dispensed with the referential aspect of film. His research is very much a part of a time when the world is no longer given as evident or accessible, when the work can no longer refer to reality, but must construct it. His hypothetical location of Spectre in “Paris and its double,” then, must make one think of Artaud (Le Théâtre et son Double). Like Artaud, Rivette has created a “nontheological space” (Derrida) which admits the tyranny of neither text nor auteur. It is a space in which the actor’s grammar of gesture and voice may play creatively, without impediment. Unlike the rehearsals of Andromaque in L’Amour Fou, Michèle Moretti’s preparation of Seven Against Thebes and Michel Lonsdale’s of Prometheus Bound reveal groups not moving inexorably toward representation, but bound by exercises and experiments in their own expressive potentiality.

Theater has been central for Rivette because, as he has noted, it is in the theater that truth and lies are at issue. The utopian plot is its mirror pretext, which congeals and dissolves largely to display the sensual values on the screen, which are purely those of spectacle. Spectre is largely a meditation on the actor and his natural capacity to generate fiction, a nexus of meanings in which the spectator is caught and from which he can emerge with a critical response, in post-Brechtian fashion, only by discerning the lapses, the hesitations, the cracks in the surfaces. Only the breakdown in artifice, the deconstruction of the plot can identify the film as fabulation. Only the recognition that the film doesn’t “work,” that it poses all questions and answers none, can point to the absence at the center of all fiction.

But this spectacle generated to supplement the absence strikes the spectator with erotic force. As Rivette has said, it carries all the weight of significance “as would a statue, a building or an enormous beast.” And the teasing density of the shots of Place d’Italie toward the end of Spectre, like the black page in Tristram Shandy, arouses our desire by refusing all interrogation. This tantalizing, fugitive element acts as a kind of philtre, eliciting our critical and creative consciousness. It is the mysterious dark underside of fiction that leads to the amazing erotic parthenogenesis of Céline et Julie vont en Bateau.

Gilbert Adair: It is not the least charming aspect of Céline et Julie vont en Bateau that its “plot” is almost impossible to relate. The critic faced with such a task can only seek refuge in the all too fragile protection of quotation marks, whose resemblance to raised eyebrows has never been more apt. For the whole movie, like a dream, is set between quotation marks; like a dream, it is an anagram of reality, open to as many interpretations as there are spectators, a Rorschach ink blot, with which, moreover, it shares the same curious mirror silhouette. Anyhow, here goes: Julie (Dominique Labourier) is a librarian living in Montmartre, whose existence is upset one day by the intrusion of Céline (Juliet Berto), a lady magician who performs in a cheap nightclub. After a brief flirtation (in a sense as sexual as you please to make it) the two girls move in together and the film properly begins. Céline has a story to tell—but is she making it up?—about a house in which she plays nurse to a little girl. around whose life glides a strange trio, consisting of two languid young ladies (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) and a no less “phantom” gentleman (Barbet Schroeder, also the film’s producer).

Next morning, as a title helpfully informs us, Julie sets off and is ushered in turn into the mysterious house, from which she subsequently emerges, dazed and with a piece of candy in her mouth, to be whisked off in a waiting taxi, like the Rolls-Royce of the Princesse in Orphée. By sucking on the sweets which they never fail to discover on their tongues after a visit to the house, Céline and Julie are able, in a kind of bizarre “private screening,” to review the drama, solve the mystery and, in a sequence both hilarious and disturbing, exorcise the demons therein.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. And the movie has much of the crazy logic we associate with Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece. In order to make sense out of its partially improvised narrative, the spectator, too, must be prepared to improvise, to constantly renew his expectations, never able to settle down in his seat with the comfortable idea that this is, once and for all, a comedy, a mystery, or even a fantasy. The events of this film do not simply proceed from left to right, as it were, in front of his eyes; each act generates that which follows it—as, in Alice, when she cries, her tears form a pool, the animals race to get dry, etc.—so that the narrative “procession” appears rather to advance at a right angle to the spectator, forcing him to chase after it.

The spectator is assisted in this chase by the movie’s richly allusive texture, both cinematic (Cocteau, Minnelli, Chytilova’s Daisies) and literary; one thinks of Henry James (less the obscure play that served as inspiration than of some odd marriage between What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw), Borges, and even Kafka. And the piece of candy is not only Proust updated (worth noting, in this respect, that the little girl’s name is Madlyn, which contains both the Proustian madeleine and the highly appropriate madly) but also acts as a kind of “go-between,” permitting access to the past, that “foreign country” in which, as L. P. Hartley wrote, “they do things differently.” For this “country” Rivette and Eduardo de Gregorio have found the perfect language, deliciously stilted and démodé, especially when it is sent up by the cartoon-inspired antics of the two heroines (Juliet Berto in particular, a splendidly filled-out Tweety Pie), giving the final sequence in the house, for example, something of the nightmarish quality of Tex Avery’s blending of animation and live action.

Céline et Julie is a kind of Tangram, the Chinese puzzle in which a player, given seven basic elements—five triangles of varying sizes, a square, and a parallelogram (which might correspond here to the three “ghosts,” the little girl, the piece of candy, and Céline and Julie themselves)—has innumerable figures to make out of them, most difficult of all being a perfect square. But, as anyone who has played the game will know, all are difficult and yet all are possible.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: How was Céline et Julie vont en Bateau prepared? What was the initial motive?

JACQUES RIVETTE: Simply the desire to make a film. To get out of the dumps that we all felt we were in, make a film for as little money as possible, and, we hoped, amuse people. Because the adventure of Out didn’t turn out very well, from the point of view of public reception—there was no reception. It was almost impossible to show the film. Meanwhile, there had been another project [PHÉNIX] which we couldn’t do because it was too expensive, which Juliet Berto was also involved in. When we realized about a year ago that we couldn’t bring this project to fruition, I spoke to Juliet one evening and we decided to do something else. Something which would be on the contrary very cheap, as easy to make as possible, and fun to do. The first idea was to bring together Juliet and Dominique, who were already friends: I’d often seen them together.

ROSENBAUM: There seems to be a Hollywood aspect to Céline et Julie that’s quite different from your earlier films.

RIVETTE: Yes—but Hollywood twenty years ago, certainly not today. We thought of it in reference to certain things, such as everything concerning the house. Contrary to what some critics at Cannes thought, our ambitions weren’t along the lines of parody, but rather a pastiche of an old-fashioned sort of cinema. For instance, the use of wide angles and deep focus. I thought during the shooting that the film was a little bit like an RKO movie of the Fifties, but in color—those films that more or less successfully imitated Wyler’s. There was a fad between 1945 and 1950 to use mise-en-scène in depth, particularly at RKO—the Gregg Toland influence. In the film’s details, we thought of several American movies. At the end, for example, the idea was to have a slapstick finish. In fact we were thinking a bit of Hawks, although we did it quite differently from the way Hawks would have. One of Hawks’ favorite remarks is that when he’s found a subject, he first of all tries to make a comedy out of it; then, if he doesn’t succeed, it’s a serious film. So we decided that the end would be completely open; it could be very dramatic or whatever we wanted. I wanted to have a slapstick finale because it seemed more amusing.

There are several scenes in the film which I had to edit a lot because they played on looks and reactions—I had to do much more editing than in L’Amour Fou or Out. And from the moment you start editing, you’re obliged to think about what Hitchcock would have done in similar circumstances. But it’s only in three or four sequences that we frankly attempted to follow the principles of Hitchcockian editing. For the first fifteen minutes, we wanted to have the imaginary Montmartre of a studio, like the Montmartre of An American in Paris—which is why we used the second title, Phantom Ladies Over Paris, which is also the title of the interior film, if you like. ²

ROSENBAUM: Were cartoons an influence?

RIVETTE: Oh, yes. Definitely. But it was important as an idea only at the beginning. If we’d had more time and money we would have pursued it more systematically. Although it might not have changed anything. And the actresses had this in mind all the time, especially Juliet. Everything she does is always very visual, physical. Her movements are very staccato—the way she walks, the way she eats the candy.

GILBERT ADAIR: And Feuillade?

RIVETTE: Not at all. I don’t find the film very Feuillade-like. The scene with the girls in black tights was just a gag, lasting only thirty seconds.

ADAIR: But the whole idea of fantasy in the open air…

RIVETTE: Yes, but that’s because we were broke. It wasn’t at all a theoretical position. When we were looking for the house, we wanted it to be very homey; in fact, it’s a completely normal house, but we filmed it in such a way that it seems a little unnatural. And we were lucky to find the cats there. We didn’t bring them. All the cats are in the film simply because they were there.

ROSENBAUM: When was script writing introduced into the project?

RIVETTE: There never really was a written script. What is a scenario, after all? If it’s a project for a film, or, on the contrary, something written and then shot, I don’t do that any longer—not since L’Amour Fou—and I have no desire to do it again.

We began by elimination: we didn’t want to make a serious film; we didn’t want to make a film about the theater because we’d done that too often; we didn’t want to make a film about current events or politics. But we did have the desire from the very beginning to do something close to comedy, and even frankly commedia dell’arte. And the first thing we did after two hours of conversation was to look for the characters’ names. And we stopped there that evening. So finding the names Céline and Julie was our starting point…

The first stage consisted of conversations with Juliet and Dominique, when quite quickly the two girls organized their own characters. Then came the idea of their meeting, how the two connected. But then there was a stage—after the first half-hour of the film as it now stands—where we didn’t have a clear idea, where there were all kinds of possibilities. We hesitated for about two weeks with Eduardo [de Gregorio], who had joined us by that time. We already felt that a second story was necessary within the first, for which I wanted Bulle [Ogier] and Marie-France [Pisier], in order to have another feminine pair, both in opposition and in relation to the first. But we didn’t know at all either what the second story would be or the mechanism between the two-that’s what took the longest to organize. It was by approximation, groping. It was Eduardo who suggested the Henry James novel [The Other House] which we started from, which he hadn’t read himself but had heard about. In fact, none of us has read it because we couldn’t find it. Eduardo read only the dramatization, which is apparently very boring; and I don’t read English well enough.

We didn’t want this to be a realistic investigation—we sought a less realistic principle. We thought of lots of things, like Bioy Casares—Morel’s Invention. The day when we were really happy, when I felt we’d found the trigger, was the day we had the idea of the candy. Because that was what permitted us to bring everything together.

ROSENBAUM: When did you shoot the scenes in the house?

RIVETTE: In the middle of the shooting. At first we thought of doing it later, and then for all sorts of practical reasons—because both girls had to talk about the house in their scenes together—we had to shoot it earlier. On the whole, the shooting was in three parts: first we shot more or less everything corresponding to the first part of the film—all the exteriors (the chase, etc.) and the “annexes” (like the cabaret); then the scenes in the house; then everything taking place in Julie’s apartment.

ROSENBAUM: Why did you decide to use a scriptwriter and not depend completely on improvisation after the experience of Out?

RIVETTE: Out and Céline et Julie are related, but in the end quite different. In Out there was a canvas, but inside the canvas was raw improvisation. But even in this case I wasn’t alone: I did it with a friend who was also my assistant director, Suzanne Schiffman. I like having someone by my side, anyway, as a kind of referee, not an arbitrator but someone who has other ideas. So Eduardo was there almost from the start. But I didn’t ask him to come as a scriptwriter. I asked him just to come and talk with us on the same level, and he was present during all the shooting.

ADAIR: It wasn’t that you wanted someone to write the dialogue in the house?

RIVETTE: Not really. Maybe a little. When you’re having discussions like that, it’s always useful to have several people to toss out ideas. Eduardo had already worked with Suzanne Schiffman on the Phénix project, and we were used to discussing things together very informally. It wasn’t at all work. In fact, during the shooting, Eduardo wrote two scenes in their entirety; everything else was done with us. The scenes in the house had to be written; those between the two girls were largely written by the actresses themselves. Their dialogue wasn’t definitive, but a sort of canvas on which we improvised afterward. After all, there were many precise things that had to be said; it couldn’t be totally improvised. And there was a whole system of repetition in the house, so that had to be completely written. Marie-France, Bulle, Eduardo, and I wrote out the principal scenes. But Bulle’s monologue when she’s bleeding and the scene just after, between Marie-France and Barbet [Schroeder], were done only by Eduardo.

ADAIR: In Out there are explicit references to “The Hunting of the Snark,” and the whole of Céline et Julie is saturated with the spirit of Lewis Carroll. What role did Alice in Wonderland play in the conception of the latter film?

RIVETTE: We thought of it in the first scene. We wanted Juliet’s dash in front of Dominique on the park bench to remind one a bit of the White Rabbit. The idea was that Dominique would chase her and they would both fall, not into the rabbit hole, but into fiction.

ROSENBAUM: Why did you choose the title Out?

RIVETTE: Because we didn’t succeed in finding a title. It’s without meaning. It’s only a label.

LAUREN SEDOFSKY: And Spectre?

RIVETTE: I wanted the shorter version to have its own title. I seriously looked for one. There are so many readings possible that finally there’s none.

ADAIR: How much was the spectator’s comfort a consideration in Out?

RIVETTE: To begin with, we never really envisaged making a twelve-hour film. We had the idea of dividing it into parts to be shown on television—which, I realize now, would have been a disaster. The ideal form of viewing the film would be for it to be distributed like a book on records; as, for example, with a fat novel of a thousand pages. Even if one’s a very rapid reader—which, as it happens, isn’t my case—one never reads the book in one sitting, one puts it down, stops for lunch, etc. The ideal thing was to see it in two days, which allowed one to get into it enough to follow it, with the possibility of stopping four or five times.

ADAIR: What were the reactions at Le Havre, when it was shown that way?

RIVETTE: Of course, length changes everything. And the reactions were more emphatic, subjective, and individual than for a film of normal length. Some people left before it was over, some arrived after the beginning; and among those who followed it from beginning to end, there were some who wanted to see it as a test of endurance, others because they gradually got interested. But in any case, it was impossible to judge. After you’ve gotten over the hump of the first four hours, you mainly feel inclined to stay and see it through. But that’s a facile solution, because all of one’s criteria for what is good or bad disappear, and one is experiencing purely the duré. There are some sequences which I think are failures, but after a certain number of hours, the whole idea of success and failure ceases to have any significance. Some things that I couldn’t use in Spectre are all right in the longer version. The whole actor-spectator relationship is totally different in Out, because there the actors are much more actors than characters. There are many more scenes where the sense of improvisation is much stronger, even to the point of admitting lapses, hesitations, and repetitions. There are some of these in Spectre, but relatively few, because we treated it much more as a fiction about certain characters. In the longer version, the dramatic events are a lot more distant from each other, and between them are long undramatic stretches.

ADAIR: For you, is the “ideal” spectator someone who sees the actors as actors, or someone who…

RIVETTE: No, he’s someone who’s taken in. In any case, there’s no “ideal” spectator. Even when one sees a film a second time, one is always a different spectator. At least that’s what interests me when I see a film again. Spectre, in any case, needs more than one viewing. It’s too complex the first time; it has too much information. Céline et Julie, on the other hand, is a film one understands the first time. But to return to the question, the “ideal” viewer is one who agrees to enter the fiction: it’s the least that one can demand of a spectator. When I go to the cinema, I adore films which draw me into their fictions, although it doesn’t happen very often. But as Spectre progresses, this so-called “ideal” spectator should gradually begin to realize—during the last third or quarter-that the fiction is in fact a trap, that it’s full of cracks and completely artificial, in every sense of the word, and has only been a vehicle.

ROSENBAUM: To what extent is a viewing of Out necessary to an appreciation of Spectre?

RIVETTE: When we edited Spectre, we tried to make it as different from Out as possible, working with the same material. We didn’t quite succeed since, contrary to what I thought, there were things that couldn’t be changed. The center of the four-hour film resembles that of the twelve-hour version quite a bit. On the other hand, the first and last hours are quite different. Not dramatically—we couldn’t alter the chronology of the sequences or it would have turned into something I didn’t want to do, something along the lines of Robbe-Grillet. The feeling of time is quite different, of course, because in the long version almost nothing happens for the first three or four hours. It’s only documentary sequences of the two theater groups, Jean-Pierre [Léaud]’s distribution—of envelopes on Champs-Elysées, or the various petty thefts committed by Juliet [Berto]. Out also ends with very long sequences in which each of the actors more or less “goes to pieces” in front of the camera. It was impossible to keep extracts of this, since the interest of this was in the total duration of each scene. But contrary to what most people believe, one doesn’t learn any more in the long version than in the short one.

I’d hoped to make not one but several films of normal length, one on each of the actors, but we discovered that it was necessary to relate them all the time. And when we started Céline et Julie, our intention was to make a film of normal length. We even had to swear to it in the contract. But we didn’t succeed. Perhaps next time we’ll manage to make a movie that’s an hour and a quarter!

SEDOFSKY: What is the meaning of the opening title in Spectre, “Paris and its double”? ³

RIVETTE: I wanted the two titles to indicate that the film was shot in April and May 1970—that, for me, is the important thing, since there are many allusions in the dialogue to that period. It should be evident that the group of thirteen individuals had probably met and talked for some time until May 1968, when everything changed and they probably disbanded.

ROSENBAUM: In the final sequence of Paris Nous Appartient, set in the country, there’s a brief inserted shot of the Seine in Paris. Is the function of this shot at all related to that of the repeated shots of Place d’ltalie at the end of Out?

RIVETTE: No. In Paris it was a kind of psychological flashback, to remind one of an earlier scene on the Pont des Arts, while in Out the shots of Place d’ltalie were inserted with no psychological implications, but frankly as empty spaces. As a kind of visual silence, like the silences in modern music. But it wouldn’t have been possible to have a blank screen for that length of time. I find these shots very disturbing.

SEDOFSKY: In both films, there is also a use of still shots…

RIVETTE: There’s no relation. In Paris, the scene we shot with the Finnish model is one which I didn’t like at all, and the stills were inserted only because the film that we shot was unusable. On the other hand, the stills in Spectre were the result of our naïve hope that our twelve-hour version would be shown on television as a serial—in eight episodes lasting an hour and a half each. So at the beginning of each episode we used about fifteen stills as a kind of visual summary of the preceding episode. They aren’t single frames, but simply production stills. When we tried a shorter version, our first montage ran five and a half hours. Then to make a commercially feasible length, we used the stills to tighten the editing, much the way that Jean-Luc uses titles more and more in his films, as in La Chinoise. Every time there was an editing problem he had recourse to a title. But finally we spent more time on these photos than on anything else, because there were a priori so many possibilities. We wanted the relation between the film and the stills to be neither too close nor too distant, so it was very difficult to find just the right solution.

Then we added the sound to the stills. They didn’t work without sound, because the silences interrupted either noises that were very loud or others that were just murmurs. Silence didn’t produce the effect we wanted. I wanted something purely artificial: what we have is just a meaningless frequency, as if produced by a machine, which interrupts the fiction—sometimes sending messages to it, sometimes in relation to what we’ve already seen or are going to see, and sometimes with no relation at all. Because there are stills from scenes, especially toward the end, which don’t appear in the body of the film and are frankly quite incomprehensible.

ROSENBAUM: Do you find that the “search for meaning” that creates a tension in Spectre and all your other films is resolved at all in Céline et Julie?

RIVETTE: In comedy we pretend to resolve things. And in non-comedy one ends with a non-resolution. But it doesn’t seem at all evident to me that there’s a resolution at the end. After all in the last scene the girls’ roles are reversed—but of course that’s just a pirouette…

SEDOFSKY: Can we say, perhaps, that the theme of the search in your earlier films has become, in Céline et Julie, a formal problem?

RIVETTE: It’s purely a question of film construction. Let me add that for me it’s the same in the other films. Because even in Paris Nous Appartient and Out (L’Amour Fou was an exception) we went through the same process: beginning with a certain number of characters, with certain relations between them, and then arriving at a stage in the preparation of the project where there was very little dramatic action. The characters have relations, they meet and so on, but they really belong to different worlds. And then there’s a stage—which was the same for Céline et Julie as for the others—which comes later, sometimes very late, that involves using a kind of fiction which I always see at first as a background and a mechanism, not the underlying motivation. Purely a narrative mechanism. It simply happened that when I wrote Paris this mechanism became too important: this fiction of the Organization, which was really there only to connect all the elements, became more important than I had planned.

In Out, I was already more careful, because the idea of the “thirteen” came rather late. For a long time we thought that the characters might never meet; perhaps there would be five or six completely different stories. We just didn’t know. Still, I had the idea that something should bring them together, and so it was Histoire des treize. But it was just a mechanism. In Paris and, even more, in Out, I don’t take the whole idea of the search for meaning seriously. It was a convenience to bring about the meetings, but it didn’t work with either film, because they were taken to be films about a search. I tried and failed to make people understand, as the film progressed, that this search led to nothing: at the end of Paris, we discover that the Organization doesn’t exist; and the more Out progresses, the more evident it becomes that this new organization of the thirteen which appeared to have been formed never really existed. There had only been a few vague conversations between completely idealistic characters without any real social or political roots. In each case there was a first part where we assembled a story of a search, and a second part where little by little we wiped it out.

For me, Céline et Julie is not very different, except insofar as the decision to make a comedy is more emphasized. To my mind, Out is also a kind of comedy. It’s less obvious in Spectre, because the condensation dramatizes it much more. And even the fact that we improvised led to an atmosphere of psychodrama, and was more likely to create a situation of aggression and violence. It’s very difficult to arrive at something more subtle. Because violence is the simplest way: this is what’s been happening in the theater for the past fifteen years. The easiest thing in the world is to roll on the ground.

So in Céline et Julie we made a great effort to control that, after the experience of Out, and remain as much as possible within a comic framework. Certain scenes between Dominique and Juliet became much more dramatic than we anticipated—which is just as well, because they were only moments. But there’s no more “truth” in this film than in the others. The only truth is that of the filmstock and the actors.

ADAIR: But it is nevertheless remarkable that what you call only a mechanism in both Paris and Out—the idea of a conspiracy—obviously permits a thematic reading.

RIVETTE: I could have found another mechanism, I suppose. But in Out didn’t want to repeat Paris, but to do a critique of it When I decided to use Histoire des treize, it was as a critique of Paris, which tried to show more clearly the vanity of this kind of utopian group, hoping to dominate society. It begins by being fascinating and tempting, but in the course of the film comes to be seen as futile.

ROSENBAUM: After your experience of directing La Religieuse on the stage, ⁴ does improvisational theater hold any interest for you?

RIVETTE: No. La Religieuse was an opportunity that presented itself, and it wasn’t very successful. Luckily, there was Anna Karina, who wanted to play the main part. She gave an interest to the play, which was otherwise quite unsuccessful. In any event, it was a totally traditional theater piece. For me, the theater is much more a subject for films, as a metaphor of jeu and a meeting place for actors which allows for interaction.

ADAIR: And the film, La Religieuse—what does that represent for you now?

RIVETTE: I haven’t been back to see it for years. It’s far from a success. It was the film where I had the greatest means at my disposal, but still not enough, which is the worst situation—so it was the hardest to make. One can get by with very little money if one’s making a contemporary film, but insofar as this was a costume film, with a script, it was nothing but problems. During the shooting, we were completely submerged in problems of decor, costumes we didn’t have. . . we had to pretend, to create an illusion. It was a very difficult shooting and moreover, I’d been turning it over in my mind for too long. Having said that, I should one day like to do a film of mise-en-sccne in costume. ⁵ La Religieuse may appear to be an uncharacteristic work, but it isn’t one for me.

ROSENBAUM: There seems to be a Bressonian side to the film…

RIVETTE: Perhaps, but that wasn’t my idea at all. It was much more ambitious. Toutes proportions gardés, it was my idea to make a film in the spirit of Mizoguchi. But it’s not Mizoguchi. There was an attempt to make a film with extended takes or even one-shot sequences, with a flexible camera and rather stylized performances. So for me it was a deliberately theatrical film. But because we didn’t have more time and a more homogeneous cast, the theatrical side was seen by everyone as a fault. Whereas it was in fact deliberate to have such a theatrical style of acting, with a very frontal mise-en-scène in relation to the camera. But this would have required more time for rehearsals, to harmonize actors from very different professional backgrounds.

ROSENBAUM: To turn to other directors’ films… How do you feel about the “American Underground”?

RIVETTE: I would like to see a lot more; I’ve seen very few. I had certain reservations about this kind of cinema, which for me was associated with filmmakers whose work didn’t interest me at all, like Kenneth Anger or certain old films by Curtis Harrington. It’s only recently that I’ve come to see some completely different films: two by Michael Snow which excited me very much, Back and Forth and La Région Centrale, although they bear no relation to the kind of cinema I do. I’ve also been very struck by films of Ken Jacobs (Tom Tom the Piper’s Son) and Peter Kubelka (Unsere Afrikareise).

ROSENBAUM: And the French cinema now?

RIVETTE: Now, I don’t know. I used to be very excited by Garrel, in 1968-69, when he made all his important films one after the other. And Tati is magnificent. If we’re going to talk about directors who are widely respected, there are many whom I greatly admire. It depends on the moment: six months ago I would have said Fellini, but Amarcord was like a cold shower after the extraordinary Satyricon and Roma. Jancso, in his last films. . .Straub. The latest Bresson [Lancelot du Lac] I find magnificent. And [Werner] Schroeter, whom I didn’t like at first, excites me more and more; above all, The Death of Maria Malibran and Eika Katapa. And Carmelo Bene . . . Resnais’ Stavisky is a beautifully filmed object, limited by a laborious script.

ROSENBAUM: What do you think of film criticism in France today?

RIVETTE: There isn’t any. I was very excited by everything Cahiers du Cinema had begun several years ago, but this was subsequently left hanging for the sake of something much less interesting and quite utopian.

SEDOFSKY: Do you find any relationship between your cinematic research and the work of such writers as Derrida, Kristeva, or Barthes?

RIVETTE: I really don’t want to talk about it… [Laughter]

SEDOFSKY: But when you’ve described the mechanism of Spectre, here and elsewhere, you have used terms which make one think of semiological discourse. . .

RIVETTE: Perhaps I’ve been influenced by my reading. . . But of course I haven’t done a serious reading of Derrida, Kristeva, or Sollers. The only one I’ve read completely and continue to read with pleasure is Roland Barthes, perhaps because he is the most accessible. And he has certain things to say which do relate to cinema, more in my case to Spectre than to Céline et Julie. The few things that Barthes has written about the cinema I find accurate, because, like me, he’s more sensitive to the sort of things that escape an overly rigorous semiological approach.

With any film, at the beginning there is a very theoretical, very abstract stage when one has ambitions that are at the same time very vast and very vague. Then, as soon as one begins to work on the practical side, one is faced with very concrete problems—relationships with those whom one is working with, especially the actors, followed by even more concrete problems in the shooting and editing.

SEDOFSKY: But obviously the concrete problems don’t efface the clearly theoretical structure of your films, the “play of elements” which is a “production of significance” . . .

RIVETTE: There are two principle ways of making films. One can make it alone as an auteur, if you like; make a product, a fabrication which corresponds as much as possible to one’s reflective activity. There is a family of such directors: Murnau, Dreyer, Eisenstein, a certain part of Godard, Bresson, Straub, and in a certain way Schroeter, von Sternberg. And then there is another way, which consists of making the film with others, meeting with certain other people. This “family” would be Griffith, Renoir and Rossellini. And as for myself, I have no desire to make a film of the first method. Even with La Religieuse, it wasn’t completely mise-en-scène. Even Paris isn’t really in that vein, and certainly since L’Amour Fou I’ve realized that working the first way, as metteur-en-scène, didn’t interest me, in fact bored me to tears.

In any event, I don’t know how to do it. There are others who know how: I simply don’t. So I looked for another method to get a better result. And there was the coincidence, very strong for me, that just after La Religieuse, and the whole business of the censorship, I had occasion to direct several television programs on Renoir. ⁶ They were deliberately made very simple, because what was interesting was to place the camera in front of Renoir and let him speak, and to show extracts from his films. First of all, we had fifteen days of shooting with Renoir in the country; we stayed with him, lunched with him, so had plenty of time to speak to him. Then came three months of editing with Eustache, in which we had time to view sequences again and again, to choose the ones we wanted. To see films which I thought I knew very well, which a priori would hardly seem to assert themselves on the movieola as much as films by Hitchcock or Eisenstein, for whom editing is much more important. But despite everything, the fact of seeing Renoir’s films on the movieola made me see things differently.

1. The 760-minute Out, subtitled Noli Me Tangere, exists today only as an unprocessed workprint, has been screened publicly just once—over two days in Le Havre, in 1971—and, alas, neither my collaborators nor I have seen it. A release print can be made only if and when enough money can be raised to furnish the lab costs. (J.R.)

2. Eduardo de Gregorio has informed me that the film’s conception was also directly inspired by Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models, which he saw with Rivette during the summer of 1973. (J.R.)

3. The action of Spectre is preceded by three introductory titles, which read as follows: “Hypothesis—location of the story: / Paris and its double. The time: April or May 1970. Meaning of the story.” (J.R.)

4. Presented at Studio des Champs-Elysées in 1963, two years before Rivette shot the film based on Diderot’s novel. (J.R.)

5. In fact, Rivette’s Phénix project is a costume film set in the late nineteenth century, with a central role designed for Jeanne Moreau. (J.R.)

6. Three programs entitled Jean Renoir, le Patron for the program Cinéastes de notre temps, in 1966, the year before L’Amour Fou. It may also be worth noting that Rivette worked as an assistant (stagiaire) to Renoir on French Cancan in 1954. (J.R)

Jacques Rivette and the Other Place, Track One - DVD Beaver Pt. 1 by B. Kite from Cinema Scope, Spring 2007

When a submerged continent rises suddenly to the surface, and one is able to visit territories that had been relegated to the fabulous by their previous inaccessibility, and trace continuities and significant ruptures between what had seemed isolated promontories, when there are new languages to learn and histories to uncover in urban centers still impossibly vibrant with life despite their decades of undercover existence, that, you may say, is a hell of a thing, and one steps out onto ground still redolent of fish and spackled with seaweed with excitement and apprehension, not least at the fact of one's own inevitable inadequacy as explorer, at a time when one stays close to home, keeping company with the cats, so seldom finding new neighborhoods, let alone new worlds. It's what one amazed gentleman was heard to exclaim in Queens, at the American Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette: Who knew?

Well, people did, of course. Jonathan Rosenbaum, perhaps more than any other English-language critic, wrote wonderfully about Rivette's early films, and inspired the cult of Out 1 (1971) among younger generations of cinephiles, many of whom may have suspected they would never come any closer to it than they got in their imaginations through reading his traveler's tales ("And I only am escaped alone to tell thee"). Out 1 grew in darkness, secret and seemingly made of secrets, and due to this unavailability (a function of the marketplace rather than fate or aesthetics, as Rosenbaum would sensibly point out), it joined that pantheon of broken and vanished objects (Ambersons, Greed, once and still to some extent Smile) in which, even against our better judgment, we place some unspecified hope of a definitive experience, maybe a bit too good for the world, as indicated by the fact that they live in a half-light, next door to oblivion.

So Out 1 faced a tall task in living up to its legend, and the fact that it so splendidly does so is due in no small part to the fact that a matched quest for ineffable order forms its narrative spine, a spine attenuated almost to the point of nonexistence at times but surprisingly resilient (1). Out 1 is engaged in hunting itself, this "cinephile's holy grail," as Dennis Lim has called it, contains its own interior Parsifal as a figure of its endlessly self-interrogatory desire, its self-consuming spirals.

"Find the mortal world enough" was W.H. Auden's kind and unlikely wish for a casual conquest, probably paid for, and whether or not one finds such a state possible or desirable, it's rarely attained by Rivette's characters, who are always searching beyond, at whatever cost to their stability. When Jean-Pierre Léaud's Colin, the part-time deaf-mute turned investigative hero of Out 1, hears the suggestion that his quest may be a hoax, he responds, "But that would mean that the magical, mysterious world I've been living in is nothing but illusion. "And that," he declares, "is impossible!" Rivette's work takes place between the world of magical mystery and the flatland of impossible reality, a no-man's land of his very own. Recognizing, with Colin, the allure of a controlling narrative -- and seeing, in Colin, a figure of warning in regard to its strict application -- let's start by proposing an underlying myth beneath the Rivette corpus, before moving on to examine its mutating manifestations.

The Other Place

The Other Place was here but now it's not. (Hypothesis: the Other Place has moved behind the scenes.) The Other Place was the citadel of order and abode of gods, and maybe it still is. Or perhaps the Other Place has been seized by shadows that would undermine its order not by breaking the connections but burying them and tying them in place, creating a citadel not of order but control. (Was there ever a difference?) Or perhaps it's only we who have changed, our eyes corrupted and apt to confuse order and control, unity and eternal night. The disappearance of the Other Place, or its retreat into a form we fail to recognize, has left us alone, in the terror and exhilaration of our unbound selves (hypothesis: once we were bound, like a captive or a book, and unable any longer to read in ourselves, uncertain which loose leaf contains our destiny, we cry for rebinding, finding certain freedoms too painful).

Those aware of its disappearance, who tell themselves that story, are haunted by the Other Place and discover two courses open: to find it or to recreate it. Neither, finally, comes to any happy culmination, unless it's the case, as it might be, that the Other Place comes to us in our confusions and achieves its order only on the point of our disintegrations.

But that goes against another way of telling the Other Place, which defines it by the fact that it locks and seals its gestures, holds them suspended and revolving on themselves. That's what we try to capture when we draw a square or rectangle on the ground and attempt to stage the Other Place in miniature. But in order to inhabit its gestures, we must find a line connecting to them from somewhere within our broken being, and once we locate these forms, we have to slip them on, make them new and ours. But that effort is beyond us, we fall back into our slipping selves and prop one or another of these partial I's up as a curtain to disguise the fact that somewhere inside, something is falling, and it can't be caught (you can hear it fall).

It's sounds we're left with, sounds never emerging into speech, never able to enunciate the generative words anew, never able to live inside them like a home. We fall apart while miming the larger disorder, and the gods and the shadows are one, united in not being us, in mocking us (but something belongs to us).

The City Shell

Paris lies old, smudged, and nearly deserted under the heavy skies of Rivette's first feature, Paris nous appartient (1960), a charcoal sketch whose title contains its own dialectic between freedom and force, depending on which "nous" one imagines speaking it. The mirror-image quotation that follows the credits (both from French poet Charles Peguy) only complicates the movement: "Paris belongs to no one." It is there to be claimed and always unclaimable, dispersed beyond the bounds of control and lacking any holding point for orientation. For the space of the film, its stone façades, cracked hallways, and doors in all their phases -- flying open, listened at, peeked through, locked -- become an antique pinball machine through which the film's guileless protagonist, Anne (Betty Schneider), is propelled by means of deflected agendas, chance encounters, overheard and ill-understood phrases and fragments, and occasional bursts of action directed toward finding the film's missing center, the piece that might unite it: a solo-guitar recording made by Juan, a Spanish political exile whose death sets the eccentric machine in motion.

Here we're introduced to two of Rivette's primary motifs: conspiracy and theater. They aren't separate or opposed, but facets of the same central structure, windows into the Other Place. Both are rather cartooned here. The nominal conspiracy lacks any definite outlines but comes loaded with all too many significant names -- Hitler, McCarthy, Big Business, Franco, Fascism -- as if jumbled together in an unwieldy sack tagged "Nasty Things." Where the true conspiratorial mindset functions through an overabundance of specifics, here even those most in thrall to the idea of the sinister "organization" seem unsure of its nature. Likewise, the travails of Gerard, the theater director trying to scrape together a production of Pericles with no money or permanent rehearsal space, and with an ever-dwindling cast, seem more rooted in received narratives from Hollywood and the commercial theater than any direct experience of theatrical process (a defect Rivette set out to correct in his later work, saying in 1968, "I hadn't forgiven myself for the way I had shown the theatre in Paris nous appartient, which I find too picturesque, too much seen from the outside, based on clichés.")

Even so, the film lingers in recollection, partly due to its intransigence, its refusal of satisfactions, whether those of narrative, character, or performance (befuddled Anne must surely be one of the most easily distracted "goal-oriented" protagonists in cinema history). Which is not to say that the film is punishing or unpleasurable, just that it realizes itself more fully on the level of image and sound than of story or meta-story. Its Paris is a hard and empty shell, open to takeover from whatever sinister mollusc may be murmuring "nous" in the offing. And the aggressive score by Phillipe Arthuys and Ivo Malec both echoes and pulls away from its hidden rhythms and oblique emphases -- sounding, in fact, far more like the imitation of Juan's music heard in an early party scene, via the vocal stylings of Claude Chabrol, than the snippet of the tape we're finally allowed to hear. In fact, the score mimics the function Gerard assigns to Juan's tape in his limping attempts to mount Pericles (a description which might be taken to double, maybe a bit too neatly, the film's own agenda).

Gerard: The reason I want to stage it is because it's 'unplayable.' It's shreds and patches, yet it all hangs together somehow.... It shows a chaotic but not absurd world -- rather like our own. Flying off in all directions, but with a purpose. Only we don't know what.

Anne: I agree. The world is less absurd than it seems. But what can we do to show this clearly?

Gerard: I'm counting on the music.

The job of Juan's music, therefore, would be to stitch the "shreds and patches" into a provisional order, a form strong enough to suggest purpose and fend off utter randomness and absurdity but sufficiently elastic to respect the partial and inconclusive nature of its material, to leave room for the emergence of meaning, should it care to declare itself, and leave inviolate its birthright in chaos. One might imagine the projected play/film as a piece of luggage capable of turning itself endlessly inside-out, the better to contain the unbounded. It's not surprising that Rivette should fail to find such a rare piece on his first search, particularly when he hasn't really allowed chance much breathing room (he later criticized the film's scripted dialogue in particular as striving for "effects, in the worst sense of the term" and "terribly pleased" with itself). What's amazing is that he should ever succeed in simulating such an ever-expanding, always-collapsing object.

Two Panels

Rivette has reiterated an artistic credo: "One must do the easy things and leave the difficult things to pedants." This applies as well to his activities as thinker and stylist, the enormous sophistication he brings to bear on the basic questions of film construction. Feuillade is frequently invoked as a primary forebear, and there's no reason to question the lineage. Rivette never strays far from origins and, especially in the first half of his career, seems dedicated to forever restaging cinema's first steps, outlining in that process other paths it might have followed. For that purpose, Feuillade serves as a much richer point of departure than, say, the dubious dichotomy of Lumièreality and the Meliesian fields of fantasy, which was already arthritic when Rivette began writing in the '50s. For one thing, Feuillade possesses the virtue of impurity on both counts.

In digging up the roots of Rivette's dialectic between theater and conspiracy, one could do worse than to posit a point of origin in two consecutive shots of Fantômas (1913) or Les vampires (1915), any point of juncture between Feuillade's blatantly stage-bound interiors and the startling immediacy of his street scenes, their document of a Paris not yet hardened to posing for the camera but already infected with fiction. Just that -- the mystery of the transfer from a potted room (a theatric hothouse, fully frontal, where every movement is directed outward and every object is chosen toward a unified and general impression of a home, an office, a hotel, etc.) to the sunblast immediacy of the street (where our eyes energetically scan the frame for intrusions of the random, evidence of vanished life caught unawares, and the fictive action too is freed to slink/dash from unexpected vectors, since lines of movement travel out in all directions, off the screen and into the world).

What could possibly link these spaces? What universe could contain them both? How can the thread (of secrets) that binds them be strong enough to pull them together into a world neither real nor irreal -- a parallel life? And last, what of the space we're not shown, which links the contraries and provides the means of passage, the space between? These are the "easy" questions that Rivette poses to himself and his cabal of viewers. The superficial fragility, awkward angularity, receding presence, and shy smile we confront in his photos may conceal the inner animal, but we recognize its presence in the pit bull tenacity with which he grips and shakes, and never stops shaking, the foundations of cinema.

Tracks and Lines

So, two panels: the street/the stage. Played in large: Paris nous appartient/La religieuse (1966). Rivette's second feature is a fascinating and largely neglected film I'll proceed to neglect further, since it stands at a tangent to the progression I'm trying to follow, inaugurating a shadow line of development. I might as well state my principles:

1. There are two tracks in Rivette's career: the first an ongoing push of exploration, culminating in Noroit (1976), and the second a zigzag of cultivation over the territory previously pioneered. These are based in chronology and correspond to his career's frequently referenced first and second halves.

2. The second track is in no sense inferior to the first. In place of the flamboyance and vertiginous sense of performance on the borders of the unknown of that initial, horizontal trajectory, it devotes itself to the vertical (digging, planting) and subterranean (unearthing, tunneling).

3. Within the two tracks, there are two lines of internal development, which carry across both periods. The first is what I'm trying to trace here as the quest for the Other Place, itself often linked with or mirrored in theater. The second, shadow line is not of but in some sense in theater, adopting its limitations as productive restraints. The two lines intersect in Celine et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and merge in Duelle (1976) and Noroit, but after La religieuse, the shadow line only comes to independent realization in the second track, in Hurlevent (1985) and Jeanne la Pucelle (1994) (and, from reports, his new film, Ne touchez pas la hache).

Any effort to come to terms with Rivette needs to confront his seemingly paradoxical assertion: "All films are about the theatre, there is no other subject." This statement, which draws no objections from his interlocutors, may seem teasingly perverse to those of us drilled in the received notion that cinema is defined in opposition to the theatric, but it has its roots in Andre Bazin's rich essays on "Theater and Cinema." Many of Rivette's ideas about filmmaking seem to spring from this source, perhaps regarded as both inspiration and irritant. The shadow line in particular appears founded on two points of divergence Bazin sees in between the artforms: performance (the theater audience is not allowed the psychological identification with the actor afforded the cinema spectator, being separated from the action by the footlights, regarded emblematically as a "fiery frontier between fantasy and reality which gives rein to Dionysiac monsters while protecting us from them. These sacred beasts will not cross this barrier of light beyond which they seem out of place and even sacrilegious...." and "the dramatic place" (the stage is "a privileged spot actually or virtually distinguished from nature" which "must not be confused with nature under penalty of being absorbed by her and ceasing to be.") For Bazin, theater stands distinct from cinema precisely in its distance from the world: "These false perspectives, these facades, these arbors have another side which is cloth and nails and wood.... [Theater] exists by virtue of its reverse side and its absense of anything beyond, as the painting exists by virtue of its frame."

In the films of this shadow line, Rivette honors these precepts through violation, grafting the stage onto the world, and thereby also digging around once more among the roots of cinema (2). La religieuse, which he first presented on the stage, is the most blunt of these attempts, with its color-coded lighting, schematic movement, highly pitched and posed performances, and controlled (in fact often sound staged) environments, which pivot around the trope of a stage within the stage by means of a dividing grid (through which the nun speaks to the outside world, or, in confession, to the priests). Hurlevent pushes these ideas further -- drawing the three-sided box from real locales and building its mise-en-scène on theatric principles: directing the action forward, almost to the point of tableaux, predominantly showing the actors full-figure, and always respecting the position of the imaginary audience, even while occasionally cutting at right angles inside the configurations, by eliminating shots which would reveal the fourth wall. Jeanne picks up from Noroit by integrating a moving camera into the equation, setting up a fluid succession of "stages," quickly organized and dispersed, within deep space (the scene surrounding Jeanne's offscreen meeting with the dauphin is an especially impressive example).

Domestic Drama

Paris nous appartient and La Religieuse might almost comprise a precis of the films that would follow. In these first two features, the themes are stated, a trajectory is announced, but the unknown and unruly are contained within pre-established limits. Rivette credits his work on the three-part documentary Jean Renoir, le patron (1967) with giving him the impetus to introduce process, in the form of improvisation and a collaborative approach to construction, as an active element in the filming. In L'amour fou (1968), "I wanted to make a film, not inspired by Renoir, but trying to conform to the idea of cinema incarnated by Renoir, a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue on every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself. What I liked most about this film was enjoying myself shoot it.... This was the first time that the shooting was not only not hell, but was even a most exciting time."

Theater is the dominant element in L'amour fou, which begins less as a tale than a forged document of a small troupe's rehearsals for a production of Racine's Andromaque. Conspiracy, in the localized form of one individual's paranoid narrative, shifts the film onto another course in its second half. The film blends 16mm footage of the rehearsals and interviews with the players -- purportedly the rushes of an episode of Theatre du notre temps directed by Andre Labarthe -- with 35mm footage covering both the activities at the theater and the private lives of the protagonists. Rivette left Jean-Pierre Kalfon, the actor who plays the director, Sebastien, free to direct the rehearsals as he saw fit, only intervening, in the theater scenes, to occasionally prod the cast interviews in potentially provocative directions, along with Labarthe, who was also accorded a large degree of free agency. This might suggest a schema wherein the narrative division is easily gaugeable as (theatrical) reality or (filmic) fiction by the stock of a particular shot, but in fact the fictive germ is planted early on, in 16mm, when Sebastien's wife Claire (Bulle Ogier) drops out of the production and into a new line of action in the middle of the first rehearsal.

In effect, the difference between theater and conspiracy is one of vantage. Theater belongs to the plotters, a group of relatively likeminded individuals huddled together in dark rooms to realize a guiding narrative. In many of Rivette's films, theater is also a utopian venture, a miniature model of a new form of society, able to function without rigid hierarchies of control (but both Kalfon in L'amour fou and Michel Lonsdale in Out 1 are less than successful in abolishing their own role as group father and leader -- and perhaps less than fully sincere in their desire to do so). Conspiracy is the province of loners, those cut loose from the web of human relations whose search for a hidden order imperfectly conceals their own desire for connection (in Out 1, Colin is driven not by a desire to expose the mysterious cabal known as the 13 -- rather, he wants to join them).

In Paris nous appartient, Rivette stamps the seal of Babel on both drives by incorporating the tower sequence from Lang's Metropolis (1927). The last image seen in that screening, just before the film flips out of the projector, is a field of hands, raised toward the tower's architect, who has just announced his plan to invade the Other Place in one of its sectarian guises. The link between architect, conspiratorial mastermind, and director is obvious, but I don't believe that in incorporating this parable Rivette intends to issue a reactionary warning against trying to overturn the realms of higher power. He's offering instead a canny apprehension of the ways in which networks of power infiltrate and corrupt even those proto-utopias formed on an opposing model, the way such attempts constantly threaten to transform into mirror images of exactly the hierarchies they oppose in a serpentine twining of anarchy and synarchy (3). Rivette's groups tend to disperse before their production can reach an audience and project these inward exercises back out into the world (the sole exception is 1984's L'amour par terre, where the will of the writer/director is paramount), but eventual collapse doesn't negate the search and process, the liberating potentials and revolutionary energies of play. His career itself, in its ongoing attempts to explore these delicate balances and betrayals in his own role of architect and collaborator, is the clearest example of this.

Once excluded from the group, Claire begins to counterplot, launching "an investigation into Sebastien," accumulating "evidence" of his shortcomings and liaisons. Forced to choose between his work and his wife, Sebastien opts for the latter, and the couple retreats to the domestic theater to form a band of two, constructing yet another model of the Other Place within the enclosed confines of their bedroom. This protracted siege in the room -- both a claustrophobic cage to desecrate and an open playpen of the imagination, as Claire and Sebastien adopt different roles, scrawl on the walls, free everyday objects from their determined functions to serve as props for their fluid role changes, and finally plot an escape -- is the centerpiece of the film's second half and the site of one of Rivette's most thorough examinations of the notion of "play."

As Gilles Deleuze notes in his brief essay on La Band des quatre (1988), "Rivette's Three Circles," the mutating meanings and manifestations of play are a central concern in Rivette's work. Deleuze breaks play down into three aspects: roles, attitudes/postures, and masks, stating, "We are all rehearsing parts of which we are unaware (our roles). We slip into characters which we do not master (our attitudes and postures). We serve a conspiracy of which we are completely oblivious (our masks). This is Rivette's vision of the world, it is uniquely his own."

Play is many things in these films -- magical, tedious, creative, destructive, puerile, revolutionary, deadly -- but it's never innocent (another of Rivette's maxims, as a critic and afterward: "We are no longer innocent."). Claire and Sebastien's interactions in the room are complex, and any interpretation of them can only be tentative. Even the results are questionable. If Sebastien intended to find a point of common ground, to meet Claire in her descent and reestablish the terms of their relationship in order to rebuild it, he succeeded in loosening the web of paranoia she was weaving round herself, but the relationship still comes to an abrupt end on Claire's declaration, "We've played too much, I've had enough."

Presumably, this staging of their relationship allows Claire a new perspective on it -- not of its essence, since to speak of revelation of essence would throw the proceedings into the realm of psychodrama, an area Rivette views with infinite wariness, but of the shapes it made, of the roles and postures they were capable of adopting toward each other, of their possibilities and limitations as a duo and as a unit. For Claire, it cracked open the edifice they had built, and in laying bare its constituent elements created what Deleuze calls, in other contexts, a "line of flight," of which she avails herself. Sebastien, meanwhile, has learned the perils of true collaboration ("Of the two, he was clearly the one who was more sick," Rivette later said). Having initiated a process which assumed its own momentum, he now finds himself trapped inside it, inhabiting the shell of a departed life. Mourning is its own paranoia, and Sebastien is left locked in Claire's old role, shut up in the apartment, listening to the recordings she had made to summarize the findings of her investigation, conducting his own investigation into absence and loss.

Every film of this first period begins as a critique of the work preceding it, undermining its premises or results. Each moves further into the unknown. The process orientation of the shooting, the ongoing interrogation of cinema's means, and the sense of active intellectual and emotional exploration beyond the bounds of pre-shrunk models of the psyche (there's a true kinship between Rivette and Deleuze, each continually asking himself, what if it were otherwise?) all add to the urgency of the series and a kind of psychological brinksmanship for both the participants and, to a lesser extent, the viewers who sign on for the trip -- as Rosenbaum says, these are films that "teeter on the edge of madness."

So Rivette says Out 1 was initiated as a response to L'amour fou, and in particular its tendency to dip in the direction of psychodrama, but in such enterprises, the intention is no guarantee of the result: "In order to counteract the spuriously 'lived' aspect of L'amour fou, each actor had to play an extremely fictional character, and theoretically maintain a considerable distance between himself and that character. In the event, there really was 'play' between the actors and the characters they were playing, and at the same time they revealed a hundred times more things about themselves than if they had been identifying with these fictional characters or were supposed to be playing their own 'characters.'" And: "Initially we thought it was going to be very jolly, and we started out with the actors by criticizing L'amour fou for its element of anguish, of psychodrama -- psychosis, even -- saying, well, it won't be like that this time but just a jolly game with serial-type fiction. But very soon, an element of anguish crept into the film...."

The Seed/The Rock

Rivette has the kind of rigorous, mathematical mind that discovers itself in pitching against its opposite -- the unformed and that in the stages of formation, active energies always pulling in new and contradictory directions. This is why he only came into his own when he decided to relinquish control, and also how his films manage to be so distinctly marked by his own search and sensibility while remaining also genuinely collaborative enterprises. Out 1 is both sprawling and beautifully shaped, though this latter aspect only becomes fully clear in retrospect or reviewing. Many of his films are studded with holographic miniatures, in which the whole is encapsulated in a part (and, as I hope to show later, what's true of his films taken individually is also true for his career in macrocosm, with certain titles functioning as particular points of reflection on the larger trajectories). The opening sequences of Out 1, apparently so trying to many viewers, judging from opinions expressed recently by writers unable to understand why Rivette would ask them to look so long on hippie theater games, are one example of this, so it's worth examining them in some detail.

The first episode opens on the bizarre image of five torsos upside down and folded into themselves, so that we see only the back and the spine. These figures are arranged in an X, like the pattern on a die, without any means of communication or locomotion -- the body as hard, isolated, and unresponsive object (the rock). After a moment, the torsos flower into humanity, as the actors slowly unfurl, raising their legs above their head and their arms outward to curl down into an upright position on the floor (the seed). They begin their warm-up routine, the minor ritual preceding the larger ritual of theater itself.

These scenes, apparently so rocklike, demanding, and intransigent, are in fact the seed of all that follows. The first introduces us to the group founded by Lili (Michelle Moretti). But there are no introductions, rather Rivette throws us straight into their process. As a general rule, aside from the primer on Balzac provided by Eric Rohmer in a later episode, Rivette avoids exposition, preferring to allow information to emerge casually, or not at all. And once the allure of the grand, impersonal conspiracy drops away (when we learn that this modern 13 was the stillborn creation of a group of friends back in 1968-69, a period charged with possibility, and that these friends have since scattered into new formations), the film's primary narrative motor for the interested viewer comes from piecing together the character information we're given -- in tiny bits, spread all across the body of the film -- in order to understand each figure's history and position in relation to the others.

It's perhaps a surprising strength in a director who treads so warily around the concept of identity, but Rivette strikes me as one of the handful of filmmakers capable of presenting characters of a believable history (the illusion of life before the film) and depth (the partial illusion of interiority and independent action). This is another benefit of his process, since in the case of Out 1, he charted a course of intersections but left the cast to fill in the roles, a temporal and successive process of discovery in which the actors come to define their characters in action, in response to ever-shifting situations. Moment to moment, they exist in a state of unknowing, or rather of acquiring knowledge. So, according to the schema Rivette planned in advance, he and the cast would know, say, that Character E would meet Character P in Scene 36, but what would happen between them would be the product of multiple engines: the decisions and goals of the actors, along with the shapes and senses developing in the larger film itself. In such process-oriented art, the number of possible moves is always large, but the work is geared to a point where the material begins to assert a mysterious coherence and the sets divide into narrowing categories of playable and nonplayable (the game of Go provides a good analogy: Players begin with an open grid, but as the game progresses moves must increasingly be made in response to the larger patterns already on the board, either to fill in gaps or exploit them in order to break up the formation).

The next brief sequence shows us Colin distributing envelopes stamped with the words: "I'm deaf and dumb. I bring you a 'message from destiny.'" Colin is one of the film's two major solitaries, and as such, a destabilizing force loose within the group frameworks of the film. Here, he divides and connects the sequences which bring the two troupes into play -- he is the integer in between. Already self-positioned as destiny's agent, he produces the message he would like to receive.

The third, much longer, sequence throws us into an improvisation by Thomas' (Lonsdale) troupe, kneeling with heads together, rising in unison, and playing a "mirror game" of doubling each other's actions. A tailor's dummy, painted red, is introduced, and much of the improvisation is centered around it. It is worshipped and mocked, given a head, a face, and a hat, while around it the actors whimper, make animal noises, moan, and shout. We can see that each actor is invested in a narrative postulate, the screen is crawling with larval stories, but because the communication remains non-verbal, interactions, when they occur, are a matter of continuous unspoken negotiations to determine the postulate of another and to find a possible point of intersection between interior worlds.

Another short interruption by Colin, in his room, stamping his envelopes with self-consciously mechanical efficiency, a destiny machine for yet other narratives, as yet undisclosed.

When we return to Thomas' group, they have collapsed around the dummy like sunrays. Joined in a single tone, they rise together with linked arms and begin the difficult work of coming to speech, grunting, pointing to their mouths, finally producing words and then a sentence -- "Don't think that I am silent out of pride or stubbornness" -- a line that's taken up and echoed in various registers by other actors.

Colin, stamping.

Back at the improv, the figure we will later know as Thomas appears to have assumed a role we will later identify as Prometheus, a tumble of words: "Fire...it's hot..." The group comes together in an embrace, each with a separate cry, and quiet each other: "Shhh...shh...sh..." Gradually, they sway into silence, then begin rocking faster. Laughing, they dissolve into scattered formations again. Thomas knocks the head off the dummy and the group lays it on the floor, piling on top of it. An ellipsis puts the group at yet another stage, grooming each other solicitously, like friendly cats. They stand up and the improv dissolves: "You've cleaned me up."

Colin stops stamping long enough to pull a book from a nearby pile and rip out pages at random for insertion into his pile of envelopes.

Thomas's group begins their post-mortem on the improv: "How was it for you?" Actors reveal the narratives they had created, the motivation of their behaviors, discovering the sets of rules in retrospect: "Bergamotte healed my sight," "We started fighting," "I had a child with no hands, just little stumps." Many feel the exercise was unsuccessful: "I found it very hard to get into it for a long time," "I felt we started much too soon," "You started very violently, which forced me into it."

Ways of Approach

These sequences tell us several important things about the strategies of the film we've only just entered. We see first that the uses and meanings of theater have deepened immeasurably since Paris nous appartient, and considerably even from L'amour fou. Rather than continue to refer to the groups by the names of their founders, we'll designate them according to the Other Place they target, both via texts by Aeschylus. So, Lili is a member of the Thebes troupe, which is working with Seven Against Thebes, while Thomas is the head of the Prometheus troupe, exploring Prometheus Unbound. The two groups take opposing means of approach. The Thebes troupe begins in language and a rather Apollonian approach to ritual, using the words and gestures as empty structures to occupy and orchestrate, a birdhouse, as yet untenanted, for meaning. Their score determines the enunciation of names ("Ayyyy-tayyyy-o-clayyys") and even nonverbal expressions -- screams and moans are conducted musically. Their working procedure is comparatively underdeveloped in the film, and their interaction with their guiding myth operates along more superficially ironic lines. Rehearsing a play about a city resisting infiltration, they are themselves infiltrated -- by another in-between integer, the scrounger Renauld -- whose intrusion and later disappearance effectively turns the troupe inside out, from the enclosed world of the theater to eventual dispersal in the city, seven against Paris.

The Prometheus group takes a more tortuous path, trying to begin in meaning and occupy language from within, rather as Borges' Pierre Menard finds the materials for Don Quixote inside himself, producing a text that's both precisely the same and utterly new. Rather than adopting a set of rites, they take on the mammoth task of reinventing ritual. The three stages of the rehearsal we see, bracketed by Colin's preparation of messages, are both relatively distinct movements within a general flow and a matching stalling, reigniting, collapsing schema for the entire film. The first corresponds to what Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, call "the so-called primitive presignifying semiotic": "...a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of expression that prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves expressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality, gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form. A variety of forms and substances of expression intersect and form relays." The somewhat self-consciously "Dionysian" approach (the god doesn't descend, so they start the orgy without him) is figured in the totem of the tailor's dummy, which forms a center of attention for the pullulating movement, and the shifting tides of their attitudes toward it (from reverence to desecration) both echo the fall of Prometheus and predict the disintegrating course of the group's attempts to revitalize the titan.

The second segment enacts the troubled "coming to language" which the group itself identifies as "artificial" in the post-mortem ("It's always words we find difficult," "We're at a pre-verbal state, so the transition is very hard," "Even if we start with the alphabet, it's hard to move directly into the play"). Consciously or not, their improvisation is structured on the principle that the Other Place they sketch will establish a line of connection to the Other Place they hypothesize: the mythic origins of theater as a sacred space in which the actors would find themselves inhabited by gods and able to live again the paradox of ritual, in which the story is simultaneously frozen and fresh, eternally the same and yet always alive and multivalent. When this fails to occur, the shift to language must be induced, in a stuttering of speech that, in its forced translation of actions to verbal equivalents, moves yet further from meaning.

The third segment plays out in the aftermath of that failure. The first stage might be seen as the attempt to make the dummy a signifying center (not yet named "Prometheus"), the second as a new tactic, to distribute the figure of Prometheus among the group, different members taking up his speech (itself a justification of silence). Which leads us to consider the importance of Prometheus within the general frame. If Abraham is the Father of Faith, so Prometheus is the Father of Signs, which is also to say the Father of Conspiracy, the equivalent of the Gnostic Christ smuggling divine light into a realm kept deliberately occluded by a malign god (Zeus, Aeschylus notes, wishes to give up humankind as a bad job, and it's Prometheus who dissuades him). Before his intercession:

...they had eyes, but sight was meaningless;
Heard sounds but could not listen; all their length of life
They passed like shapes in dreams, confused and purposeless.

Aeschylus's play is a prolonged lament from the fallen titan (another in-between figure: not a god himself but the offspring of the union of a god with the Earth). Fire was not his only gift, as he reminds the gathered chorus: he brought humans the concept of number, writing, astronomy, the ability to domesticate animals, the techniques of sailing, medicine, and, not least, prophecy. He

...was the first to tell from dreams what Fate ordained
Should come about; interpreted the hidden sense
Of voices, sounds, sights met along the road....
Leading men on the highway of an occult art;
And signs from flames, obscure before, I now made plain.

He brought not just fire but the ability to interpret fire, the riddle and its solution at one in the flame. So this troupe has set itself the tall task of establishing an original relation not with localized meanings, not with Quixote or Hamlet, but with Meaning itself, the sourcebed of signs -- forever torn from the founding body, as Prometheus is rent by birds of prey, and forever restored, as Prometheus is made whole again in the night in preparation for the renewal of the cycle, the "paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the temple" (Deleuze and Guattari). And from the beginning their attempts are marked by failures and resentment. "He's beginning to bore me," Thomas says. But in his role as a founding member of the purportedly benign conspiracy of the 13, Thomas himself is a thwarted Prometheus and another warning case of power's disturbing tendency to infiltrate opposing models like a parasite, consume them from within, and wear them as a mask (not for nothing is the sinister, and apparently active, group glimpsed toward the end of Out 1 named The Devourers).

Hypothesis: From the beginning, and perhaps without knowing it himself, Thomas is such a double agent. To a group founded to function without hierarchy, he brings the not-so-covert desire to lead, to play papa, as we see, initially in caricature, in the first of the group's most engaged confrontations with Prometheus. In these, the titan is lampooned as, in turn, a whinging, crazed patriarch (an Ubu-Prometheus, performed by Thomas) and a decadent diva, a sphinx without a secret (performed by a female cast member, with Thomas acting as intercessor and interpreter). By the end of the film, as Thomas and his few remaining acolytes decamp to the beach house which exerts an increasing gravitational pull in the second half, he may have become trapped in that Ubu-Prometheus role, querulous, domineering, and infantile. We last see him spread-eagled by the sea, assuming, in fact, the position of Prometheus at the start of Aeschylus' play. Whether this is a last supplication or an indication that the god has finally descended, but in degraded, "devoured" form, is left to the viewer.

Several Untruths

The post-mortem reveals some of the individual narratives at work, but already in their peculiar premises and dreamlike transpositions, we realize that "narrative" is the wrong word, what we have instead are play positions, attitudes adopted but not fixed because their goals are fluid and subject to alteration through interaction. The rules of the games are invented in the acting out, and even then an unexpected response can overturn solidifying suppositions. Games become stories and play positions become roles only through explicit enunciation. Even so, the improvisations demonstrate a continual movement toward narrative and resolution (one general goal seeming to be to make one's own play position clear to another, and to find ways of relating the two positions, without speaking them or attempting to find a gestural equivalent for explication, such as mime), and we discover later that there's also the magnetic push-pull of the Prometheus myth lying behind them.

But because each participant, Thomas possibly excepted, remains unbound by internal identification, it remains possible to change play position at any time, as children do, whenever the game becomes boring or predictable. We see this in the way the improvisation as a whole seems to come together to a "point," a grouping of attitudes suggestive of resolution, four or five times. But the process doesn't stop, it overturns into new patterns, running reluctantly congruent to or more freely in opposition with the given guidelines (not just Prometheus but more generally received ideas of the one-way street of human evolution and arc of individual life, in both of which the moment of coming to language represents a crucial juncture).

I've talked about these opening scenes at such length because there's a lot going on in them, though one would hardly guess that from most of the pieces written in the wake of the recent screenings, which tend to describe them as a wearisome slog one must endure, due to some perversity on the part of the director, to get to the good stuff. It's peculiar to think that the very real conspiracy to discredit the '60s and the set of resistances they've come to represent may have settled somewhere in the sediment of knee-jerk reaction even for individuals who would probably reject the notion were it presented to them outright, but such seems to be the case, judging by the frequency with which the decade has been called into service as shorthand for pointless indulgence. It's true that the film deals in part with the collapse of utopian models, and also that the theatric games play out with a certain desperation that is itself a snapshot of its time, a period when the window of revolutionary possibility seems to be closing quickly and those who had dreamed of a better life outside the grounds of force and finance are finding themselves either disconcertingly comfortable within the managed climate or else (or also) gasping for air (perhaps 1968 is the true Other Place of Out 1).

But as Deleuze notes, the ultimate failure of a movement does nothing to negate the revolutionary energies unleashed in its inception (and in the case of that decade, can one even call it a failure since it's left us a legacy of new models of praxis in art and politics, as well as setting landmines under calcified attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality?). As I've said, almost none of the rehearsals we see in Rivette's films make it to opening night. Judged from a pragmatic, result-oriented view, therefore, his decision to show so many of them must seem very perverse indeed. Rather, it ought to be a tip-off that one might, more productively, try to view these scenes with some of Rivette's own fascination at the raw process of creation and expression, for it has implications that travel well beyond the theater.

To trace some of these, it may be helpful to contrast Rivette's practice with that of a director whose career offers a number of intriguing parallels: John Cassavetes. One of the charges often leveled at Cassavetes' films by critics contemporary with their release was that they were essentially little more than extended acting exercises (as opposed, presumably, to something more shapely, presenting functional figures crafted to meet the exigencies of a well-turned plot). It's a critique that causes partisans to bristle, since, in their view, the performances in these films display human behavior in all its conflicted, fluctuating, actuality (it seems all praise of Cassavetes, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, is staked somewhere on claims of "truth" and a nearer approach to reality). Yet here is Rivette giving us exactly that -- acting exercises -- at considerable length.

I make this comparison not necessarily to rank one auteur above the other, but merely to point out that two very different conceptions of being may be at work here. Cassavetes' attitudes, especially in his early films, seem very much shaped by the intellectual currents of the American '50s, and in particular the crosswinds of Russian theatrical theory and the dispersed influence of Freud that birthed the "method." This is a term that tends to get tossed around pretty unreflectively, I'll note as I toss, but I think it's accurate to say that it relies on a notion of centered being, of finding the "truth of the moment" (in an immediate, tactile, and emotive sense) from within a reservoir of personal experience. One risk run by such a regimen arises from an implicit anti-intellectualism which creates a dichotomy between feeling and thought, to the detriment of the latter. Related to this is the fact that it ignores the extent to which many aspects of human behavior are imitative, that we learn behavioral codes for expressing grief, love, anger, etc. from a variety of social sources -- not least of which is performance, via movies, TV, and theater. By neglecting the extent to which our acts can be learned and inhabited as signs (and felt no less because of it), method acting tends to prize certain signs in particular -- especially "raw" emotional display -- and in so doing elevates them to a category purportedly above signs altogether: that of truth.

Cassavetes' ideas of acting, and of human behavior, grew more complicated as his career progressed (and the two auteurs even seem to wave to each other, across a gap of time and culture, in Opening Night and L'amour fou, probably their closest points of contact), but it seems to me that they remain based in concepts of truth and essence, the multiform externalizations of uniform being. This isn't an assumption Rivette dares to make, though it's a possibility that draws him on, often onto treacherous ground. He seems to start from a position of fundamentally dispersed and performative being, an idea that coded patterns and rituals can potentially be inhabited in emotional fullness while still allowing some degree of independence for both the role and the performer (since, in ritual, the role exists apart from whoever inhabits it, and even if the goal remains what it was in ancient theater -- possession, the revelation of the god -- the entity revealed is emphatically not located purely or even primarily in the being of the actor). In Out 1, as in many of Rivette's other films, being is a play position which begins in artifice, a totem gradually forged and perpetually melted and remade by the roles we adopt. That's what these rehearsals are, staging grounds of being, littered with the skins of identities grown and shed: production would be something else, an Other Place.

NOTES

1. As Rivette himself discovered when he came to edit the nearly 13-hour Out 1 into the shorter Spectre: "It was immediately apparent that you were still held by the fictional centre, which proved to be much tighter, much more compelling, than I'd thought.... The whole center of the film dug its heels in completely; and this four-and-a-quarter hour version was edited from the centre outwards. We couldn't really touch this centre, because there is a moment, one single shot even, in which almost all the fictions intersect, as if all these lines had to pass through a ring. This shot we put squarely in the middle...."

2. It's in this sense that these films might almost be considered science fiction, artifacts of an alternate history of development in which stylists decided to honor rather than efface the theatric paradigms of early cinema. And here, too, Bazin set the scene: "The more the cinema intends to be faithful to the text and to its theatrical requirements, the more of necessity it must delve deeper into its own language."

3. The latter term was coined, in this context, by French occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), in explicit opposition to anarchy. Where anarchism offers a call to individual freedom of organization and a rejection of compulsory government, synarchism proposes the secret infiltration, by an "enlightened" elite, of central social structures to establish a binding but invisible system of control. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre is part of a long line of esoteric writers to claim inspiration from an ageless group of Hidden Masters, sages of an Other Place, in this case the mysterious city of Agartha, nestled somewhere inside the hollow earth. Like many Hidden Masters, the Agarthites' politics swing severely to the right.

OUT 1 AND ITS DOUBLE | Jonathan Rosenbaum May 15, 2017

The Greatest Enigma of French Film - The New York Review of Books Luc Sante, October 27, 2016

Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, “Out 1 or Suspended Meaning” Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Roland-François Lack, “Mapping Out 1: Thirteen Cartographic Footnotes” Roland-François Lack from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Jacques Rivette's 1970s cinema • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, July 2016

jacques-rivette.com: On Jacques Rivette (The Early Films) - DVD Beaver Peter Harcourt from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

jacques-rivette.com: Work and Play in the House of Fiction - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Sight And Sound, Autumn, 1974

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

jacques-rivette.com: Tih-Minh, Out 1: on the ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Velvet Light Trap, Spring 1996, also in Rosenbaum’s book Movies as Politics, 1997

The 12-Hour Masterpiece | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 25, 2007

Footnotes to Out 1 [Chicago Reader blog post, 5/28/07] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 28, 2007

How film history gets rewritten | Bleader - Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, June 13, 2007

Global Discoveries on DVD: By Jonathan Rosenbaum Cinema Scope, Winter 2008

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Elusive Reality: The 25th Vancouver International Film Festival ... Bérénice Reynaud from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2007

A Very (Very) Long Engagement | Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, February 20, 2007

Rivette: Out 1 (Volume 1) - Reviews - Reverse Shot James Crawford and Michael Joshua Rowin, Pt 1 from Reverse Shot, December 8, 2006

Rivette: Out 1 (Volume 2) - Reviews - Reverse Shot James Crawford and Michael Joshua Rowin, Pt 2 from Reverse Shot, December 9, 2006

Noli me tangere: Jacques Rivette, Out 1 and the New ... - DVD Beaver Sally Shafto from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

Out 1, noli me tangere Doug Cummings from Filmjourney, August 2, 2007, also seen here: Filmjourney

Jacques Rivette's OUT 1 at UCLA Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, July 25, 2007

Jean-Pierre Léaud Out 1 film analysis • Senses of Cinema Daniel Fairfax, July 11, 2014

Jacques Rivette's Thirteen-Hour Experimental Film | The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, November 5, 2015

Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages on Notebook | MUBI Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, August 7, 2014

An Agony in Eight Fits: Jacques Rivette's "Out 1" on Notebook | MUBI Michael Pattison, April 25, 2016

All Power to the Imagination: Rivette's OUT 1 | Keyframe ... David Ehrenstein from Fandor, May 14, 2015

The Restoration of Jacques Rivette's Out 1 | Blog | Frieze ... Tom Newth from Frieze, November 04, 2015

Jacques Rivette's 'Out 1': If You Come, They Will Build It | PopMatters Michael Barrett, January 8, 2016

History of the Thirteen Plus One | The Brooklyn Rail Colin Beckett, December 09, 2015

Out-ward bound: Jacques Rivette's Out 1 in the Arctic circle | Sight ... David Thomson from Sight and Sound, July 11, 2016

Where to begin with Jacques Rivette | BFI Craig Williams from BFI Sight and Sound, initially published November 23, 2015, revised February 22, 2016

Where To Start With Jacques Rivette. – Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per ... Adam Batty, January 31, 2016

Slant: Carson Lund

They live by night: Inside "Out 1": A Revisitation, Of Sorts Bilge Ebiri from They Live by Night

Review: Jacques Rivette's Newly Restored Masterpiece 'Out 1 ... Kenji Fujishima from The Playlist

Unique and monumental, Out 1 is the most paranoid movie ever made Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

[Review] Out 1: Noli me tangere - The Film Stage Nick Newman

Rivette's 'Out 1' comes to BAM | Brooklyn Magazine Benjamin Mercer

Out 1, Outwatch, Outlast: Rivette's All-Day Epic Is Finally ... Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice

Melissa Anderson on Jacques Rivette's Out 1: Noli me tangere Melissa Anderson from Artforum magazine, November 2, 2015

The Sixty-Year Reign of French Cinema Paragon Jean-Pierre Léaud ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice, March 28, 2017

Out 1 (2015 digitally restored edition) Antti Alanen

Blu-ray / DVD: Jacques Rivette's nouvelle vague magnum opus 'Out 1 ... Sean Axmaker, Blu-Ray

Out 1 Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Blu-Ray

Jacques Rivette Collection Blu-Ray Review: Out 1 | Blueprint: Review Alex Porter, Blu-Ray

Out 1 (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Justin Remer, Blu-Ray

DVD Review: Out 1 | Disc Dish Ed Grant

DVD: The Jacques Rivette Collection | The Arts Desk Kieron Tyler

culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti [George Wu] George Wu, also seen here: Out 1

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Movies [Tom von Logue Newth] February 1, 2008

Out 1 (1971) « Celine and David Go Boating David Heslin, March 9, 2010

Out 1: plot, day 1 Brandon’s Movie Memory, March 6, 2007

Brandon's movie memory » Out 1: plot, day 2 March 6, 2007

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 5: Out 1 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 7, 2006, also seen here: House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]

How Jacques Rivette's 'Out 1' Invented Binge-Watching ... Sam Adams from indieWIRE

Out 1 Mubi

Out 1: Spectre Frank Pan from Doorknob on a Train, March 12, 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: john-a-passaro from New York

User reviews from imdb Author: davidgoesboating from Australia

User reviews from imdb Author: ametaphysicalshark from prejudicemadeplausible.wordpress.com

User reviews from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

::: the badlands collective ::: » Out 1 – FAQ

Daily | Jacques Rivette's OUT 1 | Keyframe - Explore the ... David Hudson from Fandor

Variety.com [Robert Koehler] also seen here: Out 1

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere review – 13-hour art film is a buff's ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian, October 28, 2015

Out 1 Blu-ray - Jacques Rivette - DVD Beaver

Take the 13-hour plunge into Jacques Rivette's Out 1, the cinephile's ... Jason Shawan from The Nashville Scene

Persistence of Time - Los Angeles Patrick McGavin from The LA Weekly, July 26, 2007

An Elusive All-Day Film and the Bug-Eyed Few Who Have Seen It ... Dennis Lim from The New York Times, June 4, 2006

FILM; From Hours of Chaos, Stories Start to Emerge A.O. Scott from The New York Times, December 8, 2006

Review: Jacques Rivette's 1971 Film, 'Out 1: Noli Me Tangere' - The ... Glenn Kenny from The New York Times, November 3, 2015

In Rivette's 'Out 1: Noli Me Tangere,' Paris Is a Stage - The New York ... J. Hoberman from The New York Times, March 10, 2016

Out 1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of longest films by running time Wikipedia

OUT 1: SPECTRE B 86

France (255 mi) 1974

Rivette’s offshoot work extrapolated from his massive, near 13-hour, experimental tour de force Out 1 and Jacques Rivette R.I.P. (1971), which never had a release, existing more as a working copy, believing it was too unwieldy at that length, figuring there would be no audience for it at the time. Instead Rivette struggled to whittle it down to a more manageable length, chose an alternate title, and released it in theaters with a run time of more than four hours. While ostensibly using the same footage, it is recut and reconfigured in a totally different manner, making it near incomprehensible if you haven’t viewed the original. Instead of relying upon lengthy shots that comprise the rhythm and improvisational uniqueness of the original, this is instead an example of rapid-fire editing, cutting off scenes before they develop, where it’s much more fragmentary. Interjected throughout are the black and white stills that were used between segments to recap the action from the previous episode, but here they are edited into the overall narrative, often disrupting any established rhythm. Not everyone will admire this jagged cutting technique, though some have hailed it as a “masterclass” of editing, as the unique improvisational method, considered a cinema of risk, with the actors continually stressed out, especially for such an extended period of time in the original, is barely noticeable here. Some of the best parts of OUT 1 are not included in this shorter version, featuring few lengthy sequences, where there is an emphasis on building character that was absent in the original, which instead focused on duration, spending plenty of time with a group of actors from rival theater groups. Storyline was barely noticeable in the original, while it’s essential here, completely altering the tone, adding an elevated sense of growing paranoia by the end. Both versions follow the exploits of two Parisian theater groups, each rehearsing for a different Aeschylus Greek tragedy, one led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), the other by Lili (Michèle Moretti), both resorting to extremely unorthodox methods and techniques, where barely any time at all is spent with the actual text. Nonetheless, what they’re doing is fairly self-explanatory. More curious are the actions of two significant characters, Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Frédérique (Juliet Berto), both street con artists who go through an improvisatory charade pretending to be something that they’re not in order to extract money from strangers on the street, hitting on unsuspecting customers of street café’s and bars who are innocently relaxing and lulling about. While their methods are clever, requiring a certain audacious charm, they are really the two innocent spirits who drive the story, as their normal routines are interrupted by something inexplicable, that may as well be destiny, but it appears to them disguised in coded letters that they receive that on the surface make no sense, where they have to uncover the underlying mystery. These two figures intersect at the exact middle of the film without even acknowledging one another.

With two characters criss-crossing throughout the city, Emilie (Bulle Ogier) lives a middle class life with two young children and a nanny, but her husband Igor has been missing for six months without a word, while she also runs a hippie boutique known as “L’Angle du Hasard,” or “Corner of Chance,” which is featured more prominently in this version. Brightly decorated in psychedelic artworks and colors, where the use of color is particularly expressive, the store is a front for underground political activities, while occasionally they put out an underground newspaper, but mostly this appears to be a stoner hangout, the kind of place that existed in Berkeley or Haight-Asbury in America at the time, but was non-existent in Paris. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans are more pointed throughout, with much more visibility, played with more suspense, where clues are secretly delivered to Colin, where the unasked question is bound to be why him? How did he get selected? How could they have predicted Colin’s behavior? And how could that benefit the group? Colin quickly deciphers the name of an underground group by the name of The Thirteen, which is mentioned in the preface to Balzac’s History Of The Thirteen (Histoire des Treize), revealing an unscrupulous secret society that controls the levers of power in Paris of the mid 1830’s. As a result, Colin scours the city searching for evidence of this group, with surprisingly little to show for it, including a visit to a professed Balzac expert, none other than Éric Rohmer, preserved exactly as it was in the original, with an extended scene that is reduced to comic absurdity, as Colin’s character remains mute from the outset, with the professor showing reservation about any influence from this group. Nonetheless, his search rattles the confidence of several of the people that he contacts, who resurface out of self-interest, protecting some hidden secret that is never identified. In fact, this is accentuated by another scene involving Frédérique, who wanders into the home of a complete stranger, an upscale businessman playing chess with himself, Etienne (director Jacques Doniol-Lacroze), where she feigns an interest in chess, while her real intent is theft, seen rummaging through a desk drawer looking for money, but instead finds a collection of old letters that she stuffs into her purse. As she investigates further, the letters allude to a secret underground group named the Thirteen. Like Colin, she learns next to nothing other than a few mentioned names, like Pierre and Igor, where her attempts at blackmail are amateurish, especially when she contacts a prominent attorney, Lucie de Graffe (Françoise Fabian).

Only Emilie is willing to pay Frédérique for the missing letters, thinking it may lead to her husband’s whereabouts, but immediately realizes she’s been scammed, as they are all old letters. Nonetheless, they mention some of the important players. What’s especially different in this version is the ominous influence of unseen characters, namely Igor, the absent husband of Emilie, whose name is mentioned in the letters Frédérique absconds with, and Pierre, the apparent author of the letters sent to Colin. Lucie and Etienne meet, along with Thomas, in a long walk along the Seine River, where we discover all five are members of a secret underground group that goes by the name of The Thirteen. There is never any identification of their origins other than the suggestion that they abandoned shortly after the May 1968 protests in France, remaining dormant for several years, but people poking around asking about them have aroused fears they might be exposed. Lucie is fairly certain nothing incriminating has leaked, but they each question the motives of Pierre, thinking this may be his attempt to get the group back together again. While conspiracy theories drive this version, one other difference is the amount of time spent at “L’Angle du Hasard,” an address Colin figures out from deciphering clues from a Lewis Carroll poem, a revelation of such importance that he regains his voice for the occasion, only to become infatuated with Emilie (known as Pauline at the store), spending most of his idle time observing who comes in and out of the store while waiting for his chance with Pauline. Both theatrical groups are undermined from within by what amounts to indifference, though Thomas attempts to revive interest by driving to the Normandy coast to find Sarah, Bernadette Lafont from Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) and Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), who happens to be living in a seaside home owned by Igor, suffering from writer’s block. If anything, her presence only drives the group into extinction, while at the same time she’s driven to physically attack Emilie in her own home after discovering her intentions to send Pierre’s letters to the newspapers in hopes of fleshing out her missing husband. But in this version, the boutique and the house on the coast take on special significance, as both are connected to members of The Thirteen, where members Lili and Emilie take drastic measures to protect their anonymity, while the ghostly presence of Pierre and Igor continues to wreak havoc with the rest of the members, where rumors swirl that Igor is still locked away somewhere inside his coastal house. While there is a gathering of souls at the house, particular attention is paid to a single locked room, where there are suggestions the house is haunted. Emilie wanders inside at one point when the door curiously opens, leading to what amounts to a dream sequence, where she sees an image of herself in a mirror casting infinite reflections. As if the clouds have dissipated, this opens up an entirely new outlook, as unlike the disillusionment found in the original, with no tragic end to Frédérique (who is less prominently featured in this version), this couldn’t be more hopeful and optimistic, where the entire film feels more like a road movie following clues exploring the fragile psyches and discovering the whereabouts of the secretive Thirteen group members.

Out 1: Spectre, directed by Jacques Rivette | Film review Time Out London

Jacques Rivette's grandest and boldest experiment to date (based on Balzac's L'Histore des Treize) enrages some spectators because it gives them so much to cope with: 255 minutes of improvisation by at least half of the best New Wave actors, edited and arranged so that sometimes it's telling a complex mystery story - about thirteen conspirators, two theatre groups, and a couple of crazed outsiders - while the rest of the time it's telling a realistic story about the same people that deliberately makes no sense at all. Not so much a digest of Rivette's legendary 12-hour version (hardly ever screened, its title is Out 1: Noli Me Tangere) as a ghost and a reworking of some of the same material ('a critique', Rivette himself says), it's a challenging and terrifying journey for all who can bear with it. As Richard Roud put it: 'Cinema will never be the same, and neither will I.'

Out 1: Spectre | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum Out 1: Spectre | Chicago Reader

After Jacques Rivette's 750-minute comic serial Out 1 (1971) was turned down by French state TV, Rivette spent most of a year editing the material into this scary 255-minute masterpiece—not so much a digest as a different film with its own style and rhythms. Spectre (1972) tells the same basic story about two Parisian theater groups preparing Aeschylus plays and two eccentric loners, a middle-class deaf-mute (Jean-Pierre Laud) and a working-class flirt (Juliet Berto), who stumble upon evidence of a secret group that hopes to control Paris. (The coded messages Laud intercepts are significantly different in the two films.) The actors created their own characters and dialogue; what emerges is a strange mix of bravura acting styles, an unforgettable evocation of the period, and a haunting puzzle. With Francoise Fabian, Bernadette Lafont, Michel Lonsdale, and Bulle Ogier. In French with subtitles.

Out 1: Spectre - BAM/PFA - Film Programs David Thomson, also seen here: Out 1: Spectre

“Very rarely seen, this is the ‘short’ version of the 12-hour Out 1. In editing out a more modest film, Rivette tried to make something as unlike the original as possible. Nevertheless, Spectre is one of the greatest achievements in the cinema of duration and narrative pattern. As much an admirer of Lang as of Renoir, Rivette sought to combine ‘storyness’ with the most evident virtues of real time. His films begin to respond to the affinity between real life and movie—going on, nearly forever, free and open to any event—while gradually guiding this mass of material towards the kinds of design that we, the viewers or the readers, cannot help but see. Out 1: Spectre begins as nothing more than scenes from Parisian life; only as time goes by do we realize that there is a plot—perhaps playful, perhaps sinister—that implicates not just the thirteen characters (including Léaud, as the mystery’s self-styled detective), but maybe everyone, everywhere. Real life may be nothing but an enormous yarn someone somewhere is spinning.”

'Out 1: Spectre' | Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, April 11, 2006

In some ways the most venturesome of nouvelle vague filmmakers, Jacques Rivette went through the looking glass in the 1970s. For the better part of a decade, Rivette created a series of fantastic movies that—in their conspiratorial premises, theatrical structure, and Paris locations—suggested an analogue to the fantastic Louis Feuillade serials of the teens and '20s. Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) is the mode's masterpiece (and main commercial success). The most legendary, however, is Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, a 12-and-a-half-hour improvisation, shot in early 1970 and intended as an eight-episode TV miniseries. That never happened, and the movie's subtitle notwithstanding, Rivette touched his original—editing it down to a four-hour "shadow" in which rival theater groups and stray hippies (including Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto), who may or may not belong to a secret society, crisscross Paris in a confounding mystery. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere has never been shown in New York; it's been decades since Out 1: Spectre screened here. Anthology's calendar cautions that, given the film's rarity, the 16mm print quality is "not ideal."

OUT 1: SPECTRE Jonathan Rosenbaum from Oui magazine, August 1974

“Who are the 13?” jean-Pierre Léaud, when he isn’t impersonating a deaf mute on Champs-Elysées, is traveling around the rest of Paris, asking a variety of people this embarrassing question. He’s trying to solve the riddle of a secret society alluded to in a coded message – hidden relationships of power and influence lurking behind the normal surfaces of the everyday. Some of the reputed members of this sect include the owner of a hippie boutique (Bulle Ogier), a theater director (Michel Lonsdale), a lawyer (Françoise Fabian), and a novelist (Bernadette Lafont). Meanwhile, a small-time hustler (Juliet Berto) comes across additional evidence in a b atch of letters that she steals for blackmailing purposes. Although Berto and Léaud never meet, just about everybody else in Out 1: Spectre cross paths at one point or another. The movie’s geared to work that way, with each actor furnishing his own scenario and improvising dialogue while Jacques Rivette, the director, stages confrontations between them within his master plan. A game, a plot, a doorway into madness, or a foray into futility? This 255-minute charade, tailored to tantalize as well as stupefy, begins by telling at least five stories at once, gradually ties the threads together, and then proceeds to unravel them again. Much as Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow bears witness to mid-century paranoia by by turning imaginary plots into real ones and vice versa, Rivette has a chilling way of both suggesting explanations and dispersing them in this monumental, maddening epic. But the world he constructs around his frightening void is a recognizable one: Paris today.

Movie Review - Out 1: Spectre - Festival: Two Films From Rivette ... Nora Sayre from The New York Times, October 8, 1974

Unheard melodies may be sweet, but unsolved mysteries are about as satisfying as a windowful of succulent food that you can't afford. Jacques Rivette's "Out One/Spectre"—which played Saturday and Sunday at the New York Film Festival—is frustrating for two reasons: first, because 4½ hours of hidden motivations is hard on the soul; second, because some of the characterizations and performances are tantalizingly good — hence you really want to understand these people and what drives them. (The movie has been edited down from a 13-hour version that was —and then wasn't—intended for television.)

Most of Mr. Rivette's actors were invited to invent their own roles. Not a word of script was written, and—as you can easily guess during the first half-hour—the actors didn't know the outcome of the film. (There's no plot, although there is a flow of interwoven relationships.) For an American audience, there's much that seems old-fashioned here — mainly due to a plethora of footage spent on a theater group that suggests a Living Theater manqué. This ensemble's writhing and moaning and declaiming take us back to Off Off Broadway in 1966 or 1967, to a style that's quite conventional for New York. But the exercises are filmed as though we'd never seen that kind of performing before.

Two Parisian strays set off a wave of téte-à-tétes and tremors among people who are strangers to them. Jean-Pierre Léaud suspects the existence of a secret society, and he tries to detect its purposes through clues from Balzac's "Story of the 13" and Lewis Carroll's "The Haunting of the Snark." Meanwhile, Juliet Berto—a nimble con person and sponge—steals some letters that concern the mysterious conspirators. We never learn the function of the society, though there's a woolly hint that it might solve "problems."

If this binge of obscurity makes you turns on your heel, let me hastily stress that there are many intriguing scenes within the movie. Miss Berto has a rich gift for unpredictability; here, as a headlong, rueful thief and professional charmer, she appears in a very amusing episode where she slides into the house of a chess-playing stranger and convinces him that she wants to learn the game — which doesn't interest her at all.

Mr. Léaud begins very well; he pretends to be a deaf-mute (and I suspect that he revisited Jean-Louis Barrault's "Les Enfants du Paradis" for this part). Later, he's both frenetic and austere—also infantile and grandiose in the manner that he's used so often, and he postures more than necessary. Still, he plays nicely with Bulle Ogier, whom he attempts to seduce while she remains deeply absorbed in bookkeeping, Françoise Fabian — amused and affirmative as usual—teams skillfully with Miss Berto who is trying to blackmail her. Bernadette Lafont, a blocked writer, and Michel Lonsdale have an engaging scene, which fully conveys the ease of intimate, longterm friendship. Also, the director Eric Rohmer makes a pleasing Balzac scholar.

My own interest in the movie was sustained for about three hours — until it was obvious that the puzzles would never be worked out. Then, most of the scenes themselves began to appear like actors' exercises—improvisations for a tale that didn't exist. Eventually, the cast itself seemed like a secret society—or like people who've gone underground when they don't need to. While the leisurely pace of the movie seem's justified by the characters' development in the first half, it finally weighs on you because—despite all the worry and concern and concentration expressed — there are very few strong emotions in the movie.

The editing appears as the most deliberate aspect of the film. Many scenes are fragmented to mingle with one another; the narrative leaps in and out of continuing conversations, and it's often interrupted by black and white stills, accompanied by a low buzz. Apparently, the stills evoke parts of the 13-hour version, or are meant to remind us of characters we've seen briefly.

Almost certainly, this film was more rewarding for Mr. Rivette and his cast than it can be for the spectators. Yet I will remember the particular acting styles of some of the performers when I see them in future roles. The movie unquestionably reveals their potentialities and their individual talents in a way that's educational for critics and for dedicated students of the cinema.

OUT 1 AND ITS DOUBLE | Jonathan Rosenbaum May 15, 2017

The Greatest Enigma of French Film - The New York Review of Books Luc Sante, October 27, 2016

Jacques Rivette's 1970s cinema • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, July 2016

jacques-rivette.com: On Jacques Rivette (The Early Films) - DVD Beaver Peter Harcourt from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

jacques-rivette.com: Work and Play in the House of Fiction - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Sight And Sound, Autumn, 1974

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

jacques-rivette.com: Tih-Minh, Out 1: on the ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Velvet Light Trap, Spring 1996, also in Rosenbaum’s book Movies as Politics, 1997

The 12-Hour Masterpiece | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, May 25, 2007

Global Discoveries on DVD: By Jonathan Rosenbaum Cinema Scope, Winter 2008

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

La vie viennoise [Alec Kinnear] also seen here: Out 1 Spectre Film Review with some notes on La Maman et La ...

I Shoot The Pictures: Out 1: Spectre (1974), Worth A Look, TSPDT #909

Elusive Lucidity: Out 1: Spectre Zach Campbell, September 23, 2006

I Shoot The Pictures: Out 1: Spectre (1974), Worth A Look, TSPDT #909 Michael Troutman, December 18, 2010

The Sixty-Year Reign of French Cinema Paragon Jean-Pierre Léaud ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice, March 28, 2017

Blu-ray / DVD: Jacques Rivette's nouvelle vague magnum opus 'Out 1 ... Sean Axmaker, Blu-Ray

Out 1 Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Blu-Ray

Jacques Rivette Collection Blu-Ray Review: Out 1 | Blueprint: Review Alex Porter, Blu-Ray

Out 1 (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Justin Remer, Blu-Ray

DVD Review: Out 1 | Disc Dish Ed Grant

DVD: The Jacques Rivette Collection | The Arts Desk Kieron Tyler

'Out 1: Spectre' review by James Healey • Letterboxd

• View topic - Jacques Rivette Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, June 10, 2005

• View topic - Jacques Rivette Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, September 24, 2006

User reviews from imdb Author: (pmcomm@mindspring.com)

User reviews from imdb Author: robert burton from United Kingdom

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 6 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 15, 2006

Cine-File Chicago: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING A 98

aka: Phantom Ladies Over Paris

France (193 mi) 1974

Rivette, among all directors, has always added theatrical flourishes to his cinema, often directing plays onscreen, where watching a rehearsal more or less in real time constitutes a cinematic reality, where seeing the same screen characters offstage would represent an entirely different reality, while the use of dreams or flashbacks, or changes in time structure, shortening it or expanding it, might represent yet other realities, where he often shifts in between states without offering narrative explanation. After failing his entrance exam at a Parisian film school, Rivette, along with fellow film companions Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard, began writing film criticism, eventually working together at Cahiers du Cinéma film magazine in the early 1950’s. Rivette rejected this idea of an auteur theory, claiming film exists on its own level just awaiting discovery, where filmmakers must take caution not to alter or misshape its form. Rivette’s experimentation with time led to a practice of making films well beyond theatrical acceptability, where the long version of OUT 1 (1970) is nearly 13 hours long, while the short version OUT 1: SPECTRE (1974) is just over 4 hours. Spending his career directing both theater and films, he blends both artforms, where in this film he uses cinema as living theater. While the audience is watching the screen, several characters in the film are watching and seeing their own version of what we’re watching, which may or may not be the same, as unlike us, only they seem to have the power to alter the events, where they are free to improvise and change or alter the dialogue, often exchanging places and becoming the other character, all to delightful effect, giving this a free-wheeling improvisational feel of the late 60’s, where liberation from all suffocating forms, including men, is the key ingredient. The expanded wordless opening, along with the inner title which, like a Silent film, announces “Most of the time, it started like this,” which invites the audience to play along with this incredibly inventive, multi-layered film filled with such a positive spirit from the warm and wonderfully engaging performances of the two women, Juliet Berto as Céline and Dominique Labourier as Julie, who make this the shortest 3 hours you’ll ever experience, as time just races by.

From the outset, the audience is amused by the Alice in Wonderland similarities, where Céline goes running through the park in a panic, dropping objects along the way, while Julie runs after her picking up the objects, apparently to help her, but as this sequence is prolonged, she grows more curious than helpful, lagging behind but hiding herself through an extensive labyrinthian journey through Montmartre and the streets of Paris, where the use of locations is stunning, gorgeously shot on a beautiful sunny afternoon by Jacques Renard, the beginning of which can be seen here Unknown Files #102 CELINE AND JULIE GO ... YouTube (10:15). It’s clear there’s an unspoken communication between these two women, though they spend the opening half hour following, but avoiding each other without uttering a word. By the next day, however, we have some idea what we’re dealing with, as the two are the best of friends, roommates, and spend every waking minute ecstatic to be alive, finding clever ways to thoroughly enjoy themselves, where their deliriously euphoric state of mind is something close to a fantasy world, an alternate state that exists just for them, where men in particular are not invited. The overlapping events play out simultaneously, where each of them has their own unique experiences that highlights their beguiling personalities, where Julie pays a visit to a strange house where, oddly enough, a photograph can be seen inside a trunk full of children’s dolls. Céline, meanwhile, takes a phone call from Julie’s well-dressed fiancé and agrees to meet him, where she arrives impersonating Julie, thoroughly embarrassing the poor guy (Philippe Clévenot), who never knew what hit him, eventually telling him to go jerk off in the daisies. The entire film is an extended game they play, with the characters scripting much of their own dialogue, where they find themselves trapped in a play within a play, a composite of two different works by Henry James, the short fictional story The Romance of Certain Old Clothes and a novel later made into a play entitled The Other House, a strange and unfortunate tale revolving around murder and a cover up, perhaps the only James work to contain a brutal murder, which Rivette stages as an old costume drama with old-fashioned characters who seem to have been resurrected from mothballs, eventually turning into a ghoulish theater of the dead.

So much of this film is so incredibly original and inventive, where perhaps the best bit in the entire film is Céline’s stand up magic act in a dive of a theater consisting of about a half a dozen men in the audience Celine holder.flv - YouTube (1:11). What’s adorable about this short video scene, using fake electronic music *not* used in the film, which has instead a burlesque style piano player, is the little kid to the right, who breaks out into a huge smile after she pops the balloon. Later Julie takes Céline’s place onstage, coming up with an uproarious and simply remarkable piece of intimate theater herself, beautifully highlighting her own natural inclination to get carried away with herself: Dominique Labourier performs in Celine and Julie ... YouTube (7:31). Check out the guy in the lower left in the audience, as he’s simply dumbstruck, especially after she calls them a bunch of “cosmic twilight pimps.” In this film, Rivette never distinguishes between what’s real and what’s only imagined, where the internalized adventure seems to reject memory, actively engaging a netherworld between the past and the present that exists in a fictional haunted house, like a parallel universe, much like the subsequent Rabbits sequence in David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2006) or the whole inverted narrative of MULHOLLAND DR. (2001), both of which seem hatched from this film. Both Céline and Julie have what feels like dream experiences inside the house, exchanging roles in a continuously replaying murder mystery, where afterwards they forget where they’ve been unless they munch on a piece of candy that’s been transported out of that world, recreating the experience all over again, like an LSD laced hallucination, where as they rewatch it together it takes on a world of seemingly infinite possibilities, yet the laws of memory want to hold everything in place, exactly as it was. When re-experiencing events, both seem to want to take a more interactive role in changing the outcome, which goes against all those science fiction stories that suggest if you go back in time you can’t change the outcome of history, only here there’s no such rule, as anything’s possible.

The laws holding the repetitive nature of the story in place grow more absurdly ridiculous after awhile, as why shouldn’t it change? Memory isn’t fixed or absolute, but is subject to any number of factors, such as age, distance, wish fulfillment, shame or regret. In this haunted house, where the audience becomes overfamiliar with the repetitive aspects of the play, they may wish for outcomes that break through the cyclical patterns of the narrative. In this way, the characters can literally reinvent themselves by redefining the terms, eliminating any significant male influence, which has no use here other than it’s a male who is directing the film, where part of this is his vision, but this is a collaborative process designed to envision what amounts to a feminist universe, where Céline and Julie’s entrance into the fictional world is the world they were born into, where the power of intellect and choice may lead them to entirely different outcomes than what was originally written or planned. This flexibility is the beauty of the film, as it’s the euphoria that Céline and Julie experience together inside their own imaginations, where hallucinogens are needed to enter this self-reflective world, and where they’re free to invent new narratives. What’s particularly interesting is the common thread of cats seen throughout, who seem to thrive on their own instincts, but also an experience unique to Julie, where at one point she visits a smaller house across the street from the usual house and visits a woman from her own past, an older woman (Marie-Thérèse Saussure) who remembers her mother. This visit suggests these stories could have been imagined by Julie as a young girl, where perhaps there is another house nearby that might hold the key to Céline’s past, which is never revealed, where her character only looks forward. The clash between the present and the past is met in a Surrealistic finale that is breathtakingly beautiful, a kind of serene resignation that suggests certain events remain fixed in our memories, perhaps frozen in time, where we will revisit them exactly as they are in a continuously replaying cycle for the rest of our lives. This film bears some resemblance to the puzzle construction of Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), but rather than the icy and aloof model figures used in that film which has a continuously cold and calculating, near impenetrable feel, perhaps an over-identification with the male, this film, in contrast, is an ecstatic and utterly jubilant women’s vision.

Jean-Michel Frodon from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

English-speaking viewers will never taste the real flavor of this film. It starts with the title, which means nothing but, in its original version and for French-speaking people, opens wide the doors toward tales, jokes, and children’s stories. Céline and Julie Go Boating is a password to a realm where sinuous roads travel the fringe between the exterior world and intimate dreams, bertween present and past, and between reality and fiction. When Alice followed the White Rabbit, she entered another world. When Julie (Dominique Labourier) entered the world of Céline (Juliet Berto), she seemed to do something similar—but not really. What was different? The obvious and crucial fact is that Alice in Wonderland is a book, and Céline and Julie Go Boating is a movie. A movie by one of the most demanding and delicate of film critics, Jacques Rivette, who turned into a remarkable explorer of the nature of cinema through the questioning of its relations with the real world and with other forms of art.

Rivette’s magnificent work has always been made with a joyful taste for telling stories, watching pretty women, listening to songs and stories, sharing love and admiration for actors. Never, perhaps, was it designed in such a free and inventive way than at this moment, when he created the narrative labyrinths—infinite political, psychoanalytical, and aesthetic echoes—with the film’s actresses. It was summer in Paris. The believed in utopias, fearwed nothing, and were ready for any adventure, particularly adventures of love. Along with writer Eduardo di Gregorio, Céline, Julie, Camille (Bulle Ogier), and Sophie (Marie-France Pisier) gave birth to this sunny inner travel, this diving into mirrors with a funny splash, a dance with specters so light. Ghosts and smiles followed the silent music, Jacques Rivette seemed to conduct without moving, and the world was spinning round—magic.

Céline and Julie Go Boating Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the great modern films, Jacques Rivette's 193-minute comic feminist extravaganza is as scary and unsettling in its diverse narrative high jinks as it is hilarious and exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick. Its slow, sensual beginning stages a mysterious, semiflirtatious meeting between a shy librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, an outlandish plot within a plot magically takes shape—a Jamesian, Victorian, and somewhat sexist melodrama featuring Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film's producer), and a little girl—as each character, on successive days, visits an old dark house and the same events take place. Oddly enough, both of the plots in this giddy comedy are equally outlandish, but the remarkable thing about this intricate balancing act is that each holds the other in place; the elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power, and the final payoff is well worth waiting for. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue in collaboration with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its most euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials). The use of locations (Montmartre in the summertime) and direct sound is especially appealing, and cat lovers are in for a particular treat.

For all of its reputation as a film studies favorite and perennial thesis subject, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING is ultimately a great giddy fib of a movie, and probably the breeziest three-hour film ever made. Red-headed bluestocking Julie (Dominique Labourier) and pouty brunette Celine (Juliet Berto, the greatest improvisational actor of her generation and, goshdarnit, a real pretty girl) get involved with phantom ladies, horseplay, zombie make-up, incantations, Art Nouveau lettering, cats, loft beds, white bathrobes, a mysterious house, roller-skating, tarot, and magical candy in what is either a marathon round of Clue with liberal borrowings from Alice in Wonderland or an epic of playing dress-up and talking in funny voices. Shot on pastel-colored 16mm by Jacques Renard, its unavailability on domestic DVD is made doubly unfortunate by the fact that it's probably the best introduction you can have to the work of Jacques Rivette; its freeform sprawl is a counterpoint to the resigned smallness of his most recent (and possibly last) film, AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN. This is a great work of art, a loopy entertainment, and, despite (or maybe because of) its infamous narrative and spatial labyrinths, strangely liberating.

Céline and Julie Go Boating BFI Screen Online (link lost)

"The most radical and delightful narrative film since Citizen Kane! The experience of a lifetime." —David Thomson

bfi Distribution releases new prints of Jacques Rivette's magical 70s favourite Céline and Julie Go Boating, which combines themes of theatricality, paranoia and la vie parisienne with an entrancing examination of the mysteries of movie-making and movie-going.

Céline and Julie Go Boating opens with a curious chance meeting (or is it?) between two young women in Montmartre - Céline, a magician, and Julie, a librarian. Indeed, the opening pursuit of Céline (Juliet Berto) by Julie (Dominique Labourier) on a perfect summer's day is perhaps the most luminous example of Rivette's love affair with Paris. The young women form an empathetic and playful bond, sharing the same apartment, bed, identity, imagination and magic sweets. Thanks to these magic sweets, they find themselves spectators, then participants, in a melodrama unfolding in a haunted suburban mansion, the wonderfully named 7 bis, rue du Nadir aux Pommes.

Typically for Rivette, there is also a film within the film: the events in the house, played out by its other-worldly inhabitants (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier), are drawn from two stories by Henry James. The atmosphere, however, is more Lewis Carroll, with Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier as twin Alices. The four main actresses improvised their own dialogue in collaboration with Rivette and scriptwriter Eduardo de Gregorio.

Rivette's greatest commercial and critical success, Céline and Julie Go Boating still captivates today with its exhilarating yet uncanny atmosphere. The bfi is delighted to introduce this rarely seen favourite - considered by many as 'essential viewing' - to a new generation of film-goers.

Slant: Keith Uhlich

Jacques Rivette's masterpiece—quite possibly his greatest film—is a deceptively light-hearted confection that begins and ends (or, rather, begins again) at the entrance to a Parisian wonderland. Bespectacled librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) pursues amateur magician Céline (Juliet Berto) across a city of dreams (hence the film's homage-to-Feuillade subtitle, "Phantom Ladies Over Paris"), though Rivette doesn't distinguish between the real and the imagined. Theirs is a world of limitless, initially aimless possibilities (reflecting the film's own improvisational genesis) that are slowly honed to a sharp precision point. Those bracing themselves for (or already baffled by) David Lynch's Inland Empire will find the seeds of that film's madness in Céline and Julie Go Boating, what with its pervasive Lewis Carroll referents and seamless doubling effects. Céline and Julie's friendship adheres to an emotional dream logic, so we never question the developmental gaps. These women clearly belong together and it's thrilling to watch them sever all real-world ties (in situations where they're each surreptitiously disguised as the other) so that they may focus on the main drama: the rescue of a young girl (Nathalie Asnar) from a haunted house that continually replays the same murderous melodrama. This story-within—which also features Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, and Barbet Schroeder going through a series of hilariously deadpan motions—has been described as everything from an RKO programmer to a Henry James pastiche: like a fourth-wall smashing Kuleshov experiment, it is what you make of it. More important is that Céline and Julie, after several false starts and with the Proustian aid of a magical memory candy, eventually realize they can be more than spectators to the unfolding drama. The duo's final assault on this intertextual Mobius strip is liberating and brilliantly sustained, though it nonetheless resonates with a variety of discomforting implications (read between the lines for a despondent post-May '68 commentary) that belie the overall jocularity of Rivette's presentation.

Slant: Ed Gonzalez

Jacques Rivette's spry and intoxicating 1974 comedy Céline and Julie Go Boating observes the way women look at each other, themselves, and the world around them. This through-the-looking-glass comedy begins inside a lovely Parisian garden, with the titular Julie playing Alice to her friend Céline's white rabbit. The transfixing allure of the film is all over its divine introduction and the way the wind moves sensually through the trees. It's a perfectly ordinary day, but there's a hint of mischief in the air. Rivette's once-upon-a-time title card is the first clue: "Most of the time it started like this." A seemingly frenzied and oblivious Céline (Juliet Berto) runs past Julie (Dominique Labourier), dropping a string of items. Julie subsequently chases Celine though the park and a local market in order to return her personal belongings. It quickly becomes obvious that the two women are playing a game, and as such the sexy, prosaic tonality of the film's famous intro reveals itself as a fascinating act of subversion (the "but, the next morning" title cards are Rivette's theoretical contractions). Simultaneously literate, stagy, and organic, Céline and Julie Go Boating is a free-wheeling study of the narrative-making process and the way we watch movies, but at three-hours-plus, the film's improvisational tone sometimes betrays Rivette's meta momentum. Celine and Julie's spontaneous misadventures actively reject memory and are intercut with scenes from a murder mystery set inside a possibly haunted house (comparisons to Mulholland Drive are impossible to ignore). The film's dialectic isn't so much an interplay between the past and the present as it is an elaborate confrontation between two very active spectators and a dodgy narrative text. Rivette fabulously engages silent film idiom (watch for the romantic imbroglio between a disguised Céline and Julie's childhood crush and, later, the sweet homage to Les Vampires, a favorite of Rivette's) as a means of rejecting the past (represented by the house). Julie looks back, Celine looks forward. When they do neither, they're as free as the wind. Indeed, the world is very much a stage for Rivette's actresses, and they believe only in living in the moment.

Lost and Found: Céline and Julie Go Boating, by Royal S. Brown from Cineaste, January 30, 1998

Of the various French directors that one can place within that loosely defined group known as The New Wave, Jacques Rivette is certainly one of the least well-known in the U.S., although his recent La Belle noiseuse (1991) has changed that slightly. While directors such as Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol were managing, in spite of challenges they represented to the Establishment, to find pockets of acceptance--and commercial distributors--for their work, Rivette remained the true independent, if not totally underground, filmmaker. When Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) finally appeared in 1961 after four years of desperate attempts to find money to keep the project afloat, its vague story of a political conspiracy to enslave the world--a fiction, as it turns out--appealed to very few. The French censors, headed by former leftist André Malraux, kept Rivette's adaptation of Diderot's eighteenth-century novel La Religieuse, in which a young nun (Anna Karina) revolts against her enslavement to the convent and the Church, out of circulation for over a year between 1966 and 1967.

Following a documentary in 1967 on his mentor Jean Renoir, the director's next film, L'Amour fou, released in 1969, intriguingly alternates rehearsals for a staging of Racine's Andromaque, which are filmed, and sometimes shown, in 16mm footage taken by a documentary crew, with scenes in an apartment where the principal actress from Andromaque (Bulle Ogier) and her husband (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) tear each other apart. Although the film strongly enhanced Rivette's reputation in certain areas, its 252-minute running time has definitely worked against wider acceptance. Indeed, long running times have become one of the trademarks of Rivette's style. His next film, Out 1: noli me tangere (1971), runs close to thirteen hours and has been seen in its original version by only a handful of people (a shortened version entitled Out 1/Spectre, released in 1974 and shown, among other places, at the New York Film Festival, still runs well over four hours).

1974 also saw the release of what I consider to be Rivette's masterpiece--and, indeed, one of the major masterpieces of the cinema--Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), whose running time weighs in at a mere 193 minutes. Like almost all of Rivette's films, Céline and Julie slowly and dreamily sets up the existence of two opposing worlds, with the principal characters--in this case Céline (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier)--moving back and forth between the two. The one world is often dominated by artistic creation, although in Céline and Julie this freéuently boils down to just pure game playing. The other is a darker, more impenetrable world that seems to hide sinister secrets.

But Rivette also solidifies a position that had been taking shape in his earlier work but that manifests itself in a startling, refreshing, and often extremely funny way in Céline and Julie: the nonsinister world--the world of childhood, games, innocence, witchcraft, Tarot cards, dolls, outlandish puns, even mind-altering drugs--is a universe inhabited by women, whence the film's English-language subtitle, Phantom Ladies Over Paris, which alludes not only to the old Feuillade serials (and to a sequence in which the two heroines, dressed in black body suits and hoods, roller-skate through nighttime Paris) but also to Rivette's vision of women as extraterrestrials. The director has been quoted as saying that, "Only women can be extraterrestrials. Men have no sense of the cosmic forces, which lie beyond their grasp." Interestingly, screenplay credit is given to the four principal actresses (Berto, Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier) and Rivette, "in dialogue with Edouardo de Gregorio."

And so, to open and close the film, we see what appears to be the beginning of a game (the intertitle reads "More often than not, it began like this..."). In the first sequence, Julie, playing Alice to Céline's white rabbit, follows this person, who may or may not be her friend and/or roommate, throughout Paris, which includes a run up the million or so steps alongside the funicular railway of Paris's steep Butte Montmartre, all of it transformed by Jacques Renard's cinematography and Nicole Lubtchansky's montage into something close to a fantasy world, as is often the case in Rivette's films. The film's final sequence reverses the roles, with Céline running off in pursuit of Julie. Thus does Céline and Julie's broadest structure throw the viewer outside of the comfortable, causal connections of chronological time into a universe of game playing dominated by cyclism and circularity. This is reinforced throughout the film by certain anticontinuity devices, such as jump cuts and unmotivated blackouts, that are introduced not as a kind of quasi-Godard provocateurism but rather as part of the natural rhythm of things.

We also have a sense of a deep communication between the two women that often takes place on a nonverbal level. And when the time comes, each one, playing the role of the other, is able to oust oppressive males from their world. Céline, dressed as Julie, meets her friend's choirboy fiancé (Philippe Clévenot) in a park, does a pathetically erotic waltz with him as he mutters the words "dormir, baiser" (sleeping, fucking), drops his pants, and then offends his sense of Catholic purity by telling him to go jerk off in the daisies. Julie, taking over Céline's mildly erotic magic act in a routine of songs that cover the gamut from little girl to Marlene Dietrich, outrages the cigar-smoking, Lebanese businessmen who are thinking about hiring Céline, calling them a "bunch of cosmic pimps."

Set against this world of little-girl innocence, within the foreboding confines of a large, shuttered, brick mansion set beneath the level of a street improbably named the Rue du Nadir des Pommes (Apples' Nadir Street), is a musty, hothouse, closed-off world inhabited by three ghoulish characters (Pisier, Ogier, and Barbet Schroeder, the latter somewhat evoking the gaunt character played by Sacha Pitoëff in Last Year at Marienbad), along with a little girl named Madelyn (Nathalie Asnar). Like refugees from a Pirandello play, they find themselves trapped in a double narrative taken from two different works by Henry James, a story entitled "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" and a novel, later made into a play, entitled The Other House, the only James work, according to Leon Edel, to contain "a brutal murder." Somehow, Céline has been hired into the journée perpétuelle of this narrative action as a nurse for Madelyn, and as the action progresses, Céline and Julie take turns playing the role of the nurse. Initially, however, their only way of accessing what has gone on in the house is via memories induced by what looks suspiciously like LSD-laced candies.

As the two women repeatedly witness the same fragments of action from the frozen but fractionalized Jamesian narrative, they become aware, across the long blocks of time that are essential to Rivette's cinema, that one of the two women in the house, both of whom are in love with Madelyn's father, will murder the little girl in order to undercut a vow made by the father to his dying wife that he would not remarry as long as Madelyn was alive. With the aid of witchcraft and talismans, Céline and Julie, on a dark, stormy evening, both manage to gain entrance to the house, enter the drama together for the first time, and then save Madelyn. As the next day begins, they find Madelyn in the bathtub of their apartment, asking what game they're going to play next.

An obvious interpretation of Céline and Julie Go Boating would be that the two women, living in a kind of prepatriarchal state and defying the codes of patriarchal society, have ultimately rescued what amounts to their common inner child. In a sense, it might even be said that they have given birth to her (needless to say without the benefit of a male). But what is ingenious about Rivette's vision is that he presents the women's universe, with its games, repetitions, contradictions, and cyclisms, as the real world (to which impression Berto and Labourier's extremely natural, sometimes improvised acting contributes mightily), while the stiff, patriarchal world of murderous, sexual rivalries is shown for what it is, namely a narrative construct taking place within a rigidly defined time and space. In Céline and Julie's world, LSD is needed to enter into that linear time and place, not to escape from it.

Here, as in many other Rivette films, a self-reflective examination of narrative ultimately reveals the ugly ways in which the patriarchal world has been put together. Along the way, Rivette offers no pat explanation for just what is going on: it could all be a game; it could be LSD-induced hallucinations; it could even be stories imagined by Julie as a little girl. For, at one point, Céline and Julie reaches a kind of grand pause as Julie, looking behind the brick mansion, discovers a smaller house inhabited by an older woman who turns out to have been her nurse (Marie-Thérèse Saussure), who reminds Julie how afraid she was of the nurse who took care of the little girl in the other house across the way. And at the end, the director offers a spectacular, final image that brilliantly sums up the clash between the two worlds: as Céline, Julie, and Madelyn watch from their own rowboat, we see a sumptuous, highly saturated long shot of another boat floating on its own power down the river. In it, frozen in various postures, are the man and two women from what Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Rivette's "house of fiction." How's that for a floating signifier?

New Yorker Video has performed an invaluable service by making Céline and Julie Go Boating, one of the most original visions in all of cinema, available on video. It would have been nice had they managed a sharper video transfer with truer colors(the whole thing has a bit of a greenish tint to it). Non-Francophones will also miss the subtitles from older New Yorker versions of the film, which translated such things as Rue du Nadir des Pommes (this version leaves it in French) and didn't flinch at giving baiser as "fucking" (the translation of "kissing" is totally wrong). Still, this is an absolutely essential video.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Come And See David Thomson from Sight and Sound, October 2004

Céline et Julie vont en bateau • Senses of Cinema Alison Smith from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

Jacques Rivette's 1970s cinema • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, July 2016

jacques-rivette.com: Narrative Pleasure: Two Films of ... - DVD Beaver Robin Wood from Film Quarterly, Autumn, 1981, reprinted in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, 1998

Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris - Film ... Jonathan Romney from Film Reference

jacques-rivette.com: Work and Play in the House of Fiction - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Sight And Sound, Autumn, 1974

Shaggy Dog Movie (CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING) | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum essay from Time Out London, October 1, 1976

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

Cine-Files: Michael Atkinson Village Voice, August 5, 1997 (pdf)

"Celine and Julia Go Boating" by Julia Lesage - Ejumpcut Celine and Julie Go Boating: Subversive Fantasy, by Julia Lesage from Jump Cut, March 1981, also seen here: jacques-rivette.com: Celine and Julie Go Boating ... - DVD Beaver

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Slant: Joseph Jon Lanthier April 30, 2012

Jacques Rivette Retrospective/Céline and Julie Go ... - Reverse Shot James Crawford from Reverse Shot, November 17, 2006

Slave to beauty | Books | The Guardian David Thomson from The Guardian, April 15, 2006

Not Just Movies: Céline and Julie Go Boating Jake from Not Just Movies, March 24, 2010

Parallax View [Peter Hogue] July 27, 2010, originally published in Movietone News, August 1978

Wednesday Editor's Pick: Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) Alt Screen

Celine & Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 18, 2008

Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Culture Wars [Irina Janakievska]

Double Feature Michael Ned Holte from ArtForum, June 12, 2008, also seen here: Artforum: Michael Ned Holte

Portrait of the Artists as Cat People - MUBI David Phelps from Mubi, June 23, 2008

Lynch / Rivette. Phantom Ladies, or: It Doesn't Hurt to Fall Off the Moon ... Christopher Small from Mubi, December 24, 2015

Metro Times: Book Review: David Thomson / The New Biographical ... Richard C. Walls from Metro Times, December 4, 2002

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Jacques Rivette, 1974) Dennis Grunes, August 19, 2008

Close-Up Film [Mike Bartlett]

CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) « Cinema Talk August 8, 2008

• View topic - Celine and Julie Go Boating and Paris Nous Appartient Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, May 6, 2005

C?line and Julie Go Boating (1974) | Film Reviews | The L Magazine ... Benjamin Strong

FILMSICK'S REVIEW ON “CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING” « Limitless ... February 13, 2008

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (Céline et Julie vont en bateau ... New Wave Film

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) [1 DVD9 & 1 DVD5] | AvaxHome

Celine and Julie Go Boating - The New Yorker Richard Brody, December 11, 2015

In love with a dead woman Frank Pan from Doorknob on a Train, March 17, 2007

à la recherche de Juliet Berto Frank Pan from Doorknob on a Train, April 9, 2007

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 1 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 8, 2006

The most wanted on DVD - The Masters of Cinema Series | Eureka! Nick Wrigley from Masters of Cinema, December 2003

100 Best Films - Village Voice

TSPDT - The 1000 Greatest Films: The Top 400 Films (201-250)

Céline and Julie Go Boating: Phantom Ladies Over Paris Leo Charney from All-Movie Guide

'Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette' by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, Gilbert Adair interview from Film Comment, September/October 1974

Celine and Julie Go Boating | | EW.com Ty Burr from Entertainment Weekly

Channel 4 Film [capsule review]

Time Out Dave Calhoun

Céline and Julie Go Boating | Culture | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

BBCi - Films Michael Thomson

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson, also seen here: Total Film [Tom Dawson]

The 25 greatest summer films | Film | The Guardian Jonathan Romney pick at #23, June 24, 2017

David Thomson's Top Ten Films: Céline and Julie Go Boating ... The Independent, July 21, 2002

Movie Review - Celine and Julie Go Boating - A Dotty Logic Marks ... Nora Sayre from The New York Times, October 8, 1974

Celebrating France's Directors Who Rode the New Wave G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, August 11, 1989

Juliet Berto, Actress, 42 obituary from The New York Times, January 12, 1990

Critic's Notebook; Films Inspired by a Master of Literary Delicacy, by Nora Sayre from The New York Times, June 25, 1993

'CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING' Rachel Saltz from The New York Times, June 13, 2008

Revisiting Jacques Rivette's 'Céline and Julie Go Boating' - The New ... Dennis Lim from The New York Times, April 27, 2012

Celine and Julie Go Boating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NOROÎT (Une Vengeance)

France (145 mi) 1976

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

The strangest by far of Jacques Rivette's films (1976), and perhaps the last gasp of the modernist strain that infused his work from L'amour fou to Out 1 to Celine and Julie Go Boating, this is a violent and unsettling fusion of a female pirate adventure (filmed on some of the same locations used for The Vikings and inspired in part by Lang's Moonfleet, but set in no particular place or period), mythological fantasy, Jacobean tragedy (with many lines borrowed from Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy), experimental dance film (with live improvised music from a talented trio of musicians), and personal psychodrama. The eclectic cast includes Geraldine Chaplin, Bernadette Lafont, Kika Markham (Two English Girls), and a few members of Carolyn Carlson's dance company. While the mise en scene and locations are often stunning, the film seems contrived to confound conventional emotional reactions of any sort. It's a movie where the casual slitting of someone's throat and the swishing sounds of Lafont's leather pants are made to seem equally relevant—a world apart from Rivette's more recent La belle noiseuse. Yet Rivette's feeling for duration, immediacy, and moods of menace are fully present here, and days or weeks after you see this chilling conundrum of a movie, sounds and images may come back to haunt you. Rarely screened—the film never even had a commercial run in France—this monstrous work deserves to be seen as a uniquely disquieting experience.

Festivals: Vienna - Film Comment Dan Sullivan, November 30, 2016

“Tonight, I am double”: this cryptic declaration, delivered by Bernadette Lafont’s pirate queen moments before a nocturnal duel to the death with her vengeful doppelganger (Geraldine Chaplin) at the climax of Jacques Rivette’s psychedelic and balletic Noroît (1976), curiously resonated with a number of the films included among the selection at this year’s Viennale. In Noroît, these words serve to acknowledge that its two female leads are each other’s double, counterparts whose eternal feud mirrors that of the goddesses played by Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier in Duelle, the film which preceded Noroît in Rivette’s never-completed “Les Filles du feu” series. But the notion of “being double” also conjures a sense of multiplication and division, of expansion and contraction, of films surprising us with decisive changes to their own shape and scope. Indeed, several of the 2016 Viennale’s standout titles dynamically pulled the rug out from under you.

Noroît, which was presented in a new digital restoration, is one of the most delirious works by the late French master of going-long. We meet our protagonist Morag (Chaplin) having a meltdown on a beach over the demise of her brother (film producer Humbert Balsan, who also acted in Bresson’s Lancelot du lac and assistant-directed on The Devil, Probably). She infiltrates the ranks of the pirates responsible for his death (including one played by Balsan in a double role) and slowly but surely enacts her revenge plot against their groovy, swarthy boss Giulia (Lafont) with the uncanny precision of one who is fully aware that she exists within a fiction. (Adapted from Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Trilogy, Noroît marks the only time that Rivette adapted a play.) In counterpoint to the sense of predetermination effected by Morag’s patient angling for her shot at the head honcho, Rivette increasingly litters the mise en scène with anachronistic objects and costumes and with lanky figures pirouetting, lunging, swinging swords and firing rifles as if in some kind of acid jazz remake of Minnelli’s The Pirate. Rivette untidily concludes the film with an eruption of the supernatural that reveals to us just how far we’ve drifted away from reality and toward a disarmingly nightmarish, artificial space, well past the point of safe return. Noroît is perhaps Rivette’s most frightening film, but also the one in which the choreography of bodies within the frame does the most to conjure a film-drunk world where the lightness of fiction clashes with the weight of real madness.

The films of Jacques Rivette have always placed plot in a somewhat secondary relationship to the other elements of the cinema, but never has this been more true or more obvious than in the hallucinatory, baffling Noroît (une vengeance). The film seems to exist almost entirely in terms of individual scenes, which stand apart from each other with a willful refusal to cohere into any overarching plot. Nevertheless, there is a narrative, of sorts, that carries through the film — Geraldine Chaplin as the avenging Morag, enacting her bloody revenge on the pirate gang who murdered her brother (or lover maybe) — but it's far less important than the way individual scenes play out within this broad context. And things play out, inevitably, in as strange and unsettling a manner as possible. Rivette sets up shop early on in a castle fortress, populated by his massive cast of mostly female pirates, with only a few token men on the fringes. It's a story of intrigue in which the players' motivations aren't necessarily clear. Everybody in the castle seems to have a story, and a scheme, but Rivette seldom focuses on the root causes of these double-crosses, games of treachery, and violent uprisings. It's enough, for him, that they happen, that they drive these characters into confrontations and altercations that give his weaving camera a chance to document the tensions and interplay between his actors.

With Duelle, Noroît was meant to form part of a four-film series, though the project collapsed before the other two films could materialize. And like Duelle, this film is built around these systems of interaction, expanding the previous film's rigorous rotation of duets into larger groupings. The relationships formed and dissolved here are also infinitely more mysterious, as Morag infiltrates the base of the pirate queen Giula (Bernadette Lafont), aided by the duplicitous Erika (Kika Markham). The castle is teeming with women, a huge and unwieldy cast with enigmatic purposes and affiliations, multiple murder plots and quests for treasure overlapping and intersecting one another at all times. Rivette gets almost uniformly excellent performances from these actresses, many of whom frequently seem to be improvising, vacillating between playfulness and dead-serious (if obscure) drama. Rivette's camera is constantly moving through this web of deceit and cross-purposes, but even he can't catch everything, and at times he seems to deliberately keep things obtuse or unexplained. What does Morag whisper to Elisabeth Lafont (Bernadette's daughter, here playing her niece and heiress) while running her hands through her hair? What's with the scene where Morag's supposedly dead brother returns to her and passionately kisses her? Why are there two Giulas in the film's final scenes? What is the meaning of the mysterious red stone with its tremendous magical power? There are few answers. This last element, at least, is seemingly carried over from the moon goddess plot of Duelle, but here with even less explanation of the story's mystical elements.

And while we're asking questions, what's with the improv trio hanging out in the corner of so many scenes and improvising the film's soundtrack? Who are these ragged 70s musicians acting as though they really belonged there on the outskirts of a swashbuckling adventure story? Indeed, with this project Rivette carried over the improvisatory spirit of his preferred acting methods into the soundtrack, bringing in the composer and multi-instrumentalist Jean Cohen-Solal along with his brother Robert and Daniel Ponsard. It was a tactic he also used in a more limited way for Duelle, with the sporadic appearances by pianist and composer Jean Wiener, but here the musicians are both more fully integrated into the film's visual strategies, and far more incongruous in their surroundings. Whereas Wiener fit relatively comfortably on a nightclub stage or tinkling away in the background of a room, these musicians are much more obviously out of place in an ancient castle, lounging against the stone walls or haphazardly hidden behind bales of straw. Moreover, Rivette goes to great pains not only to point out their presence, but to underline its absurdity. He frequently allows them to begin playing while offscreen, so that their music functions in a more familiar way as the film's soundtrack, while his roving camera, following the action of the actors in the scene as they walk around a room, eventually reveals the musicians tucked away in a corner, heads bent over their instruments, a gleeful anachronism in a film whose whole structure, basically, is an anachronism. It's a period film set in no particular period, with the actors dressed in a ragged pastiche of styles ranging from plausible-looking historical pirate garb to Lafont's audacious, forming-fitting pink leather pants.

To this end, the music of Cohen-Solal and his cohorts is perfectly suited to the film's modernist approach to period material. The group plays gritty, scrabbly free improv of the kind popular throughout European post-jazz circles in the 70s, all scrapes and rattles and occasional mournful tones from Jean's flute, his signature instrument but one he mostly leaves aside here in favor of various bowed instruments. The trio's music is mostly tense, edgy, even unpleasant, but they're also capable of hauntingly emotional melodies and, in one memorable scene, a bizarre but very danceable form of rhythmic pseudo-jazz, the uptempo beat assembled from a loose accumulation of clicking percussion. This provides the accompaniment to an astonishing scene in which Giula and her bodyguard Ludovico (Larrio Ekson) perform an energetic tango together, the latter sporadically breaking free of the dance in order to search the room for some trace of his mistress' treasure. It's a perfect example of the film's digressionary method, a scene with virtually no narrative purpose, but a ludicrously fun diversion all the same.

These diversions form the core of the film's method. It's a film in which, if you removed the diversions and offshoots, you'd be left with very little indeed. There are so many wonderful scenes, many of them with a relationship to the main plot that is puzzling and ambiguous at best. Similarly, Rivette punctuates the film with shots of the landscape around the castle, meditative glimpses of crashing waves and placid vistas populated only by a distant figure on horseback (who is that, anyway?). These inserts are occasionally jarring, too, as when he inserts a shot of the ocean as a reaction shot when Erika looks around a corner within the castle — what's the meaning of this sudden, unmotivated cut from interior to exterior? Rivette further adds to the confusion by wryly suggesting, in the way he structures the film, that there actually is a coherent narrative here somewhere, if only we could understand it. He periodically flashes up titles on screen that count off the acts and scenes within them. According to these titles, Noroît has a traditional five-act structure, though one would be hard-pressed to say so if Rivette hadn't provided such helpful chapter breaks. Even then, he does further muddy up the waters by adding multiple scenes to a single heading, so that one title might introduce the next section as Act II, scenes 1-3.

In a movie as willfully slippery as Noroît, such tactics can only be a typically playful Rivettian joke, suggesting coherence in a film whose form is akin to a string of non-sequiturs. These titles may also be a reference back to the film's purported source, the Jacobean revenge play The Revenger's Tragedy, once attributed to Cyril Tourneur but now thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. This play, with its tale of a man seeking revenge for his lover's death, provides the basic impetus for the film's story, but more importantly Rivette uses dialogue quoted verbatim from the play, in the original English rather than the French otherwise used throughout the film. This dialogue, recited by Geraldine Chaplin and Kika Markham as the two avenging schemers of the film, takes the form of an incantation, repeated with ceremonial precision as a code for their ritual of revenge. In one remarkable scene, the two women pace in opposite directions around a circular room, reciting the same lines of dialogue from the play, overlapping one another as if in a round; Rivette further complicates the soundtrack with Cohen-Solal's flute, for once playing while the musician isn't actually in the room. The line they're reciting, which they eventually converge on in the center of the room, thus making it fully coherent for the first time, is: "I have not fashion'd this only for show and useless property; no, it shall bear a part, e'en in it own revenge."

This line, repeated at several key points in the film, seems to hold multiple resonances for Rivette, both on the level of the narrative and in meta terms, in the implications it has for Rivette's own film. Especially in the scene where Markham dramatically shouts the line to Chaplin, it begins to seem as though Rivette is himself addressing his audience, prompting them to look beyond the surfaces and think about what else is there. It's an invitation behind the curtain, a suggestion that there is more here than meets the eye, even if it's not as yet readily apparent. And it's also, as with so many things in Rivette's films, an elaborate joke of sorts. Because in addition to being a metaphor for Morag's vengeful quest, The Revenger's Tragedy also holds a more literal place within the world of Noroît. In continually reciting these English lines, the two women are not just expressing their plans for revenge, they're actually rehearsing for a play.

Indeed, one of the film's many marvelous scenes is the sequence where the two plotters stage the climax of The Revenger's Tragedy for the assembled audience of Giula and her pirates. As the two women perform, building towards a hilariously extended death scene for Geraldine Chaplin, playing the object of revenge in this staging, the line between theater and reality begins to blur and vanish. First, Chaplin veers into the audience to enact her death scene, stumbling and running between the assembled spectators, reeling wildly and overacting with melodramatic flair, launching into one of those endless "I'm dying but I still have time for a soliloquy" finales where even multiple poisonings, stabbings, and beatings can't quite do her in for good. But even as the play nears its close, the audience begins stirring and possibly breaking out into a for-real revolt against Giula. It's unclear exactly what happens next, though the seemingly earnest rebellion soon degenerates into some more play-acting, including more stabbings with a retractable knife; Rivette's soundtrack even emphasizes the distinctive click of the knife's blade receding into the handle when someone is "stabbed." Only when Giula finally, and bloodily, slits the throat of one seemingly innocent bystander, is the line between theater and reality definitively restored to clarity.

If this scene restores life and acting to their proper places, the film's finale decisively erases the lines separating performance, reality and fantasy, frustrating anyone who might've been hoping for the ramshackle narrative to somehow get tied together in the end. Instead, Rivette stages a macabre and sinister ballet, a set of black widow dances in which one partner ends by killing the other, slow motion murders that shift between graceful beauty and murderous anguish. Rivette purposefully fragments these scenes, shifting from ordinary photographic reality to yellow- or blue-filtered alternate universes, or high-contrast, grainy black and white footage with the sound abruptly cut off as though the action was taking place in a vacuum. Similar techniques were also used in the more overtly magical Duelle, to signify magical battles taking place on a higher plane, but its sudden intrusion here, without explanation or context, is far more destabilizing and disorienting. These final scenes have an unsettling beauty in spite of their violence, as each dance plays out as an improvised murder game between the two participants. It's a stunning, fittingly ambiguous ending to a film predicated on such ambiguity and submerged narratives.

Noroît (1976/77 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum January 8, 1977

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

Rivette's Rupture | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, February 27, 1992

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Jacques Rivette's 1970s cinema • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, July 2016

Duelle/Noroît - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, January 22, 2007

Noroit – 1976, Jacques Rivette Allan Fish from Wonders in the Dark, January 14, 2011

'The Jacques Rivette Collection': Three Proto-Lynchian Dream Teases ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, June 15, 2017

Slant: Budd Wilkins The Jacques Rivette Collection

Search my Trash [Mike Haberfelner]

Noroît (1976, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 9, 2008

DVDBeaver Blu-ray The Jacques Rivette Collection [Gary Tooze]

Rivette, more Rivette Frank Pan from Doorknob in a Train, March 25, 2007

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 16, 2006

User reviews from imdb Author: david melville (dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland

User reviews from imdb Author: junta66 from United Kingdom

DUELLE (une quarantaine)

France (121 mi) 1976

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

The second installment of a four-part series that was never completed, Jacques Rivette's 1975 film is a haunting fantasy about two goddesses (Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto) who descend to contemporary Paris and battle for possession of a magic stone that will allow them to remain on earth. The plot decodes into a conflict between the magical and the realistic cinema—Lumiere versus Melies—and Rivette works out the implications of this contradiction in his mise-en-scene, which applies a long-take, realistic technique to enigmatic situations and mysterious characters. Darker and quieter in tone than Rivette's better-known Celine and Julie Go Boating, though just as inventive and cryptically intelligent. With Jean Babilee, Hermine Karagheuz, and Nicole Garcia; Eduardo de Gregorio and Marilu Parolini collaborated with Rivette on the script.

User reviews from imdb Author: cllrdr-1 (cllrdr@ehrensteinland.com) from Los Angeles, Ca.

This is part one of what was to be Jacques Rivette's four-part project "Scenes de la Vie Parallelle". The idea was to create four different films with a running sub-plot involving a mythical war between goddesses of the Sun and the Moon, fighting for possession of a mysterious jewel. This one was a "film noir" modelled after "The Seventh Victim" (which Rivette screened for the cast before the shooting began) with bits of "Kiss Me Deadly", "Lady From Shanghai" and "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" thrown in for good measure. An uncanny mood piece it takes place in a weirdly unpopulated Paris. Jean Weiner (who used to play piano at "Le Bouef sur le Toit") supplies live piano improvisations here, much in the manner of an accompanist for a silent movie.

"Noroit" the second film in this series was a pirate adventure movie inspired by "Moonfleet" utilizing Tourneur's "The Revenger's Tragedy" as a frequently recited text --much in the way that Cocteau's "The Knights of the Roundtable" is quoted here.

After these two Rivette began "Marie et Julien" with Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, but suffered a nervous breakdown three days into shooting. This brought the project to an end. This year (2003) however, he's gone back to "Marie et Julien" again with Emmanuelle Beart and Jerzy Radzilowitz. Maybe the four-part project will be compeleted after all.

In the Moment: Juliet Berto in Duelle (1976) - Film Comment Matías Piñeiro, May/June 2016

Daughter of the French New Wave Juliet Berto’s sense of presence, of being here and now in the frame, coincides with cinema’s essential obsession with capturing the present tense. In the fantasy Duelle, her final collaboration with Jacques Rivette, she plays Leni, Queen of the Moon, a mysterious character in a cosmic duel with Viva, Queen of the Sun (Bulle Ogier).

Berto’s performance channels and stylizes the composed tone that holds this universe together. Her character is not an extension of herself, as in La Chinoise (67) or even Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (74). In Duelle, her actions and reactions never fall into the categories of either the natural or the fresh—spontaneity is too thin of an effect in the otherworldly battle this film presents. The peculiar manner in which she talks, moves through space, and stares at people and things, fills the screen and beyond with an absolute belief in the new world she inhabits.

In Berto’s first scene she enters a solitary hotel like a femme fatale in a state of affected weakness. But Berto deconstructs the type. She speaks in a strong voice, breaks her lines with awkward pauses, destroying any seamless identification, and bites her finger, like the innocent girl that she clearly is not. Soon she goes about seducing the young female concierge to help her find a vanished lover. These deviant gestures establish the eerie territory in which she sets her character’s preternatural machinations.

The strength of Berto’s performance comes from the intersection of this non-naturalistic line of acting with a silent-era quality she bears naturally: her photogénie. And in her case, the photogenic energy is even more original because it is freed from the male gaze of yesteryear. Berto attacks that dominance with a character that is distant, queer, and unpredictably powerful.

Jacques Rivette's Duelle (une quarantaine) is, like many of his films, a beguiling mystery, a film whose unsettling charm and emotional impact are much clearer than the hazy outlines of its plot. It is perhaps Rivette's most satisfying ode to femininity in its various forms, a celebration of the female in her many guises and roles. There's the flirty, charming, manipulative Viva (Bulle Ogier); the harsh, sexually ambiguous Leni (Juliet Berto), who sometimes dresses like a man and dances with women; the stolid proletarian working woman Jeanne (Nicole Garcia), who disguises her common origins with the more stylish name Elsa; the naïve but resourceful young Lucie (Hermine Karagheuz). This quartet of women, derived from cinematic "types" but endowed with their own strongly defined personalities, form the film's mysterious core, engaging in a battle of wits and magic that seems to be largely happening behind the scenes. Rivette's deployment of the film's plot gives the impression that unseen forces beyond human control are conspiring in secret, and what's seen on screen is only the tip of a very large iceberg indeed. The narrative revolves around Viva and Leni, immortal supernatural beings who are limited by arcane forces to only 40 days on Earth per year, and who are battling each other for control of a mystical diamond which they believe will allow them to remain in the land of the living indefinitely. The film's sole male character, Lucie's brother Pierrot (Jean Babilée), possesses the stone and is attempting to keep either woman from finding it.

Rivette expends very little energy on the details of this superhuman struggle, which is largely shrouded in mystery and unexplained even after the film's final frame. Instead, Rivette focuses his attention on the interactions of the women and the ways in which they pair off, compete, and speak with each other. The "duel" of the title refers most obviously to a literal, magical duel between Leni and Viva, which is scheduled to occur towards the end of the film but never actually does. In place of this unfulfilled promise, the film is structured as a series of smaller duels, confrontations between one woman and another, or between one of the women and Pierrot. In one scene after another, these women warily stalk and circle each other, taking turns following each other or engaging in tense stand-offs where it's not clear what's at stake, and whether violence may erupt at any moment. Duelle was part of a planned quartet of films, each of which would concern these supernatural characters, and each one was meant to be Rivette's response to a particular cinematic genre. Duelle is the film noir of the series, which is apparent in the way that Rivette commandeers the device of the detective following a suspect, shifting the context by making the stakes shadowy and the character motivations even more opaque for most of the film. When Lucie trails Viva in a perfect parody of a detective thriller, it's unclear just why she does so, what she expects to find, and who she'll tell about it when she does. The water only gets even murkier when she catches up to the other woman, initiating a tense conversation where the characters speak in poetic riddles and nothing is resolved; at the end of the scene, Viva simply melts into the shadows and disappears, after writing a note which also fades away, unread, as soon as she is gone.

Rivette films these scenes with a languid, constantly tracking camera that stalks warily around the women even as they circle one another. Rivette's camera is constantly hiding and revealing, creating pairs and then isolating the individual characters again, playing with the friction created by placing two powerful feminine personalities against each other. In fact, Rivette toys with virtually every possible permutation of the pairings allowed by these four characters. Very rarely are more than two of the women together in one place — the one exception being the central scene at a disco where the four women briefly converge — but they are continually coupling off, testing their wits against one another even as they each work towards varying, often obscure, ends. Similarly, Pierrot is given duo scenes with each of the women in turn, and the interplay between his shifting persona and the different women is revelatory of the way that male and female identities shape one another. With the sensual Viva, Pierrot is tough, masculine, sinewy, both in a lengthy seduction sequence and a scene of magical confrontation, bathed in blue light, where the diminutive Pierrot becomes domineering, intimidating. He's more brotherly and paternal with his sister Lucie, more standoffish with the chilly Leni, and more sensitive and gentlemanly with the needy, lovelorn Jeanne. It's fascinating to watch this chameleonic performance, as Babilée adapts to reflect the nature of whichever woman he's with; the male is defined by the female, and vice versa.

In that vein, the film is also about dominance and control, about the shifting balance of power between men and women, and among the women themselves. Interestingly, the film depicts the struggles between the women as being motivated, not by men — the seduction and manipulation of Pierrot is just a diversion in this contest, and Pierrot a self-admitted pawn in their cosmic chess game — but by secret aims known only to themselves. Rivette is such a fantastic director of actresses because he allows them to have their own hidden motivations, to maintain their mystique, and to act independently of sexual politics. Rivette's characters, even when they're in a love story, are never driven solely by the desire for sexual union, and here such motivations are so far beyond the film's concern that they barely figure at all. There's a certain sexual frisson to the scene where Viva slowly, almost whimsically seduces Pierrot, leading him on by feigning drunkenness and continually pulling her lips away just seconds before a kiss; when she finally does kiss him, it's an electrifying moment of pure lust. That kiss is palpable in a way movie kisses seldom are. But such scenes are rare here, and as likely to occur between two women: there's a similar sexual energy in a scene between Leni and Jeanne, when Leni leans in and tenderly kisses the other woman.

The film is, above all, a mood piece, with Rivette perfectly balancing the languidly paced visuals against a soundtrack which is as intriguing and complex as always. Rivette seems to have conceived of the film as a silent movie at times. This is especially true of the denouement, a taut standoff accompanied by a near-complete absence of sound, this crushing silence almost imperceptible until the confrontation ends and, with a sudden crash, the sounds of the city suddenly come roaring back onto the soundtrack. Rivette frequently plays with this kind of artificiality, alternating between a realistic soundtrack that reflects the urban spaces the film supposedly takes place in, and a drained, dampened soundtrack that's fitting for the eerie underground aquarium sequence but comes across as more stylized when it's used in other locales. There's a similar tension involved in the way Rivette uses the piano music of Jean Wiener, whose tinkly improvisations sometimes pop up at the oddest moments. At one point, when Lucie is looking around the room for something to write on, the piano kicks in from silence just a second before she turns her head, creating the brief impression that she's looking around for the source of the music. The music isn't quite as disrupting elsewhere, but its uniqueness and the way Rivette tends to cut it in right in the middle of a scene rather than at natural breaking points, definitely calls attention to itself in a way other scores don't. Moreover, Wiener himself appears in the background of some scenes, playing the piano, so that his score is sometimes incorporated into the surroundings while at other times it is distanced from the film's spaces in the way a traditional score is. As with virtually every aspect of the film, Rivette is setting up friction in the soundtrack between the realistic and the stylized.

In some ways, all this talk of friction and tensions is deceiving, because Duelle is a disarmingly smooth film, one that downplays the mysterious forces working beneath its surfaces at almost every moment. Rivette's camera glides between characters, subtly linking them and weaving around them as they engage in their verbal, mystical, and physical pas de deux. It's a typically puzzling and enigmatic work from Rivette, whose films seldom have a "point" so much as they result in an accumulation of impressions and emotions. This is, perhaps, why Rivette is so difficult to pin down, why his films are so often off-putting and impenetrable to all but those few tuned into his peculiar wavelength. With Duelle, Rivette's filmmaking is at its most obtuse and enigmatic, but also, perversely, at its most lushly sensual. Between the fluid camerawork and the gorgeously understated color palette, subdued to a twilight mix of rich blues and pale reds, the look of the film is stunning, creating the atmosphere of an eternal urban evening. This visual richness reaches its apotheosis in the central dancehall sequence, where the four women finally arrive in one place, and are further multiplied and refracted by the multitude of mirrors decorating the bar's interior, suggesting an infinity of possible women derived from these template figures. This film is teeming with such moments of secret significance, scenes where the film's feminine, lunar glow spills over into giddy explosions of imagination.

DUELLE: Notes on a First Viewing | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film Comment, September/October 1976

Duelle • Senses of Cinema David Ehrenstein from Senses of Cinema, May 2007

Jacques Rivette's 1970s cinema • Senses of Cinema Hamish Ford, July 2016

jacques-rivette.com: Introduction to Jacques Rivette ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Rivette: Texts & Interviews (BFI, February, 1977)

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

Rivette's Rupture | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, February 27, 1992

jacques-rivette.com: The Spectacle of Negativity - DVD Beaver David Ehrenstein from Ciné-Tracts, Fall/Winter, 1977-78

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Duelle/Noroît - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, January 22, 2007

The House Next Door [Jaime N. Christley] September 28, 2010

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath] April 27, 2010

The Daily Notebook [Miriam Bale] the effect of Last Year at Marienbad on Rivette, from Mubi, July 30, 2010

Mysterious Extracts from a Film's Subtitle Track Daniel Kasman from Mubi, August 1, 2010, also here: The Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman]

Lynch / Rivette. Phantom Ladies, or: It Doesn't Hurt to Fall Off the Moon ... Christopher Small from Mubi, December 24, 2015

'The Jacques Rivette Collection': Three Proto-Lynchian Dream Teases ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, June 15, 2017

Slant: Budd Wilkins The Jacques Rivette Collection

Rivette, more Rivette Frank Pan from Doorknob in a Train, March 25, 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: Delly (mortanse@yahoo.com) from Los Angeles

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 2 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 16, 2006

Brooklyn Magazine: Eric Barroso

jacques-rivette.com: Interview with Jacques RIvette - DVD Beaver Serge Daney and Jean Narboni interview Rivette from Cahiers du Cinéma, May/June 1981, from Rivette’s website

DVDBeaver Blu-ray The Jacques Rivette Collection [Gary Tooze]

Film: Jacques Rivette's 'Duelle':Rivalry of Gorgons Remains Obscure to the Audience Richard Eder from The New York Times, October 13, 1976

Noroit + Duelle Jacques Rivette - DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze

PARIS S’EN VA

France (30 mi) 1981

jacques-rivette.com: Paris s'en va - DVD Beaver translated by Andreas Volkert at Du, May 1994, from Rivette’s website

"L'OEUVRE" (p. 32)

Before Le Pont du Nord Rivette films Paris s'en va, a short film of approximately 25 minutes. He works with the same actors and the same technical team on both films. Henry Chapier who produced the short: "At the beginning of the '80s nobody was interested in Rivette's highly imaginative project Le Pont du Nord. Therefore Rivette came up with a kind of 'transposition' of the themes of Le Pont du Nord in the shape of Paris s'en va. Just like a painter in the Renaissance who does a sketch for a future project."

"CHRONOLOGY OF LIFE AND WORK" (p. 84)

1980: Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale are united in the Rivette short Paris s'en va (40 mins). Rivette: "The adventure of making Paris s'en va was my first experience as a producer." [...]

1982: Paris s'en va is shown in a shorter cut (25 mins). (1)

NOTES

In the online program from a Rivette retrospective held at the Centre Pompidou in 2007, the length is given as 38 minutes.

User reviews from imdb Author: lor_ from New York, New York

For Jacques Rivette, film-making is as natural as breathing. As a prime example of his effortless technique (often mistakenly referred to as "minimalism") is this half-hour companion piece to Le Pont du Nord.

Apparently created from out-takes, alternate takes and overlapping footage used for the feature film, Paris s'en va dispenses with the feature's narrative elements. With poetic and cryptic voice-over it is a wistful, moody look at Paris, not the picture postcard approach, but a deeply felt creation that will resonate with anyone who has wandered around the City of Lights in a self-absorbed state. For Rivette aficionados, of which I count myself since I was first mesmerized by his L'Amour Fou at a NYFF screening nearly 40 years ago, this is pure cinema, allowing the viewer to make up his or her own film rather than be manipulated by the auteur.

Recurring image is of the famous Lion of Belfort statue in the 14th arrondissement. Great minds often think alike, and it is the same image (minus her fantasy accoutrements) that Agnès Varda used in her 2003 short Le lion volatil.

From Pont de Nord, Bulle Ogier portrays an end-of-her-tether woman, literally supported by a forceful young woman Pascale Ogier, her real-life daughter. An element of panache exists in watching it now, since Pascale died tragically of a heart attack 3 years later, just as her promising career was taking off. Pierre Clémenti also appears briefly as Bulle's lover, and uncredited is a stray shot of Jean-François Stévenin performing some martial arts moves.

Stripped of dialog and narrative, Paris s'en va hangs in space as an intentional fragment - inaccessible to the general film-goer or even the typical "show me what you've got -impress me" film buff. It is yet another example of the irrelevance of duration -once one has given one's acceptance to Rivette's particular universe, an unplotted 1/2 hour opus zips by just as his typically 3, 4 and even 12-hour works similarly compel attention.

LE PONT DU NORD B- 80

France (131 mi) 1981

An extension of an earlier short film called PARIS S’EN VA (1981), this appears to be a riff on one of Rivette’s most successful films, Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont ... (1974), one of the most uniquely original films the director ever made, following the exploits of two theatrically minded young girls as they create their own Alice in Wonderland experience while we watch them romp through the hallucinogenic worlds of their imaginations while racing through the streets of Paris. The ecstatic and uplifting tone of the original, an endlessly inventive treat throughout, becomes instead a darkly menacing, nightmarish world where the suffocating atmosphere literally chokes the life right out of this world. Perhaps as a response to the infamous puzzle game experimentation in the mind-altering Alain Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), Rivette invents his own board game, using famous monuments and locations in the streets of Paris as possible places to land, using characters as living pieces moving about the board, seemingly at random, interacting throughout. While you might think there’s a catch to figuring out this puzzle by following the clues, but that’s simply out of the question, as it’s not a detective whodunit, it’s simply a meandering journey through a decaying existential wasteland. While the film appears to be thrown together at the last minute, shot cheaply and quickly by Caroline Champetier and William Lubtchansky on 16 mm, perhaps the best thing in the film is Rivette’s exquisite use of vacant lots, construction sites, an endless series of stairs, and rarely seen off-locations, like abandoned railroad tracks and demolition sites. Into this world Bulle Ogier is Marie, while her real-life daughter Pascale Ogier is Baptiste, meeting seemingly at random on the streets of Paris, as Baptiste keeps appearing wherever Marie goes, so eventually they continue their journey together, but not before Baptiste announces an opening battle cry, “Bring it on, Babylon” as she rides her motorbike circling around the statue of the Belfort lion (1,280 × 830 pixels) situated at the center of the Place Denfert-Rochereau, a symbol of French Resistance against the Germans, and the site where we first see Marie. But the Babylon Pascale references is the looming presence of a corrupt city destroyed by its own materialism and greed.

Throughout the film, there are images of giant construction cranes looming off in the distance constructing new buildings while also demolishing dilapidated structures at a rapid pace, where the world is simultaneously building what it will eventually destroy. Marie is happy to see her boyfriend Julien, Pierre Clémenti from Buñuel’s BELLE DE JOUR (1967), playing another lowlife gangster who seems to be saddled with nothing but troubles, where two men seem to be following him around the city, giving him 3 days to produce what they’re looking for. While Marie and Julien constantly meet in various locations, Julien can’t disappear fast enough, as if he can’t be seen in public. At the same time, Marie was recently released from prison, where she suffers from a rare medical condition that doesn’t allow her to breathe “inside air,” as she’s become addicted to fresh air, where she’s even forced to sleep outdoors. While you’d think this clever interplay between characters is well set up, no one makes a lasting impression on the audience, where unlike CÉLINE AND JULIE, each sequence is near forgettable. Rivette tries to create a world of mystery and invention, feeling like a claustrophobic parallel world where they have fallen into set traps, often languishing in a state of limbo as the days pass by. Baptiste runs interference, as if protecting Marie from dangerous outsiders, but we never get any clear indication who she is or what she’s doing here. For that matter, all of the characters appear out of a cheap Godard gangster flick playing their respective good and evil roles, where the heavies are all named Max and exist only to exert a noirish sense of danger, while the two women continually appear clueless and innocent, as if they could render no harm to anyone, so why do they exist in this labyrinth of doom? Surrounded by dark secrets and lethal threats, where soon enough dead bodies surface, Pascale finds a secret map stuffed into the dead man’s pockets, as if this is the treasure map leading them out of their imprisoned existence. While this map gives them a chance to explain the rules of the game, it doesn’t generate any real interest in the film, which simply never gets off the ground.

This is a film that suffocates in its own film construction, where outside of its presumed puzzle existence, it becomes a road movie with two characters wandering endlessly through deserted sections of the city, continually questioning their own crumbling existence, never really finding a reason for coming to life onscreen. Made not long after suffering a nervous breakdown, the film does seem to be searching for a reason to live, but these are instead dead souls doomed to wander perpetually through the ends of time, meeting at their designated times and stations, passing back and forth various documents and information from a briefcase, setting up their next designated appointments. Eventually this begins to feel ludicrous, where even the secret language starts to resemble film noir code, where danger always lurks just around the corner. When Pascale is called upon to slay a carnivalesque dragon, which breathes fire and smoke just for effect, it veers into the territory of fairy tales and children’s stories, but just as quickly starts questioning its own raison d’etre, as if these characters are caught up in their own dreary state of malaise and can’t escape their self-inflicted philosophical conundrums, even with the aid of the secret map. The film fizzles out and meanders on too long, simply running out of gas, losing a sense of purpose and dramatic conflict, as it all feels silly and repetitive after awhile, where the absurdity of the rules don’t even begin to make sense, as in this imaginary state, there is no reason for existence other than to continually make random appointments with destiny, where some larger mystery engulfs them, as if fate has already decided the outcome, and they’re mere puppets playing out the parts. In road movies, it’s the journey that matters, not the eventual destination, but here they are caught up in a realm of Sisyphus, destined to repeat their jagged path across an urban wasteland, up and down stairs, through vacant lots, only to discover no opportunity to start over and begin anew, where they’re stuck finishing what they started, where perhaps it was only a blind dream that Marie was released from prison, as her fate is apparently sealed.

User reviews from imdb Author: Masako-2 from Chiba, Japan

This is one of the most fascinating films I've ever seen. Since then, I became a serious devotee of the director Jacques Rivette, the most important filmmaker among late/post nouvelle vauge other than Eric Rohmer. While borrowing the main two characters from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are trailing the city as if they were exploring inside the shell of a snail, which the city is actually constructed. The film shows you amazing scenery of Paris, absolutely not in a touristic sense. In this film, Bulle Ogier co-worked with her daughter Pascale Ogier, who played the heroine in "Les Nuits de la pleine lune" by Eric Rohmer, another unforgettable film and suddenly passed away at the age of 24, right after the film was released.

Le Pont du Nord Time Out London

A movie that pushes the conspiratorial playfulness of Rivette's Céline and Julie in directions both maddening and magical. Ogier and her daughter Pascale are here the crossed-paths comrades impulsively taking up the silent challenge of the city's codes: hopscotching the map of Paris' arrondissements and turning it into a life-size outdoor board game. As ever in Rivette's labyrinthine re-imaginings of the urban obstacle course, the rules and goals are obscure while the allusive clues, keys and signposts multiply alarmingly. Underworld and wonderland merge in the open air; joyous whimsy blurs with justified worry; and Rivette risks exploring the scarifying powers of fantasy and paranoia with a panning, punning documentary eye. With so many oblique strategies, a little irritation is inevitable...but if you could possibly imagine a pre-micro Tron, the leaps of faith needed here shouldn't be difficult.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kat C. Keish

Two women, a chance connection and two-plus hours of time in which to flesh out the endless possibilities—a task that has been taken on by Jacques Rivette at least twice (and probably more) in his acclaimed career. Though CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING is the more well known of such films by Rivette, LE PONT DU NORD is it's thought-to-be-lost sibling: Marie and Baptiste, just enough alike to be compatible and just different enough to be relatable, embark upon a city-wide adventure after being enticed by the likes of a mysterious briefcase and its labyrinthine documents. Despite their similarities, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING was almost entirely a silly spoof while LE PONT DU NORD tackles a more serious tone. In a recent article for the Village Voice, Scott Foundas remarked that the latter film embraces "the conspiratorial overtones of film noir standing in for Henry James," a hallmark of the former film's absurdist storyline. Much like many of Rivette's films, LE PONT DU NORD is highly improvisational and representative of his democratic filmmaking tendencies; the actresses who play the main characters had a substantial role in developing the script and turning the pre-production material into its extemporized result. Shot on 16mm, the film is also comprised entirely of exterior shots. Some sources say this was a deliberate challenge, while others say that it was merely cost effective. The answer likely lies somewhere in between, because while Rivette may have been conservative with his budget, he certainly never scrimped on quality—or length. (1981, 129 min, New 35mm Print)

Mother and daughter performers Bulle and Pascale Ogier star as an appropriately mismatched duo in Jacques Rivette's inventive outdoor fantasy Le Pont du Nord. Much like Bulle's claustrophobic character Marie, Rivette's film can't bear to enter enclosed spaces: in one of its best scenes (captured in a single, breathless long take) Marie swoons and sways her way through an extended elevated train ride, and the film seems to share in her heady mindset, never quite knowing if its setting (a Paris slowly but surely succumbing to modernization) is a paradise or an inferno. It's an intentionally amateur production through and through—even the boom mic intrudes now and again, perversely heightening the sense of fantasy while simultaneously demolishing an already tenuous fourth wall. As the knife-wielding kung-fu revolutionary Baptiste, the late Pascale Ogier (who would later star in Eric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris) proves to be Rivette's finest and strangest leading lady since Juliet Berto. It's hard to believe this angular, extroverted brunette is the real-life blood relative of her categorically more calm and collected blond co-star—in both physicality and temperament they are decidedly antithetical, proving the old adage that opposites do indeed attract. Rivette's fascination with conspiracies and complots is distinctly more shaky in Le Pont du Nord (he's only a few steps removed from Love on the Ground's head-long plunge into twee intellectual mysticism), but the film, which takes place just before the elections that toppled French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is saved both by its performers and by the tactile qualities of its location photography. Even when the narrative irrevocably, and quite brilliantly, breaks down (with Marie succumbing to the story's mechanics while Baptiste unwittingly leaves them behind), Le Pont du Nord remains a stimulating document of a city in flux.

Letterboxd: David Jenkins

Le Pont du Nord is Jacques Rivette's mystery without a solution, a thriller without a plot, a modern-day Don Quixote/Sancho Panza tale that transforms the streets of Paris into a giant board game, a maze spotted with mysterious traps, puzzling clues, and chance encounters. Rivette, obsessed as always with secret organizations and obscure conspiracy theories, understands the city as a grand mystery in itself. The people within the city do not, for the most part, know anything about the hidden structures, paths, and narratives that lie beneath their daily activities: the city is a web of strangers, randomly meeting in the streets and then setting off on their own errands. They remain mysterious to one another, their divergent purposes hidden from those they encounter in the streets, and with everyone worrying about their own stories, seldom does anyone wonder about anyone else's. This film is about two of the exceptions to this rule, two wanderers who essentially live in the city's streets, and who as a result manage to peek at the hidden rules and secret societies that exist in plain sight for those who know what to look for.

Marie and Baptiste (Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale) meet one another on the Paris streets, and soon find themselves bound together by what the flighty, childlike Baptiste deems "destiny." Their three meetings, she says, though seemingly random, cannot be only a coincidence. They are two very different women, but what they have in common is their existence outside the normal boundaries of society. Marie has just been released from prison, and yearns to be reunited with her lover Julien (Pierre Clémenti), who seems to be mixed up in some shady business himself, promising Marie that he'll be able to join her in three days. Baptiste is something of a street urchin, surviving from moment to moment, sleeping outdoors, practicing martial arts, and committing acts of vandalism against posters; she is personally offended by images that represent the human eyes, and is compelled to slice the eyes off them, as though to make them stop staring at her. The women begin wandering the streets of Paris together, sleeping by night on park benches or in the cinema. Marie, fresh from confinement, finds that she is now afflicted by a claustrophobia so intense that she can barely walk into a building, or even a phone booth, without feeling closed in — the only reason she can sleep in a movie theater at all is because it happens to be showing William Wyler's The Big Country, whose French title translates as "wide open spaces." The next morning, as she stumbles dazed from the theater, the advertisement out front is being papered over with one for Henri-Georges Clouzot's final film, La Prisonnière.

The film, though seemingly straightforward on its surface, is peppered with wry jokes like this, as Rivette's wit characteristically shows through in subtle ways. He seems to be taking a very bemused stance with respect to his heroines, who stroll aimlessly through Paris as though in search of a narrative. They make a game of it as they're pulled into some sort of shadowy conspiracy revolving around a map of London, on which someone drew a spiral maze like a snail's shell. Marie and Baptiste begin thinking of this map as a game board, drawing symbols on it to represent different spaces within the game, which they then visit in turn. Throughout, Rivette keeps his distance, stoically observing their meandering path; there are endless shots of the women simply walking through the city, chatting idly, walking up staircases that seem to ascend forever, or along railroad tracks long abandoned by trains. The characters often act like spies, especially the eccentric Baptiste, who stalks along the streets, hiding behind trees, only to steal the head off a mannequin. Julien too acts like a character out of an espionage movie, and yet when the women steal and open the briefcase that he guards so intently, they find it's filled only with inscrutable papers, mostly newspaper clippings referring to various assassinations and rival organizations with acronymic initials, none of which are ever explained. All of this is being tracked by the mildly sinister Max (Jean-François Stévenin), who watches everything intently and occasionally offers advice; his motives remain as inscrutable as his employers.

All of this intrigue and gamesmanship never quite adds up to a coherent plot, and nothing is ever explained. In one sense, the map serves the traditional purpose of the MacGuffin in thriller films, an object of hazy origins and even hazier usefulness that everybody nevertheless wants. In another sense, though, this is a film in which there is nothing but multiple MacGuffins, many of them stacked within each other like Babushka dolls. The games that the heroines play within the film — declaring Paris a game board, a puzzle to be solved — mirror the games that Rivette himself plays behind the camera. He is turning Paris into a network of symbols: the lion statues that so fascinate Baptiste; the continual destruction and reconstruction of old buildings; the abandoned places that represent an older, forgotten version of the city.

This Paris is full of surprises. Open a random door, expecting to find an interior, and step instead into an unroofed courtyard, overgrown with grass; the door only separates one exterior from another. Or a conglomeration of pipes and metal shards might be reconfigured as a fire-breathing dragon, who must be vanquished in order to reach the treasure he guards. The film is about playing games with reality, about the ways in which imagination and creativity can shape and alter the fabric of the tangible world, transforming a city into a playground. In this sense, the hastily scrawled adventures of Le Pont du Nord are a grand metaphor for Rivette's twin loves, the cinema and the theater, which also reshape reality through the power of art. Rivette is the playful guiding intelligence responsible for the film's whimsical re-imagination of reality, and his actresses are not so much his game pieces, his pawns, as his willful collaborators in the game. Even the audience must also join in the fun. When Baptiste, after performing her morning martial arts ritual, solemnly bows to an unseen master, she does so towards the film's audience, acknowledging those watching her as she would if she were in the theater.

Ultimately, this formless, improvisatory film leads nowhere and everywhere. Its "plot," to the extent that it even has one, is never resolved except in the most unsatisfying manner, in a casual and unexplained betrayal that is quickly dropped. Rivette ends the film instead with a beautiful, mystifying scene between Max and Baptiste, as their fighting soon morphs into a martial arts lesson, with Max giving her pointers about technique. It's a strange scene, especially since there are occasional inserts that suggest the duo is under surveillance from a Big Brother-style video monitor. What it amounts to is the film's most obvious embrace of the concept of play as a guiding principle. When it's all over, when the plot has been wrapped up in perfunctory fashion and it's time to say "cut" for the final time, the characters cast aside their differences, making a few half-hearted attempts at staging a final battle before starting to play around, laughing and cooperating with one another instead of fighting. Maybe, then, the omnipresent surveillance is not a far-reaching sinister conspiracy but simply the camera eye of the filmmaker, documenting the last moments of his characters as, with the film over, they begin to blend back into reality as actors and actresses.

Rep Diary: Le Pont du Nord - Film Comment Max Nelson, March 19, 2013

“Don't try to understand,” Baptiste (Pascale Ogier) tells Marie (Bulle Ogier) 20 minutes into Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord. Baptiste, a wide-eyed, leather-jacketed brunette, is trying to convince the older woman, a blonde with a penchant for red dresses and a longing for an absent lover, that their three unplanned meetings on the streets of Paris were fated according to some invisible plan: “One time, that’s an accident. Two times, that’s chance. Three times, that’s destiny.”

Could she be referring to the intentions of Rivette himself, the New Wave filmmaker famous for, among other things, staging just this sort of chance encounter? His favorite obsessions are stamped all over Le Pont du Nord, which tags alongside the two women as they amble around Paris, follow a mysterious map to an uncertain goal, dream up imaginary conspiracies, and run afoul of real ones. There’s fate and chance, of course, but also role-playing and performance, cinema and surveillance, and the thin line between gameplaying and real life.

Early in Le Pont du Nord, Rivette films Baptiste circling the Place Denfert-Rochereau on her motorcycle and cuts excitedly between her face and that of the stone lion in the plaza’s center. When she and Marie later discover a mysterious spiral map divided into squares, are they taking a peek at the director’s editing plan for that earlier scene? While we’re at it, if Bulle Ogier submits too readily to the logic of that first encounter, could it be because she’s still under the spell that forced her to enact the same somnambulistic household drama day in and day out in Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating? That film, too, began with a chance run-in on the streets of Paris, and likewise felt expected, as if it had been modeled on a still earlier encounter—and so on ad infinitum.

Marie resists the suggestion that her life is pre-determined, and hops around spontaneously to prove it: “Look! I can take one step left, then two steps right.” She’s right, up to a point: Rivette’s films, and Le Pont du Nord in particular, give one the sense of having been dreamt up on the spot, by a delicate process of collaboration rather than by any single auteurist design. He adjusts the film’s rhythm to that of his actors as they digress, improvise, and goof off; the resulting experience is not an absence of structure, but a mass of competing structures, shifting, colliding, and canceling one another out. Digressions become key narrative strands, which spawn still more digressions, and so on.

The closest things to a narrative principle in Pont du Nord are the “trap squares” Marie marks on the map, with a confidence based equally on assumed knowledge, hearsay, and childhood memories: the inn, the pit, the bridge, the tomb, and, most fittingly, the maze. Each square recasts a real-life Parisian landmark as a potentially deadly challenge to be braved by both women with the solemn goofiness of children at play.

There has often been a tendency in French cinema to pursue some harmony between the fantastic, idealized world of the movies and the humdrum details of reality—from the New Wave back to the cinéma fantastique of Cocteau, Franju, and Feuillade. Less magicians than hypnotists, these filmmakers pile on narrative coincidences and convince us that they are the result of some unseen order; they portray the impossible not through technological wizardry, but by sheer force of will. In Franju’s Judex, a splash of moonlight was enough to transform a gang of catsuited robbers into disembodied shadows, just as in Pont du Nord a line of dialogue turns an unlucky Parisian passerby into an enemy spy, a cobweb into a curse of eternal sleep, and, in one of the film’s most exhilarating comic sequences, a theme-park ride into a fire-breathing dragon.

For Rivette, magic ought to be considered an extension of life, and city life in particular. When one especially cold night forces the agoraphobic Marie to seek shelter indoors, she makes a beeline for the cinema: there, she can watch the screen and ignore the walls altogether, as if the space of the movie was a natural continuation of the space of the world outside. Elsewhere, Rivette’s camera bounds along with his heroines through the mazelike city streets as if he were their third partner-in-intrigue; when they try to outpace each other or push one another aside, he darts between them like a boxer warming up for a fight. In a sense, he is: Rivette is constantly engaged in a dancelike tug-of-war for control of the shot with the film’s virtuosic cinematographer William Lubtchansky, whose loving, lingering attention to the glow of sunlight on faces, streets and strands of hair counterbalances the director’s love of acrobatic camera movements.

All this suggests a pathological fear of confinement—to a single, closed-in space, or (returning to Baptiste’s initial challenge) to a single choice, a single course of action. The camera has a tendency to set moments in stone, to state with certainty that this happened and nothing else. In Rivette, the impetus for so many events is left unexplained and the outcomes of so many others left unrevealed and the camera is never allowed to document any moment with certainty: there is always some ambiguity, some key piece of information unfilmed and therefore left open to chance, choice, or luck. We never glimpse what brought the two women together in the first place, nor where the pair’s mysterious map leads, nor who’s behind the shadowy syndicate tracking them. But if this willful absence of narrative context leaves us a bit lost, it is a pleasant sort of lostness—giving us the right to imagine possibilities rather than absorb information.

If all of Le Pont du Nord’s games, rules, and neuroses point back to a single theme, it is the fear of death, and the possibility (or impossibility) of cheating it. It’s difficult to say more than that, because for everything you could say about Rivette’s attitude towards mortality, the opposite would likely be just as true. Death is the chief subject of comedy, and at the same time the tragedy for which all comedy exists to compensate; it’s something at once unspeakably awful and unspeakably trivial, unimaginable even as it serves as the basis for all other imaginings. When death does enter into Le Pont du Nord, it comes off as casual, arbitrary, and totally unnecessary, and we don’t know whether to be comforted by its mildness or horrified by its lack of weight. “Death can also be a beginning. Begin a new game,” Marie tells Baptiste as they pore over the map’s central square, the tomb. She pauses. “But in any case, it’s a very frightening game.”

Lights up! A few final words on the [New York] film festival [in 1981 ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Soho News, October 20, 1981

jacques-rivette.com: "Le Pont du Nord" (Review) - DVD Beaver Fabrice Ziolkowski from Film Quarterly, Winter 1983-84

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

jacques-rivette.com: La rose dans le caniveau: Magic in ... - DVD Beaver photos from Le Pont du Nord, Andreas Volkert from The Order of the Exile, September/October 2007

Le Pont du Nord (1981, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, January 21, 2011

Le Pont du Nord (no 19) « Wonders in the Dark Sam Juliano, September 12, 2009

Le Pont du Nord (1981) « Cinema Talk September 9, 2008

Jacques Rivette's 1981 Le Pont du Nord Gets A U.S. ... - Village Voice Scott Foundas

The Village Voice: Michael Atkinson February 13, 2015, also at The LA Weekly here: Don't Watch That, Watch This: February 2015 | L.A. Weekly

Slant: Jake Cole

The L Magazine: Benjamin Mercer March 13, 2013

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Le pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981) Mubi film discussion forum

The Daily Notebook [Miriam Bale] on the effect of Last Year at Marienbad on Rivette, also seen here: The Game

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 4 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 30, 2006

Le Pont du Nord - The New Yorker Richard Brody

Letterboxd: Jesse Cataldo

User reviews from imdb Author: pstumpf from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: nrh from United States

Pont du Nord, Le (1981) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Film

Le Pont du nord: movie review | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Keith Uhlich

RIVETT'S 'LE PONT DU NORD' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 7, 1981, also seen here: RIVETT'S 'LE PONT DU NORD' - NYTimes.com - The New York Times

The New York Times: J. Hoberman March 06, 2015

MERRY-GO-ROUND

France (160 mi) 1981

So the story goes: Having completed only two (Duelle and Noroît) of the proposed four films in his quick-succession series Scenes from a Parallel Life, Jacques Rivette found himself hounded by investors and teetering on the edge of sanity. The result: Merry-Go-Round—a fascinatingly nonsensical ramble through the director's own inland empire, featuring a scruffy Joe Dallesandro, as American abroad Ben Phillipps, and a sleepy-eyed Maria Schneider, as mystery woman Léo Hoffmann, wandering the French countryside in search of the elusive Elisabeth (Danièle Gegauff), the former's girlfriend and the latter's sister. There are tenuous connections to the two completed Parallel Life films (as in the onscreen musical accompaniment performed by double bass player Barre Phillips and clarinetist John Surman) though Merry-Go-Round stands quite defiantly on its own. As suggested by its opening titles, which scan like jagged, blooming-white slashes from a highly disturbed psyche, this is a film explicitly about schisms and parallel realities. Oftentimes, Rivette will cut away from Ben and Léo's shared quest to enter a paranoid headspace where each character imagines the other as a murderous antagonist. Furthering the sense of disconnection is that Léo is played in these scenes by Out 1's Hermine Karagheuz, a result of an extended and tumultuous shoot that culminated in Schneider's unplanned exit. Dallesandro's drug addiction and Rivette's increasing weariness (he would suffer a nervous breakdown upon Merry-Go-Round's late-'70s completion) likewise inform the twists and turns of this fractured fairy tale; indeed, it's almost impossible to divorce the film, which sat unreleased in its home country until 1983, from the behind-the-scenes chaos out of which it grew. And yet there is beauty in Merry-Go-Round's madness, especially in its sand dune-set climax (one of Rivette's finest finales) where Ben and Léo quite literally find peace, respite, and tranquility in their own heads.

Merry-Go-Round (1981, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 26, 2011

When someone in the film world dies I don’t always run out and watch one of their movies – only when it’s someone meaningful to me, like Claude Chabrol, Dennis Hopper and Eric Rohmer. I once considered holding a monthly “death of cinema” screening, inviting people over to watch the work of whoever had died that month (there’s always someone), but as with all my plans to watch movies in groups, it fell through – nobody liked Rohmer’s final film, so Katy suggested I not do that anymore. But Maria Schneider warrants a memorial screening because she starred in one of the few Jacques Rivette films I haven’t yet seen, and I happen to have a nice subtitled copy of it handy.

Schneider was allegedly exploited in Last Tango in Paris, backed out of Caligula, fired from That Obscure Object of Desire, and not up to the task of leading a Rivette picture, which probably explains her replacement in certain sequences by a different actress. But she’s still revered for her part in The Passenger and for being so naked in the early 70′s. This was actually Schneider’s second movie titled Merry-Go-Round – the first was in 1973, a (West) German remake of La Ronde.

Schneider’s costar is Warhol actor Joe Dallesandro, the houseboy/lover in Blood For Dracula. Yes, this is weird casting for a Rivette movie. But production-wise we’re in familiar territory, with the Out 1/Duelle team of Schiffman, de Gregorio, Tchalgadjieff and Lubtchansky (X2). By the end we’ve got triple-cross conspiracies, psychics, secret weapons, assassinations and meetings in the park, so the Rivette touchstones are all there. It’s also surprisingly good-looking (if not up to Duelle/Noroit standards) for such a reputedly troubled film.

The story goes that Maria’s father is presumed dead and some four million dollars left in his care are unaccounted for. Maria’s elusive sister Liz (Danièle Gegauff, a producer on Out 1 and star of a single Chabrol film) summons Maria and Joe (Liz’s boyfriend) but fails to show up herself, so these two meet and go on an adventure together. Liz shows up briefly, along with a bunch more characters, each of whom want to help either Maria or her possibly-alive father, or more likely, want a share of the money. Most suspicious is Shirley (Sylvie Matton, whose husband directed her and Udo Kier in his adult horror Spermula), who is possibly either Liz’s best friend, the father’s ex-lover, Joe’s sister or none of the above,

The movie seems to fits neatly in the Rivette filmography, with on-camera musicians like predecessor Duelle, and a couple of characters chasing around the country trying to solve a possibly imagined mystery a la follow-up Pont du Nord. But there are some wrinkles. The grasp on the mystery is soon lost and Joe and Maria ramble, their relationship growing increasingly unpleasant, then the plot returns with a puzzling vengeance in the last half hour. Plus there are unexplained fantasy scenes, with Joe and a suspiciously Maria-like girl (played by Hermine Karagheuz, Marie in Out 1) chasing each other through forests and deserts, with appearances by snakes, rifles and a mounted armored knight.

Jean-Francois Stevenin (“Max” in Le Pont du Nord) is in an early scene with the two sisters, and seems to kidnap Liz (cue Walter: “the girl kidnapped herself”). Seemingly trustworthy lawyer-type Renée (Francoise Prevost of Vadim’s segment in Spirits of the Dead) and the mysterious Shirley put our duo up to collecting the key and combination/location of the father’s safe in order to retrieve the money (this is never done, as far as I could tell). Psychic Mr. Danvers (Maurice Garrel, Philippe Garrel’s father, played Emmanuelle Devos’s dying father in Kings and Queen, also amusingly in a movie called Noli Me Tangere) pretends to be the post-plastic-surgery father of the sisters. Liz is rescued (or “rescued”, depending if we believe Walter) by Maria with Renée’s associate Jerome (Michel Berto, Honeymoon in Out 1, also in a Robbe-Grillet film) armed only with a pipe. In the end it either all goes wrong, or all goes according to plan, as Liz is shot by a sniper and Maria unloads a pistol into poor Mr. Danvers.

Whenever the movie just doesn’t know where to go, it cuts to either the live musicians or the fantasy scenes. I wasn’t sure what to make of them, but they grew on me. I liked the bass-and-clarinet soundtrack, the colorful, mobile cinematography. The physical action, fist-fighting and such, were pretty inept, especially coming right after Duelle starring the sprightly Jean Babilée. Movie was made to fulfill contractual obligations after the collapse of the proposed four-part series that yielded Duelle and Noroit, but then was a huge failure itself, so I’ll bet the exec producers wished they’d just left Rivette alone.

Cinema-Talk:

It just has the right amount of disregard for plot that nothing seems remotely forced. This is almost unheard of in Rivette’s world. For as great as his other films are, they (almost) all seemed to be dragged down by unnecessary elements that were thrown in at the last minute. Here, everything is so completely natural (one cannot stress this enough!) that the 150-minute running time feels fairly short.

Rivette:

We started work with the two actors, and after 8 days, things were going very badly. It was like a machine that, once set in motion, must continue running despite changing regimes, forced or arbitrary accelerations, until the energy was all burned up, exhausted. That’s not at all how we filmed L’Amour fou, even if there too, the spectator feels he’s witnessing an encounter. … It’s an exaggeration to say that we placed Maria and Joe together in front of the camera and waited to see what would happen. We had a starting point of course, and then we made up the beginning of a story, with a father who had disappeared, but all along we told ourselves, this is just a pretext for Maria and Joe to get to know each other. I like that idea: two people get together because a third, who has arranged to meet them, does not show up. There have no choice but to get to know each other. It’s a situation I imagined in the context of the Resistance. Thinking about it again later, I think it was the subject of Robert Hossein’s Nuit des espions. And since I didn’t feel like making a film about the Resistance or the terrorist underground, it became that more banal situation, two people convoked by a third who is only the sister of the one and the girlfriend of the other. But since the relationship between Maria and Joe rapidly became hostile, we were forced to develop the story-line; from a mere pretext it took on a disproportionate importance. Maybe that gives the film a certain vagabond charm, I don’t know, but it really is a film with a first half-hour that’s quite coherent, and then it searches for itself three times, three times searches for a way out.”

E. Howard:

The bulk of the film consists of Ben and Léo wandering around the French countryside, ostensibly searching for clues to Elisabeth’s disappearance or the safe combination needed to get their hands on the missing money. What they actually do is mope around a lot, wander through abandoned houses, and joke and fight and patter, improvising goofy bits like the one where Ben mocks the conspiratorial obsession with the number three by counting off increasingly lengthy numbers consisting entirely of threes. In the film’s best scene, the duo takes a break for dinner at an abandoned house whose refrigerator is improbably well-stocked: they crack open cans of sardines and make salads and drink the juice from jars of cherries, sitting across from one another at a long table with candelabras in the center. Léo jokes that it’s a bourgeois meal, and the two of them have fun playing hide and seek from behind the candle flames, and soon the conversation turns into a lighthearted seduction where it’s obvious that the actors are having as much fun as the characters.

Rivette again:

I like a film to be an adventure: for those who make it, and for those who see it. The adventure of this filming, I must admit, was a bit fitful: the course which was established at the outset was corrected many times, in response to contrary winds, lulls, or gentle breezes. I only hope that the finished film, with all its detours, keeps something of the dangers of the crossing, of its uncertainties, of its unclouded moments-even if, at the end, one notices that perhaps the voyage has been circular: like a “merry-go-round.”

Tom von Logue Newth [Movies]

jacques-rivette.com: Excerpt from "Film: The Front Line ... - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from Film: The Front Line, 1983

Merry-Go-Round (1981) « Cinema Talk June 16, 2008

'The Jacques Rivette Collection': Three Proto-Lynchian Dream Teases ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, June 15, 2017

Slant: Budd Wilkins The Jacques Rivette Collection

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 6 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 15, 2006

DVDBeaver Blu-ray The Jacques Rivette Collection [Gary Tooze]

Merry-Go-Round (1981) Mubi

Maria Schneider obituary | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, February 3, 2011

'Merry-Go-Round' Next in Tchalgadjieff Series - Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas from The LA Times, October 19, 1989

LOVE ON THE GROUND (L’Amour Par Terre)

France (125 mi) 1984

Love on the Ground | Chicago Reader Pat Graham

Another of Jacques Rivette's airy formal riddles, involving role-playing artifice, Borges-like fantasy, and suggestions of the magical in a world that resists decoding (1984). Three actors (Geraldine Chaplin, Jane Birkin, Facundo Bo) gather to perform a playwright's work in an old, exotic mansion (the wallpaper interiors suggest Larry Poons run riot), but soon find life and theatricality revising each other strangely. The shaggy story line hangs on the iconographic contrasts of the female leads: Birkin sinuous and wandering, Chaplin slight, gamin, and precious (it's not the first time Rivette's located narrative in the physical and feminine). Unfortunately, not enough of it comes together, and Rivette's playful openness sometimes results only in playful tedium. In French with subtitles. 126 min.

L'Amour par terre Time Out London

Chaplin and Birkin are actresses taken up by an enigmatic playwright (Kalfon) and installed in his fabulous suburban mansion in order to perform a play (whose last act is still unknown) for one of his house parties. With the agency of a magician and clairvoyant, melodrama gradually seeps into both life and the rehearsals of fiction; the affaires promoted between playwright, magician and actresses lead to premonitions, hallucination, jealousy and dark secrets, all of them threaded into a weird finale of reconciliation. As with Céline and Julie, the concern here is less with the contrast between fiction and reality, more with the invention of a magical realm from which reality is rigorously excluded: enchantment is discovered not from fairytale, but within life itself. Rivette creates a unique world and language, answerable finally only to himself.

Precious, lifeless, and ultimately meaningless, meticulously constructed yet possessing all the interior profundity of a wiffle ball, Jacques Rivette's Love on the Ground is the kind of French-farcical roundelay that Gallic cinema is frequently accused of producing en masse. This one stands apart from the pack only in a few minor details, specifically Geraldine Chaplin—wonderful as ever as "apartment theater" performer Charlotte—and in a cutting pair of cameos by filmmaker/producer Barbet Schroeder and film critic Serge Daney, both of whom are tellingly shown walking out on Love on the Ground's indulgent play-within (a thinly-veiled confessional-cum-tantrum authored by Jean-Pierre Kalfon's Mabuse-lite mastermind Clément Roquemaure). Clément might be the older, sell-out version of the nerve-jangled playwright Sébastien (also played by Kalfon) from Rivette's L'Amour Fou; after seeing Charlotte and her colleague Emily (Jane Birkin, coming off, like always in Rivette, as a second-tier Juliet Berto) mangle one of his earlier plays, he recruits the duo as the lead actresses for his latest score-settling production, to be staged in an airy, labyrinthine mansion that, as suggested by several ghostly occurrences, possesses various hidden and haunted depths. Yet it is sadly all smoke and mirrors; despite the incredibly photogenic locale (Rivette's frequent cinematographer, William Lubtchansky, makes nary a false step) Love on the Ground plays as little more than a shallow imitation of its director's recurrent obsessions. A three-hour cut of the film exists (Jonathan Rosenbaum reports that it is Rivette's preferred version), though I suspect it would still be a failure, something along the lines of the over-praised La Belle Noiseuse and its underwhelming alternate footage re-edit, Divertimento. Any way you slice it, when the masks drop away in Love on the Ground, there is little behind them worthy of illumination.

Love on the Ground (1984, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, November 18, 2008

The missing link between Celine & Julie and Marie & Julien (with some Gang of Four thrown in).

Jane Birkin (under a decade before La Belle Noiseuse but looking two decades younger) and Geraldine Chaplin (eight years after Noroît) are working as actresses with Silvano (Facundo Bo) in a play performed in Silvano’s actual apartment. Play was ripped off from famous/rich playwright Clémont Roquemaure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon of L’Amour Fou and some Philippe Garrel movies). One day he’s in the audience, invites the three to perform a new play in his house, based on the sordid love triangle of himself, hanger-on magician Paul (André Dussollier, the realtor from Coeurs, but not recognizably), and the now-missing Beatrice.

House-fellow Virgil (László Szabó of Godard’s Passion and Made in USA) doesn’t have much to do until the end, when he shares wacky scenes with Birkin. He spends his free time translating Hamlet into Finnish (predicting Hamlet Goes Business points out Glenn Kenny).

There’s not actually a ton of love here, but there are lots of triangles… the film is rich with triangles. And magic and mystery – the girls see visions and premonitions in mirrors and through keyholes. And the mansion is visually insane (D. Cairns calls that first screenshot the “streaky bacon” room). And the premise gives us enough of Rivette’s performance/identity motif for at least two movies… I mean, the actor characters are portraying the other characters in the film… it starts to fold in upon itself and collapse like Bjork’s Bachelorette video. That the movie even has a conclusion (public performance of the play culminating in Beatrice’s mysterious reappearance) seems moot. This is three hours gladly spent in Rivette Country… not his best movie, but one of his most Rivettian. Like his Wild At Heart.

This was the full three-hour version, happily out on DVD. Jonathan Rosenbaum says: “Rivette’s 1983 two-hour Love on the Ground is a minor work, but at a 1989 Rivette retrospective in Rotterdam I saw a superior three-hour version–the first I knew of its existence. Rivette told me on that occasion that it was the only version he believed in; he implied that the release version merely honored his original contract.” JR later echoed that even the three-hour version is a minor work, and others would agree. Senses of Cinema calls it “a mere footnote”, Slant says “precious, lifeless, and ultimately meaningless.” Ouch. But J. Reichert at Reverse Shot, G. Kenny and D. Cairns all liked it, and I’m throwing in with them.

I haven’t found any online mention that the two lead actresses are named Emily and Charlotte – the names of the two famous Brontë sisters. Rivette’s next film would be an adaptation of Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

Love on the Ground/The Gang of Four - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, January 30, 2007

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Merlin Harries]

"L'Amour par terre" (1984) de Jacques Rivette Yoel Miranda from Ways of Seeing, February 2, 2009

Rivette, more Rivette Frank Pan from Doorknob in a Train, March 25, 2007

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 4 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 30, 2006

L'Amour Par Terre > Overview - AllMovie Eleanor Mannikka

Love on the Ground (1984) Mubi

User reviews from imdb Author: Delly (mortanse@yahoo.com) from Los Angeles

User reviews from imdb Author: Hyzenthlay_and_me from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United States

Jacques Rivette - L'Amour par Terre aka Love on the Ground (1984 ... film stills from Avax Home

L'Amour Par Terre (1984) - Film Review from Film4 Channel 4 Films

'AMOUR PAR TERRE' BY JACQUES TIVETTE Janet Maslin from The New York Times, October 7, 1984

HURLEVENT

aka: Wuthering Heights

France (130 mi) 1985

EyeForFilm.co.uk Caro Ness

The single most striking memory of this film is its brilliant transposition of the characters and plot from the wilds of Yorkshire to the wild, sun-drenched landscapes and isolated farms of the Cévennes in France - beautifully filmed by Renato Berta. His camera seems to capture each nuance of the countryside, each change in the weather and the landscape lends itself to the brutality of the theme; unrequited and unfulfilled love and its consequences.

What I also think is very successful is that Jacques Rivette and his co-writers did away with all but the first chapter of a 34-chapter novel, dismissing all the different narrators of Bronte’s novel and simplifying and streamlining the action at a stroke.

Rivette also introduced three dream sequences, the most interesting of which is the one at the centre of the movie, the three-year separation of Catherine (Fabienne Babe) and Roch (Lucas Belvaux) which seems to blur the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious and offers a window into Catherine’s psyche.

The two leads, Fabienne Babe and Lucas Belvaux are both young and untried and this adds a sense of realism to their impossible extended childhood attachment but it is Sandra Montaigu’s performance as Hélène that is most compelling. Rivette made her younger and sexier, animated and empathetic all of which gives a force and reality and force to Catherine’s illness, whilst subtly counter-pointing and balancing the /Isabelle (Alice xe Poncheville)/Roc triangle with Hélène‘s own attraction to Guillaume, Catherine’s elder brother.

I did find the film self-indulgent at times and whilst the music provided by the Bulgarian Woman’s Choir adds to the bleakness and wildness of the piece, it is on occasion too overly obtrusive and therefore distracting. I also felt that not enough was done to explain Roc’s boorishness when he grew up in the same household as Cathy and her brother.

This is certainly the most interesting adaptation of Bronte’s novel I have seen.

Ostensibly an adaptation of the oft-filmed Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent (or Howling Wind, per the translation) feels more like a schematic indication of Emily Brontë's famed novel, though that should not be taken as a criticism. This is one of Rivette's most stripped down works; emotion is secondary to the film's tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more than just Céline and Julie Go Boating's haunted house melodrama played straight. Rivette's characters are often held captive by the stage (whether real or imagined), so when Catherine (Fabienne Babe) and her farmhand lover Roch (Lucas Belvaux) run through the fields adjacent to an imposing stone homestead (one of the film's two primary settings), there is a profound sense of meta liberation, of escape beyond the boundaries of narrative (the wind-strewn leaves of grass, counterpointed by the incantatory vocalizations of the Bulgarian choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, might very well be located in the empty margins of the Book of Life). Certain of Rivette's weaker films assume a window-dressed Christian pose (anxiety of influence, I think, from Hitchcock and Rossellini, among others), but here the spiritual inquiry is entirely genuine. The three dream sequences that near-invisibly signal Hurlevent's beginning, middle, and end are as much a holy trinity as they are a thematic backbone; the characters wake from these becalmed and psychologically penetrating visions into a nightmarish reality of Escher-like doorways and windows that lead them over a prolonged and circuitous path to destruction. Rivette never concretely illustrates the divide between mind and matter (the blink-of-an-eye passage of three years feels particularly apocalyptic in this context) and that allows him to have it both ways when, in Hurlevent's finale, the spirit world quite literally breaches the real world, an action that manages to have repercussions at once miraculous, damning, and devastating.

Hurlevent is Jacques Rivette's stark, emotionally naked adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The story is of course familiar, and Rivette treats it, as a result, with an air of inevitability: these things are fated to happen, they are destiny, because they have been written. The film is split neatly in two, with an ellipsis of three years in between. In the first half of the film, brother and sister Guillaume (Olivier Cruveiller) and Catherine (Fabienne Babe) are living together on a crumbling estate after their father's death, along with the "foundling" Roch (Lucas Belvaux) who their father adopted. With the old man gone, Guillaume treats Roch like a hired hand or worse, a dog, beating and berating him at every chance he gets, locking him in his room or even in the kennels. Guillaume is a jealous, nasty brute, resentful of the love Roch earned from their father, and even more resentful of the strong bond of affection and love that exists between Roch and Catherine, who are so close, so intimate, that their love for each other seems to be a weird blend of sexual desire and sibling friendship. This bond, however, cannot survive Guillaume's insistent attempts to shatter it. Hemmed in on every side, constricted by the spiteful master of the house, unable to break free, Catherine finally flings herself at their wealthy neighbor Olivier (Olivier Torres), seeing him as her only way out. Roch, deeply wounded, disappears.

At this point, the film picks up three years later, with Catherine and Olivier married, living in Olivier's home along with his sister Isabelle (Alice de Poncheville). The trio have formed a new détente similar to the quasi-incestuous bond between Catherine, Guillaume and Roch. Isabelle and Olivier are as close, as intimately connected and harmonious, as Catherine and Roch, and their feelings for each other sometimes seem to be as far from chaste sibling bonds as Guillaume's jealous desire for his sister. Into the midst of this complicated tangle of feelings, Roch finally returns from his long absence, having shed his savage ways and dirty appearance, made his fortune somewhere and cleaned himself up. He proceeds to manipulate everyone around him, exacting his revenge for the way he was abused and rejected when he was younger. Rivette lets it all play out in his characteristic slow, patient long takes, his camera crawling and stalking through each scene as the characters stalk and circle one another. There is no escape for these characters, constrained by the written word to their preordained ugly ends, and yet Rivette is continually hinting at the ways out: the beauty of the countryside with its rolling hills, the way the contact between various characters keeps shifting fluidly from sensuous embraces to violent constriction, and most importantly the escape offered by dreams and fantasies.

Indeed, dreams recur at three key points in this otherwise solidly realist film, with little indication that they even are dreams until they're over. The dreams don't so much break with the reality of the film as offer alternate visions of its final outcome, as envisioned by each of the three central characters. The film opens with Guillaume's horrified dream in which he witnesses Catherine and Roch kissing passionately in the rocky hills surrounding their estate. He makes a move to attack them, but is suddenly pulled up short by a vision of his father, a reminder of what the dead head of the household would have wanted to happen. This dream, which offers a hopeful resolution to Catherine and Roch's love story, is answered by Catherine's much more regretful dream, positioned in the center of the film right at the pivot point of the story: Roch comes to her bedroom, leads her away, then collapses dead with his arms slit up the middle, his bloody handprints left behind on her white nightgown. In the film's final dream, and its final image, Roch is summoned by his lost Catherine from the window of his room, where her arm beckons to him from outside; he reaches for her but she disappears, leaving his hand clutching at air out the window. These dreams flow from out of the fabric of the film's reality, reflecting the acts of imagination in which life is subtly altered and reconfigured into more romantic, sensuous possibilities, even if it's just the longing for a ghost that Roch experiences in the finale.

Rivette also hints at other possibilities, at least in the first half of the film, in the gorgeous images of the rural countryside surrounding Guillaume and Olivier's estates. Catherine and Roch find escape, even if only briefly, in a free-spirited run through the rolling hills, with a marbled sky of dark clouds above them, shot through with patches of sunshine. The hills, curving upwards, seem to suggest the transcendence of the two would-be lovers over their mundane melodramatic story, the possibility that they might keep running up and up, joyfully escaping together into the beautiful open fields. Rivette accompanies these scenes of potentiality with the film's only non-diegetic sound, a selection of stunning pieces by the Bulgarian women's choir compilation Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, music of such unearthly beauty that it is nearly alien, music that seems to emanate from (and yearn for) a world far beyond the corporeal plane. It is thus perfectly appropriate music for this story of perennially unfulfilled desires, and its startling ethereal quality is enhanced by the film's generally sparse soundtrack. Other than a scene in which Catherine plays records of classical music for a party, the only other sounds in the film are utterly mundane and diegetic: the distant howl of the wind, the clatter of farm equipment, the haunting calls of animals in the night. There's an eerie simplicity to the soundtrack, an emptiness, and the intrusion of these Bulgarian melodies, with their dense frameworks of interlocking voices and dissonant overtones, is thus doubly jarring and disorienting.

Despite this potent music, however, Catherine and Roch's dreams of escape must remain only dreams, and so much of the film is concerned with their dreary hopelessness that it begins to seem rather dreary itself. The second half of the film plays out like the inset melodramatic play-within-the-film sequences of Celine and Julie Go Boating, with the stiff, dissatisfied Catherine, Olivier, Isabelle and Roch wandering around Olivier's mansion. That's fitting: they're as hopelessly condemned to their fates as the characters in the earlier film, reliving a circular tragedy over and over again. And yet, without Rivette's characteristic wit and vivacity, Hurlevent begins to seem lifeless, its characters fenced in without the escape offered by Celine and Julie's playful interventions. This film is more of a kin to Rivette's flawed Merry-Go-Round, in which the alternate realities of fantasy and dream also provide the only escape for the characters from their damaging, manipulative relationships with one another. Hurlevent strips that film down even further, replacing its freewheeling improvisation and humor with a rigid, methodical structure to which the characters are pinned. This is, despite moments of beauty and grace, one of Rivette's bleakest films, an interesting, often enthralling, but ultimately dour formalist experiment.

Hurlevent: Jacques Rivette's Adaptation of Wuthering Heights ... Valérie Hazette from Senses of Cinema, December 2, 2003

Jacques Rivette's 'Hurlevent' • Senses of Cinema Mary M. Wiles, July 10, 2016

Rivette, more Rivette Frank Pan from Doorknob in a Train, March 25, 2007

Brussels Brontë Blog: Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent at the Cinematek ... January 27, 2010

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 4 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 30, 2006

User reviews from imdb Author: OldAle1 from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: Bernd Bösel (bernd.boesel@gmx.net) from Berlin

THE GANG OF FOUR (La bande des quatre)

France (160 mi) 1989

A cinema that opposes its theatricality to that of theater, its reality to that of the world, which has become unreal.

—Gilles Deleuze, Cahiers du cinema, 1989

The Gang of Four | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Bulle Ogier runs an all-female acting school, many of whose students (newcomers Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bernadette Giraud, and Ines de Medeiros) share a suburban house and get involved with the same creepy guy (Benoit Regent), who's either a cop or a criminal. In short, it's conspiracy time once again in Jacques Rivette's highly charged and scary world, where a fanatical devotion to theater and paranoia are often viewed as the only viable alternatives in a tightly closeted universe. This 1988 feature was the best Rivette to reach the U.S. in at least a decade, full of the sexual tensions and female cameraderie found in his Celine and Julie Go Boating (though without much of the comedy), as well as the kind of haunting and chilling aftereffects that are common to his work. More classical and less experimental than his previous features, it's almost a summary and compilation of his major themes and preoccupations—an ideal introduction to his work. In French with subtitles. 160 min.

Perhaps the least known of the French New Wave directors, Jacques Rivette is nevertheless my favorite of the group. And now, after years of obscurity, Image Entertainment has unearthed Gang of Four (1988), which never received a U.S. theatrical release, for a new DVD. This masterpiece is one of Rivette's best, combining his passions for theater and for Fritz Lang-type suspense. In the film, four acting students (Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bernadette Giraud, and Ines de Medeiros) study with the high-class acting coach Bulle Ogier (from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) and live together in a big Paris house. One by one, a mysterious man (Benoit Regent) approaches the girls, asking questions and telling tales about their former housemate -- implying that she may have kept some sinister secrets. Something hidden in the house attests to this. At the same time, the girls struggle in their tough acting class, trying to please the hard-as-nails teacher. Rivette sets up long, semi-improvised scenes, establishing real personalities for the girls and not just writing them off as Hollywood types. Between the theater and crime story scenes, Rivette inserts shots of traveling subway cars with hazy images reflected in the windows, physically separating the two stories, but at the same time, blurring them together. As ever, Rivette here sticks to his roots: a love of theater and literature, lengthy semi-improvised shots adding up to long running times, and a graceful poetry that eludes nearly every other filmmaker today.

Jacques Rivette's 1988 film Gang of Four is a kind of summation of the elusive auteur's style and thematic concerns, a skillful variation on the various threads that wove through his work of the preceding three decades. It encompasses his passion for the theater, his taste for esoteric conspiracies with many dangling loose ends, his way of using acting and dramatization to peel away the layers of a character over time, his playful improvisatory spirit and fondness for whimsical ghost stories. The film is a deliberately paced — but never plodding — character study of a group of young girls studying acting under the watchful eye of the demanding instructor Constance (Bulle Ogier). The main action especially centers around one particular quartet of girls living in the same house: Anna (Fejria Deliba), Claude (Laurence Côte), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud) and Lucia (Ines d'Almeida). When the film opens, Lucia is just moving in, replacing Cécile (Nathalie Richard), who is moving out but not leaving the acting class.

With his keen eye and slow, sweeping camera moves, Rivette methodically explores the characters of these disparate young women, weaving serpentine plots around them and suggesting vapor-like hints of back stories. Anna, it turns out, is actually named Laura; she's taken the name of the vanished sister who she has been searching for. The bisexual, androgynous Claude is tormented by unrequited love and is desperate for meaningful connections. The tiny, porcelain-pretty Lucia is exiled from her home in Portugal, where she disgraced her family by refusing an arranged marriage and drinking down a few sips of poison in a suicide attempt; she keeps the unused portion of the bottle in her room as a "souvenir." These hints of the past remain largely unresolved, peripheral elements in a film dense with detail and nuance. The girls are soon drawn in by a mysterious plot of some kind involving their friend Cécile's boyfriend Antoine, who's involved in some shady and possibly criminal business. The girls can see that Cécile is increasingly distracted and upset, her acting affected by the troubles of her outside life, and their suspicions are heightened when a cagey guy (Benoît Régent), possibly a cop, starts snooping around and asking questions about their friend. Not that he's any help, really: he keeps changing his name, before finally settling on Thomas, and tells each of them in turn a different outrageous story about what underworld activities Cécile and Antoine are involved in (fake IDs, gun smuggling, art thievery).

Rivette, of course, is sympathetic to the chameleonic Thomas, even though he's kind of a manipulative jerk. Rivette also cares little for the concrete details of such conspiracies; all that matters to him is the suggestion of something there, floating like smoke on the fringes of the narrative, a catalyst for everything that follows. As the girls dance around this mystery, trying to help their friend, art and life blend into one another. The play they're rehearsing — Marivaux's La double inconstance — comments obliquely on the lives of the girls, with its themes of double identities, unconsummated desires and imprisoned lovers.

Thus, when Constance leads her class through rehearsals, she is preparing them not just for the play but for life — towards the end of the film, she abruptly departs, leaving them on their own, as though she had been leading them towards this self-sufficiency all along. Rivette's emphasis on acting similarly blurs the line between what's artifice and what's "reality." He views acting, not as pretend or lies — as the bitter Claude does — but as a way of getting at deeper truths. The rehearsals cycle around endlessly, with Constance instructing her students in seemingly contradictory ways: pay attention to the written lines, put more emotion into it, tone it down, make the ideas obvious even to the back rows, don't be so obvious. Her mode of instruction frustrates the girls, who are paying a lot of money to be enrolled in the best acting class in Paris, but they seem to understand that she is pushing them towards something concrete, trying to get out of them performances that feel real.

On a metafictional level, Rivette is doing the same thing, and he lets his film's narrative ramble at a leisurely pace in order to give the actors room to breathe, time to fill in the nuances of their characters. Their personalities come out equally whether they're on stage for Constance or simply on screen for Rivette, and one senses multiple levels of acting filtering through each of them: the film actress playing another actress who's playing a part in a theater. And at the same time, these levels are also one, with no distinction made between the woman on stage, the woman in Rivette's film, and the woman who, presumably, exists off the set when the filming stops. Rivette is, as always, interested in these intersections of identity, and Gang of Four, as with all his films, gives the impression of watching something slowly take shape over the course of nearly three hours. Rivette's films are as much about the process of making themselves as they are about anything; Gang of Four is equally about producing a play, creating a film, and solving a mystery, not necessarily in that order. Indeed, Rivette purposefully leaves most of the film's mysteries dangling, unsolved, giving the final word instead to the play within the film: when the play ends, so does the film.

All of this metafictional gamesmanship is accomplished with Rivette's usual playful brio and understated humor. The acting class is always lively, and Rivette's camera wanders freely around the room, sometimes framing those on stage in strikingly dramatic compositions, other times darting off into the theater seats, where the girls who are watching whisper and joke. Rivette's compositions shift fluidly between very rigid formalist constructions and looser, more relaxed arrangements. Often, there's tension within the frame between the stagey blocking of the actors and the casual scattering of background details. There's even a running gag with one punky, disinterested student who's always either stumbling in late or sneaking out early in the background of the shot.

As much as Rivette worships the theater and the art of acting, he's not afraid to be irreverent and silly as well. One of the film's best scenes is a hilarious sequence in which Anna, Claude and Joyce act out a trial for the benefit of Lucia, each of them taking on multiple parts and signifying their role reversals by placing one of several multi-colored coffee mugs on top of their heads like hats. It's a great scene that encapsulates one of Rivette's most endearing qualities, his willingness to let his actresses have fun and cut loose; there's a semi-improvisational quality to this scene, and especially to the halting, off-key song they sing at the end of it, that makes it feel a break in the film's narrative. And yet this scene's broad satire of the justice system also ties in with the story of Cécile and Antoine, as well as with the Marivaux play the girls are rehearsing with Constance.

Gang of Four is a typically enthralling and enchanting film from Rivette, a complex game of a film in which the rules are obscure and the pieces move unpredictably. More than anything else, however, it's a showcase for the charming young actresses Rivette has cast here. Their smart, witty performances are never less than fun to watch, and as the film progresses, each of these girls invests her character with greater and greater depths. This is a pure celebration of acting as the finest art: the art of finding (and embracing) the mystery and drama in life.

Douglas Morrey, “Some Thoughts on Acting in La Bande des Quatre“ Douglas Morrey from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Cinematic Obsessions [THE GANG OF FOUR and SANTA SANGRE ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 22, 1990

Love on the Ground/The Gang of Four - Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, January 30, 2007

Brandon's movie memory » Gang of Four (1988, Jacques Rivette) August 27, 2007

The Village Voice: Elliott Stein December 26, 1989 (pdf)

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 6 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 15, 2006

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Weeks 7 & 8 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 21, 2006

EyeForFilm.co.uk Gary Duncan

User reviews from imdb Author: pyamada from Chicago

User reviews from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt

Jacques Rivette's "La Bande des quatre" (1988) Yoel Miranda photo-essay from Ways of Seeing, January 31, 2010

d+kaz . Image series: the the “Alice in Wonderland” of Jacques ... images from Daniel Kasman, June 15, 2007

Dreams, Rivette, and Inês de Medeiros Frank Pan from Doorknob on a Train, April 2, 2007

The Gang of Four > Overview - AllMovie Hal Erickson

Gang of Four (1988) Mubi

Review/Film; Women Who Share A House And Secrets Caryn James from The New York Times, December 22, 1989

LA BELLE NOISEUSE

France (240 mi) 1991

La Belle Noiseuse Geoff Andrew

Confronting the issue of creativity with honesty and insight, Rivette's loose adaptation of Balzac's short story 'The Unknown Masterpiece' is for the most part hypnotically fascinating. Hidden away with wife Liz (Birkin) in their rambling Languedoc mansion, Edouard Frenhofer (Piccoli) has painted next to nothing for years; but when a friend introduces painter Nicolas (Bursztein) and his lover Marianne (Béart), Frenhofer is so taken with the girl that he asks her to pose for a masterpiece he abandoned a decade earlier. So begins a battle of wills waged between the artist, his recalcitrant model, her increasingly jealous lover, a wife wary of his motives, and his own self-doubt. Firmly anchored by a strong cast, the relationships are explored in exhaustive detail, so that the tensions arising, as the painter's cauterising work proceeds, are convincing throughout. (Rather less plausible is the suggestion that Frenhofer is a genius, since the canvases we see - painted by the off-screen hand of Bernard Dufour - are hardly wonderful). As impeccably shot as its subject deserves, the film is more accessible than most of Rivette's work, with characteristically playful passing nods to the relationship between life and performance.

Jacques Rivette's much praised Cannes Grand Prize winner vacillates between genuine insight and didactic mystique-of-the-artist bullshit. It is most fascinating in its setups and silences; the delayed introduction of the painter Frenhoffer (Michel Piccoli) owes a clear debt to Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (a favorite, much deservingly so, of the Cahiers crowd) and the artist's sittings, especially the first, with the physically striking Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) are masterful disquisitions on the tempestuous relationship between creator and subject. Unwilling to settle for anything other than a masterpiece, Frenhoffer's every brushstroke cuts like a knife; the creation of the titular portrait is nothing less than a slow-burning and violent act of transference, the extraction of a soul to canvas—and one, fittingly, to which we never bear final witness. But it is all-too-clear, particularly in several on-the-nose expository moments, that La Belle Noiseuse began life as a joke, one extending from a character's monologue in Rivette's prior film Gang of Four. Marianne's relationship with her boyfriend Nicolas (David Bursztein) is given an illusory weight in the film's first scene where they act out a mock-angry roundelay for the benefit of two American tourists (Daphne Goodfellow and Susan Robertson). Things are not always what they seem, Rivette seems to say. We are all performers, and art—that cruel mistress—sets us achingly, perhaps unwillingly free. But his observations never resonate, not even in Frenhoffer's relationship with his increasingly jealous wife—and former model—Liz (Jane Birkin), who more often than not vocalizes the film's themes, though her exasperated explanations would be better left unsaid so that they might emerge from the fabric of what Rivette clearly intends, per his use of excerpts from Igor Stravinsky's ballets Agon and Petrushka, to be a dance. As is, the revelations of La Belle Noiseuse are decidedly obvious and small, and rendered nearly insignificant by the ill-fitting actions of the peripheral characters whose petty problems (arising from the actors' own improvisations) offer a less-than-satisfying counterpoint to Frenhoffer's intense and invasive creative process.

Movies about artists, whether fictional or biographical, are rarely about art. More often, they're about the personal effluvia generated by the artist lifestyle—the parties, the meltdowns, the stormy relationships, the inevitable nightmare descent into booze and pills, and so on. Usually, the only thing known about the actual art is that it tortures its creator. Jacques Rivette's 1991 masterpiece La Belle Noiseuse reverses the formula: In stretching a painter's three-day sessions with a recalcitrant model into nearly four hours of screen time, the film focuses intently on the creative process, and the drama spins off in kind. Rarely has a film dealt so intimately with the complex relationship between artist and subject, which here gets knotted up in mutual desire and vulnerability, intense jealousy, and a degree of exploitation.

Inspired by Honoré de Balzac's short story "The Unknown Masterpiece," La Belle Noiseuse ("the beautiful annoyance") centers on esteemed painter Michel Piccoli, who resides in semi-retirement at his provincial villa, having not picked up a brush in about a decade. After a shrewd art dealer (Gilles Arbona) introduces Piccoli to admirer David Bursztein and his stunning girlfriend Emmanuelle Béart, Arbona and Bursztein convince Piccoli to continue an unfinished portrait, with Béart replacing Piccoli's wife (Jane Birkin) as the nude model. Béart reluctantly agrees to take part, but she grossly underestimates the physical and psychological toll that will be exacted on her.

"You're not free, and neither am I," Piccoli tells Béart when she complains about holding a particularly torturous pose; his line shows the rigorous demands that great or even mediocre art can impose on its participants. And on the audience, for that matter: Few directors treat the passing of time as leisurely as Rivette, whose Out 1 clocks in at 12 hours, but the seemingly mundane work of Piccoli scratching out drawing after drawing has a mesmerizing effect. The end result of Piccoli and Béart's labor may ultimately elicit shrugs—the title of Balzac's story could refer to a hidden gem, or to a work that some might not know as a masterpiece—but getting there takes extraordinary effort. A cynic might liken the experience to watching paint dry, but the insistent scrape of Piccoli's ink pen and the whoosh of his brushes (both wielded by real figurative artist Bernard Dufour) are alive with creative tension and conflict. In La Belle Noiseuse, the painting says more about the artist's life than the artist's life could ever say about a painting.

Raging Bull [Vanes Naldi]

La belle noiseuse is a late masterpiece from Jacques Rivette, a typically haunting and enigmatic study of the mystery inherent in artistic creation, and the ways in which art and life inform and bleed into one another. The film centers around the aging and increasingly unproductive painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), who is rejuvenated by the appearance at his country estate of a young woman named Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), who inspires him to begin painting again. The film is sensuous and quiet, slowly exploring the developing relationship between the painter and his muse through lengthy, nearly silent scenes in which Frenhofer poses the nude Marianne into stiff, contorted poses, molding her body, frantically trying to capture her essence. Throughout these scenes, the only sound is often the scratch and scrape of Frenhofer's brushes and pens on paper and canvas, and Rivette frequently points his camera for long stretches of time at the painter's work area, tracing the progress of his art from a blank page to a developed sketch. The film's rhythms are slow and measured, appropriate for a document of the artistic process, the slow carving out of a creative statement from paints and inks on a plain white expanse. Forms and ideas take shape slowly, and the longer Frenhofer paints, both artist and model become more confident, more emotionally invested in the work — Frenhofer finds his passion for painting reawakening, even taking over his life, while Marianne develops from an introspective, nervous model to a passionate, deeply engaged collaborator, sharing in the demands and rigors of Frenhofer's art.

Rivette's deliberate pacing and careful eye lend themselves well to this exploration of creation. His camera circles the protagonists, lingering on Béart's nude form as though it was a statue, staring at Frenhofer's canvases and sketchbooks as the painter's ideas take shape, all of it accompanied by the distinctive scritch-scritch-scritch sounds that, by the end of the film, are subconsciously associated with artistic creation. Although the center of the film, and its heart, is dominated by the lengthy, intense scenes between Frenhofer and Marianne, ancillary characters linger around the edges, affected in various way by the all-encompassing passion of this artistic collaboration. Frenhofer's wife Liz (Jane Birkin) is increasingly driven away, shut out, conscious that Marianne is replacing her as her husband's muse: at the height of his passion for his art, Frenhofer even pulls out a long-abandoned painting of Liz and begins reimagining it, painting over it with images of Marianne, striving to create his masterpiece. Meanwhile, Marianne's immersion in Frenhofer's art causes her to neglect her own lover, Nicolas (David Bursztein), who is left to chat with the disconsolate Liz and his friend Magali (Marie Belluc). Rivette's film not only traces the process of creation and limns its mystery and magic, but examines the effects of such intense creativity on those who surround the artist and inspire his work.

jacques-rivette.com: Around Painting and the "End of ... - DVD Beaver Thomas Elsaesser from Sight and Sound, April 1992

The Choice Between Art and Life (LA BELLE NOISEUSE) | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 31, 1992

Raging Bull [Vanes Naldi] also from Metal Asylum, June 27, 2001: La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) - Jacques Rivette ...

Art Variables and Life Variables in La Belle noiseuse • Senses of ... Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2007

La belle noiseuse • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, May 12, 2007

The Humanists: Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse (1991 ... Colin Marshall from 3 Quarks Daily, April 12, 2010

Michel Piccoli: 10 essential films | BFI Craig Williams from Sight and Sound, December 23, 2015

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Strictly Film School Acquarello

mardecortesbaja.com :: LA BELLE, LA PERFECTLY SWELL NOISEUSE — 1 Part 1, October 24, 2009

mardecortesbaja.com :: LA BELLE, LA PERFECTLY SWELL NOISEUSE — 2 Part 2, November 3, 2009

La Belle Noiseuse (no 11) « Wonders in the Dark Sam Juliano, November 25, 2009

La Belle Noiseuse (1991, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 22, 2008

La Belle noiseuse (1991) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Talk [Scott Lecter]

DVD Verdict Review - La Belle Noiseuse Dan Mancini

La Belle Noiseuse | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

La Belle Noiseuse - DVD review (1 of 2) - DVD Town Hock Guan The from DVD Town

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Nikos Pappas]

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]

A Riveting Filmmaker Alan Pavelin from Talking Pictures UK

clydefro » La Belle Noiseuse June 18, 2006

LA BELLE NOISEUSE (Jacques Rivette, 1991) | AvaxHome

Review for La belle noiseuse (1991) Pedro Sena

La Belle Noiseuse « Precious Bodily Fluids ZC

MichaelVox

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna

Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse" Mubi

La Belle noiseuse (1991) Jacques Rivette - CineClassik

La Belle noiseuse (Rivette) Craig Keller from Cinemasparagus, April 24, 2006

La Belle Noiseuse > Overview - AllMovie Mark Deming

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 3 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 23, 2006

jacques-rivette.com: Order of the Exile photo of a 2007 screening of the film

www.gutenberg.org/files/1553/1553.txt Honoré de Balzac’s 1837 short story “The Hidden Masterpiece,” transcribed by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, is available in its entirety online here

Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece Mark Harris offers a short review of the story

Balzac: about this text Picasso versions of the Unknown Masterpiece

La Belle Noiseuse | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman

Austin Chronicle [Kathleen Maher]

La Belle Noiseuse: Watching the Hand of the Artist ... Jason McBride from The Seattle Courant

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] January 24, 1992

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] April 12, 2009 (Great Movies)

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Movies With Their Own Language Vincent Canby from The New York Times, May 26, 1991

Review/Film Festival; An Artist and His Muse In Jacques Rivette Work Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 2, 1991

One Artist Looks at Another in 'La Belle Noiseuse' Alan Riding from The New York Times, October 13, 1991

Looking for More Than the Next Role Alan Riding interviews Emmanuel Béart from The New York Times, May 16, 2004

La Belle Noiseuse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DIVERTIMENTO

France (130 mi) 1992

La Belle Noiseuse – Divertimento Time Out

Rivette here remodels La Belle Noiseuse into another film entirely, using alternative takes, recutting to a much brisker rhythm, and book-ending it with a discreetly but crucially different beginning and ending. The lengthy close-ups of painter Bernard Dufour's hand in action have gone; so have most of the agonising sittings in which Piccoli tries to wring out of Béart the realisation of his ideal masterpiece. This makes for a less tangible sense of painting's material nature, and makes more of a mystery out of the artist-model relationship; the emphasis shifts radically on to Piccoli's wife (Birkin), who now sees the sittings from outside, much as we do. It's a lighter film, but by no means slighter, more like the difference between a Henry James short story and an extended performance piece.

Review/Film; Artist's Woes From a New Perspecitve Vincent Canby from The New York Times, September 17, 1993

"Divertimento," opening today at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, is a straight-faced bit of tomfoolery sent out under the name of Jacques Rivette. He is the French director of "La Belle Noiseuse," the hypnotically beautiful, numbing four-hour film, released here in 1991, about the angst of a great, if severely blocked, painter.

In fact, "Divertimento" is "La Belle Noiseuse," but with its running time cut in half. According to press material handed to critics at the "Divertimento" screening, Mr. Rivette, obligated to deliver a two-hour television version of the film, "turned this chore into a challenge." That is, he recut the film, eliminating much of the original material and putting in other material not used in the first version. The idea was to see the original story from an entirely new perspective.

In view of the huge amount of cutting he had to do, it would seem as if the new material had been added with a salt shaker. It can't have been a lot. It is certainly not significant.

The original film featured long, quite wonderful sequences in which the audience watched the artist's hand at work. The effect was to implicate the audience in the act of creation. Now, by eliminating most of those sequences, Mr. Rivette, we are told, has created an entirely new film that "is much more concerned with the emotional toll created by the artist's immersion in his work and the toll it takes on himself, his wife and his model."

Unfortunately, the artist's personal problems are the creakiest part of "La Belle Noiseuse." "Divertimento" is now a sort of classy soap opera, with more soap than opera. Michel Piccoli is still very fine as the aging painter and Emmanuelle Beart a vision as his model.

The re-editing has not helped Jane Birkin's performance as the artist's aging waif of a wife. The eliminated material gave the audience some sense of what she was up against: living with a self-centered artist who put his art ahead of everything. In this new cut, she appears to be the kind of drudge who asks to be stepped on so she can be noble by not complaining. She would drive Lassie to drink.

The academically romantic nonsense preached by "La Belle Noiseuse" (something to the effect that the creation of art requires pain and sacrifice) is balanced by the on-screen evidence of another requirement: hard work over long hours, plus a certain amount of thought. All that is now gone in "Divertimento."

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 6 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 15, 2006

Looking for More Than the Next Role Alan Riding interviews Emmanuel Béart from The New York Times, May 16, 2004

JOAN THE MAID (Jeanne la Pucelle Parts 1 and 2)

aka: Joan the Maid Part 1: The Battles (Les Batailles) (160 mi)

aka: Joan the Maid Part 2: The Prisons (Les prisons) (176 mi)

France (241 mi) 1993 – 1997

Jeanne la Pucelle Time Out London

This two-part version of the great story has the space to take matters beyond the theological debate, and the agnostic, ascetic sensibility and to explore the socio-political currents which shaped an enduring popular legend. Jacques Rivette's sedulous, distanced approach is a matter of cumulative impact. The period reconstruction is undemonstrative, the screenplay (by Christine Laurent and Pascal Bonitzer) allows events to gain weight over time, and judicious bursts of Jordi Savall's soundtrack convey moments of release. All this demands a film-maker of immense confidence, but it might be arid were it not for the physical presence and spiritual ambiguity of Bonnaire's performance. Unlike Dreyer's Falconetti, she's no fiery angel, but a strong, courageous, essentially human individual. Rivette refuses to underline the truth or otherwise of her holy visions; instead, he's more interested in showing the power of an idea in moulding events, and the disposability of that idea when its usefulness in Realpolitik is at an end. He's with his heroine in showing the shock created by her explosion of gender demarcation, and in detailing the institutionalised repression of thought by a monolithic church. All this may sound the dourest of history lessons, but Rivette's mastery of the long form makes for a compelling experience; involving, thought-provoking and, as Jeanne mounts the stake, profoundly moving.

jonathanrosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Joan the Maid: The Battles ... January 26, 1996

Paradoxically yet appropriately, Jacques Rivette’s only “superproduction” to date, his two-part, no-nonsense 1993 opus about Joan of Arc, is his first realistic film since L’amour fou (1968)–and perhaps the only movie that offers a plausible portrait of what the 15th-century teenager who led the French into battle was actually like. Apart from the stylized effect of having various participants in the action narrate the plot while facing the camera, this is a materialist version of a story that offers no miracles, though it does offer a pertinent attentiveness to gender issues (such as the nervousness and sexual braggadocio of the soldiers who sleep beside Joan) and a Joan who’s girlish as well as devout, capable of giggling as well as experiencing pain; when she wins over the dauphin the scene is pointedly kept offscreen, and when she’s interrogated by priests about her faith she could almost be a graduate student defending a dissertation. (Rivette himself plays the priest who blesses her just before she leaves home.) The two features, though comprising a unit, can be seen separately; if I had to see only one I would opt for The Battles (somewhat mislabeled because battle scenes crop up only in the last third), because Rivette is doing things, especially with landscape and period detail (both traversed by inquisitive pans), that he’s never done before. (The Prisons has high points of its own, but its emphasis on Joan’s martyrdom tends to recall Rivette’s The Nun.) As Joan, Sandrine Bonnaire, who’s seldom been better, gives a singular poignance to the line “I know what I must do, but at times I don’t know how.” For his part, Rivette seems to know what he’s doing every step of the way.

Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maid) Chris Fujiwara, August 23, 2001

When Jacques Rivette set out to make a film on the life of Jeanne d’Arc, the subject had already inspired two masterpieces: Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962). Rivette’s two-part Joan the Maid, which Facets Video has recently released, is thus the third. (I also value Otto Preminger’s much reviled 1957 film of Shaw’s Saint Joan, but I can neither expect much sympathy with this opinion nor pretend that Preminger’s film is comparable to the other three.)

Based on historical materials assembled by mediæval scholar Régine Pernoud, Rivette’s 1993 film has a textual — one might say a documentary — force that neither Dreyer’s nor even Bresson’s can claim. The available documentation on Joan is so extensive that the script need add little in order to give a thorough account of what she did and how she died. The film provides little distraction from the essentials — there is no psychologizing of the characters and no elaboration of the social and scenic context of events beyond what can seem to emerge easily through their naturalistic staging.

Over the four-hour length of the film, Sandrine Bonnaire’s performance as Joan gains in stature, until you don’t want to part from her. At first she seems severe. She tends to glare at people, and she tries less hard than she might to ingratiate herself with men — both those whose favor she must court and those she leads in battle to win France for Charles the Dauphin. Her voice is low, conversational, undemonstrative. Bonnaire and Rivette emphasize such humanizing details as Joan’s anger at English soldiers’ calling her " whore, " her agony when she is wounded, and above all her laughter.

The film neither idealizes nor debunks Joan but views her head-on. When we read that she captained an army at age 17, we marvel, but as Rivette shows them, her feats don’t look very hard. Maybe war was simpler then, or maybe war has always been simpler than we would like to think. As Rivette and Bonnaire present her, Joan suggests a novice movie director protected by a seasoned crew that humors her as much as obeys her. (Army life in this film is more sitting around than fighting; in this respect it’s like a film shoot.) She doesn’t do miracles; she just uses common sense and takes the initiative.

The biggest surprise here is the lack of emphasis on the trial. Joan isn’t even captured until halfway through part two. In an audacious move, the film skips over four months of judicial proceedings — including much of what is most familiar and dramatic in the story — to take up the trial with the special churchyard session at which she signed her famous " abjuration. " Probably Rivette assumes that his audience has seen the Dreyer and Bresson films, which cover the missing four months in detail. Also, the abjuration session gives us the gist of the trial: the major accusations against her, the attitude of Joan before her judges, the crucial signature. The vindication of Rivette’s boldness is that when the time comes for Joan to burn, we’ve seen enough of her ordeal that the execution takes on its full tragic power.

Rivette shows women and their place in the mediæval world with great subtlety. Joan is, for a while, held prisoner by one John of Luxembourg, and the film dwells on the relationships she develops with the three sympathetic women of the house. The script makes the misogyny of Cauchon, Joan’s major persecutor, explicit. And in her final denunciation of Cauchon, after she has been sentenced, Joan alludes to a community of women: " If I had had women around me, this would not have happened. "

This is the first major Joan film in color, and Rivette uses it to achieve a cinema of pure beauty. Charles’s coronation, shown in real time, becomes a highlight of the film: the gorgeous interplay of reds, golds, and blues; the camera tracking gracefully; each cut a reconquering of space where a camera movement would have been impossible or meaningless. The black frames Rivette leaves between shots become important to the texture of the film, heightening our awareness of the stone and the bright sunlight that dominate the images. Giving the words in the film time and room to echo, the black frames also stand for all that we don’t, and can’t, know about this incredible woman whose story Rivette tells so well.

Tony Pipolo, Joan Of Arc: The Cinema's Immortal Maid, Cineaste v25, n4 (Fall, 2000):16. (excerpt)

To judge from the track record, canonized saints are among the rarer subjects that narrative cinema has tackled with any degree of success. Two standouts--Roberto Rossellini's works on Francis of Assisi and Augustine of Hippo--are almost impossible to see and go unmentioned in film histories. No doubt, it is the assumed otherness of such creatures--their membership in a select and unknowable caste, and the explicit or underlying virtue believed to be at their core--that makes the prospect of characterizing them so daunting. While biographers and historians, with a myriad of resources at their disposal, can flesh out the humanity through the details, narrative filmmakers (and probably playwrights) must inevitably dramatize and psychologize--processes not readily compatible with saintlike features. In other words, the filmmaker faces the dilemma that one of Graham Greene's novelist/characters identified (in The End of the Affair) when he complained that "Goodness has so little fictional value."

All the more surprising, then, that not one or two, but at least a dozen feature films (and a number of one or two reelers during the silent era) have been made about Joan of Arc. To be sure, the appeal that her story has had and continues to have--crossing national, cultural, and gender boundaries--predates the movies. She was treated, not always sympathetically, through the centuries by no lesser figures than Shakespeare, Schiller, Voltaire, Verdi, and Twain; and in the twentieth century by Shaw, Brecht, Anouilh, Bernanos, Peguy, and Honegger. Joan was the subject of numerous paintings and of folkloric pageants that continued long after her death. In fact, with the exception of Christ, few historical figures--and no other canonized saint that I can think of--have prompted such an array of attention.

Most likely it is the combination of elements that made up her brief but blazing public career--her age, her sex, her determination, her inexplicable ease with soldiers, royalty, and churchmen, her uncanny ability to move them to trust her, their ultimate betrayal, her ignominious death, and eventual rehabilitation--that keeps us wondering how such a child could have achieved such fame on such precarious grounds only to be destroyed in the names of the very things--faith and nationalism--for which she fought. In her excellent new biography, Mary Gordon says that "any understanding of [Joan] will be partial...that so compelling a figure will constantly demand new visions, new revisions...she will not stand still for us."

What makes her so compelling, the writer A.J. Dunning suggests, in an essay comparing Joan and Gilles de Rais--the notorious child abuser and murderer who accompanied her to Reims for the coronation of Charles VII--is our fascination with those with "the burning desire to live or die for a cause, no matter how unusual or extreme...In our average comfortable circumstances, we admire extremes or are repelled by them, but in either case have difficulty finding a satisfactory explanation for them." Art, sometimes even mediocre art, has always been the instrument for expressing and exploring that fascination--perhaps, at times, even compensating for the absence of such figures in our midst. It places them before us at a safe remove and in their most compelling mode. And, throughout the last century, for better or worse, we have produced no more compelling means for doing so than the movies.

Three recent films on Joan and one reissue of a silent classic have made their way to VHS and DVD--rivalling the output in the 1920s spurred by her canonization (1920) and its anticipation. Then, as now, the subject inspired filmmakers of widely different esthetic sensibilities: on the one hand, Cecil B. De Mille, whose Joan the Woman (1917) was one of his first big-budget spectacles; on the other, Carl Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as the reissue attests, remains one of the quintessential avantgarde masterpieces of the cinema. The same contrast is echoed in the new releases: both Luc Besson's The Messenger (1999) and Christian Duguay's Joan of Arc (1999) are more or less in the De Mille vein, while Jacques Rivette's Joan the Maid (1997) is a model of intelligence, modesty, and reserve. (Equally poles apart are the Victor Fleming/Ingrid Bergman epic of 1948 and Robert Bresson's austere Trial of Joan of Arc of 1962.)…

This is one of the many historical fine points which Rivette's film painstakingly gets right. Joan's first encouter with Cauchon occurs here, as it did, while she was still in the custody of the Burgundian John of Luxembourg. As played by Allain Ollivier, this Cauchon has none of the fiery, conflicted nature of the O'Toole, nor the flamboyant garrulousness of Eugene Silvain in Dreyer's film. Much closer to the cool and composed figure in Bresson's Trial, he is all business and thoroughly detached. Yet, in a fleeting, but critical exchange left out of virtually all versions, when he is asked by a fellow clergyman--after the recantation that seals Joan's fate--why she should be permitted to receive the Eucharist since she has been excommunicated, he responds, without hesitation, "Give her whatever she wants." This is not so much a reflection of Cauchon's underlying pity as it is an indication that he believed that Joan was actually guiltless of theological error and that, therefore, any conclusion reached by the ecclestiastical court was illegitimate. Indeed, this seemingly causal granting of Joan's request, authorized by the man whose knowledge and interpretation of canon law was precisely why he was chosen by the University of Paris to preside over Joan's trial, became one of the primary reasons that the trial was eventually declared invalid.

Rivette's film is replete with this kind of historically-grounded detail, which makes it the most authoritative chronicle of Joan's story ever put on film. Hence, it is no surprise to discover in the closing credits citations of both primary sources, like the trial record, and the meticulous scholarship of Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin. It was no doubt the latter that prompted Rivette to include the earlier scene at Poitiers, when more than a dozen theologians questioned Joan about her claims before recommending that Charles actually give her the army she requested. The conclusion reached was that "no wrong was found in her and that the king must not prevent her from going to Orleans." The hearing documents were apparently suppressed during the Rouen trial as they would clearly have contradicted the latter's attempt to characterize Joan as an apostate and heretic.

Rivette's film, in other words, is everything the Besson and Duguay are not--soberly conceived, intelligently executed, historically accurate, and wholly persuasive. At four hours, it is longer than the other two, even while it eschews all the obvious opportunities for melodrama and spectacle. Neither a dramatization in the conventional sense with peak scenes and climaxes, nor a tour de force for actors, Rivette's is not an audience pleaser. This filmmaker, whose work has so often celebrated spontaneity and the unexpected, has here fashioned a modernist meditation of uncompromising directness and simplicity. Because of its deliberate--and refreshing--understatedness, the film retells a familiar story as if it were brand new, avoiding formulaic and stylistic excesses that punctuate the already overdetermined 'high points' of the drama. This same reserve characterizes its cinematic vocabulary: long shots and long takes over close-ups and editing; slow, exploratory pans and tracks; no external music to underline significant moments; intertitles throughout to precisely fix the dates and places of the action; black leader interspersed between scenes, often concealing extraordinary elisions in the progress of events. Not the least effect of this approach is that in its near-minimal, quasireportorial style, the film looks as if it were in modern dress, its quietly eloquent camera movements scanning the terrain, turning the witness of place into the retrieval of time.

If some of it seems to be in the Bressonian mode--e.g., its near zero-degree acting style--this cannot be a coincidence. From Sandrine Bonnaire's fine, strong, and perfectly natural performance as Joan to the least of the soldiers who follow her banner, that style could not better suit the film's aims. Rivette could hardly be unaware of the work by the filmmaker whom he once referred to as "the only [French] filmmaker left who hasn't sold out." The opening scene, in fact, is clearly a nod to Bresson's film: three nuns walk along a portico and approach the foreground, the one in the center supported by the other two. She is Isabelle Romee, Joan's mother, who at Notre Dame, years later, tells her story, "I had a daughter, born in wedlock...," the very way Bresson's film begins.

Considering the spareness of the trial scenes--we see only Erard's cemetery oration and Joan's abjuration--it may well be that Rivette sees his film as a complement to Bresson's. While they are far apart stylistically, it may also be a respectful nod to the Dreyer. But there is one quirky--and, again, historically intriguing--touch that cannot be found in Bresson or Dreyer or any of the others. At the moment Joan signs the abjuration, she giggles. A sudden relief of tension? Perhaps, but there is evidence that the sign she made on the parchment was the same one she used on letters or documents to her military associates, a code alerting them to discount the truth of the document.

Was Joan cleverly outwitting her judges and signalling future historians? Certainly, she was in no rush to die, much less to be burned. And if a single stylistic gesture powerfully captures that truth, it is the third and last cry of "Jesus!" that she screams into the fire in the film's final image--countering the mutedness of what precedes, and wrenching the viewer from all complacency. At once a cry of pain and a protest against injustice, it may also be, for the contemporary viewer, a shriek of terrifying, lastminute doubt. Gone are the doves that fly off with her soul in Dreyer's film; gone is the empty stake that suggests her spiritual triumph in Bresson's. Rivette leaves us with a cry in the wilderness, the cut from flames to black leader now invoking a void. It is a stunning, disturbing, altogether modern end to a brilliantly executed work.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] Pt 1: The Battles, April 5, 2010

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] Pt 2: The Prisons, April 6, 2010

O Feminine Form by ~Rosesquirrel O Feminine Form: The Passion of Joan of Arc and Women in Film, an essay by Laura A.

Lynch / Rivette. Les filles du feu: “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” - Mubi Christopher Small from Mubi, December 13, 2015

Epinions [virtuelle2] August 5, 2007, also seen here: Jacques Rivette's Austere and Magnificent Masterpiece: Jeanne ...

Jacques Rivette: The Quotidian Made Fascinating essay and reviews of multiple Rivette films, including: Jeanne la Pucelle, Jeanne la Pucelle Soundtrack, November 8, 2002

Jeanne la Pucelle I – Les batailles (1994) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Jeanne la Pucelle II – Les prisons (1994) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Joan the Maid (1994, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, September 8, 2009

JOAN THE MAID, PARTS I & II (Jacques Rivette, 1994) Dennis Grunes, August 24, 2008

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Widge

Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Joan The Maid: The Battles/The Prisons" (Jacques Rivette, 1994) Glenn Kenny from Mubi, October 13, 2009, also here: The Auteurs [Glenn Kenny]

A Riveting Filmmaker Alan Pavelin from Talking Pictures UK

Apollo Movie Guide [Jason Schreurs] Pt 1: The Battles

Apollo Movie Guide [Elspeth Haughton] Pt 2: The Prisons

Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson

Joan the Maid 1: The Battles (1994) « Cinema Talk November 27, 2008

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 3 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 23, 2006

Home Video Releases for December 1999 - Nitrate Online Store Eddie Cockrell capsule review

New Look at the Maiden Destined to Save France Lawrence Van Gelder from The New York Times, November 29, 1996

UP, DOWN, FRAGILE (Haut Bas Fragile)

France Switzerland (169 mi) 1995

Haut/Bas/Fragile Gerald Peary

Lovely French actress Emmanuelle Beart spent hours in the nude as an artist's model in La Belle Noiseuse (1991), surely the major reason that Jacques Rivette's film got North American distribution. Rivette, born in 1928, remains the least-seen in the USA of the original "Nouvelle Vague" critics-turned-film directors (Truffaut,Godard, Rohmer,Chabrol). I can think of only three other works in his distinguished, forty-year, career to be shown here commercially: The Nun (1965), L'Amour Fou (1968), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Two reasons for the relative obscurity of this major filmmaker are Rivette's disinterest in publicity, and aversion to travel. I have never seen him at a film festival anywhere in the world, even when one of his pictures is showing. He stays home in Paris, and reads, works, and goes to lots of movies. He's one of the filmmakers who has viewed everything significant in the history of cinema, and he's written seminal critical appreciations of such directors as Hawks, Lang, and Preminger.

Even more, it's Rivette's films which cause problems attracting profit-minded distibutors. For one thing, they are enormously long. La Belle Noiseuse clocked in at 240 minutes, and that's typical. Simply, Rivette makes his movies as lengthy as he feels they should be (he's his own editor), just the way novels can be any duration. The rhythm of his cinema is private, personal, and not tied to the metronome of commercial cinema. The pulse of MTV? Hah! In 1971, he made a film called Out One stretching eleven hours.

As for his stories: well, they are intentionally half-baked ones, sketches of narrative which hold the promise of climaxes, catharses, denouements, but which never quite get there. The hours of watching a Rivette movie are not rewarded with a "payoff" at the end. Often, the movies just shut down. So where is the pleasure of Rivette's very radical brand of cinema? It's in agreeing to have our attentions redirected from trying to find out things (and in Rivette's gameplaying, he teases us to believe there are mysteries to unravel) to simply seeing what's unfolding before our eyes.

The old cliche of "enjoying the process" is the secret to watching Rivette. Many of his films are about rehearsals of dramas instead of the actual productions, and here's a meaningful key: we the audience peek into rehearsals for a movie, conceptions of a movie, improvisations for a movie. For Rivette, this "before" - when actors are still more themselves than their parts, when they are trying out their roles like someone dipping feet into cold water - is where the interest lies.

That's a Rivette-length lead-in to plugging Haut/ Bas/Fragile (1994), his 169-minute sometimes musical. This time, Rivette tantalizes by setting up three stories of young women which--watch out!--normal cinema logic tells us eventually will come together. Ninon (Nathalie Richard) runs away from a murderous boyfriend and an unseemly life (as a hooker?) for a new apartment and a job as a messenger girl on a moped. Louise (Marianne Denicourt) comes out of a 5-year coma, plus life in a mental institution, avoiding her mysterious father while taking over her dead aunt's house. Ida (Laurence Cote), brought up adopted, works in a decorative arts library and seeks out her real-life mother.

This is Rivette, so the daydream narrative (Lewis Carroll is always an influence) meanders all over the place. Two of the young women, Ninon and Louise, gradually criss-cross, but far less for story than to sing a silly tune together, and to improvise a dance on a nightclub floor. Ida's story never connects with theirs, except for sharing some characters. As for Ida finding her mom, it might be nightclub singer, Sarah (Anna Karina). It might not be.

What does it all mean? Nothing, a cloud puff, and I'm sure Jacques Rivette would agree. But Haut/Bas/Fragile is, in its underformed way, an amusing and charming almost three hours in the dark. I was especially enamored of actress Nathalie Richard (the lesbian costumer in Irma Vep), who uses lots of screen time liesurely dancing.Of course, Rivette lets her. Why not? What's the hurry? Parts of what Richard does seem vaguely choreographed, Twyla Tharpish, most of her stuff seems made up on the spot, a talented amateur swinging out with the music. In truth, tied to my seat watching, I felt like jumping up and dancing too: the triumph of Jacques Rivette.

jacques-rivette.com: Ragged But Right - DVD Beaver Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Chicago Reader, July 26, 1996, also seen here: Ragged But Right [on UP DOWN FRAGILE] | Jonathan Rosenbaum

The inspiration of Up Down Fragile? The MGM low-budget films of the 50s that were shot in four or five weeks on sets left over from other films. In particular, a Stanley Donen movie, Give a Girl a Break [1953], a simple film shot in next to no time with short dance numbers.

—Jacques Rivette in an interview

Entertainment does not...present models of utopian worlds, as in the classic utopias of Sir Thomas More, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.

—Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia"

Out of Jacques Rivette's 17 features to date--in which I include his 12-hour serial Out 1 (1970) as well as both parts of his Jeanne la pucelle (1994)--9 are set in contemporary Paris. And few other movies I can think of infuse that city with the same kind of distilled, everyday poetry. For Rivette, Paris is a city of secrets and puzzles, of hidden alliances and privileged locations--a park bench here, a courtyard there--forming the nexus of magical encounters.

In a way, the title of Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us says it all. Solitude and togetherness are the two great themes of his work, often intertwined like the melodic lines of a fugue, and Paris often seems to function as the orchestra that performs and places those melodies, charts their coexistence and their interplay. A city that in many ways seems designed, choreographed, and even lit to provide the settings for romantic musicals--as evidenced in such films as An American in Paris and Funny Face--Paris belongs to loners, couples, and groups, all of whom bring something sad or euphoric to the city as well as take something away from it. It's a kind of give-and-take we often associate with characters in a musical, interacting singly or collectively but always romantically with their environment. Haut bas fragile ("Up Down Fragile")--a 1995 release receiving its U.S. theatrical premiere at the Music Box this week because no New York theater has been willing to give it a run--is the first of Rivette's films to literally profit from Paris's ideal qualifications as the setting for a musical. One of the privileged sites is the alleyway outside a delivery service called VitŽbien (which one could translate roughly as "Quick 'n' Spiffy"), where Ninon (Nathalie Richard), one of the three youthful heroines, parks her moped and chats with her coworkers between deliveries (the movie's title alludes to the instructions often stamped on parcels). Because the film is set during the summer, doors and windows tend to remain open, and part of what makes this spot a magical nexus, with pathways stretching out in all directions, are such proximate details as an upstairs neighbor who calls down to people in the alley and adjacent office and a nearby atelier, where Roland--the closest thing this movie has to a male hero (and Andre Marcon is a dead ringer at moments for Gene Kelly)--works as a set designer.

The location reminds me of the courtyard in Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange and other such hangouts in populist French movies of the 30s. But if this alleyway seems like the relaxed setting for a proletarian musical, other locations suggest different classes. The movie's upper-crust heroine, Louise (Marianne Denicourt)--who's just settling in at a Paris hotel after several years in a coma in a provincial clinic--tends to gravitate toward decorous settings in and around parks; one of her favorite spots is a bench on the rue du Moulin de la Pointe that seems to have been designed for Leslie Caron. The third heroine, Ida (Laurence Cote), is neither working-class nor wealthy: she's a librarian at the Library of Decorative Arts, where Roland sometimes goes for research. Like Louise she favors parks, but less decorous portions of them. We often find her at a stand selling crepes and hot dogs, where early in the movie she flees from a crazy-looking man named Monsieur Paul who asks, "Haven't I seen you before?" (Rivette himself plays the man, and the fact that he cast Cote in The Gang of Four may be part of the joke. The fact that in real life he's a solitaire like her character--her doppelganger in a way--may be equally pertinent.)

Ninon and Louise get to know each other, and both of them get to know Roland; each has a musical number with the other two. But Ida tends to remain on the fringes of their separate and interlocking stories, in musical as well as narrative terms. All three actresses created their own characters--a procedure Rivette also followed in Out 1 and Celine and Julie Go Boating. And just as Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto are solitaires in Out 1 and Julie is one in Celine and Julie before she meets Celine, Ida in Up Down Fragile might be described as someone who'd like to be in a musical but can't because she doesn't yet know who she is. The adopted daughter of provincial parents whose letters she doesn't answer, she's obsessed with fantasies about who her real mother might be and with tracking down a song from her early childhood, of which she remembers only fragments. (Eventually her obsession leads to a meeting with Sarah, a cabaret singer, played by Anna Karina, whom we've already seen in scenes with Ninon and Louise.) Narratively and musically, Ida's in a perpetual state of becoming--the only creature to whom she's attached is a cat. Meanwhile the other lines in the fugue are the processes by which Ninon and Louise acquire romance and friendship and thereby work their way into musical numbers, all of them various kinds of duets.

A few glosses to the quotations at the head of this review: Apparently the only set in Up Down Fragile "left over" from another film--indeed, the only set at all--is Roland's atelier, which I'm told is the studio soundstage Rivette used for interiors in the two previous features comprising Jeanne la pucelle. The only other relevance of Give a Girl a Break to Up Down Fragile of which I'm aware is the fact that each film has three heroines and three interlocking mini plots. As for the Richard Dyer quote, I think one could argue that Up Down Fragile not only tells us a lot about what utopia would feel like, it also tells us a little about how it would be organized.

A whole hour of Up Down Fragile passes before the first song-and-dance number. But during that hour Rivette takes a lot of steps--in metaphysical, stylistic, musical, directorial, and choreographic terms--tracing the passage between real life and musical numbers. The same sort of steps are taken throughout the remaining hour and a half of Up Down Fragile, sometimes leading up to or away from musical numbers, sometimes not.

The metaphysical, stylistic, musical, and directorial steps Rivette takes have everything to do with his legacy as a film critic, despite the fact that he wrote and published criticism only between 1950 and 1969. As the most indefatigable moviegoer of all the Cahiers du Cinema critics who became directors--a distinguished group including Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, Andre Techine, and Francois Truffaut, among others--he knows MGM musicals like the back of his hand. But he doesn't express his knowledge in specific homages or references the way an American cinephile normally would. For Ri-vette this knowledge is precious because it enhances and poeticizes real life, not because it offers an alternative or escape.

Consequently the movie has a documentary roughness--a respect for real durations, for moments that are empty as well as full--that would have been unthinkable in a 50s MGM musical. Moreover, none of the songs is especially memorable, either melodically or in terms of performance (it's no surprise that there isn't a sound track album), nor is any of the dancing up to snuff by Hollywood standards. Indeed, some European critics have dismissed Up Down Fragile for precisely these reasons, and I have little doubt many of their American counterparts would do the same.

Tough luck for them. Though I'm sure the movie would be better if it had a better score, I'm less certain about the virtues that "professional" dancers and singers would have provided; I suppose it's all a matter of how they'd be used. When Louise finally gets acquainted with Lucien (Bruno Todeschini)--a lovable nebbish who's been awkwardly shadowing her at the behest of her wealthy offscreen father (Laszlo Szabo)--their romance finally blossoms inside and nearby a park pavilion in a song and a series of struck poses and dance turns, all of them delightfully amateurish.

This number, my favorite in the movie, reminds me of both a particular park pavilion and the irrepressible youthful giddiness in I Love Melvin (1953), a deliciously modest MGM musical with Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds directed by Don Weis. The fact that Todeschini has none of O'Connor's technique as a dancer and that Denicourt has none of Reynolds's slickness as a singer isn't a liability but one of Ri-vette's givens, and he builds the number around his actors just as sturdily as Weis built the numbers of I Love Melvin around his. In Rivette's case, the vulnerability, even fragility of his performers is every bit as important as the professional polish of Weis's; in both cases, the directors are using their actors as instruments for conveying euphoria. (I must confess that I also love what Joseph L. Mankiewicz did with nonsingers Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons in Guys and Dolls.)

O'Connor's number in the pavilion in I Love Melvin is a virtuoso turn performed on roller skates; Nathalie Richard in Up Down Fragile--the closest thing to a real dancer in Ri-vette's movie--makes some of her deliveries on Rollerblades, quite gracefully but without performing any of O'Connor's awesome acrobatics. Is O'Connor automatically a "better" performer than Richard, or I Love Melvin a "better" movie than Up Down Fragile? Criticizing the performances here is a bit like complaining that Thelonious Monk lacked the piano technique of Art Tatum; maybe so, but Monk still had all he needed to say what he wanted to say. Or as Duke Ellington once put it, more succinctly, "If it sounds good, it is good."

Rivette's numbers seem closer to life than Weis's not only because his performers are less polished but partly because he dares to prolong some of Lucien's and Louise's dance moves after the music stops, providing one kind of pathway away from the euphoric moment, and partly because he uses a real location instead of a studio set. But surely other and more mysterious stylistic differences are at play as well; in ways that are difficult to pinpoint, a whole lifetime of moviegoing seems to lurk behind the pleasures offered by this movie, a trait it shares with Celine and Julie Go Boating.

Admittedly, the cultivation and appreciation of technique--human as well as cinematic--stand solidly behind the glory of the Hollywood musical, and we'd all be much poorer without it. But what Rivette has that his American critical and directorial counterparts often lack is a poetic and abstract appreciation of what that technique yields and what that glory consists of, especially in relation to everyday life--an appreciation of the dialectic between reality and fantasy that's always been behind the potency of French cinema. That same dialectic also inspired Godard's third feature, A Woman Is a Woman (1960), which he noted at the time was conceived as "a neorealist musical." "It's a complete contradiction," he admitted, "but this is precisely what interested me in the film. It may be an error, but it's an attractive one." In the same interview he concluded, "The film is not a musical. It's the idea of a musical." A Woman Is a Woman has plenty of glories--rent the full-frame video sometime and you'll see what I mean--but Godard is right: it isn't a musical. Up Down Fragile, which derives in a way from the same idea, is a musical, however, because ultimately it practices what Godard's film only preaches, embodies what A Woman Is a Woman only theorizes about. Sometimes it's a matter of Rivette stylizing movement--the actors' as well as the camera's--and often it's simply a matter of imparting emotion; a great deal of the film's solidity as a musical has to do with the way it explores the joys and sorrows of being alone and of being with someone else. But most often it's Rivette's acute sense of what steps need to be taken to approach or retreat from a euphoric musical moment, whether romantic or friendly--how to find such steps, how to execute them, and above all how to place them in the midst of an ordinary summer afternoon or evening in Paris. In other words, not only a sense of what utopia might feel like, but also how it might be organized.

Paris is a Soundstage • Jacques Rivette • Senses of Cinema Miriam Bale, July 8, 2016

Home Movies by Charles Taylor: Idyll worship - Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon, September 2, 1998

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006

Haut bas fragile (1995) « Cinema Talk October 12, 2008

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Week 3 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, November 23, 2006

Up/Down/Fragile : The New Yorker Richard Brody

Up/Down/Fragile Mike D’Angelo

Up/down/fragile — Inside Movies Since 1920 Shlomo Schwartzberg from Box Office magazine

Up, Down, Fragile (1995) Mubi

User reviews from imdb Author: Delly (mortanse@yahoo.com) from Los Angeles

User reviews from imdb Author: sleepsev (bearania@yahoo.com) from Bangkok, Thailand

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Jacques Rivette - Haut bas fragile aka Up, Down, Fragile (1995 ... Avax Home

Drifting, and Singing, Through Paris Stephen Holden from The New York Times, November 15, 1996, also here: The New York Times (Stephen Holden)

LUMIERE ET CAMPAGNIE

France Denmark Spain Sweden (92 mi) 1995 Omnibus project with 40 directors

Lumière et Compagnie Time Out London

A Lumière centenary production (cf Les Enfants de Lumière). Forty film-makers were invited, or challenged, to make a Lumière movie: one shot, 52 seconds long, no direct sound, using an original 1895 camera. The result is a series of tableaux - elaborate, banal, enigmatic - in which the favourite gambit has been to include the past and the present in the same shot (Boorman, Yimou, Merchant Ivory). Several look like fragments that have shaken loose from one of their director's features (Wenders, Rivette), while the most distinctive (Greenaway, Lynch) blithely ignore the ground rules. Even 40 of these film-lets don't add up to a feature, so each director is quizzed on such topics as 'Is cinema mortal?' and even 'Pourquoi filmez-vous?' And yes, in principle there's a 1995 'train arriving at La Ciotat station' - that's Leconte, opening the proceedings. Except the train doesn't stop there now.

Lumière et compagnie (1995) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

To celebrate the centenary of the Lumière brothers’ invention of the cinematograph (the forerunner of the modern film camera), 39 distinguished film directors from across the world took up the challenge to make a short film using the Lumières’ original equipment. The films had to be 52 minutes in length, not use synchronised sound and take no more than three takes. The difference in cinematic styles and cultural backgrounds is reflected in the resulting series of films, which range form the banal to the surreal and frankly bizarre.

Disappointingly, only a few of the directors managed to come up with an imaginative short film. Most were presumably content to have mastered the immense difficulties of making a film with such primitive equipment. Of particular note are the films recorded by Michael Haneke (a summary of the news on the day of the Lumieres’ anniversary), Régis Wargnier (a touching portrait of French president François Mitterand, a few months before his death) and David Lynch (a block-buster sci-fi/horror mini-epic). The films also includes a few of Louis Lumiere’s original films, magnificently restored.

The film also goes in front of the camera and allows the film-makers to express some of their thoughts about their art. Here again only a few of the great men and women have anything original to say. Whilst it would be unfair to say that this film was a wasted opportunity, it is certainly does contain a lot of mediocre material and is hardly a fitting tribute to the birth of cinema.

Mixed Reviews [Martin Scribbs]

THOMPSON
(still explaining)
Well, Mr. Bernstein, you were with Mr.Kane from the very beginning...

BERNSTEIN
From before the beginning, young fellow.
And now it's after the end.

-- Citizen Kane

In 1895, the Lumière brothers were the first to charge an audience to see a motion picture show. We have one of their original shorts, a toddler taking his first tentative steps towards the rolling camera. So was cinema, new and unsure, mainly an extension of its parents, photography and theater. Its arrival brought joy and surprise into its immediate family, but the child had little personality to call its own.

Movies have accomplished so much since the inception of the art -- they have attained a global audience, learned the languages of the world, taken on richly textured stories, colored, full of sound, become portable and malleable. The prodigious child that is cinema, whose performances started as mere parlor tricks, has so secured his own fame as to eclipse that of his parent arts. Lumière and company, a centennial celebration arranged by French TV, draws voice from the heirs of mature cinema as they try to recapture the medium as it was in its first few faltering days.

Give forty famous directors a crack at making their own 52-second shorts with what's billed as the first motion picture camera, and what do you get? A remake of the famous Lumière short, L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat, from which, legend has it, the first paying moviegoers fled in terror (Leconte); a long, loving kiss between a sweet-faced couple with Down's Syndrome (van Domael); a sci-fi mystery with cops, aliens, and a naked woman in an experimental fluid tank (Lynch, of course); everything from an impromptu rock-n-roll concert on the Great Wall of China (Zhang) to a Bronx bag lady yelling crazily at a garbage truck operator (Schatzberg). While some of the films were better, or more creative, than others, criticism is best reserved for the collection as a whole, and the presentation in which they are framed.

LUMIÈRE AND COMPANY is not a cinematic twin of 1900s House. The 40 short films are no more of the 19th century than the Lumières could have made 20th century films had they a hand-held camcorder. "Perfect synchronization between sound and image," a feature most of the DVD shorts have, the brothers Lumière had declared "absolutely impossible." Moreover, the shorts use film grammar as it has developed across the intervening century -- the montage, the cut-away, the tracking shot, the close-up, the flashback. Alain Corneau even adds swirls of color to his film of a gypsy dancing, hand-tinting in blue and yellow, red and purple. For better or worse, these are unapologetically modern shorts filmed on antique equipment.

On the other hand, the restored camera definitely shapes the process. Because the camera is hand-wound, it records at different frames-per-second for different directors. For some, the Lumière box's ghostly, too-white images move fluidly. Other directors get a choppy, disjointed progression. For being more advanced, the cameras of today leave no such footprint on their films.

Thematically, many of the directors make explicit reference to the time gap between the ancient camera and the new world which it beholds. World War II lay almost exactly midway between the Lumière s' time and ours, and several of the directors use that tragic chapter in human history to give us a sense of time and proportion. Greenaway, in Munich, films a dial of years which flips from 1895 to 1995, lingering on the war years. Other of the directors film in Hiroshima, contrasting the giggling school children and the modern buildings with the enormity of atomic attack.

Another motif is that of the filmer-filmed, in which the director uses the Lumière's camera to capture another person using a modern camera, or a Lumière replica, or hanging about on a movie set or in front of a movie theater. I certainly understand the impulse of the directors to connect-the-dots between the start and current state of cinema. However, the viewer gets the same message of cinematic continuity and discontinuity many, many times, and the law of diminishing marginal returns soon kicks in with a vengeance.

In fact, for a collection of shorts under a minute long each, LUMIÈRE AND COMPANY runs surprisingly long. The producers padded out half of the running time by asking the directors stock questions like, "why do you film?" and "is cinema mortal?" The directors humor these questions, for the most part, though some do simply shrug or ignore their interlocutor. We are also treated to making-of segments regarding each short, which generally run longer than the made short itself. There is something charming about the first few minutes watching big-name directors play, like boys and girls at Christmas, with a toy to which they've never before had access. But I would advise the trigger-happy DVD viewer to fast-forward through the filler -- if she's watched one Oscars, or sat in one film class, or watched the bonus features for any DVD, she's seen and heard all this before.

The viewer leaves Lumière and Company feeling as though she's watched hours of home movies about a loved one's childhood. Even the gamest of viewers will want to indulge her nostalgia judiciously, to avoid getting sour on the narcissism of the exercise. Coo and gaze, in moderation.

Richard Neupert, “Jacques Rivette’s Homage to Louis Lumière: To Pastiche and Beyond” Richard Neupert on Lumière et Compagnie from Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Movie Vault [Sinomatictool]

Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell, Berlin 1996

All Movie Guide [Dan Friedman] Matthew Tobey

User reviews from imdb Author: Myke Aycock (mykeaycock@hotmail.com) from Seattle, WA – USA

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

SECRET DÉFENSE

France (170 mi) 1998

Secret Defense | Theater CC | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jacques Rivette's 20th feature (1997) is perhaps the most classically constructed of all his films, in terms of mise en scene as well as plot. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a research chemist whose kid brother (Gregoire Colin from The Dream Life of Angels) discovers that their father's accidental death from falling off a train a few years earlier may have been a murder committed by his business partner (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who's subsequently taken over the business. The brother plans to kill the partner, and the sister, fearful that he might bungle the job, takes a train to the country to perform the deed herself. Her journey, covering almost 25 minutes, displays Rivette's genius in handling duration and nuanced acting and shows Bonnaire at her near best. As a rule, Rivette's actresses shine more than his actors, but Radziwilowicz--a skillful veteran of Wajda, Kieslowski, and Godard pictures--gives a wonderfully dense and suggestive performance, and the brooding intimations of Greek tragedy are part of what keeps this 170-minute thriller fascinating throughout. With Laure Marsac (in an intriguing double role as sisters) and Francoise Fabian; Pascal Bonitzer and Emmanuelle Cuau collaborated with Rivette on the script.

Secret Défense Time Out London

Working late one night, Sylvie (Bonnaire) discovers her brother Paul (Colin) searching her desk for a handgun. He says he's found out that their father's death five years past was murder - he has evidence implicating Walser (Radziwilowicz), their father's closest colleague. Sceptical and instinctively cautious, Sylvie is compelled to follow up the investigation to save her brother from himself, or so she thinks. Rivette doesn't exactly cut to the chase. The most memorable sequence follows Sylvie as she goes into the Métro. She boards the train, deep in thought, and Rivette stays with her in real time right through to the next stop, where she alights, crosses to the next platform, and waits again. A decision has been reached. The scene is by no means atypical. Rivette seems intent on probing that which must remain unspoken, on photographing the unconscious - hence the title, which translates as 'Top Secret'. Sternly ascetic and unerringly contemplative, this 170-minute film is, nevertheless, a thriller - and something of a potboiler at that. It's a problem, because for all its mysteries, the movie thoroughly repudiates suspense. What the film does have in its favour is a performance of concerted, gaunt integrity from Bonnaire.

SECRET DEFENSE (Jacques Rivette, 1997) « Dennis Grunes

Throughout his career, Jacques Rivette has always flirted with the thriller genre, evincing a fascination with the shadowy conspiracies and labyrinthine plots that twist and turn behind the scenes, their contours hidden, their surprises held back. In spite of this, Rivette's cinema has been in many other ways the antithesis of the thriller, trading in slow, languid character development and a patient exploration of the truths and lies shared between his characters. He continually adapts the framework of the genre picture — the thriller, the mystery, the detective film — to his own set of concerns and his own unique perspective. In Secret Défense, perhaps for the first time, he confronts the thriller on its own terms, crafting a masterful mystery plot in which, nevertheless, the emphasis is on the longueurs between actions rather than on the twists and turns of the plot.

The story is certainly an archetypal revenge scenario. Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a research scientist, learns from her brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) that their father, who had died five years before in a train accident, had not fallen off the train but had in fact been pushed. Paul suspects their father's business partner Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who now runs the business in his place. Sylvie is not so sure, but she fears that her brother will rashly and foolishly try to kill him, so to cut him off she goes to kill Walser herself instead. This triggers a convoluted sequence of events in which Sylvie is placed in the same situation as her hated nemesis, coming to understand Walser and why he did what he did. The film doesn't lack for drama, but that's not what primarily interests Rivette. The most crucial narrative scenes have a kind of blunt, clipped quality, as though Rivette is only fulfilling an obligation by showing us these things. Violence happens quickly and abruptly, with a faint undertone of surrealist absurdity, and also a touch of Rivette's theatricality: these are stage deaths, the gestures just slightly exaggerated and stylized.

Rivette intersperses the dramatic scenes, the confrontations and revelations and twists, with extended sequences that expose the mechanics by which the characters get around, communicate with one another, navigate their world and their story. The scenes that would be brief and obligatory in another film, Rivette expands and elevates to a central importance. The simple act of moving from one place to another is never glossed over, but is instead transformed into an epic narrative in itself. At one crucial moment, after she has decided to kill Walser, Sylvie must take a long journey from Paris to the countryside, where Walser is spending the night at his palatial home. Another film would cut from Sylvie's decisive action of packing for the trip directly to her standing in the dark outside his home, stalking him. Instead, Rivette follows her in near-silence as she buys her train ticket, switches from train to train, nervously fidgets, tries on different pairs of sunglasses as though fancying herself a character in a gangster movie. He follows her long walk through the dark dirt roads leading from the train station to Walser's house, as she hides her face from passing cars and strides purposefully towards her fatal destination. Rivette lingers with her, refusing to resort to an easy linkage between decision and action: he emphasizes the time she has to think, to ponder what she's going to do, to wonder what it's going to be like when she finally gets there. And then, when the moment finally comes after all this anticipation, nothing goes as planned, and it's over in a startling few seconds, a brilliant climax/anticlimax before Rivette fades to black.

Rivette is fascinated with the long pauses between actions, the moments of stasis where Sylvie is simply lounging around her apartment — with Mark Rothko prints propped up casually against the walls — or working at her lab or traveling by train. At times, Rivette seems intent on remaking, again and again, the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, and imagining its sequels and prequels: woman waiting for train, woman traveling on train, woman switching trains. And yet Rivette's film is irrevocably set in an era when such things no longer hold the fascination they did for audiences in earlier times. Travel like this is mundane, ordinary, and Rivette's lengthy shots of trains pulling in and out of stations capture this prosaic quality without obscuring the strange beauty the Lumières must have seen in such images.

The train is no longer the height of technology, and Rivette continually reminds us of this by packing the film with then-modern accoutrements: cordless phones, answering machines, fax machines, computers, the scientific equipment that Sylvie uses in her lab, and the mysterious weapons systems being manufactured by Walser's company. These technological devices drive the plot, but often in negative ways: the phone bears only bad news, and more often than not the answering machine's assurances that someone will "call back" are never fulfilled. Communication is difficult, missed opportunities are frequent, and thus everybody seems to be out of sync with everyone else, misunderstanding one another's motives and actions and words. All of this technology is amassed around these characters to facilitate things, to make travel and communication easier, but they are nevertheless unable to make connections or speak openly to one another, to get beyond the lies and silences. This is why the truth comes out only slowly, hesitantly, after false starts and misleading diversions. It's Rivette's take on the necessity for deceit and double talk in the thriller genre: the characters lie because they simply don't know how to talk to one another. This is also why, perhaps, Sylvie keeps dodging her earnest, likable boyfriend Jules (Mark Saporta), unable to say anything to him. Later, she'll manage to tell a friend the truth only by backing into it, telling it first as though it was part of a dream.

Rivette's characters are so often weighted down by their histories, haunted by the past — sometimes literally, as in the romantic ghost story History of Marie and Julien. Here, Sylvie is haunted by the long-ago death of her older sister Elizabeth, a suicide she never understood, a death that lingers with her just as Paul can't get over their father's death. This obsession with missing relatives extends outside of Sylvie and Paul's family with the entry of the waifish Ludivine (Laure Marsac), who's searching for her missing sister Véronique (also played, earlier in the film, by Marsac, in a chameleonic double role: the pale, severe Ludivine and the lively Véronique couldn't be more different). Rivette has always been fascinated by doubles and mirroring, a theme that was especially apparent in the Duelle/Noroît diptych of 1976. Here, multiple characters enact the same plot, as though trapped within an endless cycle, unconsciously repeating the same narratives: investigation, mistaken assumptions, murder. Murderer and victim switch places and identities fluidly, standing in for one another and for others — some kill so that others don't have to, some die so that others won't have to. It is a cycle of sacrifice, a cycle in which the deeds of the past reverberate in unexpected ways in the present.

This has often been a key theme for Rivette, for whom revenge and violence hold a peculiar fascination — for a director renowned for his slow, stately pacing, his films seethe with strong emotions just below the surface. This one is no exception despite its stony, tranquil surface. Rivette gets understated performances from his cast, who don't react with melodramatic verve to the sometimes startling turns of the plot. If the narrative edges into soap opera in its final act, it's barely noticeable because the characters take it all in stride, with little to betray their tangled inner states. Bonnaire especially is perfectly balanced, capturing Sylvie's increasingly frazzled nerves and disintegrating composure while hardly ever venturing outside of a very narrow range of calm, non-committal expressions. Rivette's camera often lingers over the actress' face, so distinctive and angular, staring into her eyes or tracing her geometric profile for long moments of quiet contemplation.

Besides the oblique references to Rivette's past in terms of theme, this film seems like something of a summation for the director, a conscious engagement with the past. Just as the past and its horrors haunt these characters, the film itself is populated by ghosts from Rivette's cinematic history: his one-time youthful heroine Hermine Karagheuz (of Duelle and Merry-Go-Round) has a cameo as a stern, sour nurse; Sylvie's mother Geneviève is played by Out 1's François Fabian; Bernadette Giraud, who played a young aspiring actress in Gang of Four, reappears here as a maid. Rivette has often used the same actors multiple times, but here the way he inserts these characters around the fringes of the narrative seems calculated to call attention to the device, to add a metafictional layer to the casting. The appearance of these characters, particularly the instantly recognizable Karagheuz, is a way of tying this film to its director's lineage: this isn't just a thriller but a Rivette thriller. And that means it's a particularly smart, contemplative and entrancing thriller.

Secret Défense • Senses of Cinema Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, October 2000

Untimely Films: Jacques Rivette and the Philosophy of the Fold ... Oliver C. Speck, April 1, 2010

Jacques Rivette: The Quotidian Made Fascinating essay and reviews of multiple Rivette films, including: Secret Défense (Top Secret), full review HERE, November 8, 2002

Epinions [virtuelle2]

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Secret défense (1998) Adam Gai from FilmsdeFrance

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

A Riveting Filmmaker Alan Pavelin from Talking Pictures UK

dOc DVD Review: Secret Defense (1998) Rich Rosell

Jacques Rivette - Secret défense (1998) | AvaxHome

second impressions Frank Pan from Doorknob in a Train, April 23, 2007

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Weeks 7 & 8 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 21, 2006

Secret Defense (1998) Mubi

User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

Author: Hyzenthlay_and_me from United Kingdom

Secret Defense Review Ken Fox from TV Guide

Film: Secret Defense - Arts & Entertainment - The Independent Ryan Gilbey

FILM REVIEW; Mourning, Self-Induced, Certainly Becomes Electra Stephen Holden from The New York Times, November 19, 1999

VA SAVOIR (Who Knows?) B+ 92

France (154 mi) 2001

Va Savoir Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Rivette revisits familiar ground with this leisurely tale of romantic intrigue and possibly dark deeds among members of a theatrical troupe and their various acquaintances, but while it certainly lacks the edge of Paris Nous Appartient, it nevertheless exerts immense charm. Balibar is the Parisian diva returning after three years in Italy in a production of Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi; Castellitto is her lover, leading man and manager, jealous that she's in touch with her (now married) ex, seeking out an apocryphal play by Goldoni, and drawn to the daughter of a woman who may have the text. As ever, it's about different kinds and levels of performance and falsehood, and shifts from 'realist' elements to something more fancifully theatrical (a delightful duel - by drinking). Funny, sentimental but ironic, and wondrously assured.

Va Savoir Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Va Savoir is a labored offering from Nouvelle Vague auteur Jacques Rivette. Broken up with play-within-a-film segments from Luigi Pirandelo's As You Desire Me, the film finds Rivette in familiar terrain. His exploration of the conflict between fiction and reality isn't so much tiresome as it is tiresomely ancient, and similar to some of his more volatile works (The Nun and Céline and Julie Go Boating), the film is leisurely paced but frustrating. Rivette is headily conscious of the way characters move through doorways and interior spaces, but Va Savoir seems burdened by the director's philosophical interest in the duality between illusion and actuality, which serves little importance to the film's actual narrative center, a more or less straightforward tale of Rohmerian discord.

The older he gets, the more Western Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffe) becomes. Or so says his emotional wife, Sonia (Mariane Basler), a Feng Shui enthusiast (she favors geometrical, spatial dynamics), when discussing how at odds she is with her husband's bookish persona. Pierre was once involved with Camille (Jeanne Balibar), who has returned to Paris to perform in the Pirandello play with her co-star/director/husband Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), and finds himself gravitating toward his old flame while Ugo falls in love with a young, literature-loving beauty named Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), whose brother, Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), is having an affair with Sonia. The film's latter half is a relatively taught affair, with the pacing smooth and circular but lugubrious; little happens during the film's first half, which revolves around the banality of Camille and Ugo's marriage and Ugo's search for a long-lost play by 18th-century writer Goldoni.

Sonia, having discovered that Arthur is only after her expensive ring, convinces Camille to seduce Arthur in order to retrieve the ring. Ultimately, Va Savoir is less concerned with exploring the emotional and physical complexities of impossible love than it is with using the narrative format as an excuse to probe the intricacies of the real and unreal. The tone of the film's first half recalls the airiness of Rohmer's Boyfriends and Girlfriends only to turn into a muddled, scarcely-deep commentary on the interplay between life and fiction. Inundated with strangely piercing moments (see Balibar's unpanicked rooftop escape from Pierre's apartment) and one humorous scenario that pits a drunken Pierre against an equally drunk Ugo, Va Savoir lacks the kind of Godardian panache that would make its theoretical arguments stick to the bones.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Va savoir (2001) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, January 2002

Revisiting the territory of his first feature Paris nous appartient (1961) and several of his other films since - especially L'Amour fou (1968) and L'Amour par terre (1984) - Jacques Rivette fashions his latest movie as a 'film about the theatre' with a classic play-within-a-play narrative structure. The film revolves around an Italian-language production of Luigi Pirandello's As You Desire Me, in which the central couple Camille and Ugo act for a week's run in Paris. From the beginning we know that the developments on stage will echo those in the 'real life' of the characters (and vice-versa); tellingly, the film starts and ends on stage.

Va savoir! unfolds over a leisurely 154 minutes (a restrained length by Rivette standards), intercutting performances on stage with events backstage and with scenes of the characters out and about in the city. It shares with As You Desire Me a Pirandellian interest in identity and memory, truth and lies and shifting points of view. (With its three couples, the film also recalls Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.) But for former film critic Rivette (who took part in a famous 1957 Cahiers du cinéma debate entitled 'Six characters in search of auteurs'), references to the cinema are never far behind, most evidently to Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (La Carrozza d'oro, 1952), in which Anna Magnani led a group of commedia dell'arte players.

Camille, played by Jeanne Balibar, is in Paris for the first time in three years, since she broke up with philosophy lecturer Pierre. Thus like the play's heroine, she is ambivalently poised between present and past lovers. But the links between the characters are far more complex than this classic triangle would suggest. Pierre is now with Sonia (a ballet teacher), and while he tries to reclaim Camille's love, going as far as locking her in his flat, Sonia is seeing Arthur, the shady brother of the beautiful art student Dominique ('Do') to whom Ugo is attracted. As if this was not enough, it's hinted that the bond between siblings Do and Arthur is incestuous, and Camille sleeps with Arthur, thus having relationships with all three men. Rivette and his actors clearly delight in the game of improbable coincidences and pointed contrivances. At one point Ugo is led to Do's library by a historian played by Claude Berri - a mischievous cameo since he is a director (and producer) who represents the antithesis of Rivette's cinema.

Rivette manages the complex choreography of his characters with virtuoso comic timing, unsurprisingly since mystery and pretence have always been central to his cinema. As in his most famous film Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), self-conscious play-acting is the source of much pleasure and humour. For instance, Camille's night of love with Arthur, calculated to recoup the ring he stole from Sonia, is a brilliantly executed piece of mise en scène by Camille as woman and actress; and her retrieval of the ring from a flour jar is shot through with the playfulness - for which Balibar's impish features are ideally suited - that characterises Céline and Julie's games. The same could be said of the drinking 'duel' between Ugo and Pierre, of Pierre locking up Camille (and her escape over the roofs of Paris), and of the disastrous dinner party Sonia hosts. This is all light-hearted, charming and very French, even if there are some serious underlying points about deception being inherent to love and relationships.

The real seriousness of Va savoir, however, belongs to the cinema. Always one of the most formally radical directors of the New Wave, Rivette was also one of its most ardent defenders of art for art's sake, of cinema as a reflection on itself, through theatre. Speaking of Paris nous appartient in a 1968 interview, he said: 'All films are about the theatre... because that is the subject of truth and lies, and there is no other in the cinema.' Theatre entails performance, and Rivette is well known for giving his actors, and especially his actresses, an unusual degree of freedom. Va savoir certainly confirms Balibar as one of French art cinema's rising stars. In this context, it may seem begrudging to point out that the undoubted dominance of Va savoir's radiant actresses - Balibar, Marianne Basler as Sonia and Hélène de Fougerolles as Do - over the talented but less exciting men (Jacques Bonnaffé as Pierre and Sergio Castellitto as Ugo) disguises conventional gender stereotyping: the men are associated with high culture (Goldoni, Heidegger), the women with art (ballet, acting) or cooking (through Do's mother, a Renoiresque cameo from Catherine Rouvel). While Ugo directs and manages, Camille performs and has tantrums, while he searches, Do helps; while Pierre discusses philosophy, Sonia shifts furniture according to feng shui. Some things never change.

After his experimentation with cinema and painting (La Belle Noiseuse, 1991) and historical film (Jeanne la pucelle, 1994), Rivette returns with Va savoir not just to the theatre but to a classic New Wave idiom. As in his films from the 60s, we are seduced by the elegance and cleverness of the film-making, by witty dialogue in gorgeous Parisian interiors, by couples strolling down leafy boulevards and along the banks of the Seine. There is a sense of déjà vu, to be sure, but it is far from unpleasant. With new releases by Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol and now Rivette, 2001-02 is a great year for a late New Wave flowering.

Savoir Faire - Film Comment Chris Chang from Film Comment, September 10, 2001

In Jacques Rivette's comedy of manners, the New Wave master once again turns Paris into his own personal theater of desire and intrigue.

For the last four decades Jacques Rivette has returned repeatedly to the image of the stage onscreen. In his films, it's a place of endless possibility, and a perfect setting to bring complex human emotions to life. Although filmed theater easily lends itself to paroxysms of self-reflexivity - something Rivette certainly understands - the director has no interest in formalism per se. He's more attuned to life, love, and the obligatory misunderstandings that can happen in the space between the world and its representation. Actors caught "in the act" reveal our true nature.

Va savoir begins in total blackness. A spotlight pierces the dark. A leg steps into the beam, and then full illumination reveals the enigmatic Camille (Jeanne Balibar), an actress performing in Paris as a member of a traveling theater group. She fled the city a few years earlier to escape from her philosopher boyfriend Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé). He, like all good philosophers, has a Heidegger problem. Camille is currently involved with Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), her wizened and slightly unkempt director and co-star. He has a Camille problem. The Camille/ Ugo/Pierre triangle forms the cornerstone of an ever-growing fractal construct of psychosexual innuendo. The entanglements include Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), a grad-student Aphrodite who engages in a mutual enchantment with Ugo; Do's half-brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a petty thief whose sexual proclivities apparently extend to all the film's female characters; and Sonia (Marianne Basler), wife of Pierre, teacher of children's ballet, and a woman who surprises herself when she forms an alliance with Camille. Anyone, at any point, could be in bed with anyone. But this is a true comedy of manners, a mode in which characters are most likely to sleep alone.

Ugo and Camille have come to Paris to perform As You Desire Me (in the original Italian!). Pirandello's title sums up much of the restrained hysteria surging through Va savoir. Actors, obviously, are objects of desire even after the curtain closes. To satisfy both sides of the equation they must be willing to discard bits of themselves to please their audience - be it anonymous or intimate. Who do you want me to be today? Which act must I perform to retain your thrall? Even though it may all be pure illusion, the situation by no means implies a world without foundation. There are still hard and fast rules. For instance, Ugo allows Camille to visit with Pierre, just as Camille allows Ugo to spend time alone with the all but irresistible Do. The problem is not what happens, but conduct after the fact. Camille demonstrates it most clearly. When Ugo questions her about her potentially amorous adventures with Pierre, he commits hubris. Their love is free as long as there are no jealous questions. Camille gets very angry. (Even though she has nothing to hide.)

A director is, to some degree, a dictator. "Dictatorship is the extreme form of jealousy," declares Ugo. He realizes all too clearly that his dictates for Camille must remain stage-bound. In the real world, she is beyond his control, unless, of course, he relinquishes it. Only then is she all his. This is the sort of revelation that the characters either actively seek or stumble across; and they all do so using Pirandello's play as if it were some sort of oracle. Those who are not in it will attend at various points during the run. When Sonia goes you can see in her eyes a desperate need to understand - not the meaning of the play, but the key it holds to determining her own position in the tumult of plot complications. Arthur, after he goes, announces, "I am the unknown." And so on. After each performance Camille's dressing room becomes a confession booth for each character. Their varied responses to the play quickly turn into self-analysis.

Although the acting and recombinant twists of the plot dance with spontaneity, Rivette's mise-en-scène is precision exemplified. Every move is choreographed and framed with surgical accuracy. And the subsequent phenomenology of space astonishes. The stage is at the hub of all activity, a tabula rasa/void connected to all the streets, rooms, and even rooftops of Paris. Architecture comes alive at every turn. Doorways become portals to desire; rooms, especially those lined with books, become arenas; and staircases.· Rivette has a thing for staircases. (Discussing his film Secret défense with Frédéric Bonnaud, Rivette spoke of staircases as characters: "I chose the house where we filmed because of the staircase. I think it's where all the dramatic loose ends come together, and also where they must resolve themselves.") The opportunity to ascend or descend a stairway somehow frees Rivette characters to perform anything from spasms of absurd body-language to inspired bursts of soliloquy. Early in Va savoir, on the stairs backstage at the theater, Camille quips to herself, "It's more whim than drama." And whim is closer to the heart of the matter than any artifice.

To understand the historical poignance of Va savoir, it's helpful to remember that the Nouvelle Vague began, not that paradoxically, before the Nouvelle Vague began. (Bear with me.) The film covers ground already explored by a director who was at the peak of his power before Rivette switched from critic's pen to director's camera. Jean Renoir's 1952 film The Golden Coach, just like Va savoir, begins and ends on a stage. It is no coincidence that Renoir's female lead, Anna Magnani, plays a stage actress named Camilla. François Truffaut, in a review of The Golden Coach, wrote: "The entire film is turned inside out like a glove, but since the glove had already been turned inside out in the opening minutes, it is now right side out, and everything is in order." That statement, and the idea of a redemptive restoration of order, applies with equal grace to Rivette's film. It's great to see a breathless master, at age 73, bring the Nouvelle Vague into the 21st century. Not to mention doing so with a bona fide masterpiece.

Chris Chang is Film Comment's Managing Editor.

Va Savoir! (Who Knows!, 2001, Jacques Rivette) • Senses of Cinema Laleen Jayamanne from Senses of Cinema, May 2002

Jacques Rivette: Va Savoir - Screening the Past Sam Rohdie from Screening the Past, June 21, 2007

Va savoir Chris Fujiwara, October 11, 2001

Jacques Rivette: The Quotidian Made Fascinating essay and reviews of multiple Rivette films, including: Va Savoir! (Who Knows?), full review HERE, November 8, 2002

“Va Savoir” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, September 28, 2001

Reversals of Fortune | Village Voice J. Hoberman, September 25, 2001

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Va Savoir - FILM FREAK CENTRAL Walter Chaw

Playtime - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Rob Nelson

Va Savoir – 2001, Jacques Rivette « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish, January 18, 2011

PopMatters Kirsten Markson

Va Savoir Chris Dashiell from CineScene

Va Savoir | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Va Savoir : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Matt Langdon from DVD Talk

dOc DVD Review: Va savoir (2001) Joel Cunningham

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "phooey" (6/10)

Va savoir (2001) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Va Savoir (2001, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, March 6, 2010

Film-Festival Opener, A Critic's Just Dessert Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer, October 7, 2001

'Va Savoir' a nuanced tapestry of emotions Brett Buckalew from The Daily Trojan, October 11, 2001

VA SAVOIR (WHO KNOWS?) Erica Abeel from Film Journal International

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

Movie Review: ''Va savoir'' Digital Journal

Xiibaro Reviews: Va Savoir, Audition, and Impostor David Perry

Va Savoir - Isthmus | The Daily Page Kent Williams

Va savoir (2001) « Cinema Talk June 6, 2008

Robin Clifford

Va Savoir Jonathan Cornwell from Reel Critic reviews

A Riveting Filmmaker Alan Pavelin from Talking Pictures UK

OFFOFFOFF, a guide to alternative New York David Butterworth, also seen here: David N. Butterworth

Slate [David Edelstein]

Ways of Seeing: Yoel Meranda's Web Site - Best films of the Year ... Yoel Miranda from Ways of Seeing

SPLICEDwire | "Va Savoir (Who Knows?)" review (2001) Jacques ... Rob Blackwelder

Va Savoir! Movie Review Robin Clifford from Killer Movies

Va Savoir – Jaqcues Rivette's look at Rhomer's cinema ... Pzaprianov’s Movie Blog, June 28, 2010

Va Savoir – Jacques Rivette and the subtle pleasures of the Nouvelle ... Lisa Thatcher

Rolling Stone [Peter Travers]

Jam! Movies Bruce Kirkland

Michael D's DVD Info Page

Haro Online

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]

Reel Movie Critic [Pam Singleton]

Harvey S. Karten

midnight rambling Frank Pan from Doorknob on a Train, March 11, 2007

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Weeks 7 & 8 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 21, 2006

Va savoir (2001) Mubi

Va Savoir (who Knows?) — Inside Movies Since 1920 Ed Scheid from Box Office magazine

Va Savoir (Who Knows?) | Movies | EW.com Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly

BBCi - Films Sandi Chaitram

Washington Diplomat [Ky N. Nguyen]

Va Savoir Marjorie Baumgarten from The Austin Chronicle

Program Notes: VA SAVOIR? - Austin Film Society Zachary Phillip Brailsford

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

'Va Savoir's' Love Lives Are Magically Tangled - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Movie review, 'Va Savoir' - chicagotribune.com Michael Wilmington, November 15, 2001

FILM; A Film, Like a Face, Is Part of a Body David Thomson from The New York Times, September 23, 2001

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Headlong Heartbreak Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, September 28, 2001

Va savoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN (Histoire de Marie et Julien)

France Italy (150 mi) 2003

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Jacques Rivette creates another refined and sublimely enrapturing composition in The Story of Marie and Julien, a film that ostensibly chronicles the relationship between a brooding, reclusive restorer of antique clocks and occasional blackmailer named Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and the elusive object of his affection, a beautiful and enigmatic woman named Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) whom he had once known at a time when both were emotionally unavailable. As the film opens, a pensive Julien sits on a park bench and begins to experience an unsettling, prescient dream involving his passing acquaintance, Marie, and in the process, betrays a sense of regret and missed opportunity at their seemingly star-crossed romantic fate. Now, a year later, his haunted, unrequited melancholy now seems entirely reconcilable when he runs into a hurried Marie once again while she rushes to catch a bus at a busy intersection and he, to an appointment with the subject of his blackmail: a woman called Madame X (Anne Brochet) who had perhaps murdered her sister. Illustrating familiar Rivette imagery of interweaving parallel realities, manifestation of the subconscious, and elliptical mystery, the film evolves into a gorgeously hypnotic, slow simmering, and smoldering tone piece on chance, connection, and destiny.

Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance (excerpt)

Julien is a middle-aged clock repairman who lives alone in a big house with only his cat for company. He has acquired some items which threaten a businesswoman, Madame X, who trades in fake fabrics, and begins to blackmail her. Coincidentally, it is at this time that he renews an acquaintance with a young woman, Marie, with whom he had a brief affair a year ago. After the death of her boyfriend, Marie is alone and appears desperate for Julien’s company. Moving into Julien’s house, Marie soon manages to rekindle their former passion. But then Julien begins to notice something strange about Marie. When she cuts herself, she does not bleed; from time to time, she drifts into a trance-like state; and she seems obsessed with furnishing a small room at the top of his house. Ironically, Madame X holds the key to this mystery…

Histoire de Marie et Julien is a marked contrast to Jacques Rivette’s previous feature, Va savoir (2000), and represents a kind of return to the darker, more abstract film of the director’s past. Essentially, the film is a ghost story, but one in which the supernatural elements are gradually, very subtly, bled into our field of view. Everything we see appears not just plausible but tacitly real, even though reason tells us it must be fantasy. View films have blurred the distinction between reality and unreality as effectively as this one, and for that reason alone it should be regarded as one of Jacques Rivette’s most significant achievements.

The film’s prologue presages what is to come – a conventional scene from a romantic drama ends abruptly with a horror twist, only to be dismissed as a dream sequence. We are then diverted by the thriller sub-plot involving the enigmatic Madame X before ending up in the film’s central story strand – the rebirth of the affair between Julien and Marie. For the next thirty minutes or so, as Rivette languorously explores the relationship of the two characters (with some pretty explicit and beautifully choreographed love scenes), it looks as if we are in a conventional, typically French romantic drama. Wrong again. Little by little, the fantasy elements in the plot emerge and what Rivitte ultimately delivers is not a familiar love story but something much more unusual, and strangely far more fulfilling. This is a tale in which the carnal is subsumed by the spiritual, a film that momentarily widens our perspective, or at least causes us to ponder on our existence and what may lie beyond the curtain that retains us in this thing we call life.

At first sight, it would appear improbable that a director of Rivette’s reputation would even consider making a film with a fantasy component, but then even a cursory examination of his filmography points out that this is no ordinary directory and a number of his films do have a surrealist dimension – for example, Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974). The rigorous naturalism that most defines Rivette’s cinema allows the director to push the boundary more effectively than a director who has a reputation for artifice and whimsy, and makes it easier for an audience to accept what his camera is portraying, even if what we see is beyond our experience or imagination. Perhaps the only other film director who had this talent for making the fantastic appear so believable and relevant was Jean Cocteau, and certain elements of Histoire de Marie et Julien appear to have been influenced by Cocteau’s unique contribution to cinema.

This film began its life back in 1975, and was intended to be one of four films Rivette planned to make under the umbrella title Scènes de la Vie Parallele. Although two of the films were completed, two were abandoned, and one of these was the film Marie et Julien, which was to have starred Leslie Caron and Albert Finney. Twenty-eight years on, Rivette resurrected the central themes of Marie et Julien, effectively re-writing the script from scratch because he was unable to make any sense of the shorthand notes that he had written with Claire Denis.

For this “born again” version of Marie et Julien, Rivette had only one actress in mind for the part of Marie – Emmanuelle Béart. This popular and talented actress had famously worked with the director twelve years before on his masterful meditation on the creative process, La Belle noiseuse (1991). That film largely contributed to the young Béart’s reputation and subsequent success, which she more than repays with another extraordinary performance – possibly her best to date – in Histoire de Marie et Julien. Credit should also go to her co-stars: Jerzy Radziwilowicz is perfect as the taciturn, slightly menacing Julien, whilst Anne Brochet gives a haunting performance as the strange, almost ethereal, Madame X. However, at the end of the day, this film belongs to Béart (even if she is – occasionally – out-staged an aspiring thespian feline). Béart’s ability to engage with an audience and arouse genuine emotion pays dividends and makes this, Rivette’s darkest, most mysterious film, both a compelling human drama and a sensually composed work of art.

Histoire de Marie et Julien: Jacques Rivette's Material Ghost Story ... Michael J. Anderson from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004

A Test of Faith: Jacques Rivette's Story of Marie and Julien Douglas Messerli from Hyperallergic, February 14, 2016

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

The story behind The Story of Marie and Julien - Like Anna ... Filmbrain from Like Ana Karina’s Sweater, February 10, 2006

The Story of Marie and Julien (2003, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 10, 2008

Histoire de Marie et Julien | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey

Story of Marie and Julien : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov from DVD Talk

DVD Verdict Review - The Story Of Marie And Julien Dan Mancini from DVD Verdict

DVD Verdict - The Emmanuelle Beart Collection [Kerry Birmingham]

The Lumière Reader » Film » The Story of Marie and Julien (DVD) Brannavan Gnanalingam

Reeling Reviews with Laura & Robin Clifford

A Beautiful Troublemaker: Rivette's Mystery Without Facts | Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Films of the decade: “The Story of Marie and Julien” - Salon.com Glenn Kenny, December 18, 2009

histoire de marie et julien - review at videovista Paul Higson

Channel 4 Film [Sam Jordison]

User reviews from imdb Author: George Mpoukatsas from Europe

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The Story of Marie and Julien (2003) Mubi

Jacques Rivette - Histoire de Marie et Julien aka The Story of ... Avax Home

Jacques Rivette at MOMI: Weeks 7 & 8 Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door, December 21, 2006

Variety Reviews - The Story of Marie and Julien - Film Reviews ... Scott Foundas

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Story of Marie and Julien Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]

Critic's Choice: New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, July 19, 2005

THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS B 87

aka: Don’t Touch the Axe

France Italy (137 mi) 2007

A somber, smoldering under the surface film moving at a snail’s pace that resembles but goes back in time even further than Patrice Chéreau’s GABRIELLE (2005), which features another battle of the sexes wrapped in a chamber drama of manners. We go back another hundred years to the Napoleanic era, based on a Balzac story that begins in wit and flirtateousness but ends badly. Rivette regular Jeanne Balibar plays the deliciously coquettish role of the Duchess, who grows weary of her own marriage (her husband is never seen) and delights in interjecting herself, even if ever so briefly, into the lives of others, usually while parading around in jewels and furs and horse-drawn carriages, immersed in the upper crest of Parisian society, featuring fair ladies and sumptuous balls, where men are bound by a code of chivalry. In this costume drama, set in the most elegant and aristocratic of settings, most of it shot in natural or candlelight, the Duchess takes an interest in a General whose reputation precedes him, a hero in the Napoleanic army, having proved his mettle by surviving several years locked in an African prison, a story that initially intrigues the curious-minded lady. She professes interest, but pushes him away with his every advance, turning the tables on him with her indescribable wit and charm, completely in keeping with her social status, which she mercilessly flaunts. General Montriveau, on the other hand, played by France’s answer to Ben Affleck, perhaps the worst featured actor in Europe, Guillaume Depardieu, who helped ruin Leos Carax’s career in POLA X (1999), remains enthralled with what he can’t possess, only desiring her more with each rejection. While Rivette knowingly chose this actor for a part where his natural clumsiness as an actor could work to the film’s benefit, sadly, it had just the opposite effect for me, as in my view he is so out of his league that he ruins nearly every scene in which he appears.

So long as the Duchess remains fully in control, the film is sumptuously elegant, where the audience can delight in her bright and charming manner, much of which humorously disguises her real feelings or intentions, which deprives the emasculated General from ever having the upper hand. Instead she leads him around on a short leash which has him fuming after awhile, further exacerbated by her practice of always making him wait outside her room while she spends hours finding the right mood to make her entrance. Whenever the General does utter a word, he is graceless as well as clueless how to express himself admirably and comes off as a bit of a cad. In these sequences, the camera is largely static, where the darkened, claustrophobic interiors, filled with unused empty space, a metaphor for his diminutive stature, shrinks even further through disuse. But when the General has had enough and decides not to play along any more, refusing to respond to any of her hand-written notes, her behavior grows more agitated and downbeat, reflected in the increased camera movement.

The story is told with brief, interrupting chapter headings, most of which have an amusing effect. While the nearly full house rarely laughed in this screening, as much of the dialogue just lay there flat, this is really a comedy of manners, where the excessive privileges of their powdered richesse is revealed through exaggerated mannerisms and flowerly, at times flamboyant language, like something out of The Three Muskateers. After spending so much time in the gloomy mood of darkened interior rooms, the sudden shock of an outdoors sequence has a huge impact when the General is once again sailing the high seas. The film is told nearly entirely in flashback, with a short opening and closing sequence that does an excellent job revealing the gulf that lies between them, offering a final comment on the noble code of chivalry and gallantry.

Signandsight Review [Ekkehard Knörer]

Behind "Don't Touch the Axe," hides a film destined never to be shot. The title of this film is – or would have been – "Next Year in Paris." But Jacques Rivette and his producer weren't able to find funding for the film, in which Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu were to play the leads. It's hard to believe, but true: in film-land France, the almost octogenarian Jacques Rivette, veteran of the Nouvelle Vague and one of the greatest living filmmakers, can't raise money for an ambitious project that would have followed up on his major works from the 1970s.

Rivette can hardly conceal his disappointment as he tells this story at the press conference. Of course there's hardly anyone here, unlike just a few minutes ago when people flocked to hear Jennifer Lopez discuss her film "Bordertown". Every single question is an insult to the director. Depardieu is brazenly asked twice about his father, as if he owed his acting career to his father's success and influence.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as his fabulous acting in "Don't Touch the Axe" amply proves. When the financing for the larger project fell through, Rivette went looking for a smaller production for the same actors. The result was a chamber piece, based very closely on Honore de Balzac's "La Duchesse de Langeais." The story originally bore the title "Ne touchez pas la hache" before it was incorporated into Balzac's "La Comedie humaine." In it, Balzac tells the story of a love affair that passes rapidly from flirt to catastrophe."

Montriveau, a hero in Napoleon's army, (Depardieu) meets the Duchesse de Langeais (Balibar), who belongs to the cream of Parisian society. She is married, but her husband never appears. Montriveau comes back to Paris full of exotic stories of the desert, and seduces the duchess with his lore. They come closer, but what at first glance looks like a reasonably uncomplicated love affair soon turns into a game of love and passion that transgresses every rule known to Parisian society. Very quickly, however, society is left out of things altogether. Instead of a love affair, Montriveau and the duchess become caught up in a war: a battle for love. Sharp words clash like swords, siege is laid, the two dig trenches and lie in ambush, retreat and attack, they show no mercy and toss counsel to the wind. The battle is fought in boudoirs, hallways and sofas, in front of doors and inside salons. No blood flows, and yet no less than life and happiness are at stake.

The film is utterly concentrated on its main characters. Everything becomes a question of timing. Every gesture counts, every last glance has weight, the trembling of Balibar's upper lip is an expression of inner turmoil and Depardieu's brooding heralds untold disasters. Rivette's cameraman William Lubtschansky transforms words and movement into installations of light and darkness, which seem to freeze periodically like paintings. Fires crackle incessantly in the salons' fireplaces, yet their calming effect is misleading. The passing of time is shown with titles, and Balzac's words accompany the development of events. Rivette dramatises nothing, he observes Balibar and Depardieu using words that are sharper than foils and rapiers, and watches them – merciless as Balzac – as they hope and suffer, fear and fight.

There could be no greater a clash than between this exquisitely wrought tale and the film which preceded it, Gregory Nava's human rights pornography "Bordertown". Programming the one before the other is sheer barbarity, and yet standard festival fare. That's no reproach, after all it can hardly be avoided. But it must be said.

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)

After his 1991 film La belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) French director and erstwhile nouvelle vague member Jacques Rivette again adapts local literary giant Balzac in Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe). The film was part of the recent Berlinale Competition and is based on the novel La duchesse de Langeais (The Duchess of Langeais), which is part of Balzac’s sprawling La comédie humaine. Rivette, himself known for his sprawling epics (Noiseuse clocked in at four hours, his almost unseen Out 1 at 13), feels completely at home in what is essentially a bare mise-en-scene of Balzac’s verbal jousting between a Napoleonic war hero and a married Restoration temptress. At 137 minutes, this almost feels like a briskly paced Rivette short. It may sound like silly wordplay, but it is nothing short of rivetting.

Jeanne Balibar (the protagonist of Rivette’s Va savoir / Who Knows) is the Duchess of Langeais, who is the star of the sumptuous balls and feats of 1820s Restoration Paris. She is married to a Duke who remains out of sight not only in the film but apparently also in her life. At a party, she is drawn to the exotic stories of dashing general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a Napoleonic war hero. Despite the fact that each is considered a hero among their peers and each embodies the values that their respective classes exalt, the two are polar opposites. They are of different times, have different backgrounds and should be mutually exclusive.

But as Balzac (and, by extension, Rivette) understand, history knows no clear breaks between one period and the next and it is exactly at these perceived fault lines that the most interesting stories are told. And in this story, it is one of the most shockingly familiar yet utterly compelling clichés that underpins everything (and explains how history glues together one epoch to the next): the fact that opposites attract.

The main struggle between Langeais and Montriveau, who start seeing each other after a flighty introduction, is a romantic one; romantic in both the Gothic and amorous senses of the word. There is no love of the happy-ever-after variety in the air, however, only a passionate kind of electricity that becomes almost as unbearable for the audience as it is for the not-quite-lovers. Langeais and Montriveau act like two extremely well-behaved, well-groomed and infinitely decorous magnets that face each other with their attracting poles bared, only to quickly flip themselves when they get so close together they will have to click. This cat-and-mouse game between the two is created by only two components: Balzac’s words and the actors’ physicality, and Rivette’s mise-en-scene -- theatrical in its long takes and with an emphasis on movement of the characters rather than the camera -- allows for the sheer force of both words and performances to shine through.

Balibar and Depardieu (originally set to co-star in another Rivette project for which funding fell through) are more than up to the task, reuniting verbal and physical fireworks for the strongest show of on-screen passion since two cowboys made out in a tent on Brokeback Mountain (which was also based on a literary work, though there it was the absence of words rather than their presence that took things beyond the boiling point).

Rivette, who co-wrote the screenplay with Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, follows Balzac as closely as Pasolini followed the book of books for his Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew); almost to the letter, filling in minor scenes with words culled from other writings by the nineteenth-century novelist. Michel Piccoli, who also starred in La belle noiseuse, and former Rivette-muse Bulle Ogier co-star in throwaway roles.

Just how good the two-hour plus showdown between the Duchess and the general is, is illustrated by the fact that Ne touchez pas la hache (which was Balzac’s original, ominous title before the story became part of the Comédie humaine) is bookended by scenes set five years after the encounters between Langeais and Montriveau, when the latter finally finds his object of desire again in an enclosed Majorcan convent. These scenes thus reveal early on that both will survive their fatal-looking games of love and chance, but the intensity of their performances and the sheer force of Balzac’s own words makes you fear for their lives (and their sanity) throughout. Ne touchez pas la hache may not be a thriller in the conventional sense of the word, it certainly is one of the most spine-chilling films of the year.

Filmbrain

Two names that stood out in this year's (dare I say it?) mediocre competition lineup were Jacques Rivette and Jirí Menzel – key figures from the French and Czech nouvelle vague that are, fortunately for us, still making fine films.

Though it's unlikely that Ne Touchez Pas La Hache (Don't Touch the Axe) or Obsluhoval Jsem Anglického Krále (I Served the King of England) will be remembered as either director's greatest work, both films approach filmmaking and storytelling in a way that reveals a tremendous gap between the old masters and many of their contemporary peers in competition.

A trend I noticed at this year's festival were films that made a concerted effort to eschew traditional cinematic narrative and aesthetic techniques – the very constructs that both Rivette and Menzel happily embrace, yet do so in a way that that still manages to feel fresh. As much as I admire the directors who opted for an alternate, more contemplative route, it soon became obvious that not everybody can (or did) get away with this. Gorgeous cinematography and long takes does not a Bela Tarr make, and many of the films suffered from stripping away too much, leaving us with pretty pictures, but otherwise uncompelling stories, characters, ideas, etc.

The most common response I heard when asking people their thoughts on Don't Touch the Axe was (after a pregnant pause), "Well, it was Rivette." A flippant reaction that isn't incorrect, for even if the film was without credits there'd be no question as to who helmed this remarkable (albeit imperfect) film.

This isn't the first time Rivette turned to Balzac as a source, but unlike Out 1or La Belle Noiseuse, which were "inspired by," Don't Touch the Axe is very much a literal adaptation of the novella The Duchess of Langeais. (I've been told that the dialog is lifted verbatim from the original text.) Best described as a romantic duel, Balzac's novella tells of the tumultuous relationship between a French General, Armand de Montriveau (Guilluime Depardieu) and the coquettish but married Duchess Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar). Their story is less a traditional romance than it is an ill-fated dance between two equally passionate characters who are undone by machinations of their own making. When the Duchess first meets the heroic but dull General, she is fascinated by his tales of travel and adventure. Underestimating his character, she quickly sets out to win his affections, only to sternly rebuke him when he lets his feeling be known. Yet we soon learn that the seemingly simple Armand is far more cunning than we first realized. Kidnapping the Duchess results in her yielding to his demands, which ultimately takes the fun out of it for him. With the shift in power now in his favor, Armand does little but torment her for weeks on end – refusing to see her or answering her many letters. Naturally, things go too far, and extreme choices are made that will destroy them both.

Don't Touch the Axe is a study of two individuals for whom the game is more interesting than the outcome; where the act of conquering is more satisfying than the victory. Beyond Balzac's dialog, Rivette masterfully utilizes a handful of cinematic techniques to capture the introspective nature of the story – the yearning, the waiting, and the tormented passion. From his use of varying degrees of light (primarily from candle and/or hearth) to reflect mood, to the exaggerated ambient sounds of squeaky floorboards or crackling fireplace that almost compete with the dialog, there isn't a single facet of the direction that is superfluous or without intention. There's also something very theatrical to the whole affair – from the opening of a curtain that leads into a scene, to the many intertitles Rivette employs, which range from the descriptive, "Five years earlier" to the editorial, "If the previous scene was the civil period in this sentimental war, this is the religious one."

With the exception of a few external scenes that bookend the film, most of the action takes place in the confined spaces of sitting rooms, parlors, or bedrooms. Working once again with cinematographer William Lubtchansky, Rivette positions his actors to create a series of beautifully staged tableaux that are at times breathtaking. Lubtchansky's camera work is astounding in its economy, with every camera movement married to Rivette's choreography of the characters.

The one weakness in the film is Depardieu fils, who lacks the depth required for his many moments of quiet contemplation, especially when compared to Balibar, who turns in the finest performance of her career. Though short by his normal standards (137 minutes), Don't Touch the Axe isn't likely to create a new breed of Rivette fans. This is a slow film, and will no doubt leave many agitated. (Even the press screening saw a large amount of walkouts.) However, die-hards won't be disappointed. This is a film that begs repeated viewings, and I sincerely hope it manages to find a US distributor.

Jacques Rivette adapts a classic of French realist fiction | Film ... Godfrey Cheshire from Indy Week

Appropriately, coming from a filmmaker whose work contains so many doubles and mirrorings, Jacques Rivette's latest movie has two titles, which in turn reflect two successive titles of its source material, a story by Honoré de Balzac. In English the film is called The Duchess of Langeais, a direct translation of the new title Balzac gave his tale 10 years after he wrote it, when he decided to reissue it as part of a collection.

In French, the movie goes by the title Balzac originally gave his fiction: "Ne touchez pas le hache" (Don't touch the ax). If the latter moniker sounds less like a polite costumer about a duchess than, say, a Hitchcock film or even a Sex Pistols song—well, the sinister, anarchic, insinuating tones of that reading prove oddly appropriate to the turbulent undercurrents of Rivette's film, which superficially seems far more genteel.

Though the French title appears nowhere in the movie's English-subtitled U.S. version, its words are heard in a scene that comes exactly halfway through the drama. Until now, we've been watching as the gruff, stoic, handsome Napoleonic general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu) pursues Antoinette, the married, hyperflirtatious but unresponsive Duchess of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar), through one 1820s Parisian drawing room after another, declaring his love to no avail.

In this scene, at yet another ball, Antoinette comes up as Armand darkly tells a female partygoer of something remarkable he heard in London recently. He was visiting the Tower of London when a guard told him, "Don't touch the axe." Said blade, of course, was the one used to decapitate Charles I in 1649.

In Armand's telling, the phrase falls strangely, but unsurprisingly, flat. There's nothing remarkable about it. It's like a punch line with no joke.

Except to Antoinette. Looking suddenly paler, she says to Armand, "I felt your eyes were on my neck when you said that." As indeed they were. Within seconds, he warns her that before the night is over something dreadful will happen to her. In the context of upper-crust swells making polite chat at a fancy-dress ball, the general's seismic declaration is as startling as a burst of gunfire. After it, everything about The Duchess of Langeais—or the other title, if you prefer—is completely different.

Besides its dramatic importance, there's something else fascinating about this scene's dialogue: its discrete cultural and political resonances. In one sense, it draws certain parallels between England and France and their common experience with the trauma of regicide. It also recalls that the excesses of the English Restoration were later mirrored by those of the period on view in The Duchess of Langeais: the Bourbon Restoration, which was imposed on the French by the English and their allies after Napoleon's defeat.

According to those versed in Balzac—which I'm not—every nuance in fictions like this one is rife with political meanings. Rivette and his screenwriters, Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, reportedly tried to make their film ultra-faithful to Balzac. Yet few viewers today, even in France, can be expected to grasp the intricacies or import of the Restoration context. So what's the point of that fidelity?

Admitting another motive, Rivette turned from politics to language, telling an interviewer, "From the very beginning, our aim ... was to transpose Balzac's writing into the grammar of film. His writing plays on contradictory forces that generate a kind of system of contained explosions. Long sentences interspersed with parentheses, surprising changes of speed, a way of recounting events almost by leaving out the most important things. That's why Balzac has to be read word by word. It's three-dimensional writing."

Respectfully, I would suggest that The Duchess of Langeais also can't hope to engage most viewers in how it translates Balzac's prose style into film. Only French Lit savants would get it, much less care. Yet Rivette's comment does prompt the thought that "language" suggests two possible perspectives from which the film can be understood. One is the language of today's commercial movies, the common coin we're all familiar with. The other is the cinematic parlance introduced by the French New Wave, a movement in which Rivette was, and remains, a leading figure.

Interpreted according to the first of those "languages," The Duchess of Langeais can no doubt seem old-fashioned, stiff, artificial. Here we have a tale of aristocratic passions divided (by the "Don't touch the axe" scene) into mirror-halves: Armand pursues Antoinette without success; then, after her heart shifts, she pursues him with equally dispiriting results. Most movies give us people achieving connection; here, all is baffling disconnection. Most movies allow their characters finally to speak their hearts. In this drama, what's striking is that one character is always speaking against his or her heart. The result is a tale that refuses to "say" what we want to hear (or rather, that obliges us to articulate what it won't).

Since the language of commercial movies is more and more about obvious meanings and ready satisfactions, such withholding and indirection can seem tantamount to failure. And today film style is mostly about transparency, fluidity, easy ravishment. What are to we make of a movie in which the drawing rooms seem like they could be on a theater stage; where the characters' boots creak noticeably against the floorboards and the camera always maintains a discreet, slightly formal distance from its human subjects? Are these not the marks of a misguided astringency?

Interpret those same attributes via the language of the French New Wave, though, and suddenly meanings are reversed: Empty is full, staid is fresh, the "failure" of conventional cinematic prose becomes the full flowering of a personal poetic.

Though the critics-turned-directors who revolutionized cinema in the '50s and '60s as the New Wave are best known for the doctrine of the auteur—the director as a film's author, which assumes that images rather than words are movies' primary language—their work also involved "reading" a film not just by its overt contents but also in light of, first, the director's previous work and predilections, and, second, the cinematic traditions he inhabits and revises. The Duchess of Langeais merits both viewpoints.

I recall going into L'Amour Fou, the first Rivette film I ever saw, at UNC-Chapel Hill circa 1972, staggered by the thought that it was nearly five hours long, including intermission, and figuring it better have lots going on to keep my interest for even a fraction of that time. There didn't, however, turn out to be much "going on" in the film; on the contrary, it was far more contemplative than dramatic. Yet I was so seduced by its elongated rhythms and utter originality that I came out, turned around and went back in for the next show.

For decades Rivette was known as the New Wave's poet of duration. His films averaged more than fours hours. (The longest, the 13-hour Out One, was legendary for having been shown only once, at Le Havre in 1971, before being revived a couple of years ago; it may be available soon on DVD.) His penchant for length was part of his reputation as the New Wave's most "experimental" director: He wasn't telling well-made stories as François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer did, or even crafting quirky personal essays in the Jean-Luc Godard manner. Rather, he was testing the limits of film form through improvisation, aleatory narratives and so on. His tendency to reflect on the processes and self-understandings of art—the sources of all those doubles and mirrorings, no doubt—drew comparisons to the likes of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges.

The Duchess of Langeais, at a little more than two hours, of course is not unconventionally long, nor it is experimental in the overt sense of many earlier Rivette films. Yet it seems not to contradict but to subsume and affirm the tendencies of his previous work, and it does that in a way that recalls an axiom of the past century's art: Scratch an iconoclastic modernist and underneath you'll find a confirmed classicist.

Indeed, the teenage cinephiles who became the New Wave's key innovators were in love with the language of the classic cinema—the language of Griffith, Murnau, Renoir and Ford—and sought only to refashion it for themselves, as a means of personal expression. At age 80, it's little surprise that Rivette is still so in love with that language that he has no further need to experiment or reach for the personal; it now belongs to him, and he can use it with the nothing-left-to-prove supple understatement of a master.

Seen from this perspective, The Duchess of Langeais is something else again: a work of extraordinarily subtle beauty and concentrated meaning. Surrender to its premises—as I once did to L'Amour Fou's—and it sweeps you into an alternate cinematic universe where every scene contains small miracles (or "explosions") of light, movement, gesture, allusion, revelation, all of it founded on the brilliantly stylized performances of Balibar and Depardieu.

In this universe, we again contemplate the great antitheses bequeathed us by the Romantic era: Ego and God, Life and Art, Self and Society. But here the warring pairs are united by the very thing that eludes the tale's couple: an alignment of love and understanding, the product of one artist's serene yet encompassing insight.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Don't Touch the Axe (2006) Jonathan Romney, January 2008

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

James Naremore, “La Duchesse de Langeais“ James Naremore excerpt from Films of the Year, 2008, Film Quarterly, Summer 2009, republished in Cine-Files, Spring 2017

Not Coming To A Theater Near You [Ian Johnston]

Careful with that axe, Guillaume. Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

The Duchess of Langeais: She Got Game | Village Voice Nathan Lee, February 19, 2008

Remembering the Magnetic, Thudding Guillaume ... - Village Voice Benjamin Strong on the death of actor Guillaume Depardieu

Evénement. Don’t touch the axe by Jacques Rivette Antoine Thirion from Cahiers du Cinéma

The House Next Door [Dan Callahan] February 13, 2008

REVIEW | Holding Court: Jacques Rivette's 'The Duchess of Langeais ... Nick Pinkerton from indieWIRE, February 21, 2008

Balzac Book Goes Bust on Big Screen; Atrocities in Africa Andrew Sarris with a decidedly negative take from The NY Observer, February 12, 2008

Armond White another wrecking crew review from The New York Press

Out 1 Film Journal: Great Period...period. James Hansen, March 14, 2008

Duchess of Langeais, The | costume drama | french | rivette | romance Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel

Class Acts : The New Yorker David Denby

Cinemattraction.com [Sheila Cornelius]

Chris Knipp • View topic - Jacques Rivette: The Duchess of ...

OhmyNews (Howard Schumann)

Simon Abrams Twitch

Jumper - Be Kind Rewind - The Duchess of Langeais -- New York ... David Edelstein from New York magazine

Don’t Touch The Axe (2007, Jacques Rivette) Brandon’s Movie Memory, April 22, 2008

The Lumière Reader Brannavan Gnanalingam

Tickets to the Dark Side: The 43rd Chicago International Film Festival ... Robert Keser from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2008

DON’T TOUCH THE AXE (Jacques Rivette, 2007) Dennis Grunes, March 28, 2009

“The Duchess of Langeais” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, February 22, 2008

Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) FilmsdeFrance

CineScene [Howard Schumann]

Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin

DVD Times Noel Megahey

New York Sun [Meghan Keane]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Jennie Kermode

culturevulture.net - review George Wu

Richard von Busack [Metroactive.com]

Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]

Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]

Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]

Jam! Movies Liz Braun

Variety.com [Russell Edwards]

The Duchess of Langeais (2007) Mubi

Balibar Reaches Back Into the Future - February 15, 2008 - The New ... Steve Dollar interviews actress Jeanne Balibar from The New York Sun, February 15, 2008

The Duchess of Langeais | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

The Duchess of Langeais Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New York

Don't Touch the Axe Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Ne Touchez Pas la Hache (Don't Touch the Axe) | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

The Duchess of Langeais: Movie Showtimes and Reviews on ... Stephen Hunter from The Washington Post

The Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS'; Behind the Mask of Civility, the Battles Rage On Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, February 22, 2008

AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (36 vues du Pic Saint Loup) B+ 90

France Italy (84 mi) 2009

All of our dragons are really princesses waiting for us to free them. —Jean-Luc Godard, probably stolen, of course

A pensive film that offers a philosophical view on creativity and the meaning of life, one that suggests every creative thought has the potential for change, to offer the world something new, which has a healing or beneficial value that wasn’t there before it was expressed. This small film may be a metaphor for the director’s own personal testament, as he’s been a filmmaker of the first order for nearly half a century, known for his lengthy and ponderous films, but also for bringing a literate maturity to the French New Wave, where he was one of the original founders who also wrote extensive film criticism essays for Cahiers du Cinéma, an artist with the dual role of making but also critiquing and analyzing films. Always something of an outsider whose independence of vision could be breathtaking, his style, including the length of time between films, never fit into conventional genres. Even his initial film, PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), shot on weekends with no money and no sets on donated or leftover film stock, makes extensive documentary style use of the city itself, revealing the city as a living force, but also uses a maze-like narrative to create a world where characters enter, then disappear, often without a trace, in much the same way that thousands of strangers enter our perception and consciousness every day, only to disappear without a trace. Rivette seems haunted by memory in much the same way, as its easy to lose sight of the importance of things, where time has a strange way of shifting our priorities. This is a film that looks back, that dwells on the lingering effect of regrets that have a crippling way of accumulating weight over time, but also looks straight ahead with an almost naïve and childlike fascination in anticipation of what new ideas will be discovered and how they may change the direction of our own lives. Rivette is a Renaissance man whose films have been intellectual and cultural markers through the years, where his role has been planting the seeds for new generations to come. But at this stage in his life as one of the oldest living filmmakers, he may have a tendency to look back and see how the world around him was shaped and formed and what part he played in it.

Always at home in the theater, using a stable of actors who lived and thrived under his leadership, Rivette was never afraid to tackle the great classics, but seemed more interested in exploring with great curiosity the fickle and strange nature of human relationships. Not only actors, Pascal Bonitzer, former writer for André Téchiné in the 80’s, has now, along with Christine Laurent, collaborated with Rivette in writing his films for the past twenty years, showing great familiarity as well as staying power, Bonitzer since LOVE ON THE GROUND (1984) and Laurent since THE GANG OF FOUR (1989). Rivette has indicated that the idea for this film came to him while making LA BELLE NOISEUSE (1991), a nearly four hour extravaganza consumed with the nature of painting, and features a similar curiosity about the effect and influence of art. Of interest, Jane Birkin starred in that film, but they haven’t worked together again until this film, perhaps the shortest in Rivette’s career, where she returns to her small, family run circus after an absence of a decade or more, a broken down venture that might seem more appropriate in the era of Fellini’s LA STRADA (1954). The film opens with a curious little scene of Birkin stranded alone along an empty stretch of highway, her car with the hood up, where she attempts to flag down another car for help, but it drives right by only to return, where the driver of a fancy convertible sports car gets out, checks a few wires and connections and immediately gets her car working again, exiting without ever saying a word, all captured in a single shot. The economy utilized here feels effortless. Later they meet again in a small nearby town where she invites Vittorio (Sergio Casteilito) to the circus, where he is one of only a handful of customers, but takes great pleasure first in choosing his seat in a near empty arena and then in the charm and antiquity of the comical clowns routine, the only one to laugh heartily, which endears him, of course, to the actual performers. Vittorio decides to spend a few days just hanging around, attempting to spark a conversation with Birkin, whose mind lies elsewhere, so instead he develops a wonderful rapport with Alexandre (André Marcon), exploring the endless variations of his clown routine.

From behind a closed curtain, the performers enter in silence, always through the exact same curtain. Throughout the course of the film we see a constant repetition of this same act, which begins to feel like a newborn birth, as each time a performer steps out in front of an audience, it is for the very first time. Rivette shows a variation on several routines, just changing them slightly, but also adds new ones, which seem to be whatever each individual actor could learn over a short period of time, where despite the artificiality of a theatrical act, it always has an improvised feel to it. At one point, the performers enter and re-enter that same curtain speaking directly to the camera, one after another, in a rapid fire montage of proverbial expressions, each declared like some sort of battle cry. This reminds us that it is the theater, that nothing is real, yet something of consequence and meaning comes out of it, something that may influence our lives. The same goes for the performers, as while they go through the stage routines which have a claustrophobic air about them, they also live out their lives under that same stifling confinement where there are no secrets, as everyone knows everybody else’s business. In this way Vittorio gets drawn into Birkin’s private life, but only from a distance, by what he hears from others around her. Still, he offers his own voice as to small, possible changes in the routines which might improve them, as if he’s somehow become the voice of the art critic. This strange interplay between performers, an actual family, and an audience that provides feedback, provides a strange kind of symmetry that becomes electrically charged when working together that none would have on their own. This is the nature of art, that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, where someone continually offers some new variation that’s never been done before, which has an impact in people’s lives, even those who helped create it. Almost impossible, by the way, not ot think of Fellini’s miraculous final scene in 8 ½ (1963). This is a wonderful little film that has a strangeness all its own, as characters literally walk in and out of the screen and each other’s lives seemingly at will, coming and going, always moving in and out of a world defined as much by their past experiences as whatever the future may bring. For Rivette, the future is a performance that has never been seen, as if it’s his frail voice speaking personally, as there must be many projects that hold his attention that age, declining health, and time simply won’t allow him to experience. But performers continue to step out from behind the curtain, and the world awaits every new inspiration.

Around a Small Mountain Cliff Doerksen from The Reader

On a deserted road in the south of France, a handsome Italian gent (Sergio Castellitto) wordlessly rescues a haggardly beautiful woman (Jane Birkin) from an automotive breakdown. She’s on her way to reunite with an old-timey circus that she left under traumatic circumstances decades earlier; he attaches himself to the same concern and starts benignly stalking her while engaging various clowns, acrobats, and jugglers in philosophical dialogues about the mystery and nature of performance. This 2009 feature is as precious as it sounds but also irresistibly charming. If you’re a newcomer to the oeuvre of New Wave hero Jacques Rivette, this is a highly accessible port of entry. In French with subtitles.

Keith Uhlich Time Out New York

French New Wave staple Jacques Rivette’s shortest feature clocks in at 84 minutes, something of a surprise given the director’s penchant for lengthy, improv-heavy capriccios like Out 1. The film opens with a wordless sequence between Kate (Jane Birkin) and Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto): She’s a mysterious Parisian who’s just had a breakdown; he’s the Italian knight who rides (in growling sports car) to her rescue. It eventually comes out that Kate is returning to the one-ring traveling circus she abandoned many years before, and Vittorio ingratiates himself with the troupe to discover why. Due to Rivette’s failing health, it’s been hinted that this deceptively lighthearted lark will be his last work. The film does have about it an air of summation, or at least of farewell, as if it were the bittersweet encore at a closing-night performance. Rivette’s cinema—with its obsessive interest in actors and naturally occurring prosceniums—has always been indebted to the theater. Around a Small Mountain is his way of giving thanks before the curtain finally falls.

Around a Small Mountain travels with an itinerant one-ring circus of proud artisans, performing to shrinking rural crowds. "We're the last classics," announces one. And after a long and stubbornly marginal career heading his creative family, 82-year-old director Jacques Rivette nears closing time with this commedia dell'arte. Leads Sergio Castellitto and Jane Birkin have appeared for Rivette before; regular Pascal Bonitzer contributes to the script; Irina Lubtchansky, taking over the cinematographer's chair, does proud her recently passed father, William, Rivette's DP of 30-odd years. The premise is skeletal: Vittorio (Castellitto), an Italian passing through the Cévennes, is waylaid by the mysterious wince in the gap-toothed smile of the troupe's tightrope walker, Kate (Birkin). There's a breathable air of Southern late-summer afternoons in the public squares and campgrounds where Vittorio and Kate play their approach and retreat. Rivette inserts parentheticals of performers at work, including a reprised routine by the clowns, into which Vittorio is drawn as an incompetent substitute in a keynote scene, funny and illustrative of Rivette's improvisational practice. Rivette is known, if for nothing else, for making epically long features; this is his shortest, sidling along after the tragic secret that's kept Kate away from performing for decades. It's all slight enough to blow away, and rare enough to warrant seeing it before it does.

User reviews from imdb Author: gregking4 from Australia

AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (aka 36 Vues Du Pic Saint Loup) is the latest, and possibly final, film from French director Jacques Rivette, one of the acknowledged masters of the French New Wave. This is a slight film from the veteran, and at a brief 85 minutes it is certainly his shortest. Its thin plot is set against the backdrop of a small traveling circus that is playing to empty houses. It stars Italian actor Sergio Castellitto as Vittorio, a man who stops and helps stranded motorist Kate (Jane Birkin), a performer who is rejoining the circus after a long absence. Vittorio follows the circus around from town to town for a week, and a tentative romance develops between him and Kate. As usual Rivette's film is a mix of comedy, drama, romance and the abstract musings on the mysteries of life, with minimal action and minimal dialogue, much of it obtuse and artificial. This poignant film deals with themes of grief, loss, regret and redemption, and it treats the world as a stage as Rivette uses this insular world of performers to hold up a mirror to our own lives. The mountain of the title is more of a metaphorical one. Rivette interrupts the personal drama with reprisals of an old-fashioned clown routine. The cast includes many regulars who have appeared in the director's previous films. Around A Small Mountain may be slight Rivette, but for admirers of this 81-yea-old director's unique style and his languorous pacing that will be more than enough to satisfy them. For others though this may prove to be a bit slow and dull.

NYFF 09: "Around a Small Mountain" (Jacques Rivette, France) - Mubi Daniel Kasman from Mubi, September 30, 2009

Stepping out of the sullen romantic echo chambers of Balzac and the Bourbon Restoration in Ne touchez pas le hache, Jacques Rivette moves into the light with a gentle, simple masterwork, Around a Small Mountain (36 vues du Pic Saint Loup). In this airy film of drifting whimsy muted by melancholy, Jane Birkin stars as a traumatized ex-circus worker who has returned to her family’s tiny traveling show, rescued on the roadside at the film’s beginning by a curious wanderer played by Sergio Castellitto.

The circus travels around small towns—from the French title one might assume that the tour is circling the mountain Rivette lends a simple mythical quality to—setting up its modest tent and curling its caravans around each location like a wagon circle at ease. Birkin is casually, curiously courted by Castellitto in brief, enigmatic conversations that play just like the abbreviated bits of the circus acts—comedic sketches, juggling, and acrobatics—Rivette mysteriously teases us with, suggesting life not just as acting as an on-going act.

Drifting around the town, around the circus, around real relationships, the whole atmosphere is one of limbo; like recent Straub-Huillet, Around a Small Mountain's characters aren't humans but gods wandering our land, not quite in, not quite out. Only, gods like Jane Birkin are a little less sure of their place in this world of ours, and she glides through the film in a kind of self-contained and abstract sorrow and quietude from town to town, performance to performance. She wanders, lost; Castellito wanders, curious; and this simple duo make for a sweet, elegant, and wry look at romance, at vocation, at mourning, at theater, at life.

The scenario is the barest sketch, united by, as Castellito says at the end of the picture, a simultaneous fear of and pleasure in the freedom of the circus ring, an analogy for Rivette's cinema and its view of the world. But mostly Around a Small Mountain is not about the center but about the sidelines of life, about skirting that center of endless possibilities—thus the circus remains on outskirts of the world and its performers and devotees seem to exist on the outskirts of the circus itself. It’s a film with a great deal of space and air and relaxedness, of Birkin’s marvelous, bodily persevering melancholy, and Castellitto’s sudden gestures and romantic patience, persevering too, in his own way.

This is Rivette’s most abstract work, the one most related to his praise of Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, which saw in sci-fi film the ability to create an entirely closed world. Rivette’s new film, an outer space movie in its own way, by contrast seems infinitely open, taking place in the farthest reaches from the real world. Out in the light of nature (even inside the circus tent you feel like you are outside) this perennially grim filmmaker—who masks the dark of the world with the play of cinema—has made a movie that finally seems to remove and nearly efface itself from worldly concerns, eulogizing in a most beautiful way simply the way people move through, and around, the play of life.

Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

One of my favorite living film directors is Jacques Rivette. Rivette was once part of the original "French New Wave," a group of film critics for Cahiers du Cinema that decided to turn director and make their own films. The group also included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. The other four achieved some measure of fame, but Rivette was always the "outcast" of the group. He was the most "experimental." He completed three "New Wave" style films in the 1960s, the latter of which, L'amour fou (1968), ran over four hours. and followed them with his monumental Out 1 (1971), which ran nearly 13 hours. (The film has rarely been shown, and I keep hoping for a DVD box set someday soon.)

After that came arguably his most beloved film, though it was hardly a hit: Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), a magical movie about two women who visit a strange house. It ran just over three hours. Other highlights include the remarkable La Belle Noiseuse (1991), which ran four hours; it's about an artist regaining his muse when a beautiful young woman stays at his chateau. At least an hour of the film is devoted to watching the artist paint while Emmanuelle Beart poses naked. The amazing, epic Joan of Arc story Joan the Maid (1994), starring Sandrine Bonnaire, runs over four hours in two parts. Up/Down/Fragile (1995), Secret Defense (1998), The Story of Marie and Julien (2003) and The Duchess of Langeais (2007) each run between two and three hours. Va Savoir (2001) was two and a half hours as released in the United States, but runs closer to four hours in its director's cut.

Rivette has always used these immense lengths for musing, exploration and discovery. He's usually interested in things like the artistic process, or sometimes, very simply, romance and mystery. Very often cinema and theater and literature mirror and clash with one another. The long running times allow the viewer to sink into these movies, to become slowly, patiently, meditatively involved. I want to mention all this before I begin discussing Rivette's new movie, 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup, or -- as it is being shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival -- Around a Small Mountain. The most astonishing news about it is that it runs only 84 minutes. Apparently, this is the actual running time, not just an American edited version of something longer. Now, I'm always grateful for any lean-and-mean movie that runs less than 90 minutes, but in this case it did not seem like enough. Around a Small Mountain is certainly not a bad film. It's charming and has most of Rivette's usual touches, but it feels like a minor film.

Jane Birkin (a veteran of Rivette's films Love on the Ground and La Belle Noiseuse) stars as Kate, a French woman who starts the film stranded at the side of the road, the hood of her car propped open. Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto, from Rivette's Va Savoir) cruises by in his convertible, turns around, returns, fiddles with her engine, and fires it up, all without saying a word (and all in one shot). Later, Kate finds him in town and invites him to the circus; she works there, and is returning to it for the first time in 15 years. Vittorio becomes fascinated with the circus life and starts hanging around. He watches an act that involves a bullet and a plate, and laughs hysterically among a tiny, otherwise silent audience.

The next day, he offers some enigmatic advice on how to improve the act, and winds up befriending the clown, Alex (André Marcon). He also befriends a young, pretty high wire artist, Clémence (Julie-Marie Parmentier), and helps her evade a clueless male suitor. But he always returns to Kate, who doesn't seem quite as interested in him as he is in her. It turns out she's thinking of her lost love, Antoine, who apparently died during a dangerous bullwhip act. Kate is now pondering resurrecting the act, but the bad memories are haunting her. Vittorio seems always at the ready to offer his help, but whether it's accepted or actually very helpful is another matter. (Sometimes his answers to direct questions are interestingly evasive.) Perhaps a little more time spent mulling over these relationships and conundrums would have been helpful. They might have deepened the film past the level of whimsy.

Then comes a truly bizarre sequence in which several characters emerge, one at a time, from a tent flap, and circle around to come through again. Each time, they speak directly to the camera, offering some kind of moral or epilogue for the movie, any of which could apply. It could be argued that Rivette was picking out his own epitaph here, and a friend of mine has suggested that Rivette has deliberately made his final film here. He's now 82 and is reportedly not in the best of health. The best thing about Rivette, however, is that he has never really courted or enjoyed commercial success, and he makes films for himself. Somehow Around a Small Mountain has answered something that he, possibly at the end of his life, was thinking of. Or perhaps he's just in a silly, happy mood. Perhaps he will be the only one to ever know the truth. But for those of us who care about him, it's worth the effort.

Review: Around a Small Mountain - Film Comment Miriam Bale from Film Comment, July/August 2010

The French New Wave is winding down after a long reign. As a character says in Rivette’s late-middle-period masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse (91), as if addressing the director himself, “I will always admire you, but I feel sorry for you, too . . . I wouldn’t want to finish like you . . . in a comedy.” Whether in fulfillment of a prophecy or a statement of intent, Rivette has now made that comedy—an 85-minute film that sums up cinema from the director for whom a three-hour running time is short. How is so slight a work so dense yet so light? To answer the question with more questions: what is the weight of a jester’s gestures? Of humor without jokes? Of language drained of drama to become alliterated chains of verbal play? Around a Small Mountain is like a performance reduced to entrances and exits.

A series of questions is a fitting way to sum up a film that, while not necessarily colorful, is about creating colors. Jane Birkin plays a textile designer who devises new dyes for a living, but was originally born to a traveling circus. She returns home in an attempt to understand the traumatic accidental loss (or murder?) of her lover during a daredevil whip act 23 years previously. Sergio Castellitto plays an Italian wanderer who becomes fascinated with this sad, elegant beauty—or with her story at any rate. He also becomes this threadbare troupe’s solitary fan.

Even in a film this compact, Rivette takes his time. The action crawls along in the bright sunlight of a valley where the circus has settled temporarily. Here, the days begin and end and begin again, punctuated by short, stunning scenes of theatrically lit poses and choreography that evoke Rivette’s critical summary of mise en scène decades earlier as an “architecture of relations, moving and yet suspended in space.” It’s this Rivette, perhaps the most respected as a critic among his fellow once-Young Turks, who finally gets the spotlight here. This is not film as criticism, as with Noroît (76), but Rivette’s autobiographical tale in which watcher becomes maker, and in which the audience member (in this case the Castellitto character standing in for Rivette), so devoted that his observational appreciation is part of the art, is pushed (literally) to perform. The scene in which this occurs is the film’s core. This moment of culmination is followed immediately by the narrative’s true climax, a reenactment of the whip act. The echo effect of these two peaks make the film’s elegant, simple structure as circular and unexpected as the plot of Out 1, a 13-hour film with no resolution; Around a Small Mountain consists of two brief overlapping spectacles around which all other scenes quietly revolve.

And in Castellitto’s spectator-clown—who causes dramatic plot shifts with prank calls and who laughs at things that aren’t funny—Rivette provides a male lead, finally, to rival his decades of devotion to actresses from Juliet Berto and Jane Birkin to Geraldine Chaplin and Bulle Ogier. Castellitto is like a Hawksian Cary Grant with a dose of existential Jerry Lewis; his opening scene with Birkin is a ballet of sly subtle gestures, a silent call-and-response between bodies that seems to get to the heart of what makes pure cinema great. Rivette’s great essay “The Genius of Howard Hawks” skips over Bringing Up Baby, perhaps because it’s too physical and rhythmic to analyze in words. Yet with this filmic fairy tale he has pinpointed Hawks’s particular genius succinctly, with wordplay without weighty content and in a plein air walking ballet starring a tentative clown and a once-young waif.

Deaths of Cinema | Metteur en scène: Jacques Rivette, 1928–2016 Matías Piñeiro from Cinema Scope, Summer 2017

Love’s reach does not to everything extend, for it cannot shake or break the stab of Death.

Yet little can Death take

if in a loving heart the fear of it subsides.

Nor can Death much take at all, for it cannot

drive its fear into the heart where Love resides.

That if Death rule over Life, Love over Death.

—Macedonio Fernández, “I believed”

Over more than 60 years, Jacques Rivette was credited for “mise en scène” on his films. While his rejection of the terms “réalisation” or “direction” may have derived from a historical imperative to keep the flame of the politique des auteurs burning, it may also point towards an essential predisposition of this most evasive member of the nouvelle vague. The concept of mise en scène emphasizes arrangement rather than creation; it minimizes the notion of a single author and the channelling of the world in a single direction. It involves a degree of uncertainty that eclipses the cult of personality, the intimations of property and control that inhere in the conventional notion of authorship, and changes the focus to an attitude of observance, a recognition and appreciation of particular unities of time and place.

With the single, subtle semantic shift of “mise en scène,” Rivette highlighted the importance of encounter and interaction in his cinema. In Claire Denis’ Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990), Rivette, when asked about the loneliness that seems to attend his particular status as a filmmaker, answers clearly and assuredly that he has never felt alone. For this metteur en scène, making a film is the opposite of being alone: it is, precisely, an excuse to get together, an invitation to connect to the world. Putting together certain elements in space and time, a film becomes a document of the energy liberated by that series of unions, or reunions.

Rivette’s films derive their pulse from the present-tense vibrations developed during shooting, the amalgam of actors-crew-place-time-frame-sound. The multiple combinations of these factors make it impossible for his films to resemble each other; they are each the sum of their respective detours. Adhering to Roberto Rossellini’s dictum that form not be conceived in advance, Rivette doesn’t cultivate a distinctive “look” for his films. Rather, he is constantly escaping a look; like Alice in Wonderland, he is always moving forward to the next marvellous sight.

There is, however, a dramatic diagram that Rivette returns to repeatedly as a catalyst: the duel. In Rivette’s world, adventure emerges from the collision of pairs, but the outcome is rarely decisive. Like the protagonists of Joseph Conrad’s The Duel, Rivette’s characters meet again and again in this ritual of confrontation. This diagram appears most explicitly in Duelle (1976), with Juliet Berto’s Queen of the Moon and Bulle Ogier’s Queen of the Sun battling over a magic diamond. In a more earthly context, variations on this figure recur in the drunken confrontation in Va savoir (2001), the modelling sessions between Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart in La belle noiseuse (1991), the husband-wife conflict (complete with self-inflicted wounds) in L’amour fou (1969), or even the banter between Michel Simon and Jean Renoir in the joyful duel of fools that is Jean Renoir, le patron (1966).

As in any duel, there must be an arena, and Rivette makes sure to give his duellists plenty of space. Rivette’s interest in Mizoguchi, Preminger, and Dreyer during his years at Cahiers du Cinéma indicates the coherence and persistence of his spatial preoccupations. Wide-angle lenses, minimal editing, and distant camera positions predominate. Close-ups are used with moderation—they are too powerful. When they occur, the world trembles: they mark moments of fracture in the narratives, as in Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) or Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974). (Hands are another signal of passage in Rivette’s films: hands covering a face, or magic rings put on fingers, enable entrances to alternate or parallel worlds.) Stairs and bannisters, their presence prolonged in the frame by the ghostly shadows they cast against the walls (with William Lubtschansky’s cinematography evoking an impossible cross between a Fritz Lang noir and a Howard Hawks comedy), serve as reminders of the vertical axis—one that is less frequented in the cinema, accustomed as it is to moving sideways. Stairs open the frame to the ups and downs of camera movements, and, most importantly, imply an offscreen space—a part of the world that remains hidden, a mystery that can achieve multiple prolongations.

Rivettean duels can be epic or farcical, but they always eschew the conventional method of shot and counter-shot. Instead, the duel tends to be displayed in a single shot sustained in time and place, so that Rivette can highlight the empty space between the bodies, chart the variations in distance, and evoke the invisible energy that courses between them. In Out 1 (1970), Juliet Berto tries to bring the points of two daggers together. A magnetic force seems to prevent her from making them meet; the shot concentrates on the small gap between those points, until the daggers eject themselves from Berto’s hands and clatter to the floor.

This interest in photographing the invisible forces between two opposed bodies is also evident in scenes containing only one element. With only a single pole of energy in the shot, the frame itself becomes magnetized in counterpoint, camera movements now reacting to the game of energies: in Hurlevent (1985), the sudden tracking-in and -out shot on Olivier Cruveiller as he recovers consciousness after the opening dream sequence; Bernadette Lafont in Noroît (1976) stalking through the castle while the camera seems to track fearfully away from her, transforming every room into a potential stage for her machinations; or the simple pans in concert with Pascale Ogier’s karate moves in Le pont du Nord (1982), a kinetic response to the stillness and passivity of Bulle Ogier’s sunbathing.

The movement of Rivette’s frame is not, however, attached to the physical movements of his characters so much as to the energy generated by their bodies. Like Gérard de Nerval’s mystical inquiries into magnetism, Rivette’s camera is attempting to reveal a secret organization of the world, and the attraction and rejection of bodies produces an invisible and variable energy that transfigures Rivette’s mise en scène. When Sandrine Bonnaire dies in Secret défense (1998), the shot doesn’t track out as it would in more conventional films, for easy pathos: it tracks in, compelled to follow this mass of energy as it decreases till extinction; as the energy fades out, so the shot reduces itself. The opposite happens in La religieuse (1967) when Anna Karina finds comfort in loving Micheline Presle: as they walk hand in hand, the camera doesn’t track in to emphasize the moment, but moves back to make room for this growing passion; energy expands, taking up more space, and so the camera tracks out.

Invisible forces haunt people’s desires, and cinema can work around this paradox of the visible-invisible, as well as the exposure of characters’ emotions through their relationship to space. In Jeanne la Pucelle (1994), Sandrine Bonnaire moves across a vast courtroom trying to discern the Dauphin, her successful singling of him out from the crowd seeming less divine inspiration than attunement to his radiating energy. In La bande des quatre (1988), Inês de Medeiros, in a blind trance, finds her way to a secret key hidden in a dark corner of her house. Bounded within Rivette’s carefully demarcated geographies, these series of attractions and repulsions produce a sensual tension that leads the characters towards more undiscovered countries than are dreamt of in those geographies. For Rivette, the frame is a membrane rather than a border. From the paranoid and rushed walks in the streets of Paris in Paris nous appartient (1961), to the hysterical trespassings of Joe Dallesandro and Maria Schneider in Merry-Go-Round (1983), to the floating slow-motion movements of Jean Babilée against Bulle Ogier in Duelle, to every one of Nathalie Richard’s dances in Haut bas fragile (1995)—especially the one with Marianne Denicourt around a flight of stairs, the two performers extending their arms up and against a wall while descending together—most of Rivette’s characters attempt to unfold themselves past the limits of the frame, to other, unknown spaces beyond.

Sometimes, they even try to go beyond physical possibilities. Parallel worlds are proposed through the subversion of time and space. Céline et Julie vont en bateau explores this idea most explicitly in those sequences where the two protagonists inhabit the phantom house, but there are moments of “parallelism” even in Rivette’s less overtly fantastical films. In the most impossible kind of continuity, the beginning of La bande des quatre shows a character reading a book in a café, paying her bill, walking down some streets and into a building, waiting in a hallway, entering into an in-progress rehearsal of a Marivaux play, climbing onto the stage and breaking into her lines. Further examples can be found in the anticipatory projections of André Dussollier and the silent steps of László Szabó in L’amour par terre (1984), or the conclusion of 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (2009), where over a series of fading lights against a black background we hear narration about the destinies of every character.

For a filmmaker who, in his contemporary review of Kapò (1960), famously condemned spurious “art” as a betrayal of reality, Rivette in his own work views art as the natural medium of (and gateway to) new realities. Taking to a very concrete level André Bazin’s ideas on the fundamental impurity of cinema, Rivette “pollutes” his filmic scenarios with other artistic disciplines (music, dance, painting, theatre), relishing the possibilities that these performative encounters can produce. Musician Jean Wiener plays the music for each scene of Duelle live on the shooting stage; Roberto Plate’s paintings intervene in the main décor of L’amour par terre, stimulating camera movements and tinting the tone of the film; in Haut bas fragile, dance communicates the characters’ states of mind; Bernard Dufour painting (in the role of Piccoli’s hand) in La belle noiseuse incorporates a different experience of time (and a different experience of art) into the film’s dramatization of the encounter between artist and model; the circus acts in 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup nurture the body of the film and Jane Birkin’s conflict; theatre in L’amour fou, Out 1, La bande des quatre, Paris nous appartient, and Va savoir transforms these films into immersive experiences that blur the definitions between narrative and experimental filmmaking. Cultural hierarchy and snobbery evaporate in the face of the power generated from these amicable duels between cinema and its neighbouring arts. In Rivette, there is no need to translate one art form into another; his films simply display one art exposed, naked and unafraid, in front of another one, a moment of encounter captured in time and the energy of this complicity projected onto a screen.

This generosity and openness counterpoint the paranoia that is the motor of the Rivettean universe. Though the centre of a plot can be a void, Rivette’s characters find in that empty space a starting point. Movement comes from their suspicions about what could be occupying that centre—a conspiracy, maybe? In this sense, North by Northwest (1959) is not far from Out 1 or Paris nous appartient: all three films move inexorably towards figures of dubious existence—George Kaplan, les Treize, Juan—and can only continue moving precisely because of those figures’ inexistence. If Samuel Beckett’s characters can only exist by continuing to speak, Rivette’s characters keep moving for the same reason: they go from one side of the city to the other, wandering around big houses or turning their cramped bedrooms upside down to find the centre of their particular plot. Some, like Bulle and Pascale Ogier fabricating their storylines from a map of Paris in Le pont du Nord or Jean-Pierre Léaud insisting on the existence of the Treize in Out 1, aspire to be creators of their own centres; others, like Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier in Céline et Julie or Geraldine Chaplin in L’amour par terre, seem to achieve the lucid recognition of being characters inside a narrative.

This lucidity, painfully achieved by Anna Magnani in the last scene of Jean Renoir’s La carrose d’or (1953), has an inverted correlative in the spectator of Rivette’s films. There seems to be a sort of continuity between what happens in front of the camera and what happens behind it. This continuity reaches the spectator when the film just seen has become part of his or her experience. This is the enchanting power of Rivette’s films: in the process of watching them, you may recognize yourself on the screen. At that moment, a force strikes you. You have become a member of a Rivettean conspiracy. Just as the characters in his films become aware of their existence as fictional creatures, now you as well have been given the key to unlock your own parallel worlds of phantom cities, paranoid accomplices, magnetic fields, and eternal love.

Chris Knipp • View topic - Jacques Rivette: Around a Small ...

Around a Small Mountain (36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup) - Reverse Shot Play Time, by Damon Smith from Reverse Shot, 2009

Jacques Rivette's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup – BOMBLOG Marlo Kronberg from Bomblog, October 12, 2009

36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Around a small mountain) - Parabasis Nicole Wallenbrock from Parabasis, July 28, 2010

The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette's Phantoms - Lola Journal Adrian Martin, December 2010

Dance me to the end of love - Light Sensitive Patrick Z. McGavin, July 11, 2010

The Kraken Wakes « Film Quarterly Rob White from The Film Quarterly, Fall 2010

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Tativille: The 47th New York Film Festival: Around a Small Mountain ... Michael J. Anderson from Tativille

Strictly Film School review Acquarello

Slant Magazine (Andrew Schenker) review

36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (2009) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Around a Small Mountain (36 vues du Pic Saint Loup) | Review | Screen Dan Fainaru at Screendaily

Pedro Armocida Cineuropa

The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]

Jacques Rivette's Magic Mountain Benjamin Strong from The L magazine, October 7, 2009, also seen here: Benjamin Strong

James Hansen Out 1 Film Journal

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

CineScene [Howard Schumann] also seen here: Around a Small Mountain

Movie Review: 'Around a Small Mountain' | Arts Entertainment ... Joe Bendel from The Epoch Times

Richard Brody The New Yorker (capsule review)

The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]

36 VUES DU PIC SAINT LOUP (AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN) / Jacques ... Scott Marks from Emulsion Compulsion

Jacques Rivette's "Around A Small Mountain" - Cinema Without Borders Robin Menken

Film Review: Around a Small Mountain Eric Monder from The Film Journal International

User reviews from imdb Author: Lalit Rao (cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France

Die 66. Filmfestspiele in Venedig: Im Zirkus des Erzählens - taz.de [Translate this page] In the Circus of Storytelling, by Cristina From North from the 66^th Venice Film festival, September 7, 2009

• View topic - 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009) Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, August 21, 2008

a film by JACQUES RIVETTE Cinema Guild (pdf format)

The Auteurs Daily: Venice and NYFF. Around a Small Mountain David Hudson’s round up of links from Mubi, September 7, 2009

Boston French Film Festival 2010 and "Around a Small Mountain" David Hudson’s round up of links from Mubi, July 8, 2010

Images of the Day. Ringmasters Daniel Kasman from Mubi, July 26, 2010

Video of the day: Rivette minus Rivette Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, August 3, 2009, on YouTube (2:37)

Celia Walden Jane Birkin interview from The Telegraph, October 13, 2009

Around a Small Mountain -- Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review

Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5]

Second Look: 'Around a Small Mountain' - Los Angeles Times Dennis Lim, March 6, 2011

Close-Up Film [Paul Murphy]

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

Roach, Jay

MEET THE FOCKERS C+ 78

USA (114 mi) 2004

A follow-up to his previous film, MEET THE PARENTS, this film reviews much of the same territory. In the first film, a mumbling, bumbling Ben Stiller and his straight-laced WASP fiancé go home to meet her parents, the gentile Blythe Danner and the always worrisome Robert De Niro, who plays an overly rigid, retired CIA operative. Here, they hop into De Niro’s specially built, steel fortified, giant Hummer-like tank-on-wheels to visit Stiller’s parents, the Fockers, an overly relaxed, left-leaning Jewish couple of Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand, whose child-rearing techniques of hugs and kisses contrast with the rigid rules and fixed schedules of De Niro. While it’s all played for laughs, with the big name actors throwing their weight around in good-natured fun, it attempts to chip away at our systems of family intolerance where the children need battering rams and blow torches to get through to their inflexible parents. Overall, however, it’s a mixed review, some of the gags work, like the actual meeting of the parents, while others fall flat and are overly repetitive, like the baby and pet bits. While it’s fun, this seems mostly made for the movie-of-the-week set.

Robbins, Tim

CRADLE WILL ROCK

USA (134 mi) 1999

Cradle Will Rock Anthony Lane from The New Yorker

In 1937, Orson Welles and John Houseman tried—and, just barely, succeeded—in putting on Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock," a musical drama about prostitutes, unions, and a lot of other things that musicals were never meant to mention. Tim Robbins's picture—his most crowded, and probably his best to date—tells the story, or the interlocking stories, of that supercharged age. Houseman (Cary Elwes) and Welles (Angus Macfadyen) are merely part of the procession; we also get the saga of Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) paying Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) to paint a giant mural and then having it destroyed. As if in homage to that lost work, Robbins operates on the mural principle, moving gaily and with high technical fluency from penniless actors (John Turturro and Emily Watson) to sincere socialites like Countess La Grange (Vanessa Redgrave) and a ravishing Fascist named Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon). It could have been a mess, and there are patches where Robbins's inspiration wears a little thin; yet, all in all, his ambitious tolerance pays off, and you are happy to be hauled toward the grand—and unashamedly theatrical—finale. With Joan Cusack and Bill Murray as bashful anti-Communists, Hank Azaria as Blitzstein, and—best of all—Cherry Jones as Hallie Flanagan, the smiling mainstay of the Federal Theatre in its darkest hour.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Cradle Will Rock (1999) Philip Strick from Sight and Sound, May 2000

Introducing itself as "a (mostly) true story", Cradle Will Rock depicts the events and characters surrounding the 1936 stage production of composer Marc Blitzstein's "play with music" Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles and financed by the left-wing Federal Theater Project. The story is passingly familiar to Orson Welles admirers but otherwise so long overlooked several of director Tim Robbins' own production unit for this film assumed he was making it all up. Authentication of the key events can be found in John Houseman's autobiography Unfinished Business with its wry, admiring account of the theatrical coup achieved by boy-wonder Welles between making an all-black theatre production of Macbeth and his first film Citizen Kane (1941). But Welles plays only a small part in Robbins' complex reconstruction, assembled with the generosity of an anthologist reluctant to bypass good colourful material, particularly when it substantiates his main purpose. Given, for instance, that Blitzstein first showed his dramatic sketch for the play to Bertold Brecht (to whom Cradle Will Rock was dedicated), Robbins writes a 'ghost' Brecht into the film's action, creating another of the alternative realities which have haunted his previous films.

The unreliable senatorial campaigner in Bob Roberts and the self-deluding killer in Dead Man Walking neatly prepare the trail for Robbins' latest anti-authoritarian venture. Both characters have their deadly charm and illustrate a bigotry Robbins would find more amusing if it weren't so universal and sinister. In chilling anticipation of the McCarthy era, here a blustering congressman demands to know whether Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) is known to have Communist sympathies. And this clumsy phobia is equally apparent in desk-clerk Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack) who suspects a pro-Russian agenda in the Federal Theater's affairs, the office staff who turn against her, and the people who misinterpret the daft children's pantomime The Eager Beaver as an allegory about workers versus capitalists. Even the best intentions of Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) turn repressive in a subplot after artist Diego Rivera (Rubén Blades) proves intransigent over the subject of his mural for the Rockefeller Center. "Nothing in art is inappropriate," growls Rivera, a sentiment heartily endorsed by Robbins' screenplay which freely appropriates whatever it pleases.

The stifling of such freedom is naturally Robbins' major concern, and his films are fashioned from constraints and barriers, perpetual gulfs in communication. Dead Man Walking is a long succession of faces framed by prison bars, reappearing in Cradle with Blitzstein's imaginary private prison. A key victim in this society where free speech can spell ruin is the ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray), so dumbfounded by his collapsing world and the students who steal his routine he can barely talk except through an ungainly puppet. The agonising interdependence between the magician and the torments he has devised for himself afflicts all the puppetmasters in Cradle Will Rock, from William Randolph Hearst and Rockefeller to Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) and Rivera. In each case, the puppets finally speak up for themselves. And Crickshaw's alter ego remains alone on stage singing 'L'Internationale' to a bewildered audience until it is carried away in a coffin down Broadway.

The many parallel productions within Cradle Will Rock all conclude with a similar uncertainty, rather like the series of concerts in Bob Roberts where the refrains are so extreme ("Hang 'em high," he sings of drug dealers) that the voting public could hardly be expected to take them seriously. Crickshaw's act, Rivera's mural, the Eager Beavers, even the rehearsal for Welles' production of Doctor Faustus (in which the Seven Deadly Sins were portrayed by a "sinister puppet troupe"), are all brought to an untimely end, foreshadowing the disintegration of the Federal Theater Project itself. Less prominent performances - the fancy-dress ball, Carlo's diabolical piano concert or the behind-the-scenes steering of the Dies Committee radio-show witch hunt - also echo the arduous shaping of Blitzstein's composition, destined only for cancellation.

"I've always wanted to observe the process of art-making!" chirps art patron Countess La Grange (Vanessa Redgrave) in part-apology, one suspects, for Robbins himself who, floating his camera above a phalanx of spinning plates on the vaudeville stage, clearly regards art-making as a balancing act. From the title onwards, his film concerns itself with stability, as much in romance as in politics, as much in post-Depression recovery as in the symmetry of a single mural, as much in the Welles-Houseman unit (an alliance of opposites) as in the juggling task Robbins has set himself. It makes for quite a display of dexterity.

Striving to maintain the film's range of checks and balances is an impressive army of female activists, rebels with whole-hearted causes. With an appealing precision, each is challenged by a partner/opponent. The vulnerable Olive (Emily Watson) finds and loses an urbane union leader; the Italian fundraiser Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon) finds her match in Rivera; the redoubtable Hallie (Cherry Jones) does battle with the icy congressman; and the Countess skirmishes with her wearily wealthy husband (Philip Baker Hall). Even as would-be actor Aldo (John Turturro) is being warned by his wife (Barbara Sukowa) that Cradle Will Rock is a risky venture, Blitzstein is being warned from beyond the grave by his wife (Susan Heimbinder) he hasn't had enough sleep.

From his serpentine opening shot, Robbins would have us believe Olive is at his story's centre. Certainly her enterprise is what rescues the performance from being just a solo recital, but she is quickly absorbed by the collective participation of the entire cast. The cunning of Robbins' Wellesian dialogue lies in the amount of information it contrives to share about Roosevelt's New Deal and the rise of Mussolini, while linking Olive's plight with the song being composed in Blitzstein's studio at that very moment, a song she will eventually sing. At the same time, the booming newsreel commentary speaks of "hope for the future", exactly the theme proposed by Rockefeller for Rivera's mural.

As the story closes, all that remains of the mural is a fragment, reminding us that the near future for the Cradle generation is in fact painfully short of hope. But Robbins is disinclined towards gloom and turns the climactic Cradle performance (a touch misleadingly shown through a collection of passionate extracts) into a welter of praise and euphoria, as if by sheer force of goodwill the political tide could have been reversed. Houseman reported that apart from Blitzstein's piano only one other instrument, an accordion, accompanied the show, but the film adds several extras and the soundtrack knows no limits. While sharing Blitzstein's affection for sung drama (apparently inspired by a combination of The Threepenny Opera and Gilbert and Sullivan), Robbins concentrates on celebrating his cast and design team. With its sudden explosions of visual energy - the fancy-dress ball, the wild dance at Rivera's studio, the street parade - and its cascade of fine performances (the verbal sparring between Cary Elwes as Houseman and Angus MacFadyen as Welles provides particular enjoyment), Cradle Will Rock may not be all true but provides a concert of admirable variations.

Roberts, Kim and Eli Despres

WILDERNESS SURVIVAL FOR GIRLS C- 67

USA (80 mi) 2004

The premise of the film is interesting, 3 beautiful high school girls head off into the Colorado wilderness and stay at a family cabin in the mountains that is otherwise uninhabited, no neighbors for miles, so the girls can let themselves go. One of the three is the alpha female, one is physically attracted to her, while the other, whose parents own the house, is overly submissive. Immediately, the interrelationship dynamic is in gear, and when the alpha girl introduces a little weed for pleasure, we know we’re in for a bumpy ride.

During the afternoon, the girls strip for a little sun, but fear they are being spied upon, so they retreat to the safety of their cabin and smoke some weed, immediately sensing things are a little different. When a man with a flashlight enters the premises and initially appears to have designs on one of the girls, he is halted in his tracks by a rifle, which the alpha girl points straight at him. Not having any better ideas, they tie him up and plan to point a rifle at him all night long, sending one to fetch the police, but in her condition of being high for the first time in her life, she can’t get the car started. It turns out the guy admittedly has been unlawfully staying there, but they begin to suspect he may be the killer who murdered a couple of girls on this very site 8 years ago, a traumatic incident which has kept the girls from just exactly this kind of adventure until now.

The story then veers into a presumption of guilt or innocence, none of which works very well, as it's never about the guy, who hardly matters at all as he’s just a diversion. There’s little we ever learn about him, it’s always about the girls. The dynamic betwen the girls is really the best thing in the film, as at times they turn against one another, make outstanding confessions and accusations, and once the guy turns up, the interest in their story falls flat, paying too much attention on what to do with the guy, which ends up making these girls out to be a couple of twits. They haven’t really got a clue. This is unfortunate, as the pacing and suspense is never really activated by the guy, but by the girls. Saddled down by what to do with the guy, the film pretty much loses all interest, yet plays out in predictable fashion.

Movie review: 'Wilderness Survival for Girls' - chicagotribune.com Sid Smith from The Chicago Tribune

An unmistakable pop myth of our time is that of young girls alone in a house, besieged by some sort of homicidal baddie; it's been a plot mainstay for cinematic thrillers, not to mention campfire bull sessions, for decades.

While not avoiding all the cliches of the genre, "Wilderness Survival for Girls" (2004) is often as clean, pristine and pure in its approach as the gorgeous Colorado mountain vistas of its scenery. This is a thriller -- if thriller is even the right term here -- minus most of the peekaboo tease of the scary movie as well as the blood splatter of conventional horror. It's more a psychological pastoral, with a deadly sociological aftertaste.

And although that doesn't make it altogether original, either ("Lord of the Flies," "Straw Dogs" and "Extremities" are just three antecedents that come to mind before the final frame), writer-directors Kim Roberts and Eli Despres go for lean, straightforward psychoanalysis and a glimpse at the darkness of the human heart.

Another plus is the movie's pert coming-of-age look at three girls who have just graduated from high school, off on a cabin trip in the mountains. The rivalries, hidden lusts, resentments and personality clashes ring true and believable.

Ruth (Jeanette Brox) is shy, uncertain, needy and uninitiated in sexual matters, which we learn in a frank spell of girl talk early in the movie. She and friends Deb (Megan Henning) and Kate (Ali Humiston) are studies in archetypal contrasts. Deb is owlish, curt, painfully honest and not-so-secretly lesbian. Kate, her blond hair streaked with punkish tones of bright red, is adventurous, rebellious, troublesome and daring, fond of pushing her friends to the edge, bristling at their upper-class superiority and thinly veiled pity that she's not likely to make it to college.

Early on, a story from their childhood foreshadows the rest of the movie, an incident about the death of some girls nearby, tied up and murdered, based on an actual 1976 Colorado case. Inevitably, after darkness, a gruffly handsome middle-age man (James Morrison) shows up ominously on the porch, forces his way in and vaguely threatens the women by reminding them they don't have a phone.

They manage to overpower him and tie him up, employing a hunting rifle they found earlier. Whether he's guilty of mere misdemeanor or actual homicide is a question never absolutely resolved for the girls or the audience. Instead, the plot reveals more by means of their varying responses (Ruth lets him practically seduce her) and their descent into a vengeful justice that may or may not be justified.

The filmmakers (working within the confines of an 18-day shoot) unfold all this in a trim, coldly logical movie, with postcard-like stills of the setting and a narrative grounded in dogged inevitability and murky moral portraiture.

You won't jump out of your seat or grab your neighbor on this one. But you're likely to leave mildly intrigued, with a little something to think about. ----

When a movie begins with three 17-year old girls arriving on a remote mountaintop in the Colorado Rockies alone, you know they are asking for trouble. What kind of trouble though is a different matter, and Wilderness Survival For Girls, is not, thank God, another teen slasher/horror movie a la Wrong Turn or movies of that ilk, rather as the press blurb has it a "coming of age thriller".

With high school a not-too distant memory Ruth (Jeanette Brox), a very naïve and compulsively nice Yale bound nerd brings best friend, smart misfit Deborah (Megan Henning) and not-so-best-friend street smart rebellious Kate (Ali Humiston) up to her parents isolated summer cabin for a bit of R&R before the onslaught of college life and living begins. The girls settle into their holiday with the usual dynamics of any friendship, Kate aggressively taking charge the alpha female, Ruth subserviently complying and keeping quiet, and Debs, somewhere in between, privy to each of the other two's gripes with each other, sitting on the fence passing judgement on all.

Finding a dead fox in the freezer, a shotgun that doesn't belong in a liberal anti-gun holiday home, a spot of possible spied upon sunbathing, and some after dinner spliffs, the inevitability of the locale and the genre take control as the story is told of Ruth's ex-babysitter who, along with her friend, were raped and murdered four miles away from their very cabin a decade earlier. Hillbilly rednecks abound in places like this a la Deliverance, and the girls joke about such Billy Bobs, but being stoned and alone magnify every house creak and forest noise to threatening paranoia.

When a flashlight roams through the window, the girls freak out, someone is out there, and they're coming in. The door opens and a strange mountain man (James Morrison) looms large in the doorway, moving towards Ruth who is frozen on the spot, like a deer caught in the headlights. Just as the man threatens to get closer, Kate and Debs appear, aiming the shotgun at him. They tie the intruder, who has been living in the unoccupied cabin, to a chair and decide to hold him hostage until the morning, since their mobiles are out of range and their vehicle mysteriously refuses to start.

Thusly we enter into a hostage situation which, the longer it continues, the more fraught it gets, as the girl's stoned-ness, fears and rivalries get the better of them as Debs and Kate begin to disclose exactly what they think about each other in a very ill advised spot of therapeutic timing.

As Debs storms out, after a bitter row, Kate follows her leaving confused Ruth to watch over their prisoner and the roles of captive and captor change as mountain man Ed takes advantage of Ruth's naiveté, slowly coaxing her to release him. When the girls return after teenage awkwardness in a neighbouring cabin the reality of what started off as a relaxing break turns into a possible case of judge, jury and executioner.

Whilst watching the film I was reminded of Roman Polanski's gripping Death and the Maiden, in its captive scenario, and it's cat and mouse game of truth, deception, power, humiliation and deceit. Wilderness, attempts to reach such Polanskian heights and at some moments manages to do just that, it builds up tension just to be let down by very poor images. Admirably shot in eighteen days by husband and wife team Eli B. Despres and Kim Roberts, with a crew of just ten, on DVCam, this low budget feature cannot let it's mode of production get I the way of it's storytelling, which unfortunately it does. Whilst the exterior shots of the brooding, epic mountains awash in the red glow of dusk and dawn light are cinematic and moody, this isn't matched by the indoor lighting, which is functional at best. Bad framing, cutting back to the same shot endlessly, and very very dark scenes outside, cause irritation and does not help move the story along, giving us a we've seen this all before feeling. A more developed visual sense of character claustrophobia contrasted with geographical isolation would have made this film richer. To this reviewer it felt like a very good play poorly committed to celluloid.

Also I felt the film could have taken a little longer to play, in that the last act felt very rushed with no real time for the characters to truly grasp the magnitude of what they are getting themselves into, and so not allowing us time to put ourselves in their place.

On the other hand the acting is near faultless, with potential stereotypes, really given flesh by very talented young leads who admirably carry the story and it's ensuing emotions, a fact conferred on Outstanding Performer award-winner Jeanette Brox who "evolves from doormat to decisive leader" in the opinion of this years IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival jury. Also praise must go James Morrison, who gives a magnificent performance and it's a mystery why he hasn't been seen on cinema screens before this.

Wilderness Survival For Girls then is well worth a look for it's exceptional performances, very subtle, nuanced moments, (Ruth trying to go for a pee whilst keep an eye on her prisoner is superb) and very original and intelligent take on a very hackneyed genre. Alas the cinematography does limit it to the world of film festivals and low budget productions, but for a first feature this film is a great showcase for a handful of very promising talent.

Also points to the anti-Deliverance ending, a humorous critique on the fickleness of today's teenagers.

DVD Talk [Scott Weinberg]

MvMMDI Chad from Movies Made Me

Fatally-Yours.com Noel

Variety.com [Robert Koehler]

Robinson, Michael

IF THERE BE THORNS B+ 91

USA (13 mi) 2009

Striking imagery balanced against a near apocalyptical narrative that seems to have little to do with the narration, but both drive home a sense of the ultra dramatic. Unfortunately, using a subtitled narrative, the words often disappear from ther screen before one has a chance to read what they say, which may be their intent, leaving one in a perpetual state of not really knowing, but only sensing where this film is taking us. When fragmented images of a young girl hits the screen with an 80’s synthesized song like Phil Collins, there’s a feeling of nostalgia, missed connections, lost love, yet always the poetry takes us back to an apocalyptical world filled with ruins and death, yet what we see onscreen is fascinatingly beautiful, a world of tropical vegetation with refracted images of the sun beaming through the trees. Not sure what to make of this in one viewing, but in a two-hour program of experimental shorts, this was decidedly the most memorable of the group, densely layered, complex, continually prompting the audience to want to know more.

2009 New York Film Festival / Views From the Avant-Garde ("The Home Game" Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack, Program Six

Robinson's work continues to evolve at a rather shocking pace; this isn't a filmmaker content to replicate his considerable successes, nor is he afraid to tread into some convoluted zones of human psychology. Among Robinson's previous work, If There Be Thorns shares its most evident surface affinities with The General Returns From One Place to Another, both in its use of appropriated text in the form of subtitles and in its organization around human figures in some altered state of consciousness in a sylvan setting. But where The General provided its female subject pride of place, giving her a clearing within the surrounding landscape and a brighter, almost enchanted sense of personal power, the individuals lost amidst Thorns seem much more like faceless participants in some larger, preordained ritual. The opening images of the film consist of close-ups of slightly pitched, horizontally organized branches, the first of which feature the thorns of the title quite prominently. Robinson's lighting of these barrier-brambles is hieratic and preternatural, assigning a wavering glow that cuts through the dark forest deeper within the composition.(Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography for Lars von Trier's Antichrist is the closest contemporary analog; the fact that Robinson achieved such luminosity on the handmade level is a wonder.) By the third shot, Robinson has effectively cancelled this holy effect since, in the background behind the trees, we see a person casually walking through the shot as if on his way to class. This interrupted enchantment will be a continual theme within If There Be Thorns, providing a sense that Robinson's commitment to the enclosed diegetic hypnosis of the classic trance-film (e.g. Maya Deren, some Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos) is, if not ironic, certainly incomplete. The next movement of the film consists of close-ups of tree trunks, each of which is marked by hand with a vertical red stripe, using a lipstick. This marking of the trees calls to mind several things, such as a clear-cutter's indication of which trees are to be cut down, or (in symbology that M. Night Shyamalan borrowed from the Nazis) markers designating that some person associated, physically or spiritually, with the tree is marked for death.

In an act of dense, ambiguous symbology akin to Deren's breadknives and Anger's roman candles, Robinson shows us a woman finding a marbled, peach-colored glass ball in the dirt. She shatters it to find it contains a collection of golden nails. It's at this point Robinson's camera zooms into the branch-barrier and we get a look at human beings, each standing still, each illuminated by a series of flashing colored lights, to the accompaniment of an instrumental synth version of (I think) Elton John's "Sacrifice." Up to this point, the onscreen text described people in hiding and "the burned rooms where we had shared our beds," where "the air smelled of smoke and ruin." After the "dark night" reaches its apotheosis in the human light show, we achieve daylight, a low angle shot upwards at sunny skies and palm trees. The narrative turns to one of provisional safety ("They found us at sunrise, asleep and tangled in a loving heap"), as we see still shots on a beach, palm fronds being dragged offscreen for some unexplained use. We can presume, however, that Robinson (Crusoe) is collapsing two forms of danger / rescue narrative, the desert island maroon and the abuse / life-in-hiding scenario, combining "open" and "closed" threats to the self. The narration elaborates on the fate of the group, whoever they may be -- they have been "escorted separately to the far reaches, and left for dead." The narrator continues, explaining that everything he/she has done in the name of survival has been in some sense an act of remembrance of those from whom she was forcibly separated. As Thorns continues, Robinson's imagery becomes more explicitly tropical: a male figure walking right to left with long fronds for raftmaking or building shelter; a pileup of fronds by a tree; and the swaying of seaweed under the waves. The most obvious symbols to emerge in this final passage of the film are what appear to be mangoes. One is retrieved from the water, then set in the grass alongside another. Both then disappear. Robinson trains his lens onto the sun, its glint blowing out the visual image, which the filmmaker then uses as a kind of neutral median range for a dense, almost epiphanic final montage. Using the lens flares and rack focus, Robinson combines images of the sun, of trees and foliage, and of the rushing tide, the entire spectrum of natural sensations within this ambiguous sphere of activity suddenly becoming one overwhelming texture.

The third act of this incredibly complicated film begins in deeply Derenesque territory. The golden nails slowly disappear, and we then see the three individuals wandering through a forest in what appears to be late afternoon / pre-dusk light, shadowed by the canopy of treetops. One man reaches a creek. The text describes an escape through caves and an eventual giving-oneself-over to a sensation of a state somewhere between life and death, an epiphanic or visionary state achieved through physical duress. Or, possibly, the narrator is simply describing his/her own death. "For all my lonely desires, the slow descent was an unmatched bliss. I only wished to be sharing my exquisite relief with them, leaving this world in unison, as we had always wanted to." Soon we see the nails glistening in the sun, laying shallow in the water. A hand begins to collect them. And we return, in the next three shots, to the lipstick-marked trees, which are then hammered with the golden spikes. Although reading too much into symbolism in trance-film logic tends to smother the text, one thing cannot be avoided. Earth First! and other anti-logging activists nail spikes into tress to protect them against power saws and other logging equipment. So if Thorns entails themes of jeopardy and transfiguration, the relationship between these hovering, silent figures and the woods they inhabit is becoming more mutualistic and absolute. They protect the woods that offer some degree of protection in return. The final images of Robinson's film are a return to the faces of the performers, showered with alternating colored lights. This time, the superimposition of receding tree trunks on the left and right of the frame is more prominent, implying a merge of consciousness or communion in bodily being. The flashes of color and faces are so rapid as to blend, and the tinny, chiming music (same music as before, to fadeout) gives a sense that a ritual of some sort is reaching its end. The multiple images fade away, replaced by the unified swaying of seaweed strands just beneath the surf.

Robinson takes his title from the book by V.C. Andrews, which is the third in a series that began with Flowers in the Attic. In light of this, the three figures we witness wandering through the forest, or on the edges of the mysterious island, could be siblings, their isolation underpinned by complex and necessarily submerged networks of desire. As such, the para-Freudianism of the trance-film mode, which Robinson adopts in certain ways but, as I stipulate above, does not completely inhabit, seems an appropriate mode of cinematic discourse for the themes at hand. The question I find myself left with following two close viewings of If There Be Thorns is whether the elements Robinson chooses to assemble for this film actually hold their own when combined. Robinson's previous work has undoubtedly been about evoking moods (anxiety, melancholia, inchoate desire) through the mobilization of unexpectedly auratic elements -- the abandoned world's fair, the Hollies song, the outdated videogame graphic. With Thorns, however, we have a film that is certainly not a literary adaptation, but employs enough elements of narrative, adaptation and performance as to require us to consider it an oblique consideration on what adaptation is, in a Straub / Huillet kind of way. The General fully submerged Frank O'Hara's text into a collaged tone-poem. If There Be Thorns retains linear relationships with the source material, but deepens it with a fixation on images, "vertical" poetic relationships and a textural approach to film space. This is the first of Robinson's films (not counting the singular Carol Ann is Dead) to really foreground performance values, to a degree that the "collage" can stand or fall on their success. The performers (Robinson being one of them) are awkward, but not in an obviously composed, dance / movement fashion, making their status within the diegetic world a bit hard to read. (The halting lateral drag of a palm frond is worth a thousand words in Thorns. But what does it mean?) What Robinson does achieve with unparalleled success (and why Thorns, even with its undecidable parts, represents an exciting new direction for him) is treat physical and plastic textures with an attention and conviction equal to that assigned to human figures (who, at times, really are just light-catching props, a la Warhol's Chelsea Girls). In a longer film, Robinson's woods would have asserted themselves even more, as they do in von Trier's Antichrist, or in so many Apichatpong Weerasethakul films. Thorns is a film that is bursting with information, some of it specifically character-driven, some of it evocative of an all-pervasive ambiance. But given just a bit more running time, these elements might have gelled a tad more, allowing everything to achieve both equal weight and maximum density. So, the final analysis: If There Be Thorns is mysterious and dense. And I hope that Michael Robinson begins making longer films.

Onion City Film Festival Chicago Filmmakers

Robson, Mark

THE SEVENTH VICTIM

USA (71 mi) 1943

The Seventh Victim Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine from the Val Lewton Horror Collection

Robson's work is in top form throughout the influential The Seventh Victim, which starts slow and is unnecessarily gabby but is chockfull of some of the most arresting images put out by Lewton's Snake Pit factory. Where to begin? The two shots are dazzling displays of symmetry and the gaudy backdrops appear as if their chillingly communicating with the characters, seemingly dropping clues about their identities. But it's the suffocating sense of dread that lingers in the air that the film is best known for—and, of course, its lesbian subtext. (Like the best Cronenberg, the film's horror seethes beneath its beautiful, intoxicating surface—so much so you're tempted to scratch it for relief.) Next to Welles, I don't think any director has shot staircases as menacingly as Robson does here, and the final pessimistic leg of the film—essentially a prolonged death sequence that begins as a forced suicide, transitions into an expressionistic nightwalk, and ends with a self-imposed suicide—rivals the hall of mirrors climax from Lady from Shanghai in terms of sheer force of invention, will, and emotion.

The Seventh Victim (Robson, 1943) | My Life in Movies

Returning this week to my exploration of the AFI 100, here’s another neglected film included on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100. The Seventh Victim is one of the 9 B horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO in the 1940’s, noted for their psychological subtlety and existentialist overtones. Regular readers might remember I wrote about the Lewton-produced Cat People back in 2008, a movie that I admire deeply and regard as one of my favorites. Like Cat People, The Seventh Victim situates much its horror in the ambiguous shadows of perception and deeper human fears, eschewing the supernatural frights and monsters traditionally associated with the genre. One cannot emphasize the influence of Lewton’s productions too much, especially on psychological horror, thrillers, and film noir.

The Seventh Victim opens with a quote from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet No.1 (miscredited as No.7 in the film):

I run to death, and Death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.

Death is the primary focal point of fear throughout the film but will come later. Instead, we begin with young Mary (Kim Hunter, who would later appear in A Streetcar Named Desire), who is informed by the headmistress of the boarding school she attends that her tuition has not been paid for several months. It seems that her older sister Jacqueline, her only living means of support, has gone missing and Mary will be forced to work for her room and board if unable to come up with the money. In New York to find her sister, Mary is rebuked by Jacqueline’s former business partner, now the owner of the cosmetics company she founded. Mary learns of a restaurant Jacqueline frequented, above which she rented a room without ever moving in. Much to her horror, the room is furnished only with a noose and a chair. Mary soon discovers more secrets about her sister, that she had a husband (Hugh Beaumont), had no fear of death, and was seeking the help of a psychiatrist (Tom Conway, reprising the role of Dr. Judd from Cat People). What’s more, she was involved with a circle of Satanists, called the Palladists, who are now seeking her death for turning her back on them.

Much has been made of the relatively mundane way in which the Satanists are depicted in the film, a fascinating twist the predates Rosemary’s Baby by some 20 years. They appear normal, ordinary, successful and functional members of society. But they are trapped by their own codes and when Jacqueline is found, they force her to drink the poison they are unable to administer themselves, out of commitment to non-violence. Ingeniously, both sides are trapped: Jacqueline unable to commit suicide against her will, and the Palladists who must kill her without soiling their hands. In the end, however, she escapes, and in one of the most effective sequences in the film, is pursued by an anonymous assassin through dark city streets, unable to find release until returning to the room where the noose hangs. The Seventh Victim reaches its high point, when in the hallway Jacqueline speaks to a dying woman (Elizabeth Russell, who also appears in Cat People and Curse of the Cat People) who has decided to venture out for one last night out, presenting a clear contrast between the embrace of death and the embrace of life. But there is no easy way out, and The Seventh Victim offers a simultaneously bleak and hopeful ending that for its time is quite shocking.

Shot quickly on a meager budget and directed by first-timer Mark Robson (who edited Cat People–will the connections ever cease?), The Seventh Victim doesn’t quite measure up to its predecessor, but it’s nevertheless an interesting film dripping with pervasive dread throughout. Much of the cinematography makes brilliant use of shadow for the sake of mood. Apart from the early murder of a private detective who tries to help Mary, there are none of the horrific pay-offs one associates with most horror, only what we imagine inhabits the shadows (the human heart?). Its primary fault lies in the sometimes confusing nature of the story, due in part to the removal of explanatory scenes for the sake of length. For instance, the supposedly budding romance between Mary and Gregory Ward, Jacqueline’s husband is treated offhandedly, as if it’s assumed we understood. Similarly, Dr. Judd tosses off some lines of rebuttal against the Satanists that comes practically from left-field. The Seventh Victim has also been criticized for an over-abundance of characters, which bothered me very little. In spite of these flaws with the writing and editing, the performances in the film are, for the most part, serviceable and memorable when it is required. Kim Hunter is generally engaging whilst carrying the first half of the film, and Conway is as always a delight (for me, anyway). Jean Brooks as Jacqueline is the most striking; with her wide eyes and face carved with dread, she provides a spectral portrait of melancholy and existential angst that’s hard to forget. Her scene with the dying woman is especially powerful.

The Seventh Victim is too flawed a film to really regard as a favorite, but it is in bursts quite brilliant and stands apart from many horror films of its era, B-movies and otherwise. It’s certainly the kind of movie I won’t be forgetting and in this sense could be regarded as a classic. While it failed to measure up to the impeccable Cat People, it’s nonetheless worthy of consideration.

DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005

Noir of the Week The Seventh Victim (1943), essay by Steve-O from Film Noir of the Week, October 16, 2005

Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005

Lewton/Tourneur - The Lennon & McCartney of Cinema - Bright Lights ... C. Jerry Kutner on THE SEVENTH VICTIM, from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 14, 2008

Val Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GHOST SHIP

USA (69 mi) 1943

Ghost Ship Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine from the Val Lewton Horror Collection

In Mark Robson's The Ghost Ship, the handicapped are possessed with a heightened sense of the world around them, and like the characters from Curse of the Cat People, who all seem to be exorcising themselves of the past, Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix) is haunted by madness. Tom Merriam (Russell Wade) is his third officer, who can't get anyone on board to believe that the captain is slowly killing off the crew. The central act of emotional terrorism Stone wages against Merriam isn't very engaging, especially when compared to the more subversive, politically-charged tug of war that anchors Bedlam, and the direction feels as indifferent as Dix's miscalculated performance, but Robson's aesthetic detachment gives the film's best set pieces—one involving the ship's swinging anchor, a second around the anchor's chain dropping into its compartment—an appropriately ghostly feel.

Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship Fear Itself, by Donald Phelps from Rouge (2006)

DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005

Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005

a coffee break THE GHOST SHIP photo by Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee, January 13, 2008

Val Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE ISLE OF THE DEAD

USA (71 mi) 1945

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]

This moody film from RKO, one of the last of the Val Lewton-produced masterpieces of horror from the 1940s, saves the signature RKO dreadfest until its final 20 minutes, at which point it becomes one of the few truly scary films of the 1940s. It's inspired by German painter Arnold Bocklin's series of five paintings of the same title, executed during the 1880s and demonstrating the kind of Romantic obsession with death that suffused Lewton's films. Legend has it that Lewton asked his writers to concoct entire films on the basis of titles he provided (the best one being Cat People), but this time he was able to provide a visual aid.

Boris Karloff stars as General Pherides, a hard-nosed Greek general. We first meet him as he orders a subordinate officer (whom we later learn was Pherides's friend) to commit suicide because some of his troops were late for a battle—a battle that the officer won, but no matter: rules is rules, and the officer exits with a tasteful offscreen bang. American war correspondent Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) doesn't understand why the his friend the general, nicknamed The Watchdog by his troops, is so hard on everybody, but he hasn't seen hard yet. Pherides and Davis travel to a nearby cemetery island to pay their respects to Pherides's dead wife, but discover that her grave is empty—a red herring, because this film isn't about that kind of dead. Led by eerie singing, they discover the home of Swiss archaeologist Albrecht (Jason Robards Sr.), who has a house full of guests: diplomat St. Aubyn (Alan Napier) and his sickly wife Mary (Katherine Emery), along with Mary's nursemaid Thea (Ellen Drew); the creepy Madame Kyra (Helen Thimig), one of those superstitious old women who tend to pop up in RKO horror films; and Andrew Robbins (a sorely underused Skelton Knaggs), who drops dead of plague during the night, forcing Pherides and Dr. Drossos (Ernst Deutsch) to declare that nobody can leave the island until the plague runs its course. Pherides intimates that he'd be happy to kill anyone who refuses to obey the doctor's orders.

For much of the film, it's not clear where the frights are going to come from. Sure, the island sets are ominous, modeled explicitly on Bocklin's painting, but the middle portion of the film is concerned with a combination of (1) waiting to see who will get sick next and (2) debates about science versus superstition. Madame Kyra's dire pronouncements about the dreaded vorvolaka, a sort of vampire ghost that can take human form, start to earn her some converts—including, finally, the deranged Pherides, who comes to agree with Kyra that Thea is in fact the evil spirit responsible for the deaths. Karloff's change from man of science to man of superstition seems a little abrupt, unless you think about it in terms of control. His nickname has always been the Watchdog, which he got by keeping a close eye on all of his men—i.e., controlling them. When faced with the plague, something he has no control over, something that brazenly defeats the science Karloff believes in when it kills the doctor, Karloff loses his mind. But even in his growing madness, his protective instinct wins out, prodded by Madame Kyra's tall tales, and he decides to protect the survivors from the vorvolaka.

The film isn't entirely successful: it takes too long to get around to being scary, and the script feels padded—when the film's raison d'être becomes apparent, it's clear that much of the film was intended merely to push the big moment toward the end of the film. But even the significant down time is enlivened by a very good performance by Karloff, who reminds us, as he tends to do in more serious roles, that he's a gifted actor who managed to overcome his typecasting when he was given enough to work with.

The Film Sufi MKP

Behind the Couch [James Gracey]

DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005

Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005

Roderick Heath's erudite essay The Isle of the Dead, from Ferdy on Films, January 15, 2008

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

Bloodtype Online [John "El Juan" Shatzer]

DVD Times Gary Couzens

DVD Verdict [Rob Lineberger]

Cinema Novo | Brazil: Five Centuries of Change

Val Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Isle Of The Dead - Original Trailer 1945 on YouTube (1:31)

BEDLAM

USA (79 mi) 1946

Slant Magazine - DVD Review: The Val Lewton Horror Collection Ed Gonzalez

Like Body Statcher, Bedlam was written by Lewton under the pseudonym Carlos Keith. Inspired by William Hogarth's painting The Raven's Progress, the film tells the story a young woman, Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), who leaves the tutelage of Lord Mortimer (Billy House) because of her distaste for money and bourgeois callousness. Interested in the conditions at the notorious St. Mary's of Bethlehem Asylum (a.k.a. Bedlam), Nell is maliciously committed there by the institution's cruel manager, Master Sims (Karloff), and forced to fascinatingly confront the limitations of her empathy. The film isn't very stylish outside of its insane asylum sequences, but it has a strong political perspective and an even stronger social consciousness, and the twisted literally and comedic rhythms of Lee and Karloff's catty exchanges make for delicious drama. Any scene without them is a wash by comparison. Lewton was an avid reader with a big sense of humor and a great appreciation for art, and though he never directed a film, if he had it might have looked and sounded a little like this one. Bedlam's story is worthy of Poe but thank Warner for deeming us worthy of Lewton.

Dark Dignitaries: When Karloff met Lewton Part III: Bedlam James from Behind the Couch

DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005

Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2005

Val Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bedlam (1946)-Sensational Secrets of Infamous Mad-house!! on YouTube (3:15)

PEYTON PLACE

USA (156 mi) 1957

Peyton Place Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Welcome to Peyton Place, novelist Grace Metalious' scathing indictment of 1940s small town America and the damaging effect its tacit moral superciliousness has on blooming young hormones. Main Street might be all picket fences, lavish Labor Day parades (with cake and watermelon, gee!), and freshly-scrubbed kids presenting inscribed deluxe gift dictionaries to their teachers. But behind the surface lies dirty rundown shacks teeming with child abuse, and overprotective mothers who still bathe their 18-year-old sons. This was hot stuff for the mid-1950s, though beneath the sleazy coating covering the entire film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness. However, moral turpitude is portrayed as lamentable, but still more preferable to emotional isolation and societal dishonesty (more so than the suggestions of incest and rape, this might have been responsible for the bluehairs' outrage). Audiences responded accordingly, condemning the film even as they helped make it the biggest dramatic hit of the year. Auteur-for-hire Mark Robson, who could usually be counted on to add a dash of uniqueness to any project, be it The Seventh Victim or Earthquake, can't quite reign in a bloated and episodic script (a television spin-off followed, naturally). And, considering how much Metalious seemed intent on spewing her contemptuous bile for her own neighbors by painting them as daughter-fuckers and whatnot, the elements and storylines that ended up watered-down are to the detriment of the film's overall effect. But Robson manages a few winningly odd performances from the likes of Lana Turner, whose sex appeal is used against her character's pathological frigidity, and Russ Tamblyn, whose character is the one who receives that unwanted sartorial helping hand from Mommy and who is wildly named Norman; an unwitting omen of movie history's most famous mama's boy.

Rocha, Glauber

Rocha, Glauber Art and Culture

"A camera in your hand and an idea in your head" was how film critic-turned-filmmaker Glauber Rocha characterized the creative conditions under which Brazil’s "Cinema Novo" (New Cinema) began. Rocha was the movement’s guiding spirit, both in theory and in practice, as he and other filmmakers sought to develop a new cinematic language that was genuinely Brazilian and Latin American.

Rejecting the models of Hollywood and European film, Rocha argued that the core of Latin American reality was "an aesthetic of hunger and violence." Cinema Novo needed unique vision and a worldly aesthetic, not Golden Age glamour and Bergmanesque nuance. "Hunger is the essence of our society... and hunger’s most noble cultural manifestation is violence."

Although greatly influenced by the auteur concept of the French New Wave, Rocha nonetheless differentiated between the intellectual dilemmas of the developed world and the more fundamental social concerns of Latin America, saying: "We’re not interested in neurotics’ problems, we’re interested in the problems faced by those who are lucid."

Cinema Novo officially began in 1962 with Rocha’s "Barravento," a Neo-Realist drama about the exploitation of black fishermen in Bahia. Although the film was initially banned in Brazil, it attracted considerable attention at international film festivals that year. The films following "Barravento" show a marked turn in style; operatic and spectacular, they reflect Rocha’s desire to capture the Magical Realism found in the works of Latin American writers such as Juan Rolfo and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Rocha’s first color film was the extravagant "Antonio das Mortes" (1969), an operatic drama in which a bounty hunter becomes a hero. The film brought him much critical acclaim, including a shared best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It also brought sharp criticism from the Brazil’s political right, which banned the film and threatened Rocha with imprisonment. Angry and frustrated, Rocha left Brazil for a time to work in Africa and Europe.

The problem of his reception in Brazil continued to plague his career. At the time of his death at age 43, he was again in Europe working on a large-scale film about Napoleon to star Orson Welles. Although Rocha left behind only a handful of completed projects, his efforts to create a unique film vernacular based on Brazilian popular culture, aesthetics, and themes made him the unquestioned figurehead of the important Cinema Novo movement.

Glauber Rocha - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications John Mraz from Film Reference

"A camera in your hand and an idea in your head" was how Glauber Rocha described the minimalist conditions in which the filmmakers of Brazil's Cinema Novo (New Cinema) began. Though the origins of Cinema Novo can be traced to Nelson Pereira dos Santos's movie, Rio 40 Degrees (1955), the "official" starting point for the movement which redefined Brazilian and Latin American film is 1962, when Rocha directed Barravento. Rocha was Cinema Novo 's principle theorist and most flamboyant practitioner, developing many of its key concepts and realizing them on the screen.

The most important element in Rocha's theory of filmmaking was his recurrent insistence on discovering a filmic language of a uniquely Brazilian and Latin American quality, ending the practice endemic to neo-colonies of aping Hollywood and European cinema. This new idiom was to arise out of working directly within the reality of Latin America; thus, in one of his best-known essays, he argued that its core was an aesthetic of hunger and violence: "Hunger is the essence of our society . . . and hunger's most noble cultural manifestation is violence." Rocha was looking for a popular, but not a populist, form of expression, and he felt that this would lead to new acting styles, different ways of using music and color, and innovative forms of montage.

If the base of Rocha's cinema was the traditional culture of Brazil, modern influences were also important. One of these was the Cuban revolution, which offered the example of radical social transformation in Latin America and made possible the birth of a truly Cuban cinematography. Another was the New Wave in France, from whence sprang the concept of the director as "auteur" which so influenced Rocha. Adherents of this concept pioneered the path he traveled from critic to filmmaker. However, Rocha clearly distinguished between the cinema of Europe, which expressed the existential anguish of the developed world, and the epic cinema which he believed more appropriate to articulating the social and economic crises of Latin America. As he pithily polemicized: "We're not interested in neurotics' problems, we're interested in the problems faced by those who are lucid."

After some short films, and relatively extensive experience as a critic, Rocha burst onto the international cinematic scene with Barravento. Although in later years he was to express dissatisfaction with the film, even disclaiming authorship because he had taken it over from another director half-way through the shooting, at the time he called it the "first great denunciation realized in Brazilian cinema." Filmed in a neo-realist style that was characteristic of many Cinema Novo directors—though this was the only instance in which Rocha employed this form—the movie focused on the harsh living conditions of a fishing village. If the work's realism is at odds with Rocha's later theatricality, the film nonetheless contains many of the elements found throughout his oeuvre. For example, the narrative leaps and the fighting which is choreographed as dancing presage the reflexivity of Rocha films that followed. Also present is the dialectic of the traditional and the modern, for while Rocha criticizes the mysticism that is part of the fishing people's underdevelopment, he also shows how their popular culture provides them with a defense against the ravages of capitalism.

The films that came after Barravento are extravagant and operatic, expressive of Rocha's search for a cinematic tropicalism equivalent to the magic realism contained in the work of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier. One of the unique formal elements in Rocha's work is the combination of this tropicalism with the self-reflexivity of the New Wave through such strategies as the placing of a film within a film in Land in Anguish and the use of highly stylized violence in Antonio das Mortes. In both of these films he also pricks the audience's critical sense by making the perspective of the works larger than that of their central protagonist, thus cutting back against the very identification that he simultaneously foments in the films. This sort of systematic contradiction is characteristic of Rocha's efforts to realize a dialectical form, and is perhaps most evident in the counter-point he consistently established between image and sound.

Rocha's concern with thematic dialectics is most apparent in his explorations of Brazilian popular culture, which he perceived as representing both a permanent rebellion against oppression and the evasion of social problems. His interest in resolving this contradiction and turning popular culture and myth into a progressive force is portrayed in Black God, White Devil and Antonio das Mortes through the conflict between the cangaceiros , the social bandits of the Brazilian Northeast, and Antonio, the killer hired to eradicate the lawbreakers but who ends up embodying their social ideals. That it is popular—not populist—culture which offers the only possibility for national liberation is made explicit by Rocha in Land in Anguish , where he contrasts traditional values to those of liberal populism, which is shown to lead inevitably to co-option by the bourgeoisie. Rocha's efforts to form a genuinely Brazilian cinema, founded on authentic themes and expressed through an idiom peculiar to Latin America, led him to make beautiful and moving films which continue to speak for his ideals.

Tempo Glauber official website

Glauber Rocha | Brazilian director | Britannica.com biography

Glauber Rocha – Director – Mr Bongo brief bio

Glauber Rocha • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Gabe Klinger from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005

cineCollage :: Cinema Novo

Glauber Rocha Piero Scaruffi reviews

The Aesthetics of Hunger The Aesthetics of Hunger, by Glauber Rocha, 1965 (pdf)

Glauber Rocha: Godard's Latest Scandal | Sabzian Glauber Rocha film review of Wind from the East (La Vent D’est), made by Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group, originally published as ‘O último escândalo de Godard’ in Manchete, January 31, 1970

Cinema novo: Pitfalls of cultural nationalism by Hans Proppe and Susan Tarr from Jump Cut, 1976

Land in Anguish by Robert Stamm - Ejumpcut Robert Stamm, 1976

Introduction: Beyond Cinema Novo Robert Stam and Randal Johnson from Jump Cut, November 1979

Censorship in Brazil Robert Stam from Jump Cut, November 1979

Music in Glauber Rocha Graham Bruce from Jump Cut, May 1980

glauber rocha is dead at 42; innovative brazilian director Obituary from The New York Times, August 23, 1981

The Death of Glauber Rocha | Diagonal Thoughts ‘La mort de Glauber Rocha’ by Serge Daney from Libération, August 24, 1981

The Intellectual in Anguish - Wilson Center 32-page essay, The Intellectual in Anguish: Modernist Form and Ideology in Land of Anguish and Memories of Underdevelopment, by Julianne Burton, 1983 (pdf)

Brazil. Cinema Novo and Tropical Modernism, 1926–2003 Film Museum, May 25 to June 26, 2005

Glauber Rocha | New Latin American Cinema and Latin New Wave February 1, 2012

The Evolution of “Third Cinema” in a Brazilian Context: from Santos to ... Zain Jamshaid from Offscreen, July 2012

2012 RETROSPECTIVE GLAUBER ROCHA - FID Marseille Glauber Rocha Restrospective, International Film Festival of Marseille, July 2012

Literary, Artistic and Political: The Films of Glauber Rocha | Sounds ... Leo Nikolaidis from Sounds and Colors, November 19, 2012

Cannibals at the Carnival: Cinema Novo and Marginal Cinema ... Dialectical Films, July 27, 2013

Cinema in Brazil and tips for learning language with movies | Living ... Dulce from Living Language, November 11, 2013

Cinema Novo 101: Essential Films From Brazil's "French New Wave" Andrew S. Vargas, 2014

On the Edge: Brazilian Film Experiments of the 1960s and Early 1970s ... Museum of Modern Art exhibit, May 10 – July 24, 2014

Brazilian Film Experiments of the 1960s & Early 1970s, NYC, May 10 ... Tambay A. Obenson from indieWIRE, May 16, 2014

The Age of the Earth, Glauber Rocha's rarely screened final film, is ... Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader, June 6, 2014

BBC - Culture - Brazil: Cinema's most radical battleground Christian Blauvelt, June 27, 2014

The secret history of Brazilian resistance cinema | Dazed Georgia Fleury Reynolds, July 22, 2014

Glauber Rocha and the Cinema Novo | VIFF Adam Cook, August 25, 2016

Hunger and Rotten Flesh: Cinema Novo, Pasolini, Eisenstein | [in ... Hunger and Rotten Flesh: Cinema Novo, Pasolini, Eisenstein, 8-minute video essay by Albert Elduque from [in] Transition, October 18, 2016

TSPDT - Glauber Rocha

There's Nothing More International Than a Pack of Pimps - Rouge A Conversation between Pierre Clémenti, Miklos Janscó, Glauber Rocha and Jean-Marie Straub convened by Simon Hartog in Rome, February 1970, from Rouge

A conversation with Brazilian film critic Franthiesco Ballerini (part one ... 2-part Ben Sachs interview with Brazilian film critic Franthiesco Ballerini from The Chicago Reader, November 14, 2013, continue to Pt. 2 here: part two of this conversation

Glauber Rocha (1938 - 1981) - Find A Grave Memorial

Glauber Rocha - Wikipedia

Cinema Novo - Wikipedia

BARRAVENTO (The Turning Wind)

Brazil (78 mi) 1962

User reviews from imdb Author: Daniel Yates from Montreal, Canada

I must honestly say that I never thought I would chose to write anything on Glauber Rocha. Frankly, the most common reactions I have when I watch a Rocha film are (in order) confusion, frustration, anger and boredom. At first I always find the films to be bold and dynamic. Quickly however, I begin to feel that the films aren't going anywhere. I lose track of who the characters are. That wouldn't be so bad, but I need the characters to help me understand what the filmmaker is trying to say. If I can't understand the point of the film, I become frustrated and wonder why I'm watching it in the first place. Rocha's flashy imagery and rhetoric spewing characters mean nothing to me. My brain shuts off and I fall asleep.

Please don't get me wrong. I believe Rocha to be an important filmmaker, and I really try to understand his films. It's just that they're so. I'm not quite sure. Weird doesn't begin to describe these films. Nevertheless, I think he deserves credit for attempting to present his ideas in a radically new way. I'm sure for many people his films are successful. Barravento, Rocha's first film, is probably the film that his admirers like the least, given that it is the least `Rocha-esque' and that Rocha himself disowned the film. It should be no surprise then, that Barravento is the only Rocha film I have seen so far that I have enjoyed. I hope to explain why I like this film while at the same time exploring the film flaws.

The story, unlike Rocha's other films, is easy to follow. On the surface, at least. Firmino returns to his hometown, the (predominantly black) fishing village of Burquino. Firmino is outraged that the townspeople are using equipment supplied by, and are working for a large fishing company. Firmino also feels that the people are brainwashed by their religion, Candomblé, and encourages the people to break free from it. He cuts the fishing nets in order for the people to go back to their previous fishing methods. His main opponent is Arua, the young, handsome virgin, whom the people respect and believe to be protected by the Sea Goddess. Firmino also has his girlfriend Cota seduce Arua, thereby depriving of his protection from the Sea Goddess. At the end after two climactic scenes (a wild storm, or barravento, that takes the lives of several people, and a one on one fight between Arua and Firmino, that Firmino wins), Firmino leaves the village again, followed by Arua. There is a subplot involving Arua's girlfriend's seduction into the Candomblé religion.

When this film was screened in my Cuban/Brazillian Film class at Concordia University here in Montreal, there seemed to be a great deal of confusion about the story. I found this odd, since the plot lines in Rocha's other films fly completely over my head, and this one seemed much easier to follow. However if the story itself was easy to follow, the motivations behind the characters are somewhat more muddled. However upon looking further into that, it seems the film might be more `Rocha-esque' than we first thought. Let me explain. The character of Firmino is an interesting one. The leftist ideology that he spreads throughout the film seems to make sense. In-fact he is a precursor to characters in later Rocha films, who stand in front of the camera and shout their views loudly, except Firmino is easier to follow, and in the end the townspeople decide that he was right. However he also causes the deaths (indirectly) of many people (including his lover) in order `enlighten the people'. This seems to be regarded by most people as a flaw in the films logic.

There are other contradictions as well. The film seems to support Arua's sexual awakening of being seduced by Cota. It is partly because of this that Arua is able to leave the village. However, Arua's seduction also seems cause the barravento. Also confusing is the films attitude towards the Candomblé religion. The film clearly has a message that the religion is entrapping the people, keeping them from realizing their potential, and yet the Sea Goddess seems to exist, causing the barravento. I believe however, that these `flaws' might be intentional. In the case of Firmino, Rocha might be making a comment about how just because someone's political ideas are in the progressive, that doesn't make him perfect. This theme is reflected in more complex ways in later films of his. Likewise, in the case of Arua and the Candomblé religion, the confusion might also be a way of commenting on the conventions of narrative and theme. Perhaps Rocha wants us to think about the way we normally see films as having a concrete `message'.

Of course, since Rocha did not finish the film himself, we won't know for sure if all this confusion is intentional, but I think I'm on to something. In fact I think the film helps one prepare for Rocha's later, even more challenging films by not giving us any easy answers.

BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol)

Brazil (120 mi) 1964

User reviews from imdb Author: gazineo-1 from Brasilia, Brazil

This movie is considered by the critics as the most important Brazilian movie of all times. And they are right in this point. An impressive, outstanding portrait of Brazilian rich culture with a focus on some delicate subjects as religion, faith, violence and economic exploration. Rocha made here a fantastic synthesis of the main problems of Brazil, problems that still remained almost forty years after. Great performances by Del Rey and Mauricio do Valle.

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"So I've told you a story/of truth and imagination/I hope you've learned the lesson/that this world is wrongly divided/for the land belongs to man/not to God nor to the Devil". Thus sings the narrator of Glauber Rocha's shattering, symphonic, revolutionary masterpiece that caused an earthquake in Brazilian cinema, earned the admiration of great international filmmakers (Buñuel, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Godard, Leone) and stormed Cannes in 1964. Glauber, just 23 at the time of filming, combines a wide range of influences (Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Humberto Mauro, John Ford, Rossellini, cinema-vérité, Godard, Brecht, Marx, Guimarães Rosa, José Lins do Rego, Villa-Lobos, Brazilian Northeastern traditions) to achieve a very individual, bold, explosive style that bombards the screen with unforgettable images and sounds.

"Truth and imagination": these are the keywords. Inspired by actual events ("truth") raised to legendary and even mythological heights ("imagination") by Brazilian popular pamphlet literature ("literatura de cordel") and folklore, the film follows poor peasant cowherd Manuel (Geraldo Del Rey) and his wife Rosa (Yoná Magalhães) through the Brazilian "sertão" (the arid, dry Northeastern hinterland) and their encounters with "God", personified by black prophet Beato Sebastião (Lídio Silva), who turns out to be a messianic madman, and the many "Devils", personified by "Blond Devil" Corisco (Othon Bastos), the very last of the "cangaceiros" (heavily armed bandits who terrorized the region and became anti-heroes not unlike the U.S. Wild West bandits); Antonio das Mortes (Maurício do Valle), the mercenary headhunter hired by local politicians and priests to kill Corisco; and Moraes (Milton Rosa), the cattle owner who humiliates Manuel, causing his tempestuous reaction and journey into crime, fanaticism, tragedy and final enlightenment.

The highlights are countless: the slow-paced depiction of Manuel+Rosa's dire lives, their hard and repetitive work, their endless struggle against poverty; the extraordinary sung narration, in the style of the "cantadores" (minstrels) of the "sertão", setting the action in motion and commenting on it; the electrifying montage of the Monte Santo massacre, a tribute to Einsenstein's famous Odessa steps scene in "Potemkim", and just as riveting; the Monte Santo chapel sacrificial rite, as Manuel kills the innocent baby and suddenly realizes the horror behind Beato Sebastião's fanatic creed; Sebastião, fatally stabbed by Rosa, crawling to the altar's big crucifix trying to place himself as the new Messiah; the haunting scene where the shadows of Rosa's knife and Antonio das Mortes' rifle "touch" on the chapel wall, marking the birth of a new, tilted "cross" of blood and death; Villa-Lobos' famous Bachianas #5 vocalise dictating the pace of Corisco+Rosa's sweeping love scene, contrasted with his dissonant music used in the terrifying wedding assault sequence.

There's much more: the amazing performance of Othon Bastos as Corisco, his body swift and restless, his voice thunderous ("Corisco" means lightning in Portuguese) and-- in an staggeringly bold conception, partly Rashomonian, partly influenced by Afro-Brazilian religious trance tradition -- Corisco suddenly "incorporates" the spirit of recently murdered Lampião, aka the "king of the cangaceiros". His voice lowers, his gestures become hieratic, the camera cuts off half of his head, with close-ups of his hair and the emblematic elements of the iconic "cangaceiro" outfit, where bullets, crucifixes, silver coins, guns and amulets co-exist: it's an awesome sequence! Observe the way Glauber "arranges" his characters on screen: they always move "magnetically" toward other characters with which they identify at given moments; it's a theatrical, choreographic mise-en-scène in a completely un- theatrical environment (the vast openness of the sertão!). Waldemar Lima's weightless, dizzying camera and high-contrast cinematography is essential to the film's aesthetics, as is Sérgio Ricardo's singing and guitar- playing as the narrating minstrel, Rafael Valverde's multi-style editing and the unique locations in the hinterland of Bahia.

I could go on and on; it's such a rich film that multiple viewings are required, culminating in the breathtaking finale of unforgettable poetic and political impact. Building a realist/expressionist/ mythological portrayal of Brazilian sertão -- the labor and life subhuman conditions of the destitute, illiterate, famished, God-fearing peasants, perennially exploited by landowners, politicians, bandits, Catholic priests, messianic doomsday "prophets" -- Glauber proposed a "new Brazilian cinema" that would lead to the construction of a new Brazil, less ignorant, less corrupt, less unequal, less exploitative. A country where land would belong to Man, not to the Gods or the Devils. His ambition may have been utopical (especially after the Brazilian military coup in 1964, the year "Deus e o Diabo" opened!). But this incendiary, highly accomplished manifesto is still dazzling enough to keep inspiring filmmakers and audiences as long as socially-concerned cinema survives.

Distant Voices [Reehan Miah]

The Lumière Reader Brannavan Gnanalingam

Moviemartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]

Thirtyframesasecond [Kevin Wilson]

New York Times [A.H. Weiler] (registration req'd) also seen here: Review

ANGUISHED LAND (Terra em Transe)

aka: Entranced Earth

Brazil (106 mi) 1967

User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In the hypothetical Latin-American country of Eldorado, the idealistic and anarchist poet and journalist Paulo Martins (Jardel Filho) fights against the populist governor, Felipe Vieira (José Lewgoy), and the conservative president Porfirio Diaz (Paulo Autran), supported by revolutionary forces. Paulo is depressed, since the two corrupt politicians were his former friends and have been elected with his moral support.

In 2005, "Terra em Transe" is dated, and has a confused screenplay, although being magnificently updated regarding the lack of ethics and the amoral behavior of the politicians. If the reader has had the opportunity of reading Machiavelli's "The Prince", he or she will see how the behavior of politicians remains unchanged along the centuries. However, keeping in mind that this is a 1967 movie, and Brazil was under a tough military dictatorship, this movie is a milestone in the history of Brazilian New Cinema. Glauber Rocha was very braze, discussing forbidden themes such as fight of classes, manipulation of the submissive masses by the elites, corruption in politician, anarchism, campaign promises not kept after the elections, economical power of foreign groups (or countries) in Latin American countries and coup d'état. In 1967, "Terra em Transe" was awarded with "Great Prize" in the Locarno Festival (Switzerland); "Luis Buñuel Prize" in Cannes Festival; "Federation of International Critics Prize" in Cannes Festival; and Best Movie of the Year in the Air France Prize, among other prizes. My vote is eight.

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Terra em Transe" (in Portuguese, "Terra" means "Land"; "Transe" has quite some meanings, like "Anguish", "Risk", "Trance", "Transience") is Glauber Rocha's most important film, along with his earlier masterpiece "Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol" (1964). In "Terra", we see best his cinematic assets (originality, boldness, non-conformity, experimentalism, confrontational "genius", red-blooded vibrancy, great visual style) and faults (grandiloquence, contradictoriness, verbosity, technical shortages). The main character of the film is his own country, Brazil, and by extension Latin America, amalgamated into the fictional country of Eldorado (the South American dreamland pursued by European explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries).

The films uses avant-garde fragmented, non-chronological narration and editing because we are witnessing the random thoughts and memories of a dying man (though this is not clear until half-way into the film). That man is the "Artist", Paulo Martins (Jardel Filho's best role), poet (thus capable of transcending immediacy, materialism and greed) and journalist (thus also a man of his time, capable of connecting to reality). Paulo is caught in a terrible personal, political and ethical crisis: what's the role of Art and Artists (especially movies and filmmakers) in the Third World in the 1960s? Apparently, to serve as a sort of Socratic "light" (ethically, sociologically, politically) against the obscurantist, alienating praxis of "Imperialist domination" of Latin America, since movies are more accessible and efficient than books, theses, newspaper articles (movies can reach the illiterate public) and theater (movie tickets are a lot cheaper than plays). But artists have to be aware they're paying a big personal price for their commitment.

The film poses a series of bold, difficult questions: why is political corruption ubiquitous and endemic in Latin America? Why and how do fascist leaders get legally elected? Why do fascist leaders always fascinate the "masses"? Why are Latin fascists always connected with the Catholic Church? Is a demagogue better than a fascist? Are the "ignorant, unprepared working classes" ready to take power in their own hands? Do the "masses" want power for the sake of equality or do they aspire for the privileges of power? Once in power, will they turn down those privileges for the sake of a new political ethics? Is armed revolution more efficient than gradual conquest of civil and legal rights? Is any model of revolution "importable" (from the USSR, Cuba, etc)? Can the "new society" really be less autocratic and corrupt than the "old" one? No easy answers available, but good questions.

"Terra em Transe" is feverish, urgent, frantic, but not preachy or self-righteous: it's "radically" dialectical and that's one of its best qualities. It's the work of a lucid, angst-filled, courageous 28 year-old filmmaker trying to think out the socio-political complexity of his own country and times, trying to make a contribution as an artist. Glauber boldly confronted censorship with his clear allusions to Brazilian military regime and the "subversive" revolutionary counter-movements that were beginning to take shape in 1967. The military censors vetoed the exhibition of "Terra...", eventually liberated because it was invited to compete at Cannes (where it won 2 prizes) and Locarno (where it triumphed as Best Film) and the military feared a negative international repercussion of the affair.

Some critics complained the film was incomprehensible and allegoric; but the fact is the Brazil had gotten so complex by the late 60s that no simple 3-act plot could suffice. Glauber employs the Brechtian concept of building characters as archetypes behaving not as individuals but as symbols of their social class, origins and interests. Cinematically, the film was influenced by the Soviet revolutionary "montage" of Einsenstein/Dovzhenko, the French avant-garde of Vigo and Godard, the cinéma-vérité of Rouch, the poetic experimentalism of Marker. Dib Lutfi's hand-held camera is mesmerizing, dizzying, practically having a life of its own. Luiz Carlos Barreto's bleached lighting creates diffuse backgrounds and unspecific landscapes of the invented "Eldorado" (and also helped solve budget limitations concerning locations). The all- star cast is committed, vital, acting at the top of their lungs -- Glauber was no fan of understatement or subtlety:)) The only terrible, embarrassing performance is that of non-actress socialite Danuza Leão, whose dialogs were all cut in post-production -- she poses as a mute beauty.

Made as a fiction film, "Terra..." is also a testimony of the tense shift that Brazil (and the world) was going through in the mid-60s: utopia was breathing her last bittersweet breath. Today, "Terra..." can be seen both as a fiction film AND a historical document, despite (or because of) the fact that it's extremely symbolic, poetic, anti-naturalistic. Suddenly, you're aware of a time in History when a film -- a popular medium of artistic expression! -- was not afraid to raise and discuss political theses or use words like "patriarchalism", "imperialism", "conolialism", "masses" or "revolution" in dialog! To 21st century politically sanitized audiences, "Terra..." can be quite an experience. Rocha's risky, confrontational, thick-blooded art towers over the hordes of predictable, intellectually flaccid, ideologically boneless films of the 2000s.

This is compulsory viewing for anyone interested in Glauber Rocha and/or Brazilian/Latin-American political cinema. It can be confusing, loud and chaotic at times, but it's highly impacting and, most importantly, it urges you to think. It's a good companion piece to key "revolution" films of the mid-60s such as Ruy Guerra's "Os Fuzis", Alea's "Memorias del Subdesarrollo", Bertolucci's "Prima della Revoluzione", Pasolini's "Uccellacci e Uccellini", Godard's "La Chinoise", Pontecorvo's "La Battaglia di Algeri", Resnais' "La Guerre est Finie", Kalatozov's "Soy Cuba", etc (the list goes on and it's a GREAT list!). Don't watch it if you're not into political art or dislike experimental film-making.

Land in Anguish by Robert Stamm - Ejumpcut Robert Stamm, 1976

The Lumière Reader Brannavan Gnanalingam

Movie Review - Earth Entranced - From Brazil Comes Film About Poet ... Roger Greenspun from the New York Times

ANTONIO DAS MORTES (O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro)

Brazil France Germany (100 mi) 1969

Chicago Reader [Don Druker] (capsule review)

Part epic, part folklore, part political allegory, Glauber Rocha's 1970 reflection on the role played by legend, myth, and tradition in Brazil's social and political realities is a complex and powerful drama. Antonio (hired by the government but acting partly out of religious conviction) tracks down and kills the members of a guerrilla band, only to realize after killing the last rebel in ritualistic combat that his fight is beside the dispossessed country folk against the landowners. Rocha makes Antonio very much a contemporary figure (even equating him with Che Guevara), and uses folk songs, rhymed verse, and lush color to fashion a stunning call to arms for the Brazilians and one of the most memorable films of the Cinema Novo.

Rocha's sequel to his own Black God, White Devil returns to the Brazilian Sertao in the period after 1940, the key year in which the last of the cangaceiro bandits was killed. The legendary 'warrior saint' Antonio is now the central character, and the movie celebrates his turn against the military regime that hires him, offering his righteous fight as a model for all revolutionary resistance. This time, though, Rocha completely rejects the elements of realism that made his earlier films particularly obscure: the movie is styled and paced like a Leone Western, and is as flamboyantly operatic as a Jancsó parable. Interestingly, the lack of direct historical references makes the result all the more venomously agitational.

All Movie Guide [Todd Kristel]

Bringing Glauber Rocha's 1969 socialist fable to I-House seems to have been a labor of love for programmer Michael Chaiken, who in the press release announcing the screening calls it "visually resplendent" and "among the greatest [films] I have ever seen." As my dad likes to say, that's what makes horseraces. A sort of sequel to Rocha's Black God, White Devil, the 1969 Antonio -- which took best director honors at Cannes -- continues the story of a hired killer whose mission is to wipe out the cangaceiros, revolutionary people's bandits who roam the Brazilian serto. But unlike the earlier film, where Antonio (played in both by Maurcio do Valle), was the heavy, here he's a haunted man who becomes swept up in the vibrant song of the people and eventually turns against his masters. Rocha devotes long (long, long) stretches to tableaux of singing peasants and tells much of the story in song. The compositions are deliberately theatrical; the effect is something like a Brazilian Threepenny Opera, or a collaboration between Jean-Luc Godard and Sergio Leone. To be fair, the film on video is washed-out, with the red tint of aged Technicolor, the subtitles sometimes illegible, but even on the big screen, it seems as if Rocha's histrionic dialogue and unabashed sentimentality would start to grate. Do Valle's performance makes Eastwood look positively expressive; considering the change of heart Antonio undergoes, his lumbering acting is a serious liability, even if it does make an interesting contrast with the wailing and breast-beating going on around him. (This is the kind of movie where a wounded man screams, "The piranhas have got me!") One interesting consideration, though: The plot bears serious similarities to Apocalypse Now, and it would have come out just when a young Coppola was in his impressionable, operatic youth. It's not at all inconceivable that Antonio das Mortes is the missing link between Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.

New York Times [Roger Greenspun] (registration req'd)

THE LION HAS SEVEN HEADS (Der Leone have sept cabeças)

Congo France Italy (103 mi) 1971

The linguist joke of the title states the multinational condition of oppression in Africa, and maybe Glauber Rocha’s state as an artist in exile. The revue of Antonio das Mortes is transposed in any case to the Congolese savanna, where the kind of footage shot for Mondo features becomes groundwork for a scorching political fantasy. The first shot has a bwana couple writhing in half-discarded big hunter regalia, and so it goes, an arresting new idea every ten seconds. Jean-Pierre Léaud in white robes punctuates his sermon by pounding a mallet into the ground, the local women assembled are mildly intrigued: His litany ("The beast... has the paws of a bear... the throat of a lion...") might be a description of the film, though Rocha’s creature is not a chimera but a hydra. A lily-white cabal of Euro buccaneers and CIA agents (which include Rada Rassimov, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Gabriele Tinti and Hugo Carvana) spout imperialist crap in ventilated terrazzos ("In Latin America it was easier"), the people outside are mobilized for the revolution. A stooge is propped up as ruler, given colonial peruke to complete the frogged ensemble from The Emperor Jones; resistance rests on the mating of the spear (Baiack) and the machine gun (Giulio Brogi). The Scriptures are quoted and rejected, "Lili Marleen" and "La Marseillaise" are sung in garbled accents, Don Quixote, saxophones, guerilla bellowing. "In moments of imaginative stultification, there is always someone assuming power" (Ici et Ailleurs). Rocha understands the paradox of the rebel without a state, and ends on the image (out of Preminger) of revolutionaries out on their own Exodus. And, if you don't like that, there’s the spectacle of a Dziga Vertov Group prophecy of Cannibal Holocaust. With Aldo Bixio, Andre Segolo, and Segolo Dia Manungu.

User reviews from imdb Author: jlabine from San Francisco

I'm simply reviewing this film for one reason...I'm a big Jean Pierre Leaud fan. I would not have normally sat through a film that I couldn't even read the subtitles of, but J. P. Leaud seems to hold some weird spell over me and gets me to commit half of my movie viewing life on his output (as boring and slow as that output can be sometimes). Well, not being able to read the subtitles obviously impairs my grasp on the narrative, because I couldn't make much sense of the visuals. The film opens with a man's hands grasping on some woman's breasts while he's yelling like a mad man. Then it jumps to a scene of Jean Pierre Leaud shouting out loud (in French) a lot words while hammering at the ground with a big hammer (or something resembling such) while African natives look on the scene. Then it cuts to some African chanting and dancing, in some Mondo looking footage (but nothing seems to be going on here, really) and it feels like a documentary without narration. Incorporated in all of this looks to be some political angle, with millitant soldiers marching around opressing everyone, and Jean Pierre Leaud (wearing a white nightgown) getting into the scenes with that hammer of his. One scene in particular has the soldiers marching in circles, while the natives chant the same thing for what seems like 15 MINUTES! I thought I was in some kind of cinematic redundency torture! But being a good sport, and carrying on some Leaud one man fan club, I sat through this damn thing to the end. The film is shot in black and white (I'm not sure if this was for artistic reasons or budget restrictions?) and has the feel of an Art Film. This is basically a Foreign Film Phobic's nightmare. If you don't like pretentious French Art Films, then you'll probably last about two minutes through this film (then again, you probably won't stumble across this film or review anyways). I really wish I could have read the subtitles, because I'm sure I'm not giving this film a fair review. If a Jean Pierre Leaud fan is out there searching for this film, don't look too hard. I've a feeling that you'll be sadly disapointed. I'd love to understand this film, and not to be writing some moronic review about something that's over my head. In the end, I found it be really weird and very slow. A real endurance test and no mistake. But I still like Jean Pierre Leaud a lot!

CLARO

Panama (106 mi) 1975

User reviews from imdb Author: Carlos Mello from Brazil

I saw this film by chance, yesterday on the TV, and was glad to relate this movie to the 1970's production of Michelangelo Antonioni and other great directors. It takes place in Rome and some footage inserts from Rio de Janeiro and Bahia show the macumba and other cultural traces of the people's religiousness, in contrast to the behavior of the Italian strikers protesting and the cast of actors free interpretation of the timeless rites of Imperial Rome. It is said that Brazilian director Glauber Rocha referred to this movie as "a view of the colonists by the colonized". It is indeed a political thriller of its time, just like Bernardo Bertolucci's recent "The Dreamers". It was no surprise to reckon sex and drugs entwined amongst the politics of freedom, while guns spread fear and money only restrains individuals from expressing themselves.

DI CAVALCANTI

Brazil (18 mi) 1977

User reviews from imdb Author: Daniel Leal Werneck (thegate@net.em.com.br) from Belo Horizonte, MG

This is a very rare movie, but the story is very spread among brazilian cinema people. When brazilian art master Di Cavalcanti died, Glauber Rocha went to his funeral... with a camera. The short movie shows Cavalcanti`s corpse in the coffin, the funeral, and his family yelling at Rocha to get out of there with that camera, while in the background we hear Jorge Ben singing "Umbabarauma, homem gol", a famous samba-funk song about a famous brazilian soccer player. The guts make the myth.

THE AGE OF THE EARTH (A Idade da Terra)

Brazil (140 mi) 1980

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"This film is both a portrait of Brazil and of myself", stated director Glauber Rocha about his final film "A Idade da Terra", in an interview shortly before his sudden death at 42 (in 1981, of pneumonia). "Idade..." is his artistic epitaph: here you'll find the best and worst of Glauber's exuberant, allegoric, compulsive, revolutionary, verbose, ambitious and very individual style. There is no story-line: it's a collage of long scenes (mostly improvised) with the purpose of "reinventing Brazilian cinematic art, in the same way Villa-Lobos did with Brazilian music, Portinari and Di Cavalcanti did with Brazilian painting". He called it an "anti-symphony", where cinematic "noise" and "cacophony" would be part of a revolutionary artistic style. He was outraged by the fact that mainstream cinema still followed 19th-century literary paradigms (the predominance of dialog, narrative and plot over formal experiments) and wanted the movies to "finally enter the 20th century", to be as ground- breaking as the modern painting movements. Glauber's original project for "Idade..." included having the 16 reels of the film being presented at random order, at the discretion of each projectionist in each movie session, never actually put into practice (the copy we see in VHS today is in the same order he screened at the Venice Film Festival).

"Idade..." had a long troubled genesis, as it began in 1978 and was only finalized two years later. Glauber was at the time a walking paradox: he was Brazil's most prestigious filmmaker on an international level, admired by Bertolucci, Godard and Buñuel; he had revolutionized Brazilian cinema at 24 y.old with his 2nd feature "Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol" (1964) becoming the leader of the Brazilian New Wave ("Cinema Novo"), creating a whole new aesthetics for third- world cinema, consolidated in his famous manifesto "Estética da Fome" (The Hunger Aesthetics). He had won two big prizes at Cannes (best director in 1969 for "Antonio das Mortes", and the Jury Prize for his 1977 iconoclast short "Di Cavalcanti"). And yet, by 1978 he was completely broke: he couldn't get financing, as his films were highly controversial and commercially unsuccessful. By then, he was in the habit of verbally attacking film critics and powerful media corporations, which didn't help matters. He was also living a private hell, as he -- an outspoken leftist -- was shunned by artists and intellectuals for having supported the military regime in a 1975 controversial interview, as well as for showing sympathy for the new Pope (John Paul II), and was thought to be mentally disturbed. Still, he managed to raise enough money to buy a good amount of film negative and began shooting frantically with a shoe-string budget (he filmed a total of 36 hours, which he reluctantly reduced to the final version of 140 minutes).

Urgency is the key word here: it's as if he prophetically sensed this would be his last film. Glauber points his intellectual machine-gun at a multitude of themes: capitalism, militarism, imperialism, revolutionarism, Marxism, racism, sexism, religion and religious myths, pollution, the bourgeoisie, politicians, etc. Visually, the film has tints of cinéma-vérité (in the crowd scenes), expressionism (the 15-minute opening sequence representing the massacre of native indigenous peoples) and cubism (in some sequences, ALL the takes are included one after the other). Glauber's idea of acting was measured in decibels: not only the actors shout all the time, but he himself yells directions off-screen at the actors with his booming voice ("Fala mais alto, Danuza!!!").

"Idade…" is one of the last films to "believe" in avant-garde, experimental, uncompromising art films (as opposed to the omnipresent sense of commercialism we witness today, even from beginning filmmakers). It's from the days when films with political statements and philosophical discussions were welcome and relevant, when intellectual complexity was a plus and not "boring stuff". "Idade..." doesn't strive to be coherent, logical, accessible, entertaining: Glauber wants to provoke bewilderment and discomfort – and he certainly succeeds. It's a film of excesses: it's overlong, overly repetitive, overly digressive. It's a loud film from a loud man who didn't believe in subtlety. Glauber didn't even bother to write down his voice-over comments in "Idade...": he goes on and on ad libbing, thinking out loud in messianic speeches that are alternately lucid and maddeningly over the top. His famous inability to be succinct – both in films and real life – pays a price in his last film and it's no wonder that, by the end of the movie, we feel exhausted.

This is a film for audiences not afraid of experimentalism and controversy -- it's mandatory viewing for all interested in Glauber Rocha and as perhaps the last breath of Brazilian "Cinema Novo" movement. DO NOT watch this if you like conventional story-telling, clarity and subtlety. For the curious, open-minded, patient viewer, trust me: you've never seen a film quite like this.

User reviews from imdb Author: artihcus022 (artihcus022@gmail.com) from India

User reviews from imdb Author: Rodrigo_Amaro from Brazil

ROCK, CHRIS

TOP FIVE B+ 92

USA (102 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site

Chris Rock, named the heir apparent to Richard Pryor early in his career after his HBO stand-up special CHRIS ROCK: BRING THE PAIN (1996), while at age 34 he was also named “the funniest man in America” in September 1999 by Time magazine, Seriously Funny - TIME, which places a lot of pressure on a guy to have to be funny all the time. With the recent suicide of brilliant comic Robin Williams, who often joked about his addiction, or before him Freddie Prinze, or Richard Jeni, one looks at the troubled childhoods of so many comedians who learn to make fun of themselves at an early age, developing a unique ability to make others laugh, often to protect themselves from real life traumas that haunt them throughout their lives. But imagine the weight on one’s shoulders to be labeled the funniest man in America, where the spotlight is always going to be pointed at you even when you least desire it. Rock has always handled his stardom admirably, maintaining a center of balance, refusing to serve as a role model while he satirizes and excoriates public figures onstage, as expressed in his 1997 memoir Rock This, “Why does the public expect entertainers to behave better than everybody else? It’s ridiculous...Of course, this is just for black entertainers. You don’t see anyone telling Jerry Seinfeld he’s a good role model. Because everyone expects whites to behave themselves...Nowadays, you’ve got to be an entertainer and a leader. It’s too much.” In the open and freewheeling observational style of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, comedians are actors and stand-up entertainers that offer scorching social commentary, off color jokes, biting satire, and personal autobiographical revelations while also challenging the limits of free speech. All the best comedians go through a comedy circuit where they do bits and pieces of their stand-up routines in small clubs, which seems to be the Holy Grail of comedy, as it receives far greater adulation and acclaim for actually being funny than movie roles, where Woody Allen has made over 70 motion pictures, but people still persist in believing that his earliest movies that were the closest to his stand-up routines were his funniest.

To his credit, Rock loves all comedians, past and present, where he’s probably stolen from the best of them, but he continues to showcase his own unique flair onscreen, where his stream-of-conscious style of outrageous humor is simply hilarious, and this film, which he writes, directs, and stars in front of the camera, bears some autobiographical resemblance to Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), where Allen’s character Sandy Bates is a highly successful film director known for making hilarious comedies, but confesses, “I don’t want to make funny movies any more, they can’t force me to. I don’t feel funny. I look around the world and all I see is human suffering.” In Rock’s film, his character Andre Allen interestingly reveals he was high or drunk at the height of his professional comedy career, and now that he’s sober, the world doesn’t appear so damn funny anymore. Trying to make more of a positive difference, he makes a serious film where he plays a Django Unchained style, real-life historical figure Dutty Boukman, the leader of a Haitian slave rebellion called UPRIZE, where he’s hoping to make a serious statement without comedy, but it’s flopping miserably as all anyone wants to talk about is Hammy, a crime-fighting bear, a character that he played in three successive blockbuster films, the last one grossing about $600 million dollars, even though he’s done with the role, insisting upon moving on, but reporters aren’t the least bit interested in his sidestepping their questions, knowing their readers can’t get enough of Hammy. Shot in New York, where much of the film is openly walking down the streets, fixated cries of “Hammy!” can be heard throughout, much like the “Birdman” calls in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). No matter how much these guys try to ignore their past, it follows them everywhere, like an embarrassing nickname or a foul rumor they can’t shed, but the real surprise of the film is the complexity of the role written for Rosario Dawson as New York Times journalist Chelsea Brown, who spends a day following Allen around in order to write an extended profile piece on his life. While he’s obviously at a crossroads in his life and career, where all the tabloids are writing about his upcoming marriage to be broadcast live on Bravo with Reality TV star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union), seemingly matching the pattern of co-producer Kanye West’s marriage to Kim Kardashian, but what’s most intriguing is that Dawson’s more complicated life is exposed right alongside his own, a beautiful contrast to the vapid imagery seen in tabloid journalism, creating one of her best, most down-to-earth and intelligent roles since Spike Lee’s 25^th HOUR (2002)

Actually, the complexity of the secondary roles is equally outstanding, from his loyal bodyguard and chauffeur, JB Smooth as Silk, who’s been his longtime friend since childhood, to the outlandishly freakish role of Cedric the Entertainer as Jazzy Dee, the underground black market mayor of Houston, the guy who can procure anything, anytime, anywhere, where he’s also like a Get Out of Jail Free card, even though hanging around with him is what gets your ass thrown in jail in the first place, where in any other movie his scene-stealing antics would be the highlight, but this film features an overabundance of stars. Kevin Hart’s scene as Andre’s manager is equally hilarious, where over the phone the two get into an N-word contest, where they delve into the idea of a black man getting into trouble for calling another black man the N-word, which unleashes a barrage of expletives that could only exist in black culture. Perhaps the highlight of the film is when Andre brings Chelsea into the housing project where he grew up, where we meet Ben Vereen as his alcoholic father and Sherri Shepherd as his mother, where his old friends from the neighborhood are like a who’s who of black stand-up comedy, including Tracy Morgan (before his recent accident), Jay Pharoah, Hassan Johnson, and Leslie Jones, all playing to the journalist, each stepping all over the other to try to offer the real dirt on Andre, where it’s the only scene where the nonstop laughter feels so authentically natural, as this group takes such pleasure in teasing and ribbing one other, where it feels like they’ve been doing it for years, with the group wondering whether Tupac Shakur would be a U.S. Senator today had he lived, or maybe, as Andre suggests, he just might be “playing the bad, dark-skinned boyfriend in a Tyler Perry movie.” It’s here that they happen upon the theme of the top five rappers of all time, which is like the listing for a nonexistent black hall of fame, yet each distinct choice offers an eye into each personality, as it’s like defining what it is to be black. Within the context of this enveloping humor, there’s a surprisingly effective “smallness” brought into the film that simply hones in on Andre and Chelsea walking through the streets of New York while opening up about their lives, offering some of the more astute insight into alcoholism, where part of the recovery program is “rigorous honesty.” Chelsea’s shrewd insight into her own life, remaining honest and forthright throughout, but also flirtatious and funny, is the unexpected star of the film. While initially the two protect themselves with lies and carefully guarded secrets, but as the film progresses the guard comes down and what we’re treated to is an unexpectedly smart and comically inventive film that veers into an equally clever relationship movie that feels extremely close to the real Chris Rock, which as we all know is nothing short of amazing.

Review: Chris Rocks Top Five is simply a comedy ... - HitFix Gregory Ellwood

If you were to look over Chris Rock's lengthy and impressive career you might think he peaked with HBO's "The Chris Rock Show." Or perhaps it was his string of Emmy-winning standup specials including 2008's "Kill the Messenger." Or perhaps it was as the producer and co-creator of the critically acclaimed TV series "Everybody Hates Chris." Well, happily, at the ripe young age of 49, Rock has hit a career high with his new film "Top Five," which debuted at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival Saturday night.

The third movie written by, directed by and starring Rock after "Head of State" and "I Think I Love My Wive," "Top Five" finds the comedian playing Andre Allen, a former stand up comedian turned movie star who is at a major turning point in his life. Best known for his character "Hammy" – essentially Rock in a bear costume with guns blazing yelling "It's Hammy time!" – and three blockbuster sequels, Andre has decided to stop making comedies. His first foray into "serious" films is about to hit theaters and, well, its prospects at the box office don't look good. He’s also days away from marrying a Bravo reality star, Erica Long (a fantastic Gabrielle Union), whose entire life is being chronicled in anticipation of the big day.

Much to Andre’s disdain, and while all this is swirling around, his manager (J.B. Smoove) convinces him to speak to a writer in the middle of a New York Times profile piece on him, Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson). Andre doesn't trust her after years of the paper's movie critic ripping his movies, but over the course of a few days they walk the streets of New York discovering secrets about each other while also providing commentary on the current state of the nation and pop culture.

Seemingly uncertain of how much to share with her, one of the first things Andre does is bring Chelsea to the housing projects where he grew up. This is the second hint after a very funny Kevin Hart cameo as Andre’s LA-based agent that many familiar faces from Rock’s comedy world will be appearing. In a small apartment, Chelsea meets a group of Andre’s old friends played by Sherri Shepherd, Tracy Morgan, Jay Pharoah, Leslie Jones and Michael Che. Rock lets this scene explode into one bit after another, bringing the best out of his actors while also documenting the environment where Andre’s comedic gifts were born.

As the hours pass, things become more intriguing when Andre and Chelsea discover they are both recovering alcoholics. Andre’s explanation of when he hit rock bottom (which we later discover wasn't really his lowest point) involves one of the film’s funniest and most shocking set pieces in a Houston hotel room. Spoiling more details would ruin the surprise, but it's worth noting the scene involves Cedric the Entertainer playing one of his most inspired characters in years. The other moment audiences will not be able to get out of their heads is a story told by Chelsea that involves her boyfriend Brad (Anders Holm of "Workaholics"). Truthfully, that’s all you need to know because to tease anything else would ruin the set-up and the joke (and it's worth the surprise).

Unlike his previous work, Rock has partially fashioned "Top Five" into a well thought out sequence of hilarious situations that continues to top itself as the film progresses. And just when you think the surprises are over, another famous face appears. These are comedy icons that either provide another remarkable story or are humbly self-deprecating within the context of a scene. It's worth noting that after the passing of Robin Williams and Joan Rivers over the past month, Rock has spoken eloquently about the history of American standup. He may, in fact, know the ins and outs better than any of his peers because he uses that knowledge masterfully in casting this picture. But where "Top Five" transcends its genre is with everything else Rock wants to touch upon.

Sound On Sight [Justine Smith]

The moment he dropped his 1996 breakthrough stand-up special Bring the Pain, Chris Rock was dubbed the heir apparent of Richard Pryor, one of the few comics on the scene to approach the king’s potent mixture of social commentary, personal confession, and performative brilliance. But that wasn’t all they had in common; Pryor spent most of his film career failing to find a vehicle that captured his unique gifts, and Rock has experienced much of the same struggle. “Richard Pryor has two good movies out of 30 or 40,” Rock told Rolling Stone. “Rodney Dangerfield had one. So it’s easy to look at history and go, ‘Maybe I’m not going to get one’… But I guess you’ve got to make your own history.” And Rock has done just that with his new film Top Five, writing, directing, and starring in a picture that plays like a cross between Stardust Memories, Funny People, and Before Sunset, but refracted through the prism of Rock’s distinctive comic sensibility. So why did it take him so long to make a movie worthy of his talent?

It’s not that his previous filmography is a trail of turkeys. His brief bit in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and supporting turn in New Jack City were key components in his early stardom. He’s decent in secondary turns in Nurse Betty and Dogma. And his appearances in such Adam Sandler dreck as The Longest Yard and the Grown-Ups films aren’t really his fault, aside from the crime of agreeing to them (but everybody’s got bills to pay). What separates Rock from Pryor is the degree of control he’s had over his projects since all the way back in 2001, when he co-wrote and co-executive produced the Heaven Can Wait remake Down to Earth. After that, he co-wrote and directed two more features, the can-you-imagine-a-black-president farce Head of State and the Love in the Afternoon remake I Think I Love My Wife. None were outright terrible. But none could even touch — in comedy or in truth — the worst five minutes of his stand-up act.

In a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable, Rock said (presumably of I Think I Love My Wife), “I did a movie that wasn’t that good awhile back that I directed, and I remember Alexander Payne talked to me and goes, ‘I watch you do stand-up, you can get away with anything. And I watch your movies and you’re so safe. What are you doing?’ And I took that note into this movie.”

“This movie” is Top Five, which Rock wrote, significantly enough, while on location for Sandler’s execrable Grown-Ups 2. Rock plays Andre Allen, a stand-up-comic-turned-movie-star on the verge of a very big weekend: he’s about to get married (on television, to a reality-show star), and his new movie, a dead-serious dramatization of the Haitian slave revolution called Uprize, is about to open. Its fate is important to him since, after kicking a dangerous booze habit, he’s afraid he’s lost his gift. “I don’t feel like doing funny movies anymore,” he says, recalling Stardust’s Sandy Bates. “I don’t feel funny anymore.”

His high-pressure day is spent with Chelsea (Rosario Dawson), a New York Times reporter penning an in-depth profile. She trails him to his tuxedo fitting, his press junket, and to pick up the rings; he takes her back to his old neighborhood. And along the way, they talk — and talk and talk and talk, creating a dynamic reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Before movies (and that series’ star Julie Delpy’s 2 Days In… movies, the second of which co-starred Rock), sharing with those films the pleasure of just listening to smart, witty people batting it back and forth. (It’s also a welcome showcase for the considerable charms of Ms. Dawson, one of the industry’s most perpetually underused and undervalued actors.)

Rock has stated that he wrote most of the roles for the people who played them, and you can tell — this is a guy who loves his fellow comics and wants to give them a chance to shine, and much of the picture has a loose, warm, show-me-whatcha-got vibe. His direction is miles more confident; he’s creating moods instead of framing jokes, tinkering with structure gingerly and playfully, using his score and music cues (coordinated, of course, by Questlove) as emphasis but not as a crutch. Sure, it’s got some issues — Rock’s views on what drives women remain problematic, and it’s one more entry in this year’s trend of oddly childish attacks on critics (OK, I’m a little more sensitive to those than most viewers). But it all adds up to easily Rock’s finest film to date, and one of the year’s smartest and funniest comedies.

So how did he get this one right, after so many years of getting it rather wrong? Because, like Pryor, he’s never had the opportunity to play a character as interesting as he is — and so, by playing a rough approximation of himself, he can get closer to the truth he puts across so freely onstage. For the first time, he’s not trying to stuff his gonzo energy into the ill-fitting box of a “normal” person in a conventional comedy; we didn’t want to see Rock doing the lame white-people-dance-funny bits of Head of State or the even lamer Viagra gags of I Think I Love My Wife. In Top Five, he finds a cinematic approximation of his act: free-flowing, unpredictable, personal, spiced up with pop cultural references, political shout-outs, and a decidedly hip-hop energy, and above all else, funny as hell.

Chris Rock's Top Five Is Jammed With Great ... - Slate David Haglund

The comic centerpiece of Chris Rock’s extremely enjoyable Top Five is a sequence in which Andre Allen, the famous comedian played by Rock, takes journalist Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson) to the housing project where he grew up. (She’s writing a profile for the New York Times.) Back in Andre’s old neighborhood, Chelsea meets the friends and family Andre has known forever, and these old acquaintances are played by a murderer’s row of comic talent: Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Jay Pharaoh, Michael Che, Sherri Shepherd, Hassan Johnson (aka Wee-Bey). Pharoah has said that Rock “put out a comedian’s signal in the sky like Batman” when casting the movie, which also features JB Smoove, Jerry Seinfeld, Brian Regan, and other great stand-ups. But what’s remarkable about the scene in the projects is not just how many funny people are assembled. It’s that, even given that collection of talent, the scene is even funnier than you to expect it to be. It’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s a blast.

The comics rib each other, explain themselves to the interloping journalist, and argue about the best rappers of all time (the “top five” of the title). Rock, directing his third feature film and allowing much more improvisation than he has in the previous two, orchestrates the scene expertly. Here and elsewhere, Top Five has a jaunty rhythm, credit for which goes not only to Rock—and executive music producer Questlove, who’s partly behind the pitch-perfect pop-music choices that keep the movie humming—but also editor Anne McCabe, who cut both of Kenneth Lonergan’s movies (among many others). Rock has compared his performance in the projects scene to Double Dutch, him trying to find his way in as the jokes keep swinging by. It’s a metaphor he likes. At another point in Top Five, we see snippets of Andre and Chelsea walking and talking around New York City, including a shot, returned to multiple times, of Andre trying to find his moment to jump as two girls swing ropes by a playground. He never does. Chelsea leaps right in.

That’s the two central characters in a nutshell: Chelsea is daring, perhaps a little too much so, while Andre, despite his success, is full of self-doubt. Best known for playing Hammy, a crime-fighting bear (a role mildly analogous, Rock acknowledges, to the zebra he voices in the lucrative Madagascar movies), Andre is making a bid to be taken seriously with his new movie, Uprize, in which he plays real-life Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman. (Brief clips of Allen-as-Boukman make it amusingly evident that we, unlike the critics in the movie, are not meant to take it seriously.) Top Five transpires, Linklater-like, in a single day, with Andre doing publicity engagements, running errands, and talking with Chelsea.

Andre and Chelsea are both recovering addicts, and they promise each other “rigorous honesty,” an unlikely pledge, of course, from a movie star to a celebrity profiler. (This detail pales in comparison to later revelations, which let us know that Rock’s take on journalism is not exactly reality-based.) But that promise provides an excuse for the movie to present comic set pieces in the form of flashbacks to embarrassing moments in their respective pasts. Andre narrates his “bottom,” a trip to Texas where he met the self-proclaimed “motherfucking man in Houston,” unforgettably embodied by Cedric the Entertainer. Chelsea, meanwhile, provides awkward bedroom details about her boyfriend in a tale that, along with an impressive bit of physical comedy by Anders Holm, carries an unfortunate whiff of homophobia. (The Houston story ends on the sour note of false rape charges; Rock’s sexual politics have never been as progressive as his shrewd, complex take on race in America.)

Dawson is terrific, making a complicated and slightly fantastical character seem like a real human being. Gabrielle Union accomplishes something similar, and with much less to work with: The role of Andre’s fiancée, Erica, who has a reality show on Bravo and whose upcoming marriage is meant to be a major media event, could have been a curdled Kim Kardashian caricature. But Union turns Erica’s lack of talent into a reason to sympathize with her, explaining to Andre that this superficial form of celebrity is all she’s got. We don’t get a particularly deep understanding of her relationship to Andre, but we do get a feel for the complicated relationship each of them has to fame. (I began to wonder what Kanye West—who, along with Jay Z, Scott Rudin, and Eli Bush, is a producer on the film—thinks of this storyline. And does Hammy look a little like the Dropout Bear? Probably I’m reaching.)

Rock’s own performance is not quite as dynamic or assured as that of his female co-stars, but then his job is mostly to register introspection and bewilderment at the madness that frequently surrounds him. It’s a self-consciously Woody Allen-ish role, most obviously akin to Sandy Bates, the filmmaker in Stardust Memories whose fans prefer his “earlier, funnier movies.” (Andre learns a lesson much like the one Sandy learns, though instead of hearing it from aliens, he infers it from a hilarious encounter featuring a cameo too good to spoil.) And it’s a testament to Rock’s generosity as a performer (and wisdom as a filmmaker) that he seems happy to be upstaged by his supporting cast. He recently told Frank Rich that his own daughter has said, “Kevin Hart’s funnier than you,” which makes it all the more impressive that he cast Kevin Hart in his movie and then let Hart be funnier than him.

That interview with Rich kicked off a wave of Q&A’s with such striking insights that Rock was finally dubbed “America’s real black president” by Gawker. But Top Five is not an op-ed. The movie probably makes its loudest statement about race simply by existing: an ambitious and personal film full of black stars, backed in part by black producers, written, directed by, and starring a hugely popular black artist. There is a scene in which a member of the NYPD puts a black man in a chokehold, which feels almost shocking in its timeliness, but which is mostly a reminder, if one were needed, that that shit has been going on for a long time (it even has a long history in film and stand-up). Admittedly, the moment in a strip club when Jerry Seinfeld lists his top five does serve as a commentary on terrible white taste in rap music. But mostly it serves as an inspired punch line to a very, very good time at the movies.

PopMatters [Bill Gibron]

Why We Need Comedy Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Review: Chris Rock's Top Five Is Fun But Unquestionably ... Lesley Coffin from The Mary Sue

PopMatters [Jon Lisi]

INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Top Five - Pajiba TK

Review: Chris Rock's 'Top Five' | Indiewire Eric Kohn

ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD [Luke Bonanno]

Top Five is Chris Rock's Annie Hall | Vanity Fair Jordan Hoffman

'Top Five' Review: Chris Rock's Comedy Is Funny ... - TheWrap James Rocchi

Review: Rosario Dawson shines in Chris Rocks ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

'Top Five' Review: High Hilarity in Rock's Classic - WSJ Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

How Chris Rock's Top Five Gets Undercut by an Ill ... - Vulture E. Alex Jung

Fuse Film Review: Chris Rock's “Top Five” — Only Funny on ... Gerald Peary

Chris Rock comes into his own as a filmmaker | Movie ... JR Jones from The Chicago Reader

Top Five / The Dissolve Nathan Rabin

Blu-ray.com [Martin Liebman]

DVD Sleuth [Mike Long] Blu-Ray

DVDcompare.net (Blu-ray Disc) [Abraham Phillips]

Twitch [Peter Martin]

Film Racket [Bill Gibron]

Chris Rock's rigorous honesty [Jerry Saravia]

Movie Review: Chris Rock Nears Greatness With TOP FIVE ... Evan Saathoff from Badass Digest

Review: 'Top Five' is Chris Rock's Best, but Still Disappointing Vince Mancini from Uproxx

Top five things you need to know after seeing Chris ... - HitFix

Top Five - The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule review)

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Chris Rock: 'I'm doing OK, but some days I'm sad outta my mind' Hadley Freeman interview from The Guardian, May 7, 2015

'Top Five': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer

Variety [Scott Foundas]

Guardian [Catherine Shoard]

Westender Vancouver [Curtis Woloschuk]

Top Five - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'Top Five' movie review: Chris Rock soars as director and star Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Joseph Anthony]

New York Times [Manohla Dargis]

'Top Five' review: Chris Rock's best movie to date - SFGate Mick LaSalle

Top Five Chris Rock - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times

Pining for sophisticated comedy in a world of raunch - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times

Top Five Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna

Top Five - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rocksavage, David

OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS A- 94

USA (98 mi) 1995

A film adaptation of Truman Capote’s first novel, a daring film of life inside a doll house filled with cob-webbed memories, narrated by Joel, played by David Speck, a 13-year old who returns to a Southern mansion after his mother dies, supposedly summoned by his father who finally feels his paternal obligations, only to discover his father is bed-ridden, paralyzed, mute and unable to write, discovering that it was instead Randolph, played by Lothaire Bluteau, a lonely eccentric uncle who summoned Joel. Upon arriving, Joel is left alone, cared for by a Blanche DuBois mistress of the house, Miss Amy, and the black maid Missoula, played beautifully by April Turner, who tells him: “When somebody needs you, it makes you feel mighty important. It makes you worth something.” While his uncle and father are mysteriously absent, supposedly sick, and for days on end, Joel is largely alone to fend for himself in a huge, empty mansion, listening to the voices in the walls and the other rooms, with “sounds on the edge of silence,” until his family secrets are slowly revealed to him by Randolph, a most fragile and melodramatic alcoholic living only in his imagination, dressed in silks, wearing robes, constantly drinking and smoking, even cross-dressing, which seems ever so natural for Randolph, never needing to leave a room. He invites Joel on a picnic, only to sit him down in the middle of a room, speaking endlessly about one exotic adventure or another involving his father, luring Joel into this dilapidated world separated from all humanity, where he has been invited to be the audience for Randolph and Miss Amy, two lonely hearts who are content to live forever only in the world of memories, until Joel realizes they’re not strong enough to live outside the seclusion of their dreams. “What good is imagination if you don’t have the guts to live it?” he asks Randolph, discovering that they are caught in their own webs, imprisoned forever, lost and alone in a pathetic, decaying world which was once beautiful. Using gorgeous Southern atmosphere that reveals a portrait of a secret aristocracy, where time is the one thing they have plenty of, this film allows the beauty of Capote’s language to flower and decay in the same breath.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Other Voices Other Rooms (1995) Rob White from Sight and Sound, July 1999

Thirteen-year-old Joel rides a bus to Noon City in the deep south of the US. He remembers how a letter had arrived at his aunt Ellen's house in New Orleans from his long-absent father summoning him to live in his mansion at Skully's Landing. When he finally reaches the house he meets his aunt Amy and cousin Randolph, but there's no sign of his father. He befriends Jesus Fever, the elderly servant, and Jesus' daughter Zoo, as well as Idabell, the fiery daughter of the neighbour. He discovers his paralysed and autistic father in an attic bedroom. It was Randolph who wrote the letter.

Amy steals the letters he tries to send to New Orleans while Randolph slowly captivates him with stories of Cuba and his futile love for Pepe (whom Randolph writes to, care of all the world's capital cities). Jesus dies. Zoo runs away but returns after she has been raped and beaten in the road. Joel and Idabell run away but return when Joel is bitten by a snake. Aunt Ellen visits, bringing Joel's things which Amy hides. Joel finds them and confronts a drunken Randolph who confesses to shooting and paralysing Joel's father. Joel leaves Skully's Landing.

Review

Other Voices, Other Rooms was Truman Capote's first novel, published to enormous acclaim in 1948 (when the author was only 24). Told from the point of view of Joel Sansom, a 13-year-old boy uprooted on false pretences in order to stay with relatives in the deep south, it's a claustrophobic chamber piece, part gothic saga of family secrets, part coming-of-age memoir. It was always going to be a difficult novel to adapt to the screen. Lacking the film-friendly premises of In Cold Blood (1967) or Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), it's more purely a writer's book, full of subtly subjective narration and ornate descriptions of the fecund swamplands where the dilapidated Skully house sits, and the wasted, tormented people who occupy it. So it was a risky choice of source material for a first feature for documentarian David Rocksavage, and this isn't a particularly distinguished debut.

There are too many curious experiments and evasions. The character of neighbour Idabell, prominent in the novel, is underdeveloped here, making her presence inexplicable. Instead of accentuating how the southern setting would appear to an adolescent and adopting the visual style of, for example, The Night of the Hunter (where everything is primal, enlarged, threatening to the senses), the film-makers give us swamps which are a little too muddy, a mansion just a little too peeling and battered. And while a framing voiceover delivered by a Capote soundalike is forgivable, the fantasy flashbacks where bibulous cousin Randolph remembers lost-love Pepe and imagines Joel with them are simply bizarre in their staginess. They look like out-takes from Fassbinder's Querelle and – the very muted homoeroticism of Capote's book notwithstanding – seem entirely inappropriate. On the other hand there are two very powerful moments involving the servants Zoo and Jesus: an improvised prayer service in which father and daughter sing an exquisite spiritual, and a brief slow-motion sequence in which she's chased on an empty road before (we later discover) being raped.

What remains are the lead performances. David Speck as Joel could have been better coached and his diction is often awkward, but he has a wonderfully still, thoughtful face. Anna Thomson as the dipsomaniac Amy moves through the film like a ghost – pallid, crushed, tears always at the edge of her eyes. Lothaire Bluteau luxuriates in the decadence and the guilty, inward-looking maudlinity of Randolph. Both these adult players are compelling but finally too wan, too overcome by ennui, too eviscerated to lift the film beyond the ordinary.

Rodrigues, João Pedro

Spotlight | João Pedro Rodrigues - Cinema Scope Dennis Lim interview with the director from Cinema Scope, 2009

Is there still such a thing as queer cinema? On the one hand, Cannes 2009, where every other movie seemed to have a gay character, theme, subtext, or sensibility, could be seen as a reflection of a “post-gay” cultural climate, where onscreen homosexuality is so ubiquitous that its existence barely seems worth noting. (Indeed, everyone went on and on about the blood and gore , but not the gays.) But what should we make of the fact that the most vital and singular of these homocentric films, and easily one of the two or three best films of the entire festival—João Pedro Rodrigues’ Un Certain Regard entry To Die Like a Man—received almost no attention, and furthermore was expressly condemned by both Variety and Screen to a purgatorial existence in “gay festivals?” (Like Cannes?)

The indifference that met Rodrigues’ third feature—about an aging drag performer, past her prime but still ambivalently pre-op—could partly be chalked up to puzzlement. Its dignified fatalism ignores the politically correct line on gender dysphoria; its homespun flamboyance and its odd, boldly sustained tone of anguished comedy thwart any existing notions of camp. Plus-sized Tonia (Fernando Santos), born Antonio, has lived as a woman for decades. She’s a battle-scarred veteran of the Lisbon drag clubs, with a cute if somewhat crazy lover young enough to be her son (she also has an actual son, an army deserter working through his own sexual issues).
But as the title flatly suggests, she ultimately finds it impossible to escape her biological destiny. This is a poignant rumination on the mysteries of identity but hardly an affirmative celebration of our fluid and malleable selves. A wry, strangely enchanted tragicomedy, To Die Like a Man is, in the end, so resistant to taxonomy that it only points up the predictability of most gay-themed films, which—nearly two decades after New Queer Cinema, after the endless exhausted debates about visibility and representation—remain boxed into tidy sub-categories.

The coming-out template remains eternally popular, as evidenced by Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère, a crowd-pleasing harpy mom/gay son bitchfest that swept the prizes at this year’s deeply queer Quinzaine. So, too, does the forbidden-love melodrama, which reached its commercial apogee with Brokeback Mountain (2005). Ang Lee was back with another portrait of tentative gayness in a repressive environment (the Catskills on the eve of the Age of Aquarius), in the tepid counterculture comedy Taking Woodstock.
Two other films took on the Brokeback theme of socially unsanctioned love: Haim Tabakman’s Eyes Wide Open, about the scandalous affair between an Orthodox Jerusalem butcher and his hot new employer, and Lou Ye’s Competition entry (and surprise Best Screenplay winner) Spring Fever, an extended middle finger to the Chinese authorities and, despite its longeurs, a plausible and touching account of the ubiquity of sexual repression in present-day China.

Then there were the gimmicky twists on tried-and-true formulas. Le roi de l’evasion, from Alain Guiraudie, whose previous films mined the unlikely erotic dream life of rural France, is a reverse coming-out movie in which a portly fortysomething gay tractor salesman switches from homo gerontophilia to hetero near-pedophilia—wacky farce ensues, but by Guiraudie’s standards, it’s fairly conventional. More or less the opposite happens in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a more overtly comic Old Joy (2006) in which two straight buddies (one married, the other adrift) try to get it up for a gay porno.

I Love You Philip Morris, from Bad Santa (2003) screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, employed a familiar strategy of subversion, subjecting stereotypes to comic exaggeration. Jim Carrey plays a devout, married Southerner whose midlife coming-out and attendant lifestyle changes (“Being gay is expensive!”) lead him on a career path as a con artist. In the film’s boldest breach of taste, he even fakes his own death from AIDS.

Many of these films had their moments, but all seemed somehow small and obvious next to the irreducible enigmas of To Die Like a Man. The film’s central conundrum is understanding how someone so determined to live like a woman reconciles herself to dying like a man. Resisting the sentimentality of an illness weepie (the implication is that Tonia has AIDS), Rodrigues discreetly connects his heroine’s failing health to her dawning acknowledgment of her corporeal limits. A devout Catholic, Tonia has never been able to work up the courage for the final gender-reassignment procedure—Rodrigues, who studied biology (he wanted to be an ornithologist), provides a graphic origami demonstration of a sex-change operation—and toxic silicone implants have left her breasts sore and her nipples pustulent.

But her final burst of resolve and clarity also comes from the cumulative fatigue and self-consciousness of a life lived in between genders. When Tonia’s boyfriend, Rosario (Alexander David), a volatile junkie, breaks into one of his fits of contemptuous abuse, he invariably takes aim at her identity: “neither fish nor flesh,” “a man with boobs.” The subject is clearly ever present in Tonia’s mind. When she catches Rosario ogling her buxom younger rival, Jenny (Jenny Larrue), she snaps, “Have you never seen a naked man?”

The arrival of the urbane forest-dwelling grand dame Maria Bakker (Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida) ups the one-liner count, but To Die Like a Man mostly unfolds in a melancholic minor key (“the most downbeat film ever made about transsexuals,” Jonathan Romney declared in Screen). Still, it’s not without its subtle raptures. A distinctive stylist with a pop touch and an eye for the totemic, Rodrigues has a knack for the perfectly uncanny image: a car, wrapped in foil, presented as a birthday gift; an extended switchblade hitting a plastic shower curtain; a succession of objects (a gnawed chicken bone, a family photo, a stiletto shoe) incongruously dropped into an aquarium.

Rodrigues’ films are both precise and radical in their use of sound and music. O Fantasma (2000) was almost silent but for an infernal chorus of howls and barks. The Odete (2005) soundtrack featured Bright Eyes, Andy Williams, and various versions of “Moon River.” To Die Like a Man, despite its strategic avoidance of on-stage vamping (we never see Tonia perform), is practically a musical—in fact, the most lovably artless movie musical since Jacques Rivette’s Haut bas fragile (1995), which likewise mines the quotidian for surprising moments of euphoria. Rodrigues rejects the clichéd ostentation of musicals and drag shows—as indicated by the constrained 1.33 frame —and his vaguely ascetic approach has the perverse effect of making his material all the more magical.

There’s a wonderful matter-of-factness about the way the characters break into song—Tonia dreamily continuing a tune heard on a car radio, singing with her friend Irene as they fuss with her wig—and in the plainspoken yearning of the lyrics (most songs are Portuguese pop, with the notable exception of the hymnlike “Cavalry,” by transsexual performance artist Baby Dee, which accompanies a nocturnal interlude in the woods). Rodrigues uses the musical numbers as license for experimentation and trickery (a playful camera angle here, a tinted image there), occasioning a few moments of bargain-basement transcendence worthy of Guy Maddin.
It is absurd to think of Rodrigues simply as a gay filmmaker, though that may be the most effective way to get his work seen (especially in the North American marketplace). The tag is especially annoying given how routinely he’s compared to Pedro Almodóvar, who has long escaped the gay ghetto and now rules the middlebrow roost. This year’s obligatory Almodóvar film at Cannes, the sombre meta-noir Broken Embraces, only reinforced the sense that Rodrigues’ films have in abundance precisely what’s been missing from Almodóvar’s—verve, nerve, a real empathy for carnal needs and transgressive behaviour—for years now. If anything, the “gay film” that To Die Like a Man most resembles is one that could share its title (and one that held little appeal for what marketers typically think of as gay audiences): Jacques Nolot’s tough, mournful Avant que j’oublie (2007).
With each of his three features, Rodrigues has tackled a loaded or negative archetype—with O Fantasma, the submissive slut; with Odete, the fag hag; and with To Die Like a Man, the tragic tranny. It is reductive and even misleading to say that he has ennobled these figures (he does not necessarily see them as fallen, to begin with). But he has attempted, in each case, to provide a full and credible account of their deepest and most tangled desires.

Cinema Scope: The film is dedicated to Sonic—who’s that?
João Pedro Rodrigues: That’s my cat. He died on August 26th, while we were shooting the scene where Tonia and Rosario are singing in the cemetery. I had him for 15 years. The tracking shot in that scene, it’s like an appreciation.

Scope: Is Tonia based on an actual person?

Rodrigues: Several people. I had the first version of the script before I met Fernando Santos, who plays Tonia, but he had been doing drag for years, so there are a lot of things he offered to me.

Scope: Could you talk a bit about the double meaning of the title, which has a macho connotation but also refers to the character’s biological fate?

Rodrigues: Well, it starts a little like a war movie, with the two soldiers in the forest. There’s a fight and one of them dies. So the idea was to play with this expectation that, OK, that’s why it’s called To Die Like a Man. There’s the military sense, but, of course, there’s another sense at the end, which is that Tonia wants to die like a man. The main idea is someone who believes they have a fate and they cannot escape it. In Portugal, with the power of Catholic education and the idea of religious fate, this is someone who cannot go against their ultimate desire of change, and that’s very tragic and very touching.

Scope: Odete ends with the heroine transcending her physical body. This film is about a character who, despite her best efforts, is ultimately unable to do so.

Rodrigues: You’re right, but it’s not theoretical. I work a lot by intuition and it’s difficult to theorize about the film. It’s always difficult for me to figure out my next film, and I think this did start from there, from the last shot of my previous film. That’s a scene where a girl is possessed by a boy and she’s fucking this other boy, which made me think about the disruption of gender, the idea of this floating gender.

Scope: I know that you researched O Fantasma by closely observing trash collectors in Lisbon. Was there an equivalent process here, immersing yourself and befriending people in the drag community?

Rodrigues: It’s a small group of people, where everybody knows everybody else. For O Fantasma I followed the collectors for six months, at least once a week. Sometimes they didn’t want to talk. For this film, it was easy because most people wanted to talk. I was sometimes surprised by the degree of exposure. They were talking about their private lives with a level of detail that made me uncomfortable. I think a lot of them were inventing or exaggerating their stories. People tend to tell you not exactly what happened but their way of seeing their own life. But that was also interesting.

Scope: Did you work mainly with nonprofessionals again?

Rodrigues: Fernando Gomes, who plays the boss, is the only one who acted before. I try to find the right person to play the characters I invent. What usually happens is I feel that person has to be my character, even sometimes just by the way they move. I have to know everybody quite intimately before I start shooting, so we can trust each other. I couldn’t work with actors who demand psychological explanations of their characters and also I don’t think they could play these parts.

Scope: Even though Tonia is a celebrated drag performer, you never show her on stage.

Rodrigues: That was really important to me. I didn’t want to show the show, because I really wanted to make a film that was against spectacle. I didn’t want it to be like those films with transsexuals, like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). It can be funny sometimes, but I’m not interested in that. Everybody has seen drag shows, and it’s always the same. Drag shows were popular in Portugal in the ‘80s and ‘90s but now there’s a sense of repetition, singing always the same songs. I find it very tedious.

Scope: The intention to go “against spectacle”—is that why you shot in 1.33?

Rodrigues: Yes, I wanted some of the images and even the choice of the actors to suggest silent movies. I wanted to do something very unspectacular, even austere. It’s almost like a musical, but without the usual musical numbers. I wanted to keep the conventions of the musical, that during the songs the action stops. But instead of presenting it as a spectacle, I wanted to show the characters singing or humming in intimate moments. And in drag shows in Lisbon, mostly they sing Spanish songs, but most of the songs I used are popular Portuguese songs.
Scope: One obvious connection to silent films is the pseudo-tinted images during a couple of the songs.

Rodrigues: It was because I thought of silent films that I could be more playful and experimental with the image. The scene where they’re all in the forest [bathed in eerie red moonlight], the idea is they’re all sitting there like someone who’s watching the film, just sitting and watching the song. I wanted to always be a bit playful. The scene where they’re singing in the courtyard of the house [which cuts to an overhead shot and turns into a negative image] is like a Busby Berkeley moment. She’s singing very softly, then the picture becomes more flamboyant, but in a homemade way.

Scope: Two pivotal scenes take place in the forest at night—does the setting have a mythical significance?

Rodrigues: Mainly I wanted to get out of the city, because my other films were set there. But the forest has always been to me about fairy tales. I like that there’s this little house in the woods, although when you go in, it looks more like a New York apartment. The forest is a place where people can hide, but also a place for revelations, where Tonia really understands her fate and that she can’t fight it. Maria Bakker, who she meets in the woods, is a character I appropriated for the film. She’s a kind of double for Tonia, a more sophisticated version. Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida is a friend of mine. It’s an act he’s developed, and he does it very seriously, always in English, so I had to convince him to switch to Portuguese.

Scope: Were you concerned that Tonia fits too closely the archetype or cliché of the tragic transsexual?

Rodrigues: Everybody tends to have a tragic life in my films. And most of the stories I heard were tragic. I talked to some doctors, too, and in that generation it was quite common to do breast implants that were badly made and not done under proper hygienic conditions. Their breasts would be rotted inside; the body corrupting itself from the inside out. The younger generations are different because they’re getting reassignment surgery younger.

Scope: It’s not spelled out, but the film implies that Tonia has AIDS.
Rodrigues: Yeah, but I didn’t want that to be clear.

Scope: We’ve been conditioned to expect a message of empowerment from films with gay or “minority” characters. Within that context, Tonia’s tragic end and acceptance of her fate seems almost politically incorrect.

Rodrigues: Perhaps, but also I think this is a unique story. I’m not comparing transsexuals and gays, or saying that you should accept your fate. It’s something the character does, and she does it with a certain dignity. Even her body—his body—it’s the body of a trucker. He’s very strong, not at all what I think a drag artist would be. That’s the drama. He cannot change his body because he really has a body of a man. I don’t want to make films with a sociological position. There are a lot of gay people who thought O Fantasma gave a bad image of gay life. People tend to reduce films that way, but films are about the unique stories of unique characters.
Scope: The clueless Variety review condemned To Die Like a Man to the “gay-themed fest circuit.”

Rodrigues: That was stupid. The review made me really mad. There’s the idea that I make films for gay festivals, when my films go to every kind of festival. It shows such a limited understanding about film, always wanting to put films in cages.

Scope: The film is dedicated to your cat, but dogs are prominent in the film, which brings up a sort of canine link to O Fantasma.

Rodrigues: I thought of the dogs as doubles of Tonia and Rosario. I like dogs and cats, but they’re really very difficult to work with.

O FANTASMA

Portugal (90 mi) 2000

The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]

Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year, Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues's debut, O Fantasma, attempts an improbable triangulation, drawing boldly from Bresson, Feuillade, and Genet. Young Sergio (Ricardo Meneses), a sultry Lisbon trash collector who lives in a flophouse, dotes on his pooch, but his other relationships are less straightforward. He carries on a rancorous flirtation with a female co-worker (Beatriz Torcato) and seeks out rough sex with anonymous men, including a role-playing cop perpetually on the night shift. Almost silent but for an infernal chorus of howls and barks, O Fantasma is best understood as an anatomy of animal lust. Sergio's voracious appetite for debasement takes on increasingly feral manifestations: bared-teeth snarls, nocturnal rooftop prowls, an intense sensual curiosity undaunted by hygiene concerns (lots of sniffing and licking). Stingy as the movie is with dialogue and backstory, its unironic tag line, "No one can live without love," bespeaks the underlying psychology: He wants to be your dog. He wants to be adored.

Sergio's behavior becomes more erratic—and the movie more surreal—when he meets a strapping lad with a big motorbike. Fishing out a pair of shredded Speedos from the guy's garbage, he decides it must be love. He cruises him at the swimming pool, and when rebuffed, dons the stolen bikini and vigorously soaps his groin while choking himself with a shower hose. Marking his turf, he then pisses on his intended's bed. Upgrading to a black latex bodysuit, he finally retreats into a fantasy that starts out like Irma Vep meets Tom of Finland but culminates in a fate not dissimilar to Jeff Goldblum's in The Fly. The longueurs are sometimes undermotivated and the odd elliptical cuts tend to disrupt more than enhance the transgressive trance. Still, Rodrigues and Meneses (a nonprofessional actor giving a remarkable pure-id performance) pull off an impressive distillation: Their vision of squalid heat reduces narrative to a state of permanent, abject arousal.

Double 'O' Heaven: The Vertigo Pop and Phantom Desires of João ... Double ‘O’ Heaven: The Vertigo Pop and Phantom Desires of João Pedro Rodrigues, also reviewing ODETE, by Johnny Ray Huston from Cinema Scope

When cruising the movies of João Pedro Rodrigues, maybe it’s best to start with a pair of blowjobs.

Number one, in Rodrigues’ 2000 debut feature O Fantasma, is notable because it is graphic in a casual sense, and because the lucky but throwaway character who drops to his knees before Sergio (Ricardo Meneses) in some Lisbon bathroom is only joining the director in paying tribute to nonactor and star Meneses’ extreme beauty. The second, in this year’s Odete, is less hardcore, yet hotter—it takes place in a steam room, after all—and a definite sign of Rodrigues’ development as a filmmaker. As the camera slowly creeps forward, moving above the roused crotch of Rui (Nuno Gil) to stare closely and sustainedly at his expression, the shot overtly recalls a major queer cinema touchstone, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). Audaciously, Rodrigues doesn’t merely mimic his influence, he attempts to outdo him. Whereas the face of the man in Warhol’s film is unreadable beyond evidence of pleasure, Rodrigues sets sight on the emotion submerged within sexuality, the way buried grief can be glimpsed through the cracks of an orgasmic grimace.

Odete ’s very first sequence is another place to begin when noting this director’s bold assertiveness in relation to famed artistic forefathers and funny uncles. The sequence opens with an embrace and ends with a very different one. In between, Rui and his love Pedro (João Carreira) tease each other and exchange a goodbye that fate quickly seems to change from casual to final. There are strong, simple musical ingredients: the tender femme-haunted foreshadowing of Greg Brown’s “Banjo Moon,” the bad tidings of a techno samba take on “ Moon River ,” Pedro and Rui’s favorite song. And there is highly stylized, choreographed action: a CPR kiss that yields a gush of blood; grief-stricken sobs that seem to provoke a sudden downpour. In terms of melodramatic impact, it all calls to mind the equally wet death sequence at the beginning of All About My Mother (1999). But Rodrigues’ approach, while just as bravura, isn’t quite so florid.

This commanding prelude just might be upstaged by the very next scene. Against the bright white light of a supermarket aisle, the word ODETE appears in flaring red capital letters. The text fades, and then—to a swooning flourish of strings—the film’s skinny-limbed title character roller-skates into view, all six-plus feet of her.

Movie introductions don’t come much more memorable than the one Ana Cristina de Oliveira receives in Odete, and her Jolie-gone-feral appearance proves that Rodrigues hasn’t lost his knack for finding physically stunning people to build a shot and ultimately a world around. Still, the radical use of music, the way those strings gather and release all the sorrow of the preceding scene, makes the deepest impression. Rodrigues takes a seemingly incidental background tune—Andy Williams covering “Both Sides Now”—and utterly transforms it through dramatic presentation. It’s the spine-shivering opposite of typical soundtrack product placement: in Rodrigues’ hands, Muzak attains operatic power.

Odete is more methodical in terms of shot composition than Rodrigues’ sprawling first feature. When O Fantasma emerged, I labeled it Trash Narcissus, in reference to James Bidgood’s obsessive tribute to the splendor of a young Bobby Kendall. But whereas even the rotten city-porn ghetto sequence of Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971) was filmed inside the director’s apartment, Rodrigues’ realist attentiveness trades the mirrored boudoirs and sapphire jungles that come with such extreme artifice for the real dirt and grime found on the borderline between city and country. Ultimately, O Fantasma’s subject isn’t narcissism so much as obsessive desire directed outward as well as inward. Since the heyday of Fred Halsted and Wakefield Poole, I can’t think of another film that has explored the sexual compulsion common to urban gay life so directly and at such length.

Scandalizing conservative viewers when it premiered in Venice , O Fantasma doesn’t fit anyone’s traditional idea of a state-funded film. If government money supported such a work in the US , Donald Wildmon’s head would explode, and Jesse Helms might finally meet his maker. Nor does Rodrigues’ first full-length movie—after a dramatic short (Happy Birthday , 1997) and two documentaries (Viagem à expo , 1998;O pastor , 1998)—adhere to the literary roots favored by Manoel de Oliveira, whom many might identify as the representative of Portuguese film. In its literal dedication to carnal prowls through urban realms, O Fantasma makes one shadowy man of Lisbon a counterpart to the Taipei father-and-son somnambulists of The River (1997), whose director Rodrigues admires. Meneses’ imperious charms and roving spirit also call the Terence Stamp of Teorema (1968) to mind. Today, according to the IMDb, Meneses has returned to his childhood town of Fuz Coa to help his mother run a family farm. There are no other films on his resume. Not so with the star of Odete, who has caught the attention of Michael Mann—and awarded a role in his Miami Vice—since completing the film.

Odete does share certain distinctive traits with the divisive and relatively hermetic O Fantasma. Both announce themselves with bold crimson credits. Aside from rare moments of glaring fluorescence—at a swimming pool in O Fantasma, a supermarket in Odete—Rodrigues and cinematographer Rui Po ç as often immerse themselves in blackness. Whereas most filmmakers can’t wait to alter the night with a variety of bright lights, these two explore its naturalistic textures.

Likewise, the costumes and set design offset or reflect these dark shadows with a fetishist’s array of vividly colored items. In O Fantasma, many of them—Sergio’s bright yellow garbageman’s gear, a cop uniform, a torn Speedo, a latex bodysuit harking back to Les vampires (1915) and Irma Vep (1996)—carry sexual connotations. In Odete, they are romantic talismans attached to the deceased Pedro, from his striped soccer shirts to funereal flowers that resemble ripped chunks of flesh. Moving through stages of grief, Rui shifts from the black of mourning to bloody valentine colours. Chancing upon a vision of his lost beloved as Alex Chilton chokes out “I saw you” on the soundtrack, he’s bathed in the light in the stop sign; later, sprawled across his bed and lost in an endless loop of Mancini, his red underwear matches his guitar. If the latter tableaux verges on the pretty vacancy of fashion or advertisement, the narrative that frames it adds a psychological depth.

Aside from a closing-credits blast of “Dream Baby Dream,” O Fantasma’s descent into sexual obsession was nearly music-free, which makes its highly original and emotional deployment in Odete—Big Star, Bright Eyes, Scala’s children’s choir take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and multiple “Moon River”s ring bells—doubly startling. Likewise, the previously somewhat solemn Rodrigues finds visual comedy in a ring sucked off a corpse’s finger (yet more oral action), a crazed leap into an open grave, or a late-night trip of a “mother” to the cemetery in black with matching stroller. (If Talk to Her [2002] is Almodovar’s “Girlfriend in a Coma,” then Odete is Rodrigues asking one to meet him at the “Cemetry Gates.”) At the heart of it all is Odete, a character who explodes the ugly term fag hag through the sheer force of her profanely spiritual insistence that she’s pregnant with a dead gay man’s child.

One might say that Odete’s impulses are written on the wind, to invoke both one of Rodrigues’ chief directorial influences—to whom he pays tribute more imaginatively and subtly than Todd Haynes—as well as its quite literal application to numerous scenes in the film: throughout, gusts alternately accompany or seem to provoke this wild child’s looniest acts. Rodrigues spells out Odete’s personality early on, when she throws her boyfriend out on his attractive bare ass after demanding a baby and turns to a Snoopy doll for comfort (her embrace of it a mocking echo of Pedro and Rui’s final hug a few minutes earlier). The beagle’s pal Woodstock looks down from a poster on her wall, then a sudden breeze blows through Odete’s window, directing her gaze outside, where Pedro’s despondent mother ducks into a funereal car. The little girl who wants a little boy has found her calling.

And down will come baby. Taking aim at het breeder and gay marriage sentimentality, the events that follow can be interpreted as black comic ingredients—a satire of both liberal sexual and conservative religious codes. But they can also be taken at face value: Odete is undeniably a spiritual film. As such, it is a mystic tale: spectral reflections of Odete—in mirrors, or more often, windows—sometimes dominate the frame more than the flesh-and-blood woman herself. But Rodrigues primarily performs a juggling routine of sorts with romantic symbols and religious iconography. The camera gazes down from a God’s-eye view at very particular moments, such as when Odete (whose name, as Dennis Lim has observed, brings Ordet [1955] and Mouchette [1967] to mind) lights votive candles around—and sleeps atop—Pedro’s grave at night, or when she places Pedro’s ring on one of Rui’s pillows. The new Pope may not approve of such rituals, but anyone with a heart or a sense of humour will.

Undoubtedly, Rodrigues is attracted to characters that disobey conventional mores. Odete shares the impulsiveness of O Fantasma’s Sergio, whose nocturnal adventures traverse a domain far beyond the comparatively tame and more self-aware public naughtiness found in the works of Rodrigues’ better-known contemporary François Ozon, not to mention the unimaginative hetero-clone courtship codes of contemporary commercial gay film. At times, Rodrigues overtly links the two characters, as when Odete, escaping from a hospital’s mental ward, prowls along train tracks and architectural edges with a lithe animalism. The sound of dogs barking accompanies both protagonists, though Oliveira’s gleefully devious features—a bit like a female counterpart to experimental filmmaker Jose Luis Rodriguez’s untamed looks—are perhaps more feline than canine.

When Rodrigues passed through San Francisco during O Fantasma’s festival travels, visits to many of the locations in Vertigo (1958) were high on his agenda, and it’s safe to say that he’s now constructed an excellent if minor 21st century filmic answer to that masterpiece, one that ends on a note of daffy optimism rather than tragic pessimism. Odete’s unique final shot proves that Rodrigues is as deft at serving up vivid endings as he is at crafting memorable beginnings. No longer claiming to be possessed by Pedro’s child, Odete seems possessed by the ghost of Pedro himself, a point that—anatomy be damned—she tries to drive home to a seemingly receptive Rui on his bed.

Warhol, Almodovar, Sirk, Hitchcock, Tsai, Pasolini, Bresson, Dreyer, Feuillade. These are mighty big cards for any cineaste to carry in his deck, and Rodrigues doesn’t always play them for maximum effect, or subjugate them in a way that allows his own auteurist impulses to reign. O Fantasma’s dedication to Sergio’s days and nights can be frustrating and even tedious because of the character’s emotionally remote quality. Odete’s back-and-forth between the title character’s crazed rituals and Rui’s dazed mourning verges on overly schematic, and when the two storylines begin to bleed into one another, the dialogue (“You frighten me”) and performances occasionally verge on a parody of European art film.

Yet has any recent European art film presented sexuality with the multi-faceted candour and unashamed flair for visual pleasure characteristic of Rodrigues’ two features to date? The explicit moments within recent works by Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, and Gaspar No é , for example, either adopt mock-shock dramatic tactics, an air of moral severity, or both. “The human body is made of human parts. Why shouldn’t you show that?” Rodrigues told me during an interview in 2001. Thus far he’s chanced upon some amazing bodies to display. He’s still finding his way as a dramatist, but even in his relatively discreet new film’s final sex act, he’s revealing much more than you’ll find in porn’s psychologically and spiritually stunted rulebooks. Just as Warhol might envy Odete’s blowjob, Fassbinder would applaud its final image of buttfucking.

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott

ODETE

aka: Two Drifters

Portugal (101 mi) 2005

Two Drifters Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

João Pedro Rodrigues will not fall to his knees before the cackling god of the Sophomore Slump. He avoids this by worshipping a different deity, one entirely of his own creation: The Goddess of Will. Her name is Odete, a six-foot creature who travels by rollerskate and whose face represents a ferocious blank slate—a scanner-darkly visage that allows her to resemble no one yet everyone at the same time. Shelley Duvall. Sarah Polley. Fiona Apple. Milla Jovovich. Maybe a boy. Perhaps Pedro (João Carreira), dead at 21 on the night of his one-year anniversary to Rui (Nuno Gil). Only the cosmos—heartbreaker and dreammaker—is to blame for this death, but the rain that falls from the sky after Pedro has flown through the windshield of his car is not so much a sign of remorse as it is a portent of things to come. Rodrigues, once again, is using film as a medium (in the Patricia Arquette sense of the word), a funnel through which the unconscious and subconscious are annexed. Like O Fantasma, perhaps the scariest and finest film ever made about the compulsion of gay desire, Two Drifters' sensual-spiritual plumbing is totally off-the-map; one film charts the topography of desire, the other scopes the limits of our grief. Except for a scattered pan here and there—the most gripping is a Godardian my-life-to-live swipe of Odete, ostensibly pregnant with the dead Pedro's child, rolling a baby carriage to the cemetery where Pedro slumbers—Rodrigues's camera is mostly static, framed strikingly along every up-down-diagonal plane imaginable, evocative of his characters' crash-into-me anxieties. When it rains it pours, and when the wind spills through Odete's window it is to lead her to Pedro's wake, which invokes the Calvin Klein-mode of asymmetrical symmetry Mark Romanek uses in his music videos. After O Fantasma, this is a definite upgrade for Rodrigues, who continues to work on an almost elemental level but whose supposition of nature as a conduit for communication between people delves into deeper emotional terrain. He's not just getting physical now, but also mystical.

Odete [Two Drifters] Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Good news! Apparently it's possible to vote for two Pedros at once. While Rodrigues' sophomore effort unfortunately isn't as formally radical as his widely-loathed debut O Fantasma, it's every bit as brazenly, experimentally queer. You wouldn't know this by looking at the first half-hour or so in isolation, since Odete looks as though it's going to be the story of a spurned, slightly unbalanced young woman (the luscious Ana Cristina de Oliveira) appropriating a gay male identity to compensate for not having one of her own. Rodrigues has more in store, since he's really interested in the mutability of identity, sexual and otherwise. In this regard, Odete is both an embarrassment of riches, and a case of a talented young director biting off more than he can chew. The reference points explode in all directions, and they don't always add up. We have the unsettling of identity (Bergman, Rivette, and Lynch apply here), as well as the insistent, irrevocable pull that the dead have over the living (a theme as old as Aeschylus and Sophocles, and explored in the latest film by Spain's leading auteur). But Rodrigues boldly stages his ambisexual seance action in a florid, carnally frank melodramatic framework that borrows liberally from the Almodóvar playbook.

[MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW] Although I understand Strand Releasing's need to retitle the film, making its marketing more "gay-friendly" by obscuring Odete's focus on its female lead, it's still fundamentally misleading. Like Almodóvar, Rodrigues seems to tell us that under the rules of male heteronormative privilege, unbridled female desire of necessity ends up being as transgressive and "queer" as any same-sex union. At the same time, Rodrigues favors still frames, hieratic poses, and high-key lighting that turns his anguished protagonists into sculpted vessels, somehow radiant and infused with life-energy even at their most desperate. This approach is one that Rodrigues seems to be drawing from his countryman Pedro Costa, whose insistent focus on social outcasts provides them a cinematic space for hyper-visibility and monumentality. (Pedro and Costa are relatively common Portuguese names, but the fact that the dead lover Pedro [João Carreira] has a fourth name, Costa, right under 'Pedro' on the tombstone, hardly seems coincidental.) As I say above, sometimes the complexity and hairpin tonal shifts are a bit too much for Rodrigues, but what Odete cannot fully sustain structurally it more than makes up for in genderfuck rigor. Odete, the woman who fantasizes a life with Pedro she never had, and Rui (newcomer Nuno Gil), the man who actually had his love affair cut short by cruel fate, both experience their private and their shared pain as seismic ruptures upon the body. By the final shot, the dead have defiantly returned, boyfriends are bent over, and the ladies are packing and pegging, Rodrigues has miraculously brought all the free radicals together. He has yet to make his masterpiece, but he's obviously one of the brashest, most original young filmmakers in the world today. Is anyone paying Rodrigues due attention? Kind of makes you wonder whether Jean Genet would've found his audience in the present climate.

Jean Genet On Film for possible help on the Academic Hack’s query, read Nathan Lee from the Village Voice

TO DIE LIKE A MAN (Morrer como um Homen)

Portugal France (133 mi) 2009

Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies

Unfortunately, I’ve ended the festival on a bum note, with one admirable film that didn’t quite do it for me, and one that was out-and-out awful.

The better of the two was João Pedro Rodrigues’ To Die Like A Man. Not knowing a damn thing about it before I went in, I was half hoping it might be some sort of gormless gangster epic I could lose myself in for a bit, and as the film began with a close-up of a soldier all decked out in camo paint, leading to a slow, silent scene in a forest as an army crept stealthily through, I began to get excited. By the time two of the soldiers had started back-door humping against a tree, I realised we were going somewhere slightly different.

Rodrigues’ film takes us deep into the scurrilous world of jaded, faded Lisbon drag queen Tonia (Fernando Santos). Saddled with a junkie lover, a homicidal son, a younger rival and painful tits, life for Tonia is spiraling slowly out of control. Kind hearted, but numbed by regret, we follow her as she struggles to regain the pieces of her past and juggle the harsh realities of her present. Though clearly influenced by Almodovar, Rodrigues has an altogether bleaker outlook. This is a strange, stagey film, full of overt cinematic devices (a blood moon turns the screen red while the cast sit out a keening song about the death of Jesus on the cross), but one underpinned by a swamp of Catholic repression that occasionally breaks rank as a kind of serene beauty, especially in the film’s key musical parts. I wasn’t really feeling it though, until a brilliant digression to the jungle home of glamorous old queen Maria, played by Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida with scene-chomping relish. It feels to me like the kind of film Almodovar could only make if he lost his zest and passion for life; but then again, it’s a bold and inventive attempt to deal with some serious subjects.

To Die Like A Man (Morrer Como Um Homen) Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

Rarefied, hyper-stylised drama To Die Like A Man takes an oblique look at the lives of Portuguese transvestites; most viewers will find it a drag in more ways than one. Centred on a commanding lead performance by Fernando Santos, the film has some moments of genuine exotic magic, but overall its languorous rhythm will tax the patience of all but the hardest-core art-house faithful. Its natural home will be at gay festivals; commercial prospects, however, look as thin as a tranny’s nylons.

Rodrigues made a name with his previous films O Fantasma and Odete, and his follow-up displays an auteur style that is highly distinctive – too much so, in fact, to translate beyond niche appeal. Set in Lisbon, the film maps the sorrows of Tonia (Santos), an ageing cross-dresser who, unlike his friends, refuses to become a woman surgically, stopping at breast implants. The film begins enigmatically with a nocturnal sequence in which a young soldier goes on a forest manoeuvre in almost total darkness: creeping tracking shots create an intensely mysterious atmosphere. He and another soldier pause for sex, then he shoots his lover dead.

Rodrigues then skips to the home life of nightclub performer Tonia, whose young lover Rosário (David), a junkie dress designer, has gone on the run. The film’s first part skips between Tonia’s attempts to get Rosário back on the straight and narrow; his backstage tiffs with rival diva Jenny (Larrue); and run-ins with his errant son Zé Maria (Malatitch), the homicidal soldier of the prelude.

This section of the film is shot in a largely realistic mode, given a bold skew by the larger-than-life drag milieu. DoP Rui Poças throws in some heightened colour effects, plus the odd sequence that verges on dream, notably a candlelit glide through a graveyard at night. Overall, though, the film’s first third is marked by its downbeat tone, defusing the ostensibly lurid nature of Tonia’s domestic traumas.

An eccentric middle section has Tonia and Rosário visiting the secluded forest home of theatrical ‘grande dame’ queen Maria (Ferreira de Almeida). This talky passage plays like one of Manoel de Oliveira’s staider films, only with frocks, and features a bizarre sequence in which, in intense red moonlight, the characters pause in the woods to listen to a moody torch song. The closing section deals with Tonia’s moment of truth, as he reconciles himself to saying farewell to his female persona.

For all the flamboyance and brittle repartee, To Die Like A Man casts its gay characters in a muted, everyday perspective. This may be the most downbeat film ever made about transsexuals, with only Ferreira de Almeida camping it up, and that most memorably.

The film’s best moments are very striking: Tonia’s final bow comes in a closing crane shot, an audacious flourish that wraps the film up magnificently. Despite such visual flair, however, the film is too often bloodless, the dialogue generally delivered in the pensive, near-sotto voce register familiar from much Portuguese art cinema (Oliveira, Pedro Costa et al). Santos, however, agonises with imposing dignity. A small white Scottie dog, Agustina, also livens the film up no end. A striking bonus is a no-nonsense close-up demonstration of a sex change operation - mercifully, done origami-style, with a piece of paper.

TIFF09: TO DIE LIKE A MAN--Interview With João Pedro Rodrigues ... Michael Guillen interview with director João Pedro Rodrigues and actor Alexander David from Screen Anarchy, September 22, 2009

"There are no secrets; only shame."--Tonia. [This entry is dedicated to Johnny Ray Huston, whose Cinema Scope article "Double 'O' Heaven: The Vertigo Pop and Phantom Desires of João Pedro Rodrigues" provided some of the first working language to appreciate this Portuguese maverick's films more fully. Thanks, Johnny! João Pedro says hi and looks forward to seeing you in Vancouver. This entry is not for the spoiler-wary!!]

In his most recent vision Morrer Como Um Homem (To Die Like A Man, 2009), Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues has staged some uneasy equations. The film begins with a close-up of a soldier's face applying camouflage paint. You hear the voice of another soldier--who you will later learn is Zé Maria (Chandra Malatitch), the son of drag queen Tonia (Fernando Santos)--complimenting his friend on how he looks, adding some finishing touches to his lids and cheeks. The parallel to how women apply their daily war paint is obvious and these militarized men are tainted by a suggestion of femininity. They break away from their patrol to wander AWOL in the night. Zé Maria leans his feminized friend against a tree, pushes down his pants and spitfucks him hard. At this point, you realize this is not your father's war movie. Their lust satiated, the two soldiers continue exploring this dark enchanted forest of the night that they have entered. They come across a house brightly lit in the darkness wherein two men dressed as women are singing at the piano. The sodomized soldier suggests candidly to Zé Maria that perhaps his father knows these two? Zé Maria hardens, mutters, "My father is dead" and shoots his friend in the chest. Rarely has a spit-stiff dick and a rifle penetrated flesh with such enraged and internalized homophobia.

This violent act initiates To Die Like A Man's portrait of transgendered Tonia, a veteran drag queen in Lisbon circles whose life has begun to unravel. The drag queens are getting younger and more competitive. Audiences want a different style of performance. Her son Zé Maria has become a deserter and a murderer and her boyfriend Rosario (Alexander David) is pressuring her to have a sex change operation. Her silicone breast implants have poisoned her body and she is dying of cancer. Sometimes it's just not worth waking up in the morning. In order to forgive and be forgiven for the slights endured over a long life as a drag queen performer, Tonia devolves her body back into a male form and seeks reconciliation with her estranged son, even if it be by way of dementia.

To Die Like A Man arrived for its North American premiere at the Toronto International after competing in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. David Hudson gathered those decidedly mixed reviews at The Daily @ IFC. At Toronto--where day after day I caught one adequate film after another--To Die Like A Man stood out as a uniquely energized and distinct vision, strange and special. As indicated at Wikipedia, the story of Tonia was allegedly inspired by the life of Joaquim Centúrio de Almeida (artistic name: Ruth Bryden), and has motivated a lawsuit by Carlos Castro, the author of de Almeida's biography. I welcomed the opportunity to sit down with João Pedro Rodrigues and one of his actors Alexander David to discuss the film.

* * *

Michael Guillén: João, To Die Like A Man is a fascinating film and difficult to talk about because it operates on multiple registers: it's sublime, it's ridiculous, at times sad and frequently hilarious. Perhaps it would help me more if we start at the end of the film?--that closing fado?--whose lyrics synopsized what I had just witnessed and perhaps not fully understood. For starters, who sings that fado?

João Pedro Rodrigues: That fado is sung by Fernando Santos, who plays the transvestite Tonia; but, the song is a fado from the '80s from a singer who is not very well regarded in Portugal. He was a rebellious maverick of the fados in the '80s. As a man, he would wear skirts in the streets--quite the crazy guy!--but, he wrote strong lyrics. That closing song is a particularly beautiful fado. Fados aren't what I listen to most; but, especially that song expressed a lot about the film and sublimated Tonia's character. I wanted Tonia to have the aura of the grande dame of the drag show. At the same time, in this film I tried to go against the usual films that feature drag queens. I wanted to do something different. I wasn't interested in shooting Tonia's stage performance, at least not until the end of the film when it becomes a special moment; when it becomes something different.

Guillén: As far as I'm concerned, To Die Like A Man is now the definitive transgender movie and has set the bar for subsequent transcinema. Not only does it speak uniquely for the transgender community; but, it has a "formal audacity"--as Eye Weekly's Jason Anderson phrases it--that is downright thrilling, precisely for its difference. You dalliance with some stunning visual flairs. I suppose why the fado struck me so much was because it desirously expressed what I have long felt is the underlying fear of gay people: the confrontation with their unapologetic androgyny; that they suffer no façade of what is male and female and operate at their best when remaining true to both. Their particular desire might be argued to be a longing--in fact--to remain both male and female, to remain--as the fado puts it--plural. "I want to be plural," Santos sings. He wants to be understood for being more than what he appears to be; that the singularity of his appearance might deceive his true plurality. For the singular, unfortunately, plurality is judged as an abomination, something supranatural exceeding division. Its excess is suspect. In the face of such inexplicable androgyny, a single sex suffers deficit. That being said, I guess my true question is who is this movie for? Who do you imagine to be your audience? Or do you imagine your audience?

Rodrigues: I don't think about it. I'm the first audience of the film. I think of myself first as a viewer; but then, it's hard to tell. But I don't mean that I only want to do films for myself. The way the film is shot and the way it resembles my other films, I suspect you either like it and understand it or you don't. Even in terms of space. When I think of filming a room, I prefer filming pieces of the room. If you then try to combine the pieces to see how the room looks as a whole, you can't. In my films I try to build a space that--though not real space--is close to reality. Reality comes first. I like films that are real even as I try to arrive at some imaginary space. Of course, any film is about building an imaginary space constructed from shots and sounds, all the more so because the film also goes into the direction of a fairy tale. It's hard for me to know a priori what kind of reactions audiences will have toward the film.

Guillén: You're no stranger to controversy so I'm sure you're used to mixed-to-negative reviews?

Rodrigues: I am.

Guillén: Now, I want to be clear that I am wholly respectful of your singularly unique vision; but--as I was preparing how I wanted to approach this interview--I found I could understand To Die Like A Man better by comparing it to the work of other filmmakers. If I mention other filmmakers, I don't want you to interpret that in any way as some judgment that you're derivative because that's not what I mean at all. And nothing could be further from the truth. It's more that I find your films to be in the same domain of energy as certain other filmmakers.

Rodrigues: I do that too. I watch a lot of films so it's normal. Although I went to film school, I learned how to make films mostly by watching other films.

Guillén: As To Die Like A Man starts out, two AWOL soldiers have separated from their patrol and are alone together in the dark forest. This reminded me of how you claim night's terrain as a mise en scène within which to frame the fractured passions of obsessed psyches, which I wrote about when I reviewed your last film Two Drifters. As with that film, because To Die Like A Man starts with a night sequence, I am once again reminded of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood query: "Watchman, what of the night?" This seems to be the presiding question that addresses your films. Within your films, we watch the night. In this, they remind me of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the "Plaisirs de la forêt" series of photographs by Pierre and Gilles. All three of you share a fairy tale element to the night. Can you speak to what night means for you in your films and why you use it so frequently?

Rodrigues: This might not be at all what you're thinking, but I wanted the movie to start as a war movie in the style of classic Hollywood cinema, like Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1945). In that film you follow an abandoned troop of soldiers. I wanted To Die Like A Man to start as one thing so that it could turn into something else altogether, though of course you return to characters in the film that you glimpsed in the beginning. I wanted the film to be always changing and surprising, even if only little surprises. As for the night, well, first, it's mysterious of course. Sex is connected to the night. Though To Die Like A Man starts as a war movie, the two AWOL soldiers start fucking. While I was writing the script, it seemed obvious to start it that way. Sometimes I don't know how to put into words or to explain my choices. Sometimes they're instinctive. Through the film work, things come up and I don't know exactly why sometimes.

Guillén: Inversely, as spectator, those who do understand what you're filming experience a commensurate instinctual response. As a filmmaker, you tap into something spectators instinctively recognize. I found it difficult to explain to myself why I was reacting to the film the way I was. But that's your gift. You have a knack for the numinous. I don't mean to be overly literal, but I'm curious what the blue swing means in your film? Not only that it's there in your night scenes but that it's also pushed and set swinging each time it's passed?

Rodrigues: That came from a book called Casa Susanna, which is a bunch of photographs of men dressed as women that were found in a flea market. The pictures are from the '50s and the '60s. The two men who edited the book [Robert Swope and Michel Hurst] didn't know who the individuals were in the photos, but were intrigued by these men dressed as women drinking tea or walking in the woods. They're a bit like William Eggleston's pictures sometimes. They possess that mystery of finding images of people who you don't know who they are. One photo shows a transvestite in front of a tree on which a sign is nailed: Casa Susanna. You can just imagine their social encounters in the middle of the woods somewhere in America.

Guillén: We used to be able to have social encounters in the woods. It's all been privatized now so we can't do it anymore for fear of prosecution. But it was fun while it lasted!

Rodrigues: [Laughs.] Anyway, there's one very beautiful image of a man dressed up as a woman in a swing. That's where the image of the swing came from. Also, because I framed that shot exactly the same way the two times you see it, it's like a doorway into another world; a swinging door into a fairy tale world.

Guillén: One interesting visual flourish with Alexander's character Rosario is that you take this broken young man whose masculinity is frail and contingent and you dress him in macho t-shirts. I often see this on public transit--scrawny kids wearing Conan the Barbarian t-shirts--it's their way of expressing a masculinity that is not readily evident. Which leads me to ask about the performance of gender. Acting like a man. Acting like a woman. Passing for either. Sometimes possessing masculine attributes through feminine gestures.

Rodrigues: That idea was built with João Rui Guerra da Mata, the art director of the film, who's worked with me on all my films. Everything is constructed--the clothes, the décor--everything is worked out even at the writing stage. The idea was that there are these young guys like Rosario in Portugal who go out to the clubs with drag queens. I don't even know if they're gay or not. They pretend to be with their women. That's the idea behind their wearing--what you call--macho shirts. Also, there's a playfulness in that. Rosario wears a Robin Boy Wonder shirt too. We were playing with the idea of Rosario as an eternal child, not a feminized young man, but a playful, childish one. Rosario's relationship with Tonia, they're more than lovers, they're almost mother and child.

Guillén: There's also a slightly sadomasochistic co-dependency going on. An almost necessary cruelty passes between them. Much in the same way that a teenage son would rebel against his parents by punishing them with juvenile behavior. Further, there's also another quality that I've come to think a lot about in my middle years that was introduced to me during the Men's Movement some years past: that there is a specific male nurturance that is not an imitation of female nurturance; a male nurturance that is paternal, not maternal, and specific to the male gender, where some older guy helps a younger incomplete guy get along with life, much as Tonia did with Rosario. I sometimes question whether the unhappiness of drag queens like Tonia might have something to do with their misunderstanding this nurturing impulse within themselves, defining it as feminine and maternal when in fact it's one of the best masculine qualities they have: an ability to guide, to take care of others, to provide, to make decisions.

Alexander David: With them also there's something of a shared survival instinct. She helps Rosario but Rosario helps Tonia too. I'm not exactly sure in which way; perhaps just by being with her, providing companionship. I imagine they were in love when they first met; but, that faded away as they lived together.

Rodrigues: Tonia is also a very lonely person. That echoes my other characters in my other films, as someone who doesn't really know how to deal with that and who can't face that she's really lonely.

Guillén: That I understood, unfortunately, through personal experience. [Rodrigues laughs.] My partner of 12 years passed during the AIDS pandemic. It's now been 13 years since his death and I've, of course, had to move on with life; but, the truth is that since him, I've never been able to fall in love again in the way that I loved him. I have found and lost other lovers and have now discovered--in my middle years--that all I can do is to unconditionally further love in others. If I know there's something I can do for someone else, that's the only kind of love I have left. I don't feel the passion I used to have for my partner. So in my experience I have, like Tonia, taken young men under wing who frequently remind me that they believe they have stolen from me what I have offered freely. But there is still enough power and love within me to absorb such slights and to help them achieve their goals in life. I agree with you, Alexander, that Tonia and Rosario give each other reasons to keep going, even though they're a bit abusive to each other. The relationship between Maria and her partner Paula likewise has a level of abuse going on, much like a diva with her stagehand. Can we speak about Maria Bakker (Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida), who--in my estimation--took your film into Fassbinder territory: unapologetically melodramatic, over the top, chewing the scenery.

Rodrigues: [Chuckles.] That character Maria Bakker pre-existed my writing of the script, even though Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida usually plays Maria Bakker in English. For Gonçalo, Maria Bakker is a fantasy character. He does shows and sings songs. At first, he didn't want to do it in Portuguese because for him it didn't make sense that Maria Bakker would speak Portuguese. For a while we considered that Maria could speak in English and Tonia in Portuguese and that they would somehow understand each other. Perhaps in this strange world people could understand each other even if they didn't speak the same language? But then we decided it would be too strange. [The idea of something being too strange in a João Pedro Rodrigues film made me chuckle under my breath.] Maria Bakker in my film, her hair, all of that comes from the character that Gonçalo already created. Also, it's a little past the halfway point in the film when Tonia and Rosario arrive at Maria's house. At that point, I wanted the film to go towards the direction of comedy.

Guillén: And that's where it went!

Rodrigues: But it's very difficult to play comedy. Still, I wanted to try. Did people laugh during your press screening?

Guillén: There were these two buffed up butch dudes who I presumed were straight laughing their asses off. They got it. It became interesting to me to watch when people would leave the screening, at what point, at what scene. Mainly it was women who left. I don't know if they felt they were being travestized, perhaps? I've known women who have admitted they don't like drag queens because they don't feel that they perform women; they feel they perform travesties of women, which insults them. I don't know how across-the-board that sentiment is.

Can we talk about things buried in the garden?! First, there's the soldier buried in Maria's garden, which startled me at first. I kept thinking, "What is that soldier doing buried in Maria's garden?! Wouldn't they have come looking for him precisely because he'd gone AWOL? And isn't this a dead giveaway with the soldier's helmet perched on the cross on the grave?" Then there was that wonderful sequence that actually moved me quite a bit where Tonia and Rosario dig up her memories from the backyard garden where her little dog has buried them. Perhaps as someone whose heart's cargo consists of memories frequently recapitulated, I once again identified with Tonia. I am often reminded of how important my memories are to me; they're like seeds buried in my garden.

Rodrigues: The idea was that--just before she falls ill--Tonia has a flashback of symbolic moments in her life. You got exactly what that scene meant. As for the soldier buried in Maria's garden ... [Rodrigues starts laughing] ... sometimes I can only answer you with silly answers. The soldier died in Maria's garden and there was no undertaker to remove him to a morgue and bury him in a cemetery, so they buried him in the garden. I wanted it to be like an Indian burial from the cowboy movies.

Guillén: So before we wrap up here, let me ask you Alexander how you approached your characterization of Rosario in the film? I didn't much like your character at first. He reminded me a little too much of the kind of young man I was talking about earlier who feel they have stolen what has been given freely.

David: I tried to follow the kind of acting style from Robert Bresson. João Pedro gave me some of Bresson's films so I could gain a sense of his style.

Rodrigues: But you're also naturally like that. That's what I liked about you. You're natural for what interests me in an actor.

Guillén: So what exactly is that? Is it a lack of affect that you're going for? What is it that interested you in Alexander?

Rodrigues: Again, it's instinctive. It was instinctive to play the character in a sotto voce tone. Basically [addressing Alexander]--not that you acted like you are; you're not like that addict at all--but, we talked about this: you were playing yourself a lot of the time.

David: I strived for low profile acting. There was no psychological construction of my character.

Rodrigues: We didn't talk much about psychology.

David: He didn't want that, so I didn't do that.

Guillén: Rosario was so angry, though. Where did the anger come from? Wasn't there some psychological motivation for that?

Rodrigues: The role was written that way.

David: Yes. Why was he angry? The stuff with the girlfriend. [He grins.]

Viennale 2009: Not Just Another Fest in the Crowd Gabe Klinger from Mubi, November 12, 2009

To Die Like a Man | Reverse Shot Hungry Like a Wolf, by Andrew Chan, Fall 2009

DVD Outsider [Joseph Ewens]

To Die Like a Man | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

The Auteurs [Glenn Kenny]

The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson] Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Queer Cinema's Phantom Menace, October 6. 2010

Melissa Anderson at Cannes from Artforum, May 22, 2009

Screencrave [Tom von Logue Newth]

CultureCatch.com (Brandon Judell)

To Die Like a Man David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 23, 2009

Leslie Felperin at Cannes from Variety, May 22, 2009

THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (A Última Vez Que Vi Macau)

Portugal France Macao (82 mi) 2012

Cine-File: Patrick Friel

João Pedro Rodrigues (TO DIE LIKE A MAN) co-directs with his frequent director of photography João Rui Guerra da Mata on this dazzling meta-film/thriller/city symphony, set in the former Portuguese colony of Macao, in China. Taking off from Josef von Sternberg's 1952 film MACAO (this film opens with a drag lip-synched performance to Jane Russell from MACAO), LAST TIME is a film of absences, displacement, and cultural dysphoria. A Portuguese man (the filmmaker(s)?) returns to Macao, where he was raised, at the desperate plea from a long-ago friend, Cindy—the drag performer seen at the start. But we never see our protagonist (beyond glimpses of hands, feet) and we never see Cindy again—only hearing her voice. As our mysterious hero searches for the endangered Cindy, we're reminded of THE THIRD MAN, and Orson Welles' own puzzle films THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and MR. ARKADIN. The noir/thriller narrative takes place in a city that at times feels like it could be the back alleys, shops, and restaurants from a film by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Ke Jia or from the filmmakers' fellow countryman Pedro Costa; at other moments it's the almost-surreal neon future of BLADE RUNER. Macao is as much a puzzle as the intrigue that Cindy has become enmeshed in, both of which we, and our hero, struggle to sort out. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata have crafted a beautiful work that is constantly shifting, surprising, and beguiling. It's a stunner.

Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson September 2012

In real life, João Rui Guerra da Mata grew up in the former Portuguese colony of Macao, and in the hybrid work The Last Time I Saw Macao, co-directed by João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui returns. An old friend, Candy (Cindy Scrasch), contacts him after a suspicious murder during a paintball game, saying “strange and scary things are happening.” After João Rui arrives, he finds it hard to catch up to the elusive Candy—but this gives him an opportunity to wander the streets, to the places of his childhood, places that have changed or no longer exist. Just as Macao, the city, is a blend of two cultures—Portuguese and Chinese—so Macao, the film, merges fiction and documentary together into an alien beast, a play of illusion and reality that earns comparisons to the works of the late Chris Marker. It’s a portrait of the ghostly, post-handover city in the Year of the Tiger, a journey into one’s private past, and, why not, a science-fiction film, all wrapped into one.

With its noirish voiceovers (courtesy of both João Pedro and João Rui), conspiracy plots, and focus on rituals, the film is also laced with a subtext of cinephilia. The Last Time I Saw Macao also refers to von Sternberg’s film, and its lead, Jane Russell, a kind of totem for the Joãos: the first scene of the film sees Candy performing a tantalizing show to Russell’s Macao number, “You Kill Me,” standing in front of a cage containing live tigers. (The film also answers the mystery of the red shoe from last year’s Macao night-market-set short, Red Dawn, which was dedicated to the late Russell.) The Joãos put their first showstopper up front, but, don’t worry, many more follow in this wild work, all the way to a Kiss Me Deadly-like ending that can only be called apocalyptic.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Michael Pattison]

Co-directed by João Pedro Rodrigues with frequent collaborator João Rui Guerra da Mata, The Last Time I Saw Macao owes a more crucial debt to Mariano Llinás’s 245-minute masterpiece, Extraordinary Stories, than to Rodrigues’s own reputation as Portugal’s premiere queer auteur. The new film, a noir-documentary whatzit that renders almost all of its characters in off-screen space, begins with an extravagantly lit lip-sync performance by transvestite Cindy Scrash. You think you know where you are, but the filmmakers pull the rug out almost immediately. Following the delicious cold open, the story shifts gears to a paintball battle that provides a clue as to the filmmakers’ use of negative space: There’s no paint, and spatial disorientation skitters across the red line as it did in the bank heist in Bresson’s L’Argent. Under the noisy war games, a real murder is committed, as an unseen gunman takes out an invisible target. We only have a close-up of the weapon and the victim’s dying rasp to tell us that something is amiss, and the death sets in motion a sort of dime-novel crime picture—stranger in a foreign city, in too deep—that has its roots in pulp fiction stories and films of the 1940s and ’50s. The touchstone is, of course, Howard Hughes’s Macao: Scrash’s song is taken from the 1952 film, where it was sung by Jane Russell, and The Last Time I Saw Macao’s minimal story borrows from the abortive Sternberg picture’s equally minimal noir tropes, namely the one about “Leave Macao if you know what’s good for you.”

This “Macao Confidential” thread is built and substantiated by the protagonist’s off-screen voice, while the images wander about the Chinese port city, in a manner inspired both by Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and Extraordinary Stories. With images of city life, traffic, and the Macao skyline, Guerra da Mata and Rodrigues lull the audience into a melancholy fugue state. The voiceover, hushed and never insistent, frequently wanders away from the noir vein to reflect on the title subject, 20-year-old memories of the protagonist’s childhood and upbringing in the former Portuguese colony. The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles. Indeed, when earlier, seemingly free-associative mentions of the Mayan 2012 prophecy turn ludicrously literal, the payoff probably wouldn’t have been possible had the crime story been written and filmed the usual way. While the fatalistic turn The Last Time I Saw Macao takes in its final minutes seems simultaneously, disappointingly over-determined and abrupt, the directors’ aplomb in pulling off a Llinás-esque haunted semi-fiction nevertheless exerts a pleasing spell over the viewer.

At different points in The Last Time I Saw Macao (A Última Vez Que Vi Macau), the Chinese port city is described as “an ex-Portuguese colony that never was” and as “the Las Vegas of the East”. Throughout the film, meanwhile, the city with the world’s highest population density is, in pictorial terms, all shimmering neon and in editorial terms an unnavigably fragmented labyrinth. In narrative terms, it is a place immediately of intrigue and, later, of conspiracy. A place of dormant threat and unfulfilled romance, Macao is a changed and changing city. As this film has it, its history already seems half-decided while its space continues to be contestable – in gender, political, national and apparently (or especially) imagistic terms.

All of which is to repeat the movie’s own blend of distanced assertion and poetic observation. The film’s point of departure, quoted in its weird, Lynchian pre-credits sequence, is You Kill Me, a song from Joseph Von Sternberg’s 1952 film Macao, and before it has properly begun, an ostensibly harmless firearms exercise plays out in abstract mid-shots and close-ups and culminates – we learn after – in someone’s murder.

João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodriguez’s film is a seamless and absorbing blend of essay film and hardboiled thriller. Comprising fixed-camera establishing shots and a fictional voice-over, it contains the most skeletal of plots, a Maguffin by which a narrative responsibility to incident is deferred and an extended stay in and exploration of the city is increasingly justified. Our unseen narrator arrives in Macao because of a letter received from an old friend who lives there, and consequently gets dragged into some kind of murderous conspiracy. Once in the city, he becomes dependent upon faulty technology: time is of the essence, and through a series of text messages and botched meet-ups our man seems to be playing perpetual catch-up.

The concept of a foreigner reconceptualising alien and exotic lands by playing out dramas and thrills within them isn’t new, of course. In this sense, our man in Macau recalls Robinson, the unseen travelling researcher of Patrick Keiller’s films. And Guerra da Mata and Rodriguez’s film is further evidence of the narrative possibilities provided by the essay film, a mode of expression by which anyone with a camera (and, preferably, a tripod) may visit a location and form a fiction to match the images recorded there.

The quasi-fictional cinematic travelogue owes much of course to Chris Marker’s seminal Sans Soleil (1982), and The Last Time I Saw Macao pays its debt with numerous references to cats, in both its opening scene and with the “army of playful tigers” (inflatable and luminous the lot of them) that have overrun the city.

Film of the Week: The Last Time I Saw Macao - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, September 12, 2013

Myself, the last time I saw Macao was in the James Bond film Skyfall, in which the former Portuguese colony appears as a lantern-lit fantasyland where Chinese heavies risk getting eaten by Komodo dragons. Before that, it featured as the exotic setting of Orson Welles’s The Immortal Story and of Josef von Sternberg’s 1952 adventure Macao, with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum.

I say “exotic” advisedly. If the idea of Macao comes laden with orientalist fantasy, if the reality is hard to extricate from the movie myth, that’s the very premise of a new Portuguese essay film cum meta-noir narrative. Even today, touristic fantasies of Asia still circulate in Western cinema. Recently, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void have used Bangkok and Tokyo respectively not as real places with real cultures but effectively as sex-and-death theme parks, top destinations for Westerners in search of lurid perdition.

This tendency is critiqued in The Last Time I Saw Macao by João Pedro Rodrigues (known for gay-themed dramas such as To Die Like a Man) and regular collaborator João Rui Guerra da Mata. Their film is a deeply alluring contemplation of Macao as reality and myth; an investigation of the locale’s past, present, and future; and a fascinating experiment in form, combining visual essay in the “city symphony” vein, personal search for a lost past, and self-consciously glamorous mock-thriller.

The film begins with two preludes. One features transsexual diva Cindy Scrash pacing in front of caged tigers while lip-synching “You Kill Me,” as sung by Jane Russell in Sternberg’s film. Yet instead of Russell’s insouciant sway, Scrash looks pained while performing, her face fixed in an oddly angry rictus as she squeezes her breasts at the camera. Then comes a strange sequence featuring a role-playing army game, gunshots suggesting that something has gone horribly wrong.

Here the first-person voiceover kicks in: the narrator, Guerra da Mata, has returned to Macao after 30 years, summoned by his friend Candy [sic]. She is in trouble, following the mysterious shooting of a friend, and only Guerra da Mata can help. How? At first, by lurking largely out of shot (we see his shadow and occasionally a hand) in his hotel room while waiting for Candy to summon him to meetings with her associates—meetings which, of course, he is fated to miss.

The skeletal plot concerns a shadowy nemesis named Madame Lobo, something alluded to as “the ritual of the chosen ones,” and the obligatory McGuffin, a birdcage carried around the city by a man in leather gloves. Even at the end, it’s not clear exactly what the cage contains, but it’s intimately linked with the fate of Macao, indeed of humanity itself; think of it as an avatar of the suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly.

Narrated in Portuguese by Guerra da Mata—with occasional interjections from Rodrigues—the thriller intrigue is a brilliant exercise in grafting narrative onto a diverse collection of documentary images. It’s not doing the film a disservice to say that there’s also the material here for a superb photo exhibition; shooting the film themselves (apart from the stylized opening sequence, photographed by Rui Poças), the directors create a mesmerizingly evocative selection of city images, mostly in static shots. The images are structured musically, with repetitions, leitmotifs, and rhymes building to hypnotic, sometimes witty effect: take the shots of a fish market, later echoed by the fish scale pattern in neon on the side of a boat. The film is a feast of neon, by the way, as befits the so-called “Las Vegas of the East.”

Candy continues to be elusive until, in the film’s most exuberant flourish of noir iconography, she meets a sticky end, leaving behind only a high-heeled shoe on a pavement. Sternberg’s Macao continues to haunt this film: finding a pair of discarded tights, Guerra da Mata speculates that they are the very ones that Jane Russell threw off a boat 60 years earlier.

Meanwhile, the skeletal plot and the accumulation of imagery build up to a personal and historical contemplation of Macau as reality and myth. Exoticism (and the whole point is that it’s highlighted as such) is juxtaposed with the mundane: the film is as enthralled by a garbage truck at night as it is by the bizarre video of a topless mermaid cavorting with a dragon fish. At times, the narrator seems to occupy the traditional position of the Westerner musing on the opaqueness of the East—for example, when trying to fathom a Chinese opera on TV. But, just as Macao is a focus for Western fantasies about the East, the converse is true: early on, we see Chinese tourists who have come “to glimpse the West through this Macanese keyhole.”

Guerra da Mata spent his childhood in Macao, a Portuguese colony for 400 years before it was handed over to China in 1999. The film is a search for his own past, and for colonial ghosts. He visits his old school, and finds that his former classroom is now used for storing junk. The Moorish Barracks, where he once lived, is now a World Heritage Site: the camera scans the deserted rooftop where he played as a child. Black-and-white images of Westerners at the Military Club (the film sparingly uses archive footage and stills) are accompanied by distant jazz, creating a distinct Shining vibe.

Not least because of the directors’ lugubrious voices, the film is steeped in melancholy—in that specifically Portuguese brand of nostalgic yearning known as saudade. And if one risks stereotyping a nation by invoking this quality (it’s a bit like constantly harping on Russians being “Chekhovian”), it’s worth noting that Candy’s Macao address is “Travessa da Saudade,” which translates as something like “Blues Alley.”

A bewitching hybrid, The Last Time I Saw Macao is a work of remarkable beauty, right up to a payoff evoked with dazzling concision and a coda suggesting that Macao’s (and Earth’s) future belongs to cats and terrapins. The film belongs in the first rank of psychogeographic cinema; its closest affinities are with Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy. Behind its pulp-style investigation of the Mysteries of Macao, the film is really about the present mystery of Macao’s future, and how that future will relate to its past. The film’s project is to defuse exoticism under cover of exoticism—to demystify through mystification. You might say—given the opening sequence—that it’s a drag act of supreme elegance.

Cinema Scope | He and “I”: Joaõ Pedro Rodrigues and Joaõ Rui ... Aaron Cutler interview with the director along with co-director and co-writer Guerra da Mata from Cinema Scope, Summer 2012

“Goodbye Lady from Macao” reads a newspaper headline at the end of Joaõ Pedro Rodrigues and Joaõ Rui Guerra da Mata’s short Red Dawn (2011), an unnervingly straightforward view of fish and livestock being sliced open in Macao’s Red Market. This tribute to the recently departed Jane Russell, the sultry wonder who starred opposite Robert Mitchum in Josef von Sternberg’s film noir Macao (1952), carries over into the opening of their subsequent film and first co-directed feature, The Last Time I Saw Macao, as the glamorous Candy (played by trans performer Cindy Scrash) lip-synchs Russell’s recording of “You Kill Me” from Macao while tigers prowl in a cage behind her. “I’m certain, I’m positive that my love will survive,” Russell/Candy croons, “Because you kill me, and keep me so alive.”

Desire and despair courses through nearly all the collaborations of the Portuguese pair, which began with Rodrigues’ 1997 short Happy Birthday! (in which Guerra da Mata played the leading role) and have since primarily showcased Rodgrigues as writer-director and Guerra da Mata as art director and production designer. (Guerra da Mata also served as co-writer on Rodrigues’ 2009 feature To Die Like a Man.) Rodrigues’ previous features often feel like horror films, their monsters born of the characters’ insatiable desires: O Fantasma (2000) follows the adventures of a young trash collector as he prowls for sex through a nocturnal Lisbon, his lust for a resistant stud eventually transforming him into a bizarre, leather-clad spectre; in Odete (2005), a young woman’s obsession with a dead man drives her to reincarnate him within herself; while in To Die Like a Man, an aging drag queen’s irreconcilable desires to live like a woman while retaining her biological birthright turns fatal after her wracked and crumbling body rejects the female hormones she has been taking to maintain her hybrid self.

While Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s previous work has focused on the innate need people feel for the presence of others—in the most radical instances to the point of fusing with them—The Last Time I Saw Macao is a film of and about absence. Its hero, an unseen narrator named Guerra da Mata (who shares many biographical details with his real-life counterpart), lives alone in Lisbon, engaged in a permanent dialogue with his memories. One day his old friend Candy, the chanteuse of the opening sequence, sends him a desperate e-mail: she’s gotten involved with the wrong men, a friend is dead, and she’s next. Begging for help, she entreats Guerra da Mata to return to his childhood home of Macao, where he grew up while the island was still a Portuguese colony prior to its handover to China in 1999. Arriving on the island and responding to the intermittent questions of an offscreen interlocutor (voiced by Rodrigues), Guerra da Mata narrates his encounter with a city he no longer recognizes. His former school has been converted into a warehouse for rubbish, familiar old buildings have been torn down and replaced by neon-lit casinos and skyscrapers, and when, lost, he fruitlessly attempts to obtain directions, he wryly observes, “Four centuries of Portuguese presence and no one here speaks Portuguese.”

As the film’s hero desperately attempts to reach an unresponsive Candy by cell phone, and begins to receive ominous, threatening calls from parties unknown, Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata weave their neo-noir narrative together with present-day documentary images of Macao—outside of Candy’s performance in the opening sequence, none of the film’s “characters” ever appear onscreen—while simultaneously crafting a ruminative, Markeresque essay film in which memory ceaselessly interacts and overlaps with the present. And as with the films of the world- and time-travelling Marker, one of the principal subjects of The Last Time I Saw Macao is how our memories always travel with us, creating a cognitive dissonance with our immediate present while, possibly, bringing us comfort at the same time. Yet this is no nostalgia trip: as hinted at by the film’s slyly double-edged title, “the last time I saw Macao” could refer to either the most recent time or something dreadfully final. Yet even as the film’s plot eventually disappears and the seemingly disconnected stream of images hints at a hopeless tilt towards the apocalyptic, there exists as well the potential for liberation. In contrast to the tourists that Guerra da Mata observes roaming Macao at night, “as if History could be erased with a simple click of the dozens of cameras that obsessively freeze the memory and fantasize happiness,” his search for Candy drives him deep into unknown regions, creating new memories to accompany his old ones.

Similarly, as Guerra da Mata’s voice fades and the viewer is freed from the exclusive vision of “his” Macao, each “I” is granted the freedom to create his or her own.

Cinema Scope: How did you first encounter Macao?

João Rui Guerra da Mata: My father was a marine engineer officer for the Portuguese Navy, and during the fascist regime, military personnel would often travel for duty commissions in the colonies. I was born in Mozambique, then went to Lisbon, then on to Macao. João Pedro Rodrigues: Whereas I have always lived in Lisbon.Guerra da Mata: I like to think of this film as a story a friend is telling another friend. I met João Pedro 20 years ago, and since then I’ve been telling him about my childhood in Macao. I have very vivid memories about the things I used to do, about the places I used to go to and about how I, literally, used to get lost in Macao. I see these childhood years as a great adventure.

Rodrigues: And getting lost, I think, is a good way of putting it. That’s what happened here: by getting lost, physically and emotionally, we found our film.

Scope: How did you begin co-directing?

Rodrigues: The first film we co-directed was called China, China (2007)..

Guerra da Mata: I wrote the script for João Pedro, and then we worked on it together. He understood how involved I was and that I had so many visual ideas for the film, so he asked me to co-direct.

Rodrigues: It came naturally, but that doesn’t mean that from now on we will be co-directing every film. We won’t be like the Straubs. I will continue to make my films. Last year I had a solo short, The Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (2012), about young people turning into zombies and roaming Lisbon on a day for lovers.

Guerra da Mata: I did the art direction on that film. And I will collaborate every time João Pedro wants me to, co-writing the scripts and being his art director and production designer. That’s what I’ve been doing since Happy Birthday!, and it is what I really like to do.

Rodrigues: Yes, but last year João Rui directed a short film, As the Flames Rose, in which I played the lead actor.

Guerra da Mata: It’s my debut solo film. It’s very freely inspired by the play La voix humaine,by Jean Cocteau, and João Pedro wasn’t the lead actor as he said:. Hhe was, in fact, the only actor, and he gave a 27-minute monologue into a telephone. The action takes place on the day the Chiado district in Lisbonsuffered a devastating fire in 1988. I tried to work out a connection between a city that is burning up and a relationship that is burning down.

Rodrigues: We co-directed The Last Time I Saw Macao because João Rui has a special relation with Asia. So far, every film we have co-directed has been related to China.

Scope: How did you create The Last Time I Saw Macao?

Guerra da Mata: In Portugal, we used to have funding from the Film Institute through the Ministry of Culture. We got money for a documentary. We went to Macao three times altogether with a crew of between four and six people during a period of three years for location scouting and then to shoot. We would go back to Portugal in between, look at the rushes and organize them.

Rodrigues: Then we would travel again. I think it was actually during our first time in Macao that we understood that a documentary was something we weren’t very interested in doing.

Guerra da Mata: I suppose that, initially, my strongest contributions to this film were my memories and my stories about Macao. It’s such a cliché to say that memories are fictions, but they actually are. Your memories change according to your age and to the people you’re talking to.

Rodrigues: You reinvent your memories throughout your life. I was ready to listen to his stories, and then to see the city with my own eyes.

Guerra da Mata: In the beginning, everything was based in my memories and in João Pedro’s memories. We were thinking of confronting the ideas of one that has never been there with those of one that has actually lived there.

Rodrigues: When we got to Macao, though, that changed. We got involved with the city in a very strange way.

Guerra da Mata: As João Pedro likes to say, and I agree, suddenly it was as if the city was telling us stories. Stories we had to tell through fiction.

Rodrigues: Which was difficult, because the budget we had gotten was really for a documentary. We had great help from the Cultural Institute of Macao, which gave us permission to shoot everywhere public. We were there in the city for six months in total, and being a small crew gave us a lot of freedom in how we organized the shoot. We didn’t have the restrictions you face when you have a larger crew. As a result, some days we shot until we dropped, and then the next day we would shoot nothing. Sometimes we just walked without a precise destiny or destination, and that’s how we found some of the most intriguing locations.

Guerra da Mata: Sometimes we would plan to go from Point A to Point B, and then from Point B to Point C, but on the way we would see this back alley, and we would go and explore it. By then we were lost in the labyrinth of the city but we had found something exciting to shoot. It’s this freedom João Pedro was talking about. And yes, we had an anchor, we have to admit it—the places where I used to go, either with my parents or alone: restaurants, my old school, the house where I used to live…

Rodrigues: And Josef von Sternberg’s Macao.

Guerra da Mata: In one of the very first shots of Sternberg’s film you can see the house where I lived.

Rodrigues: But you see it from very far away, and we only noticed it after watching the film several times.

Guerra da Mata: Because it’s not important for the plot. But it’s there.

Scope: Who is Candy?

Rodrigues: The actress or the character?

Guerra da Mata: Candy for us is Cindy Scrash. She’s a trans performer who had a small role in To Die Like a Man. She’s been my friend since the ’80s and we absolutely love her, because she has the old Hollywood glamour of a femme fatale.

Rodrigues: She has had a complicated life, and what Candy says in her letter to João Rui about her life is partly true about Cindy Scrash. There is something genuine about her, like a Fassbinder character or an Andy Warhol Superstar. “Candy? Candy Darling!” João Rui says in the film when he hears her voice on the telephone.

Guerra da Mata: Candy is also the real name of the cat that appears at the end of the film, which is a lookalike of our late cat Sónic, who died during the shooting of To Die Like a Man.

Rodrigues: To Die Like a Man is dedicated to Sónic.

Guerra da Mata: And then, when we were shooting, we found a bamboo shaft with the word “Candy” carved into it. There were all these connections between what we were seeing.

Rodrigues: An echoing. When we were shooting the film, for instance, Jane Russell died. We went every morning to a café and bought Portuguese newspapers there, and one morning we read that she was dead.

Guerra da Mata: And all the newspapers were saying, “Goodbye Lady from Macao.”

Rodrigues: There were several links that were being established, a small, subtle net of connections between us, films, and Macao.

Scope: Chris Marker?

Rodrigues: It’s hard to make a film that plays so much with space and time and not think about Chris Marker. But there’s also James Bond, because a small part of The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) was shot in Macao while João Rui was living there.

Guerra da Mata: I actually went to the shoot.

Rodrigues: We wanted our film to be playful, and I think that this is a really wide range: Chris Marker, James Bond, film noir…

Guerra da Mata: B-movies…

Rodrigues: Sci-fi. I like to see the film as being influenced by all of them, but also as if we started from zero. Of course I’ve seen many films, and what I’ve seen is a part of myself, but my idea of doing films is to try to find a way into cinema that is my own. In this case, we found it together.

Guerra da Mata: Direct citations in films are so boring, aren’t they?

Rodrigues: The only person who can do them well is Godard.

Guerra da Mata: But we do have several references, like from Josef von Sternberg’s film Macao. We open with the song “You Kill Me.” There are high heel shoes and silk stockings, which are also references. But this is all because we wanted a mixture of documentary and fiction. One of the first shots of our film is a travelling shot by boat, like in the beginning of the Sternberg film. We liked the idea of having documentary images introducing a plot that was actually shot in a Hollywood studio.

Rodrigues: And we decided to do the opposite: inventing a plot mostly shot with documentary images. I think that our film, although it has a fictional plot, is ultimately a portrait of the city as we ourselves see it now.

Guerra da Mata: I think it’s a portrait of “our” Macao, a re-invented territory where we felt free to use images shot in several places in China and even Portugal.

Rodrigues: It’s like a documentary about a fictional place. As the film deals with memory we thought of an imaginary city inhabited by ghosts, bodies with no faces, body parts, silhouettes, shadows…haunted by voices from past, present, and future times, disembodied voices forever lost in the labyrinth of a mythical city.

Scope: You mention Macao’s moment of independence at the beginning of the film, and then present the city as well past Portuguese occupation, to the point where your protagonist cannot find anyone else who speaks Portuguese.

Guerra da Mata: It really puzzles me that we were there for more than 400 years and almost no one speaks Portuguese today. Macao was a gift from China, it was never an occupied territory; it was basically China with Portuguese administration. Very different from Hong Kong, which was a British colony. Everyone in Hong Kong speaks English because they created educational structures. And the Portuguese never did. During the Portuguese dictatorship there was a saying: “Portugal spread from [the northern province of] Minho to Timor.” That was the Big Portugal. In the ’80s, because we knew that the handover would come, we decided to build in Macao like maniacs, neglecting the Chinese neighbourhoods and building ugly postmodern architecture.

Rodrigues: Especially seeing this in the centre of the city is ridiculous.

Guerra da Mata: No one in Portugal gave a shit about Macao, and then suddenly we had to leave a mark. And then, after the handover, the new administration had to leave a Chinese mark over the Portuguese marks. So it’s an architectural jungle now.

Rodrigues: Macao is also a theme park, in a way.

Guerra da Mata: Now it’s a theme park.

Scope: Your voiceover calls Macao “the Las Vegas of the East.”

Rodrigues: As far as I know, Las Vegas was designed to be a gambling city. Whereas Macao has a different history, there is another layer.

Guerra da Mata: In Las Vegas, they built replicas of the Eiffel Tower and of the pyramids for entertainment purposes. In Macao you can always go and see the original Portuguese architecture. Macao, which was started as a trading port, is a gambler’s paradise today. Even the biggest American gamblers go to Macao now because the bets are much higher there than in Las Vegas.

Rodrigues: Macao used to have two islands. Now they have been connected through the main gambling strip.

Guerra da Mata: When I left Macao it was half the size that it is now. Although it’s a peninsula, it felt like an island, and when I lived there you could always see the sea. Which is something you cannot anymore. And that was a bit confusing for me coming back, because I remember that I always had references, like the water. Now you can’t see the water from many places. But cities have to change, so it’s natural that 30 years later I would…the character would be lost.

Rodrigues: It’s normal to be lost when you remember a city differently.

Guerra da Mata: Yet the character is not nostalgic.

Rodrigues: We didn’t want to make a nostalgic film.

Guerra da Mata: His comments are often critical. I like to see him as someone who thinks, “Well, things could have gone a better way.”

Scope: How did you edit your material?

Rodrigues: It took eight months, but I count all the times we went back to Lisbon and organized. The first part of the editing was organizing.

Guerra da Mata: In the beginning we didn’t have a subject. We wanted to make a document more than a documentary. We wanted it to be a fiction, and we wanted it to be in Macao. But we had all this footage, and although we had some clues, we didn’t know how the story would be developed.

Rodrigues: It was very hard and complicated. Our editor Raphaël Lefèvre came several times to Lisbon to work with us at different periods.

Guerra da Mata: By the third time we went to Macao we had…

Rodrigues: A structure for the film.

Guerra da Mata: And we were already starting to write the voiceover.

Rodrigues: Even though we thought that the film would have voices, we weren’t sure how they would sound. When we wrote them, we thought a lot about film noir voiceover, but also about a Max Ophüls film called Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). The story in that film is told through a letter that you always go back to, sent by a woman to her old lover who has abandoned her. The first words in Candy’s letter—“By the time you read this letter, I may be dead”—are exactly the same as Joan Fontaine’s first words in that film in her letter to Louis Jourdan. We wrote the voiceover inspired by that, as well as based on what we had filmed, and then we changed the editing of the images because of the voiceover. We kept going back to the voice, back to the images, back to the voice, back to the sound editing. Because there are other sounds in the film besides the voiceover.

Guerra da Mata: Sound is very important in the film. Almost everything happens offscreen, and it’s through sound that you understand what’s happening. For instance, there is a moment when a character is shot, and the images are of a bridge, some neon reflections on the water, dogs looking on as though they are witnesses, and a high-heeled shoe turned sideways. It’s through sound that you know what has happened.

Rodrigues: The high-heeled shoe came from Red Dawn. That film started with the shoe. Now we are shooting a film about the Chinatown in the north of Portugal, and the shoe and Candy’s dress are also part of that film. We like that the films resonate between themselves.

Guerra da Mata: Even if their stories are different.

Rodrigues: We have a lot of other images left over from the shoot of The Last Time I Saw Macao that we are still figuring out what to do with.

Guerra da Mata: I’m fascinated with all the changes taking place in Macao. We have another short film to be shot there. But as the funding for cinema in Portugal is blocked, we’ll have to wait…

Rodrigues: Our film will open first in Portugal and then in France. My previous features opened in other countries, like in the US, where they have all had commercial runs. But it’s getting harder and harder to distribute a film like ours. That’s why film festivals are so important.

Guerra da Mata: Films are made to be seen. It would be great if they had commercial releases, but we know that it’s difficult sometimes. So at least if they’re shown in festivals, some people will be able to see them. We’re facing terrible times in Portugal, as well as in many other places, as far as the arts are concerned. So for the film to travel to Locarno, Toronto, New York, Busan, Montreal, Vancouver, Rio, Valdivia, Copenhagen, and so on is good because it helps show our politicians that they’re wrong. To show those people that made this incredible…

Rodrigues: Mess…

Guerra da Mata: With their irresponsible attitudes towards culture. It’s good to prove them wrong with our work and with the work of other Portuguese filmmakers, even if we’re not getting support.

The Last Time I Saw Macao - Essays- Cinema Guild James Quandt

The Macao Gesture - Lola Journal Cristina Álvarez López, December 2012

The Last Time I Saw Macao - Reverse Shot Max Nelson, September 9, 2013

Melissa Anderson on The Last Time I Saw Macao - artforum.com / film September 13, 2013

Slant [Calum Marsh]

Film Blerg [Angus Tonkin]

TIFF 2012. Wavelengths (P)review: Part Two – The Features on ... - Mubi Michael Sicinski, September 11, 2012

The A.V. Club: Nick Schager

The Last Time I Saw Macao | Film Review - Spectrum Culture Jesse Cataldo

The L Magazine: Paul Dallas

Are the Hills Going to March Off?: Carson Lund

Letterboxd: Mike D'Angelo

ScreenAnarchy [Kwenton Bellette]

JLT/JLT: Josh Timmermann

Variety [Boyd van Hoeij]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]

In-Betweenness Dominates 'The Last Time I Saw Macao' - The New ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Rodríguez, Marta

LOVE, WOMEN AND FLOWERS (Amor, mujeres y flores)

Great Britain Columbia (58 mi) 1988 co-director: Jorge Silva

Love, Women and Flowers Behind Every Flower a Death, Ilene S. Goldman from Jump Cut, June 1993 (excerpt)

LOVE, WOMEN AND FLOWERS deals with the socio-economic and political position of Colombia's flower growers. Specifically, the film documents the health hazards of the country's flower industry, Colombia's second largest export industry. Because the industry employs so many women, the film concentrates primarily on how the pesticides and fumigation affect women workers' health. Although the film depicts, among other things, a women's health issue, the film is not feminist in a North American sense. Rather, it deals with the issue as part of the general condition of Colombia's working classes. In this context, women's struggles are inseparable from class struggle. The film also raises the issue of the health of male workers as well as the damage done to families.

LOVE, WOMEN AND FLOWERS' powerful presentation of the workers' struggle made the film quite controversial when shown on Colombian television. The film's critics were afraid that it would damage Colombian flower sales abroad. Its supporters applauded it for the frankness with which it confronted a serious social issue.[4]

Rodríguez and Silva always intended that their films stir up discussion about important social problems, and this goal has connected them to other Latin American filmmakers. As Rodríguez said in a 1974 interview,

"When you combine the social sciences with a mass medium like film, you are challenging the uses to which both are put by the privileged class while simultaneously putting them at the service of the working class. In contrast to the kind of hermetic treatise that only five initiates can read, this is a way to use anthropology or sociology so that the working class can put it to use analyzing their particular situation."[5]

Various forms of politicized cinema emerged in different Latin American countries throughout the 1960s. Many of the directors at that time strove to make films the working class could use, films with which the poor might identify and ones that would help them analyze their own situation. Importantly, this self-aware (self-conscious?) mode of filmmaking has not been limited to any one type of film. It encompasses documentary, narrative fiction and experimental film (and video) making.

The New Latin American Cinema was influenced by Italian neo-realism as well as by John Grierson's social documentary. In the former movement Latin American filmmakers found a cinema

"that discovered amidst the clothing and the rhetoric of development another Italy, the Italy of underdevelopment. It was a cinema of the humble and the offended which could readily be taken up by film-makers all over what has come to be called the third world."[6]

Marta Rodriguez interview Dennis and Joan M. West interview with Marta Rodríguez, from Jump Cut, June 1993

Rodriguez, Robert

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO

USA (102 mi) 2003

BFI | Sight & Sound | Border Control Edward Buscombe from Sight and Sound, October 2003

SIN CITY

USA (124 mi) 2005 co-director: Frank Miller

BFI | Sight & Sound | Sin City (2005) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, June 2005

Basin City, a town so corrupt it is often called 'Sin City'. A smooth assassin (the Man) ( Josh Hartnett) murders Becky (Alexis Bledel), a woman he has been paid to kill but who thinks he loves her.

John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), an honest but ailing cop, mutilates Roark Jr (Nick Stahl), a serial rapist-murderer who is the son of a powerful senator, saving 11-year-old Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), but he is shot in the back by his partner.

Some years later, Marv (Mickey Rourke), a hulking ex-con, has a night of love with Goldie (Jaime King), a gorgeous woman who is promptly murdered. Escaping from cops who arrive to pin the crime on him, Marv goes to Lucille (Carla Gugino), his sympathetic parole officer, and explains that Goldie gave herself to him because she knew she was being targeted and only he would be tough enough to avenge her. When thugs come for him, Marv tortures them for information. He learns that Goldie's killer is Kevin (Elijah Wood), a cannibal who lives on a farm owned by Cardinal Roark (Rutger Hauer), the senator's even more powerful brother. Lucille is killed by Roark's men, but Marv gets the better of Kevin, letting his own pet wolf eat him. Marv kills the Cardinal, but takes the rap for all the murders and goes to the electric chair. Only Wendy (Jaime King), Goldie's twin sister, knows he has acted heroically.

Dwight (Clive Owen), a fugitive with a face changed by plastic surgery, is in a relationship with Shellie (Brittany Murphy), a waitress. Her apartment is invaded by Jackie (Benicio Del Toro), an abusive ex-boyfriend whom Dwight humiliates. Worried that Jackie and his friends will take their anger out on innocents, Dwight trails them to Old Town, an area run by 'the Ladies', a gang of tough prostitutes queened by his ex-girlfriend Gail (Rosario Dawson). Miho (Devon Aoki), Gail's samurai-sword-wielding enforcer, chops off Jackie's gun hand, but he uses his other hand to try to shoot Dwight. Miho has blocked Jackie's barrel and the backfire kills him, whereupon it turns out he was a cop. This killing is liable to break the truce that has allowed the Ladies to run their own turf. Becky, a treacherous hooker, tells Manute (Michael Clarke Duncan), a mobster, about the situation. Manute sends Irish mercenaries to prevent Dwight from disposing of Jackie's body. However, Dwight gets away with Jackie's head. Dwight and Miho offer to exchange the head for the captured Gail, and the Ladies wipe out the mobsters, reasserting the independence of Old Town.

A little earlier, Hartigan is in jail for his assault on Roark Jr, kept sane by weekly letters from Nancy. When a disfigured 'yellow bastard' appears in his cell with a girl's severed finger, Hartigan confesses to Junior's crimes and is released, then traces Nancy, who is now an exotic dancer. Glimpsing the yellow bastard at the bar, Hartigan realises he has been duped and has led Nancy's former molester to her. Overpowering them, Junior leaves Hartigan to hang and begins to torture Nancy, but Hartigan escapes and batters him to death. Knowing Nancy is in danger as long as he lives, Hartigan sends her home and shoots himself.

The smooth assassin meets Becky and begins charming her for the kill.

Review

Writer-artist Frank Miller, who became a star in mainstream superhero comics with a run on Marvel's Daredevil, was hard done by in the credits of the Daredevil and Elektra films, which make near-unacknowledged use of characters he created on a work-for-hire basis. He has no cause to complain of any slight in this adaptation of his creator-owned property: not only does Miller rate a co-director credit with Robert Rodriguez - who privileges him as a co-creator in an otherwise one-man-band production much as Orson Welles did cinematographer Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane - but almost every sequence uses the original panels as storyboard, and a combination of make-up, CGI and lighting effects transforms the cast into the images of their on-the-page originals. Mickey Rourke might have his highest-profile role in years, but his physical profile is utterly changed by a prosthetic appliance that gives him the concrete features of the books' Marv, a character who reveals the breadth of Miller's influences by coming on like a crossbreed of Moose Malloy, the hulking ex-con who hires Marlowe to find his lost love in Farewell My Lovely, and the rock-skinned Thing of The Fantastic Four.

Sin City is one of several recent films (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Casshern) which abjure traditional sets in favour of placing the cast into computer-generated, photo-realistic artwork. While there is still something fakey in the use of CGI to depict the ancient world in Gladiator or Alexander, this technique works well when dealing with a stylised, self-contained fantasy world. A comic-book film doesn't need to be as eye-deceivingly realistic as an epic; indeed, part of the appeal is in showing things that can't be real in a manner calculated to astonish rather than convince. In his superhero work, Miller tended to use urban vigilante characters like Daredevil and Batman, drawing on the cityscapes of filmr(mutating in the 1980s into the retro-futuristic environments of cyberpunk) and the brutally honourable ethos of samurai or kung fu stories; whenever characters who can fly, like Superman or Thor, interact with his gritty, battered masked men, they are treated ambiguously. Miller's previous credited involvement in cinema includes the scripts for a couple of RoboCop sequels, which also conflate crime in the city with the futuristic. In Sin City, we are in a parallel world of some sort, a Silver Age Gotham City without masks and stripped of a Comics Code Authority rating, but there are few overt fantastical or science-fictional touches (beyond Marv's near-invulnerability).

If comics are predominantly concerned with boys' adolescent fantasies - nerd Peter Parker gets spider-powers and a supermodel girlfriend - then Sin City embraces this lack of maturity with a relish that is almost confrontational. Putting together three of Miller's books in a structure obviously modelled on Pulp Fiction, Rodriguez and Miller avoid the pitfall of varying the mood or tone and instead present three unstoppable hardboiled heroes who take appalling punishment while they try to protect angelic (but devastating) female innocents from irredeemably depraved villains. The Spillane paperback cover fantasy of a guy in a trenchcoat with a gun in one hand and his arm around a glamour girl has not been presented so insistently since Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). If the film were conventionally made, it might be tiresome action nonsense, but stylisation redeems the exercise, making it less an heir to Aldrich's Mike Hammer movie than the 'Girl Hunt' ballet Spillane parody (with Fred Astaire as dancing detective Rod Riley) in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953). Sin City is consistently gorgeous, mostly in high-gloss black and white but with the occasional striking splash of colour: the opening scene, as Josh Hartnett's predatory hit-man closes on his victim on a roof terrace overlooking the city, features a red evening dress as vivid as Cyd Charisse's in 'Girl Hunt', while Nick Stahl's horrible Roark Jr is a ghastly, sickly yellow that seems to stain the film. The most obvious effect is to have bloody wounds show red on the black and white, but the film uses that sparingly - the most ultra-violent sequences play a different game, with gushes of blood appearing as glowing white.

A side-effect of this is to highlight the way contemporary actresses are less well served than their 1940s counterparts: model-actress faces like Rosario Dawson, Jaime King, Devon Aoki and Jessica Alba, survivors of numberless teen movies and genre flicks, are revealed here as shimmering creatures, getting the full lighting and glamour treatment of Lana Turner or Lauren Bacall. Miller, creator of Elektra, has always liked women who look like exotic dancers and kill like Toshiro Mifune, and Rodriguez summoned up Selma Hayek as Santanico Pandemonium in From Dusk Till Dawn. The women of Sin City are different from the women of traditional noir, if just as objectified. The missing element is murderous duplicity: even the treacherous Becky isn't as rotten as such Chandler-scripted women as Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) in the film of James M. Cain's novel Double Indemnity. In Sin City, as befits the simpler morality of the comics, even whores and strippers are untouchable innocents with a sideline in lethality. The only major female character who isn't a sex worker is Marv's probation officer, a naked lesbian who has her hand eaten by a cannibal and gets casually gunned down - notably without inspiring a feeling in the man who has got her killed on a par with his devotion to the hooker who has treated him gratis to a night of sex in a heart-shaped bed with crimson sheets.

Obviously, this is a party everyone wants an invite to. Quentin Tarantino gets 'special guest director' credit for helming a single scene, involving Clive Owen in a car with Benicio Del Toro as a talking corpse. Rodriguez, who famously has a hand in everything from the music to the set catering, takes a memorable crime-comic-style 'shot and cut by' credit. Most film-makers presented with comic-book material tend to try to add 'depth', but Rodriguez and Miller are enthusiastic about a world stripped down to two dimensions, minimal even in the use of colour, with characters who have no arcs except, sometimes, from living to dead. Surprisingly few comic-book adaptations have really tried to look like comic books - Mario Bava's Diabolik and Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy come to mind - and none has so successfully seemed like a gloss on the originals as Sin City.

by Adam Nayman Sin City, from Cinema Scope

There is an exhilarating moment in Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) when a sneering villain played by Josh Lucas gets rocked by an explosion and flies towards the camera, arms pinwheeling, mouth agape. It appears that his momentum will carry him through the lens and into our laps, but instead he stays suspended in mid-air—a splayed chalk outline-in-waiting. It’s a fittingly 2-D end for a very one-dimensional character, and a witty, affectionate nod to the material’s comic-book roots. Robert Rodriguez’s neo-noir Sin City, adapted from the popular graphic novel by Frank Miller, takes this concept of the film frame—an inherently kinetic space—as comic book frieze, and distends it to feature length.

The result is a film that’s rigorous but also rigor mortised. Sin City might as well be a piece of installation art or a photographic exhibit. Its carefully arranged, digitally augmented tableaux just sit there on the screen, dutifully approximating Miller’s original illustrations. It also replicates his novels’ episodic narratives, playing out as a loosely connected, Tarantino-like triptych about three unlikely white knights—craven goon Marv (Mickey Rourke), enfeebled cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis), and surgically altered photographer Dwight (Clive Owen)—labouring to avenge, rescue, or otherwise redeem a smorgasbord of scantily clad gutter princesses (including Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, and Rosario Dawson) from various bizarre villains. Those who argue that an adolescent misogyny is the piece’s organizing principle are absolutely right, but as bothersome as Sin City ’s dime-store nihilism gets, its aesthetic deficiencies trump its moral ones.

Rodriguez’s calling card has always been his impatience—this is the dude whose how-to book contained an appendix called “The Ten Minute Film School” (later reproduced on DVD) and whose Chef Boyardee spaghetti Westerns Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) suggest he never met a first take he didn’t love. (Exhibit C: those maladroit Spy Kids moppets.) Something about Miller’s work must have struck a chord, though, because the laboriously airbrushed Sin City is obviously a product of painstaking digital craftsmanship.

Call it a step forward, then, but certainly don’t call it good: Sin City intrigues as the cinematic equivalent of a kid eagerly tracing over his favourite comic book, but as far as escapism goes, it’s the pits. Its black-and-white-and-red-all-over universe is a closed circuit; where the dreamscapes of Terry Gilliam or Jeunet and Caro feel somehow permeable, Sin City presents the viewer with an aesthetic cul-de-sac. One recalls Pauline Kael’s wrong-headed excoriations of Barry Lyndon back in 1975: “[Kubrick] suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable; he must believe that his perfectionism about the look and sound [of the film] is what will make it great.”

The difference is that Barry Lyndon’s stately choreography and funereal pacing were intended as a critical parody of upper-class mores. Kubrick, as ever, knew exactly what he was doing. Rodriguez, though, doesn’t understand the effect of his painterly ambitions on his material. The elements are in place for Sin City to be a lot of grotty fun. The players are vividly grotesque, and their backwater playground has been impressively realized. But there’s no heat to their various misbehaviours. When Rourke’s Marv bulls his way through a hotel door to dispatch the phalanx of crooked SWAT-teamers on the other side, there’s no force, no sense of explosion: it’s a fart in a monochrome fishbowl. Time and again, characters are subjected to physical violations (stabbings, shootings, and old-fashioned pummelling), but as rendered within Rodriguez’s coy colour scheme, the resulting expectorations are quite literally bloodless—their guts dribble out white and silver, like tepid drips from a soldering iron. And they keep dribbling, with such numbing regularity that you’d sooner take tea with Barry Lyndon and the gang than sit through one more disemboweling.

The grating faux austerity of the violence is one problem; Miller’s comically hard-boiled narration is another. The characters don’t talk to each other, but at us. The turgidity of the dialogue works on the page, of course—your mind’s voice processes it in precisely the flat, unaffected tones that make it sing. When spoken by actors, though, these word balloons turn leaden. There’s a fine line between deadpan and catatonic, and for all its visual restraint, Sin City crosses it consistently—Rodriguez artfully positions his actors within the frame and then leaves them to drown in a sea of bad poetry. When Clive Owen’s Dwight refers to girlfriend Rosario Dawson as a “Valkyrie,” he sounds less love-struck than confusedly sullen, like a student reading aloud from his cribbed term paper on The Ring.

Both Rourke and Willis do better to suggest world-weary heroism, but they’re playing clumsy abstractions—the gold-hearted thug and defiantly anachronistic cop, respectively —and while both manage to enact a righteous vengeance on their nemesis, their satisfaction doesn’t extend as far as the audience. Like Kill Bill (2003) (whose director makes a “guest appearance,” helming one sequence), the film thoughtlessly traffics in extreme violence without suffering; since its protagonists are able to shrug off the various abuses levelled on their comically sturdy frames, we never doubt their ability to overcome. What’s supposed to make them vulnerable are their puppy-dog attachments to imperiled (or, in Marv’s case, dead) women, but their Rapunzels aren’t worthy of them: they’re basically indistinguishable amidst Sin City ’s thriving naïf population.

The silent, bespectacled monster played by Elijah Wood (he kills prostitutes and eats them, but not before mounting their heads Bluebeard-style on the wall) encapsulates the movie’s failures. Wood’s villain cuts an impressive figure, but he’s humourless and disappointingly remote—his bookish appearance is initially funny, but the lenses of his glasses are opaque, denying us any vicarious identification with his malevolent countenance. The script insists upon his deadliness before we really ever get to see it. Like everyone else in Sin City , his reputation precedes him, but the threat he poses is defused almost instantly: he’s killed off in his very next scene. His end is amusingly gory, but he’s such a narrow character that he doesn’t even seem to deserve it. When John Cassavetes gets psychically annihilated at the end of Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978), he’s brought it on himself with his ceaseless pithy nastiness; when Wood gets eaten alive by some dogs, it’s just another entry in the film’s blithe inventory of depravities.

The tossed-off sadism is annoying, but isn’t worth getting worked up over. Sin City teems with cruelty, but its callowness is transparent, with none of the stabs at gravitas that marred Kill Bill. That film’s arty appropriation of grind-house disreputability was irritating and reductive, but Tarantino’s misstep was, at least, borne of genuine movie love. Rodriguez claims a similar affinity, but he hasn’t really made a movie here. Sin City ’s attempts at artistic cross-pollination wind up devaluing both mediums. Rodriguez has credited Miller as his co-director (a gesture that cost him his own DGA membership), but he can’t pass the buck on this one: he’s taken the author’s studiedly self-contained triumph and blown it up bigger than all outdoors, exposing and enshrining its shallowness for all to see

Sin City Henry Sheehan

Best Big-Screen Strippers Cinematical

Roeg, Nicolas

The Director's Chair - Nicolas Roeg - DVD Beaver

On a superficial level, Nicolas Roeg's films are fascinating to look at but difficult to comprehend. Time is nonlinear and lacks monotonic flow. The characters are difficult to understand. The narratives seem to break down. Natural laws seem to be undermined and questionable, laughable conventions. Logic is imbued with a sense of mysticism. Under the surface of the films, lurks a foreboding beyond description; possibly beyond comprehension. This is the world in which Roeg's characters live, forge their identities and make their choices. A world and identities which they cannot escape, which drive their decisions to their inevitable conclusions. Using the complete gamut of cinematic techniques, from Welles-like mise-en-scene to innovative editing and sound, from elaborate camera angles to intricately placed objects - symbols, Roeg stretches the potencies of narrative filmmaking while challenging both senses and intellect.

BFI Screenonline: Roeg, Nicolas (1928-) Biography Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors, Neil Sinyard from BFI Screen Online

Nicolas Roeg's films deal in raw emotion, and shake our preconceptions about civilisation and cinema. At the peak of his form he is one of Britain's most adventurous directors. The medium's expressive potential is stretched through a masterly montage of time and space; the films' characters are equally tested, forced into journeys of self-exploration, cut adrift from their usual moral and physical surroundings. None of his best films conform to the normal rules of commercial entertainment; they operate more like experimental visual machines, bent on puncturing human complacency. He has filmed Joseph Conrad's classic novella Heart of Darkness (for cable television in 1994) and it was Conrad who uttered what could be Roeg's credo: "A man who believes he has no illusions has at least that one".

Roeg was born in London on 15 August 1928. After National Service he joined the film industry as tea-maker and clapper-boy at Marylebone Studios, working his way up to camera operator on Ken Hughes's The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960) and other films; he also contributed to scripts for Cliff Owen (A Prize of Arms, 1961) and Lawrence Huntington (Death Drums Along the River, 1962). However, it was as an inventive cinematographer that Roeg first attracted critical attention, especially on Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964), François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1965) and Richard Lester's Petulia (1968). Intriguingly, each of these assignments anticipated aspects of his own feature films. Petulia foreshadows the complex time leaps and splintered narratives of Roeg's mature work; while its depiction of 1960s permissiveness disintegrating into despair and violence finds resonant echoes in Performance. The Masque of the Red Death features a 'Red Death' figure that re-materialises in a different, even more sinister guise in Don't Look Now. The cold, futuristic surface of Fahrenheit 451 re-emerges in The Man Who Fell to Earth, with its penetrating, alien vision of the emptiness of modern life.

Roeg moved into direction in 1968, paired with the painter and writer Donald Cammell on Performance, an ambitious film centring on the confrontation between a gangster on the run (James Fox) and a pop idol in retreat (Mick Jagger). Cockney accents, graphic violence, a sympathetic view of London's hallucinatory drug culture, and a complex narrative concerned with identity and power, proved too heady a brew for Warner Bros. executives and the film's release was delayed for two years. By that time Roeg was in Australia directing and photographing Walkabout, his solo debut, a rite-of-passage drama built round the relationship between a teenage Aborigine (David Gulpilil) and two white children (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg), who become lost in the Australian desert after their suicidal father tries to kill them. Playwright Edward Bond supplied sinewy dialogue, but nothing could compete with Roeg's startling images of fierce orange suns, lizards and insects, and savage terrain. The film's unique resonance attracted both audiences and critics.

Roeg's biggest success, however, came with Don't Look Now (UK/Italy, 1973), a bizarre supernatural tale, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story. A glamorous, fashionable couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) are haunted by the accidental drowning of their little daughter. In Venice, where Sutherland's John Baxter is restoring the church of San Nicolo' dei Mendicoli, they attempt to come to terms with their grief: she through faith in two eccentric English mediums, he through the pursuit of an elusive red-hooded figure that seems to resembles his dead daughter. Mystery, tragedy, sensuality, and the evocative depiction of decaying Venice as a city of death, helped give the film both genuine profundity and popular appeal.

Roeg's subsequent films have been uneven. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) makes clever use of David Bowie's otherworldly weirdness by casting him as a benign but unhappy alien; but the character's drift into exhaustion and confusion gives the film an unsatisfactory dying fall. Bad Timing (1980) is sharper and much more vicious, with convincing performances by Theresa Russell (subsequently Roeg's second wife) as a sensual, sexually liberated young woman and Art Garfunkel as the inhibited psychoanalyst who becomes destructively obsessed with her. Shot in Vienna and Marrakesh, the film is visually remarkable, but the disturbingly frank depiction of cruelty and sexual perversion upset the Rank Organisation, which preferred to lose their substantial investment rather than show the film in their cinemas.

A similar fate awaited Eureka (UK/US, 1982), a big budget film backed by MGM, based on the real-life story of the successful gold prospector Sir Harry Oakes, murdered (most probably by the American Mafia) in 1943. An enthralling beginning in the frostbitten goldfields of the Yukon gives way to languid decadence after Gene Hackman's miner strikes it rich and discovers that fabulous wealth brings disappointment and tragedy. Though Roeg's imagery is fascinating, the visual attractions cannot prevent the story's collapse into an ill-resolved murder mystery. MGM complained that Roeg had not delivered the film he had promised, and avoided giving it the expected wide release; one can understand their point of view.

Roeg restored his commercial credibility with the more modest Insignificance (1985), which imaginatively fantasised an encounter between four post-war American icons, Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joseph McCarthy. It was considered audacious enough to win a Cannes Festival prize, but the originality lay in Terry Johnson's play rather than Roeg's direction, and the film creaks under the weight of philosophical dialogue. Castaway (1986), with Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe marooned on a desert island, left no such shackles on Roeg's visual exuberance, though pretty settings and excellent performances did little to disguise the thinness of the material. Roeg's last mainstream movie was an adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's story The Witches (1989): black, cruel, and entertaining enough, but far removed in style and intent from the subtlety and imaginative flair of his other venture into the world of children, Walkabout.

Elsewhere, Roeg appeared to drive himself into a cul-de-sac, making films of little public appeal. The unrewardingly eccentric comedy-drama Track 29 (US/UK, 1988), from a Dennis Potter script originally earmarked for Joseph Losey, was followed by a disappointing adaptation of Brian Moore's novel Cold Heaven (US, 1992), unusually dour and dry in its treatment of guilt and paranoia. Two Deaths (1995), an oppressive, talky chamber piece about romantic obsession, set in Bucharest as the Ceausescu government falls was equally disappointing. Subsequent features were made for cable TV.

Roeg's later decline is regrettable; but it has done nothing to dent the potency of his best work, or lessen the inspiration his career has given to younger film makers like Michael Winterbottom and all cineastes who view cinema as a provocation not a palliative, the ideal medium for shedding light into our own dark places.

Nicolas Roeg website

Nicolas Roeg | Biography, Facts, Films, & Marriage to Theresa Russell ... biography

Nicolas Roeg - Films as director:, Other films: Joseph Lanza, updated by Rob Edelman from Film Reference

Nicolas Roeg • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Lee Hill from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002

Jason Wood on Nicolas Roeg | BFI Live | British Film Institute

Nicolas Roeg brief bio fromo NNDB

Yahoo Groups: Nicolas Roeg Roeg, a film discussion group open to the public

Nicolas Roeg Mubi

Nicolas Roeg | Tony McKibbin Fragile Geometries, essay on Roeg (Undated)

Nicholas Roeg films by Chuck Kleinhans - eJumpcut.org Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, by Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut, 1974

Two Deaths - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, March 1, 1997

Sex and death: Nicolas Roeg at BFI Soutbank with Time Out Film ... David Jenkins from Time Out London, November 4, 2000

Walkabout • Senses of Cinema Justine Kelly, April 10, 2001

"What's Been Puzzling You is the Nature of My Game": Performance ... Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, June 13, 2001

James Fox: Subverting Sexual Identity & Social Class in British Cinema Kimberly Lindbergs from Cinebeats, February 20, 2007

C I N E B E A T S :: Nicolas Roeg Kimberly Lindbergs, June 10, 2010

The Many Roles of Mick Jagger Kimberly Lindbergs from Movie Morlocks, June 10, 2010

The Essentials: The Films Of Nicolas Roeg | IndieWire June 23, 2011

Leaving it to Chance: Maverick Director Nicolas Roeg ... - The Quietus Colm McAuliffe, June 27, 2011

The World is Ever Changing, by Nicolas Roeg – a review | The Spectator The World Is Ever Changing, book written by Nicolas Roeg (256 pages), Thirza Wakefield book review from The Spectator, July 20, 2013

Review: The World Is Ever Changing, By Nicolas Roeg ... Fiona Sturges from The Independent, July 28, 2013

The World Is Ever Changing by Nicolas Roeg – review | Books | The ... Christopher Bray book review from The Guardian, August 25, 2013

10 Essential Nicolas Roeg Films You Need To Watch - Taste of Cinema Neil Evans, October 13, 2014

Director Nicolas Roeg Looks Back | HuffPost Jay Murphy fropm The Huffington Post, December 29, 2014

“This is my time”: why the work of filmmaker Nicolas Roeg rewards a ... Ryan Gilbey from The New Statesman, June 24, 2015

Where to begin with Nicolas Roeg | BFI Matthew Thrift from Sight and Sound, September 13, 2016

The Elephant in the Room: INSIGNIFICANCE | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 10, 2016

6 Filmmaking Tips From Nicolas Roeg - Film School Rejects Christopher Campbell, August 15, 2017

TSPDT - Nicolas Roeg

Loving the Alien: Nic Roeg Xavier Mendik interview from kamera.co.uk, (Undated), reposted at The Cult Film Archive here: The Cult Film Archive - GEOCITIES.ws

NICOLAS ROEG INTERVIEWED; "BAD TIMING" Harlan Kennedy interview of Roeg from American Cinema, January/February 1980

Gerald Peary Interviews Nicolas Roeg The Real Paper, October 23, 1980

Looking at the rubber duck: Nicolas Roeg on François Truffaut | Sight ... Richard Combs interview about working as Truffaut’s cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451 in 1984, originally published in Sight & Sound, Winter 1984/85, also republished January 28, 2013, seen here: Diary Of A Screenwriter: Nicolas Roeg: On Truffaut, Words and Images

Nicolas Roeg Interview Nick Setchfield interview (Part One) from SFX magazine, August 1999, also featuring: PART TWO, both seen here: SFX magazine

His brilliant career Jason Wood interview from The Guardian, June 2, 2005

Q&A: Nicolas Roeg :: Stop Smiling Magazine Nile Southern interview, November 27, 2005

Nicolas Roeg: 'I don't want to be ahead of my time' | Film | The Guardian Ryan Gilbey interview from The Guardian, March 10, 2011

Interview: Anthony Richmond on Nicolas Roeg | FILMdetail Ambrose Heron audio interview with Roeg’s cinematographer April 4, 2011 (10:02)

'Man Who Fell to Earth' director Nicolas Roeg on sci-fi without 'buzzes ... Mark Olsen interview from Hero Complex, July 2, 2011

Nicolas Roeg interview: the director who fell to Earth - Telegraph John Preston interview, July 19, 2013

Who Would Believe It? | Frieze conversation between film director Nicolas Roeg and artist John Stezaker, October 12, 2013

Nicolas Roeg on Mirrors and Memory | AnOther Ray Bennett interview, October 20, 2013

Images for Nicolas Roeg

Nicolas Roeg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PERFORMANCE

Great Britain (105 mi) 1970 co-director: Donal Cammell

The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.

—Turner (Mick Jagger)

Time Out Tom Milne

Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated. The first half-hour is straight thriller enough to suggest a Kray Bros documentary as Fox, enforcer for a London protection racket, goes about his work with such relish that he involves the gang in a murder and has to hide from retribution in a Notting Hill basement. There, waiting to escape abroad, he becomes involved with a fading pop star (Jagger) brooding in exile over the loss of his powers of incantation. In what might be described (to borrow from Kenneth Anger) as an invocation to his demon brother, the pop star recognises his lost power lurking in the blind impulse to violence of his visitor, and so teases and torments him with drug-induced psychedelics that the latter responds in the only way he knows how: by rewarding one mind-blowing with another, at gunpoint. Ideas in profusion here about power and persuasion and performance ('The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is one that achieves madness'); and the latter half becomes one of Roeg's most complex visual kaleidoscopes as pop star and enforcer coalesce in a marriage of heaven and hell (or underworld and underground) where the common denominator is Big Business.

All Movie Guide [Tom Wiener]

If Michelangelo Antonioni put one foot in the waters of late-'60s London with Blow-up, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell dove right into the deep end of the pool, emerging with this rock & roll version of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (consider the film's production number, "Memo From Turner," the first example of gangsta rap). The delineation between the contributions of the co-directors has been a subject of ongoing critical debate for over 30 years. Because Roeg served as cinematographer (after a brilliant career as a director of photography on such films as Petulia and Far From the Madding Crowd) and Cammell wrote the original script, it was originally assumed that film's "ideas" were Cammell's and the "visuals" were Roeg's. Then, when Roeg went on to have a more prolific career than Cammell (who directed only three more films before his 1996 suicide), credit for more than just Performance's stunning visuals began to tilt to Roeg. But, as Roeg made clear in the 1998 documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, the questions of identity, sexual and otherwise, that Performance dealt with were lifelong concerns of Cammell. Performance is no simple wallow in the mutually decadent lifestyles of criminals and musicians, but an honest attempt to understand the roles we play every day.

Britmovie

Performance is an artsy psychological melodrama that marked the directorial debut of cinematographer Nicolas Roeg; the film was co-directed and written by Donald Cammell. Warner Bros put the film on hold for two few years after filming while they tried to agree with Cammell on the final edit. Warner’s were then faced with the problem of how to market the film, whether to make it a Mick Jagger rock vehicle or promote it as a gangster film.

Set in 60s London, James Fox plays Chas Devlin, a petty gangster on the run from his gangland colleagues after the unauthorised killing of Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). Chas must seek refuge while he waits to skip the country and visits an inconspicuous guesthouse in the hope of renting a room; he is initially turned down but due to his insistence gains a room. Chas finds himself staying in the strange household of ageing rock star Turner (Mick Jagger), and his two girlfriends Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton) for a weekend of identity assault. The reclusive Turner recognises something of his younger daring self in the violent criminal, and pushes open the boundaries of the villain’s experience with a mixture of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Chas begins to find his sense of identity completely undermined, he becomes a child lost in the wilderness of mind-expanding drugs orchestrated by the manipulative Turner. Chas begins cross-dressing with the assistance of Pherber, losing his sense of manliness he even admits Turner sexually attracts him. Chas attempts to get a passport from Tony Farrell (Ken Colley) so he can flee to America, but Tony double-crosses him and informs Chas’ boss of his whereabouts. It’s not long before mob boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) shows up to collect Chas, Chas is taken away on a final ride in the gangsters car leaving behind the body of Turner who he left with a bullet in the head – a final head trip.

Introduction BFI Screen Online (link lost)

Shot in the summer and autumn of 1968, Performance is a mesmerizing portrait of late 60s London, offering a potent mixture of gangland violence, rock 'n' roll decadence, sex and drugs.

James Fox plays Chas, a brutal, Krays-type gangster on the run both from the police and from his own associates. While waiting to escape abroad, he seeks refuge in the Notting Hill mansion of a reclusive, burnt-out rock star (Mick Jagger) who lives there with his girlfriend (Anita Pallenberg) and a young French girl (Michele Breton).

As they draw Chas into a disorientating world of sexual and psychological games, the macho gangster and the androgynous rock star assume increasingly interchangeable identities. In the words of the original poster: 'This film is about madness. And sanity. Fantasy. And reality. Death. And life. Vice. And versa.'

Crucial to the film's rhythm is its blazing synthesizer soundtrack. Composed and arranged by Jack Nitzsche (who worked with such as Phil Spector, Sonny Bono and the Rolling Stones), the music was conducted by Randy Newman, performing alongside musicians such as Ry Cooder, Mick Jagger and Buffy Saint-Marie.

Backed by Warner Brothers, the production history of Performance was extremely fraught. At a test screening in Santa Monica in March 1970, one executive's wife vomited with shock and paying customers had to be offered their money back. When released in the US in August 1970, the film was loathed by mainstream critics, with the reviewer of Time calling it 'the most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen'.

Held back by Warner, Performance was not released in the UK until January 1971 - but, with strong support from the underground press, was to gain the status of an instant classic. 'Don't miss Performance,' wrote the editor of Time Out: 'Many people don't like it. It is disturbing and confusing but it is a very strong, uncompromising and very English film.'

More than thirty years on from its original release, Performance remains a film which attracts and repays repeated viewing and which has lost none of its disturbing power.

BFI Screenonline: Performance (1970) Mike Sutton from BFI Screen Online [Show full synopsis]

Usually thought of as Nicolas Roeg's first film as a director, Performance (1970) is actually co-credited to Donald Cammell, with Roeg also credited as Director of Photography. Many of the film's flourishes, which now seem characteristic of Roeg, were probably Cammell's. Inspired by real-life East End violence, and by the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, this was a genuinely collaborative effort, despite Cammell's subsequent career decline and Roeg's cult success.

Performance tells a simple story in complex terms. The opening half-hour is a comparatively realistic tour of the London underworld of the late 1960s, but once gangster Chas (James Fox) enters the house of reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger), the film becomes concerned with the disintegration of his perceptions about himself and his world, after which the film becomes a jumble of jump-cuts, point-of-view shifts, visual effects, elliptical editing and seamless changes between fantasy and reality.

The identities of the two men become blurred, with the frequent use of mirrors indicating how they become reflections of one another. In Turner, Chas sees his own desire for acceptance and adulation. In Chas, Turner sees his own demon, the violence needed to restore his powers of creation. When he sings the song Memo From T, Turner brings the two worlds together, the society of violence and the cult of rock music. The two personalities begin to merge, and they even become physically similar: when Chas wears an androgynous curly wig, he resembles a tour poster illustration of Turner.

James Fox's excellent performance captures Chas's increasing alienation from his world, as well as his sadistic streak. The script offers him, and a fine supporting cast of thugs, the opportunity for plenty of black humour. But the film is also notable for capturing the sheer energetic audacity of Mick Jagger's persona. Constantly performing for his audience, just as self-consciously as Chas, Jagger's Turner is an edgy character, who eventually drops the isolated flower-child act in the song sequence, when he displays the insolent aggression which was Jagger's trademark.

The explicit sex and brutal violence were a breakthrough for British cinema, explicitly linked in Chas's taste for rough sex and his oddly sexualised whipping at the hand of Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). These elements, and the frequent drug-taking, seem to have caused Warner Bros to panic about the film, shelving it for two years and then re-editing it before its 1970 release.

"What's Been Puzzling You is the Nature of My Game": Performance ... Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, June 13, 2001

It is virtually impossible to write about Performance without referring to the multi-layered themes, identities and posturing of the 'performers' who populate and circulate around the film. This is a film that foregrounds issues of identity, subjectivity and personality, its extraordinarily angular structure providing multiple, crystalline points of entry, exit, engagement and distanciation. Following on from the cool temporal pyrotechnics of Alain Resnais and his 'pop' protege, Richard Lester (particularly the Roeg shot Petulia [1968], staged in Haight-Ashbury fuelled San Francisco), the film's co-directors, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, create an endlessly turning and returning world, in which characters dissolve into other characters (sometimes literally), acts and gestures are repeated, and in which the barriers between fantasy and reality, past, present and future are seriously tested (in fact, obliterated). Scenes, images and actions are often connected or joined in unexpected or uncertain ways. Seemingly disorganised, casual, atemporal and discontinuous montage and mise en scène, evolves, on repeated viewings, into a rich nexus of motifs, references (from books, as photos on the walls, on the soundtrack) and visual and aural metaphors. In some ways, the great visual metaphor of the film and its branching structure are the images that attempt to visualise the atemporal processes of memory. As the camera appears to crash through layers of time and memory, and seemingly the human brain, the film attempts to connect each of these layers, and give them to us all at once. This is one of the factors that makes Performance a fascinating if somewhat unsatisfactory film - though often brilliantly constructed and shot it reaches for a state that is largely beyond or counter to cinema's nature (essentially, atemporality and simultaneity). In general, the tone of the film is Borgesian, both circular and endlessly forking, as in the asynchronous opening shots of a screeching jet plane, which initially appear as a 'jolt' to the spectator, but find their place in the background skies of several of the film's penultimate shots.

Performance is not a likeable film. It is difficult to get into the groove of its fragmented and uneven structure, particularly as it lurches and flashes from the gangster/business underworld, the first forty minutes of the film focused on Chas (James Fox), to the bohemian counterculture of Turner's (Mick Jagger) house. The first section of the film is, in many ways, the most fragmented, and betrays the cuts that Cammell was forced to make to the film. Nevertheless, rather than lamenting and bucking against this imposition - mainly insisted upon so that we get to Jagger earlier - the film's tactic is to use this cutting to set up a fragmented and blurred sense of place, space and character identity. Editing is also used to create implicit and explicit connections between characters, to flash frames that belong at other points in the story, and to unsettle easy patterns of point of view and identification. This works to fluster the spectator's expectations, to blur distinctions between what might initially seem to be a gangster film, a trip film, soft-core sex film or a celebrity vanity project.

Performance is also a 'pop' film, or, at least, it has often been considered in this way. In this respect it is useful to compare the kind of films associated with some of the key musical celebrities of the 1960s such as Jagger, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Whereas Lester's Beatles' films (A Hard Day's Night [1964] and Help! [1965]) and D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (a 1967 documentary of Dylan's 1965 British tour), centrally stage the vibrant charisma and pop celebrity of their star protagonists, Jagger's film appearances are much more troubling, indistinct and ill-at-ease. This is an understandable characteristic of the self-analytical postmortem of Altamont we see in David and Albert Maysles' rockumentary Gimme Shelter (1970), but it also defines the fragmentary glimpses and questionable 'presence' that distinguishes Jagger's appearances in Godard's Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One (1970) and Performance. Whereas Dylan and The Beatles engage and command the camera, and the space and people around them, Jagger's presence and his performances are much more undecided, uncommanding even. You can't take your eyes off Dylan or The Beatles, but it's often difficult to know if you are even looking at Jagger. Compare Dylan's wilfully fractured presence in the deliberately evasive and wildly fragmented Eat the Document - a filmed record of his 1966 European tour that was finally compiled by Dylan in the early 70s in seeming homage to Performance - to Jagger's effete narcissism. Even in the lead role of the charismatic Ned Kelly [1970], Jagger fails to exude a galvanising personality. Performance is a film where everything has its mirror image or double, where appearances can be both deceiving and fleeting, and where it is uncertain where the boundaries of character and actor lie. Thus, Performance utilises the instability of Jagger's image - particularly its androgyny - to reinforce its ideas of dissolution, archetype and the chimerical nature of identity. (1)

Performance is as challenging to listen to as it is to watch, and it is the soundtrack that is perhaps the most influential and groundbreaking aspect of the film. Rather than being a totally 'composed' score or a collection of 'found' pop songs, Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack mixes together disparate and 'impure' musical forms, conventional arrangements and snatches of voice, 'orchestra', synthesiser and sound effects - presenting itself as both a conventional 'score' and counterpoint, rock sampler and an impure mix of pop, orchestral and visionary electronic scoring. The music chosen and composed for the film ranges from proto-rap (The Last Poets), blues, Native American (Buffy Sainte-Marie), synth washes, bottleneck guitar and dulcimer colourings (Ry Cooder), to cribbed Beefheart psych-blues with a touch of tabla. (2) It is not just the range of performers and their interpolation that distinguishes Nitzsche's score, but the manner in which it interweaves, pulses and competes with the world and actions of the characters. At times the score totally dominates the sonic realm, rising to a peak in Merry Clayton's signature gospel scream, while at others the music track appears to be coming from another room, is played by Turner on his sound system, propulsively scores the journey of a car into the country, or is performed by the film's one true musical performer, Mick Jagger. In keeping with the processes of mirroring and contrasting that underscore Performance, Jagger's two musical performances in the film are radically disparate. Despite expectations, the film takes more than an hour to get to Jagger's first musical sojourn, a solipsistic, but authentically rootsy version of Robert Johnson's "Come on in My Kitchen". This 'performance', which is unlike any other moment associated with Jagger's generally fey and opaque Turner (it actually is self-defining, even galvanising), is contrasted to the surreal "Memo from Turner" sequence. This trippy fantasy, which features Jagger donning a dapper suit and tie and behaving as a gangland boss, plays with the conventions of musical performance. The number is self-consciously synched and shifts vocals from Jagger to one of the other men gathered in the room. As in many other aspects of the film we are uncertain how to regard this sequence and performance - at the moment where Jagger seems furthest from his star persona he sounds most like it. Both of these 'performances' contribute to the multiplicity of Turner's character rather than provide a mark of authenticity (the moment when the 'real' Jagger emerges).

Performance tells a relatively straightforward story in a completely cockeyed fashion. Chas, a sadistic underworld pretty boy has to escape from his familiar surroundings and immerse himself in the strange 'otherworld' of London counterculture. In the process he loses a sense of himself, his identity dissolving and merging into the opaque world and character of Turner. With its somewhat antiquated themes, techniques and characters, Performance is not a fun film. Although it seems, at one level, to sum up the Zeitgeist, it is also a singular and insular work. The film can be linked to such early '70s films as Mike Hodges' Get Carter (1971) and similarly themed '90s films as Todd Haynes' The Velvet Goldmine (1998), but the slipperiness of its hybridisation of styles, genres and performances make it an angular and imperfect point of reference (but an exemplary 'queer' film). Learning the lessons of Performance, Roeg went onto a much lauded career as an art filmmaker, while Jagger's acting career never really came to much. Though both soon turned up in Australia to respectively make and star in Walkabout (1971) and Ned Kelly. Cammell and Fox's subsequent careers reflect the more traumatic and transformative effects of Performance. Fox dropped out of acting to become an evangelist. Cammell struggled to complete Performance the way he wanted and to make films for the twenty-five years. He committed suicide in the Hollywood Hills in 1996.

Endnotes:

1. Though this film is most definitively a collaborative effort, and many now favour Cammell as Performance's 'designated' author, its key themes, representational preoccupations and much of its style are central to much of Roeg's future work. The dissolution of identity and the investigation of a character's questionable sex and sexuality are the key leitmotifs of Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980). These last two also feature somewhat fey and even androgynous pop stars in their central roles (David Bowie and Art Garfunkel).

2. The influence and effect of Nitzsche's visionary score can be seen in Ry Cooder's soundtrack for Paris, Texas (in much of Cooder's work, in fact), the collaborations between Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for Dead Man Walking (1996), and the endless composite of pop songs that make up many contemporary film soundtracks. Nitzsche's scores are also remarkable for the collaborations they enable and the mix of styles and ethnicities they place side by side.

Nicholas Roeg films by Chuck Kleinhans - eJumpcut.org Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, by Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut, 1974

Nicolas Roeg | Tony McKibbin Fragile Geometries, essay on Roeg (Undated)

Performance (1970) - Articles - TCM.com Richard Harlan Smith

VideoVista Gary Couzens

Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Performance (1970) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com

Film Freak Central Walter Chaw

The Spinning Image Pablo Vargas

James Fox: Subverting Sexual Identity & Social Class in British Cinema Kimberly Lindbergs from Cinebeats, February 20, 2007

C I N E B E A T S :: Nicolas Roeg Kimberly Lindbergs, June 10, 2010

The Many Roles of Mick Jagger Kimberly Lindbergs from Movie Morlocks, June 10, 2010

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)

Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]

DVDTOWN [John J. Puccio]

DVD Verdict [Matthew Singer]

ReelTalk Donald Levit

Eye for Film Jennie Kermode

filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti

CineScene.com Chris Dashiell

CHUD.com Josh Katz

James Fox and Sandy Lieberson: how we made Performance | Film ... Jack Watkins interviews with the lead actor and producer, from The Guardian, July 21, 2015

Entertainment Weekly Sean Howe

Variety

Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]

WALKABOUT A 97

Great Britain (100 mi) 1971

From start to finish, this isn’t really like anything else, although Peter Weir’s gorgeously abstract later work Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) comes to mind, as this is one of the best films ever made that blends together two different cultures so well, largely because it makes no attempts to explain either one, but simply allows them to naturally coexist without an ounce of sentimentality or pretense. Beautifully shot by the director himself, showing a fascinating use of editing, this is a stunning work not only in how well crafted it appears, but by the subtle ways it co-mingles and heightens the differences between cultures, offsetting one against the other as a way of better understanding each one. Opening in an upper class school in Sydney, where all the students wear the same uniforms, the camera veers around a corner of a building and we’re suddenly jettisoned into the Australian outback, a flat horizon for as far as the eye can see. A family picnic between a father and his two children goes terribly awry when he inexplicably starts shooting at them. After dousing his car with gasoline and setting it on fire he shoots himself in the head, leaving both to fend for themselves out in the middle of nowhere. Jenny Agutter is the prim and proper well behaved 15-year old sister to Luc Roeg, the director's son, who plays her playful and inquisitive 5-year old brother. Showing little emotion, without explaining what happened, the two of them start walking into the distance, walking for several days under a blazing hot sun. Just when it looks like they may die lost and alone, they discover a small oasis of a water hole under a single fruit tree, which they make their home for awhile. During the night, animals eat all the fruit and the water disappears, leaving them startled, but they stay, hoping the water will come back. What makes these sequences interesting are the Terrence Malick directoral flourishes showing creatures that live naturally in this habitat, how strangely different they appear than these properly dressed city children who obviously live elsewhere. What makes this especially interesting is that WALKABOUT was made two years before Malick’s first film. Also interesting is the heightened sound design imagining what animals in mass must sound like to one another, as it’s a cacophony of what sounds to humans like noise, unable to distinguish between the sounds. This is quite a contrast to the swelling, oversaturated strings by John Barry who wrote much of the music for James Bond films, or the introductory sounds of a didgeridoo playing while swarms of pedestrians make their way through the busy streets of Sydney.

Out of nowhere, a young Aborigine boy is seen coming over the hill, a 16-year old boy who is out on his walkabout, a tribal custom where he must learn to live off the land for months by himself to prove that he is worthy to enter adulthood and become a man. This boy (a young David Gulpilil) carrying two spears is quite capable of finding prey every day, starting a fire, finding water, and fending for himself, though he continually speaks in his own native tongue which is never translated, and never understood by the girl, while the young boy learns to use gestures and hand signals to communicate with him. Mostly, the duration of the film is wordless and what follows plays out through images alone where we lose all track of time, which is rather stunning in its conception, beautifully integrating landscapes with the open ended possibilities of these young lives, where we are lured into this symbiotic coexistence between life and death, even when there are aspects we may not fully comprehend. This puts the audience in a similar mindset as these kids onscreen. Naturally, they follow where the Aborigine kid leads them as he feeds them every day, and even without communicating, they become friends. Agutter continues to maintain her proper distance, though it’s impossible for her not to notice the young man is wearing only a loin cloth, while the young boy takes to the older one like a brother. But there are moments where we see Agutter swimming alone completely naked in an idyllic natural setting, where it would be hard for the Aborigine boy not to notice how in the heat of the day, she wears less and less clothing as time goes on. Without ever speaking, their relationship is vividly intense even from afar.

As he leads them back to white civilization, the balance of nature begins to change. There’s a strange scene where they pass by an outpost where a white couple on their ranch are mixing with a group of Aborigines making cheap art objects for sale, showing absolutely no interest for one another’s ways, where it’s a completely exploitative relationship, while this “Tarzan and Jane” couple with a young chimp for a kid tagging along has a bold curiosity and a much more sincere form of respecting one another. In an even stranger scene, like something out of Lina Wertmüller’s SWEPT AWAY (1974, also not yet made), a group of scientists are in the outback with weather balloons, where the men are leering at one of the scientists who is an attractive woman, staring under her skirt when she shifts her legs, or coming close to talk to her in order to get a better close up view of her exposed cleavage, more overt signs of nonverbal sexual signals. When our travelers discover an abandoned ranch house next to a paved road, civilization takes an interesting turn, as our couple suddenly have time for one another, but she’s overtly nervous, not yet ready to abandon her prudish yet dignified upbringing. This is intermingled with a stunning sequence of white hunters in a jeep shooting the wild game for sport and leaving their carcasses behind to uselessly rot under the hot sun, actions witnessed by the Aborigine boy who lays down in a dream of animal bones to purify himself from this callousness. But this is an ominous sign of natural discord, where Agutter is equally clueless about Aborigine customs, including a heartbreaking mating dance ritual that she fails to respond to, with disastrous consequences. What follows is a beautiful segway of emotional distance and extreme longing, where a mature audience may be tempted to read signs into this relationship more than the young participants themselves, who remain aloof and don’t yet know how their lives will be forever imprinted by this time they spend together. This is hardly an idyllic or idealized portrait, but instead remains an elusive and mysterious journey where the three characters are endlessly fascinating, unintended spokespersons or ambassadors for their respective cultures, leaving behind an astonishing blend of sumptuous beauty and haunting devastation, a rare glimpse into our own future of innocence and paradise lost.

View Program Details Chicago Humanities Fest

Director Nicolas Roeg's second film, a mystical masterpiece first released in 1971, centers on two British children, a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her young brother (played by Roeg's son Lucien John). Stranded in the Australian desert when their father chillingly commits suicide (after first trying to kill them), they are led back to civilization by an Aboriginal male (David Gumpilil) who appears to be about the girl's age. The fascination of the movie comes from the cultural collision that also carries a sexually charged undercurrent. Complete directors' cut. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. UK, 1971; 100 mins.

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

An innocent family picnic explodes into existential panic in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, a tale of two city children who bump horns with Mother Nature in the Australian Outback after their incestuous, abstract father figure goes berserk. The screen erupts in elliptic madness and an Aboriginal boy enters the frame, acting as a spirit guide for the two white children, whose dependence on technology will not be the only thing that's tested throughout their trek across the Outback. Two journeys predicated on initially disparate ambitions will become one, and as the trio moves through the mysterious landscape, they will reach a spiritless limbo on the map: buildings whose structural misery suggests a colonialist war was once waged and lost here. Roeg's shots of steely, spiritless cityscapes bring to mind Michelangelo Antonioni and Jacques Tati's jabs at industrial topographies and his elusive editing draws gripping comparisons between nature's food chain and the savagery of urban planning. Always contemplating the relationship between here and now, our notions of each other's differences, and the costs of our culture of consumption, Walkabout suggests that the precarious relationship between industry and nature is not so easily reconciled, though understanding that humanity is our greatest natural resource couldn't hurt.

It’s tempting to interpret “Walkabout” as a simple statement that living in the woods is better than living in a city, but I doubt such a statement is accurate. Rarely is there a movie in which the day-to-day existence of wild animals is so unfriendly and, well, alien. In the course of “Walkabout” we meet an aborigine boy who must hunt, every single day, to stay alive, and we don’t just see him say “I’m going to hunt” and then come back with fresh-cooked ribeye, we see the spear taking out the adorable kangaroo, we see him clubbing it to death, we see him ripping its furry legs off and sticking them on the fire. That’s life. Animals eat other animals. But I for one am happier when someone else takes care of the gory stuff and I just get the ribeye.

“Walkabout” is a juxtaposition of “civilization” and “wilderness,” told in the purely cinematic terms of images and expressions, not words. This is life in one place, and this is life in another, and while the aborigine clubs the kangaroo director Nicolas Roeg also shows us the civilized butcher separating the chunks of meat. When the two city children laugh in the tree the family of aborigines have a similar experience in what’s left of a defunct automobile. The eyes of the aborigine boy cannot stop being drawn to the tiny skirt of the city girl, but the same is true of the three men playing cards next to the woman whose garters are barely, deliciously visible. “Walkabout’s” strength is that it resists passing judgment on these comparisons and merely shows them.

What connects these images is the journey of a brother and sister (Lucien John and Jenny Agutter) lost in the outback. An aborigine boy on his walkabout (David Gumpilil) comes to their aid and the three of them do the best they can to communicate, which isn’t much. There’s a muted attraction between the aborigine and the girl, both of whom seem to be trying on their developing sexuality like a new set of clothes, and the little boy begins to look up to him because of his survival skills. What happens to them I will not reveal, only to say that their adventure takes them more into the symbolism of cultural differences, rather than just a string of dangerous incidents. Sometimes I wondered if the narrative had strayed into a dream, or a fantasy sequence. As for style, it’s safe to say that Nicolas Roeg is Terence Malick with an Austrailian accent. As his own cinematographer, he fills his canvas with lush, deadly landscapes, oppressive sunrises, and prefers, over close-ups, long-shots of isolated, insignificant humans amidst the wilderness. “Walkabout” is not a relentless Hollywood movie in which the lost children exchange clever quips every couple of feet. They’re too bewildered, both by the desolation around them, and by how ill-equipped they are too face it.

User reviews from imdb Author: Sean Choi from CA, USA

"In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT. This is the story of a 'WALKABOUT'." Thus begins Nicolas Roeg's 1971 debut feature, "Walkabout", one of the most beautiful, mystical, and magical film I've had the privilege of seeing as a filmgoer. Seeing it again recently on the beautiful Criterion edition DVD, I was once more captivated by this film as it slowly worked its magic on me. The "plot" of "Walkabout" is simplicity itself: a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (the director's son in real life, Lucien John Roeg--billed "Lucien John" on the credits) are stranded on an Australian outback as their father, who took them out for a picnic, suddenly and inexplicably commits suicide. The two of them are thus left wandering by themselves and it looks as if they will die in the vast wilderness--until they encounter an Aborigine boy who is on his "walkabout," an Aborigine rite of passage into manhood. For a time these kids travel together as a trio and the Aborigine's skills in hunting and finding water allow them to survive. And although the girl and her brother will eventually find their way back to civilization, for a brief unspecified length of time the exotic Australian outback becomes a wondrous and mystical place where their story of survival unfolds. If you've seen this film, you know that the brief synopsis above doesn't really touch what is so special about "Walkabout." And that is because "Walkabout" isn't really about plot, like more conventional films. It is one of those rare films like Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock," Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," and Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire" which are all about evoking a kind of sad and bittersweet emotional response from us. I think that is what "Walkabout" is mostly about. The overall impact of this film "hits you in the heart" and very impressionable viewers might be stirred in their emotions to the point of swooning in the scene at the end where the girl, now a married woman, remembers her idyllic days happily swimming in one of the outback's water holes Nicolas Roeg was not only the director of "Walkabout" but also its cinematographer. And his photography in this film is unbearably beautiful and sumptuous. "Walkabout" is without a doubt one of the most gorgeous color films ever made. Shot on location in the Australian outback--perhaps one of the most exotic places on earth--"Walkabout" has a visual grandeur that is reminiscent of passages from David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" and John Ford's "The Searchers." Never has the "voodoo of location shooting" (as Werner Herzog likes to call it) been more manifest than in this film. In fact, the exotic and unique location in which it was shot, coupled with Roeg's masterful cinematography, feels like one of the main characters in "Walkabout." The film's location adds a mystical (almost spiritual) and meditative dimension to it which lingers in the viewer's mind--haunting it long after the film is over. If Roeg's photography is one of the film's main characters, so is John Barry's legendary and justly famous score. Maybe it's the harp used in the score, or the subtle billowing quality of its composition (i.e. the way its beautiful melody gently builds and builds), but the music in this film simply soars. It moves me like no other score I've ever heard. It feels completely transcendent, as if it exists outside time and space altogether--but gently swooping down from time to time, "kissing" this film's images with aching sweetness. All of the above elements work together to form a film-viewing experience that inspires both beauty and awe in us. The film's message is not necessarily that life in the outback is better than life in a modern civilization, but that no matter where you happen to find yourself (even if that happens to be a wilderness like the Australian outback), if you have resources that meet your basic needs, it can become your "home" for a time. And that afterwards there is bitter-sweetness in reminiscing about those "good times" you were fortunate enough to have--to which you can never return again.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, also seen here in his revised 1998 Criterion essay: Walkabout

Is ``Walkabout'' only about what it seems to be about? Is it a parable about noble savages and the crushed spirits of city dwellers? That's what the film's surface seems to suggest, but I think it's also about something deeper and more elusive: The mystery of communication. It ends with lives that are destroyed, in one way or another, because two people could not invent a way to make their needs and dreams clear.

Nicolas Roeg's film, released in 1971, was hailed as a masterpiece. Then it disappeared into oblivion, apparently because of quarrels over ownership, and was not seen for years; Premiere magazine put it first on its list of films that should be available on video but were not. In 1996 a new theatrical version restored five minutes of nudity that had been trimmed from the original release; that director's cut is now available on video.

The movie takes its title from a custom among the Australian aborigines: During the transition to young manhood, an adolescent aborigine went on a ``walkabout'' of six months in the outback, surviving (or not) depending on his skills at hunting, trapping and finding water in the wilderness.

The film opens in the brick and concrete canyons of Sydney, where families live stacked above one another in condominiums. We glimpse moments in the lives of such a family--a housewife listens to a silly radio show, two children splash in a pool, and on a balcony their father drinks a cocktail and looks down moodily at them. There is something subtly wrong with the family, but the film doesn't articulate it, apart from a suggestive shot of a bug that does not belong indoors. In the next scene, we see the father and children driving into the trackless outback in a wheezy Volkswagen. They're on a picnic, the children think, until their father starts shooting at them. The 14-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter) pulls her 6-year-old brother (Luc Roeg) behind a ridge, and when they look again their father has shot himself and the car is on fire.

Civilization, we gather, has failed him. Now the girl and boy face destruction at the hands of nature. They have the clothes they are wearing, a battery-operated radio, and whatever food and drink is in the picnic hamper. They wander the outback for a number of days (the film is always vague about time), and stumble upon an oasis with a pool of muddy water. Here they drink and splash and sleep, and in the morning the pool is dry. At about this time they realize that a solemn young aborigine (David Gulpilil) is regarding them.

They need saving. He saves them. He possesses secrets of survival, which the film reveals in scenes of stark, unforced beauty. We see the youth spearing wild creatures, and finding water in the dry pool with the use of a hollow reed. He treats the child's sunburn with a natural salve. Some of the outback scenes--including one where the youth spears a kangaroo--are intercut with quick flashes of a butcher shop. Man's nature remains unchanged across many platforms.

There is an unmistakable sexual undercurrent: Both teenagers are in the first years of heightened sexual awareness. The girl still wears a school uniform that the camera regards with subtle suggestiveness. (An ambiguous earlier shot suggests that the father has an unwholesome awareness of his daughter's body.) The restored footage includes a sequence showing the girl swimming naked in a pool, and scenes of the aborigine indicate he is displaying his manliness for her to appreciate.

These developments are surrounded by scenes of implacable, indifferent--but beautiful--nature. Roeg was a cinematographer before he became a director (he co-directed the Mick Jagger film ``Performance'' in 1969 before this first solo outing). His camera here shows the creatures of the outback: lizards, scorpions, snakes, kangaroos, birds. They are not photographed sentimentally. They make a living by eating other things.

Aboriginal culture has a less linear sense of time than that of a clock-bound society, and the time line of the movie suggests that. Does everything happen exactly in the sequence it is shown? Does everything even happen at all? Are some moments imagined? Which of the characters imagines them? These questions lurk around the edges of the story, which is seemingly simple: The three young travelers survive in the outback because of the aborigine's skills. And communication is a problem, although more for the girl than for her little brother, who seems to have a child's ability to cut straight through the language to the message.

There's one tantalizing scene where the travelers actually pass close to a settlement; the aborigine sees it, but does not lead the others to the top of a rise where they could see it, too. Is he hiding it from them? Or does he not understand why they would be seeking it? (The film gives us no information about the aborigine's background--not even whether he has ever had any contact with modern civilization.) There's a haunting scene where they explore an abandoned farmhouse; she cries while looking at some photographs, and he watches her carefully as she does so. And finally a scene where the aborigine paints himself in tribal designs and performs a dance that can be interpreted as courtship. The girl is not interested, and the gulf between the two civilizations is not bridged.

What should we have been hoping for, given the conditions of the story? That the girl and her brother learn to embrace a lifestyle that is more organically rooted in nature? That the aborigine learn from them about a world of high-rises and radios? That the two teenagers make love as a sort of symbol of universality, before returning to their separate spheres?

I think the film is neutral about such goals. Like its lizards that sit unblinking in the sun, it has no agenda for them. It sees the life of civilization as arid and unrewarding, but only easy idealism allows us to believe that the aborigine is any happier, or his life more rewarding (the film makes a rather unpleasant point of the flies constantly buzzing around him).

Nicolas Roeg does not subscribe to pious sentimental values; he has made that clear in the quarter-century since ``Walkabout,'' in a series of films that have grown curiouser and curiouser. In ``Don't Look Now,'' ``The Man Who Fell to Earth,'' ``Insignificance,'' ``Track 29,'' ``Bad Timing'' and other films, many of them starring his wife, Theresa Russell, he has shown characters trapped inside their own obsessions and fatally unable to communicate with others; all sexual connections are perverse, damaging or based on faulty understandings.

In ``Walkabout,'' the crucial detail is that the two teenagers can never find a way to communicate, not even by using sign language. Partly this is because the girl feels no need to do so: Throughout the film she remains implacably middle-class and conventional, and she regards the aborigine as more of a curiosity and convenience than a fellow spirit. Because not enough information is given, we cannot attribute her attitude to racism or cultural bias, but certainly it reveals a vast lack of curiosity. And the aborigine, for his part, lacks the imagination to press his case--his sexual desires--in any terms other than the rituals of his people. When that fails, he is finished, and in despair.

The movie is not the heartwarming story of how the girl and her brother are lost in the outback and survive because of the knowledge of the resourceful aborigine. It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film--more lost than before, because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world.

The film is deeply pessimistic. It suggests that we all develop specific skills and talents in response to our environment, but cannot easily function across a broader range. It is not that the girl cannot appreciate nature or that the boy cannot function outside his training. It is that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: That there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see.

Walkabout: Landscapes of Memory Criterion essay by Paul Ryan, May 18, 2010

Walkabout Criterion essay by Roger Ebert, May 5, 1998

WalkaboutNicolas Roeg The Criterion Collection

Walkabout • Senses of Cinema Justine Kelly, April 10, 2001

Nicholas Roeg films by Chuck Kleinhans - eJumpcut.org Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, by Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut, 1974

Walkabout Review | Two Against Nature - Pajiba Drew Morton

Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson

The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]

not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)

DVD Journal Joe Barlow

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)

Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]

DVD Verdict Sean McGinnis

DVDTown [John J. Puccio]

Walkabout Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Walkabout Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Tom Landy, Criterion Blu-Ray

Walkabout (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Adam Tyner, Criterion Blu-Ray

Walkabout | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Joseph Jon Lanthier, Criterion Blu-Ray

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1971

Walkabout Blu-ray Jenny Agutter - DVD Beaver

DON’T LOOK NOW A- 94

Great Britain Italy (110 mi) 1973

A film that thrives on what’s happening under the surface, a mood of disaffected emotions, a series of endless searches, missed connections, various mediums, overlapping dialogue that sometimes fades out altogether, and deteriorating ancient relics that need restoration that may as well stand for the declining morals and deteriorating importance of the Catholic Church. Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story from her book Not After Midnight, 1971, who interestingly wrote a letter to Roeg congratulating him on making such a strong adaptation of her story, this film was released in the same year as THE EXORCIST (1973), received some notoriety as an art film, for the sex scenes between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie who were offscreen lovers at the time, and remains downright gloomy to watch, with its icy disconnected emotions captured in the back alleys and canals and dark shadows under the bridges of Venice during winter. The surface detail shot by Anthony Richmond as well as the director, also the over-the-top musical score by Pino Donnagio accentuates the unsettled psychological mood that only grows more macabre by the film’s end.

Nicolas Roeg trained for twenty-three years in the British Film Industry before getting a shot as a director, starting out as an editing apprentice and camera operator for twelve years before getting the chance to work under infamous British director David Lean on the second unit photography for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), eventually becoming the lead cinematographer on Roger Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964), François Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger’s FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester’s PETULIA (1968), before co-directing his first film at age 42, the legendary PERFORMANCE (1970) starring Mick Jagger in his film debut, amusingly voted best performance by a musician in a film by Film Comment in the September/October 2009 edition. Roeg brought his own camerawork into WALKABOUT (1971), his first solo effort, a uniquely visualized, magnificently beautiful film. Roeg’s films characteristically are beautifully filmed, where each shot displays a mastery of composition, framing, focus, and color qualities, breaking free from conventional film narration, exhibiting an experimental use of editing, creating an impressionistic film mosaic told out of time, challenging the viewer to understand the work as a whole, even as the fragmented parts may be puzzling to comprehend, heavily influencing modern era directors such as Christopher Nolan, François Ozon, Danny Boyle, and Steven Soderbergh.

Innocently enough, the film begins with raindrops on a lake, showing the reflection of Christine (Sharon Williams), a little girl wearing a bright red raincoat playing around the water’s edge on a giant estate while her parents, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie), sit in the warm comfort of their home oblivious to what’s happening outside, until suddenly and unexpectedly John races outside without any warning and discovers Christine’s body too late, as she has already drowned. The scene shifts to Venice where the couple hopes a change of scenery will lift their grief-stricken spirits, where John is working on restoring a church, to the complete indifference of the Bishop. Venice with its waterways is certainly an interesting choice to recover from the shock of a drowning, where it’s used as a location of eroticism and violence, while another is Sutherland’s impeccable unsubtitled Italian, which is prominently featured throughout, a subtle yet effective device to keep the audience in the dark. Adding to this curious mixture, Laura meets two inseparable sisters, one of whom is a blind psychic that communicates with the dead, claiming their child is trying to contact them and warn them of imminent danger, a complete stranger accurately describing her daughter’s physical appearance, which sends Laura in a swoon.

John thinks these women with their séances are a bit daft and refuses to take them seriously, even after they are issued a warning that something terrible is about to happen to them, while simultaneously there are reports of recent serial killings in Venice, which doesn’t stop them from having a passionate sexual experience, a curious mingling of sex and violence. The psychic mentions that John is a seer himself, though he may not yet understand his gift. A call in the middle of the morning conveys the news that their son has had an accident in his school in England. Laura takes the first flight back to England, but later that same morning, John sees her with the two sisters in a barge on the canals in what appears to be a funeral procession, but can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from her. With news of a serial killer on the loose and his wife missing, he makes a police report implicating the sisters. But just as baffling, he later receives a call from his wife in England reporting that their son is fine, which leaves John in a state of flux, as he could have sworn what he saw was real, yet what he mistakenly thought was the present may have been a vision of the future, a premonition of events yet to come, opening the floodgates for strange and mysterious occurrences that resemble the occult.

From that point on, things appear out of a different supernatural dimension, where red deliriously begins to overwhelm the color palette, as John catches glimpses of a young child running around wearing his daughter’s red raincoat. He politely walks the blind seer home from the police station where she was being interrogated, at John’s request, inexplicably abandoned by her other sister, setting in motion an investigation of an event that apparently never took place. When the seer gets agitated, telling John he must leave Venice immediately, John leaves, but the psychic screams for him to come back as he disappears into the shadows outdoors, out of which Laura appears instead. John catches a glimpse of the red raincoat, believing now this is the ghost of his missing child, and follows the trail up and down the dark walkways which remain otherwise eerily empty. Oddly resembling a hallucination dream sequence drenched in a wafting fog, the murky atmosphere matches the deteriorating stability of John’s state of mind. What happens next is shocking, one of cinema’s most terrifying climaxes, like the increasing waves of dread and anxiety in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), suddenly reaching a level of surreal visual hysteria that predates David Lynch, ending the film with a “life flashing before your eyes” sequence, as the brilliantly edited, disconnected pieces finally start to make sense in this collapsing world of psychological terror.

Steven Jay Schneider from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOUR DIE:

Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now showcases the British director’s characteristically nonlinear style of storytelling, in which temporal ellipses and frenetic crosscuts serve to reflect and enhance the already palpable atmosphere of psychological disturbance and dread.

Shortly after their young daughter dies in a drowning accident, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) travel to Venice in the off-season to work on an old church and recover from their traumatic loss. Instead what they find is a creepy city filled with lonely canals and eccentric characters, including a pair of strange old sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania), one of them a blind psychic who insists that she can communicate with their late child and warns them of impending danger. John is initially skeptical but starts to come around after catching random glimpses of his daughter darting through the streets wearing the same red raincoat she had on when she died.

In the film’s unforgettable conclusion, John races through the Venice alleys at night in pursuit of the mysterious red-garbed figure – who he now believes is the ghost of his deceased child – only to catch up with her in a dark passageway, her back toward him. The figure then turns around, revealing an ambiguously gendered dwarf, and John can only stand there stunned as the little person (who is quite real, and quite deadly, having been on a killing spree in the city for some time) walks up to him and slashes his throat with a straight razor. It is no exaggeration to say that few scenes in the history of cinema have proven as effective at sending chills up the spines of viewers as this one.

But Don’t Look Now’s terrifying finale is not even the best-known scene in the film. That honor goes to the lengthy sex scene between John and Laura, mixed with quiet shots of the married couple impassively dressing for dinner. Rumor spread that the remarkable passion on display between this lovemaking session resulted from an off-screen affair between Christie and Sutherland. Whatever the case, it is this same passion that suffuses the entire picture.

Don't Look Now Tom Milne from Time Out London

A superbly chilling essay in the supernatural, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's short story about a couple, shattered by the death of their small daughter, who go to Venice to forget. There, amid the hostile silences of an off-season resort, they are approached by a blind woman with a message of warning from the dead child; and half- hoping, half-resisting, they are sucked into a terrifying vortex of time where disaster may be foretold but not forestalled. Conceived in Roeg's usual imagistic style and predicated upon a series of ominous associations (water, darkness, red, shattering glass), it's hypnotically brilliant as it works remorselessly toward a sense of dislocation in time; an undermining of all the senses, in fact, perfectly exemplified by Sutherland's marvellous Hitchcockian walk through a dark alley where a banging shutter, a hoarse cry, a light extinguished at a window, all recur as in a dream, escalating into terror the second time round because a hint of something seen, a mere shadow, may have been the dead child.

Don't Look Now | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were offscreen lovers at the time, the film's infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film. Easily the most successful film adaptation of a Daphne Du Maurier story (sorry Hitch!), Don't Look Now is both a chilling horror film and a fascinating portrait of grief. The film's remarkable dreamlike textures evoke a present constantly slipping into memory. Laura Baxter (Christie) and her husband John (Sutherland) are the parents of a young girl who dies by drowning. Spilling water, a breaking glass, a book ("Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space") and a bleeding picture portends the girl's death while hinting at John's connection to the world of the dead. In a labyrinthine Venice, John and his wife follow different paths of worship: he helps to rebuild crumbling churches while she ponders the death of their daughter. Roeg's allusions to sightlessness and his fascination with mirrors and cavernous alleyways evoke a world that is not necessarily disconnected from the afterlife as much as it is unwilling to acknowledge the power of dreams and memory. A lesser writer or director would have cast the woman in the weaker role. As the grieving John, Sutherland spends the entirety of the film looking out at a disintegrating world that demanding his emotional involvement. Tragically, even in death he remains disconnected.

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young)

The plot, based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story, is simple enough. A young girl accidentally drowns; her parents (Christie, Sutherland) escape to Venice. While he loses himself in his work restoring an old church, she falls in with a pair of elderly sisters (Matania, Mason), one of whom claims to be psychic and able to ‘see’ the dead child. Meanwhile, a psychotic killer is on the loose loose among the shadowy canals…

Fairly basic thriller material, but in Roeg’s hands Don’t Look Now becomes a dazzling puzzle of a movie in which the viewer, like the characters, is constantly being forced to re-examine what we’ve seen, or, more accurately, what we think we’ve seen. The movie is as much composed as directed, building up a technically astonishing network of intricate visual rhymes and musical themes. But the film isn’t just an intellectual exercise in story-telling, it’s also a tremendously powerful emotional experience.

The legendary love scene (and it’s a love scene, not a sex scene) between Christie and Sutherland is still among the most beautiful and sensuous sequences in cinema, but it’s surpassed by the devastating closing montage in which all the movie’s shattered fragments finally fall into place. Roeg’s done some fine work over the years, but he’s never matched this stunning masterpiece. Come to think of it – who has?

Burden of Dreams - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Amy Taubin from the Village Voice, October 20, 1998 (excerpt)

Time has tamed some of the terror and eroticism of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, but it's still a haunting thriller about guilt and the supernatural. What's notable (more notable even than the much celebrated bedroom scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in which sex is displaced into memory even as it's taking place) is that Roeg's use of the death of a child as the focus of a horror film never feels exploitative.

But 25 years after its release, Roeg's most precisely constructed film seems a bit weighed down by its predictable narrative. Its scariest moments—the glimpse of that small, red-coated figure disappearing into a doorway, or the soft sound of its sobbing before the final confrontation—are more powerful remembered than when they appear on screen. That said, the new print is gorgeous, and Christie and Sutherland, as the parents of the child who dies by drowning, actually convince you that they've been married for years and that their loss is slowly driving them crazy, albeit in different ways.

Roeg maps Sutherland's disintegrating psyche onto the city of Venice, with its labyrinthian alleys, murky canals, and crumbling facades. It's as perfect a setting for contemporary Gothic horror as the swimming pools of Hollywood are for the science fiction of Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth.

User reviews from imdb Author: LukeS from London, England

People want and expect different things from movies. What engages and captivates one person can just as easily displease and repulse another (see Titanic). Sometimes, a film simply doesn't register beyond the viewer's walk/drive home (this criminal offense is not exclusively a phenomenon of the 1990s in spite of the last decade's distinct dearth of memorable films). Don't Look Now, however, is a film which cannot fail to last long in the mind.

It is easy to love the film for its rare depth of character, its beautiful yet disturbing plot, the stunning Venice setting, the tender and original love scene or just for Donald Sutherland's never-rivalled wig! I am sure, however, that people find it easy to fault the film because it doesn't neatly tie up loose ends, because it is dark and depressing (the film's extensive reach encompasses death, loss, murder, blindness, religion and dwarfism) and because film-making conventions are abandoned.

The source material of Du Maurier's short story provides only a meagre framework onto which screenwriters Scott and Bryant have fleshed a stunning adaptation. Roeg's visual and emotional style of directing has never been so perfectly showcased as in Don't Look Now. How many more times can film-makers and advertisers steal (or "pay homage to") Roeg's ingenious work? Julie Christie is luminous and pulls the viewer with her through Laura's painful journey after the film's shocking opening. Sutherland's performance is stellar as well. His character, John, is like a Hitchcockian fall-guy with real personality and depth. You are swept along through the canals and narrow avenues with him as Pino Donaggio's stirring music both chills and lulls.

Films made in the tone of Don't Look Now are so rare these days. I am not an old fuddy-duddy who complains that "they don't make 'em like they used to" but am simply a slightly disillusioned film fan who wishes there were just a few more film-makers willing to take chances and not follow the dull formulaic line. What was the last film that stayed with you long after you saw it? It always sounds like a cliche when some obsessed fan tells you a film haunted them for days but Don't Look Now has a curious effect on the viewer. Its intensity grows. Different parts of the film mull around in your mind. You don't think about individual 'scenes' from the film either, you think about the situations, the people, the feelings. All of which is testament to the roundly drawn characterisation and elegant (yet not contrived) structure of the film.

If you haven't seen Don't Look Now before then you have a treat awaiting you. If you have seen it - see it again and marvel at a profound, eery, haunting, moving and beautiful film. If it disappoints you that films of such indelible and recurring substance like this are thin on the ground (Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver and The Conversation had similar effects on me) then do not hesitate to picket the next showing of....

BFI Screen Online Mike Sutton, also: Show full synopsis

Don't Look Now (d. Nicolas Roeg, 1973) is a beautifully restrained horror film. Superficially calm, it is underpinned by a constant sense of foreboding which erupts into bloody horror only at the climax. It is a love story with only one love scene and a study of grief during which nobody cries. This sense of restraint makes the film characteristic of the same peculiar 'Englishness' which informs films as different as Brief Encounter (d. David Lean, 1945) and The Innocents (d. Jack Clayton, 1961).

Often remembered solely for its final bloody confrontation, it is Roeg's careful pacing and the dread of what will happen next which make the film genuinely frightening. Beginning with every parents' nightmare, the tragic death of a child, the film builds towards a climax which is inevitable from its first moments. John's second sight is reflected in Roeg's characteristic use of fast cutting, which brings disparate images together in a suddenly meaningful fashion and which plays with past, present and future to disorientate the viewer, just as John is disorientated by his visions.

The film is also deeply moving, examining how grief can overpower the emotions. Christine's death casts a shadow over the relationship of her parents as it does over the entire film, and the different responses of John and Laura suggest the ways in which people try to overcome the loss of a loved one. Equally, the film is cautiously optimistic in its portrayal of how intense love can transcend death. The brilliantly edited love scene, contrasting tender physical union with the banality of dressing for dinner, is vital to this aspect of the film.

Donald Sutherland is entirely believable as John, the sceptic forced to become a believer during his final moments of life, and his performance is matched by that of Julie Christie. The script, largely faithful to Daphne du Maurier's original story, allows time for sardonic asides from Massimo Serato's ambivalent Bishop and memorable hysteria from Hilary Mason as Heather.

Venice appears as a character in itself, caught in faded off-season grandeur and turned into a labyrinth of dead-ends and winding back alleys. The use of colour is especially notable, with all but red being muted, and icy blues and greys becoming prominent as John's search becomes more frustrating. Pino Donaggio's lush score captures the film's poignant tone with the florid romanticism of his later collaborations with Brian De Palma.

Don't Look Now | donald sutherland | give me back my son/daughter ... Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus, also seen here: Deep-focus.com

Seen from the uncompromising vantage of a quarter-century's passage of time, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now is showing its age. The injudicious use of the zoom lens, impressionistic editing techniques, and an ill-advised sound mix featuring mainly Donald Sutherland's moaning all contribute to a film that feels very much of its era.

That was quite an era, however. Hollywood was cranking out honest-to-God masterpieces, or at least near masterpieces, on a regular basis, and aesthetes like Roeg (whose previous Walkabout is a similarly dreamlike evocation of time and place) were getting Hollywood-funded distribution for their unconventional imaginings of the metaphysical world. As you're viewing it, Don't Look Now feels disconcertingly slight -- incomprehensible, even. It's a slow-moving film with a spare, foreboding style and the sense that a shadow hangs over every scene. The film editing, famously, demonstrates the relation between seemingly disconnected occurrences, and the baffling climax only reinforces the inscrutable atmosphere. Take that, Dario Argento!

What makes Don't Look Now stick with you is the potent undertow, the sense of guilt and despair that suffuses the Venice locations and plasters itself across Sutherland's scowling face. The film begins with an ending, the death of a child. The little girl, who wears a shiny, red, hooded coat, frolics near a pond while her father (Sutherland) pores over slide photographs and Polaroids of a church and her mother (Julie Christie) tends to other business. The father spills something across one of his photographs, and as he's cleaning the mess is shocked by a premonition that something has gone wrong. He dashes through the house and into the backyard, only to slog into the water and pull the lifeless body of his dead little girl from the much. (Later, his wife rebukes him gently for permitting the girl to play near the water.)

This sequence is, for my money, among the more extraordinary and unforgettable in the history of film, demonstrating a faith in cinematic grammar and a willingness to venture into the realm of the purely visual. The girl wears a red coat; after Sutherland spills his drink across his photographs, the ensuing chemical reaction draws a fat red arc across the background of a church's stained-glass window; and finally, as Sutherland staggers out of the water, the shape of the corpse he cradles in his arms traces the same red arc in the center of the film image. In keeping with the themes of premonition and inexplicable vision, the rest of the film is dotted with purely abstract references to the same horrible event — a candle or fireplace glows red in the middle of the screen, a blind psychic wears a red sweater. The scarf that Sutherland drapes over his coat has reddish stripes — is that the burden of a child's death that he carries on his shoulders?

Beyond that, the film's highly developed style of montage draws explicit associations between unconnected actions. As Christie brings her hand to her mouth, Roeg inserts a shot of the daughter giggling, fingers touching lips, then cuts to Christie putting her hand down again. As the girl drops a ball into the water, Christie catches a ball tossed at her by Sutherland. Through this editorial style, Roeg manages to compress time and space. At one point, Christie sits with two other women in a room deep inside a house as Sutherland stumbles through the door to the front room. The women cannot see him, but as their heads turn, Roeg cuts immediately to Sutherland in the other room. In the narrative world of the film, the characters are not together, but in the interior world that the film creates, they do share the same space.

Even more celebrated is the sex scene that comes a half-hour into the film, as Sutherland and Christie undress and roll around on the bed, touching one another in the way that a real couple might. First, we see Christie sitting naked in the bath, and then watch a naked Sutherland brush his teeth and sit nude at a drafting table. The ensuing lovemaking is surprising in its fair degree of frankness — you wouldn't necessarily expect Sutherland and Christie to get naked in a film — but what makes it unique in the history of love scenes is the way Roeg chooses to envision it. Bits of clothing sliding off of bodies are intercut with the couple getting dressed again to go out for dinner. As Sutherland rolls Christie around on top of him, the fleshy sexual image gives way unexpectedly to pictures of him finishing dressing and waiting in the bedroom as she applies her makeup in the bathroom. He appears at least tranquil, but she seems almost joyously happy. At any rate, their solitary domesticity is an intriguing and unavoidable counterpoint to sexual coupling. And just like that, Roeg's dark fable is inhabited by real people whose state of mind we feel we have become intimately familiar with.

The sequence also underscores the way in which nudity and sex in films has generally moved over the past 25 years from the realm of the erotic into that of the merely prurient. Roeg demonstrates that putting nudity in film is easy, eroticism quite a bit harder, and that imparting actual meaning during the sex act is the duty of a poet.

The rest of the narrative concerns Sutherland's work at restoring a church in Venice, and the constant reminders of his daughter's fate. A sightless woman claims to have spied the girl sitting with them; she wears a crescent moon brooch that once again traces the cruel arc of the girl's raincoated body in her father's arms. And Sutherland begins to see a small, red-coated figure in the shadows of Venice, darting around corners and remaining just out of clear sight. Savvy viewers may figure out where all this is going before the conclusion. Better to approach the film as a mood piece, confident in the relevance of the supernatural and the logic of dreams. Finally, most resonantly, Don't Look Now is simultaneously a paean to ordinary love and a haunting rumination on loss and guilt.

Don’t Look Now: Seeing Red Criterion essay by David Thompson, February 12, 2015

Criterion Designs: Don’t Look Now by Fred Davis Criterion essay by Eric Skillman, April 09, 2015

Don't Look Now (1973) - The Criterion Collection

Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' is a special kind of a supernatural ... Cinephilia & Beyond

Don't Look Now | Film at The Digital Fix Mike Sutton

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]

'Don't Look Now!' Misdirecting Direction in Roeg and Du ... Academic paper (9 pages) by Prudence Caric (pdf format)

Nicholas Roeg films by Chuck Kleinhans - eJumpcut.org Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, by Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut, 1974

Nicolas Roeg | Tony McKibbin Fragile Geometries, essay on Roeg (Undated)

Deep Focus Review - The Definitives - Don't Look Now (1973 Brian Eggert

Don't Look Now (1973) | The Film Spectrum Jason Fraley

Antagony & Ecstasy Tim Brayton, November 9, 2008

Don't Look Now (1973) - Greatest Films Tim Dirks

Don't Look Now - Pajiba Ranylt Richildis from Pajiba

REVIEW – Don't Look Now (1973) | Ruthless Culture Jonathan McCalmont

The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] December 20, 1973 (pdf format)

Venetian Blind: Don't Look Now | Electric Sheep John Bleasdale

kamera.co.uk - film review - Don't Look Now directed by Nicolas ... Sameer Padania

Leaving it to Chance: Maverick Director Nicolas Roeg ... - The Quietus Colm McAuliffe, June 27, 2011

Warwick blogs Jon Ware comparing the film to DONNIE DARKO, February 13, 2009

Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For [Ken Anderson]

HorrorDigital.com [Rhett Miller]

0-5 Star Reviews Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley] also seen here: Don't Look Now (1973); Dir. Nicolas Roeg | The Sheila ...

Disturbing Movies - Bright Lights Film Journal Disturbing Movies: or the Flip Side of the Real, Robert Castle, April 30, 2004

Don't Look Now (1973) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon, also seen here: Damian Cannon

Edward Copeland on Film (Squish)

Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web

Random Movie Club Rich

the most famous thing about it Donald Sutherland's Buttocks or Sex In Movies for People Who Have Sex, by Jonathan Lethem

The Terror Trap Dan Hunter and Jason Knowles

Don't Look Now: “Did You Really See Her?” | Spectacular ... Spectacular Attractions

Not Just Movies: Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) Jake Cole from Not Just Movies

Oh, the Horror! [Brett Gallman]

DVD Journal Dawn Taylor

Don't Look Now : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video D.K. Holm

Don't Look Now + The Man Who Fell To Earth - film reviews ... Gary Couzens from The Zone

Don't Look Now James Kendrick from Q Network Film Desk

Rich Rosell - digitallyOBSESSED!

DVD Verdict Michael Stailey

DON'T LOOK NOW movie review Nick Kaufmann from Feomante’s reviews

DVD.net : Don't Look Now - DVD [Region 4], Anthony Clarke

Digital Retribution Trist Jones, 30^th Anniversary Edition

Urban Cinefile DON'T LOOK NOW: DVD (30th anniversary) Keith Lofthouse

Not Just Movies: Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) Mike Sutton from The Digital Fix, Blu-Ray

Don't Look Now Blu-ray review | Cine Outsider Camus from Cine-Outsider

Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

AVForums (Blu-ray) [Cas Harlow]

Horrorview.com Black Gloves, Blu-Ray

Film 365 [David Beckett] Blu-Ray

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon] Blu-Ray

Don't Look Now Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Don't Look Now Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest David Krauss, Criterion Blu-Ray

Don't Look Now | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Bowen, Criterion Blu-Ray

'Don't Look Now' (Criterion Collection) Blu-ray Review - ComingSoon.net Brad Brevet, Criterion Blu-Ray

EyeForFilm.co.uk [James Benefield]

Don't Look Now (1973) by Nicolas Roeg - Unsung Films Theo Alexander, also seen here: Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]

Horror Gems: Don't Look Now (1973) dir. Nicholas Roeg ... David Zou

Mondo Digital

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now--Write-Off - Don't Look Now ... Mike Bracken from Epinions

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Lang]

Final Girl Stacie Ponder

Empire's EMPIRE ESSAY: Don't Look Now Movie Review Simon Braund

Empire's Don't Look Now Movie Review Adam Smith

eFilmCritic Reviews M.P. Bartley

366 Weird Movies G. Smalley

Don't Look Now | 1971 - British Horror Films Chris Wood

Don't Look Now (1973) Britmovie

Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell

TV Guide Online: Don't Look Now

Movie Locations film locations

His brilliant career Jason Wood interview from The Guardian, June 2, 2005

On the money Carole Cadwalladr interviews Donald Sutherland from The Observer, March 29, 2008

Ben Wheatley on Don't Look Now: 'I felt a great panic come over me' Ben Wheatley from The Guardian, August 28, 2013

Film 4.com [Ali Catterall]

San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]

BBCi - Films David Wood

Don't Look Now: Reading the film Sam Jordison from The Guardian, October 27, 2011

Reading Group webchat: Justine Picardie on Daphne du Maurier Transcript of Sam Jordison online interview with Justine Picardie, author of Daphne, from The Guardian, October 20, 2011

Don't Look Now: The 'middlebrow' question How far does Du Maurier's work rise above the limitations of effective genre writing? And does it matter if it's only entertainment? Sam Jordison from The Guardian, October 14, 2011

• Danny Leigh on the sex scene in Don't Look Now Danny Leigh from The Guardian, March 4, 2011

Don't Look Now and Roeg's red coat Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, January 18, 2011

Don't Look Now: No 3 best horror film of all time Anne Bilson from The Guardian, October 21, 2010

Sex had to be on the menu Nicolas Roeg from The Observer, February 2, 2008

The sexual power and terror that produced a classic Sean O'Hagan and Philip French from The Observer, April 8, 2006

• Philip French on Don't Look Now Philip French from The Observer, March 25, 2001

Laramie Movie Scope: Don't Look Now Patrick Ivers

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] December 20, 1973

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] [Great Movies] October 13, 2002

New York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen here: Movie Review - Don t Look Now - The New York Times

New York Magazine [Judith Crist]

DVDBeaver - Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]

Don't Look Now - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH A 96

Great Britain (139 mi) 1976 ‘Scope

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Breughel, 1558, Full resolution‎

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

—W.H. Auden from Musée Des Beaux Arts, December 1938

Adapted from a sci-fi novel by Walter Tevis, who just a few years earlier enjoyed success with his 1959 book The Hustler, which featured the iconic movie performances of Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason, which at its core embraces ultra realism, identifying with the alienation of a character who feels continually out of place, as if his life has been one wrong turn after another, while this 1964 novel exhibits a similar theme of perpetual alienation yet with a substantially different style, one that may refer to but does not accentuate the imaginings of space ships or life in outer space or other typical science fiction devices, choosing instead to examine the world as it existed at the time the story was written, but visualized more clearly through the eyes of a space visitor. This is one of Nicolas Roeg’s most ambitious and more notable films as it perhaps best represents his working style and imagination, free from commercial interference, as there were fewer economic restrictions and more artistic freedom exhibited in films during the 70’s than exist today, especially sexual freedom, most likely due to the influx of foreign films of the late 60’s that featured nudity on American movie screens. Perhaps most unusual is the highly complex sound design, a distinguished feature of WALKABOUT (1971), which becomes beautifully connected to the alien’s inner thoughts, where the carefully chosen music or use of film clips are brilliantly interwoven into the themes of the film. The film is not overtly political, yet raises pertinent questions about the trappings of capitalism, which allows one nation to hoard the world’s resources while indulging in unabated and excessive consumption. The depiction of government is excessively bleak, as it is portrayed as a secret underground operation, an unseen force that does its dirty work outside the parameters of public viewing, obsessed with protecting itself, even at the expense of public interest, as it can’t take the chance that things might turn out differently than what has been planned for and anticipated. There’s an interesting parallel to the mafia, suggesting they are not like the mafia, as they are depicted as ordinary human beings who strive to raise their children like everyone else, supposedly a universal ideal, yet they carry out their enforcement business in much the same way, as they don’t allow for competing or alternative views, and take whatever action is necessary to guarantee their way prevails.

The androgynous David Bowie plays the space visitor Thomas Newton who mysteriously lands on earth during the opening credits, carrying with him a collection of gold rings which he uses for start up money before contacting Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), a patent lawyer, offering him highly advanced scientific ideas that don’t exist on earth yet, such as self developing film, eventually building a corporate empire together that makes him one of the richest men on earth. His initial contact with the human race is a befuddling experience, as he haggles with a woman who could easily be one of the oldest humans on earth, where throughout the film his impressions of the world around him and the people in it keep changing, initially brimming with optimism and hope, beaming with youthful idealizations, eventually becoming more cynical and cryptic, as the world is not what it seems. From a distance, earth is viewed as the water planet, as Newton’s own planet has nearly depleted its water supply, so Newton has left his wife and two children in search of bringing water back to his planet. This isn’t known initially and is seen in an extremely eloquent dreamlike sequence to the haunting music from The Fantastiks, “Try to Remember.” The incomparable Candy Clark, Toad’s (Charles Martin Smith’s) girlfriend in AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), who at the time was the director’s girlfriend, plays earthling Mary Lou (also Newton’s wife in his recurring planet reveries), the first to befriend Newton, using a motherly approach as he seems weak and fragile after his ordeal, keeping an eye on him, nursing him back to health, offering herself, her rambling conversation and her love of gin as his evening’s amusement, but he’s more obsessed with drinking water. When she realizes he has corporate idealizations, she’s literally swept off her feet, as she’s a small town girl from New Mexico who’s seen the good side of life pass her by, so she latches onto him, continually keeping him company, even as she discovers he already has a family living elsewhere. His continual longing for this faraway family adds a streak of pathos and sadness, where drinking alcohol seems to accentuate these visions of home, but Mary Lou is always seen at his side, building a home on the side of a lake which has a sense of peace and tranquility.

Newton also hires none other than Rip Torn as scientist Nathan Bryce, initially seen as the exact opposite kind of man as Newton, a wild, animalistic and lustful man with a taste for young teenage students when he was a professor at college. When he hires Bryce to secretly begin work building a space ship, Bryce grows suspicious and wonders what lurks behind the mask of his strange new employer. Bryce’s suspicions alert Newton to the kinds of human scrutiny he will eventually be subjected to, yet the full force of it is beyond even his highly evolved imagination. The actual moment that Newton plans to exit the planet in his newly built space ship is seen in newsreel television style, filled with all the pandemonium an event like that would attract, with the entire world watching, where his identity has been kept as secret as possible, but begins to unravel at the moment of truth when after being betrayed by his own friends the government prevents him from taking off, literally kidnapping him, whisking him away in secret seclusion and plying him with plenty of alcohol to wile his troubles away, where at this point time seems to stop. Everyone else ages and seems to forget Newton and his brazen ambitions, which have all been forgotten as if it was some kind of hoax perpetuated on the public, like some kind of stunt. Newton however looks the same, never aging, but becomes consumed in alcoholism and despair, keeping his millions, yet having nowhere on earth, or outer space, where he can go, literally imprisoned for what appears to be decades. In a nod to Kubrick’s deplorable corrective, criminal deprogramming therapy from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), or the malicious totalitarian control exhibited in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975) where individualism or free will is literally lobotomized in the interest of the State, scientists, in the name of advancing the public good, stick him and prod him like some kind of guinea pig, supposedly trying to get at the origin or source of just who and what he is, while actually performing some of the more dastardly and dehumanizing tests imaginable, showing little regard for the patient’s well being, continually probing him, all in the name of science. In the book, they accidentally cause him to go blind, though the movie version is not quite as bleak, as instead it is his spirit and his will to live that is broken, where he is eventually released silently without a word, no longer of interest to the State, the public welfare, or even himself, just another broken heap tossed aside and left on the side of the road where he will no longer constitute a threat to society, a humbled man forever exiled from his world.

Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [5/5]

Roeg's hugely ambitious and imaginative film transforms a straightforward science fiction story (novel, Walter Tevis) into a rich kaleidoscope of contemporary America. Newton (Bowie), an alien whose understanding of the world comes from monitoring TV stations, arrives on earth, builds the largest corporate empire in the States to further his mission, but becomes increasingly frustrated by human emotions. What follows is as much a love story as sci-fi: like other films of Roeg's, this explores private and public behaviour. Newton/Bowie becomes involved in an almost pulp-like romance with Candy Clark, played out to the hits of middle America, that culminates with his 'fall' from innocence. Roeg, often using a dazzling technical skill, jettisons narrative in favour of thematic juxtapositions, working best when exploring the clichés of social and cultural ritual. Less successful is the 'explicit' sex Roeg now seems obliged to offer; but visually a treat throughout.

Man Who Fell To Earth, The (1976) Mike Sutton from Screen Online Show full synopsis

Nicolas Roeg's first film shot in America, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) is a complex, difficult film which is as much about the reactions of a foreigner to the country as it is a traditional narrative. Typically, Roeg takes a straightforward source - in this case, Walter Tevis' novel - and cuts it up to suit his favoured style, which proceeds through the non-linear connection of images and ideas.

As with Mick Jagger in Performance (d. Donald Cammell/Roeg, 1970), Roeg uses David Bowie as much for his stage persona as for his acting abilities, although Bowie gives a fresh, naturalistic performance. The qualities of aloofness, strangeness and sexual androgyny which Bowie projected in his stage persona are integral to the scheme of the film, which demands Newton to be both recognisably human yet entirely alien.

Assisted by a script from his recurring collaborator Paul Mayersberg, Roeg uses his typically dazzling editing style to mix past and present, deliberately disrupting a traditional sense of time passing. He also makes notable use of the recurring images of water and, memorably, of Newton sitting, drugged, in front of a wall of television sets, whose programmes often ironically counterpoint the storyline.

Underneath the surface, this is a hackneyed moral tale of purity corrupted by experience, but it is distinguished by its style and the extraordinary images concocted by Roeg and his cinematographer Anthony Richmond. America seems a rich and strange country, impossibly overwhelming. The deserts of New Mexico are a potent image of aridity, reflected in flashbacks to Newton's planet. However, the repetitive use of explicit sex, although often amusing, seems included more for commercial than artistic reasons.

In its examination of loneliness and lost love, this is Roeg's most moving film. Like Chas in Performance and John in Don't Look Now (d. Roeg, 1973), Newton is an outsider in an alien world, whose inability to understand his new environment seals his fate. His quest for water is destined to fail because, to the outsider, America is too much of a distraction, and human frailty seems to infect everything it touches.

Nicolas Roeg's epic story of an alien who loses his way on Earth is such an enormous, sprawling and complex piece of work that it's difficult to know where to begin. On the surface it's a simple tale, yet it has mythic overtones which reach far back through history and deep into our subconscious whilst remaining just as relevant to rock 'n' roll. It is a tale of cultural imperialism, of the innocent corrupted by the city, of the addict sacrificing his dreams, of the rock 'n' roll suicide. David Bowie is perfectly cast as its hero who, alien though he may be, comes to represent something completely human.

Arriving alone on our planet, Thomas Jerome Newton (the only name by which he is ever known) has only a string of gold rings, his wits, and his knowledge of technology far surpassing our own. From this he creates a business empire with one initially discreet aim - to carry water back to his homeworld and to the family he seems to have loved. Yet in the process of undertaking his quest, Mr Newton has discovered alcohol, Earth women, and all the temptations of power and luxury. He has changed in some ineffable way. His lover, Mary Lou, seems to think he has become less human, but the way he interacts with others would suggest the opposite. Though he will always be an outsider, he easily acquires human failings.

Falling under the romantic spell of his own failure, Mr Newton becomes gradually less distinct, and it is here that Roeg's film really starts to do something clever. As he loses his grip, he loses the quality of genius which has, more than anything, made people consider him alien. Suddenly his real nature and origins become less certain. Is he simply deluded? Can anyone tell anymore? There are shades here of Roeg's other great rock 'n' roll opus, Performance, yet here the violence is essentially internal. Questions are raised about the connections we make between genius and madness whilst exploiting both.

With its necessarily slow pace, The Man Who Fell To Earth may frustrate some viewers and seem inaccessible to others, though it is full of dazzling images and striking individual scenes which will grab your attention. In its time it fell foul of the censor with its aggressive sex and a sex act in which the heroine is so frightened she pisses herself; these seem mild today, yet they still serve to humanise the characters. Stunningly photographed throughout, this is a film which uses visual beauty as a metaphor for the seductiveness of a world which, though technologically behind, is culturally much too much for the simple morality of its protagonist. It will seduce you too, if you let it. It will haunt you regardless.

Electric Sheep Magazine [Jason Wood]

Following apprenticeships at various London film studios, Nicolas Roeg worked his way up to camera operator on, among others, Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) before gaining writing credits on Cliff Owen’s A Prize of Arms (1961) and Lawrence Huntington’s Death Drums along the River (1962). It was as a cinematographer that Roeg established his reputation as a distinctive cinematic visionary. Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1965) and Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) all in some way looked forward to Roeg’s own visually and thematically arresting work as director, where colour was used to symbolic effect to probe taboo subjects and linearity was eschewed in favour of complex time leaps and splintered narratives.

Beginning with Performance (1968, co-directed by Donald Cammell), a tale of identity crisis set amid London’s late 60s criminal underworld and taking in Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Roeg became the leading light of British film, establishing a run of films that remains unparalleled in contemporary cinema. Frequently focusing on characters cut adrift from their usual moral and physical surroundings, Roeg seemed unstoppable until first Bad Timing (1980) and then Eureka (1983) ran into problems with their uncomprehending distributors. The director found himself at odds with an industry increasingly resistant to his pioneering vision and tendency to shine a light on areas of the human psyche many would prefer left darkened.

Screened as part of the BFI Southbank’s recent Roeg retrospective, The Man Who Fell to Earth has arguably emerged as perhaps the director’s most characteristic and richly rewarding work. Adapted from the Walter Tevis novel by Paul Mayersberg (who would also script Eureka), it’s a film that takes pleasure in resisting categorisation, retaining the science fiction origins of its source material while heavily accentuating Tevis’s less overt allusions to capitalism, corporate power (the film remains the closest Roeg has come to any kind of political statement) and the alienating effects of contemporary American society. The first non-children’s film that I can ever actually remember seeing, it is a work that seemingly contains all the infinite possibilities of cinema (often in a single frame), and I return to it periodically for inspiration and stimulation. It is not and never has been universally loved. It was cautiously received at the time by critics, as so many of Roeg’s films were: Nigel Andrews, writing in The Financial Times, accused it of having ‘enough ideas for six different films; and far too many, in my opinion, for one’.

Initially favouring Peter O’Toole for the central role of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who comes to a fertile earth in order to save the inhabitants of his own dying planet, only to become marooned as a potent cocktail of sex (courtesy of Candy Clark), gin and television slowly take control, Roeg instead dipped once more into a pop star pool that had proved so effective with Mick Jagger and Performance. Roeg became convinced that David Bowie, the recent subject of a BBC Alan Yentob documentary charting a tour of America of equally irresistible and infinite temptation, was in fact his Newton. The financiers (the film was among the first ever British-financed movies to be made in the United States) failed to share the conviction, expressing their scepticism as to whether the singer could actually act. Roeg remained undaunted, exclaiming, ‘what do you think he’s doing when he gets up in front of 60,000 people to perform?’ Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.

Beginning with stock NASA footage of a space rocket leaving earth before cutting to a vessel – assumingly jettisoned from the rocket – crash-landing back to earth in a New Mexico lake, Roeg and Mayersberg frequently undercut the genre elements of their material (in fact they don’t seem especially interested in the novel at all) in favour of thematic juxtapositions and kaleidoscopic cross-cultural allusion. In one of the more overt, a randy college professor later seconded into Newton’s expanding business empire (the alien arrives on earth with a small stock of gold rings that he swaps for cash and with a number of futuristic product patents that will allow him to amass a fortune), Bryce (Rip Torn), is seen lingering over an image of Brueghel’s Icarus. The Man Who Fell to Earth also incorporates W.H. Auden’s contemplation of the Greek myth (‘the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’), emphasising Roeg’s interest in the notion of watching and being watched.

When Newton takes his first tentative steps on earth he is observed by an unknown spectator, who will again later appear at the alien’s bedside once he has undergone a series of painful and incapacitating medical examinations. Newton himself turns voyeur. Initially using television to learn about his new planet and humankind through the medium’s multiple images and signals, he fashions a wall of television screens to which he ultimately becomes addicted. Television helps fuel Newton’s increasing paranoia, with Roeg and Mayersberg suggesting that the modern technological age of observation and endless consumerism is corrosive. There are elements of this also perhaps in the film’s incredibly prescient presentation of an increasingly global America nostalgic for its past (the music of Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and the flashbacks to sequences involving early pioneers, glimpsed by a weary Newton from his limousine), yet enthralled to the point of obsession by the notion of its future. The Man Who Fell to Earth concludes with a shot of the crown of Newton’s head, an image similar to that of Turner in Performance just before Chas puts a bullet through it, revealing a man utterly broken and adrift, who has undergone the process of becoming human only to discover, to his cost and that of his homeland, what a wilfully destructive race we are.

The Man Who Fell to Earth: Loving the Alien Criterion essay by Graham Fuller, September 26, 2005, also here: Criterion Collection film essay [Graham Fuller]

The Man Who Fell to Earth Criterion essay by Robert Lloyd, March 11, 1993, also here: Criterion Collection film essay [Robert Lloyd]

PRESS NOTES: SEEING BLU December 11, 2008

The Criterion Collection Goes High Definition! December 15, 2008

Harvard Honors Seventies Sci-Fi June 18, 2010

Big-Screen Bowie October 13, 2010

Time Out with Nicolas Roeg March 11, 2011

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) - The Criterion Collection

Nicolas Roeg | Tony McKibbin Fragile Geometries, essay on Roeg (Undated)

The Man Who Fell to Earth: Criterion Edition | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens, Criterion Collection 2-disc

The Man Who Fell to Earth (Limited Collector's Edition) - The Digital Fix Clydefro Jones

Slant Magazine review Matt Noller

The Man Who Fell To Earth | finem respice Ep

The Man Who Fell to Earth (film): Facts, Discussion Forum, and ... Absolute Astronomy, comparing the film to the novel

Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw, Anchor Bay 2-disc

tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib

American Cinematographer dvd review Kenneth Sweeney, January 2006

The Man Who Fell to Earth - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Bernardo Rondeau

Horror View Red Velvet Kitchen

Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web

Digital Retribution Julian

The New York Sun (Gary Giddins) review

Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For [Ken Anderson] excellent photos

Looking back at Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth - Den of Geek Ryan Lambie, March 27, 2011

DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2-disc

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: The Man Who Fell to Earth JJB, Criterion Collection 2-disc

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Criterion Collection 2-disc

DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] 2-disc

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2-disc

Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection 2-disc, James Emanuel Shapiro

Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5] Criterion Collection 2-disc

DVD Town [Christopher Long] Criterion Collection, 2-disc Special Edition

Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Steven Cordova, Criterion Collection 2-disc

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2-disc, Colin Jacobson

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Anchor Bay 2-disc

Monsters At Play (Gregory S. Burkart) dvd review Anchor Bay 2-disc

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Anchor Bay 2-disc

Audio Revolution (Paul Lingas) Anchor Bay 2-disc

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson

KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Special Edition] [Anchor Bay Release]

Dreamwatch Total Sci Fi [Brian J. Robb] Special Edition,

DVD Outsider [Camus] Optimum Blu-Ray

The Man Who Fell To Earth - DVD review for VideoVista monthly web ... Andrew Darlington, Optimum Blu-Ray

Phil on Film [Philip Concannon] Optimum Blu-Ray

The Man Who Fell To Earth 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition Blu-ray Studio Canal

The Man Who Fell to Earth: Limited Collector's Edition Blu-ray Review ... Joshua Zyber, Lionsgate

The Man Who Fell to Earth Blu-ray: Limited Collector's Edition Jeffrey Kauffman, Lionsgate

The Man Who Fell To Earth / four-disc limited collector's edition blu-ray ... Lionsgate

DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review [Criterion Collection] Blu-Ray

DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Blue-Ray

DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Clark Douglas]

AVForums (Blu-ray) [Alan Paterson]

Film 365 (Blu-ray) David Beckett

Review of The Man Who Fell To Earth Blu-ray Ambrose Heron from FILMdetail

Blu-rayDefinition.com UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]

ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]

The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review

The Man Who Fell To Earth - Talking Pictures Carina Platt

Un-kvlt Site [Suresh S]

Darkmatters [Matt *cult classic* Adcock]

Screen Fever [Paul Gallagher]

filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]

Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Doc Ezra

Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Lang) review

The Man Who Fell to Earth Clarke Fountain from All-Movie Guide

Loving the Alien: Nic Roeg Interviewed Xavier Mendik interview from kamera.co.uk

Olly Blackburn meets Nic Roeg Nicholas Roeg interview from Time Out London, (2007)

Variety (Robert Hawkins) review

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason

Screens: Review - The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing - The ... Raoul Hernandez from The Austin Chronicle

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]

The New York Times (Richard Eder) review May 29, 1976, also seen here: 'Man Who Fell to Earth' Is Beautiful Science Fiction

The Man Who Fell to Earth Blu-ray David Bowie - DVD Beaver

The Man Who Fell to Earth (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Man Who Fell to Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (novel)

Heavenly Body Jay Cocks from Time magazine, June 14, 1976

'Man who Fell' baffling Leah Rozen from the Penn State Daily Collegian, October 1, 1976

Horselover Fat and The New Messiah - 1981 Interview with Philip K. Dick where he mentions his regard for this movie, from The Hartford Advocate, April 22, 1981 posted on Philip K. Dick fansite

The Man Who Fell to Earth Summary Jesse from Travelin-Tigers, November 17, 2000

The Man Who Fell to Earth Book Review Fran Cobrain from Shvoong, October 16, 2005

Review of "The Man Who Fell to Earth" with some Gnostic Attachment Lukas Devita from Red Ice Creations, September 23, 2006

The Man Who Fell To Earth Geoff Willmetts from SF Crowsnest, January 9, 2008

CCLaP: Movies for Grown-Ups: The Man Who Fell to Earth Jason Pettus from Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, January 31, 2008

Best-movie Oscar is film-office triumph on the use of New Mexico movie locations, from The New Mexican, March 3, 2008

100 sf: The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part I Jason from 100sf, August 16, 2008

100 sf: The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part II Jason from 100sf, September 22, 2008

"Fenton Lake State Park" location used for the film

Official website Walter Tevis website

2001 XM Radio TV commercial David Bowie movie spoof, on YouTube (30 seconds)

BBC - The Culture Show - The Man Who Fell to Earth Nicholas Roeg talks with Mark Kermode (1:17)

BAD TIMING: A SENSUAL OBSESSION

Great Britain (123 mi) 1980 ‘Scope

“…a sick film made by sick people for sick people…”
—an executive at Rank Films, which took its logo off UK prints of the film

Long Pauses [Darren Hughes] also seen here: Films of the '80s (part 1)

Amidst the formal fireworks on display here -- the mesmerizingly elliptical cutting, the fast zooms, the unexpected music cues -- what I found most shocking was Theresa Russell's performance, which gives life to a role that, on paper, is little more than a misogynist fantasy. But, damn, she's good. The image I captured above is from a scene on a bridge, where her reunion with Alex (Art Garfunkel) is spoiled by his pettiness, and her response is so natural and solicitous that, for a second or two, she breaks the movie. All of Roeg's machinations are undone by the sudden intrusion of uncalculated emotion.

Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)

Nicolas Roeg’s Cuisinart cutting strains to create the impression of meaning in this rather dishonest 1980 thriller about a Freudian psychiatrist’s destructive involvement with a mystery woman. Apparently the decision to jumble the time scheme was made after shooting was completed, which may explain the mysteriously misplaced emphases in the playing, yet the film’s real problem is Roeg’s willingness to sacrifice the logic of situation and character to facile shock effects. In his way he isn’t much different from the director of Friday the 13th.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

One of Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.

Bad Timing (1980) Mike Sutton from BFI Screen Online, also seen here: BFI Screen Online

Bad Timing (1980) is one of Nicolas Roeg's least seen films. The studio, Rank, hated it, publicly disowned it and briefly banned it from its own cinemas. This is particularly unfortunate, since it is a pivotal film in Roeg's career. The experiments in non-chronological storytelling that stretch back to Performance (co-d. Donald Cammell, 1970) blossom here in a film which is, on first viewing, difficult to follow, but is ultimately extraordinarily insightful and moving in its painfully close examination of a destructive love affair.

The film takes the form of a detective mystery, in which the crime is only revealed gradually, as Roeg painstakingly guides us through the tortured relationship between Alex (Art Garfunkel) and Milena (Theresa Russell), from the optimism of its beginnings to the brutality of its ending. As a result, the revelations at the end of the film seem not merely shocking but inevitable.

Abandoning chronology, Roeg jumps around, taking cues from objects, pieces of music, habitual gestures and various artworks, all of which link one moment in time to another. This makes the film a little disjointed at first, but also gives the relationship more of a sensory impact, as we go from highs to lows with little warning. The explicit sex, a Roeg commonplace since Performance, is interesting here for how un-erotic it is. There is a disgust throughout, about sex and about the human body, frequently distorted in mirrors, glass and paintings - the key moment being the intercutting of a bloody operation on Milena's throat with a particularly passionate sexual encounter.

Garfunkel and Russell, given almost impossible roles, are extremely impressive - despite problems which brought both of them to the point of walking off the film - and their relationship is entirely convincing. Harvey Keitel's Netusil has an intense self-righteousness which is unnerving, more priest than detective, and Denholm Elliott is unbearably moving in the small but vital role of Stefan.

The film marks the third collaboration between Roeg and Anthony Richmond, and the cinematography of Vienna is suitably cold and oppressive, which contrasts well with the brief excursion to Morocco. Tony Lawson's editing is exemplary, fracturing the narrative without rendering the film incoherent. Also noteworthy is the soundtrack, which mixes Pachelbel, The Who, Billie Holiday and, most memorably, Tom Waits, whose poignant 'Invitation To The Blues' sets the perfect tone.

Bad Timing: The Men Who Didn’t Know Something Criterion essay by Richard Combs, September 26, 2005

Time Out with Nicolas Roeg March 11, 2011

Bad Timing (1980) - The Criterion Collection

Nicolas Roeg | Tony McKibbin Fragile Geometries, essay on Roeg (Undated)

Bad Timing: Criterion Edition | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens, Criterion Collection

966 (108). Bad Timing (1980, Nicholas Roeg) Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures

Art Garfunkel acts for Nicolas Roeg, and the results are predictably ... David Ehrlich from The Onion A.V. Club

Electric Sheep Magazine Ben Cobb

Film Noir of the Week Ian W. Hill

Crushed by Inertia Lons

GOOD TIMING - Filmmaker Magazine - Fall 2005 Scott Macaulay

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Bad Timing Christopher Null from filmcritic

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Ian Jane] Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Rob Lineberger] Criterion Collection

digitallyObsessed [Nate Meyers] Criterion Collection

Bad Timing Blu-ray (United Kingdom) - Blu-ray.com Region 2

Bad Timing | Rotating Corpse superb photos

Mondo Digital also reviewing EUREKA

BoxOffice.com [Wade Major]

Fright Site Adam Groves

All Movie Guide [Michael Betzold]

NICOLAS ROEG INTERVIEWED; "BAD TIMING" Harlan Kennedy interview of Roeg from American Cinema, January/February 1980

Gerald Peary Interviews Nicolas Roeg The Real Paper, October 23, 1980

Channel 4 Film [Ali Catterall]

Nic Roeg's Bad Timing Nick Hasted from The Guardian, August 15, 2000

New York Times (J. Maslin) (registration req'd)

EUREKA

Great Britain USA (130 mi) 1983

Time Out Time Out London

The usual nervy Roeg cross-cutting has almost vanished in favour of a cleaner but just as distanced narrative, in two plain parts: a prospector (Hackman) in Canada in the '20s finally strikes it lucky, engulfed in a river of gold; and then the rest of his life, immured in his house ('Eureka') in the Bahamas and wondering what on earth there is left. While the weight of Roeg's success is usually stylistic, this is more of a harkback to the cosmic scale of The Man Who Fell to Earth, with enormous themes streaming through a strange tale. Alongside the bass-line of a man who 'once had it all, and now just owns everything', there are games of knowledge and power (voodoo, cabbalahs, magick), a devouring relationship with his daughter (Russell), and a nebulous running battle with business competitors who want their own share of the planet. The man who raped the earth and lost his demon is finally the victim of 'business interests' in the same way that Jagger was in Performance. It's a great, Kane-like notion - the price we pay for gaining what we want - and overflowing with awkward ideas and strange emotion.

Peter Reiher

There are a lot of directors who aren't particularly interested in plot. There are a few directors who don't really like plot. One or two directors seem to hate plot. Then there's Nicholas Roeg, who takes it one step further. He has such scorn for the whole idea of story that he invariably sets up a strong story early in his films and then purposefully neglects to finish it. Roeg refuses to buckle under to the Hollywood principle of primacy of plot, and his form of rebellion is much more forceful than never bothering with a story at all, at least in my book. Roeg rebels again in Eureka, and the studio meted out its usual punishment, by recutting the film and delaying its release. (I can't understand how he can keep getting studios to finance his films, but I'm glad they do. You can at least count on Roeg for something different than the usual stuff.)

Well, plot isn't everything. Roeg has always been much more interested in atmosphere, characters, and photography. His films usually reflect these preferences quite clearly. Walkabout, Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don't Look Now, and Bad Timing were all strong in these areas and deficient in plotting. Eureka is, too. But not, unfortunately, strong enough, or perhaps just too deficient. Roeg sets up a mystery, offers a potential solution (which all avid filmgoers know must give way to at least one plot twist), and then fails to resolve it. He did the same sort of thing in his previous films, but then he was able to make a virtue of ambiguity, while in Eureka it merely annoys.

Eureka is about a man named Jack McCann. We first see him struggling through the Yukon, one of the last of the goldseekers. It's 1925, and most of the gold has already been found. The boom towns are folding and everyone else is beginning to lose faith, but McCann is still obsessed by the rich gold strike he knows is waiting for him. Here the film makes a typically Roegian dip into the mystical. McCann finds a stone that is linked to his destiny, and then stumbles into a cave that seems to be filled with liquid gold. Instant riches.

The film jumps ahead twenty years. McCann is now the richest man in the world. He lives on an island in the Caribbean that he more or less owns. But is he happy? Need you ask? His wife is an alcoholic, his business associate is secretly making a deal with some Mafia types to build a casino on his island, and his beloved daughter has married a man he despises. He seems to have nothing to do with his life.

The film's plot twists and turns through any number of convolutions, some predictable, some not. Finally, we reach what is definitely an end, and we have a reasonable explanation for the major characters' motives, but Roeg regally declines to answer what were, for me, the two most interesting plot questions, one of which set the second half of the story in motion, the other a mystery that Roeg shrouded in enticing ambiguity, with the implied promise that all would be revealed in the end. These omissions are not accidental. Roeg clearly was never interested in the first, and tries to convince us that the second really wasn't important. He fails. Give Roeg points for trying, but ambiguous endings really flop if they don't work, and this one didn't work for me, or for a lot of other people, if reviews and the babble of exiting crowds mean anything. Some of the themes Roeg tries to address in Eureka are pretty clear, but there are others that never come into focus, particularly an ongoing dalliance with magic in various forms.

Whatever else one may say of Roeg's films, they are always visually stunning, and, again, Eureka is true to form. The discovery of the gold is thrilling, the other Arctic scenes starkly beautiful, the Caribbean scenes lushly beautiful, the interiors darkly beautiful, . . . well, you get the idea. Roeg was originally a cinematographer, and one of the best, and he knows how to shoot a scene. The screenwriter, Paul Meyersberg, doesn't deserve any praise for this effort; maybe Roeg forced him into it, but the script is maddeningly ambiguous and some of the dialog is very bad. Stanley Myers' score is excellent.

The cast is also superior. Gene Hackman gives a strong performance as Jack McCann. Hackman's performance is well shaded to provide just enough mystery to keep us guessing at McCann's motives, and yet so finely tuned that when we discover what makes McCann tick, we understand what was previously inexplicable. Theresa Russell, a Roeg favorite, is generally good as Hackman's daughter, though she has some weak moments in an overextended courtroom scene that Roeg stages in a surprisingly conventional way (with the exception of a single shot). Rutger Hauer, as her husband, succeeds in making us see why Hackman hates him and Russell loves him. Mickey Rourke is underutilized (and oddly cast) as a Mafia lawyer. Ed Lauter has the note of desperation necessary for Hackman's associate, but I can't picture anyone trusting someone so ratty looking in the first place.

Unless you're already a Roeg fan, or don't mind mysteries where they don't ever tell you whodunnit, you'll probably not like Eureka. I found it to be a fairly noble failure with some very interesting elements, but I have a great deal of patience with unusual films. If fuzziness and uncertainty makes you want to throw popcorn at the screen, don't go to this one. The film has been withheld for a year and a half, then cut to avoid an X rating (there are a couple particularly erotic sex scenes and some rather gruesome violence), but, even giving Roeg the benefit of the doubt about the lost material, I think that this film never worked.

Nicolas Roeg | Tony McKibbin Fragile Geometries, essay on Roeg (Undated)

The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]

Mondo Digital also reviewing BAD TIMING

User reviews from imdb Author: wilderfan from Australia

DVDBeaver.com [Rob Farmer]

INSIGNIFICANCE

Great Britain (110 mi) 1985

Insignificance Time Out London

1954. As Monroe, Einstein, DiMaggio and McCarthy, Roeg assembles an excellent cast of non-stars, confines them in anonymous hotel rooms, and lets them rip on all his favourite topics: life, love, fame, hate, jealousy, atomic firestorm and the whole damn thing. As usual with Roeg, the firmament is streaming with large ideas and awkward emotions, which grow larger and larger in significance, and most of which come together in a delightful scene when Marilyn (Russell) explains relativity to Einstein (Emil) with the aid of clockwork trains and balloons. Curtis is Senator McCarthy, still witch-hunting phantoms of his mind; Busey is the washed-up ballplayer, aching for Marilyn's return. It may be a chamber piece, but its circumference is vast.

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

This is a British metaphysical comedy with four fictional characters who bring to mind Albert Einstein, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, and Joe DiMaggio. Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) draws out the inner psychological nuances of the drama and delivers the philosophical freight in Terry Johnson's screenplay.

The Professor (Michael Emil) is in a Manhattan hotel working on "the shape of the universe" when a right-wing Senator (Tony Curtis) shows up and tries to convince him to cooperate with an investigation of Communists his committee has undertaken. The scientist declines: he will be busy giving a lecture at a World Peace Conference.

Shortly afterward, the Actress (Theresa Russell), a beautiful blonde, stops by the Professor's room and, using toys as props, demonstrates the theory of relativity to him. They share their exasperation over the burdens of being famous, and he refuses her offer of sex.

This long day's journey into night ends when the Ballplayer (Gary Busey) arrives to retrieve his sexy wife, and they get into a squabble in front of the Professor. The Actress can't deal with her demons, the Professor is hobbled by guilt over the bomb, and the Ballplayer realizes that his days of glory are over — along with his marriage.

Insignificance shines with some incandescent moments of acting bravado delivered by Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis, and Gary Busey. As a weird meditation on sex, power, knowledge, and fame, this is a four-star treat for those who savor exotic movie fare.

InsignificanceNicolas Roeg The Criterion Collection

The Elephant in the Room: INSIGNIFICANCE | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 10, 2016

Insignificance (1985) Review | CultureVulture Dan Schneider

PopMatters [Jose Solis]

Film-Forward.com Scott David Briggs

Insignificance · Dvd Review Insignificance · DVD Review · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias, Criterion

Insignificance Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atnasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Insignificance Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Steven Cohen, Criterion Blu-Ray

Insignificance | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Joseph Jon Lanthier, Criterion Blu-Ray

Insignificance - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the ... Jamie S. Rich, Criterion Blu-Ray, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Insignificance Glenn Erickson, Criterion Blu-Ray

Channel 4 Film [Ali Catterall]

'Insignificance': A Second Look - latimes Dennis Lim

Movie Review : 'Insignificance': A Night Of Icons - latimes Sheila Benson

Movie Review - Insignificance - SCREEN: 'INSIGNIFICANCE,' MYTHIC ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

Insignificance Blu-ray - Theresa Russell - DVD Beaver

CASTAWAY

Great Britain (117 mi) 1986

Castaway Time Out London

Given the material he began with - Lucy Irvine's rambling, disconnected, soapy saga of love turned sour in a Pacific paradise - Roeg has produced a remarkably straightforward narrative which, while encapsulating all his previous obsessions and themes (strangers in strange lands, love and hate and the whole damn thing), irons out all the wrinkles and time warps which were the hallmarks of his earlier works. In fact, what we get is surprisingly plain sailing through the Blue Lagoon. Gerald (Reed) is a beer-bellied mcp ('Give me a woman that can cook, sew and put up a tent') who advertises for an island soulmate and winds up with Lucy (Donohue), a frustrated London Inland Revenue clerk up for a voyage of self-discovery. Forced into a marriage of convenience, this ill-matched, ill-equipped couple rapidly becomes a non-item when the Tuin island paradise is reached - she refuses to put out, he refuses to put up the shelter, both refuse to face reality. In fact it's a lifetime of marriage - courtship, estrangement, understanding and separation - condensed into a single year. All of which makes for less than comfortable viewing, but real life rarely is, be it in Tuin or Tooting.

Nicolas Roeg directed this strikingly beautiful adventure loosely based on Lucy Irvine’s bestseller of her own experiences as a voluntary castaway. Roeg’s most accessible work features an assortment of lush visuals but is sadly letdown by an unimaginative script and over-emphasis on filming Donahoe from different angles in a state of undress.

Middle-aged divorcee and publisher Gerald Kingsland (Oliver Reed) advertises in Time Out magazine for a female companion to join him for a year on the desert island of Tuin in the tropics. He is responded to by bored London tax clerk Lucy Irvine (Amanda Donohoe). The first signs of trouble arise when the Queensland government decree that to stay on the Pacific island Gerald and Lucy must be married – which she reluctantly agrees to. On the island, Gerald and “Girl Friday” Lucy romp around au natural and an antagonistic relationship gradually develops.

They try not to get in each other’s way; whilst Gerald indolently lounges about, Lucy romps along the beach in the all-together, increasingly maddened at her fellow castaway’s slovenly attitude and unwanted sexual advances. Soon they realise paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and mutual dependence is the only recipe for survival when Gerald suffers a foot infection and Lucy begins to drastically lose weight. After a year of tension, turmoil and bliss, they go their separate ways.

Of all Nicholas Roeg's films, there is one that stands out very nicely and shows that you don't have to say and do something meaningful to make a film that is very good, and get the same things across.

CASTAWAY, is pretty much like that. A simple story, that in itself is meaningless, but as a whole, it is important, because it is about the way we relate to each other, before, during and after all the games we play just to communicate with each other.

A reasonably well to do gentleman wants to go spend a year in a desert island, and he places an advertisement for a lover for that year in the 'paradise island'. In comes Lucy, a very independent woman, who decides for her own reasons that the idea is an exciting event for her own growth. She wants to do this for herself, not for another person. And off they go to the island paradise. Because of the English and island laws, they are forced to 'marry' so they can get their passports in order. And to the chosen island they finally arrive. It really is a paradise of sorts.

For the duration of the year, the two manage to withstand each other, amidst personal crisis, and territorial problems with each other. They learn to fish and what they can eat. Things get tough, and Gerald is getting diseased feet, and she is losing weight. And he is even more disappointed in her because she does not live up to her 'marriage' agreement, by denying him sex.

The film is a veritable gourmet of visual images, aided by a few lines here and there. In between there is more tension that a bunch of shark infested waters. And the camera never takes sides, although in the end, Lucy's decision to leave after her one year is up, is looked at as a cop-out, but she has her reasons. She has experienced what she wanted to try, and is finished. Gerald has dedicated himself to this lifestyle, and has pretty much left the social milieu behind, although he does now mix in with the indigenous cultures in various other islands. He has become an important fixture in their lives because he can fix the old boat engines, and has a mechanical ability which few are capable of.

Beautifully photographed, with very fun moments. ( " Isn't it better than sex " says Gerald about an imaginary meal he is talking about ) . Amanda Donohoe is excellent, and not self conscious in a role which is not convertible to all, and to someone like Oliver Reed, who is known to be a rebel rouser. Even he, locked up in an island to make a film, seems like an odd thing. But both of them are excellent, and really show a lot more acting ability and communication than most people will ever have in their own lives.

And it is the type of film that I personally wish Nicholas would do much more of. Like WALKABOUT ( 1972 ), it just does its thing without having to say very much. It just speaks for its own actions, rather than have to hammer us with meaningful situations, which are more showy than they are helpful. And a lot of it may be because the diary which this is based on, is an extensive study of two people's minds, which really helps the story develop. We already have the changes, and the actors only have to play them. And I think the independent Ms Irvine, would even enjoy the film, maybe even Gerald, if ever a film theatre would moke it to the 'end of the world'.

Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You Jonathan Rosenbaum, September 16, 1998

Movie Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]

Movie House Commentary ICMS

Castaway (1986) photos from Avax Home

TRACK 29

Great Britain USA (91 mi) 1988

Track 29 | Theater CC | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Flawed but fascinating, Nicolas Roeg's direction of an original script by Dennis Potter (Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective) yields a provocative and multilayered depiction of American infantilism. In a North Carolina town, Theresa Russell plays a bored, alcoholic, and frustrated housewife married to a doctor (Christopher Lloyd) who prefers playing with his model railroad to dallying with her. Into the picture comes an enigmatic young English stranger (Sid and Nancy's Gary Oldman) who may or may not be her long-lost son, who was forcibly taken from her at childbirth and who, like much else in the film, may or may not be real. Roeg and Potter's grasp of Americana may be flawed in certain details, but the overall drift of their parable carries an undeniable charge. Russell's southern accent only works intermittently, and it's a pity to see actors as interesting as Sandra Bernhard and Seymour Cassel wasted (Colleen Camp fares somewhat better as Russell's best friend), but Roeg's talent as a stylist, purveyor of the bizarre and kinky, and poet of disturbed mental states (as experienced from within) keeps this alive and humming. If you're looking for something different, this is definitely worth a visit.

Track 29 Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

So obsessed with his model train set is North Carolina geriatrician Lloyd that he neglects the complaints of wife Russell about their sexless, childless union. Her suicide is averted only by the sudden arrival of English oddball Oldman, who claims to be her long-absent illegitimate son. Cue fiery rows and frantic role-playing. Roeg and screenplay-writer Dennis Potter's brash, over-emphatic psychodrama tosses out enough tricky ambiguities (is Oldman merely a child of Russell's frustrated imagination?), musical and cinematic references, and verbal and visual puns, to suggest that there's far more here than meets the eye. Finally, however, it's merely an inflated Oedipal riddle, and an exploration of guilt, desire and impotence that ends up as a curiously unilluminating and predictable vision of the world as funny-farm. Lloyd performs with a certain verve, but Russell and Oldman seem to have confused range with wobbly histrionics.

The audience gets to determine what's real and what's imagined in this ambiguous surrealist work from Nicolas Roeg. Roeg seems the perfect director to adapt Dennis Potter because his proclivity to disregard plot and timeline in favor of thrusting us into the confused if not disturbed mental process of his characters is a suitable match for Potter's mining of the inner self, particularly memory and states of consciousness. His major mistake is he takes everything to excess, which not only takes away from the credibility of the performances but is quite simply unnecessary because Potter is meant to be played straight. Theresa Russell was raped at 15, had the bastard child literally torn from her arms at birth, and wound up married to an inattentive surgeon (Christoper Lloyd) who has not given her a child. A child bride of fragile sanity doesn't please Lloyd, who spends all his free time playing with model trains while Russell mother's dolls. All the characters retreat from reality by returning to childhood in their past times, sexual fantasies, and general behavior. English stranger Gary Oldman emerges in the juvenile Southern town seeking his long lost mother, who may well be Russell. Oldman rocks her world becoming her little boy, lover, and tormentor. He's odd, annoying, dangerous, and even more infantile than she is, allowing her to play the role of mother. Like Potter's Brimstone and Treacle, dream and reality blur, but ultimately a disabled woman is fulfilled and freed through an encounter with a peculiar stranger who is at least something of a rapist. This studio work is not one of Roeg's more beautiful, but it's a kinky psychological send up of American infantilism that has a lot to say about how the human brain functions and how we deal with pain by trying to escape from it.

Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Track 29 Richard Scheib from the Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy film Review

Rio Rancho Film Reviews *potentially offensive* Ricky Roma

New York Times [Janet Maslin] (registration req'd)

Siskel & Ebert (video)

DVDBeaver.com [Rob Farmer]

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH – made for TV

USA (95 mi) 1989

Sweet Bird of Youth Time Out London

Liz Taylor takes the role Genevieve Page made her own, on stage and in Richard Brooks' 1961 movie version, as the fading Hollywood idol seeking solace in booze, pills, and the arms of masseur Harmon. Retreating to his small home town, she exploits his dreams of glamour, but the threatening ghosts of his past aren't far away. For all the cast's earnest efforts, passion fails to rise, and the stature of the Tennessee Williams source material seems diminished this time round (for TV), even if modern frankness allows more of the playwright's savage vision to come through than three decades previously.

Epinions [Stephen O. Murray]

Geraldine Page created the role of aging movie star Alexandra del Lago in "Sweet Bird of Youth" on Broadway in 1959 with Paul Newman playing the fading golden boy Chance Wayne. Page and Newman recreated their roles in the 1962 movie, directed by Richard Brooks with Shirley Knight as Heavenly Finley and an Oscar-winning Ed Begley as preacher turned politico Tom "Boss" Finley (Sr.). As great an actress and formidable a dinosaur as Page was (and there is no grounds for dispute about either!), in closeup it was difficult to believe that she had been a great beauty. As an over-the-hill movie beauty, Elizabeth Taylor ca. 1989, prompted no such questioning. She didn't have to act like a legend, she was one.

The part of the celebrity in hiding (and paying for male companionship and turning fancy phrases) is more than a little autobiographical: playwright Tennessee Williams knew plenty of Chance Waynes with unrealized dreams. Mark Harmon did not bring Newman's self-loathing (which Newman also portrayed very effectively in Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" with Taylor). 48 when the movie was shot, Harmon could not pass for 31, and this was unnecessarily made even clearer with nude shots when Chance was supposed to be 18. Too old, too bland, not desperate enough. However, Valerie Perrine was perfect for the part of Miss Lucy, Boss Finley's mistress (Madeleine Sherwood in the earlier movie). In the reduced part of Boss Finley, the hypocritical prophet of purity (white and family), Rip Torn was blander than Begley (but for bringing resonances surpasses even Taylor in that Torn was married to Geraldine Page until her death in 1987,and played Tom Finley Jr. in the 1962 movie).

This adaptation was more faithful to the text, particularly in its ending, which had been very compromised by censors ca. 1962.

I don't know what happened to former cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, whose first four directorial efforts were astounding to look at and narratively complex (somewhere between oblique and opaque): Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth). The skyrocketing director who fell to earth? There is no visual bravado in "Bird," though the decors are well-chosen and the sometimes overblown (blowhard) speeches are dispatched well (even most of Harmon's are). Aunt Nonnie's part was nearly cut out, but Mildred Dunnock was not around to play it any more, so that's OK.

And though more than a little Gothic and set in the era of defending segregation as a Christian crusade, Williams's preacher turned political demagogue (and hiding the disorders of his own house) has not lost its relevance.

Despite the censoring in the 1962 version, I'd have to recommend it in preference to the 1959 one, though, obviously, it is possible to view and review both versions, as I have.

Sweet Bird Of Youth (1989/Telefilm/Tango Entertainment) Nicholas Sheffo

User reviews from imdb Author: Poseidon-3 from Cincinnati, OH

User reviews from imdb Author: robb_772 from United States

THE WITCHES

Great Britain USA (91 mi) 1990

The Witches Time Out London

A gutsy version of Roald Dahl's story, reasonably faithful despite the changed ending. Luke (Fisher) and his Norwegian grandmother (Zetterling), both clued up on witch-lore, end up sharing a seaside hotel with a coven. Led by the Grand High Witch (Huston), the witches plan to turn all of England's children into mice. Distinctive casting has paid off, (Huston splendidly glam, camp and evil; Zetterling the voice of maternal moderation; Rowan Atkinson an obsessive hotel manager), and the adaptation recreates the sense of foreboding that gives way to gruesome reality. Customary Roeg concerns are evident, but issues of identity are given darkly humourous expression, while directorial extravagance is held in check by an outrageous plot about supernatural transformation, and there are some wonderful special effects from Jim Henson's crew. Strange and scary enough to fascinate parents and offspring alike.

Maverick director Nicolas Roeg‘s child-oriented fantasy adapted from the fiendish Roald Dahl story casts a big enough spell to snare adults too.

The film begins with young Luke (Jasen Fisher) being warned by his Norwegian grandmother Helga (Mai Zetterling) about witches, how they are not fables, and the various characteristics by which to identify them. Following the death of Luke’s parents in a tragic car accident, his granny takes him to England and together they stop at a seaside hotel run by Mr. Stringer (Rowan Atkinson). While wandering through the hallways of the old hotel, Luke stumbles upon a private meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and discovers to his horror that the Society is actually a convention of witches holding its annual convention. Led by the Grand High Witch, Miss Ernst (Anjelica Huston), the witches hatch a plot to turn all the children of England into mice. Luke and his pal Bruno (Charles Potter) are the first victims on the list, and make it their mission to scupper the witches evil plot succeeding

kindertrauma

If there’s one thing Luke’s (JASEN FISHER) grandmother Helga (MAI ZETTERLING) really detests, it would have to be witches. According to Helga, witches are the vilest of creatures, with their purple-tinged eyes, stumpy feet concealed by sensible shoes, and baldheads covered by itch-inducing wigs. The sole mission of witches, per Helga, is to rid the world of the children, and she speaks from experience, having lost one of her fingers to a witch as a wee one. In fact, one of her best childhood friends was not only abducted and murdered by a witch; the poor girl was then sentenced to a purgatory of feeding ducks in a Currier & Ives style, sofa-sized painting. Flash-forward through the untimely deaths of Luke’s parents, and Helga’s diabetes diagnosis, the pair decide to take a much-needed seaside holiday at the Hotel Excelsior. Chalk it up to poor inter-generational travel planning; the resort just happens to be hosting all of the witches in England who just happen to be convening under the auspicious title of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Luke stumbles into one of their closed-door sessions where the Grand High Witch (ANGELICA HUSTON), in an accent of indeterminate Eastern European origin, reveals her diabolical plan of franchising sweet shops that sell laced chocolates that turn kids into mice. After being caught by the witches, Luke learns first hand that life as a talking rodent is not the toy car joyride depicted in STUART LITTLE. With it’s hideous make-up effects, MONTY PYTHON-like gross out humor, and dark puppetry courtesy of JIM HENSON, THE WITCHES skews closer to a Grimm’s fairy tale than your typical saccharine-sweet family outing.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

The little girl who gets trapped in a painting
The removal of the wig and mask from the Grand High Witch at the meeting
The witches kicking off their shoes
The aftermath of the witches ingesting the tainted soup

notcoming.com | The Witches Beth Gilligan

From an adult vantage point, Roald Dahl seems an unlikely candidate for enduring status as a beloved children’s author. In addition to the fact that most of the adults in his books aren’t rendered in an especially flattering fashion (grotesqueries only magnified by Quentin Blake’s vivid illustrations), Dahl’s unsentimental and often unflinching way of tossing his young protagonists into terrifying situations almost begs the question why parents would choose to share these works with their offspring. Children, on the other hand, have for decades devoured these books with the same relish as Augustus Gloop gobbled up Willy Wonka bars in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If there seems to be a disconnect here, it’s perhaps on account of Dahl’s gift for grasping the deepest fears of children (loss of parents being a chief one) and then twisting them into gloriously detailed, fantastical — and above all — vastly entertaining stories in which the outcast inevitably triumphs.

Growing up, Dahl’s books held me in thrall, and I remember being especially fascinated and scared by both the book and film version of The Witches. For a child, the premise posited by this work — that witches are not old ladies on broomsticks wearing pointy black hats, but rather everyday women who work behind counters in shops or desks in libraries — is supremely frightening for its suggestion of the everyday being laced with danger.

The movie begins, as the book does, on a violent, tragic note. The protagonist, a young boy named Luke, is both frightened and entertained by his grandmother Helga’s stories of children falling prey to witches. “Sparks fly. Flames leap. Oil boils. Rats howl. Skin shrivels. And the child disappears,” or so goes Dahl’s description of such an incident. The film, directed by Nicolas Roeg, is no less terrifying, as it depicts a pretty blonde girl with braids walking down an alley with a milk pail when a witch suddenly snatches her from the street. Shortly thereafter, Luke’s parents are killed in a tragic car accident that is largely glossed over by the book but is lingered on in the film, perhaps to emphasize the degree to which Luke and his granny must fend for themselves.

When Helga is suddenly diagnosed with diabetes, the two decide to spend some time at a seaside resort to rest. Little do they know, however, that the resort is also playing to host to a witches’ convention spearheaded by the Grand High Witch. As the witches gather and remove their wigs (real witches are bald, explains Helga) and kick off their shoes, the movie’s heretofore slightly sinister tone (this is Nicolas Roeg, after all) shifts to a more comic one. The special effects for the film were provided by the Jim Henson Company (Henson himself is credited as an Executive Producer), which does an especially impressive job of rendering the Grand High Witch in all her hideousness. Played by Angelica Huston, who turns in an appropriately over-the-top, heavily accented performance, the Grand High Witch functions as both a believable object of fear for children and a delightfully twisted comic creation that adults can relish.

The movie remains in large part faithful to the book, save for the ending, which is a little brighter in the latter, but as with all of Dahl’s works, it seems impossible to fully replicate the delicate balance between the macabre and comic. Still, while other directors have reveled in Dahl’s unique brand of humor, Roeg brings a slightly darker sensibility to the table, and as such, The Witches remains truer in tone to its source than perhaps any other film adaptation of Dahl’s work.

The Witches Richard Scheib from Moria Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review

Witches, The (1990) Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image

eFilmCritic Reviews Mrs. Norman Maine

Jeff Meyer

The Carrying on of a Wayward Son [Robert Saucedo]

Mark R. Leeper

Huston, Anjelica essay by Gerald Peary, April 2000

The Witches | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com Ian Caddell from Georgia Straight

Edinburgh U Film Society [Scott M. Keir]

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

The Witches | Movies | EW.com Angeline Goreau

Austin Chronicle [Ada Calhoun]

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Movie Review - The Witches - Review/Film; When the Ladies ... Caryn James from The New York Times

COLD HEAVEN

USA (95 mi) 1991

Cold Heaven Time Out London

Roeg's adaptation of Brian Moore's novel fuses deeply felt emotions and religious ideas into a gripping metaphysical thriller that is both moving and intellectually challenging. On holiday in South America, Russell tries to tell her husband (Harmon) about her infidelity with Russo; but before she can do so, he is hit by a boat while swimming and declared dead. When Harmon's body subsequently disappears, avowed atheist Russell is plunged into a maelstrom of guilt, self-doubt and confusion. Sadly, for all its technical brilliance and narrative assurance, the film's climactic scenes require an act of faith that no film-maker - Christian, agnostic or atheist - has any right to ask.

User reviews from imdb Author: Joe Medina from United States

If you thought Titanic was the best thing since slice bread, then this film is probably not to for you. This is not your typical popcorn movie fare. When you watch a Nicholas Roeg film, you are walking into a dark world populated with individuals with fractured psyches, desperate lives and dark motives. Everything from his distinct use of visual metaphors to his trademark dramatic camera zooms to his choice of eclectic, but darkly dramatic subject matter typifies Roeg's cinematic universe. His long trajectory as a filmmaker goes back to the early 60's where he began as a camera operator and eventually became one of the most visually unique cinematographers in the business. He made his debut as a director in 1970, co-directing with Donald Cammell, the controversial film Performance, starring James Fox and Mick Jagger in his feature film debut. From then on, straight up to Cold Heaven, Roeg has maintained his eclectic cinematic style of filmmaking working outside of the studio system. This film stars Roeg's then, wife, Theresa Russell as Maria, the confused, conflicted yet unfaithful wife of Alex, played by Mark Harmon in an eerily understated performance. There are also supporting roles by Talia Shire as the mysterious nun and James Russo as Maria's lover. If you like your films to be a bit challenging, if you have some appreciation for the visually abstract, if you are keen on dark psychological cinema with a unique perspective in the vein of David Lynch or David Cronenberg, then Cold Heaven may be up your alley.

User reviews from imdb Author: robertllr from Crozet, VA

After reading the other tepid reviews and comments, I felt I had to come to bat for this movie.

Roeg's films tend to have little to do with one another, and expecting this one to be like one of his you liked is probably off the mark.

What this film is is a thoughtful and unabashed look at religious faith. The only other film like it-in terms of its religious message-would have to be Tolkin's `The Rapture.'

I am astonished that anyone could say the story is muddled or supernatural. It is a simple movie about Catholic faith, miracles, and redemption--though you would never guess it till the end. It is also the only movie I can think of whose resolution turns, literally, on a pun.

As a (happily) fallen Catholic myself, I know what the movie is about, and I find a sort of fondness in its ultimate innocence about the relation between God and man. But if you are not familiar with the kind of theology on which the film is based, then it will go right over you head.

As a film-as opposed to a story-`Cold Heaven' it is not ground-breaking. While `The Rapture' is heavy with pictorial significance and cinematic imagery, `Cold Heaven' downplays its own cinematic qualities. There are no striking shots, no edgy effects, no attempts to fit the content to the form. It is workmanlike shooting, but subdued. Nor does it have dialogue or acting to put it in a class of high drama. It is a simple story that unfolds simply. It may seem odd; but at the end the mystery is revealed. It looks ambiguous; but with a single line the ambiguity vanishes in a puff of Catholic dogma.

In this regard, `Cold Heaven' has at its heart exactly the same sort of thing that drives a movie like `The Sting,' or `The Sixth Sense,' or `Final Descent,' or Polanski's `A Pure Formality.' All of these are films with a trick up their sleeves. They may frustrate you along the way, but they have a point-an obvious one, indeed--but the fun is, at least in part, in having been taken in.

Still, even if it seems like little more than a shaggy dog story with a punch line, it is worth watching for way it directs-and misdirects-you. Try it-especially if you are, or have ever been, a Catholic.

He's So Heavy [COLD HEAVEN] | Jonathan Rosenbaum August 14, 1997

User reviews from imdb Author: in-the-fade from the Mad Hatter's tea party

User reviews from imdb Author: petershelleyau from Sydney, Australia

User reviews from imdb Author: fedor8 (fedor8@yahoo.com) from Serbia

Cold Heaven Marc Savlov from The Austin Chronicle

Movie Review - Cold Heaven - Review/Film; Intimations Of Danger ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times

TWO DEATHS

Great Britain (102 mi) 1995

Two Deaths Time Out London

Secrets and lies in Bucharest. Dr Daniel Pavenic (Gambon) hosts the annual evening get-together of four old friends. Outside, civil war rages. Inside, everything's perfect: delicious food and self-effacing service by the beautiful housekeeper Ana (Braga). Pressed by his companions, Pavenic tells Ana's story - a tale that turns into a sordid confession. Gradually the war outside seeps through the walls of these well-appointed male bourgeois lives, and long-established convictions and relationships crumble to dust. Although Roeg and screenwriter Allan Scott have transposed Stephen Dobyns' novel The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini from Chile to Romania, the budget seems not to have stretched much further east than a soundstage at Pinewood - giving this dinner party conversation piece a dourly theatrical air. This impression is exacerbated by ungainly chunks of speechifying and pontificating, some uneven performances, choppy editing and hand-held camerawork. Visually, this must be the least distinguished of Roeg's films. There's enough sting in the tale to keep you watching, but Two Deaths marks no career resurrection - indeed it only rarely comes to life at all.

Nicolas Roeg ("Performance"/"Walkabout"/"Don't Look Now") directs and Allan Scott writes the screenplay for this heavy-handed erotic political drama (which compares the totalitarian mind-set in public and private behavior). It's based on the novel The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini by Stephen Dobyns.The low-budget film has its setting changed from Chile to Romania. The talky theatrical production, not cinematic, is filmed in London's Pinewood Studio.

In Bucharest, the wealthy, bon vivant, corrupt and well-connected surgeon, Daniel Pavenic (Michael Gambon), is a charmer who hosts his annual house party for friends. His blind cook Ilena (Sevilla Delofski) cooks a sumptuous feast and his beautiful mysterious housekeeper Ana Puscasu (Sonia Braga, Brazilian actress) silently serves the meal. Since a civil war is taking place in the streets, the night is not a safe place to travel and only three of the twelve guests invited attend. All the bourgeois guests have a secret and a lie to reveal, and during the course of the violence outside the host and guests fill their bellies and tell their own perverted tales of woe.

Daniel tells of his lust for schoolteacher Ana, and how he purposely crashed his car into her fiance Roberto's (Karl Tessler) motorcycle. This left Roberto paralyzed. Sicko Daniel made a deal with Ana that Roberto could reside in his house, if she would be his sex slave. The other guests, all spineless characters, are George Buscan (Patrick Malahide), Marius Vernescu (Nickolas Grace) and Carl Dalakis (Ion Caramitru), whose love-life tales are just as disgusting--with Marius admitting that he enjoys having a whore piss on him.

The dour dinner party conversation fails to keep one's attention, as there's much speechifying, pointing fingers at others, talk of each's touching debauched relationship and the sickening visit by Ceausescu's head torturer (John Shrapnel), one of the doctor's close school chums he still is friendly with.

The inert drama, shot as a pessimistic view of relationships and as a political allegory, set in the waning days of the Romanian dictatorship, is one of Roeg's lesser films.

Variety.com [Steven Gaydos]

Two Deaths - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, March 1, 1997

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

Two Deaths Mike D’Angelo

Two Deaths | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com Mark Harris from Georgia Straight

User reviews from imdb Author: in-the-fade from the Mad Hatter's tea party

not coming to a theater near you (Jason Woloski) review

PUFFBALL D 55

Great Britain Ireland Canada (120 mi) 2007

From start to finish, this is one hideous film project with a ludicrous story, poor casting, borderline atrocious acting and a horribly ugly tone that feels poorly devised throughout. Adapted from a Fay Weldon book, where the author’s son wrote the screenplay, one would have thought this was a good match, as Roeg works wonders placing humans in havoc with nature, creating an imbalance that leads to a kind of disassociative disorder, as the inadequacy of human social skills and their ordinary flaws are magnified by the immensity of nature which has a tendency to overwhelm and even engulf humans. Roeg’s soundtracks are always off kilter, as we hear things that we don’t see, from animal sounds or human voices to an electronic sound design, all meant to create an imaginary train of thought that co-exists side by side along with realism. This is a nightmarish witch story blending sex and the supernatural, where a well-to-do couple moves out into a mythological Irish countryside which may as well be a low lying, muddy swampland where the wife is an architect and has designed her dream home rehabbing a dilapidated old country cottage which just might be haunted. Kelly Reilly plays the wife Liffey who lives there supervising the neverending, continuously ongoing construction work by Polish workers, while her husband Richard (Oscar Pearce) commutes from London and visits only on weekends, or even larger stretches of absence.

Immediately we can tell something is not right when they meet their slightly deranged neighbors, Miranda Richardson as Mabs, former resident of the home under construction who turns out to be a witch who frantically desires a son, along with her derelict mother, the ancient and ghastly looking Rita Tushingham who resembles the living dead, but is always brewing some voodoo concoction designed to ruin their new neighbor’s lives, believing they don’t belong there. Mabs’ daughter is pulled into this dirty business along with her own sister and even the family dog, so the townsfolk resemble concealed bloodsucking vampires in human shape. When Liffey becomes pregnant and is left alone, the neighboring family conspires to steal her child from her, insanely concluding she is pregnant with the child meant for Mabs. Liffey becomes psychologically tormented by unseen forces within the cottage itself which appears to be speaking to her, reflecting some bizarre family history that includes the horrible death of a child (the grandmother’s) in that house that has left Lilly tainted where she is perhaps more susceptible to spells, as she tends to believe in hallucinations and dreams which are hard to differentiate from reality. It’s all about interiors, so to speak. With every sex act, usually enhanced by a specially brewed alcoholic potion of some kind, the screen is inundated with scientific imagery that reminds us of the act of procreation with sperm squirting into a woman’s vaginal canal veiled in color schemes. Other recurring images are a strange rock with a hole in it and giant mushrooms, where the pronounced head is smashed or exploded, made to resemble the belly of a pregnant woman. All signs lead to some ghoulish end, complete with repetitive Celtic music wherever deemed appropriate with men who are especially robotic, insufferably wooden, and turned into worker drones while their mysterious women concoct evil spells or fall under the influence of them. Besides being humorless, the problem with this film depiction is the unlikability factor of every single character. The audience has no reason to care about anyone, either the witches or the victims, as they all seem so egotistical and self-serving, so by the end, most in the audience couldn’t wait for it to be over. This was a huge disappointment and a good film to walk out on.

User comments from imdb Author: (niklburton@gmail.com) from Canada

I watched Puffball last night, as a huge Fay Weldon fan who read the book quite a few years ago. I was surprised to discover it was a 2007 film, as the subject matter, and the atmosphere of the pic, would have suggested something many years older.

Still, I thought it was quite faithful to the intent of the book, and is, despite some comments, very much a women's film. It deals with elemental forces, and the complexity of women's nature and women's power. The men are little more than sperm donors, penile life support systems to be acted on by women's emotions and a separate women's nature, almost echoing, (or prefiguring, more likely) some of Jane Campion's observations in The Piano, among others.

This has always been the heart of Fay Weldon's work, a poke in the eye of naivité, of the "Eyes Wide Shut" variety, about the nature of women. The film doesn't really add to this narrative, but it doesn't diminish it either, which is saying something for a film adaptation of a novel, made by an auteur to boot.

User comments from imdb Author: AJMcKenna from United Kingdom

Loath it or love it, once you've seen Nicolas Roeg's latest offering - Puffball - you'll probably never be able to forget it. Roeg has delved into the psyche of the male animal and returned with disturbing images of life, death, religion and sex. Puffball is as haunting and memorable as the best he has done before.

Kelly Reilly plays an architect who is refurbishing a derelict house in the wilds. When she arrives with her lover she is watched by an old woman who is possibly a witch and means the visitors no good. This almost familiar opening does not lead down a predictable path – Puffball takes myriad twists and turns and surprises and manages to remain original and engrossing. Supported by stunning and atmospheric photography in rural Ireland the plot twists and meanders to an exciting and satisfying conclusions. It is how Roeg waves his spell that is so fascinating and unforgettable. There is little erotic content – sex is brutal and cruel and ultimately a woman's body is the receptacle for hopes and ambitions that surpass the male lust for immediate satisfaction.

The cast is excellent. Miranda Richardson is convincing as the woman who aches to give birth, Rita Tushingham is compelling as the sinister old lady who weaves her spells and incantations and the always excellent Donald Sutherland makes a brief but significant appearance.

Not a film for screen slouchers, Puffball demands attention and rewards with a haunting tale of rebirth and redemption. The Screenplay is by Dan Weldon adapted from Fay Weldon's novel. Puffball is disturbing but rewarding. Nic Roeg has given us another great film and for that we should be thankful.

User comments from imdb Author: Isobel Bernard

I wanted to write a review of "Puffball" when I saw the rather negative post that rated it 1/10. While I understand that some might see this film as a disappointment, I didn't want other moviegoers to dismiss Nic Roeg's latest right away.

Set in the Irish countryside, "Puffball" tells the story of Liffey (Kelly Reilly), a young architect who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant while renovating a rundown cottage. Her new neighbor Mabs (Miranda Richardson) has three daughters already, but is desperate for a son. Convinced that Liffey has "stolen" the baby, Mabs' mother Molly (Rita Tushingham) resorts to witchcraft to put Liffey and her fetus in peril. Though quite bizarre, "Puffball" still manages to teach the audience about relationships, motherhood and family.

Another user described "Puffball" as a mess. Though I clearly enjoyed the film more than they did, I understand, to a certain extent, what they meant. When watching the film, I got the distinct impression that beneath what I was seeing, a better film was struggling to get noticed. For this, I think the blame lies mostly the editor (who seems to have an unhealthy fondness for fade outs) and the numerous composers (who clearly weren't working together), because the images are lovely, the film is very well shot, the performances (particularly Reilly's as Liffey) are strong and the story is compelling. The script shows a few weaknesses (the point the other reviewer made about Odin's standing stone is a fair one), but all in all demonstrates a fascinating interpretation of Fay Weldon's novel. Of course, fans of Fay Weldon's "Puffball" may very well be confused by her son's adaptation (the novel and the script hardly resemble one another), but I think anyone with an open mind will find something to appreciate in this film.

Exclaim! [Travis Hoover]

I can’t for the life of me figure out what this UK/Irish/Canadian co-production is driving at. The first film in 11 years by fallen idol Nicolas Roeg, it’s a bizarre mishmash of attractive people, weird acting out, supernatural shenanigans and metaphorical sleight of hand that could mean so much if it wasn’t so completely impenetrable.

There’s a sexy couple (Kelly Reilly and Oscar Pearce) renovating a country house when they’re not engaging in ridiculous lovemaking, resulting in not one but two intrauterine cum shots for reasons too gratuitous to enumerate here. There are witches, or some such mystical women (represented by Miranda Richardson and Rita Tushingham), who are strangely interested in the unborn child. It gets kind of fuzzy after that but there’s a raft of wholly unbelievable acting delivered with great gusto, a lot of gleefully pretentious symbolism surrounding sex and a camera style that never falters even as the plot blows your head clean off.

Donald Sutherland shows up for a minute as something or other (as a possible favour to his Don’t Look Now director) but his gravitas is all for naught — this is one silly movie, make no bones about it. Depending on your mood and your level of inebriation, this could either be a glorious camp extravaganza or just about the worst movie you’ve ever seen but either way, you’ve got to give Roeg credit for going so far out on a limb, and so far off the deep end.

Though one gets the impression that there’s a feminist subtext in the script (which is based on a Fay Weldon novel), the director is completely oblivious and simply lets his freak flag fly. Tragic that his comeback isn’t even close to being a genuinely good movie, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an entirely watchable piece of embarrassment.

PressReader - Montreal Gazette: 2007-08-29 - Ordinary is extraordinary John Griffin

Four films that changed my life are Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. All four are by Nicolas Roeg.

Performance caught the decadent, druggy London I knew in 1968. Walkabout showed a new way to tell stories in 1972. Don't Look Now is a 1973 thriller that 30 years of therapy has now finally banished from my dreams. The Man Who Fell to Earth has Bowie in 1976. They also happen to be among the most beautiful pictures ever made.

When news filtered down that the legendary British director might grace our city with his presence for screenings of his new film, Puffball, my immediate instinct was to genuflect, kiss his ring finger and hope he wouldn't hurt my brain. That's how much his work gets inside your head.

In person he is gentle, soft-spoken and, as a man in his late '70s, comparatively fragile. But his visionary brain is sharp as a carpet tack, and Puffball shows this former cinematographer is still creating images at a dizzying and utterly unique level.

"What's Puffball about?" was how he opened yesterday's conversation. "I say things people don't want to know. It's not structured in any teachable way. I hope people identify with the secrets of the people inhabiting the film."

Puffball is not a thriller, though it has elements of the same creepy occult voodoo that drove us mad in Don't Look Now. It's not a horror movie, through you will be forgiven the odd need to scream. It's not a ghost story, though it's crawling with ghosts. It's a Nicolas Roeg movie. It "takes the familiar and makes it strange." See it.

The stunning Kelly Reilly is an ambitious young architect who has bought a ruined cottage in the heart of Ireland with plans to rebuild. But the place, and the people, in this isolated rural valley are riddled with history. When Kelly suddenly, unexpectedly, finds herself pregnant, a great malignant power is unleashed.

Puffball is taken from the book by Fay Weldon, and co-produced by her son Dan. It stars Reilly, Miranda Richardson, Rita Tushingham, fine newcomer Leona Igoe, and Donald Sutherland, who has presumably recovered from starring in Don't Look Now.

It's a Canada-U.K. co-production, with strong local input in post-production and score, thanks to globe-trotting Montreal-based producer Martin Paul-Hus. Even though the film is anchored in the Irish countryside, Roeg calls Puffball "international, the way the world is now."

It almost didn't get made, at least not by him. He'd been sent the Dan Weldon script but never received it. "It sat under things in the London office for a year before being found and sent on. I read the script and liked the sense of it."

Despite, or because of, Roeg's reputation, financing had to be stitched together. The marketplace likes to be able to place projects in neatly labelled boxes. Roeg doesn't fit in them.

Finally, the pieces fell into some semblance of order and the production decamped to Ireland in March 2006, where Irish-South African producer Michael Garland held sway. Then Roeg found the ideal location in Monaghan on his very first foray. Though the weather was a logistical nightmare of unpredictability, it helps give the film a spectacular appearance.

"The location dictated itself," Roeg explained. 'The weather affected the look, performances, everything." Many wellies were worn.

Now it's time to see how audiences react to a film I suggested was a type of fairy tale, which Roeg did not reject out of turn. "Everything is a fairy tale. It's all extraordinary."

Charmingly, Roeg was nervous about introducing his film at its North American premiere last night. "After the fact, my work seems to become appreciated, but at the time ..."; the inference is people don't get what to him seems perfectly straightforward. "I'm nervous because I always think they're going to like it.

"With Puffball, I don't think I've ever worked on anything so magical. I hope the magic of our lives and what they mean comes across."

Lair of the Boyg [Jared Roberts]

Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [2.5/5]

Movie House Commentary Johnny Web

floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]

Puffball Review (2007) Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image

Eye Weekly [Adam Nayman]

ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [2/5]

Scott's Movie Comments

Total Sci Fi [Jonathan Wilkins]

Jam! Movies Liz Braun

Variety review Dennis Harvey

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [3/6]

The Guardian (Xan Brooks) review

Fay Weldon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fay Weldon biography and bibliography from Contemporary Writers

Fay Weldon Index of Weldon related articles from The Guardian

A Fertile Fable book review of Puffball, by Mary Cantwell from The New York Times, August 24, 1980

Leader: Pride and prostitution brief book review of Life and Loves of a She Devil, from The Guardian, September 4, 2001

Observer review: Auto da Fay by Fay Weldon Fay and Fortune, book review by Kate Kellaway from The Observer, May 5, 2002

Observer review: Mantrapped by Fay Weldon Little Swap of Horrors, book review by Liz Hoggard from The Observer, September 19, 2004

John Crace's digested read: She May Not Leave by Fay Weldon book review by John Crace from The Guardian, September 26, 2005

Guardian interview and review of What makes women happy Lie Back and Think of Jesus, by Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, September 5, 2006

Q&A: Fay Weldon Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet from The Guardian, February 16, 2008

'Large families are good. You can talk about how much you hate your parents' Nigella Lawson interview by Fay Weldon, from The Guardian, Decermber 13, 2008

Roemer, Michael

Michael Roemer - Filmmaker Page Docurama Films

Born in Berlin, Germany 1928, Michael Roemer graduated Magna Cum Laude from the prestigious Harvard University in 1949.

He wrote and directed "A Touch of Times," the first feature film produced at an American College. Roemer went on to produce twelve films on Hamlet and Oedipus Rex for the Ford Foundation, with the Stratford, Ontario, and Shakespearean Festival Company. He has produced and directed six films for the National Science Foundation and sixty-eight films for the Heath Publishing Company. All of these films have been widely shown on Public Television.

Roemer directed and co-wrote NOTHING BUT A MAN, which went on to be a double prize winner at the Venice Film Festival, London and New York film festivals. He earned an Emmy® award nomination for writing and directing a documentary for Public TV called "Faces of Israel."

Nine of his screenplays have been published by Scarecrow Press. He produced the originally unreleased film "The Plot Against Harry," which was invited to show at Cannes film festival, New York, Toronto, Munich and Bergamo‚ where it won first prize in 1990. It was subsequently released in theatres throughout the U.S. and Europe. Roemer continues to teach filmmaking at Yale University.

Melissa Anderson on Michael Roemer - artforum.com / in print October 1, 2014, also seen here: Nothing but the truth: melissa anderson on the films of michael roemer ...

"I'M SLIGHTLY OUT OF SYNC with my own time," the staunchly independent Filmmaker Michael Roemer, who has taught at Yale University School of Art since 1966, told the New York Times in 2004--an observation. borne out by the initial reception of most of his work. Roemer's comment was made forty years after the premiere of Nothing but a Man, a film that boasts one of cinema's most 'fully realized African American couples, on the occasion of its DVD release. Although Nothing but a Man was heralded at both the Venice and New York Film Festivals in 1964, it did negligible box office during its limited theatrical release, owing largely to exhibitors resistant to attracting black audiences. Only with its intermittent revivals would Nothing but a Man's singularity--it remains the rare film about race that forgoes sentimentality--begin to be fully appreciated.

Similarly, Roemer's low-key, detail-rich comedy The Plot Against Harry took decades to find acclaim. Shot in 1969 but shelved lw studio executives nonplussed by its understated humor, the movie was invited to the New York Film Festival only in 1989; the following year, it opened theatrically in the US and played out of competition at Cannes. Nothing but a Man and The Plot Against Harry, the director's best-known works, screen this month as part of a long-overdue Roemer retrospective at New York's Film Forum. The seven films on view, including three documentaries, are populated by shrewdly observed characters, whether real or fictional, who are often on the margins, a place that Roemer refuses to taint with pieties.

Roemer's own early life was marked by precariousness. Born in Berlin in 1928 to a wealthy Jewish family soon to be financially ruined with the rise of the Nazi party, Roemer, along with his sister and hundreds of other Jewish children,. was sent to England to escape Hitler's .regime in 1939's Kindertransport. Soon after the war, Roemer and his sibling reunited with their mother in Boston; he began college at Harvard shortly thereafter, earning his degree in I 949. While an undergraduate. Roemer spent two years making A Touch of the Times, a feature-length fantasy about kite flying that, in his words, "was intended as social satire"; student films were such a rarity then that Life magazine ran a piece on the project in its October 3, 1949, issue. In the 1950s, Roemer worked for the producer Louis de Rochemont, a creator of the influential March of Time newsreel series. That same decade, Roemer produced and directed scores of educational films.

In the early 1960s, he began a crucial partnership with Robert M. Young, a Harvard classmate (and one of the cameramen for A Much of the Times) who asked him to collaborate on an NBC-commissioned documentary about a slum in Palermo, Italy. Written and directed by Roemer and Young (with the latter also serving as cinematographer), Col-tile Cascino (1962) was the first of their projects to be killed: The network, proclaiming that the unsparing footage of the squalid district of the title was too strong for American audiences, pulled the forty-five-minute film shortly before it was to air.

Cortile Cascino is indeed unremittingly bleak, depicting, among its scenes of deprivation, a severely deformed child navigating an overcrowded street; a five-year-old ragpicker; a twenty-three-year-old mother of four who, after her infant dies, can only declare, "She is a thousand times better near God." Significantly, though, that overwhelmed mamma's words, like those of all the film's interlocutors, aren't subtitled but spoken in English, here by an impassive female narrator, typifying what film scholar Bill Nichols has called documentaries' "discourse of sobriety." When encountered today, this practice, even if dominant in nonfiction filmmaking at the time, has the disjunctive effect of alienating Cortile Cascino's subjects from their own experiences, vitiating an otherwise robust project. (Conversely, Roemer's next nonfiction film, Faces of Israel, from 1966, again photographed by Young, features no voice-over at all. An assignment from public television, the roughly half-hour movie, made the year before the Six-Day War, also eschews all other conventional documentary signposts, including identifying titles--a strategy that anticipate Susan Sontag's more oblique, less hopeful examination of the same terrain, I 974's Promised Lands, filmed during the final days and aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.)

Undeterred by the last-minute yanking of Cortile Cascino, Roemer and young became intent on making, as the latter described it, a "meaningful film that no one could take away from us." As Roemer recounts in the first volume of his Film Stories: Screenplays as Story (2001), Young, who had shot sit-ins in Nashville in 1960, suggested that their next project should be a feature about African Americans in the South. The research for Notbrug butt a Man began in 1962, when the two white men, with the blessings of the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, "left on an Underground Railroad in reverse," as Roemer put it, staying with black families from South Carolina to New Orleans for three months.

The unassuming veracity that defines so much of Notting but a Man, written and produced by Roemer and Young, the latter reprising his cinematographer duties, bloomed from this fact-finding mission. Set in Alabama, the film quietly but potently examines the iniquities of racism through their impact on a newlywed couple, Duff (Ivan Dixon), a railroad worker, and Josie (Abbey Lincoln, the celebrated jazz vocalist), a schoolteacher. (An impossibly dangerous place to make a movie with an interracial cast and crew during the summer of 1963, the Heart of Dixie was played by Atlantic City and Cape May New Jersey.) just as important, the film considers class: During their earls courtship, solidly blue-collar Duff, with some defensive, macho bluster, badgers josie, a college graduate and a preacher's daughter, about what she could possibly want with him. Undaunted, she answers, "I thought we might have something to say to each other."

Josie's response exemplifies the film's assured yet natural dialogue, so markedly in contrast to other movies *of the '60s that attempted to tackle race (namely, Sidney Poitier vehicles), in which characters speak in bromides .and slogans. As Duff tries to protect his dignity, and sometimes his very existence, from constant cracker assault--buffeting that begins to corrode his joyful life with Josie--the film's title takes on greater, more complex meaning. "Nothing but a man" suggests both diminishment and an essential, unshakable core; the expression assumes deeper significance when juxtaposed with a civil rights motto that took hold later in the decade, "I am a man."

Decades after Nothing but a Man's release, Roemer admitted to having some misgivings: "I think we were honorable and honest, but it wasn't our community and there are things we got absolutely wrong." With The Plot Against Harry, which dissects with incisive if gentle humor the foibles of a cross section of New York Jews, Roemer, even if not a native of this milieu, at least felt on more solid ground in his storytelling. (He was the sole writer and director of Harry; Young shot it.) Tracking Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest, who had a small role as a peckerwood in Nothing but a Man)--a Bronx-born numbers runner who, failing to put his enterprise back together after nine months behind bars, tries to buy his way into middle-class respectability--Roemer's comedy is enriched by its quasi-documentary style. This effortless authenticity is, as it had been with Nothing but a Man, the result of Roemer's prodigious research: To accurately portray the various businesses, both illegal and legit, that Harry circulates in, the di-rector worked as a caterer's assistant at bar mitzvahs and Jewish weddings, shadowed a Manhattan attorney, and interviewed call -girls. The film's verite vibe is also heightened by the tremendous cast of supporting characters, almost all of them nonprofessional or first-time actors, that Roemer painstakingly assembled: Harry's ex-wife is played by a psychoanalyst (Maxine Woodsl, his former brother-in-law by an auditor for the New York State Department of Labor (Ben Lang); one of the. female escorts is none other than Hollis Culver, aka Holly Solomon, the future art dealer.

Harry's initial failure ended Roemer and Young's partnership; of Roemer's three (presumably) final projects, the PBS documentary Dying (1976), an unflinching chronicle of a trio of adults of varying ages in their last months of fife, remains his most successfully realized. Pilgrim, Farewell (1982) and Haunted (1984)--tumultuous dramas about women reconciling with their pasts that aired as part of PBS's American Playhouse series and screened at European film festivals--are at times excruciating, owing largely to their central characters' rages and perilously tenuous mental health. But even if I can't praise these works, there is something about their ferocity and rawness that I respect, much as I admire this candid assessment from the man who made them: "No doubt my stubborn indifference to career considerations--I approached each film as though it might be my last--made me indifferent to the sensibilities of the audience. Haunted and Pilgrim, Farewell have both the strength and the limitations of deeply personal work. They are genuine, but hardly entertaining." Yet even these lesser works bear the hallmark of Roemer's greatest films: his insistence on truth--fulness--or, as he put it, on "finding out what actually goes on in the world."

Roemer's films are populated by shrewdly observed characters, whether real or fictional, often on the margins--a place the director refuses to taint with pieties.

Michael Roemer | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie bio from Sandra Brennan

Michael Roemer: Information from Answers.com profile page

Michael Roemer Biography - - Cinedigm Entertainment - New Video brief bio

Michael Roemer | News | The Harvard Crimson William H. Smock from The Harvard Crimson, March 4, 1965

The Best Jewish Director You've Never Heard Of – The Forward Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 31, 2013, also seen here: Michael Roemer: The Man Who Knew Too Much | Jonathan Rosenbaum

MoMA | Michael Roemer's Nothing but a Man Charles Silver, March 11, 2014

Director Michael Roemer on his seminal 60s drama Nothing But a ... Emma Brockes interview from The Guardian, October 1, 2013

Michael Roemer - Wikipedia

Michael Roemer - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

CORTILE CASCINO

aka: The Inferno

USA (58 mi) 1962

User reviews imdb Author: russell-125 from United States, July 11, 2006

Director Michael Roemer made this documentary about a slum in Palermo, Sicily, for NBC in 1961. NBC never aired it. I saw it years later in a film class at which Roemer showed up and talked about it.

The houses had no running water. They fetched water from one outside spigot. They shat on a railroad track that ran through the center of the slum and occasionally someone would get killed when a train came through. The men got occasional work from the Mafia. The women struggled to raise their children.

The stories of the slum-dwellers are raw and well-told.

It was also titled 'Inferno'.

Robert M. Young returned 30 years later to follow up on some of the people in the documentary 'Children of Fate'.

The Best Jewish Director You've Never Heard Of – The Forward Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 31, 2013, also seen here: Michael Roemer: The Man Who Knew Too Much | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Michael Roemer | News | The Harvard Crimson William H. Smock from The Harvard Crimson, March 4, 1965

Education in Sicily - Best of Sicily Magazine Maria Luisa Romano

NOTHING BUT A MAN A 98

USA (92 mi) 1964

One way for local whites to take the strut out of a black man's step was to put him in prison...Southerners who had just lost a war managed to convince courts to put hundreds of black men in prison, including black soldiers.

—from the book Ain’t Nothing But a Man, by Scott Reynolds Nelson

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
—Martin Luther King Jr. from April 16, 1963, Letter from Birmingham Jail full text

I ain’t fit to live with no more. It’s just like a lynching. They don’t use a knife, but they got other ways. —Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon)

Reportedly Malcolm X’s favorite film, this is one of the best black films ever made in America, set in Alabama’s Deep South in the early 60’s, is interestingly enough actually made by a white guy, Michael Roemer, born in Germany and educated at Harvard University, who co-wrote and directed the film using a more European, social realist style, giving it a near documentary look. Shot during the dawn of the Civil Rights era, both Roemer and his co-writer and cinematographer Robert M. Young were Jewish and wrote the script after traveling through the South together. What distinguishes the film is the remarkable ease in telling the story without a hint of condescension or manipulation, no preaching, no moral crusading, no underlying political message, and never resorting to caricature or exaggeration for added emphasis. Instead it just tells it like it is. Never once do we hear music swelling to emphasize a poignant moment and the end credits play without a sound. There’s not a false step anywhere in this landmark picture, beautifully directed with an assured, understated style that reeks of authenticity and serves as a time capsule that holds up unusually well even after 50 years. Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson gives one of the great unheralded performances in American film, smart, proud, a sexy swagger to his step, extremely dignified, never overreaching, usually calm and quiet, a strong, silent type, but his life is a neverending series of exasperating events, continually being goaded into unwelcome confrontations by racist taunts where he refuses to buckle under the humiliation of ignorant whites who expect him to “act the nigger” and play the game of bowing down to white superiority, as that’s what’s always been expected in this neck of the woods.

It ain’t pretty, but it’s real, where the film does an excellent job laying a foundation of his well respected and confident demeanor working and joking among fellow blacks as a nomadic railroad worker. But when he falls for a preacher’s daughter at a church social outside Birmingham, Alabama, Josie (Abbey Lincoln), a proud and irresistibly beautiful woman, their romance is accompanied by a backdrop of contemporary Motown songs playing on a jukebox or the radio, like Martha and the Vandella’s “Heat Wave” Martha & the Vandellas - (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave on YouTube (2:43), which predates the use of culturally relevant rock music in movies like EASY RIDER (1969) or early Scorsese movies like MEAN STREETS (1973). When they decide to get married, there’s little fanfare, as her father (Stanley Greene) is suspicious of a man who never went to college and doesn’t go to church, believing that his daughter deserves better. But they’re happy in an easy going kind of way, a low key relationship not usually shown in motion pictures. But their marriage suffers as he experiences a series of job setbacks where he’s forced to endure local insults, always being labeled a troublemaker for refusing to shuffle and jive for the white man, losing one job after another which puts them in desperate straights financially. Usually he’d just hit the road, but now he’s part of a marriage. Interesting that Josie’s father gives Duff a word of advice, suggesting he “act the part,” calling it a form of psychology to “make 'em think you're going along and get what you want.” Duff has a few words of his own for the preacher, “You've been stooping so long, Reverend, you don't know how to stand straight. You're just half a man.” Like De Niro in a Scorsese film, Duff’s refusal to compromise his pride is what distinguishes his character, and his strong sense of self-respect is precisely what Josie finds so remarkably attractive about him.

Despite the bleak and unforgiving landscape for blacks in the Jim Crow South, the film doesn’t so much tell a story as let one life unravel before our eyes, where the brilliant performances in the film allow the audience to immerse themselves in the predominately black cultural themes, like juke joints and church (featuring a brilliant gospel solo by Dorothy Hall), men getting blacklisted for standing up for themselves, where the only work available for blacks is back-breakingly hard labor that physically wears people out, where if they get injured or old, they’re of no use to anyone anymore, including themselves. Without a job, forced to wallow in their worthlessness and self-loathing, their lives consist of sitting on their front stoops doing nothing, wasted in the mind-numbing void of alcohol abuse, where the only places to live are dilapidated living conditions, where there are so many uncaring or absent fathers, poor schools, and where violence becomes synonymous with black living conditions, a state of mind that eventually comes to live inside your head somewhere. This cycle of generational dysfunction hits Duff in the face like a ton of bricks, and he’s determined not to let it happen to him, where he chooses to be different, to be a responsible man, even as the world around him won’t let him. The film reflects the obstacles he faces, the anger, the indignation, the wretched helplessness he feels as he attempts to wade through the minefield of daily disasters waiting for him. But never does he feel sorry for himself, or give up hope, but he does feel a righteous anger. Their marriage is no picnic and there are some rocky moments, but perhaps most significantly, this film offers no easy solutions. Yet its portrait of a weary life and a man tired even before his adult life begins is strikingly lucid, casting a harsh light on those blacks who do abandon their families, only making things that much more difficult for those they leave behind, only making things worse for those they leave behind, perhaps removing the only hope they have, which weakens the already fragile state of broken black families and community. A brilliant depiction of a troubled life during the tumultuous Civil Rights era, the film was selected to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1993.

Musical Soundtrack

1. "(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave" - Martha & The Vandellas

2. "Fingertips (Pt. II)" - Little Stevie Wonder

3. "That's the Way I Feel" - The Miracles

4. "Come on Home" - Holland & Dozier

5. "This Is When I Need You Most" - Martha & The Vandellas

6. "I'll Try Something New" - The Miracles

7. "Way Over There" - The Marvelettes

8. "Mickey's Monkey" - The Miracles

9. "You Beat Me to the Punch" - Mary Wells

10. "You've Really Got A Hold On Me" (live) - The Miracles

11. "Bye Bye Baby" (live) - Mary Wells

Nothing but a Man | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

A sincere, intelligent, and effectively acted independent feature from 1964, about a black worker (Ivan Dixon) and his wife (Abbey Lincoln) struggling against prejudice and trying to make a life for themselves in Alabama. Directed by the able and neglected Michael Roemer (who made The Plot Against Harry five years later) from a script written in collaboration with Robert Young, who served as cinematographer; with Gloria Foster, Julius Harris, Martin Priest, and Yaphet Kotto. 92 min.

Gifts From the Recently Departed – Part 1 Movie Morlock, April 19, 2008

His performance in NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964) is my favorite memory of Dixon as an actor. As a man who’s been disillusioned but not defeated by his lack of opportunities and second class status in the pre-Civil Rights era South, Dixon creates an unforgettable portrait of a stubbornly determined and proud individual. When he falls in love with a schoolteacher (Abbey Lincoln, equally eloquent) in a small Alabama town and they eventually marry, he is forced to take stock of his life and finally deal with some unresolved issues such as his strained relationship with his father and his illegitimate 4-year-old son. This is an incredibly moving and subtle drama that still holds up extremely well because the focus is on the human condition and not just the issue of race relations which is only part of Dixon’s troubles. Some critics have compared the movie (directed by Michael Roemer) to the Italian neorealism films and the comparison is apt. But it’s Dixon’s Duff Anderson who will live on in your memory of the film long after ”The End” fades on the screen.

Nothing but a Man (1964) Turner Classic Movies

A young black man in 1963 Alabama loves a minister's daughter, works hard, and is put upon, oppressed, and called "boy" by everyone with whom he comes in contact; he wants to be "nothing but a man."

Duff Anderson, a Negro railroad worker, meets Josie Dawson, a Baptist minister's daughter, at a church social in an Alabama town. They fall in love in spite of Anderson's unwillingness to accept responsibility and in spite of Josie's middle-class father's objections to Anderson. They go to nearby Birmingham, and there Anderson visits his father, a sick, bad-tempered alcoholic who owes his life to Lee, the woman who lives with him. Anderson also visits his illegitimate son, who has been deserted by his mother and left with a woman who is reluctantly taking care of him. Anderson and Josie marry, and although Josie wants the child to join them, Anderson refuses. He takes a job in a sawmill but is fired because he will not defer to his bigoted white employers; he advises the other millhands to organize a union. His father-in-law helps him get a job in a filling station, but vigilantes threaten to wreck the station unless he leaves. Frustrated, Anderson strikes out at his pregnant wife, claiming she does not know what it is like to be a Negro because she has never had to live like one. Once more he visits his father, watches him die, and observes Lee's terrible loneliness. Finally, he takes his son and returns home to Josie, determined to raise his family in dignity and peace.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List K.A. Westphal

Upon learning that NOTHING BUT A MAN is the work of two white filmmakers, we might assume that the title constitutes a syrupy call for brotherhood, smugly proud of its mild liberalism. Likewise, when Ivan Dixon says that he's heading to Birmingham, we naturally jump to the conclusion that he's about to become politicized, join the CORE, and subtend the front line of the civil rights movement. That NOTHING BUT A MAN frustrates both expectations is crucial to its lasting interest. Essentially a missing link between Italian neo-realism and the L.A. Rebellion naturalism of KILLER OF SHEEP and BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, NOTHING BUT A MAN depicts a world of ceaseless striving and gross social stratification that marks Freedom Summer as both urgently necessary and despairingly distant. More acutely than any film I know, NOTHING BUT A MAN demonstrates how routine economic oppression simultaneously sabotages and stokes the possibility of political action. (When set next to Bertolucci's superficially radical contemporary, it's Roemer's film that lays much greater claim to the title BEFORE THE REVOLUTION.) Like its post-Popular Front antecedent SALT OF THE EARTH, NOTHING BUT A MAN has the rare distinction of treating racial discrimination, gender equality, and labor rights as irreducibly linked. Most bracingly, NOTHING BUT A MAN possesses such an abiding and deep sense of righteousness that it never wastes our time by presenting compromise or gradualism as morally-defensible options. It's also the only movie I've ever seen that credits a film laboratory (DuArt) as its production company, a footnote that suggests a major and neglected avenue of scholarly investigation at a moment when these former industrial behemoths are shriveling away.

DVD Talk (David Walker) dvd review [5/5]

Brilliant is not a word to be taken lightly, but in the case of 1964's Nothing But a Man, brilliant barely begins to scratch the surface. Praised by critics and film scholars for decades as a masterpiece, it is a film that still languishes in obscurity, waiting to catapulted to its rightful place as a classic of American cinema.

Ivan Dixon stars as Duff Anderson, a railroad worker in the South, waging his own private wars, while coping with the racism that surrounds him everywhere he goes. While Duff and his crew are working in a small town in Alabama, he meets Josie (Abbey Lincoln), the local schoolteacher at the segregated, colored-only school. Duff and Josie begin an unlikely relationship – despite the protest of her preacher father – and eventually the couple gets married. But married life in a rural Southern town proves hard for Duff, who refuses to bow down to local bigots, and finds it difficult to accept the fact that his wife is the family bread-winner. As he wrestles with his new position as husband and provider, Duff also must take stock of his role as father to a son he has neglected, and his relationship with his own estranged father (Julius Harris). All of these issues bare down on him with a tremendous weight that threatens to crush him.

Nothing But a Man is an amazing film, beautifully photographed by Robert Young, who co-wrote and co-produced with director Michael Roemer. Through the combination of writing, directing, photography and sublime acting, Nothing But a Man emerges as an intimate, detailed portrait of a couple enduring racism and classism, that rings with so much authenticity it seems like a documentary. Recalling the work of the Italian neo-realist that emerged during that era, Young and Roemer's film seems more like something you'd find coming out of Europe. In fact, there is so much frank and brutal honesty in Nothing But a Man that it's almost impossible to believe the film came out of the United States – not just in 1964, but any year.

Addressing issues of race in a manner that had never been done before in American film, Nothing But a Man was a groundbreaking film that dared to depict black Americans as complex human beings. At a time when the most fully realized black characters in film were being played by Sidney Poitier, Nothing But a Man stood out as something so profoundly resonant that people didn't know what to make of it. Audiences – both white and black – had never seen black people portrayed as such multi-dimensional characters. Likewise, they had never seen issues of race or racism dealt with so honestly, without heavy-handed polemics, or feel-good solutions wrapped up in a nice neat package. Even by today's standards, Nothing But a Man stands as a revolutionary film in its depiction of the black existence in America.

Ultimately, the credit for the brilliance of Nothing But a Man lies not with filmmakers Young and Roemer (although they deserve supreme credit for making the film), but with the incredible cast. Yound and Roemer put together all the ingredients to make the film, but it is Dixon, Lincoln and the supporting cast that includes, Harris, Gloria Foster, and a young Yaphet Kotto that breaths life into the film. If it were possible to give an Oscar for Best Actor four decades later, it would go to Dixon, who gives the best performance of his career.

Amy Taubin on Nothing But a Man - artforum.com / film November 09, 2012, also seen here: Artforum: Amy Taubin

ONE OF THE GREAT American independent films and one of the great films about how racism defines African American masculinity, Nothing But a Man (1964) is as convincing and emotionally agonizing as it was when I first saw it at the New York Film Festival in 1964. Formally, the film absorbed the Neorealism that had dominated European cinema, particularly in Italy, since World War II, and which continues to energize emerging national cinemas through what now is dubbed “observational cinema.” The subject matter and point of view that made it seem “foreign” when it was first released—especially in relation to social uplift movies about racial difference—still testifies to the ugliest aspect of America, the racism that was exposed by the civil rights movement and which has never been “cured,” as the political discourse of the recent election proved.

Nothing But a Man is the work of two white filmmakers, Michael Roemer and Robert Young, who met at Harvard in the late 1940s. Roemer directed, Young wrote the script and was in charge of the cinematography, and both coproduced the film along with Robert Rubin. It was made on the cheap, but its spare visual beauty is the result of Young’s sensitivity and skill and also the support of DuArt Film Laboratories, which was run by Young’s brother Irwin Young and which was a crucial resource in the development of the American Independent film movement. When Nothing But a Man was restored, rereleased, and added to the Library of Congress’s National Film registry in 1993, Roemer commented that had there been black fiction-film directors of the caliber of Spike Lee working in the mid-’60s, he would not have directed the script, and that the aspects of black culture he failed to capture because he hadn’t experienced them from the inside—the humor, for one thing—bothered him every time he looked at the movie.

No matter, since the galvanizing, unsparing performance by Ivan Dixon more than compensates for any distance Roemer felt. Dixon plays Duff Anderson, a railroad worker who leaves his relatively well-paid and protected union job when he falls in love with Josie Dawson (Abbey Lincoln), a college-educated preacher’s daughter who teaches in a segregated primary school in a small Alabama town near Birmingham. Despite the opposition of Josie’s parents and the anger Duff feels toward her father, who “stoops” to every white man from the school principal to drunken dropouts and teaches his congregation to do likewise, Duff and Josie marry, and Josie soon becomes pregnant. Duff gets a job at a sawmill, but, accused of being a union agitator, he’s fired and blackballed from every decently paying job in town. Unable to earn a living and unwilling to turn a deaf ear to insults and threats, he takes out his rage on his wife.

Roemer’s most dramatic directorial choice is to shoot close and keep the narrative largely within Duff’s point of view. Locked into his subjectivity, one feels in one’s own gut the humiliating and enraging experience of being forced to deny your humanity for the sake of preserving your life. What is most powerful about the script and Dixon’s tight-lipped performance is that it makes us aware that Duff’s rage cuts two ways. His fury is directed both at the racist power structure and at himself for being less than a man. The film is complicated, being as much a father-son story—Duff has an alcoholic dad and a young son living separately in hopeless poverty in Birmingham—as it is a story about a marriage that may or may not be able to withstand the economic blight and emotional devastation of racism.

In Birmingham, at the same time as Nothing But a Man was made, Martin Luther King Jr., having delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, still marches. The first orders for school desegregation have incited a wave of white violence, including the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in which four little girls are killed. Roemer and Young made a deliberate decision to keep all this out of the movie. The impact of civil rights will not reach small towns in the South like the one where Duff and Josie live for many years. Indeed you could have taken a camera to Birmingham in 1964, just as the filmmakers did, and seen no sign that “change is gonna come.” The film is toughest for not holding out that hope to Duff, although small seeds have been planted, perhaps through his experience as a black unionized worker. It is left for us to hope that in the future they will grow.

Nothing But a Man (1964) | PopMatters Christopher Sieving

For roughly its first half hour, Michael Roemer’s 1964 film Nothing But a Man—newly available on DVD for the first time—fully lives up to its reputation as a “classic,” conceptually interesting but formally a bit stale. The tale is a familiar one for American moviegoers; a devil-may-care young man is drawn to a grounded young woman, they part, he realizes he prefers stability to freedom, they reconcile. The interest for viewers today as well as 40 years ago lies in the protagonists’ skin color: they are Black, as is most everyone else on screen. And they live in the Deep South of the early 1960s, where the still-operative system of peonage conspired to keep African Americans enslaved economically and beaten down emotionally.

Like most Black-themed films of the 1960s, in the period before the blaxploitation boom, Nothing But a Man was directed and written and produced by Whites: Roemer and Robert Young, two Jewish filmmakers with documentary backgrounds and Harvard degrees. Borrowing liberally from the already worn conventions of American cinema verité (as featured in the film and television work of Robert Drew and Richard Leacock), they give over the task of narrative exposition to an early series of scenes that record work- and leisure-time environments in gritty detail. Most of the film was shot in New Jersey and not Alabama, where the story appears to be set, but no matter; the production team studiously researched Southern life and Jim Crow custom, talking to and staying with Black families throughout the South for an entire year. (Their entrée into this world where few Whites trod: a letter of introduction from Roy Wilkins.)

As a means of vouching for the picture’s authenticity, Young’s camera—he doubled as the director of photography, while Roemer primarily worked with the actors—frequently holds tight on the painstakingly recreated details of this highly segregated milieu, like the juke joint where Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) and his co-workers unwind after a day of heavy labor on the railroad; here, even the pock-marked prostitute gets a close-up. (In a recent interview included on the DVD, Roemer says his decision to feature Black actors in tight framings whenever possible was a reaction to Hollywood’s fear of African American faces dominating the screen.) Even more “real” is the church revival meeting across town that same night, where Duff first encounters Josie (Abbey Lincoln), the pretty preacher’s daughter; the congregation’s “hell-howling”—Duff’s derisive term—is recorded in classic verité style: shallow focus, handheld camera, direct sound.

Roemer and Young’s lack of experience with the fictional mode is most evident in these early scenes. The impoverished setting of the gandydancers’ bunkhouse seems dead-on, right down to the game of checkers played with Coca-Cola bottle caps. But the small talk that takes place within this realm of studied naturalism, among Duff and his pals Frankie (Leonard Parker) and Jocko (Yaphet Kotto), is stilted. And Duff and Josie’s meeting-cute is awkwardly written, featuring lines of the “Baby, where’d you learn to kiss?” variety. The acting styles of the two leads don’t quite mesh in this scene; Dixon delivers his lines with the slickness of a sitcom regular (which he would become, with the 1965 premiere of Hogan’s Heroes, in which he played Sergeant Kinchloe). It isn’t until Duff grows more sullen and withdrawn that Dixon the actor becomes more expressive.

By contrast, Lincoln delivers in Nothing But a Man that rarest of achievements for singers-turned-actors: an unassuming, utterly unaffected, yet wholly believable performance. Able to convey reservoirs of feeling via the most mundane of mannerisms, she constructs an inner emotional life for a character written as something of a cipher; Josie loves Duff despite her father’s stern disapproval, but all she can offer as her motive is the observation that most of the men she dated before Duff were “kind of sad.” When Duff grows unbearable in his own right, she seems oddly paralyzed. Indeed, her story is put on hold while Roemer and Young try and figure out how to bring Duff’s character arc to a hopeful resolution.

Thankfully, the filmmakers do have a good idea of how to accomplish this. One-third of the way into the film’s running time, they contrive to have Duff—on a day trip to Birmingham to visit his illegitimate four-year-old son—unexpectedly meet up with his father. And with the appearance of the broken-down alcoholic Will Anderson (Julius Harris) and his younger, hardened female companion Lee (the always reliable Gloria Foster), Nothing But a Man‘s emotional core is revealed.

What was previously the story of a young couple coping with married life, set against an unforgiving backdrop of economic deprivation and social degradation, becomes a story about a father’s sins visited upon the son. Again, a familiar tale, yet one that comes alive due to the socio-economic context in which these characters dwell (Will’s Birmingham boarding-house room is almost impossibly slovenly), but also Harris’ indelible performance as a Black man utterly defeated by the system. Unable to hold a job—the almost sole measure of one’s worth for all of the film’s male characters—because of a factory injury, Will withdraws from responsibility, leaving his son and caretaker/companion to pick up the pieces when he finally drinks himself into a coma.

A registered nurse without prior acting experience and encouraged to audition for the filmmakers by Charles Gordone (future Pulitzer winner for the play No Place to Be Somebody), Harris so completely embodies the role of Will—in his whipped posture, in his 100-yard stare, in the graveyard tone of his voice—that he pulls together the film’s melodramatic storyline with the naturalist aesthetic imposed upon it. Like Lincoln, Harris should have had a film career that matched his considerable talent, but the paucity of supporting roles for Black character actors doomed him to relative obscurity; probably few buffs have seen him outside of his teeth-flashing turn as a villain in Live and Let Die (1973). A charming (though regrettably brief) new interview with Harris, now apparently confined to a nursing home, is included among the DVD’s extras, along with newly recorded comments by Dixon, Lincoln, and Roemer and Young. (The other bonus attraction, a segment from an upcoming documentary on Lincoln, is—like the woman herself—utterly beguiling.)

The encounter with his father brings Duff’s quandary into sharp, existential relief. Forced to quit the railroad after he marries Josie, Duff drifts through a series of lower-paying jobs. But his refusal to “act the nigger” in order to get along results in his blacklisting from the local mills just as he receives news of Josie’s pregnancy. From here parallels to his father escalate with tragic force: walking out on his wife and kid(s), wallowing in self-pity and impotent rage. Though nothing happens to suggest that Duff will find meaningful, satisfying work once he returns home, or even that he will remain with his family, his expression, “I feel so free inside,” in the film’s closing scene seems justified. This justification is rooted in the maturity Dixon (finally) finds in the character during Duff’s last exchange with Lee—the two of them framed against a remote cityscape following Will’s desultory funeral service—and in his powerful reconciliations with his son James and, ultimately, a shattered Josie.

The performers carry the burden of communicating a point of view; the mise-en-scène is meticulous but neutral, and the editing and camerawork rarely contribute to our understanding of a character or of the potentially fatal parallels that exist between Will and Duff. In this sense, The Cool World (1964)—the other well-remembered entry in the modest cycle of independently-produced, Black-oriented pictures made during the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement, and an intriguing companion piece to the Roemer film—may be easier for contemporary audiences to understand. As realized by longtime avant-gardist Shirley Clarke, The Cool World, a coming-of-age story about a Harlem street gang, vigorously reflects her quirky, jazz-inflected creative vision. If Clarke is, to paraphrase André Bazin, a filmmaker who puts her faith in the plasticity of the image, Roemer puts his faith in reality, abdicating moral comment and refusing to direct viewers to conclusions.

The absence of any explicit mention of the burgeoning Black protest movement in the South drew a lot of critical comment in 1964. White critics for mainstream publications (Life, Newsweek, Saturday Review), grateful for its seemingly even-handed tone, commended Nothing But a Man‘s “universality.” (Indeed, Roemer did nothing to discourage such a reading; even in the pages of Ebony, he characterized his picture as “the story of many average young couples.”) For some in the African American press, this lack of specificity was cause for condemnation, for it let racist Whites off easy.

But focusing on the real economic effects of racism on people rather than dramatizing flashpoints of the Civil Rights struggle or depicting White brutality is not a mistake; in fact, this is where the film’s strength lies as a statement on race. In his book Interpreting the Moving Image theorist Noël Carroll links the Roemer picture to the Clarke film, labeling them both as works “underwritten by the hope that the documentation and explanation of injustice will move people of good will to eradicate it.” But Roemer seems less naïve than Clarke, whose portrait is characterized by unrelieved misery; in the end her hero, Duke Custis, loses both his lover and his freedom. Roemer proves much more adept than Clarke in elucidating the causes and effects of the “race problem” without tipping over into nihilism. Nothing But a Man remains a fascinating and uplifting document because its makers understood that, as worldviews, candor and hope are not mutually exclusive.

Images Journal [Chris Norton] Black Independent Cinema and the Influence of Neo-Realism

iNFLUX Magazine [Randy Krinsky]

Nothing But a Man - Archive - Reverse Shot Ashley Clark, March 5, 2015

Nothing but a Man: This Is(n't) a Man's World | Village Voice Nick Pinkerton, November 7, 2012

Nothing But a Man: Roemer Directs Abbey Lincoln in Malcolm X's ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, October 8, 2014

The Brooklyn Rail: Katie Rogin December 10, 2012

The Best Jewish Director You've Never Heard Of – The Forward Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 31, 2013, also seen here: Michael Roemer: The Man Who Knew Too Much | Jonathan Rosenbaum

MoMA | Michael Roemer's Nothing but a Man Charles Silver, March 11, 2014

Michael Roemer | News | The Harvard Crimson William H. Smock from The Harvard Crimson, March 4, 1965

Nothing But a Man | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jaime N. Christley

DVD of the Week: “Nothing But a Man” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 22, 2013

Lisa Smith review

DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [40th Anniversary Edition] Nicholas Sheffo

digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review

Black Classic Movies | Ivan Dixon

Cult Vault #22: Michael Roemer on Nothing But a Man | Dazed Carmen Gray

All Movie Guide [Tom Wiener]

Nothing But a Man Black Classic Movies

Nothing But A Man Docurama Films

Nothing But a Man 1964: Movie and film review from Answers.com information page

Director Michael Roemer on his seminal 60s drama Nothing But a ... Emma Brockes interview from The Guardian, October 1, 2013

Film4 [Jamie Russell]

Time Out New York: David Fear

Nothing But a Man – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

The Boston Phoenix: Michael Atkinson January 08, 2013, also seen here: The Boston Phoenix

Washington Post (Desson Howe) review

Baltimore City Paper (Heather Joslyn) review

Laramie Movie Scope Patrick Ivers

Nothing But A Man Movie Review (1993) | Roger Ebert

New Life for a 1964 Film - NYTimes.com Vicki Vasilopoulos from The New York Times, November 14, 2004

Ivan Dixon, 76, Actor In 'Hogan's Heroes' Obituary by Dennis Hevesi from The New York Times, March 20, 2008

Nothing But a Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY

USA (81 mi) 1989

The Plot Against Harry | Film Society of Lincoln Center

Rejected by confused Columbia Pictures execs in 1970, Michael Roemer’s The Plot Against Harry spent two decades lying in wait before being resurrected to great acclaim—and becoming a selection of the 1989 New York Film Festival. Small-time Jewish racketeer Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) is freshly released from prison to find his barely legitimate business struggling to keep afloat. Roemer’s film features a priceless cast, deadpan sense of humor, and and a wonderful sad-sack turn by Priest, while capturing a lost world of the Bronx in the mid-Sixties: call girls, maudlin suburbanites, Mafioso street toughs, bar mitzvahs, and all.

The Plot Against Harry, directed by Michael Roemer | Film ... - Time Out

Described by the Village Voice as 'a deadpan, post-Jarmusch comedy made when Jarmusch was still in grammar school', shot on the streets in black-and-white with sly camera movements and naturalistic sound, Roemer's film is comedy out of cinéma-vérité. It looks and feels like Jarmusch, a seriously oblique, cool look at Jewish aspirations and social morality: this perhaps explains why it was shelved until 1989, since no one in 1970 thought it merited release. A two-bit New York Jewish racketeer, Harry Plotnick is released after a l2-month 'vacation' to find his affairs in disarray. The Mob has muscled in on his turf, the tax man is auditing his books, a parole officer is hovering, and his sister's staying over...all this before Harry has even crashed into his ex-wife's car and met a daughter he didn't know he had. It may sound frantic, but in fact the plot takes a back seat to ironic observation. Through it all wanders Martin Priest's magnificently nonplussed Harry, an outsider stoically trying to work his way back in.

Rolling Stone [Peter Travers]

There is little joy in the life of Harry Plotnick. He is a low-level hoodlum, a banker for a numbers game in a New York neighborhood that was once Jewish but is now largely Hispanic and black - a neighborhood where he was once a big frog but is now without a pond. Is his numbers empire dissolving as part of a plot against him? Not really, but for Harry so many things are going wrong in so many different ways that life itself seems like a conspiracy aimed at him.

Maybe everybody else got up earlier than he did today to attend a meeting on how they were all going to screw him.

As "The Plot Against Harry" opens, Harry (Martin Priest) has just been released after serving a short prison sentence. He is met by Max (Henry Nemo), his loyal chauffeur and bookkeeper, but as he returns to the old neighborhood he finds that he has to use a Chinese restaurant owner as an interpreter to even understand what his Spanish-speaking lieutenants are trying to say to him. Even more ominously, the mob seems ready to turn over his numbers business to a black man.

Harry regards these development with sad, tired eyes with large bags beneath them. He rarely smiles. Life has lost the ability to astonish him - until one day he almost has a traffic accident with a car - which turns out to contain his ex-wife, his ex-brother-in-law and a daughter he has never known. Life is amazing. He even has another daughter, he discovers, that he knew nothing about.

Now events begin to overtake Harry. He is plunged into a social whirl: One daughter is expecting, and the other is a lingerie model with a fiancee and wedding plans. His brother-in-law (Ben Lang) owns a catering business and might want to take in a partner with some ready cash. His ex-wife is part of a respectable circle that includes an executive for the Heart Fund. Can Harry buy into this middle-class normality? Certainly he seems uncomfortable with the mob, where he is such small potatoes that when he testifies before a congressional crime commission, the members lose interest when they realize he knows almost nothing.

"The Plot Against Harry" is one of those comedies with a sprung rhythm, so that the jokes pay off by working against themselves. It's a film that makes its points through its observation of human nature, especially in such scenes as a charity benefit on a subway train, and a wedding. The writer and director, Michael Roemer, doesn't build his payoffs by the boring formula of setup and punch line, but by gradually revealing the dilemma that Harry finds himself in. Even the film's big moments (like the inspired scene where Harry passes out on camera at a telethon) get their laughs because of the deliberate steps by which Roemer paints the situation.

In a sense, this is filmmaking in the Robert Altman style: The camera plunges into the middle of a group of people who seem to carry on as if they're oblivious to it. They aren't playing to the camera, and the screenplay isn't aimed at the audience. Instead, the people seem strange, funny and unique all on their own, and the audience is invited to share the filmmaker's delight as he discovers this.

The behind-the-scenes story of "The Plot Against Harry" is by now well-known. The movie was completed in 1970, but at the time it was unable to find distribution; Hollywood didn't think it was funny. It waited on a shelf for 20 years, until Roemer decided to transfer it to video to show to his children. The video technician started to laugh as he watched it. A curiosity stirred within Roemer: Could the movie possibly be good, after all? He submitted it to the Toronto, New York and Park City film festivals, where audiences were enthusiastic, and now he has commercial distribution, two decades later.

That adds a certain poignancy to the whole enterprise. If you see the film, pay particular attention to the performances by Martin Priest as Harry, and Ben Lang as the forever-smiling brother-in-law. They have a genuinely, intrinsically amusing quality. Priest has acted only occasionally in the last 20 years, and Lang not at all (he went back to his job as an auditor for the state). Would their careers have happened differently if this movie had been seen in 1970? Would the movie have been a hit then? Was it ahead of its time? (Altman's revolutionary "MASH" came out the same year.) Who can say? What can be said is that this time capsule from 1970 feels, in 1990, like a jolt of fresh air.

No Stars: A Must-See [THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 9, 1990

The Best Jewish Director You've Never Heard Of – The Forward Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 31, 2013, also seen here: Michael Roemer: The Man Who Knew Too Much | Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Plot Against Harry Nate Myers from digitallyOBSESSED

DVD Savant Review: The Plot Against Harry - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson

The Plot Against Harry - The New Yorker

The Plot Against Harry Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com

The Plot Against Harry | Variety

THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY - Cleveland International Film Festival ...

MICHAEL ROEMER: Unraveling 'The Plot Against Harry' - latimes Susan King

Movie Review - - FILM FESTIVAL: IN THE US, A RETURN TO THE 60'S Janet Maslin from The New York Times , also seen here: FILM - Belatedly, the 'Plot Against Harry' Hatches - The New York Times

The Plot Against Harry - Wikipedia

The Plot Against Harry - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

CHILDREN OF FATE: LIFE AND DEATH IN A SICILIAN FAMILY

USA (85 mi) 1993

Two generations of American filmmakers consider the pernicious legacy of poverty in "Children of Fate," a skillful portrait of a Palermo slum-dweller and her emotionally crippled descendants. Subtitled "Life and Death in a Sicilian Family," the film is actually two documentaries -- the first a cult classic directed by Michael Roemer and Robert Young in 1961, the second a sequel shot 30 years later by Young's grown son, Andrew.

Each on its own is a powerful study of destitution, but together they become so much deeper and sociologically relevant. As with Michael Apted's series of films ("7 Up" etc.) about a generation of British schoolchildren, the Young family's film has been aided by history. The years have passed, yes, but time has made fewer inroads on the subjects' character than we might expect. And "Children of Fate," like Apted's "35-Up," comes to a fairly frightening conclusion -- one avoided in Hollywood fiction: We don't find it easy to change.

Andrew Young was 2 years old when his father made "Cortile Cascino," a black-and-white film named for a squalid Palermo ghetto, where toddlers waded in sewers and little boys picked rags for a few lire. In those days, neighbors fought each other for scraps of food and the chance to rinse their bare feet in the single fountain that served 300. The Mafia did a good business in tiny white coffins in Cortile Cascino, which earned the nickname "the well of despair" because so many little ones died there. Scheduled to air on NBC-TV, the senior Young's neo-realist work was never broadcast, presumably because the network thought it too harsh for tender U.S. audiences. Then again, there was the matter of some staged footage, and in 1961 NBC apparently still had journalistic principles. Then, in the late '80s, Britain's Channel 4 expressed interest in reviving "Cortile Cascino" along with a 10-minute introduction by Andrew Young and his journalist wife, Susan Todd.

The couple, documentary filmmakers with an interest in cultural survival, saw an opportunity to continue the saga of the film's sad-eyed protagonist, Angela Capra. A survivor in spite of her defeatism, Angela narrates the earlier footage, which shows her as a 23-year-old mother of three with a fourth child on the way. Over the course of the film, she reveals that her husband, Luigi, was a vain, abusive layabout, who like many of his drinking buddies never worked at anything but making bruises and babies.

"The men always found a way to pass the time, but inside they were empty and sad because they felt they were nothing," recalls Angela, now a 53-year-old whose thickening waist attests to her more comfortable lifestyle, in Todd and Young's update. Not that she forgives Luigi, whom she finally left after 28 years.

The filmmakers caught up with Angela in Ragusa, a more pastoral region of Sicily where she keeps a tidy little house and enjoys regular visits with her four grown kids. Life is better, but neither she nor her kids are free of the past, as is distressingly clear in the new color footage. Angela continues to swipe pasta from her employer -- "it's too much for one" -- even though she's no longer starving. But it's hard to condemn her when you've seen her lose one tot to malnutrition.

Angela, whose life has been but a litany of losses, is remarkably open with Todd and Young, allowing them to film the last days and hours of her eldest daughter, 34-year-old Anna. Though dying of lung cancer, Anna smokes as an IV drips into her arm. Even more horribly, she offers a couple of drags to her daughter, effectively handing on her habit and perhaps the addiction to despair that lies behind it.

Though Angela prostituted herself to give her kids better lives, they are all too obviously the children of despair. None of them has attended school, and two have served time for crimes of various kinds. All but one -- a young son who cleans apartments with his wife -- are unemployed. It was meant to be, say the Capras, one and all. "If a person is destined to live an awful life, I don't think there is anything he can do about it," says 31-year-old Tortucco, who mistakes hopelessness for the will of the gods.

But then hopelessness was his birthright. It was handed down as surely as Robert Young's interest in taking pictures of people in need.

"Children of Fate: Life and Death in a Sicilian Family" is unrated and is in English and Italian with English subtitles.

The Official Lionel Rogosin Website

Rogosin, Lionel

Lionel Rogosin Profile - TCM.com David Sterritt

Lionel Rogosin was a pioneer of docudrama, a filmmaker with a passion for social progress, an American thinker committed to global understanding, and an industry outsider seeking new ways of producing, distributing, and exhibiting movies. He was undervalued in his lifetime and remains so today, but his contributions to American cinema were important and unique, and in recent years his films have started getting some of the attention they richly deserve.

Rogosin grew up on Long Island and studied chemical engineering before entering the textile industry, where his Soviet-immigrant father had prospered. He left the business world because he wanted to participate in public conversations about international issues like apartheid in South Africa and pacifism in the nuclear age. In the early 1960s he bought a theater in downtown Manhattan and turned it into the celebrated Bleecker Street Cinema, showing his own 1959 movie Come Back, Africa as its first attraction.

Convinced that American film could thrive outside the money-driven Hollywood studios, Rogosin joined with Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Rudy Burckhardt, and other mavericks to form the New American Cinema Group, an organization of experimental filmmakers. So large were the obstacles they faced that despite his remarkable energy and organizational skills, Rogosin managed to complete only ten shorts and features during his career, all made between 1957 and 1974.

Although he wasn't a prolific filmmaker, Rogosin was a dedicated and respected one. The great producer-director Basil Wright, a legendary figure in British cinema, saw reflections of Fyodor Dostoevsky's mighty novels in Rogosin's first film, On the Bowery (1956), a fiction-documentary hybrid about New York's notorious skid row. Martin Scorsese, who grew up near the Bowery in Little Italy, also praised Rogosin's depiction, calling it a completely truthful rendering of what he had seen with his own eyes, both on the street and from the windows of his family's apartment. Scorsese also applauded Rogosin's second feature, Come Back, Africa, as a work of "terrible beauty," and John Cassavetes said that Rogosin was "probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time." These are glowing words from filmmakers who recognized that Rogosin was fully as gifted, if considerably less famous, than themselves.

Rogosin decided to make his first movie about the Bowery because the place embodied the kind of social problem - known about everywhere yet ignored by public-policy makers - that he wanted to expose and explore. Named after its most important street, which is the oldest roadway in Manhattan, this district had flourished in colonial times but then gone badly downhill. By the time Rogosin arrived there it was a full-fledged slum, inhabited mostly by "Bowery bums" who staggered down its sidewalks and slept through alcoholic stupors in its alleys. Spending time with residents, transients, and drifters in the area's streets and saloons, Rogosin became intimately acquainted with local moods and personalities; he also got connected with a writer and a cinematographer who shared his aspiration to make movies that could change society for the better. Together they set about erasing the boundaries between fiction and documentary, basing their story on the lives of the people they'd met and then recruiting those people to play characters in the film.

They shot the picture over three months in 1955, etching an unsentimental portrait of a handsome young worker named Ray (Ray Salyer) who lands in the Bowery and sets about satisfying his need for alcohol. The other main character is a wino named Gorman (Gorman Hendricks) who helps Ray sell his clothing after his cash has disappeared, then steals Ray's remaining possessions and leaves him to fend for himself. Like the film's other performers, the actors playing Ray and Gorman were denizens of the Bowery with experiences like those of the characters they played; some scenes were staged, but everything was shot on location. Unlike most documentary filmmakers today, Rogosin felt that trying to capture something as big and complicated as a community in a completely nonfictional film could produce only a stale and limited version of reality. Yet while it isn't a "pure" nonfiction production like those of, say, Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles brothers, On the Bowery was honored by the British Academy Awards and the Venice Film Festival as best documentary, and it was nominated for the Academy Award in that category.

Rogosin visited a different kind of depressed community in his next feature, Come Back, Africa. This time the filming was done with hidden cameras and stealthy tactics in Sophiatown, a nonwhite ghetto near Johannesburg, the most populous city in South Africa, which was then ruled by the infamous apartheid system of legally enforced racial oppression. Sophiatown was being demolished by the South African government at the time, as part of a rebuilding project that subjected the black, mixed-race, Chinese, and Indian inhabitants to even more misery than usual. Rogosin went there and conferred with local artists and intellectuals, soliciting ideas for the screenplay and assembling a racially diverse cast.

The finished film centers on a Zulu worker named Zachariah (Zachariah Mgabi) who comes to the gold mines outside Johannesburg looking for work. Later he moves to the city and gets arrested for violating the "pass laws," and finally returns home to find that his wife, Vinah (Vinah Makeba), has been killed by a black hoodlum. The film ends with a heartrending cry of rage over the incessant struggle black South Africans must go through under apartheid, which assaults them with contempt and hatred every day of their lives.

Come Back, Africa and On the Bowery are generally regarded as Rogosin's best pictures, but others are worthwhile as well. The hour-long Black Roots is a lively 1970 documentary about African-American blues and folk music. Out, a 1957 short written by the renowned author and journalist John Hersey, was sponsored by the United Nations Film Board, which asked Rogosin to publicize the barriers faced by Hungarians seeking refuge in Austria after the Hungarian Revolution, which had been stamped out by the Soviet Union a year earlier. Good Times, Wonderful Times, an antiwar feature completed in 1966, contrasts a pretentious cocktail party (partly staged, partly real) with horrific images of modern combat. This film does for warfare what On the Bowery does for alcoholism and Come Back, Africa does for racism, sensitively diagnosing a seemingly intractable disease of the human spirit.

Rogosin's period of active filmmaking ended with the forty-minute documentary Arab Israeli Dialogue in 1974, more than twenty-five years before his death. What his body of work lacks in extensiveness, however, it more than compensates for with its quality, ingenuity, and unshakeable commitment to cinema as a force for good and an engine of social change. At once a sociologist, an ethnographer, and an artist, Rogosin was a unique commentator and invaluable observer of the world we all share.

The Official Lionel Rogosin Website :: Biography

Lionel Rogosin | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Sandra Brennan biography

Lionel Rogosin – African Film Festival Inc. brief bio

Obituary: Lionel Rogosin | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan, December 15, 2000

Lionel Rogosin | Variety Obituary by Nick Attanasio, January 3, 2001

American Neorealism: Lionel Rogosin's Docs Reconsidered ... Ron Sutton from Documentary, March 1, 2012

On the Bowery & Come Back, Africa (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... David Sterritt, Summer 2012

Indie Giant Lionel Rogosin: An Interview With James Mackay - Take One James Walpole interviews James Mackay, organizer of a recent Rogosin Retrospective, from Take One, September 2, 2014

Lionel Rogosin (1924 - 2000) - Find A Grave Memorial

Lionel Rogosin - Wikipedia

ON THE BOWERY

USA (65 mi) 1956

Chicago Reader [J.R. Jones]

On the Bowery (1957), Lionel Rogosin's landmark film about skid row in Manhattan, was nominated for an Oscar in the category of best documentary. If the same thing happened today there would surely be an uproar, because the movie is partly scripted and staged. Rogosin, an affluent businessman making his first film, was inspired by Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948) to create something of real immediacy that would blur the line between drama and documentary. Hanging around the Bowery, he recruited three down-and-outers—Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, and Frank Matthews—to improvise a simple story line in which Salyer attempts to sober up and get back on his feet. Much of the screen time, however, goes to real-life footage of the Bowery's lost souls as they slug down the booze and stagger around the streets. With its harsh locations, ravaged faces, and plainspoken performances, On the Bowery galvanized a generation of New York independent filmmakers, most notably John Cassavetes.

A restored print of the movie screened a year ago at Gene Siskel Film Center, along with an excellent making-of documentary by Rogosin's son, Michael, called The Perfect Team. Now both titles have been anthologized in a two-DVD set from Milestone Film & Video, On the Bowery: The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Vol I. Though Rogosin died in 2000, The Perfect Team includes several interviews with him—one broadcast on NBC's Today Show in March 1957, when he was 33, and a few more conducted in the late 90s by film professor Marina Goldovskya—and he proves to be smart, wise, and disarmingly candid. As the video reveals, some of the filmmakers were pretty heavy drinkers themselves; they bonded with their subjects by getting blasted with them, and eventually Rogosin had to fight the drunken chaos that was his subjects' daily lot. Just as the movie dissolved the line between fact and fiction, the process of making it began to dissolve the line between the artist and his subject.

Born in 1924, Rogosin earned a degree in chemical engineering at Yale and spent three years in the navy on a minesweeper before going into his father's rayon business. In the Goldovskya interviews he remembers his eagerness to capture the real world on film: "We just came through the Holocaust, which was insane. Something's wrong. I have to find out—with my camera." Rosalind Kossoff, a noted distributor of art films, urged him to observe his subject carefully before introducing a camera into the equation, and after deciding the Bowery was a dramatic topic Rogosin spent about six months roaming the bars, missions, and flophouses of skid row. Gradually he made contact with a half-dozen men who would contribute to the film, and he'd invite them over to his Greenwich Village apartment to drink. Ray Salyer, who became the film's protagonist, was a ruggedly handsome 40-year-old from Kentucky who drifted around the country, working for the railroads; 64-year-old Gorman Hendricks, who played his antagonist, claimed to have been an MD before he took to drink.

Rogosin admits he was hitting the bottle pretty hard himself during this period, and quite naturally the collaborators he sought out were people who could relate to the subject. He went out drinking with the great writer and film critic James Agee and persuaded him to script the movie, but when he tried to follow up, he learned that Agee had died of a heart attack at age 45. Rogosin hired screenwriter Mark Sufrin after meeting him at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, and Sufrin persuaded him to enlist cinematographer Richard Bagley, who had shot the Oscar-nominated documentary The Quiet One (1948). "It fit like a glove for him," Rogosin recalls. "He was practically on the Bowery himself." The shoot began as pure cinema verite, but the men quickly concluded that they needed a story and hammered out a script in one evening. Using the men's real names and experiences, the movie would follow Salyer as he arrived on the Bowery, went on a drunk, cleaned up at the local rescue mission, and soon fell back into the gutter.

On the Bowery runs only 65 minutes, but by the end you can feel skid row in your bones. The credits are followed by a two-minute establishing sequence of men drunk on the street: one sleeps on the curb, his coat rolled up like a pillow; another lounges in a pushcart, leafing through a copy of Esquire; yet another tries valiantly to sit up, can't quite get his balance, and lies back down. Rogosin urged Bagley to model his imagery on Rembrandt's portraits, and in the movie the filmmakers manage to zero in on the humanity of every wrecked face. One of the more stunning sequences takes place in a mission church, where men listen impassively to a sermon in exchange for a free meal and a bed for the night; as the camera pans over them, their faces are a gallery of hardship and hopelessness. The portraiture grows frightening in the climactic bar scene, a late-night "orgy" (as Rogosin later characterized it) expertly edited by Carl Lerner (12 Angry Men): men knock back shots, drool on themselves, nod off over tables littered with empty glasses, and reel around picking fights with each other.

Set against this backdrop, the hero's desire to get off skid row couldn't seem more imperative. Ray Salyer arrives on the Bowery having earned a small stake laying railroad tracks in New Jersey, but the first thing he does is install himself at a bar and spring for a bottle to treat his newfound friends. The best of them, Gorman Hendricks, turns out to be an enemy in disguise: no sooner has Ray passed out drunk than Gorman absconds with his suitcase. The arc of this compromised friendship is the real heart of the movie; Gorman isn't so much a bad man as one who refuses to believe either of them is any good. At the end of the movie, when Ray wants to leave town and build up another stake in Chicago, Gorman snaps, "I've only said that about a thousand times." The younger man replies, "You've got me by a couple of years—I've only said it about eight hundred."

The most striking scenes in On the Bowery may be those in the mission, not only for the haunting montage described above but also for two vivid minor characters: the minister giving the nightly sermon and the jaded mission supervisor. They're real people too, and clearly they needed no rehearsal. Reverend George L. Bolton identifies himself as a former drunkard who's spent the last 28 years "endeavoring to tell men that there are no hopeless cases with God." None of them "started out with a life ambition to end up in a drunkard's grave. And yet that might happen to some person here, this very day." His lilting voice is soon dispelled by the no-nonsense cadences of the supervisor, who informs the men that, in order to get a bed, they'll have to stay in all night, take a bath, shave, and clean their clothes. "Now listen, when you come in here, you leave the booze outside!" he orders. "Forget all about Sneaky Pete. He's a thing of the past with you. When you come in here, stay sober!" After the promised beds run out and the remaining men begin spreading newspaper on the floor, Ray balks and returns to the bar.

Rogosin, Sufrin, and Bagley started shooting in July 1955 and continued for three months, the project complicated by the challenges of making a movie on the streets of New York City, dealing with police, coaxing performances from amateur actors, and handling extras who were drinking. Gorman Hendricks was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and told that another binge would kill him, though he promised Rogosin to stay sober for the shoot. The director fell into the habit of eating dinner every night with Bagley, drinking with him until 4 AM, and then shooting the next morning. "I was always alright," Rogosin claims. "He was drinking an awful lot, and he wasn't so strong. And so he was very shaky." Around this time, Rogosin reveals, he dreamed he was alcoholic. "I woke up later and thought, 'Oh my God. I've gotta be careful. . . . I can't get sucked into this vortex with all the others.'" Vortex was right: after the shoot ended Hendricks went on a bender that killed him, and Bagley would die six years later at age 41.

On the Bowery would go on to become Rogosin's most famous film, though he completed several more projects (the new DVD set includes Out, about Hungarian refugees in Austria, and the feature-length antiwar film Good Times, Wonderful Times) and for many years operated the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village. A compassionate man, he took responsibility for the men he'd pulled off the street to help him. He saved Hendricks from a drunkard's grave by paying for his burial in Linden, New Jersey. Gerda Lerner, the widow of editor Carl Lerner, relates in The Perfect Team that Rogosin considered Ray Salyer a natural actor and offered to pay for his rehabilitation. Salyer received several offers but couldn't handle the responsibility; in the end he hopped a freight train and was never heard from again. For Lionel Rogosin, who wanted to use his camera to find out what was wrong with the world, the hardest thing about filmmaking may have been knowing when to yell cut.

On the Bowery & Come Back, Africa (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... David Sterritt, Summer 2012

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD feature: On the Bowery () Nick Bradshaw from Sight and Sound, December 20, 2011

A Drinking Life: On the Bowery | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz

Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]

Wasted Downtown: A Restored On the Bowery | Village Voice Michael Atkinson, September 15, 2010

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel

Lionel Rogosin's 'On the Bowery' (1956) | PopMatters Michael Barrett, February 20, 2012

New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]

American Neorealism: Lionel Rogosin's Docs Reconsidered ... Ron Sutton from Documentary, March 1, 2012

http://documentaries.about.com/od/revie2/fr/On-The-Bowery-Movie-Review-1957-Restored-2012.htm Jennifer Merin from About.com

When the Bowery was Skid Row: Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery ... Teri Tynes from Walking Off the Big Apple, September 21, 2010

Remembering the Bowery Before it was Hip | Village Voice Tony Ortega, June 3, 2010

'From Mae West to Punk: The Bowery on Film' Is a Don't ... - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl, May 14, 2014

On The Bowery: The Films Of Lionel Rogosin, Volume 1 · Dvd Review ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club

Cagey Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George Godwin

Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray) [Michael Reuben]

DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: On the Bowery Glenn Erickson

On The Bowery - The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Vol. 1 (Blu-ray) : DVD ... Jamie S. Rich from DVD Talk

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Budd Wilkins]

The Village Voice [Dan Balaban] July 3, 1957 (pdf)

Wide World of Warhol | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 9, 2007

Flickers in Time [Bea Soila]

On the Bowery - Reviews links to various reviews

Movie review: 'On the Bowery' - latimes Kenneth Turan

On the Bowery - Wikipedia

Lionel Rogosin's 'On the Bowery' on Blu-ray - The New York Times February 24, 2012

On The Bowery - The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Vol. 1 Blu-ray DVDBeaver

Complete National Film Registry Listing - National Film Preservation ...

COME BACK, AFRICA B 87

USA South Africa (95 mi) 1959 Official site

When the sun sets,

and the cattle come back

I think of you.

The sun sets and the moon rises

on the horizon of the sea.

When the birds come back

and the sun sets.

And I went looking for you

in the houses and streets

and even in the hospitals and jails.

I will look for you until I find you.

When the sun sets

and the cattle come back,

I think about you.

When the sun sets.

—Miriam Makeba, Lakutshon Ilanga YouTube (2:21)

COME BACK, AFRICA is a curious film, as it’s really a composite of at least two films, one black and one white, also one shot outside on the streets, using a using a guerrilla, shot-on-the-fly, cinéma vérité style that couldn’t be more vibrant and alive, and another rather amateurishly shot indoors with a fictionalized script written by two young anti-apartheid South African writers Lewis Nkosi and William Bloke Modisane (who also appear in the film as Lewis and Bloke) set in the harsh, historical reality of apartheid in Johannesburg, South Africa. While this may exhibit initial signs of Haskell Wexler’s distinctive style developed later in MEDIUM COOL (1969), a much more successful attempt to blend history into cinema, the existence of apartheid remained largely unseen by most of the international world, so shining a spotlight directly upon a matter of national secrecy is of major historical importance. Supposedly filmed in secret using lightweight and portable equipment by a white American filmmaker on a tourist visa, Rogosin, who lived in the country for a year, obtained permits to shoot travelogue style footage promoting South African tourism and the celebratory music in the country. Inspired by Italian neorealism, Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922), and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930), Rogosin decided to make films that expressed his political activism, dramatizing the plight of the oppressed. Despite winning the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1960, this film could find no distribution in America, the same problem he encountered after the release of his first film ON THE BOWERY (1956), which documents New York’s skid row, forcing the director to actually purchase a New York City theater, which he re-named the Bleeker Street Cinema in order to exhibit controversial films, including his own works. The documentary style time capsule photos shot by Ernst Artaria and Emil Knebel are what makes this film so historically riveting, as they strip away any dramatic pretense and instead offer a vivid sense of urgency, magnifying the contrast between the squalor of the endlessly flat, dilapidated, all-black shantytown of Sophiatown and the prosperous and economically booming, skyscraper filled all-white city of Johannesburg.

While the alluring images of nearly all-black workers racing from the heavily packed trains into the streets on their way to work in Johannesburg, accompanied by native drum beats on the soundtrack, offer another startling contrast, as this harrowing life in a virtual white city is so alien to the natural inclinations of blacks coming from the townships. One of the workers is Zacharia Mgabi, an anonymously chosen black from Zululand, who immediately sets out looking for work and attempts to join a massive group of blacks working in the mines, but soon discovers you need a work permit to work as well as live in Johannesburg. Nonetheless, there are interesting images training the miners how to use pick axes and shovels, where the black instructor literally breaks out into an expressive dance as he attempts to show how it’s all about rhythm and motion. Zacharia eventually finds a wealthy white couple looking for a “house boy,” where the wife, Myrtle Berman (all the whites in the film are played by political activists), literally harangues him from the start, claiming his name “won’t do,” so she calls him Jack, but soon enough resorts to insults, calling him a dumb and ignorant native, supposedly an educated woman whose merciless hatred becomes the theme of the film, as in a worked up state of venomous rage Zacharia is fired as quickly as he’s hired, where the hostile reflections of the white employer are a stand-in for the nation’s demeaningly racist view of blacks. Using non-professional actors, the film is not without major flaws, as the fictional dramatizations within the film feel raw and unrehearsed, often uncomfortably out of place with reality, where the lifeless energy saps the mood established from the intensity of the documentary imagery. Zacharia spends his days moving from mine to dusty mine in nearby Soweto or seeking domestic work in Johannesburg, returning afterwards to Sophiatown, where he’s but one of thousands of others doing exactly the same thing, where he encounters the moral corruption even among blacks, where he’s robbed and hassled and later beat up by gang leaders, discovering people are desperate enough to do anything, it seems, for money.

As vital as the imagery is, it’s the interspersed music by Chatur Lal that energizes the film with a pulsating life, where among the most stunning images are the various street musicians that line the streets of Johannesburg, where often crowds of whites would gather just to watch, as young black children would perform in groups, from drums and penny whistlers to the elaborate choral rhythms and dance movements of township music, to an incredible doo wop version of Elvis Presley’s “Teddy Bear” Elvis Presley - (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear YouTube (1:47). Zacharia spends his evenings commiserating with others in similar dire predicaments, alone and away from their families, making too little money to send home, which was their purpose in coming there, occasionally leading to late night sessions drinking or arguing about religion, where in one of these sessions a very young Miriam Makeba shows up, also a resident of Sophiatown, and sings two songs in their entirety Come back, Africa : Miriam Makeba, both songs on YouTube (4:45), a haunting lullaby “Lakutshon llanga,” while others join in a more rousing second number providing that rhythmic foundation to her soaring voice Miriam Makeba sings "Into Yam" from COME BACK, AFRICA ... YouTube (2:07). Despite the violence and poverty, Sophiatown was the hub of major black cultural activity, from music to artists and intellectuals, but it was eventually demolished a year after the filming by the government under apartheid, the residents displaced back to the townships, and the name changed to Triomf (Triumph) to make way for the development of white neighborhood housing. As it turned out, too few whites wanted to live there, becoming something of an embarrassing eyesore, where in another 45 years, the name would be changed back to Sophiatown in 2006. Eventually Zacharia sends for his wife Vinah (Vinah Bendile) and young son, living in a one-roomed home, where their troubled son tends to hang out with other kids on the street, even if all they do is continually get into fights. But as work opportunities dry up, where blacks are routinely fired on the word of disgruntled or selfishly cruel whites, their hopes vanish along with them, joining the ranks of the impoverished and the destitute. It’s hard enough for a man alone in a hostile environment, but this film makes it clear how much more difficult it is to attempt to raise a family while the laws of apartheid make it near impossible to stay together, leading to a finale that is so relentlessly downbeat and hopeless, all that’s left is a seething inner rage about to boil over into uncontrollable violence.

Early activist filmmaker Lionel Rogosin was able to film this powerful 1960 apartheid drama on location in South Africa by telling the authorities he was making a musical. Using many nonprofessional actors, the film focuses on the story of a black man named Zacariah who looks unsuccessfully for a steady job in Johannesburg.

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Rogosin's docudrama was an early exposé of the evils of apartheid, filmed clandestinely and using a non-professional cast who portray a typical township family, separated by law and drifting through a series of menial jobs until a single infringement (i.e. man and wife share a night together) leads to a singularly bleak denouement. Although the film has considerable weaknesses - principally on the narrative level of performance, and the need to spell everything out in the manner of a social science course (this last, an entirely understandable decision for 1959) - its power comes from the location filming of the township, which might have been shot today. This township - Sophiatown - was once the only place in South Africa where blacks could own freehold properties. The area was demolished and became a white suburb called Triumph.

Chicago Reader Ben Sachs

Shot clandestinely in Johannesburg with a nonprofessional cast, this 1959 feature by director Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery) is an extraordinary document of black life under apartheid. Even the scripted dialogue scenes have the immediacy of a newsreel; it's the rare movie where the lapses in technical sophistication actually add to the feeling of authenticity. The main character is a poor miner who goes to Johannesburg in search of a better job, only to be tossed out by one callous employer after another. Rogosin notes the specifics of his daily struggle—such as the process of securing permits both to live and work in the city—and he's no less observant of the vibrant social life of the shantytown where he ends up living. The movie contains several joyous musical performances that are as revealing as the overtly political sequences. In English and subtitled Afrikaans.

User comments from imdb Author: skillz govender from South Africa

Lionel Rogosin in co-operation with the staff of the iconic Drum magazine of the 1950's create an accurate and unbiased portrayal of township life in South Africa under apartheid. Written by Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane and starring a collection of South Africa's brightest black urban stars of the fifties, this film broke new ground in the manner in which it showcased African urban identity and the hardships and realities of township life in the magical place known as Sophiatown. Rogosin had entered South Africa and shot this film under false pretences while constantly being hounded by strict apartheid legislature. Sophiatown was destroyed by the apartheid government in 1957 and replaced by the white suburb triomf (triump). This film is one of the few documents left that survive a township where black, white, Indian and coloured residents lived together decades before the 'rainbow nation' ideology of modern day South Africa.

Slant Magazine Bill Weber

The miracle of Lionel Rogosin's apartheid drama Come Back, Africa isn't that it's a solid, affecting artifact of a cruel society, but that it exists at all. In the wake of his debut film, the New York skid-row chronicle On the Bowery, Rogosin set out in 1957 for Johannesburg, and for months laid the groundwork for surreptitiously shooting a follow-up that would lay bare the pain and humiliations of black South Africans subjugated by the white majority, enlisting native writers Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane to collaborate on the scenario. Mixing documentary-like footage with scripted scenes as he had in his first feature, the filmmaker heavily features music and dance by throngs of street performers, a diegetically captured salve for the wounds of extreme poverty and social oppression—and an ideal camouflage of his critical agenda from the South African authorities, who were persuaded that he was assembling a musical or a travelogue. Its narrative spine the unhappy emigration of rural villager Zachariah (Zacharia Mgabi) to the big city, which is often characterized by montages of forbidding skyscrapers or smoke-belching refineries, the film has its aesthetic shortfalls (the nonprofessional cast and fly-by-night production values let the seams show), but fulfills its goal of presenting this time and place in all its vibrancy and sorrow through atmospheric scenes of real daily life and labor.

In his battered cap and frayed jacket, Mgabi's bumpkin learns from fellow itinerants upon his arrival in Johannesburg that securing an urban job without a slew of permits is nearly impossible. Before long, he's contracted to work in the outlying gold mines, where the location shots of blasting, digging, drilling, and a nighttime parade of lamp-burning helmets counter the placid simplicity of Zachariah reading out a letter he composes to the wife (Vinah Bendile), who has yet to join him. His mining work ended, quickly moving through unsuccessful city jobs such as houseboy, car washer, and waiter due to suspicious or abusive employers ("cheeky" is among the least incendiary slurs that meet any black's response to an accusation), and in danger of being set upon by violent hoods in the township where he settles, Zachariah takes comfort in a sort of speakeasy where one of Come Back, Africa's most compelling scenes takes place. A number of local intellectuals drink while debating the black man's station in existential and political terms, one among them (Can Themba) wearily refusing to blame a gangster for his lifelong brutishness because "We live in a world of violence," and dismissing salvation through art or religion because "human nature stinks!" Such alcohol-fueled social discourse is mysteriously liberating to the uneducated Zachariah: "I don't understand it, but I like it."

This speakeasy tableau is capped by the then-unknown singing legend Miriam Makeba, who joins the men and serenades them with a pair of casual, lilting tunes before the party dissolves. It's typical of Rogosin's method of sharing what he saw in and around Johannesburg: despair and long-suppressed anger not extinguished, but made bearable by song and other forms of physical self-determination, from child penny-whistlers in the streets of Soweto to improvised drumming jams around strolling newlyweds. His crowd scenes of black commuter-train passengers bustling through town under hats and long coats has the snappy look of American Depression melodrama, but accompanied by a constant undertow belonging specifically to this colonial tragedy. From a garage owner snarling about the African National Congress to a mixed-race crowd, together but with subtly different reactions, watching busking boys dance on a Jo'burg sidewalk, Come Back, Africa was the first film of its kind to bear witness to the hypocrisies of this riven country, particularly to audiences in segregated America.

Hands Off, Westerner : Cinespect Ryan Wells

After a recent conversation with Susan Weeks Coulter, chairwoman of the Global Film Initiative, whose Global Lens series is currently in full swing at MoMA before a cross-country tour, my mind—in a humanitarian, can-do state—wandered to recent cinema history. Where has cinema caused change to happen, to move the needle in the name of progress? When was the last time this occurred—not a polite discussion, but real social and political change?

I found myself coming back to these prodding questions upon a recent viewing Lionel Rogosin’s second feature “Come Back, Africa” (1959). The film, which aesthetically works as a blend of pioneer documentarian Robert Flaherty and Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica, exposes the jaw-dropping racism and social injustice that has victimized black South Africans under the apartheid government since its enactment in 1948. It follows the story of Zacharia Mgabi (real name, a non-actor), a rural man from Zululand on the North coast, who is transported to Johannesburg to work in the local goldmines. After his work discharge, the film follows Zacharia’s numerous attempts at employment, each ending poorly with vicious dismissal. (He’s feeding a wife and children whom he rarely sees because of the strenuous hours and rigid work structure he’s dealt.)

“Come Back, Africa” also looks widely at shifting urban design and life in Johannesburg. These shaky, poetic images illustrate a city that’s both booming economically with commerce (on several occasions we see blue-collar workers—essentially all natives—racing through the streets, pouring out of metro trains with a subtle drum beat layered around them) and sagging from moral deterioration. Indeed, the Johannesburg skyline, in some instances, resembles a miniature Manhattan. We see large-scale buildings and construction sites, cinemas (we see a ticket line for the atomic horror film “Fiend without a Face”), glorious parks, wide lane roads (shot beautifully by documentary veterans Ernst Artaria and Emil Knebel). Yet the inhabitants of so many of these images are really citizens of Sophiatown, a heavily populated all-black neighborhood that was torn down by the government a year after the filming wrapped. The residents of Sophiatown are the true backbone of the city–they give it life, according to “Come Back, Africa.”

While Rogosin admittedly knew little about the intricate political conditions in South Africa before arriving to shoot (he originally told the Department of Interior he was working on a musical on the sounds of South Africa), he nevertheless understood that it was a very contemporary issue that lacked a media outlet that would get it global recognition in exposing the brutality and injustice taking place due to segregationist extremism and xenophobia.

Rogosin met Bloke Modisane who was heavily involved in Drum, a leading anti-apartheid magazine. The meeting would prove fruitful for both: Modisane would connect Rogosin with Lewis Nkosi who co-wrote the script with him; not to mention several of the Drum circle–as well as other folks affiliated with the African National Congress, which has close political affiliations with the publication–would make cameos in “Come Back, Africa.” (The white actors in the film were all activists themselves, including Myrtle Berman, who plays a shrieking woman who fires Zacharia for, amongst other things, tossing out her mushroom soup.)

Another cameo is by the musician Miriam Makeba, who was known locally but not internationally. Though Harry Belafonte is usually given credit for discovering Makeba, it was “Come Back, Africa” and Rogosin’s efforts that really let audiences hear the talent that was Makeba. Prior to the film’s screening at the Venice Film Festival in 1959, where it won the Critics’ Award, Rogosin organized a visa for Makeba to attend the festival, as he felt her appearance would help promote the film and simultaneously draw attention to the budding chanteuse (soon after she appeared on Broadway and also sang on The Steve Allen Show). Many supporters of Rogosin felt that her bitterness towards the filmmaker in discovering her (a credit she gave to Belafonte) caused resentment and hurt for Rogosin. (Makeba’s reasoning was never fully fleshed out outside of an early press interview in which she claimed that the man who brought her over was not “nice to her,” although gossip also suggested that she was romantically linked to Belafonte for a spell.)

After its success at Venice, “Come Back, Africa” struggled to find a U.S. distributor and exhibitor for the premier. Stylistically, the film wasn’t groundbreaking enough that it would scare away the general public. It was the same year that John Cassavetes’s debut “Shadows” appeared on the scene—a film steeped in the cinéma vérité tradition Rogosin also adopted. (“The 400 Blows,” “Black Orpheus” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” were also released that year.) Yet thematically, let’s be honest, “Come Back, Africa” is a degree more controversial than revisionist Greek mythology even if the leads were Brazilian. And while it was critically well received in the U.S., the subject matter would no doubt make many a moviegoer blush considering its significant focus on segregation in South Africa, an issue certainly still in full swing in 1959 America. To see poverty and squalor abroad is disheartening and provokes nervous empathy, but stone cold racism between whites and blacks at the time was a topic that was divisive in this country to say the least. (Rogosin went on to premiere the film himself at Bleecker Street Cinema, a theater he co-owned and operated, in January 1960.)

2012 marks the 100^th anniversary of the African National Congress, a political party many of the film’s characters—and the filmmakers—were supporters of. Seeing Rogosin’s “Come Back, Africa,” a cry for international amnesty for native South Africans, in this historical context only emphasizes the relevance of these kinds of films, especially in the current state of selfish complacency that lingers in our society. Rogosin didn’t claim to solve apartheid, but he did expose it to the world. Take notes, viewers.

On the Bowery & Come Back, Africa (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... David Sterritt, Summer 2012

Lionel Rogosin was remarkable in many ways—as a pioneer of docudrama before the term was invented, a political filmmaker deeply committed to progressive causes, an independent filmmaker seeking new modes of exhibition and distribution, and an American filmmaker with a nuanced understanding of international issues. Yet, despite his enormous contributions to American cinema, Rogosin was badly undervalued in his time and has been scandalously overlooked since he completed his last film, the 1974 shortArab Israeli Dialogue, more than twenty-five years before his death in 2000. Milestone Film & Video is now resurrecting and exhibiting his legacy via theatrical engagements of his most important productions—On the Bowery (1956) and Come Back, Africa (1959)—as well as DVD and Blu-ray releases in a multivolume collection called The Films of Lionel Rogosin.

Rogosin grew up on Long Island in a well-off Jewish family—his father, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, made a fortune in rayon—and studied chemical engineering at Yale before serving in the Navy during World War II and then rising high in the textile business. He decided to become a full-time filmmaker so he could participate in public dialogues about such crucial issues as pacifism (Lewis Milestone’s 1930 antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front had deeply impressed him) and the postwar fascism of South Africa’s apartheid regime. In the early Sixties, he converted a Greenwich Village theater into the Bleecker Street Cinema, which opened with the premiere of Come Back, Africaand remained an influential venue for serious cinema until long after Rogosin sold it in 1974. He also helped establish the New American Cinema Group along with Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Robert Breer, Rudy Burckhardt, Robert Downey, and other radically independent screen artists. His energy and enterprise were unquenchable, but the obstacles facing independents were daunting, and Rogosin completed only ten shorts and features between 1957 and 1974, his regrettably brief period of active filmmaking.

On the Bowery is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, but Rogosin said later that he undertook it as a training exercise for the more challenging task of making Come Back, Africa. Located in lower Manhattan, the Bowery neighborhood (named after its major street) had gone from riches to rags by the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth it was populated mainly by alcoholics and other social outcasts. I first saw it as a child in the Fifties, and I vividly recalled how it lived up to its reputation, with a legion of “Bowery bums” staggering, slumping, and sleeping all over the sidewalks and sometimes the streets. This was precisely the kind of social problem, known to everyone yet unaddressed by public policy, that Rogosin took as his mission to document. He started by hanging out in Bowery streets and saloons, talking to the locals and getting a feel for the place. He also hooked up with writer Mark Sufrin and cinematographer Richard Bagley, free spirits who shared his interest in political film. Their idea was to blur the boundary between documentary and fiction, telling a story based on the experiences of real people who would play characters based closely on themselves.

Shot over a three-month period in 1955, the film chronicles three days in the life of Ray (Ray Salyer), a good-looking young laborer who arrives on the Bowery with hard-earned money in his pocket and a powerful thirst to spend it on. He meets an older wino named Gorman (Gorman Hendricks) in the wildly misnamed Confidence Bar & Grill, and when Ray’s money runs out, Gorman helps him replenish the supply by selling clothes out of his suitcase. Ray winds up dead drunk outside, whereupon Gorman steals the suitcase, setting the stage for Ray’s continuing decline. Subsequent episodes show him bedding down in a flophouse, visiting a rescue mission, and grappling with the dark urges that are plainly destroying any hope he ever had for a decent life. Salyer and Hendricks were recruited on the Bowery, like the film’s other performers, and alcohol was their demon. Salyer had served in World War II and reportedly received overtures from Hollywood when On the Bowery was released, but he disappeared permanently into the night a short time later. Hendricks, who stayed clean and sober for the shoot, fell off the wagon thereafter and died a few weeks after the film opened.

Some scenes in On the Bowery were staged, but the whole film was shot on location and the illusion of unmanipulated authenticity is strong. Rogosin had a low opinion of documentary in today’s sense, contending that any attempt at detailed depiction of something as large and intricate as a community can never generate more than “a meaningless catalogue of stale, factual representation.” He would surely have agreed with Werner Herzog’s position that cinéma-vérité (a term not yet devised in the Fifties) gives only “the truth of accountants.” Wittingly or not, Rogosin also shared Jean Vigo’s aspiration of creating what Vigo called “social documentary, or more precisely the documented point of view.” Personal documentary of that kind had a robust life in the Thirties and Forties, producing such classics as Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started (1943), Sidney Meyers’s The Quiet One (1948), and various films by Robert Flaherty. Although it isn’t a “pure” documentary à la Frederick Wiseman or David and Albert Maysles, On the Bowery was certainly received as one, winning best-documentary prizes from the Venice Film Festival and the British Academy Awards, and scoring a documentary Oscar nomination to boot.

The power of On the Bowery to open eyes, stir the spirit, and outrage the conscience is undiminished to this day. Milestone’s fine DVD and Blu-ray release also includes The Perfect Team: The Making of On the Bowery and A Walk Through the Bowery, both directed by Michael Rogosin, the filmmaker’s son, as well as shorts about the Bowery made in 1933 and 1972. Out, a 1957 short written by the great John Hersey, was directed by Lionel Rogosin for the United Nations Film Board, which enlisted him to publicize the difficulties faced by Hungarians seeking refuge in Austria after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. But the most imposing bonus is Rogosin’s feature-length Good Times, Wonderful Times (1964), his definitive antiwar movie, juxtaposing scenes from a pretentious and frivolous cocktail party (partly real, partly set up) with truly horrifying images of the human devastation caused by modern warfare. Although the quaffing of cocktails here contrasts starkly with the swilling of muscatel in On the Bowery, both films diagnose chronic diseases of the human spirit with a stunning blend of detachment and compassion.

The second Milestone volume centers on Rogosin’s second feature, Come Back, Africa, shot on the sly in Sophiatown, a nonwhite ghetto adjacent to Johannesburg. The district was about halfway through a process of systematic destruction by South Africa’s racist government when Rogosin went to work. (Once forced removals had cleared out all the black, mixed-race, Chinese, and Indian residents, the area was demolished, shabbily rebuilt, and renamed Triumf, a name as bitterly ironic as that of the On the Bowery saloon.) Rogosin again started production by going to the area, where he met and conferred with journalists, artists, and activists of different colors and sought out locals who could provide story elements, improvise dialogue, and play characters very similar to themselves; his main collaborators on the basic script were Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi, both affiliated with Drum, a progressive magazine aimed at black readers. An American in Sophiatown, an hour-long documentary about the film directed by Lloyd Ross, shows how much ingenuity, duplicity, and mendacity the makers of Come Back, Africa had to employ when shooting the picture, from inventing dummy scripts to filming musical numbers for the friendly travelogue they were purportedly making.

The racially mixed cast includes white antiapartheid activists playing highly unsympathetic Afrikaners, based on what they had observed as citizens of the officially white-supremacist nation. While they contribute spice to the film, its heart and soul reside in its depiction of black South Africans waging a daily struggle to understand their irrational sociopolitical environment and survive despite the hostility, suspicion, and outright malice that assault them every day. The main character is Zachariah (Zacharia Mgabi), a Zulu worker who comes from a rural village to the gold mines outside Johannesburg in search of employment to feed his family. When his mining job fizzles he tries various lines of work in the city (garage assistant, houseboy for a spiteful white woman, and the like) before getting arrested for violating the complicated pass laws, going to jail, and returning home to find that his wife Vinah (Vinah Makeba) has been killed by a black thug he had alienated earlier. The ending is a full-throated cry of anger and desolation, voicing the despair inflicted on individuals and groups in a land where bigotry and oppression have the full force of law behind them.

Come Back, Africa has more conspicuously amateurish acting than On the Bowery—not a bad thing if you agree with Bertolt Brecht that “good” acting is just a more effective form of fraud—but its best moments are vividly alive. In the film’s centerpiece, Zachariah sits in a shebeen (illicit hangout and drinking spot) during a dead-serious bull session that includes the worldly and sophisticated Nkosi, the noted communist and anarchist Can Themba, and eventually the superb musician Miriam Makeba, who sings a pair of songs with a sweetness and control that leave the listener breathless. Rogosin helped Makeba get a visa to attend the film’s premiere at the Venice festival, where it won the Italian Film Critics award; he and Harry Belafonte then brought her to England and the United States, but when she tried to attend her mother’s funeral the following year she learned that her South African passport had been revoked. She and Rogosin subsequently fell out for reasons that remain unclear. These and other matters are touched on in a 1989 documentary by Jürgen Schadeberg called Have You Seen Drum Recently? An odd, mercurial, and entertaining film, it recounts the magazine’s history with many references to Modisane and Thembe as well as a portion of the shebeen scene. Milestone includes it as an extra with Come Back, Africa, along with Rogosin’s hour-long Black Roots (1970), about the place of blues and folk music in African-American life; Bitter Sweet Stories, a Michael Rogosin short with reminiscences by people involved in making Black Roots; a radio interview about Come Back, Africa produced by the UN in 1962; and more.

Rogosin’s passionate supporters have included Basil Wright, who found echoes of Fyodor Dostoevsky in On the Bowery, and John Cassavetes, who called him “probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time.” Another is Martin Scorsese, who provides brief video introductions to On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa on the Milestone discs. Scorsese grew up in Little Italy, less than a stone’s throw from the Bowery, and he finds Rogosin’s depiction a dead-on accurate portrayal of what he saw on the street and from the windows of his home; he also praises Come Back, Africa as a work of “terrible beauty,” a judgment I find exactly right. A dozen years after his death, Rogosin’s star is on the rise, thanks to Milestone and the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, which has mounted a heroic restoration project. His documentaries deserve keen attention from everyone who cares about political film, sociological film, humanistic film, and the art of film.

Come Back Africa Come Back Africa and South Africa Film History, by Ntongela Masilela from Jump Cut, May 1991

Come Back, Africa - TCM.com David Sterritt

worlds apart - artforum.com / film Melissa Anderson from ArtForum

'Come Back, Africa' Tells Many Stories - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs

The Music, Drink, and Fury of Life Under Apartheid in ... - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton

Vadim Rizov GreenCine Daily

Some Came Running: "Come Back, Africa" Glenn Kenny

Cagey Films [kgeorge]

Lionel Rogosin's problematic COME BACK, AFRICA, re-released after half a century James van Maanen from Trust Movies

Steve Macfarlane L-Magazine

Film Review: 'Come Back Africa' (1959) – Africa is a Country Elliot Ross

The 10th AnnualCHICAGO AFRICAN DIASPORA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media

COME BACK, AFRICA - Movies - Film Forum

The New Yorker [Pauline Kael]

Lionel Rogosin's "Come Back, Africa" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson

Director site Lionel Rogosin

Come Back Africa Press Kit (pdf)

COME BACK, AFRICA | Milestone Films

TimeOut Chicago Ben Kenigsberg

Sam Adams Time Out New York

Chicago Sun-Times Bill Stamets

The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen here: New York Times (registration req'd)

Come Back, Africa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rohmer, Éric

While the narrator is looking for a woman, he meets another one, who occupies his affection until he finds the first woman again.
—Eric Rohmer describes the plot of the Six Moral Tales

Director’s Chair from DVDBeaver: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/direct-chair/rohmer.htm

Eric Rohmer (pronounced HERE) has created a unique niche for himself; coming out of the Nouvelle Vague experimental era, his films have strongly established themselves without over-utilization of cinematography adaptations such as tracking shots, jump cuts or reverse angles, and he prefers using only natural sounds (no artificially induced noises or music to enhance the existing soundtrack). The experience subtly conveys to the viewer the ability to identify more closely with the characters and more intimately with the plot and storyline. Mr. Rohmer has stated “Ever since the cinema attained the dignity of an art, I see only one great theme that it proposed to develop: the opposition of the two orders - one natural, the other human; one material the other spiritual; one mechanical, the other free; one of the appetite, the other of heroism or of the grace - a classical opposition, but one our art is privileged to be able to translate so well that the intermediary of the sign is replaced by immediate evidence.”

The Village Voice Eric Rohmer’s Talking Cures, by Kent Jones, February 6, 2001 (excerpt)

Even more than Truffaut or Chabrol, Rohmer has always believed in the power of stories and storytelling. In his early “Moral Tales,” the carefully calibrated narratives pushed his gallery of intellectuals toward a melancholy self-realization. As the director became more interested in young people at the beginning of the ’80s, his focus shifted to the spiritual. Like Rossellini, one of his role models, the devoutly Catholic Rohmer tends to leave his heroes and heroines in a state of grace, framed within the most ordinary circumstances and settings (it’s hard to imagine a more subtly enacted miracle than the climax of Tale of Winter). And, of course, they talk their way right up the spiritual ladder. Many people are driven around the bend by Rohmer’s “dialogue-heavy” movies, which supposedly approach cinematic danger level. But in his case, talk always equals action: a form of therapeutic inquiry for the heroes of My Night at Maud’s or Claire’s Knee, a restless search for clarity in Pauline at the Beach or Le Beau Mariage, a wayward path toward enlightenment in the latest films. Moreover, Rohmer’s talking cures are always firmly rooted in their settings: It’s the pre-Christmas snowstorm in Clermont-Ferrand that keeps the skittish Jean-Louis Trintignant holed up with Françoise Fabian’s game divorcée in Maud’s, and it’s the golden, sunlit southern countryside that fillsMarie Rivière with the knowledge of her own mature beauty in Autumn Tale.

With his three long series spanning six decades, broken up by excursions into documentaries, literary adaptations, and omnibus films, has Rohmer realized his ambition to be the Balzac of cinema? Maybe. It has to be said that his conservatism borders on nationalism: Unlike Pialat or Téchiné or even Rivette, he’s never risen to the challenge of portraying the racial diversity of modern France. But for all its neatness and moral self-containment, his is a remarkable (and often remarkably funny) body of work, rich in natural wonders, bewitching interactions, and emotional passages. Maud’s is still his meatiest film: Trintignant’s wary self-exposure is perfectly matched by Fabian’s seductive frankness, and Nestor Almendros never got a crisper black-and-white image. Depending on your tolerance for Jean-Claude Brialy, even at his least preening, Claire’s Knee remains an intricately suspenseful movie: The buildup to that nonlecherous caress is one of the neatest inventions of the ’70s. The “Comedies and Proverbs” of the ’80s are more diaphanous, with the soulful exceptions of The Aviator’s Wifeand the largely improvised Summer. But even the insubstantial Full Moon in Paris vibrates with the delicate beauty of the late Pascale Ogier. Autumn and Winter (his most purely Christian film) are the most vaunted of the later movies. My personal favorite is the undervalued Tale of Springtime, which works up a lively romantic intrigue against a background of suburban greenery under overcast skies. Also not to be missed: the painterly adaptation of Kleist’s Marquise of O, with a devastating lead performance by the great Edith Clever; the early short The Baker of Monceau, the first of the moral tales, filled with new wave exuberance and featuring a young, handsome Barbet Schroeder; and the largely unknown feature debut, The Sign of Leo. A favorite of Fassbinder’s, this beautifully elaborated tall tale offers a wonderful portrait of Paris in the late ’50s. And, during a nicely detailed bohemian party scene, it features an unforgettable cameo. The young man in dark glasses sitting at a table, endlessly lifting the needle off a record to play and replay his favorite piece of music, is none other than Rohmer’s opposite number, Jean-Luc Godard.

The religion of director Eric Rohmer On top of the wave and against the stream: The cinema of Eric Rohmer, Per Magnus from Sync, Winter 1993

French New Wave cinema came into being with a handful of French directors who began making films in the late 1950s: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, and others. Their works were linked through Cahiers du Cinema, the most advanced critical film journal at the time. Under the wing of the great film historian and critic...

Though Eric Rohmer may not have been in the forefront of the Cahiers group, his work is artistically the most subtle. Before discussing his work, however, we must briefly recapitulate the key issues of the New Wave that developed in France after 1958. We also need to look at Rohmer's Catholic paradigm, as he is the only New Wave director with an articulated Christian approach. With the benefit of these two perspectives (New Wave and Roman Catholic) we will be able to evaluate one film from Rohmer's rich and varied productions since 1959: My Night at Maud's (1969). This film belongs to Rohmer's first series of films, "Moral Tales."

...My thesis here is that Rohmer's films are a cinema of grace. Rohmer hid profound religious beliefs under the surface of his films. The somewhat superficial moral structure of My Night at Maud's is partly a device to reveal the true nature of grace. I will also try to show how the moral in this film and Rohmer's other films is a reflection of divine immanence...

Eric Rohmer's Catholicity
...As a political and aesthetic conservative, Rohmer was an outsider in the milieu of French film making during the 1960s. His articulated Christian approach was not exactly popular in a time when the Church and all other social and political authorities were dismissed by the cultural elite. To understand Rohmer's religious intentions and the religious content of his films, we need to understand the Catholic way of perceiving reality.

Ingrid Schafer (1991) makes a very clear distinction between what she calls the Catholic and the Protestant imagination. She talks about a Catholic "both-and" imagination versus a Protestant "either-or" imagina-tion. "Both-and" reflects the incarnation: God became man, and he is truly God and truly Human at the same time. The Protestant paradigm focuses on "divine transcendence" versus the Catholic focus on "divine immanence" ( p. 50-51). Divine transcendence sees the world "fractured by original sin," while divine immanence views the world as originally blessed by a God who is a caring and loving Father.

The Catholic imagination is "analogical" according to Shafer. The world as God's creation shows us how God is. We learn about God by understanding the world. This distinction is based on the Catholic emphasis on the Incarnation and the Sacrament. Divinity and flesh are intermingled; God himself is also truly human and the blood of Christ is physically present in the communion cup. For Thomas Aquinas the whole world was sacramental, "a bearer of grace." In the Catholic perspective the "artists are sacrament makers, revealers of God-in-the-world" (Shafer, p. 52). R.A. Blake claimed (1991) that people tend to come closer to the divine "through the senses-through color and form, through song and story and dance--than through precise verbal formulations of their theologians" (p. 60).

With one or two exceptions Rohmer's films do not deal with any explicit spiritual or religious themes. His attention is rather directed to contemporary man, his values, conflicts, and everyday problems without any reference to religious or non-religious beliefs. Bedouelle (1979) notes that "such attention to what we might call the spiritual dimension of every human situation has become a commonplace in post-Conciliar Catholic thought" (p. 272). For Bedouelle, Rohmer's films, especially the "Moral Tales," represent a rediscovery of Christian reality.

Rohmer, however, obviously had more on his mind than moral education. He held that "Christianity is consubstantial with the cinema," and that "the cinema is the cathedral of the twentieth century" (Bedouelle). The latter statement is interesting with regard to another significant focus of the Catholic imagination. Shafer states that the Catholics emphasize the "the individual relating to God as a member of a community" (Shafer, p. 53). The community of people serving God is realized through the cathedrals. And what is the "cathedral" expressing if not "the liturgical re-enactment of God's comedy of grace," Shafer notes (p. 53). Film as a collective art form does carry traits of the cathedral. However, Rohmer probably had a more transcendent concept in mind when using "cathedral" as a metaphor.

...The hero of [My Night at Maud's] is Jean-Louis, an unmarried engineer in his early thirties and a practicing Catholic who has recently returned to France from years of work abroad. A chance encounter brings him together with an old friend, a Marxist atheist philosophy professor, who introduces him to Maud. Jean-Louis spends the night with Maud, talking, discussing, and finally platonically sleeping by her side. Before that night, however, he had seen a girl in church whom he hoped someday to marry, but with whom he had been unable to make contact. In spite of Maud's invitation -she is beautifully attractive--Jean-Louis is "faithful" to the image of his prospective wife and declines sex with Maud. The next day, in another chance encounter, he meets the girl from the church. Their relationship is sealed. The film ends with talk, reflection, and observation.

In several ways Maud is one of Rohmer's most exceptional films. It is his only film dealing overtly with religion: several times we are brought into the church to partake in the Catholic mass--one scene actually involves a full-dress Sunday sermon. The principal topics in the night-time conversation of Maud and Jean-Louis deal with Christian beliefs and Catholic morals.

The film also makes extensive literary cross-references. Scarcely an argument is presented without reference to Pascal, Rousseau, or Chanturgues, not to mention the Church, Christ, and religious ethics.

BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales (0) Tim Lucas reviews Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales from Sight and Sound, October 2006

The subtleties of Eric Rohmer are brought to vivid life by a fine new box-set.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau/Suzanne's Career/La Collectionneuse/My Night at Maud's/Claire's Knee/Love in the Afternoon

The six films comprising this series offer different sketches of the same dilemma. A man falls in love with a woman, thereby forming a commitment, either in fact or in principle, and then must navigate safe passage through sexual temptation by relying on (and sometimes discovering) his moral code, proving himself worthy of that love. Rohmer's brand of morality is subjective and non-judgemental; his characters include students and petits bourgeois and the idle rich, Catholics and atheists, singles and marrieds-with-children, and their standards vary. The point is "to thine own self be true" as the series depicts the ways in which thoughtful people can meet themselves in the mazes of their own stratagems, and how their true selves are sometimes at odds with the people they think they are or aspire to be. These films have been available on DVD before, but only in stale-looking, no-frills editions. The DVD label Criterion has come to Rohmer's rescue at last with one of its most welcome and ambitious box sets, one to rival its splendid 'Adventures of Antoine Doinel' François Truffaut set. Each of the films has been meticulously remastered in high bit-rate transfers supervised by Rohmer himself, in his preferred ratio of 1.33:1. Not only are the new transfers exquisite, they offer persuasive validation of the now unfashionable 1.33:1 ratio. The latter two films in the series were composed to allow for 1.66:1 projection; they may look more enveloping when zoom-boxed on a 1.78:1 widescreen set, but they lose much more than they gain - including most of the optional English subtitling.

The new transfers also lend greater pronouncement to Rohmer's rich gallery of characters and his carefully judged uses of colour. Le Collectionneuse is far more vibrant, and My Night at Maud's is one of the most ravishing black-and-white presentations you'll find on disc. The mono soundtracks seem newly alive, with often thematically enriching incidental sounds that lend soul to lonely rooms and scenic lakes alike; it's illuminating to crank up the sound when the films are most quiet, especially after learning from the accompanying supplements that Rohmer's attention to detail includes looping his films with only those background sounds likely to be heard in the specific times and regions that his scenes were shot. The yield of all this technical rejuvenation is that Rohmer's body of work, so often accused of being "filmed radio", becomes more inarguably cinematic. Further considerations are collected in the 56-page booklet On the Moral Tales, which presents essays by five critics and cinematographer Nestor Almendros, along with Rohmer's own 1948 essay, 'For a Talking Cinema'. Given the importance that Rohmer's films place on language, it must be mentioned that Criterion's "new and improved" English subtitles too often seem written to serve quick comprehension rather than the nuance of his original dialogue. The precision of the language and its occasional academic quality (appropriate to an era when people read and discussed books) have been boiled down to something more common and modernist. Everyone in these films sounds alike, regardless of education or background. Eliminated, for example, is much of the grating slang used by Chloé (Zouzou) in Love in the Afternoon; in the new translation, she and Frédéric (Bernard Verley) seem less uneasily matched, and the gulf between them more easily bridged, which disarms the film of some tensions that should be present. Similarly, in My Night at Maud's, a "pretext" becomes an "excuse", and the charming expression "affair of the heart" becomes the less sentimental but more easily scanned "love affair"; while in Le Collectionneuse a "change of opinion" becomes a "change of mind" (not quite the same thing), and some incidental but lengthy Italian dialogue receives no annotation whatsoever.

But Criterion deserves every plaudit for assembling such a thoughtful and wide-ranging resource of supplementary materials. Each feature is accompanied by a Rohmer short, selected for its thematic relevance: The Bakery Girl of Monceau is paired with Presentation or Charlotte and Her Steak (1951), another food-based romantic triangle starring an almost unrecognisable Jean-Luc Godard; Suzanne's Career with Nadja in Paris (1964), a profile of a young female academic; My Night at Maud's with On Pascal, a televised 1965 duologue between a philosopher and a Catholic priest; the youth-oriented Le Collectionneuse with A Modern Coed (1966); Claire's Knee with The Curve (1999), a delightful exploration of art's role in sexual aesthetics and the objectification of desire; and Véronique and Her Dunce (1958) seems related to Love in the Afternoon by the presence of a pretty blonde maths teacher. Adding text to subtext, Criterion includes an exclusive and illuminating 84-minute conversation between Rohmer and his longtime producer, Barbet Schroeder, an hour-long Rohmer interview from 1977 Canadian television, and archival interviews with interested parties from My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee. It's a perverse pleasure to see the affectionate half-sisters from Claire's Knee, Laurence de Monaghan and Béatrice Romand, argue about what kind of person Rohmer really is. Rounding out the set are trailers for each film.

Seeing the Moral Tales in random order over time in no way compares to the pleasure of watching them back-to-back, as Rohmer intended. Love in the Afternoon contains a dream sequence in which the series' earlier female leads return to tempt its protagonist, a meaningless procession unless viewed this way. Criterion's set thus restores not only the pictorial radiance of these works, but their reinforcement of one another.

Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Keith Uhlich from Slant magazine

It is a mistake to privilege any one of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" over another, though the temptation exists and is easily indulged, especially if one takes the disparate, yet complementary viewpoints of this inimitable sextet as entirely representative of its creator's own principles. Strange that auteurism should fail us so completely in the case of one of its founding practitioners, but Rohmer was always something of an odd man out among his contemporaries, if not in the remove of years (a decade older than most of his nouvelle vague brethren) then in the deceptive placidity of his art. His revolutions, in other words, were quiet ones, couched in a perpetual remove and observation. He shall perhaps forever be categorized by My Night at Maud's, his greatest popular success and one of the films presented in The Criterion Collection's superb box set.

Maud's is frequently misremembered as a nonstop talkfest when it begins with extended passages (nearly 10 minutes' worth) of silent pursuit as the unnamed Catholic protagonist (Jean-Louis Trintignant) trails the woman (Marie-Christine Barrault) who will, at film's end, become his wife. Trintignant's brief flirtation with the fetching divorcée Maud (Francoise Fabian) brings about his ultimate "moral" choice, a fascinating psychological mishmash of Catholic liturgy, Pascalian hypothesis, and Hitchcockian blonde/brunette dichotomy that is all too often mistaken—at least in the West—for Rohmer's own worldview.

At the heart of this misreading is the word "moral" itself, which is typically defined in collective terms, the conscientious needs of the society at large trumping the various bodies that make it up. Rohmer's sextet is more concerned with individual moral codes and how these play off of each other within a given situation, and though the "Moral Tales" share a basic narrative structure (a man in love with one woman is tempted by a second, only to return to the first), it is the specific milieu and, resultantly, the characters who inhabit that space which determine the ultimate outcome. Rohmer puts his trust—his faith—in a sense of place: the bustling Parisian side-streets of The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne's Career beget the stark Catholic trappings of Maud's, which lead to the dandified color palette of La Collectionneuse, the deceivingly nostalgic summertime glow of Claire's Knee, and the Theremin-scored, post-'60s fatigue of Love in the Afternoon.

Even if his characters hew primarily to the middle class, Rohmer's gaze (complemented, in many of these works, by cinematographer extraordinaire Nestor Almendros) is all-inclusive. Witness Claire's Knee in which Rohmer relates a battle of generational wits with a complexity akin to Marcel Proust. The respective narrators of the "Moral Tales"—in this case Jean-Claude Brialy's middle-aged writer Jérôme—always have their manipulations and powers called into question, though Rohmer, for a good stretch of this fifth film in the cycle, seems to privilege Jérôme's intellectual lecherousness. His pursuit of both the headstrong Laura (Béatrice Romand) and the unwitting, vulnerable Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) extend from sublimated longings, specifically for his friend, fellow writer, and unconsummated love Aurora (Aurora Cornu). That Aurora effectively masterminds the connections between Jérôme and his objects of desire shows that no one is completely innocent in Rohmer's world, though such shades of character never come across as the finger-wagging judgments of a pseudo-aesthete.

The cruelty of Rohmer's characters is casual: Jérôme gets what he wants by effectively destroying Claire's youthful naïveté, using her cheating boyfriend Gilles (Gérard Falconetti) against her to contrive a naked emotional moment in which he comforts her by caressing her knee. If this was all there was to Rohmer's vision it would be limited and unenlightening—Claire would effectively remain a cautionary symbol and little more. But an epilogue shows Rohmer's true intent. Jérôme is allowed his illusions (by revealing Gilles's wandering lusts he has helped Claire see the "true" way of things) and so leaves with his desires satiated. Aurora then spies an exchange between Claire and Gilles in which the former's accusations of infidelity are quickly put aside, and not just because of Gilles's charms. Jérôme, therefore, has failed, but he'll never know. The intuitiveness of the image (revelatory, as so many of Rohmer's films are, of the many mysteries of human nature) is balanced by a concomitant sense of hope, and the moral—if there is indeed one to be had—is left for us to discover and then to, potentially, express for ourselves.

The Criterion Collection presents the "Six Moral Tales" in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratios, though there is some controversy surrounding these transfers. Criterion's new policy (unstated on the packaging, which makes the practice all the more suspect) is to picturebox all their 1.33 acquisitions. As I'm to understand it, pictureboxing takes into account the overscan inherent to tube television sets where a good portion of the video-transferred image is lost, effectively destroying a movie's intended framing. At this time, according to the numbers, most people own tube televisions, hence Criterion's decision to picturebox. The problem comes with those who own widescreen and/or Hi-Definition televisions, as a pictureboxed image appears as a frame-within-a-frame, though, research tells me, the extent of this square black border surrounding the image varies between products. This is in no way a cut-and-dried issue and the debate rages on about the practice (see criterionforum.org and DVD Beaver for more discussion). Myself, I quickly acclimated to the framing of the films, though I find Criterion's non-mention of this particular to be pretty shady, especially for a company that prides itself on offering the best available version of a movie in the highest possible quality. All that said, Rohmer's "Moral Tales" have never looked better. Suzanne's Career fares the worst, probably because it is a 16mm film mastered from a 35mm duplicate negative, but everything in this set, especially a newly vibrant La Collectionneuse, is infinitely preferable to the godawful Fox Lorber releases, which should now be rendered obsolete. Here's hoping the "Comedies & Proverbs" and "The Tales of the Four Seasons" are on the horizon. All six features come with their original French mono soundtracks, suitably cleaned up to remove hiss and crackle. Optional English subtitles are provided on all features. Owning this set is your moral imperative.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography — Cineaste Magazine Éric Rohmer: A Biography, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe (637 pages), 2016, book review by Chris Fujiwara, Winter 2016

The great theme of this monumental book is the cunning collusion between cinema and reality that manifests itself in a rigorous and exemplary way throughout Éric Rohmer’s work. A collusion that the authors, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, often describe as a “trap.” For his La Collectionneuse, instead of a conventional scenario, Rohmer “constructed a trap, a rather closely woven dramatic canvas” within which the main characters could emerge. To put her at ease and make her “forget the presence of cinema,” Rohmer “set a clever trap” for young Laurence de Monaghan, the Claire of Claire’s Knee. Bernard Verley, who played the hero of Chloe in the Afternoon, is quoted describing Rohmer as “someone whose fiction is so strong that it coincides with reality.” Another actor, Pascal Greggory (Le Beau Marriage, Pauline at the Beach), said of the director that “every attitude we might have enters into his plans.”

We can call Rohmer’s trap, or his fiction, or his plans, “mise en scène”—a term for which he elaborated a complex definition through his activity as film critic and (from 1957 to 1963) chief editor of Cahiers du cinéma. The term plays a decisive role in the book (though one that the English translation sometimes disguises under the word “staging”). We read, for example, that when Rohmer lent himself reluctantly as the subject of an episode in the TV series Cinéastes de notre temps, he proved, in the words of critic Jean Douchet, “the metteur en scène of everything that could happen to him.”

At the same time, Rohmer left to reality and chance a large share in the responsibility of his work. As de Baecque and Herpe write, “Even as he asserts himself as a demiurge, as the absolute master of his creation, the filmmaker feels a resistance of the real that proves to be the stronger.” The making of each film was, in part, a “gamble” (as this translation usually renders the French pari, the same word that is used of the Pascalian wager that plays a key role in Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s). This led to an ambiguity in which the production of each Rohmer film was immersed. In their account of the filming of Pauline at the Beach, de Baecque and Herpe write of “things floating undecidably between everyday life and its cinematic transposition.” Often, Rohmer did not let the actors know when rehearsal ended and filming began.

Rohmer was born (in 1920) Maurice Schérer and, under that name, conducted his life as a teacher and a bourgeois family man in parallel with his life as a filmmaker. His mother died in 1970 without ever having known that her son was already a famous film director. Laurent Schérer, the younger of Maurice’s two sons, said that his father kept his family and his work apart (“I did not grow up as the son of a filmmaker”). A notable exception, blurring the line between identities: Rohmer invited Mme. Schérer’s advice about some editing cruxes in Full Moon in Paris and Summer. De Baecque and Herpe say little about the life of Maurice Schérer, letting the assumption stand that “it was simple, tranquil, reassuring, and no doubt dull; but certainly happy, like everything that has no story.” The authors apply both tact and psychological penetration to the mystery of Rohmer’s relationships with the numerous desirable women who populate his cinema. Asked, “But how do you manage to have tea every day with these magnificent girls?”, Rohmer replied, “My secret is absolute chastity.” In a letter to a member of the chorus of musicians of Perceval, Rohmer wrote of his relationship with his wife as a “deep and indestructible attachment”—a word he crossed out and replaced with “love.”

Providing abundant information about the production and reception of each of Rohmer’s films, de Baecque and Herpe also contribute intelligent critical commentary. They rehabilitate the often neglected Sign of the Lion, the director’s first feature film; they give Rohmer’s pedagogical films of the 1960s their just value; and they pay due respect to the qualities in La Collectionneuse and My Night at Maud’s that enabled Rohmer to establish himself as a great filmmaker with these two films. The authors highlight the autobiographical and self-critical aspects of Chloe in the Afternoon, the last of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” and note the changes in perspective and theme that distinguished his next series, the “Comedies and Proverbs.”

Interpreting Perceval as an epic of space and an allegory of the birth of cinema, de Baecque and Herpe underline the affinity of “Rohmer’s madness and genius,” as they term it, for the work of F. W. Murnau (whose Faust was the subject of Rohmer’s doctoral thesis, written, incredibly, during the same two-year period that saw the production of both Claire’s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon). The deceptively modest The Tree, the Mayor, and the Mediathèque is celebrated as “one of Rohmer’s most ambitious films, the only one in which his involvement in his time is expressed.” After allowing themselves the most delicate of reservations about Boyfriends and Girlfriends and A Tale of Springtime, the authors note the quintessentially Rohmerian nature of A Tale of Summer and bring out the importance of the final films Rohmer made before his death in 2010.

De Baecque and Herpe’s comments on how Rohmer’s films reflected their times are valuable, especially for readers who may know little about those times except, precisely, through their reflections in cinema. Thus Chloe in the Afternoon outlines “a chronicle of Pompidou’s France, which was sinking into...boredom...at the same time that it nurtured dreams of escape in which the flare-ups of 1968 vaguely survived.” The characters of The Aviator’s Wife are “bogged down in...communication problems, as people called them in the early 1980s.” Full Moon in Paris, rooted in “the early Mitterand years” when “excess bloomed in all its forms,” was widely understood on its release to be “perfectly in phase with the spirit of the time.” De Baecque and Herpe also acknowledge, and enter into dialogue with, such criticisms as those of Alain Auger, who accused Rohmer of promoting an “unbelievably narrow vision” of an ethnically homogeneous, middle-class France…

extensive biography of Eric Rohmer New Wave Film

OVERVIEW biography from Turner Classic Movies

Eric Rohmer • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Tamara Tracz, January 24, 2003

Film Reference Dennis Nastav career essay, updated by Rob Edelman

Eric Rohmer > Overview - AllMovie biography from Jason Ankeny

Eric Rohmer: A Highly Unofficial Page Rohmer biographer Terry Ballard’s memorial web page, also here: Eric Rohmer

Éric Rohmer Mubi

Filmography: Eric Rohmer The New York Times

"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"

Éric Rohmer — critical essay at Kamera Comedies And Proverbs: An Eric Rohmer Retrospective, by Edmund Hardy from Kamera (Undated)

Eric Rohmer in the rue de la Huchette, c.1956 - The Cine ... early still shots from the shooting of Rohmer’s La Sonate à Kreutzer, 1956

Die Marquise von O… (1976 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum Monthly Film Bulletin, December 2, 1976

The Marquise of O... and Effi Briest Women oppressed, by Renny Harrigan from Jump Cut, 1977

FILM VIEW; When Film Becomes a Feast of Words Caryn James from The New York Times, July 30, 1989

Celebrating France's Directors Who Rode the New Wave G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, August 11, 1989

What's Sex Got to Do With It? | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum on A Tale of Springtime, November 5, 1992

FILM; Grim, Shocking, Didactic, a New New Wave Rolls In Phillip Lopate from The New York Times, November 22, 1998

Growing old with Eric Marie Riviere from The Guardian, March 24, 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | An Autumn Tale (1998) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, April 1999

Eric Rohmer's Canvas - Boston Review — Home Alan A. Stone from The Boston Review, Summer 1999

Master of Reality | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 19, 1999

Magic Realism in Conte d'automne (Autumn Tale) • Senses of Cinema Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000

Rohmer Talk • Senses of Cinema Bill Mousoulis from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000

The Village Voice Eric Rohmer’s Talking Cures, by Kent Jones, February 6, 2001

Profile Article: Eric Rohmer (February 11, 2001) A.O. Scott from The New York Times, February 11, 2001

Film; In Its Fiery Pages, A French Revolution Dave Kehr from The New York Times, October 7, 2001

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: The Lady & the Duke (2001) Philip Horne for Sight and Sound, February 2002

The French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine, July 2, 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Triple Agent (2003) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, November 2004

Triple Agent: Portrait of the Unknowable Other ... - Senses of Cinema Tamara Tracz from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005

Place de l'Etoile • Senses of Cinema Steven Rybin, April 15, 2005

My Night at Maud's • Senses of Cinema Rahul Hamid from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

Claire's Knee • Senses of Cinema Daniel Hayes from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

The Grace of Suffering: Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris • Senses of Cinema Alexander C. Ives from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

The 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle • Senses of Cinema Aaron Goldberg from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

A Tale of Springtime • Senses of Cinema Dan Harper from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - #2 - Conte d'automne The Caprices of Rosine or the Follies of a Fortnight: Parallel Intrigues in Eric Rohmer’s “Conte d'automne,” by Jacob Leigh, July 2006

FILM; Just for Laughs: Newer Than New Wave Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, March 11, 2007

Breathless: French New Wave Turns 50 Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

Noli Me Tangere: Jacques Rivette, Out 1 and the New Wave Sally Shafto from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

Critique. Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon Shepherds in the Wind, Arnaud Macé from Cahiers du Cinéma, September 2007

jacques-rivette.com: La rose dans le caniveau: Magic in the streets of ... Andreas Volkert from The Order of the Exile, September/October 2007

Pairs through the Eyes of the New Wave Gilles Rousseau from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

Jean Luc Godard’s Histoire du Cinema Dr. Laleen Jayamanne (University of Sydney) from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, August 29, 2007

The New New Wave in French Cinema Dr. Joe Hardwick (University of Queensland) at Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, October 5, 2007

May 68: then and now Sylvia Lawson from the Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, November 9, 2007

Leah Vonderheide, Literariness in the Films of Eric Rohmer, MA Thesis, University of Canterbury, 2008 117-page Master’s Thesis (pdf)

Plus ça change: French New Wave directors are still tearing up the ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent, August 24, 2008

Pauline at the Beach Robert Horton from The Crop Duster, January 11, 2009

ARTS, BRIEFLY; Cahiers Du Cinma Will Continue To Publish Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, February 9, 2009

Michael J. Anderson, ' Face & Form in Rohmer: From Ma nuit chez Maud’s Talking Cinema to the Denial of Eloquence in Le Rayon vert', Tativille, August 9, 2009

"Eric Rohmer, a Leading Filmmaker of the French New Wave, Dies at 89" Dave Kehr from The New York Times Arts Beat Blog, January 11, 2010

French New Wave director Eric Rohmer: RIP Rachel Abramowitz obituary from The LA Times, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, New Wave Film Director, Has Died Dave Kehr from The New York Times, January 11, 2010

The Films of Eric Rohmer Slide show of images from The New York Times, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer: In Memory Roger Ebert, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer And The Roaming Eye | The New Republic David Thomson from The New Republic, January 11, 2011

Rohmer's World Richard Brody from The New Yorker, January 11, 2010

French film-maker Eric Rohmer dies aged 89 The Guardian, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer: a life in pictures The Guardian, January 11, 2010

Obituary: Eric Rohmer, Tom Milne from The Guardian, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer: philosopher, rhetorician, and an ally of the young Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer: a career in clips Xan Brooks selects video clips from various Rohmer films, from The Guardian, January 11, 2010

"Film-maker Rohmer dies in Paris" Ruadhán Mac Cormaic from The Irish Times, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer The Daily Telegraph, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010 Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010 Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer (1920-2010 Patrick Z. McGavin from Light Sensitive, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010 David Edelstein from The Projectionist, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer: April 4th, 1920 – January 11th, 2010 Keith Uhlich from Slant magazine, January 11,2011

Eric Rohmer, RIP. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine Stephen Metcalf from Slate, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, 89, Made Intellectual Films About People's Emotional Lives Molly Finnegan and Zoe Pollack from PBS, January 11, 2011

Master of French Cinema Eric Rohmer Dies - EInsiders Kathy Stover from EInsiders, January 11, 2010

"French filmmaker Eric Rohmer dies at 89" CBC News, January 11, 2010

"French film-maker Eric Rohmer dies" BBC News, January 11, 2010

cinemadaily | Eric Rohmer: April 4, 1920—January 11, 2010 Andy Lauer from indieWIRE, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, French Filmmaker, Dead At 89 Frank James from NPR, January 11, 2010

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010. Vadim Rizov from IFC’s The Independent Eye, January 11, 2010, also seen here: Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010. - Indie Eye - Blogs - IFC.com

Eric Rohmer (1920 – 2010) Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, January 11, 2009

Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010 Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, January 11, 2009

REMEMBERING ERIC ROHMER, 1920 – 2010 | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog Scott Macaulay, January 11, 2011

Pauline at the Beach Robert Horton from The Crop Duster, January 11, 2009

Michael J. Anderson, ' Face & Form in Rohmer: From Ma nuit chez Maud’s Talking Cinema to the Denial of Eloquence in Le Rayon vert', Tativille, August 9, 2009

Le Monde Jacques Mandelbaum, January 11, 2010 (in French)

"Eric Rohmer: director whose films included Le genou de Claire" Obituary from Times On Line, January 12, 2010

Eric Rohmer remembered Charles Bremner from Times On Line, January 12, 2010

AN APPRAISAL; Rohmer the Classicist, Calmly Dissecting Desire A.O. Scott from The New York Times, January 12, 2010

CineScene Article (2010) Eric Rohmer, An Appreciation, by Chris Knipp from CineScene, January 12, 2010

Eric Rohmer, an art-house intellectual to the end Glenn Kenny from The LA Times, January 12, 2010

Eric Rohmer, French 'New Wave' cinema filmmaker, dies at 89 The Washington Post, January 12, 2010

A Rohmer Datebook Robert Horton from The Crop Duster, January 12, 2010

French Movie Master Eric Rohmer Dies at 89 Richard Corliss from Time magazine, January 12, 2010

Agnès Poirier on Eric Rohmer Eric Rohmer: un homage, from The Guardian, January 12, 2010

Eric Rohmer: Let's talk about … everything | Film | The Guardian Gilbert Adair from The Guardian, January 12, 2010

Rohmer, master of French cinema, dies at 89 John Lichfield from The Independent, January 12, 2010

Time Out Obituary (Geoff Andrew) Time Out London, January 12, 2011

Talk, keen observation marked Eric Rohmer's films Steven Rea from MINA, January 12, 2010

Eric Rohmer remembered Ryan Gilbey from The New Statesman, January 12, 2010

"French film maker Rohmer dies at 89" Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 12, 2010

A note on Rohmer and "mumblecore" Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, January 12, 2010

3quarksdaily: Eric Rohmer, 1920-2010 Robin Varghese from 3 Quarks Daily, January 12, 2010

New Statesman - Gilbey on Film: Eric Rohmer remembered Ryan Gilbey from The New Statesman, January 12, 2010

Life with Rohmer - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, January 13, 2010

The appeal of an Eric Rohmer film. - Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens from Slate, January 13, 2010

Master of Reality (updated, 1/13) Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 13, 2010

"Eric Rohmer: Prolific film-maker, critic and novelist whose pioneering work homed in on romantic tangles", Christopher Hawtree from The Independent, January 13, 2010

Eric Rohmer: The French New Wave intellectual whose influence endures Grace Wong from CNN News, January 13, 2010

Director who put dialogue first The Financial Times, January 13, 2010

Eric Rohmer's Talking Pictures Philippe Garnier from The LA Weekly, January 13, 2010

Le Figaro Dominique Borde, January 13, 2010 (in French)

Eric Rohmer, 89, French New Wave film director Dennis McLellan from The San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 2010

14/01/2010Remembering Eric Rohmer: A cinematic maverick who never compromised Expatica, January 14, 2010

Rohmer blossomed late, but contributed much Jorg von Uthmann from Austin 360, January 14, 2010

Five essential films by Eric Rohmer Chris Garcia from Austin 360, January 14, 2010

Eric Rohmer, 89, French New Wave film director - SFGate Dennis McLellan from The Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2010

Eric Rohmer, the Cinéastes' Favorite Conservative [Victor Morton] Victor Morton from The National Review, January 15, 2010

Eric Rohmer: Moralist at the heart of French cinema The National, January 15, 2010

Eric Rohmer 1920-2010 Peter Keough from The Boston Phoenix, January 15, 2010

The career of French film director Eric Rohmer David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, January 16, 2010

French filmmaker captured tales of love and lust Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe, January 16, 2010

Eric Rohmer's movies convey more than what words could Geoff Pevere from The Toronto Star, January 16, 2010

Eric Rohmer: 1920-2010 - The Moviefone Blog Jeffrey M. Anderson from Cinematical, January 16, 2010, also seen here: Eric Rohmer: 1920-2010

Letters: My day with Eric Peter Avery in his Letter to the Editor, from The Guardian, January 16, 2010

What was Eric Rohmer? Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, January 16, 2010

New York Review of Books The Persistent Pleasures of Eric Rohmer, by Geoffrey O’Brien from The New York Review of Books, January 19, 2010

n+1: On Eric Rohmer Damion Searls, January 22, 2010

Eric Rohmer, RIP - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine Jesse Walker from Reason magazine, January 24, 2010

Eric Rohmer: It's Good to Talk | The Moving Arts Film Journal Alison Frank from The Moving Arts Film Journal, March 20, 2010

The Accidental Auteurist: Eric Rohmer Remembered | Film ... The Accidental Auteurist: Eric Rohmer remembered, by Andrew Sarris from Film Comment, March/April 2010, also seen here: Eric Rohmer

Ten Best Films: Ten Best Éric Rohmer Directed Films Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, April 3, 2010

Senses of Cinema, Revue Leucothéa, Cargo David Hudson from Mubi, April 4, 2010

Adieu, Eric Rohmer • Senses of Cinema Rolando Caputo and Michelle Carey from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Eric Rohmer, Educator • Senses of Cinema Alain Hertay from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Cinema and the Classroom: Education in the Work of Eric Rohmer ... Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

When Rohmer Was Making 'Silent Films' • Senses of Cinema Jackie Raynal and Berenice Reynaud from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Secrets and Lies: Three Documentaries About Eric Rohmer • Senses ... Bruce Perkins from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Short Take Tributes on Rohmer • Senses of Cinema various contributors from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The Sign of the Map: Cartographic Reading and Le signe du lion ... Roland-François Lack from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Eric Rohmer's Place de l'Étoile • Senses of Cinema Luc Moullet from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

La collectionneuse: Dandies on the Côte d'Azur • Senses of Cinema Jacob Leigh from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Choice and Chance: A Dialectic of Morality and Romance in Eric ... Constantine Santas from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Night Moves Around Maud • Senses of Cinema Bruce Jackson from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The Tale of Perceval le Gallois and the Young Althusserians • Senses ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and ... - Senses of Cinema Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Following The Law of One's Own Being: The Crying Woman in The ... Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, 4, April 2010

Games of Passion: Eric Rohmer's Boyfriends and Girlfriends • Senses ... Adam Bingham from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

James Quandt on Eric Rohmer - artforum.com / film A Loss for Words, August 18, 2010

All Talk: Eric Rohmer Lives On | Village Voice J. Hoberman, August 18, 2010

The Human Comedies of Eric Rohmer - Harvard Film Archive August 20 – 30, 2010

Eric Rohmer vs. the 3-D Threat: August in Focus - indieWIRE Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, August 27, 2010

My Love Affair With Eric Rohmer « THE HYDRA Anelise Chen from The Hydra, September 2, 2010

Why I love: Eric Rohmer - Telegraph Philip Horner from The Daily Telegraph, October 15, 2010

ERIC ROHMER'S (ALL TOO) HUMAN COMEDIES | More Intelligent Life Andrew Stout from More Intelligent Life, Spring 2011

Eric Rohmer Wave Maker, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, March 12, 2011

The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social ... Ben McCann book review of The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World (384 pages), by Jacob Leigh from Screening the Past, May 2013

Review: A Summer's Tale | Film Comment Max Nelson, June 20, 2014

Eric Rohmer: everyday miracles of a New Wave master | Film | The ... Michael Newton from The Guardian, December 26, 2014

The Green Ray 1986 - The Focus Pull Mervyn Marshall, January 19, 2015

Film of the Week: Full Moon in Paris - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, April 16, 2015

Perception and Suppression in Claire's Knee | ianlcahoon Ian Cahoon, May 12, 2015

Éric Rohmer: Comedies and Proverbs - doc films - University of Chicago Ivan Albertson, Fall 2015

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) • Senses of Cinema Xanthe Ashburner, March 17, 2017

Triple Agent (Éric Rohmer, 2004) • Senses of Cinema Lee Hill, March 27, 2017

Not Reconciled: Close-Up on Eric Rohmer's "The Romance of Astrea ... James Slaymaker from Mubi, August 12, 2017

TSPDT - Eric Rohmer

New Interview with Eric Rohmer • Senses of Cinema Interview by Cahiers staff of Jean Narboni, Jean-Louis Comolli, Serge Daney and Pascal Bonitzer, published in Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010, originally appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, April, 1970

1977 Interview with Eric Rohmer on Vimeo TV Ontario video interview (subtitled in English) on YouTube (6:20)

Interview with Mary Stephen • Senses of Cinema Bill Mousoulis interviews Mary Stephen, Rohmer’s editor since 1992, from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000

Interview with Eric Rohmer | Film | The Guardian The French Revolutionary, interview by Tobias Grey from The Guardian, September 2, 2001

Interview with Eric Rohmer • Senses of Cinema Aurélien Ferenzi interview from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001

Eric Rohmer - father of the New Wave | The Independent Interview by Kaleem Aftab from The Independent, March 21, 2008

Robin Buss' Top 10 Directors

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Images for Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer (1920 - 2010) - Find A Grave Memorial

Éric Rohmer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of Rohmer Short Films

1950: Journal d’un Scélérat (A Scoundrel’s Diary)
1951: Présentation ou Charlotte et son Steak (Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak)
1952: Les Petites Filles Modèles (Perfect Little Girls)
1954: Bérénice
1956: La Sonata à Kreutzer (The Kreutzer Sonata)
1958: Véronique et son cancre (Veronique and Her Dunce)
1964: Nadja à Paris (Nadja in Paris)
1965: Paris vu par (segment, Place de l'Étoile)
1966: Une Etudiante d'aujourd'hui (A Modern Co-Ed)
1967: Fermière à Montfaucon (Farmer Montfaucon)
1983: Loup y es-tu? (Wolf, are you there?)
1999: The Camber (The Curve)

Six Moral Tales

1963: La Boulangère de Monceau (The Bakery Girl of Monceau)

1963: La Carrière de Suzanne (Suzanne’s Career)

1967: La Collectionneuse (The Collector)

1969: Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s)

1970: Le Genou de Claire (Claire’s Knee)

1972: L'Amour L’Après-Midi (Chloe in the Afternoon)

Six Comedies and Proverbs

1981: La Femme de L’Aviateur (The Aviator’s Wife)

1982: Le Beau Marriage (A Good Marriage)

1983: Pauline à la Plage (Pauline at the Beach)

1984: Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (Full Moon in Paris)

1986: Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray)

1987: L’Ami de Mon Amie (Boyfriends and Girlfriends)

JOURNAL D’UN SCÉLÉRAT (A Scoundrel’s Diary)

France (50 mi) 1950

Watch Journal D'un Scélérat (1950) Free Online - OVGuide

PRESENTATION OU CHARLOTTE ET SON STEAK (Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak)

France (10 mi) 1951 (redubbed by Anna Karina and Stéphane Audran in 1960)

Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak - Letterboxd

Two young people, Walter and Charlotte, are walking through a small village in Switzerland a snowy winter day. Walter introduces Charlotte to Clara, hoping to make Charlotte jealous. After saying good-bye to Clara, Walter accompanies Charlotte into her house, although she doesn't want him to. Charlotte is hungry and cooks a steak. She asks Walter if he wants a piece of it. He says no, but she gives him a small piece anyway. He wants a kiss, and she says no. She starts to compare herself with Clara, who Walter agrees is more beautiful. In spite of this, Walter says he likes Charlotte much more, but she thinks he is lying. She notices that he is cold and shivering. She hugs him, he kisses her, and she starts kissing him. After leaving the house he accompanies her to the train.

Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak Jaime Christley from Unexamined/Essentials, June 24, 2009

Apart from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Jean-Luc Godard barely out of knee pants, and as a conceited Rohmer hero no less, Presentation contains at least some of the DNA that would later flourish into a complete ecosystem, beginning with 1963's The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The bad news is, at ten minutes, the film seems nine minutes too long: it's not that Rohmer would wind up as the paragon of quick conflict turnaround, but he would eventually become so adept at mining the territory of his characters' perceptions, motives, and actions, that hardly a moment would seem wasted, as leisurely as his later masterpieces can sometimes seem. Still, Presentation at least hints at the direction of future Moral Tales preoccupation: the protagonist gets it in his head that, through a seemingly passive gesture, he can make his girlfriend jealous, and win her devotion at the same time. The consequences are less surprising to us than to him.

User reviews Author: Rodrigo Amaro (rodrigo882008@hotmail.com) from São Paulo, Brazil, April 27, 2011

Eric Rohmer's short "Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak" (something like "Presentation or Charlotte and her steak") follows Walter, Charlotte and Clara on a ordinary day simply walking on a snowy place. Then, Walter takes Charlotte to her home, spends some time with her with one single purpose: to kiss her, telling he's in love with her but also provoking her by telling that he likes Clara best. Charlotte refuses giving him a kiss, and only offers a piece of her steak as lunch. In the meantime, they have some conversations about trivial things while he still tries to get a kiss from the girl.

Here's a unusual and forgettable short film whose major attractive is to see Jean-Luc Godard as an actor, and he's a good one. There's nothing so interesting about the story, although it's quite charming, a little bit funny but nothing memorable dignifying of a great director. It was filmed in 1951 with two actresses, who were later dubbed by another (and more famous!) actresses, Anna Karina and Stéphane Audran, so the only one who's really present is Godard.

It's well made, very nice, enjoyable, exclusively and purely that! 6/10

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Verdict Review - Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer ... Joe Armenio, Criterion Collection

DVD Review - digitallyOBSESSED! Jeff Ulmer, Criterion Collection

DVD review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales (0) - BFI Tim Lucas, Criterion Collection

Les Petites Filles modèles — Wikipédia

Rohmer in the afterglow: Reflections on the French film master Rob Nelson from the Star Tribune, July 25, 2014

LES PETITES FILLES MODÈLES (Perfect Little Girls)

France (Unfinished, lack of financing) 1952

Cinemasparagus: Skorecki and Mourlet on Eric Rohmer On Rohmer, essay by Louis Skorecki, printed by Craig Keller from Cinesparagus, January 25, 2010

That a man of that quality can pass away in the blink of an eye, without a peep, on tiptoe, says everything about his nobility... That the media, and TV especially, remain silent in the face of his death (he filmed hours and hours of pure leçons de cinéma for educational television) speaks volumes about the lack of culture in these same media-outlets... He was obviously the greatest French filmmaker after Bresson, and before Brisseau and Moullet, two of his most brilliant disciples... We're still going to try our hand at two or three other words (which will be added to the only decent text to have been published upon Rohmer's death — that of Philippe Azoury in Libération), but we can already put forward the notion, without fear of slipping up, that he was one of a kind in the cinema, and that he taught everything to Jean-Claude Biette, Marguerite Duras, Jean Eustache, and also a certain... Woody Allen (La Collectionneuse is from 1967, Annie Hall from 1977).

Regarding the quietude surrounding Eric Rohmer's death, we can already remark upon one thing: only his actors were faithful to him, humbly testifying about what they learned from him, with an intelligence and a modesty that compels admiration.

P.S.: Rohmer's death at last allows us to do away with the foundational heresy of Bresson's cinema, that sublime myopia that would hold theatre as the sole entity accountable for all the evils of the cinema — while he [Bresson] will go down by far as the most brilliantly theatrical of filmmakers, from his two inaugural films, Les Anges du péché (sublime incursion into the Mizoguchian porno), and Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (contamination of the narrative by way of a parallel sado-lesbian intrigue)... Rohmer on the other hand will linger, obliquely, upon the perversities of Les Petites filles modèles, Bresson holding to a more frontal, more Balthusian eroticism — but all this will, in the end, stand only as theater, sublime theater, and nothing more...

Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard, by Jean Luc Godard, 1986

BÉRÉNICE

France (15 mi) 1954

Bérénice (1954) directed by Eric Rohmer • Film + cast ...

Shot in 16mm, Berenice is Rohmer’s first finished film. The film is based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe about a man who becomes obsessed with his fiancé’s teeth. The film was shot at Andre Bazin’s house by Jacques Rivette. Rivette also edited the film.

Tim Lucas / Video WatchBlog: Eric Rohmer's Horror Movie February 8, 2014

Bérénice (1954) - Eric Rohmer - YouTube (21:30)

LA SONATE À KREUTZER

France (50 mi) 1956

La sonate à Kreutzer (1956) — The Movie Database

La Sonata à Kreutzer is a 16mm film based on a Tolstoy story and was written and directed by Eric Rohmer and produced by Jean-Luc Godard. The film follows a man (Rohmer) whose wife starts to fall for a another man (Jean-Claude Brialy). The film is a great look into the Nouvelle Vague in 1956, with Godard in a supporting role and a scene shot in the offices of Cahiers du cinema, with cameos by Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, and Andre Bazin. It was in reference to this film when Truffaut called Rohmer the master of 16mm.

Eric Rohmer in the rue de la Huchette, c.1956 - The Cine ... early still shots from the shooting of Rohmer’s La Sonate à Kreutzer, 1956, from The Cine-Tourist

La sonate à Kreutzer - Watch Movies Online Free - Just Added

VÉRONIQUE AND HER DUNCE (Véronique et son cancre)

France (18 mi) 1958

Cinema and the Classroom: Education in the Work of Eric Rohmer Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, April 2010 (excerpt)

The most delightful of Eric Rohmer’s early shorts is Véronique et son cancre (Véronique and Her Dunce, 1958), the story of a stylish young woman (Nicole Berger) giving grinds to – and effectively babysitting – an unruly pupil (Alain Delrieu). As with many apprentice works, the blueprint for Rohmer’s ‘mature’ cinema is easy to trace – the discord between female and male, expressed through the interaction of dialogue, body language, costume, décor and space. But it foregrounds one theme that will recur throughout his films, and serves to unite the disparate aspects of his biography and his work as a cinema theorist, as a television professional, and as creator of some of French cinema’s most beloved works: education.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Slight, atypical (being closer to Truffaut in its look at a mischievous lonely boy) but likable 18-minute short from Rohmer. The plot could not be simpler, what with a single setting (the dining-room of a flat) and only 3 characters (the child, his mother and his young female guardian). The latter overlooks the kid's studies during afternoons while his mum is away on some errand, asking her to be severe if necessary. Anyway, after a few tantrums, 'tutor' and student settle down to work at some arithmetic problems – but logic soon leads to confusion, and she cannot quite explain to him how to get at the requisite answer except that that is the way it should be done! Next, they tackle composition and she has a hard time convincing him on the need to elaborate with respect to a typical Thursday morning's activities – since one simply thinks about doing something and as such does not require further explanation! When the girl leaves, he is not yet ready and the mother has still not returned; though the boy assures her he will keep working on the essay, he takes to playing with his ball as soon as she exits. Enjoyable on the surface but full of often sardonic insight about methods of upbringing and teaching in the modern world.

Véronique et son cancre (1958) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

DVD Verdict Review - Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer ... Joe Armenio, Criterion Collection

DVD Review - digitallyOBSESSED! Jeff Ulmer, Criterion Collection

Love in the Afternoon | DVD Video Review | Film @ The ... Gary Couzens from The Digital Fix

love in the afternoon - review at videovista.net Paul Higson

Putting the “vague” - Ken Jennings - Blog

DVD review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales (0) - BFI Tim Lucas, Criterion Collection

Watch Veronica And Her Dunce 1958 FREE Online ...

THE SIGN OF LEO (Le signe du lion) B+ 90

France (103 mi) 1959

Maintaining his secrecy throughout his life, Rohmer was either born in Tulle (southwestern France) under the name Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer or born in Nancy (northeastern France) under the name Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. The truth remains a mystery. His first feature was made in 1959 for Claude Chabrol’s new production company AJYM, though the film was recut and restored in 1962 when Chabrol was forced to sell the company and Rohmer disowned the recut version. In 1962 Rohmer and his longtime producer Barbet Schroeder co-founded the production company Les films du losange which produced all of Rohmer's work except his final three features. A lone film, not part of his Comedies And Proverbs or Moral Tales, it has continually slipped under the radar of Rohmer retrospectives, along with half a dozen rare short films from the 50’s ranging in length from 10 to 50 minutes that never screened outside of France. Rohmer was already over 40 by the completion of this film, at least ten years older than any of the other critics who went on to become filmmakers in the Cahiers du Cinéma group, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rivette, and his first film failed to have the explosive impact of his contemporaries, where The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), LES COUSINS (1959), and BREATHLESS (1960) were very much in the style of early French New Wave, becoming a major disappointment for Rohmer who returned to his work at Cahiers and continued making 16 mm shorts while having to wait another decade before making another feature. Unavailable on DVD (though available on Region 2, Eric Rohmer - The Early Works) and one of the hardest Rohmer films to see, viewers will have to search out film schools and art house theaters for a screening of this film.

Rohmer is considered the most literary and conservative-minded of the Cahiers group, whose low-budget films were rigorously prepared and shot, but in contrast to the early films of his contemporaries, where every frame announces it intends to change the course of cinema, this has none of the jarring New Wave techniques, yet it aptly belongs with those films by bringing the camera out into the streets, making bold use of urban locales as the aesthetic architecture of the film, where shooting locations become an expression of the character’s interior world. While it’s a very poised and austere morality tale, taking an absurdist view of life where fate can be uncommonly cruel and without mercy, the heavily despairing overall mood is a sobering cinematic experience. Rohmer is accused of focusing his attention on the banality of life, characterized by overly chatty, dialogue-driven films, often featuring educated, yet highly materialistic characters, including intellectuals and artists, who are constantly talking about themselves, placing themselves at the center of their existence, yet happiness, and the security of emotional attachments, remain elusive. Rohmer has used no music in his films after this one and has always been an interior storyteller, confining himself to conventional, neatly contained, bourgeois worlds where racial diversity, for instance, simply doesn’t exist, and characters quickly grow alienated from the world around them, often displaced from God and unable to find meaning in their existence. What is perhaps most unique about Rohmer is not so much his heralded literacy, but his undeniable success in finding cinematic images for common, everyday and ordinary moments that would otherwise seem so uncinematic. While characters usually discuss these moral concepts at length, known for his characteristic literary and philosophical classicism, not in this film, a more gloomy effort where themes of disillusionment are instead wordlessly introduced through visual internalization. Supposedly a favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where his film FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975) could be described as a variation on a similar theme, unrelentingly pessimistic, where a down and out carnival worker (Fassbinder as Fox) wins the lottery and suddenly has friends mooching off him left and right, all contending to be friends, which Fox desperately wants to believe, until they’ve stolen everything he has, leaving him utterly penniless and alone.

Rohmer’s film has an unusual lead, Indiana-born Jess Hahn, a U.S. Marine who served in France during the war and became a French citizen afterwards, playing Pierre, whose heft and strong man appearance could easily pass as a gangster in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, a French-speaking American musician living a bohemian existence in Paris who is surrounded by well-to-do friends, who at the outset is informed his fabulously wealthy aunt has died, where he assumes right away he’s rich beyond his dreams, even sharing the inheritance with his cousin, inviting everyone he knows over to his flat for a celebratory party, borrowing money and running up huge debts, as accumulating bills are suddenly the least of his worries, where in typical Chabrol style (each of his earliest films feature an elaborate party sequence), he features an exuberant, but entirely naturalistic, bohemian party scene with an abundance of food and free flowing wine, where none other than Jean-Luc Godard in dark glasses, taking a break from shooting BREATHLESS (1960), shows up playing his favorite passage on the phonograph player over and over again. In the morning he’s served an eviction notice, also news that his cousin inherited everything, so he’s quickly booted to the street, the first sign of his precipitous fall from grace. At first, he maintains his friendships and easy connections, but they soon lose touch when’s he’s thrown out of every last known address, where angry hotel landlady Stéphane Audran (lead actress and former spouse of Chabrol) insists upon reporting him to the police (her brother is a policeman), so all hotels refuse to accept him. As a result, Pierre spends his time endlessly walking around the Parisian neighborhoods, becoming something of a love letter to the bohemian quarters, selling his books to a mystery lover street vendor, none other than Jean-Pierre Melville, spending his final few pennies on bread, where eventually he’s forced to sleep on the street, where a dissonant and psychologically shatteringly Louis Sageur violin piece plays throughout (a rarity in a Rohmer film), whose exasperating repetitiveness may prove irksome for some.

The jovial tone of the film shifts to neo realism and becomes a long, drawn out and near wordless encounter with the streets of Paris in the 50’s, capturing the mood and atmosphere of the steamy hot month of August, using the available natural light of summer, shot by pre-war cinematographer Nicolas Hayer, where despite the New Wave’s love of the streets in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Godard’s BREATHLESS, Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (both 1960), Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), or even Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), no other film is as graphically detailed in such carefully observed documentary style, where the city becomes the dominant force of the film, literally teeming with life from the cars on the street, strolling pedestrians, patrons sitting in outdoor café’s, to the narrow confines of hawking street vendors, like a street bazaar, and on into the heavily populated city parks, where the idle can sit uninterrupted for hours on benches, or even sleep at night, literally a time capsule conveying the sights and sounds, something along the lines of George Orwell’s autobiographical first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which details prolonged periods of hunger, taking odd jobs to avoid destitution, and living among the working poor. Similarly, Rohmer’s film is a bleak portrait of despair, where without friends or money or food, Pierre’s life is spiraling into a physical and spiritual decline, where his existentialist journey of endlessly walking the streets also becomes a picturesque cinematic travelogue not only of the photogenic bridges extended across the Seine River with people sitting along the river banks, but Paris is also viewed as a cumbersome city, often loud and dirty and hot, especially when seen through the eyes of the impoverished, where an air of gloom hangs over the city, especially alone at night, lonely and painful moments conveyed through the emptiness of a series of night shots.

The is not the familiar New Wave setting of Paris with pretty girls, fast cars, or gunfights, but is a nightmarish, cruel, and indifferent city where the protagonist is not seen hanging around the street café’s, but along the lower riverbanks of the Seine, where the city is seen as an urban inferno, frustrating, and utterly forbidding. The city itself stands for the doomed protagonist’s deteriorating state of mind, where the customary welcoming attraction of the City of Lights, where Paris is considered the romance capital of the world, sweet and inviting, instead turns into a heartlessly dark city where he finds himself abjectively alone. Pierre is continually portrayed as a human ghost walking among the living, watching intimate couples kissing or overhearing bits and pieces of conversations, until it appears he is beyond hope, that he has lost all connection to humankind. For whatever reason, the man is never seen looking for work, though he does work up a musical act performed in front of tourists in the street café’s under the wing of another street tramp (Jean Le Poulain) he meets on the banks of the Seine, a loud street peddler who ingratiates himself to American tourists and the wealthy, asking for donations, as he often makes a spectacle of himself, which Pierre hates and finds humiliating, though there are moments of humor, such as this stream of overheard conversation, “Is that beggar playing Bartok?” “No, he’s just out of tune.” “Well, it’s modern at any rate.” Co-written by Paul Gégauff (who wrote the dialogue), ironically this was the only time that Rohmer did not write the dialogue to one of his movies. Interspersed throughout Pierre’s wanderings are glimpses of his former friends, a newspaper photographer continually sent out of the country on work assignment, or friends discussing his disappearance, where now even if they saw him, due to his haggard appearance, they wouldn’t recognize him. But what Rohmer’s really suggesting is that money determines your identity and social status, that without it you’re invisible and may as well not even exist to the rest of the country. The director then rethinks that thought and offers a less fatalistic view, one apparently more in tune with chance and the possibilities of the cosmos, more akin with the finale of his later work, Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986). THE SIGN OF LEO is the only Rohmer film to exhibit any hint of lower class consciousness, where the tragic hero descends into dire poverty and homelessness, but nonetheless continues to wear a suit, like most all of Rohmer’s male characters, spending the rest of his career exclusively probing the interior consciousness of the middle class.

Le Signe du Lion | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Eric Rohmer's uncharacteristic first feature (1959) is the flavorsome and poetic account of a musician (Jess Hahn) who finds himself homeless in Paris for a summer and turns into a street bum. Touching and often funny, and providing a memorable look at Paris during the summertime, this footloose film may be preferred to Rohmer's better crafted but decidedly less funky subsequent work. With cameos by Jean-Luc Godard, Stephane Audran, and other French New Wave colleagues.

Le Signe du Lion Tom Milne from Time Out London

Rohmer's first feature, not so much a moral tale as a cautionary anecdote (loosely modelled on Murnau's The Last Laugh) in which an impoverished American musician living in Paris (Hahn) runs himself into debt on the strength of an inheritance he doesn't inherit. Very much of its nouvelle vague day in its amused anatomy of the Latin Quarter fauna as the hero desperately does the rounds in quest of a loan, having no luck because it is summer and everyone's on holiday, and gradually slipping without realising it into becoming a clochard. But also a precise, poetic documentary on Paris, with the city turning into a stone prison that gradually crushes resistance until the musician suffers total moral and physical disintegration.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Always a bit of a goofball, Eric Rohmer made his feature directing debut with this broad fable about an American expat who believes he's inherited a fortune, spends money freely, and then ends up down and out on the muggy streets of Paris. While the movie bears little resemblance to Rohmer's subsequent work, its detailed mise-en-scene, 1930's-style acting, and limber camerawork all point to the appreciation for classical filmmaking that lay behind the French New Wave's radical innovations—not to mention the finely-tuned, subtle style Rohmer himself would later develop. Like Jacques Rivette's PARIS BELONGS TO US, which screened earlier in the same series, this was a commercial flop in its time; long neglected, it is ripe for re-appreciation. As was customary for the early New Wave films, the film is chock full of director cameos; look out for Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, and perennial scene-stealer Jean-Luc Godard. (1962, 100 min, 35mm)

While his New Wave colleagues were working up dozens of cinematic fireballs in their respective 1959 debuts, Eric Rohmer was aiming for a hundred tiny match flares instead. Summer is the filmmaker's first season (Paris in August), his Lucky Pierre is an American moocher (Jess Hahn) with a half-finished sonata, disdain for aesthetes who don’t know how to drink, and news of an incoming inheritance. "I’ve always believed more in my luck than in my talent," he confesses to a chum in the middle of a nocturnal soiree, where a knack for picking up incisive curlicues of emotional data is already evident as characters drift in and out of apartment rooms. (Bonus: Taking a break from shooting Breathless, Godard turns up by a Victrola for a deadpan gag.) The bohemian and the cosmic promptly collide as the musician in a fit of bravado leans out the window and shoots his rifle into the starry skies. Astrology ("the most ancient of sciences") works in mysterious ways, and, when the fortune doesn’t come, Hahn is reduced to a literally starving artist, dodging hotel concierges, selling his possessions for coins, spending nights on park benches, filching from fruit stands. As the dilapidated figure wanders through the sweltering city, he notices the concrete walls encircling the Latin Quarter sidewalk cafés: A descent out of Zola and Hamsun, the "mortal silence" that could crumble any of Rohmer’s loquacious future protagonists into dust. One type of theater gives way to another with the arrival of the razzing, bowler-hatted vagrant (Jean Le Poulain), which is where Renoir’s Boudu meets Beckett’s Estragon as fate and chance wrestle over the rake’s progress. Sturges is the punchline’s chief tributary (Christmas in July), just the finish for a portrait of wry grace told under blasting sunlight and heavenly constellations. With Michèle Girardon, Van Doude, Paul Bisciglia, Christian Alers, and Stéphane Audran. In black and white.

A History of the French New Wave Cinema Richard John Neupert

Le signe du lion, with Pierre’s long slide into misery and final redemption, in many ways fits the structure of a parable more than the later films of his Six Moral Tales series. The sense of fate, which often influences Rohmer’s stories, is dominant and heavy-handed here. Moreover, while later Rohmer male characters spend much of their time thinking and debating, Pierre seems to have no real mind of his own. The first private screenings of Le signe du lion were very disappointing, and its distribution was further complicated by financial problems at Chabrol’s AYJM. Completed in October 1959, though later recut and rescored, it was not shown commercially until 1962 at the Pagoda in Paris, selling only five thousand tickets. Le signe du lion never earned any money, though it garnered a few sympathetic reviews. Magny points out that the biggest problems for the film were that it offered a thin story line, an unappealing protagonist, repetitive music, and insignificant details that were nonetheless granted excessive screen time. Magny does acknowledge that Rohmer’s first feature fits the New Wave spirit in many ways, however, especially in its documentation of a Paris that is very different from the commercial cinema’s stereotypical city of romance and monuments. Here, Paris in August is presented as a hostile place, and many images preserve Pierre’s heavy boredom and emptiness via the aimless duration of time and cavernous deep space in striking long takes. Jean Collet praises Rohmer’s city, arguing that Rohmer’s first feature proves right away that he is as much an architect as a director: “Le signe du lion is nothing if not a meditation on the city, the indifference its inhabitants show for one another and the distance established, as in Rear Window, between the characters and the spectator-tourists.”

Certainly Le signe du lion should be seen today as an interesting but failed experiment; some of its traits, such as the connection between appearances, setting, and character, will be worked out more elegantly in Rohmer’s later Moral Tales. Here, the obsessive documentary-like observance of the decline of Pierre and the hard, cruel space of the unforgiving Paris around him become a bit too obvious and even preachy. Frodon, however, praises Rohmer’s fascination with the concrete: “The mise-en-scene belongs firmly to the material side, granting a striking physical presence to the building walls, pavement, and cobblestones that surround this character, who could not have been named anything other than Pierre [stone].” But Crisp effectively sums up the problems: “The New Wave had accustomed the public to all sorts of frenzied and unpredictable outbursts, but not to the austerity and understatement of this film… [much less to] being told that men were drab, slack and uninteresting.”

The Sign of the Lion Jaime Christley from Unexamimed/Essentials, May 31, 2009

Not a film that goes places you expect Rohmer to go. The Sign of the Lion - his first feature - stars American-born Jess Hahn (a man with a long and layered acting career, but probably best-known to cinephiles as one of the two policemen who rousts Anthony Perkins from his bed at the start of Orson Welles's The Trial*) as a musician living in Paris, scraping by thanks to the dwindling goodwill of his friends and a procession of unforgiving landlords and landladies (including the fabulous Stephane Audran).

The premise is simple: Pierre receives a telegram with news of his aunt's death, leading him to believe himself a billionaire heir to her multinational fortune, and goes on a spending spree against his imminent wealth. When he learns he's been disinherited, Rohmer fashions a number of tenuous circumstances that will allow his gallery of compatriots to withdraw without seeming to do so maliciously. Not that intentions matter; the effect of their disappearance on Pierre is the same. He's evicted and soon finds himself down to his last sou, and in short order he's reduced to wandering the sun-baked streets of Paris, his shoes disintegrating, without a friendly face in sight.

Unlike the majority of Rohmer's subsequent features, Lion (an apt title, regarding the character, who truly has a bulky, leonine frame) doesn't concern itself much with the protagonist's inner life, perhaps because it lacks the typical Rohmerian template, where a character's decisions or suppositions are tested through antithetical arguments and circumstances. Instead, the film travels through territory more closely associated with something like Little Fugitive (the classic American independent from Morris Engel and Ray Ashley) or even Snoopy Come Home (a Peanuts animated feature), in which a protagonist's journey on the outer rim of society (always a witness to minor creature comforts, never a participant) runs parallel with increased levels of despair, loneliness, and degradation. It's never as bad for Pierre, Snoopy, or little Joey Norton, as it is for someone who legitimately experiences homelessness for any length of time, but Rohmer certainly leans hard on Pierre's misery, subjecting the poor sap to a number of humiliating and painful experiences on his way to the bottom, and he never lets us forget the brutal heat of the city in July and August.

The viewer, whether or not he's conditioned by Rohmer's later work (which is all about inner life, among other things), may begin to wonder, after what seems like a rather extended depiction of Pierre's downward spiral, just how much longer Rohmer is going to keep sitting on this guy's ribcage. Even with countless ellipses, this distended passage, which seems to consume four fifths of the movie, seems to be happening in real time. And Rohmer veterans and newcomers alike will spend much of that time guessing when the O. Henry twist ending will be introduced - although it's possible that, given the notion, Rohmer prolongs Pierre's suffering until we stop expecting anything other than more suffering.

While the film lacks for discipline and a contemplative approach to suffering (but not craft; as each camera angle and cut seems perfectly judged), we're more than compensated by three things. First, Jess Hahn has a great face and a commanding screen presence: at times, Rohmer's camera is happy simply to gaze into his perpetually dumbfounded mug, which appears at once to be childlike and preternaturally wise. Like Lino Ventura (alongside whom Hahn co-starred in Les grandes gueules), Hahn has a face you could forgive anything. And if the film doesn't do much thinking about his plight, he most certainly does. Second, the film's ability to convey viscerally the sights and sounds of Paris in the late '50s is without peer, perhaps even in greater films, such as Godard's Breathless or Truffaut's The 400 Blows - it is truly one of the most vivid "hot town, summer in the city" films. Third, Lion's earliest scenes gives us the first of Rohmer's great parties, as Pierre rashly tries to impress everyone as a Bacchanalian purveyor of food and drink. This part of the film establishes its atmosphere succinctly but keeps things popping, and it has a nice night-and-the-following-day feel to it. At the eye of the storm, there's the young Jean-Luc Godard, in a non-speaking but eloquent-beyond-words role, taking it upon himself to be the party's disc jockey, replaying a cut of music over and over and meditating on the repetition.

* The other was Billy Kearns, who went on to act for Tati (as the obnoxious-at-first,-then-actually-really-cool American in Playtime) and Truffaut (as the American executive in Bed and Board).

The Criterion Collection Eric Rohmer and Six Moral Tales, Criterion essay by Geoff Andrew, August 14, 2006

The Sign of the Map: Cartographic Reading and Le signe du lion ... Roland-François Lack from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Short Take Tributes on Rohmer • Senses of Cinema Under the Sign of Leo, by John Conomos from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

983 (115). Le signe du lion / The Sign of Leo (1959, Eric Rohmer) Kevin B. Lee, November 11, 2009

THE SIGN OF LEO (Le Signe Du Lion) - Eric Rohmer - New Wave Film

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Eric Rohmer's Talking Cures | Village Voice Kent Jones, February 6, 2001

Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "The Early ... - Mubi Glenn kenny

kamera.co.uk Chris Wiegand

Le Signe du lion (1959) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Film Reference.com Dennis Nastav, updated by Rob Edelman

Eric Rohmer: Le signe du lion (1959) Brian Rajski from Retentional Finitude

Rare Rohmer at Northwestern University | The Bleader Ben Sachs

"The Sign of Rohmer" and "A Film Unfinished" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson

The New York Times Vincent Canby

GIRL AT THE MONCEAU BAKERY (La Boulangère de Monceau)

France (23 mi) 1963

La Boulangère de Monceau Time Out London

Before he shot any of them, Rohmer announced the titles of his 'Six Moral Tales', the series that would occupy him for the next decade and make the French critic and academic an international name as a writer/director. Shot in 16mm and never released theatrically, this fledgling effort (though Rohmer had already made his first feature Le Signe du Lion in 1959) is narrated by Bertrand Tavernier and follows the fortunes of a student, Barbet Schroeder, who returns each day to the spot where he fell in love with a girl he met in the street. On the way though, there's a bakery where he stops for his daily cakes, and a very alluring young lady behind the counter.

Six Moral Tales - CineScene Howard Schumann, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The first film, The Girl at the Monçeau Bakery, only twenty-three minutes in length, centers on the dilemma of a young man (Barbet Schroeder) forced to choose between women. The young man, a law student, is infatuated with Sylvie (Michele Girardon), a girl he sees walking on the street each morning and thinks about how to introduce himself. After making a brief connection, the girl suddenly disappears and he spends his days looking for her on the streets of Paris . His search takes him to a nearby bakery where he buys one cookie each day and begins to notice Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier), the bakery counter girl.

She is shy and withdrawn but when she finally agrees to go out with him, the first woman reappears and he is faced with a choice between a girl he hardly knows but loves and a promising relationship with a girl that has taken to him. He arrives at his choice but it is done coldly and with little regard for the feelings of the rejected woman, rationalizing this by telling himself, "My choice had been above all, moral. One represented truth, the other a mistake, or that was how I saw it at the time." The film, though a first effort, offers believable characters and conveys a strong sense of location, providing a loving glimpse at Paris in the 60s.

La Boulangère de Monceau (1963) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A young man studying in Paris is drawn to an attractive young woman he sees every day in the street, but he does not have the courage to speak to her. When he finally decides to accost her, he is unable to meet her by chance, so he decides to spend some time every day waiting in the street for her. As he waits, he visits a baker’s shop to buy some pastries. As he carries on this bizarre ritual for several weeks, he gets to know the young baker’s girl who serves him every day...

The first of Eric Rohmer’s Six contes moraux provides an engaging portrait of male indecision and illustrates perhaps more clearly than in the other five films Rohmer’s premise for the series.

The central character in this film has to make the choice between waiting for the woman he knows he is destined for but whom he has temporarily lost sight of and making an immediate conquest of the earthy baker’s girl. The conflict, as in the other films in the series, is one of spirit versus flesh. Because Rohmer is an optimist and has such great faith in human nature, the spirit invariably wins through in the end. However, this outcome never appears certain and the hero in his films, who is in some measure a reflection of ourselves, always appears vulnerable and corruptible to the temptation he finds in his path.

La Boulangère de Monceau is noticeably different to the other five Moral Tales. It is by far the least ambitious and most experimental of the films. Owing to lack of funds, Rohmer was forced to make it (along with its successor La Carrière de Suzanne) using 16 mm film (as a result to the surviving print is of poor quality), and it was just over 20 minutes in length.

The film’s lead character was played by Barbet Schroeder, who is better known as a director/producer, and who produced this and many of Rohmer’s early films (including the entire Moral Tales series). Curiously, in this film Schroeder is dubbed with the voice of Bertrand Tarvernier, who would himself go on to become a successful film director.

Eric Rohmer: Blueprints for a Brilliant Oeuvre Criterion essay by Ginette Vincendeau, August 14, 2006

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Savant Review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Glenn Erickson, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer: The Bakery Girl Of Monceau ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

SUZANNE’S CAREER (La Carrière de Suzanne)

France (54 mi) 1963

La Carrière de Suzanne Time Out London

The second of the 'Six Moral Tales', and more substantial than the first (La Boulangère de Monceau): here the focus is on two young men, Beuzin and Charrière, who take advantage of Catherine Sée's ethereal Suzanne to bum drinks and food off her, but the crunch comes when it's revealed which one she's actually interested in. Although the resources are relatively modest, Rohmer's elegant wordplay and his exquisite attunement to the vagaries of the human psyche are evident even at this early stage in the director's career.

Six Moral Tales - CineScene Howard Schumann, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

In Suzanne's Career , the 54-minute second film of Rohmer's suite of Six Moral Tales , two friends, both students at a local university, vie for the affections of Suzanne (Catherine See). Guillame (Christian Charriere) is the more aggressive and the most manipulative but Bertrand (Phillipe Beuzen) goes along with his schemes and his character is not beyond blemish. Both scheme to have Suzanne pay for their good times and ignore her at parties to make her jealous while telling each other how they detest her.

There is a great deal of narration in the film and we are privy to Bertrand's thoughts and feelings as he sorts out for himself what is right and what is wrong. Suzanne is sweet but seemingly rather passive and easily exploited and we root for her to assert herself, and in typical Rohmer style we don't have to wait very long. This is a lovely film and, though it goes on a bit too long in pursuing its resolution, the ending is deliciously satisfying.

La Carrière de Suzanne (1963) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Bertrand and Guillaume are students at university in Paris. Bertrand watches helplessly as his friend exploits a seemingly naïve young woman, Suzanne. He does not know whom he despises most: Suzanne for allowing herself to be duped, or Guillaume for his despicable cruelty. Bertrand suspects that Suzanne is transferring her affection to him, but he has no real interest in her. He is smitten with another woman, Sophie, although she does not reciprocate his feelings.

In the second of his Six contes moraux, Eric Rohmer paints an all too believable portrait of adolescent vice and vulnerability whilst pursuing the central linking theme of a moral dilemma concerning love and desire. Here, the central character Bertrand is no more than a spotty youth, dependent on his parents for money and a total no-hoper when it comes to the opposite sex. His moral dilemma is hence more theoretical than in the other five Moral Tales – even if he were able to choose between the two women in his life, it is certain that neither of them would reciprocate his feelings. Yet, in his mind at least, the dilemma exists and it has a profound effect on him, as the film’s conclusion reveals.

Although far less polished than Rohmer’s subsequent films, La Carrière de Suzanne is an engaging work which clearly shows the writer-director’s uncanny capacity for observing and then re-creating real-life situations on film. Whilst the acting is not great, and technically the film is weak compared with Rohmer’s later films, the characters in the film appear fully rounded and believable, thanks largely to Rohmer’s naturalistic dialogue.

Eric Rohmer: Blueprints for a Brilliant Oeuvre Criterion essay by Ginette Vincendeau, August 14, 2006

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Savant Review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Glenn Erickson, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer: The Bakery Girl Of Monceau ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

SIX IN PARIS (Paris vu Par…)

Rohmer segment: Place de L’Étoile

France (95 mi) 1965 Omnibus film with 6 directors

Time Out review Tom Milne

A disappointingly lightweight collection of sketches, filmed in 16mm (blown up to 35mm) in an attempt to encourage experiment by reducing costs. Godard's contribution elaborates a story told in Une Femme est une Femme (about a girl who posts letters to her two lovers, then agonises that she got the envelopes mixed), interestingly but not very successfully shot cinéma-vérité style with Albert Maysles as cameraman. Rohmer and Rouch are desperately cramped for space; Douchet's episode is routine Nouvelle Vague sexual sparring; Pollet's is neatly observed but conventional. By far the best sketch is Chabrol's ruthlessly funny caricature of a bourgeois couple (played by himself and Audran) whose constant nagging, quarrelling and platitudinising drive their young son to resort to ear-plugs, with the result that he is blithely unaware of his mother's desperate cries for help when...

Also known by the French title Paris vu par . . . , this is probably the best of the French New Wave sketch films (1964). Six directors are assigned separate sections of Paris, and each sketch is shot in 16-millimeter. The most powerful episodes are those by Jean Rouch (one of his few purely fictional works, shot documentary style in only one or two takes and costarring the future director of Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder) and Claude Chabrol (a convulsive bourgeois family melodrama featuring Chabrol himself and his then-wife Stephane Audran). Eric Rohmer contributes a mordant and well-crafted story set around l'Etoile, and the interesting if uneven Jean-Daniel Pollet, whose other films are woefully unavailable in the U.S., is represented by a bittersweet comic short starring the Harry Langdon-like Claude Melki. Jean Douchet (best known as a Cahiers du Cinema critic) offers a fairly undistinguished depiction of a Left Bank seduction, and Jean-Luc Godard presents a more detailed version of a story told in his feature A Woman Is a Woman, shot by Albert Maysles and starring Joanna Shimkus. Like most sketch films, this is patchy, but the Rouch, Chabrol, and Rohmer segments shouldn't be missed.

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] (excerpt)

Eric Rohmer's Place de l'Etoile is one of his weaker efforts, even if in most of this company it winds up looking comparatively strong. The film opens with a documentary segment, in which Rohmer describes the area after which his segment is titled, a section of 12 streets arranged in a star pattern around the perimeter of the Arc de Triomphe. This area is carefully established in the opening minutes, particularly the way that the layout of streets leads to a situation where pedestrians circling the Arc are continually forced to cross busy intersections formed by the crisscrossing network of streets. This informative establishing material pays off when Rohmer's narrative reaches its climax, allowing the viewer to place the protagonist's movements within the context of the space he's moving in. It's a simple thing, but this is the only segment so far to truly establish a sense of location and spatial logistics for the neighborhood that gives its name to the segment. Despite the nominal theme of this project, most of the other directors chose stories that could take place anywhere, that use the neighborhoods they're located in as backgrounds at best. Only Rohmer, always detail-oriented, understands that character is at least partially defined by space. Just as in his features he always pays inordinate attention to the decoration of his characters' living spaces, here he takes great pains to set up the environment in which his character will be moving.

Once the narrative gets going, though, it's a simple enough little story, about a haughty and fastidious clothing shop clerk (Jean-Michel Rouzière) who believes that he's accidentally killed a bum who accosted him on the street. The payoff of the documentary sequence that opened the feature is Rouzière's mad dash away from the scene of the crime through the entire Place de l'Etoile, running across intersections filled with cars and weaving among the other pedestrians. The slow, leisurely tour of the opening minutes is now repeated at a much brisker pace, as the man runs frantically from his imagined pursuers. They never catch him, and months later he runs across the bum on the train, and thus realizes that he didn't kill him after all. It's a slight story, obviously, as minimal and pointless as many of the others in this compilation film. The only difference is that Rohmer's characteristic attention to mise en scène allows him to inflect even this undistinguished narrative with at least a hint of cinematic interest.

User comments from imdb Author: Aw-komon from Los Angeles, CA

Except for the idiotic Godard segment which just plain sucks, all the other directors did a hell of a job shooting these 16mm short films. In the best tradition of the French New-Wave, most of the films come as close to documentary as possible. The American girl (Barbara Wilkins) in Jean Douchet's little film about American girls who get taken for a ride by French playboys, is just wonderful in her role and perfectly portrays many nuances that have never been captured on film. Douchet was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema who wrote one of the greatest analyses of Hitchcock ever. Documentary master Jean Rouch, one of the godfathers of the New Wave is represented next in a spectacularly authentic and resonant segment that's one long continuous take for about 15 minutes straight, following its protagonist (another wonderfully authentic young girl, this time French) from the breakfast table argument with her boyfriend (producer/director Barbet Schroeder in an early role) into the street where she meets a mysterious man who wants her to go away with him. A wonderfully hilarious 10 minute segment by Jean Daniel Pollet features Michelline Dax playing the experienced Parisian prostitute to perfection as she affectionately makes fun of her inexperienced john who looks like a French version of Buster Keaton. Rohmer's piece is about a salesman/former runner who gets into an altercation with a drunk man on the street and thinks he might have accidentally killed him; it is very different from anything else Rohmer has ever done and, needless to say, quietly masterful. In Chabrol's interesting and typically Hitchcockish 'horror-under-the-prim-bourgeois-surface' expose piece Chabrol himself acts as the 'bourgeois' father and his then-wife Stephane Audran as the mother of a mischievous boy who starts putting ear-plugs in his ears to keep from hearing their constant arguments. Overall, there's a lot of decent stuff here for attentive viewers and French New Wave fans.

User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

"Paris vu par..." was a surprise that was shown on cable recently. Not having seen the film before, and not having an idea what to expect, proved to be the right choice when everything being shown didn't compare to this excellent account about Paris in the early 1960s, as seen by six distinguished directors, mostly followers of the New Wave movement.

The six segments concentrate in a Paris neighborhood. The first one, "Saint Germain-des-Pres, deals with a young playboy and a young American woman who have a one-night-stand. The girl evidently had romantic hopes that doesn't pan out. Barbet Shroeder, a film director himself, appears as the young playboy.

Another vignette "Rue Saint-Denis" present us a young man who has brought home a prostitute. The woman senses the shyness in Leon, her client, and assumes is his first sexual encounter. She ridicules him, and even shames him into feeding her; she even offers to pay him for her meal. Micheline Dax and Claude Melki are the excellent players.

"Gare du Nord" is a disturbing account of an encounter between a young woman and a stranger as they walk on a stretch of the street that looks down on the train tracks leading to the station. The man, who appears in a car out of nowhere, follows the young woman who has had a quarrel with her boyfriend. He appears to be quite sincere in what he asks her, but we are not prepared for what he will do, in a surprise ending that leaves the viewer quite shocked.

Eric Rohmer, a director still active, shows his hand in "Place de l'Etoile", which follows a man as he rides the metro to his place of work in a men's store near the Arc of Triumph. He is man of habit who follows the same path every day. When he encounters a mad man, intent in harming him, he responds with his umbrella. Later on, Jean Marc will meet again his attacker, but then it's a different encounter altogether.

"Montparnasse-Levallois" by Jean-Luc Godard, presents a young woman who is seen posting two letters in one of the pneumatic devices popular in Paris. The only problem is she has sent letters to two different men with whom she has been having intimate relations. As she tries to get out of her dilemma, expecting forgiveness, she gets instead reactions she didn't expect. A young Joanna Shimkus is seen as the Canadian at the center of the conflict.

The last section of the film is by Claude Chabrol, a master of suspense. "La Muette" shows a young man whose parents seem to be not interested in him. The father has a roving eye for the sexy maid, something the mother doesn't seem to care about. Chabrol plays the father himself and Stephane Audrn, at the height of her beauty, is seen as the careless mother. Giles Chusseau is the young man.

"Paris vu par..." is not seen often these days, yet it offers the viewer an interesting look at the early work of these directors. Paris being the background for the story is captured as it appeared in those days.

Eric Rohmer's Place de l'Étoile • Senses of Cinema Luc Moullet from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Place de l'Etoile • Senses of Cinema Steven Rybin, April 15, 2005

Six in Paris (1968) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker

Paris vu par... (1965) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

FCN—Review of SIX IN PARIS (PARIS VU PAR, 1965) - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

DinaView [Dina Iordanova]

Six in Paris | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 1, 2008

The Stranger (Charles Mudede) review

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [C+] Adam Markovitz

Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [3/5]

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review Kathie Smith

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

THE COLLECTOR (La Collectionneuse)

France (89 mi) 1967

La Collectionneuse Tom Milne from Time Out London

The third of Rohmer's six moral tales, and the first of his films to achieve wide recognition. The collector of the title is a delectable nymphet, footloose in St Tropez, who makes a principle of sleeping with a different man every night until two friends, declining to become specimens, decide to take her moral well-being in hand. In the 18th century game which Rohmer transposes to a contemporary setting, this pair can be seen as intellect trying to dominate instinct, but only succeeding in rousing unwanted passions. Wryly and delightfully witty.

La Collectionneuse (1967) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A young art dealer, Adrien, decides to take a holiday in the south of France. He shares a villa with an artist, Daniel, and a promiscuous younger woman, Haydée. When he realises that Haydée collects men like art enthusiasts collect works of art, Adrien becomes convinced that Haydée intends to seduce him. Determined to resist her charms, he cruelly pushes other men, including Daniel, into a relationship with her.

Eric Rohmer’s third film in his series of Six Contes Moraux is similar in style to the first two shorter films (La Boulangère de monceau and La Carrière de Susanne). All three films involve a great deal of improvisation (this film more so) and excessive use of voice over to centre the narrative around the principal protagonist. La Collectionneuse is also strikingly different, because of its longer runtime and the fact that it is in colour.

The film presents a cynical, even cruel, view of human relationships. Of all the male leads in Rohmer’s Moral Tales, Adrien is perhaps the least likeable – not only is he too sure of himself but he also exhibits a nasty streak of malice. This partly explains why this Moral Tale is somewhat less engaging and ultimately less satisfying than the others.

La collectionneuse Jaime Christley from Unexamined/Essentials, May 7, 2009

It's My Night at Maud's that remains Eric Rohmer's most successful film, in terms of box office, Oscar nominations (one for its screenplay, one for Best Foreign Language Film), and enduring popularity, but La collectionneuse was his magnificent opening volley, a tempestuous study of human interaction disguised as a lush travelogue, surely the tensest leisure atmosphere we would find in the cinema, prior to Michael Powell's Age of Consent - or Steven Spielberg's Jaws. It's the kind of film that takes the phrase "sun-dappled" right to the end of the road, but as a study in sex warfare, its placid surface masks deep turmoil and ruthless gamesmanship.

Rare for a Rohmer film - or perhaps not, since every one of his films seems to have something about it that "doesn't belong" - La collectionneuse bristles at one's attempts to love it. It's not exactly what you'd call "amiable," as great films go, but its prickliness is neither inorganic, nor does it seem to be an aspect of the work that grows anachronistic as one looks at it across the subsequent forty years of Rohmer's filmography. Instead, it's a structuring principle, and the director tips his hand regarding the film's operation during the three-part prologue:

The first sequence, wordless, gives us Haydée but does not establish her in any context, except a geographic one realized later. A long shot of the girl walking along the breakers, giving the camera the perspective of a lascivious beach gawker, is followed by a fragmented cut-up of her most desirable "parts." It's a strange sequence of shots for Rohmer, closer to a Kenneth Anger montage, but absent of music, like the rest of the film.

Next is the first dialogue sequence. In it, the artist Daniel Pommereulle - who will become the film's "other man" - and his friend, artist and poet Alain Jouffroy, discuss an artwork of Daniel’s, a paint can that has been armed all around its body with outward-facing razor blades. If we sense that there's something documentary about this sequence, we're not far wrong - Alain and Daniel play themselves, or at least Rohmer concocts no pretense for the two to disappear into any kind of artificial character.

Alain also talks with Daniel about Daniel, in a mode that combines critique, compliment, and dry appraisal (i.e. not so different from the Haydée montage), and considers the razor-can as a way of seeing the artist, of seeing with him, as we will use our sense of the artwork of the film (attractive yet elaborate and not conducive to the easy approach) to see into, and through, the characters. The characters will also regard each other with haughty, appraising eyes, pretending intimacy when they could not be more distant, pretending indifference when something is already under their skin. Everyone, after a fashion, is implicated.

Alain observes that, although the razor-can is a "Unique" object, perfect in its way, that it has no root cause, it indicates an image-consciousness on Daniel's part, in a manner that produces a void around him that people can try, unsuccessfully, to breach. (At this point in the film, scarcely a few moments in, Daniel isn't made any more familiar to us, despite the fact that Alain is, presumably, speaking as a close friend and confidante.) Finally, he declares "razors are words." It’s understandable if Alain's talk, when you watch it, is hard to process – by and large contrary to what we would otherwise expect from Rohmer, it’s a poetic impression rather than a cogent argument.

In the third prologue, the declaration, "Razors are words" is reversed: words become weapons. The brunette (Annik Morice) makes devastating, opinionated remarks regarding ugliness versus handsomeness, not flinching when Adrien (Bauchau; our eventual protagonist) jokingly presumes that she means it's "to the ovens" with ugly people. Eleven and a half minutes in, we've been on the beach, in an artist's modest studio, and on a birdsong-accompanied veranda overlooking a clear, blue swimming pool, and Rohmer has drawn us a map of a minefield. Throughout the film, the fact and experience of beauty (in art, in human form) are inextricably linked with hostility and resentment.

The film’s triple-headed lede is less a decryption key for subsequent events (despite giving that impression, especially in the baroque fracturing of the body in the first prologue) than a listing of ingredients that will be subject to greater and older laws, as well as a certain degree of chance and spontaneous decision-making. To say that things are "set up" by the prologue is not the same as saying that they are "set," any more than words spoken are equal to words written. (Not even a priceless artifact from the Song Dynasty is guaranteed safe passage.) A closer analogy, one that actually helps to explain a lot about Rohmer's tendency toward the mercurial yet system-oriented narrative, is that of a virus being introduced into a body, the resulting conflicts, and the resolution.

The first prologue sees Haydée but denies us any understanding beyond the act of looking - and, in fact, her second appearance is not really confirmed (as she's masked in shadow) until subsequent dialogue. The second seems to "lay bare" an artist's personality but it's just a feint: Daniel is scarcely established as a key player until we meet him later, and even then he remains as much a cipher as Haydée, perhaps moreso, right up to his big kiss-off speech. In the third, inadequate words become hazardous words (as the brunette verbalizes ideas that may be true in her mind, but are unambiguously hurtful for everyone else - at least, those of us who aren't Rohmer actors; a bourgeois complacency at once self-aware and completely deluded), setting the stage for Adrien to assume the mantle as narrator.

If a film this amorphous in form can be said to have a core - and it does - it concerns the relationship between Adrien and Haydée, which begins with a few rounds of hostile-playful sparring (with an ever-present but never-consummated edge of sex - seemingly a house rule for the director) and doesn’t so much change across the rest of the story so much as it mutates, tracing the contour of the emotional-sexual landscape, growing without expanding, condensing without contracting. It's a story told through nearly imperceptible expressions and carefully modulated tones of voice: less what is said than how. Evidence regarding Rohmer's mastery of sub-surface plot development is found in the scene of the ejection of Haydée's second male suitor. Adrien intends nothing more than to resume his do-nothing holiday undisturbed, but in vanquishing his younger, less experienced opponent, he impresses Haydée, who wears a knowing, coquettish grin. He is the victor, but he is not prepared for his spoils.

In making his resolve clear, Adrien reverts to his more central, truer nature, proving the film's most basic thesis, that you can't take a vacation from yourself. As shown by the parade of boyfriends that Haydee “collects” (she is introduced copulating with a faceless lover we presumably never see again, and in her last moments in the film she is talking up two brand new guys), but more pointedly by the way she lays waste to the third housemate, Daniel, and the art collector Sam (played by American film critic Eugene Archer), the girl gives Adrien cause to work hard just to avoid becoming one of her rags. Whether this is a comic byproduct of Adrien's commitment to his do-nothing holiday, or a negative reinforcement of the same, is the provocative question that outlines the film's narrative. When all barriers between Adrien and the girl have been dismantled and hauled away, a Haydee-Adrien coupling seems inevitable, but the possibility dissolves like a dream on waking, and soon enough, so too does the film.

La collectionneuse: Marking Time Criterion essay by Phillip Lopate, August 14, 2006

La collectionneuse: Dandies on the Côte d'Azur • Senses of Cinema Jacob Leigh from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] April 29, 1971, original newsprint via (pdf format)

-Derek Malcolm's Century of Films: Eric Rohmer: La Collectionneuse Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, September 9, 1999

Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

La Collectionneuse - TCM.com Lang Thompson from Turner Classic Movies

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer

DVD Savant Review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Glenn Erickson, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer: The Bakery Girl Of Monceau ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales - CineScene Howard Schumann, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Film: Eric Rohmer's 'Collectionneuse' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, April 26, 1971

MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) A 95

France (110 mi) 1969

You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win, you win everything: if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then: wager that he does exist.

—Pascal's Wager from Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, 1669

Throughout Rohmer’s career, he kept searching for life’s secrets and meanings, sharing his understandings with his audience in what might be called a lifelong conversation in search of meaning. But it’s here in this film that it all began, as it is perhaps the most autobiographical of Rohmer films, where Jean-Louis, Jean-Louis Trintignant using his own name (though “I” is the only name used in the film), is the stand-in for the director with his moody, self-absorbed, Catholic intellectualizing, while Françoise Fabian as Maud is perhaps his idealized woman, beautiful, strong, atheistic, and equally intelligent, perhaps a bit more mature than the men she knows as she’s more certain of herself, while the blond and Catholic Marie-Christine Barrault as Françoise is a more compatible version of his ideal wife. More than anything else, this is a film of ideas, the ones that haunt the artistic creator, obviously, but the universality of philosophical thought carries over into the lives of the audience. This film is almost scientific in the way it presents itself, well thought out ahead of time, perfectly harmonious and balanced, the only one of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (Six Contes moraux, 1963–72) that was shot during the winter. As an example of Rohmer’s commitment to detail, he insisted that the shooting for this film had to begin during the Christmas holiday season, but when actor Jean-Louis Trintignant was unable to make that precise date, Rohmer postponed the film for a year until all the stars in the sky were properly aligned. As a result, chronologically it changes the sequence of the Six Moral Tales, where this is supposedly the third in the sequence, but the fourth LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (1967) was shot two years earlier. The film is consistent in the third spot, however, introducing thematic complexity to the story, including maturity from the characters, who in the other 5 episodes are much younger, while maintaining a certain symmetry as the first three Tales are in black and white, none more beautifully than MAUD, while the final three are shot in color. As the centerpiece of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, using older and more mature characters, each one involved in their careers, this was Rohmer’s only use of professional actors throughout the entire series other than Jean-Claude Brialy in CLAIRE’S KNEE (1970), where the director insisted upon using Brialy against type. Here responsibility is a given, as 34-year old Jean-Louis has traveled to Canada, America, and Chile through his job as an engineer for Michelin, has had his share of relationships with women, but now is attempting to settle down, where he’s single, serious, and unattached, but Catholicism is an essential component of his life. In one of the earliest scenes, he’s at church just before Christmas listening to the mass as he sees a young blond across the aisle, vowing then and there to marry her. When he attempts to follow her on her motorbike afterwards, he loses her in the traffic.

Mirroring the narrative of the first Moral Tale, THE BAKERY GIRL OF MONCEAU (La Boulangère de Monceau, 1963), the protagonist falls in love with a woman he sees on the street without ever having spoken to her, but then becomes sidetracked and involved with another woman who literally consumes his interest before accidentally running into the first woman, where in each instance a choice must be made. Purely by accident, the story veers into another direction when he runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a former student friend, now a marxist philosophy professor at a local university that he hasn’t seen in 14 years. They pick up where they left off, however, discussing the merits of Pascal and Catholicism, attempting to apply mathematical logic to abstract thoughts, combining mathematics and metaphysics, where both are well aware of each other’s views, with Vidal commenting, “To a communist, Pascal’s ‘wager’ is very real,” claiming “Gorky, Lenin, or maybe Mayakovsky talking about the Russian revolution said that circumstances forced them to take the chance in a thousand because it was infinitely better to take that chance than no chance at all.” Together they attend a concert of violinist Léonide Kogan playing a Mozart piano and violin sonata, integrating art into the equation, highlighting the contrast between the painted angels on the ceiling at the performance and the massive empty space above the parishioners inside the cathedral, both houses of thoughtful contemplation. When Vidal invites him to an evening dinner engagement with Maud, identified as a good friend and occasional lover, coming from a family of free thinkers (or Freemasons) where irreligion is a form of religion, whose winning attributes are her intelligence and beauty, Jean-Louis continues where he left off, reflecting upon a life of moral values that would embrace faith, where Catholicism is encapsulated in delineating the complex nature of morality rather than demarcating clear distinctions between good and evil. Separating himself from sacred devotion through abstinence, “As a Christian, I say it’s evil not to acknowledge what is good,” acknowledging that he can appreciate the fine wine that comes from the region, believing religion enhances not only one’s life, but the merits of marriage. “Religion adds to love, but love adds to religion also,” where at that moment Maud’s young daughter peeps her head out the door, as if adding context to the stated premise. His strict and somewhat selfish principles take the non-believers by surprise, so they continually tease him, as they’re basically excluded from his existential philosophy that only concerns his own personal salvation. The key ingredients to the film include naturalism, an element that exists in all Rohmer films, but also a willingness to present a free-flowing discussion of ideas relating to life, relationships, and our place in a world that incorporates faith. This identifies the central themes of the Six Moral Tales, which continue to be discussed throughout the film.

Perhaps it might be interesting to note that the precise definition of “moral” means something slightly different in French than the same word in English. Quoting Rohmer who elaborates extensively in Graham Petrie’s interview from Film Quarterly, Summer 1971:

In French there is a word moraliste that I don’t think has any equivalent in English. It doesn’t really have much connection with the word “moral.” A moraliste is someone who is interested in the description of what goes on inside man. He’s concerned with states of mind and feelings. For example, in the eighteenth century Pascal was a moraliste, and a moraliste is a particularly French kind of writer like Le Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, and you could also call Stendahl a moraliste because he describes what people feel and think. So Contes Moraux doesn’t really mean that there’s a moral contained in them, even though there might be one and all the characters in these films act according to certain moral ideas that are fairy clearly worked out. In Ma Nuit Chez Maud these ideas are very precise; for all the characters in the other films they are rather more vague, and morality is a very personal matter. But they try to justify everything in their behavior and that fits the word “moral” in its narrowest sense. But “moral” can also mean that they are people who like to bring their motives, the reasons for their actions, into the open. They try to analyze; they are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself. They aren’t films of action, they aren’t films in which physical action takes place, they aren’t films in which there is anything very dramatic, they are films in which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective. That’s what Contes Moraux means.

The discussion on Pascal and Christianity alone are worth the price of admission, where a half century later they remain as blisteringly intense and applicable in today’s world, proof that films with ideas last, while conventionality fades. Trintignant’s man of faith character is consistent with many of the roles he took throughout his career, an educated man of conscience who often sees himself drowning in mediocrity, such as his infamous role as a sexually repressed secret police agent seeking redemption through normalcy during the fall of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970). But the philosophical discussion only leads us into Maud’s apartment, who conveniently dismisses the professor on grounds he’s had too much to drink, leaving her alone with her man of principles. The astonishing power of the film is the performance of Françoise Fabian, an Algerian by birth, the widow of French director Jacques Becker, and while thirty years younger, she never appeared in any of his films. She did, however, work for Luis Buñuel in his provocative tale of erotic surrealism in BELLE DE JOUR (1967), Jacques Rivette’s near 13-hour masterwork OUT 1 (1971), also OUT 1: SPECTRE (1974), while appearing again in a dream sequence of Rohmer’s LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972), the concluding film of the Six Moral Tales. While she has appeared in more than 80 films since 1956, she is a revelation here, a modern woman, a free spirit, sexy, intellectually engaging, and sophisticated, one of the more intriguing female characters to appear in French films, while largely unheralded, as her appearance in the film is a complete surprise. She is vibrant and stunningly beautiful, unconventionally liberated, has that mysterious, indefinable female essence, appears smarter than Jean-Louis in every sense, certainly more openly honest, can hold her own on any subject, remains true to her convictions, yet the film focuses nearly all its attention on him. They spend the night in her apartment sharing intimate conversations, where the contrast between the two is the tale of the film, as she sensuously manipulates him into her bed, though he remains wrapped in a blanket, but it’s the wintry season, so it gets cold at night. While he convinces himself that he’s into something deeper, she sleeps naked where the sexual invitation appears open, as she does invite him into her bed, while teasing him about his “dream woman,” the blond he’s only seen and never spoken to. The choice becomes Pascal’s wager, as Maud is there in the flesh, in the here and now, while his other option exists only in his head.

The gorgeously austere black and white cinematography by Néstor Almendros is striking, especially the wintry town of Clermont-Ferrand during the Christmas season in the snow. Pascal’s ideas are not only introduced, but become the overriding theme of the story, where the center of interest is free choice. Will a man bet his future happiness on marrying a girl he has only seen, and will that translate to a fulfilling married life together? Morality for Rohmer in his Moral Tales does not mean normal moral behavior, but rather a struggle within a certain individual to come to terms with crucial decisions, while being able to explain to himself and those around him his or her rationale for these decisions. While romantic interests seem to fuel this speculation, in this film the holy trinity is reflected by the triangular sets of ideas embodied in the three main characters, a Catholic, a Marxist, and an agnostic. A fourth is added to the equation when Jean-Louis finally introduces himself to Françoise on the street in an awkward introduction, while meeting again shortly thereafter when he offers to drive her home during a heavy snow. When his car conveniently gets stuck outside her student dormitory apartment, she offers him a spare room, where he behaves like a perfect gentleman. Later they are seen in church together (for the first time), as only then can an appropriate relationship ensue, where each acknowledges previous love affairs, but agrees to leave them in the past. Five years later they are married with a young child vacationing at the beach (which is actually a setting on the island of Belle Île, a favorite setting for Claude Monet who painted the rock formations, File:Claude Monet Pyramides Port Coton.jpg - Wikimedia ..., also Storm off the belle ile coast - by Claude Monet), when they run into Maud. Apparently she and Françoise are familiar with one another, but not on good terms, where it is implied that Françoise’s previous affair with a married man was likely the husband of Maud. The surprise at seeing one another evokes similar feelings of the past, which quickly resurface, as the two obviously have some chemistry together, perhaps reminding him of what he’s lost, while she remains at ease with herself, confident as ever. Jean-Louis, however, as an engineer with an interest in mathematics is more calculating, where certain conditions must be met before he can love a woman — first and foremost she must be a Catholic, and the rest will follow — while for Maud love is unconditional, with no strings attached. All the forces are at play here in this simple exchange, which ends blissfully in such a picturesque realm, where the viewers will continually have to ask themselves where they fit into so many of these fateful moments, some of which occur by sheer coincidence, suggesting happiness will always rely upon some element of chance.

My Night at Maud's Michael Sragow

In a period when makers of tony romantic comedies were scrambling for credible ways to delay their characters' making love, the austere French writer-director Eric Rohmer, doing what came naturally, hit on religious scruples. His Catholic hero (Jean-Louis Trintignant), steeped in Pascal, bets that holding out for his ideal—blonde, also Catholic—will have a better payoff than dallying with the raven-tressed nonbeliever Maud (Françoise Fabian). The movie's centrepiece and high point is his night at Maud's, a chaste yet ticklish probing of male emotions and convictions. Rohmer and Trintignant create a man who's so fixed on a mental image that he can't appreciate what's in his grasp. While the pale beauty played by Marie-Christine Barrault fits his ideal, it's Maud—initially intriguing, ultimately haunting—who leaves vibrations in her wake, partly because Fabian is so flesh-tingling and sophisticated. Nestor Almendros did the peerless, sensuous black-and-white cinematography.

My Night with Maud Dave Calhoun from Time Out London

Six months after the death of Eric Rohmer at the age of 89, the BFI is re-releasing a good-looking new print of ‘My Night with Maud’, the French filmmaker’s 1969 work which, a decade into his slow mutation from Cahiers critic to director, made his name outside of France and preceded such enduring works as ‘Pauline at the Beach’ and ‘The Green Ray’.

The title suggests some sort of saucy nocturnal encounter, but the truth is more austere, if no less captivating. The film gives us Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a dapper 34-year-old engineer with a good line in wry, toothy smiles who works for Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand. He’s lived in Canada and Chile, enjoyed a few girlfriends, but now he’s single, serious and more committed to his religion and future.

We meet Jean-Louis in church, on Christmas Eve, where he spies a young blonde, Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), who he determines to marry. He follows her in his car, but she soon disappears and he bumps into Vidal (Antoine Vitez), an old friend and teacher at the local university. Vidal is an atheist and Marxist who has less rigid ideas about love and marriage, and their chat allows Rohmer to explore various ideas relating to life, relationships and our place in the world before (or perhaps in the absence of) God.

Vidal invites Jean-Louis for dinner at the flat of his sometime lover Maud (Françoise Fabian), a good-looking, liberal doctor who’s a divorcee and single mother. When Vidal leaves for the evening and encourages Jean-Louis to stay with Maud, there’s a brief will-they-won’t-they episode – but Rohmer is more interested in behaviour and motive than titillation. Using Maud as a moral torch, he shines a light on Jean-Claude’s ideas. But Maud is more than just a foil: she’s a complex, alluring, smart character, an encapsulation of modern thinking with whom we sympathise as much as anyone else. The same can be said of Françoise, the blonde, who re-enters the film and Jean-Louis’s life: she’s more than she appears.

In an interview with long-time associate Barbet Schroeder not long before he died , Rohmer identified two traits in his films which he hoped he’d mastered: an easy naturalism and a willingness to present the discussion of ideas. ‘My Night with Maud’ offers both in spades, although those familiar with Rohmer’s breezier but no less inquiring 1980s films might be a little surprised by the rigour and bookishness of this wintry, black-and-white work (the crisp photography of Clermont-Ferrand at Christmas is especially striking). Talk was never cheap in Rohmer’s films; here, some knowledge of Pascal’s Wager and various tenets of Catholicism wouldn’t go amiss if you’re to gain the most from the characters’ intense chats about religion and atheism, chance and determinism, love and desire. But, as ever, Rohmer gives us a playful slice of life which has the effortless air of reality and challenges us to think about life afresh.

Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Jean-Louis is a devout Catholic who discovers his ideal partner, an attractive blonde student named Françoise, whilst attending mass one evening. Although he is certain that Françoise will be his wife, Jean-Louis cannot bring himself to approach her. He then meets up with an old friend, Vidal, whom he has not seen for 14 years. Vidal takes Jean-Louis back to the apartment of his current girlfriend, Maud, and the three spend the evening discussing philosophy, religion and love. As the weather has taken a turn for the worst, Jean-Louis risks a serious accident if he attempts to drive back home, so Vidal persuades him to spend the night in Maud’s apartment...

To bed or nor to bed, that is the profound existential choice that Eric Rohmer lays before us in his six moral tales (contes moraux), of which the best-known and most perfectly constructed is Ma nuit chez Maud, the third in the series. This was the film that brought Rohmer international recognition (as well as two Oscar nominations) and established him as one of France’s leading auteur filmmakers. Because of his association with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol on the review paper Les Cahiers du cinéma, Rohmer is considered one of the leading lights of the French New Wave, although his career only really took off when la Nouvelle Vague was in terminal decline.   Rohmer’s films have none of the revolutionary fervour that we associate with the French New Wave. Instead, they are invariably low-key dialogue-heavy dramas (all too often dismissed as talky romances for intellectuals) which are content merely to explore the complexities of human relationships. It is the consistency and perceptiveness of Rohmer’s work that distinguish it from that of his contemporaries and allowed him to retain a loyal following, in spite of some infantile criticism from those who failed to see the beauty of his art. The cinema of Eric Rohmer has an irresistible charm for anyone who can appreciate quiet films that explore matters of the heart with insight, poetry and perfectly judged emotional restraint.

Rohmer began his six moral tales in 1963 with two short films, La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne. Ma nuit chez Maud was to have been next but the director instead shot La Collectionneuse (1967), the fourth in the series and Rohmer’s first excursion into colour. Ma nuit chez Maud followed, and the series concluded with Le Genou de Claire (1970) and L’Amour l’après-midi (1972). In each of these films, a man is confronted with a stark moral dilemma: should he remain faithful to the woman he thinks he is in love with, or should he allow himself to be tempted by another woman who offers immediate gratification but perhaps nothing else?   In Ma nuit chez Maud, the dilemma is posed in reference to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager. The latter states that even if the likelihood of the desired outcome is minuscule, you should always bet on this outcome if you expect the rewards to be worth it.

The central irony of the film is that the main character Jean-Louis is a die-hard Catholic who has an almost psychotic loathing for Pascal, presumably because his wager has been used to provide the most cynical argument for believing in God. (If you believe, you gain everything if God exists and lose nothing if he does not; if you do not believe, you gain nothing in either case. Hence, it is logical to believe in God.) Despite his antipathy for Pascal, Jean-Louis ends up applying his wager to resolve his moral conundrum - he rejects an easy but meaningless amorous liaison in favour of one that, whilst less likely to end the way he wants it, offers a far greater return.   Just as we should suspect the integrity of those whose belief in the Almighty is based on Pascal’s argument, so we scent more than whiff of bourgeois hypocrisy in Jean-Louis’ decision to repulse the lubricious seductress Maud in favour of the inhibited Françoise (the latter is, after all, 12 years his junior).

Much of the humour of this film (and there is humour in most of Rohmer’s films, if you know where to look) arises from Jean-Louis’s moral confusion and pathetic attempts at self-justification. Early on in the film, he admits that the reason he is a Catholic is because he came from a Catholic family - just after Rohmer has flashed up a quote from Pascal’s Pensées which scorns unthinking belief as a kind of delusion intended merely to check our animal passions. After being out-manoeuvred intellectually by his old friend Vidal, Jean-Louis soon finds himself at the tender mercies of an even greater enemy, the predatory man-eater Maud. A wiser man, a man with an ounce of sense and moral conviction, would have left the scene long before Maud took down her stockings, slipped under the covers and put her "come hither" routine into overdrive. Instead, Jean-Louis sticks around and allows his moral confusion to slowly transform him into a quivering pop-eyed eunuch. Only after he has wrapped himself from head to foot in a bed cover does he feel safe from the she-Devil he is compelled to spend the night with. Then, once this ordeal is over, Jean-Louis does something even more bizarre. He goes out and propositions a complete stranger in the street, putting Pascal’s wager to the test a second time. If the woman he accosts slaps him in the face, he loses nothing; if she falls into his arms and swears undying love, it’s happy ever after. (He overlooked the possibility that she might run off to the nearest gendarme and have him thrown into jail for sexual harassment.) Fortunately, the gods are on Jean-Louis’s side and the bet comes off. Or does it?   Are we to take seriously the film’s twee happy ending? By putting his faith in mathematics rather than instinct, Jean-Louis not only demonstrates his lack of moral fibre, but he may also have sacrificed true love for a bland bourgeois imitation.

Ma nuit chez Maud is not only one of Rohmer’s most probing and intelligent films, it is also one of his most visually alluring compositions. Nestor Almendros’s lush black and white photography, which is particularly beautiful in the nocturnal exterior scenes, makes a striking contrast with the sumptuous colour of La Collectionneuse, the director’s previous film. It is strange that Rohmer chose to make all of his subsequent films in colour, because monochrome seems to be so well-suited for his style of cinema, bringing a focus and sharp veracity that colour often tends to diminish. As in many of the films of the French New Wave, Almendros’s black and white photography conveys modernity and sophistication, but here it also serves the story, emphasising the moral ambiguity of the main protagonist and adding immensely to the tension in his scenes with the two women he must choose between. The superiority of monochrome over colour is apparent in the sequence in which Françoise Fabian makes her sultry seduction of Jean-Louis Trintignant, the most erotic scene of any Rohmer film - and also the funniest.

My Night at Maud’s: Chances Are . . . Criterion essay by Kent Jones, August 14, 2006

Eric Rohmer, 1920–2010

Michael J. Anderson, ' Face & Form in Rohmer: From Ma nuit chez Maud’s Talking Cinema to the Denial of Eloquence in Le Rayon vert', Tativille, August 9, 2009

Ludwigs - Pascal's Wager in Rohmer's My Night at Maud's Marina Ludwigs

My Night at Maud's (1969) - Classic Art Films Matthew

My Night at Maud's • Senses of Cinema Rahul Hamid from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

Choice and Chance: A Dialectic of Morality and Romance in Eric ... Constantine Santas from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Night Moves Around Maud • Senses of Cinema Bruce Jackson from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Choice and Chance: A Dialectic of Morality and Romance in Eric ... Constantine Santas from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

The religion of director Eric Rohmer On top of the wave and against the stream: The cinema of Eric Rohmer, Per Magnus from Sync, Winter 1993

The Sign of Rohmer Joseph Jon Lanthier from Slant magazine

My Night at Maud's | The Passion of Joan Jett of Arc Steve

The career of French film director Eric Rohmer - World ... David Walsh from World Socialist Web Site, January 16, 2010

Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

doc DVD Review: My Night at Maud's (1968) Jon Danziger

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Glenn Erickson, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer: The Bakery Girl Of Monceau ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales - CineScene Howard Schumann, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

My Night at Maud's - Turner Classic Movies Lang Thompson

Long Pauses Darren Hughes

Close-Up Film [Robert Barry]

Pillow Talk | Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]

CineScene.com Howard Schumann

The Persistent Pleasures of Eric Rohmer by Geoffrey O'Brien Geoffrey O’Brien obituary from The New York Review of Books, January 19, 2010

Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: My Night at Maud's: The ... DSH, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

My Night at Maud's | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]

My Night At Maud's Review | TVGuide.com

Film4.com

Independent.co.uk [John Walsh]

DVDBeaver.com - Review [Pascal Acquarello]

Movie Review - My Night at Maud's - Eloquent 'Ma Nuit Chez Maud ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times, also seen here: The New York Times

My Night at Maud's - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

CLAIRE’S KNEE

France (105 mi) 1970

The Chase to The Clock Pauline Kael, also seen here in (pdf format): The New Yorker [Pauline Kael]

The air is thick with summer and leisure in Eric Rohmer's serene story of a vacationing diplomat (Jean-Claude Brialy) who says he is interested only in women's minds and then has an "undefined desire" to stroke a young girl's knee. There's a rather enigmatic woman novelist who stands in for the director and makes ponderous remarks, but Rohmer's quiet, complacent movie-novel game is pleasing, and a captivatingly gawky teenage actress, Béatrice Romand, who plays a subsidiary role, looks like a Pisanello princess. With Laurence De Monaghan as Claire, and Aurora Cornu as the novelist. Cinematography by Nestor Almendros. In French. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Deeper into Movies.

Claire's Knee Time Out London

The fifth and most accessible of Rohmer's six 'moral tales', Claire's Knee is the story of the temptation of an affianced diplomat (Brialy) while on holiday, and its successful suppression. The film was rapturously received as a cinematic equivalent to Jane Austen at the time of its original release. The comparison is apt, though a better one would be with Joseph L Mankiewicz, a director of similarly literate, talky, classically structured movies, but none the less misses the point. For Brialy is no throwback to the 19th century but rather a Martian, a visitor to this planet discovering the values of his own culture through surveying those of the people he finds himself among, and finally retreating back home. If this makes Rohmer sound like a poet of bourgeois repression (just as Chabrol can be seen as a poet of bourgeois excess), one must also add that the film's self-reflexive structure makes it both more exciting and more ambiguous than such a description allows for.

Le Genou de Claire (1970) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A 35 year old diplomat, Jérôme, takes a summer holiday in the picturesque French lakeside resort where he spent his childhood. He meets up with an old friend, Aurora, a writer who is staying with another woman and her two teenage daughters, Laura and Claire. Jérôme is soon to be married to the woman he has been attached to for the last six years, and declares that he has no interest in other women. Aurora tempts him to flirt with Laura, who appears to be attracted to him. When Jérôme fails to succumb to Laura’s charms, he is instantly struck by Claire, and harbours an unquenchable desire to touch her knee...

The fifth of Rohmer’s six Moral Tales closely parallels the preceding tale Ma nuit chez Maud as it portrays a man who is betrothed to one woman but is tempted by another. In Le Genou de Claire, the central character Jérôme regards love almost as an intellectual exercise which he reckons he has totally mastered, much to the understandable bewilderment of his female entourage. The diplomat is fast approaching middle-age and, presumably after several amorous disappointments, is content to condemn himself to a passionless marriage. Although he is attracted to the younger women he is seen flirting with in the film, he suppresses his desire through cold reason and pompous self-righteousness. No surprise that he prefers the climate of Sweden to that of France.

With its emphasis on intelligent dialogue and sumptuous photography, this film provided the template for the kind of film which Rohmer would be best known for in future years. Although most of the scenes lack the spontaneity of some of the director’s more recent films, the quality of the script and acting makes this a compelling work. Not for the first, or last, time, you are struck by Rohmer’s perceptiveness and ability to articulate his ideas in such a hypnotic and eloquent manner. It is also a pleasure to see Jean-Claude Brialy, that child of the New Wave, being given the opportunity to prove his calibre as an actor, something which Rohmer’s New Wave contemporaries missed out on.

Claire’s Knee: Rohmer’s Women Criterion essay by Molly Haskell, August 14, 2006

Eric Rohmer, 1920–2010

A Rohmer Farewell

Claire's Knee | Tony McKibbin

Claire's Knee • Senses of Cinema Daniel Hayes from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Perception and Suppression in Claire's Knee | ianlcahoon Ian Cahoon, May 12, 2015

Edward Copeland on Film (Jonathan Pacheco)

The House Next Door [Odienator]

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]

Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Chris Dashiell at CineScene

-REVIEW: of Claire's Knee David Denby from The New Yorker (capsule)

DVD Savant Review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Glenn Erickson, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer: The Bakery Girl Of Monceau ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales - CineScene Howard Schumann, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Film Festival: Eric Rohmer's 'Chloe in the Afternoon' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, September 30, 1972

CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON

aka: Love in the Afternoon (L'amour l'après-midi)

France (97 mi) 1972

Love in the Afternoon Time Out London

The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales sees its hero married - in contrast to the protagonists of the earlier films, who were merely contemplating marriage - and resisting the temptation of an affair, almost out of perversity. Equally, the film is a homage to the late afternoon - seen by Rohmer as a sunny parallel to 3am and the dark night of the soul - the time Bernard Verley eccentrically chooses as his regular lunch time. A formal, elegant examination of someone puzzled by marital fidelity, Love in the Afternoon is a wonderfully cool and lucid exposition of the twists and turns of its hero's thoughts.

L’Amour l’après-midi (1972) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Frédéric, a successful businessman, is married to Hélène. Outwardly, they are a happy respectable middle-class couple. Inwardly, Frédéric feels repressed and constantly fantasises about other women. One day, his fantasy becomes reality when an old flame, Chloé, re-enters his life. Having abandoned her boyfriend, she turns to Frédéric for moral support. He agrees to spend time with her in the afternoon, conditional on their remaining just good friends. Chloé agrees, but Frédéric soon realises that she is expecting far more from him than mere friendship...

Eric Rohmer brings his series of six moral tales to a close with L’Amour l’après-midi , a charming romantic comedy which is as much a conventional bourgeois satire as a characteristically Rohmeresque portrait of temptation and desire.

Somewhat lighter in tone (and also less intellectual) than the previous five tales in the Six Contes Moraux series, the sixth is also the most banal, telling a comparatively simple story of a man wondering whether or not he should extra-marital affair. Rohmer skilfully avoids the conventional stereotypes and, thanks to sympathetic and magnificently ambiguous performances from Bernard Verley and Zouzou (who play the husband and his temptress), the film manages to be one of his most uplifting and engaging.

The most memorable part of this film is the surreal dream sequence near the start of the film, where the central character Frédéric manages to make an easy seduction of a succession of beautiful young women (including Françoise Fabian, Béatrice Romand and Marie-Christine Barrault) with the help of a flashing talisman. It’s the maddest thing you’ll find in any Rohmer film, but perfectly inserted into the main narrative.

Love in the Afternoon: Marriage, Rohmer-Style Criterion essay by Armand White, August 14, 2006

A Rohmer Farewell

Jay Antani, 'Chloe in the Afternoon', CinemaWriter.com, November 9, 2009

The Roving 'I': Ambiguous Subjectivity in Eric Rohmer's 'Six Moral Tales' Karen Sloe Goodman from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Eric Rohmer: Six Moral Tales | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

love in the afternoon - review at videovista.net Paul Higson

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]

DVD Savant Review: Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Glenn Erickson, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales By Eric Rohmer: The Bakery Girl Of Monceau ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Six Moral Tales - CineScene Howard Schumann, Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Six Moral Tales, Criterion Collection

Movie Review - Chloe in the Afternoon - Film Festival: Eric ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

THE MARQUISE OF O

France (102 mi) 1976

Die Marquise von O… Time Out London

Based on a novella by Heinrich von Kleist set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. A virtuous widow (Clever), saved from rape and then, while asleep, raped by her rescuer (Ganz), is cast off by her family when she gives birth to a child and proclaims her innocence, only to be then courted by her 'heroic rescuer', whom she doesn't know is the father of her child. In the course of the story, Kleist sets out in a most ironically literary fashion a series of arguments about the place of women in society. Rohmer's great achievement is that it is this, rather than merely the story, that he has brought to the screen, recreating and making even more ironic Kleist's literary written conversations, and opting, in his colour scheme, sets and camerawork, for a style that hovers between formalism and realism, and so further distances the viewer from the characters.

Die Marquise von O... (1976) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

In the 18th century, in a town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise von O lives with her father, a Colonel, and mother. When their house is attacked by Russian troops, the Marquise is rescued by a Russian Count. A short time later, the Count asks to marry the Marquise, but, at her father’s insistence, she puts him off until he returns from a visit to Naples. Meanwhile, the Marquise discovers that she is pregnant but has no recollection of having had contact with any man. Rejected by her parents, she is compelled to place an advertisement in the local paper to invite the father of her unborn baby to reveal himself...

Having completed his acclaimed series of six Moral Tales, Eric Rohmer made this, his first historical film, based on the controversial novel by Heinrich von Kleist. In stark contrast to his subsequent historical film, Percival le Gallois, Die Marquise von O... is made in the realist tradition, with authentic-looking sets and great attention to period detail. The film was even made in German (although a version dubbed in French exists), the only one of Rohmer’s films to date not to have been made in his native language.

In many ways, Die Marquise von O... can be viewed as a continuation of the Moral Tales series. Its central plot hinges around a moral dilemma for each of its principal protagonists. First, how can the man who made the Marquise pregnant without her knowing reveal himself without bringing disgrace on both himself and the woman he loves? Second, how is the Marquise to react when she finds herself pregnant with no knowledge of how it could have come about? Rohmer skilfully portrays the anguish that both characters endure as they struggle to make sense of their predicament and navigate a course through the maelstrom of prejudice and accepted conventions of their time. The inevitable happy ending in von Kleist’s novel is less certain in Rohmer’s film, and Rohmer even goes so far as to introduce elements (such as another possible father for the Marquise’s child) to make the outcome less predictable.

The film is a near-faultless piece of Rohmeresque drama, beautifully written and with compelling performances, particularly from Edith Clever and Bruno Ganz. Indeed, the film’s overall quality makes it easy to forgive Rohmer his indulgences, such as the display of histrionics from the Marquise’s mother and father. Rohmer can himself be glimpsed briefly near the start of the film – he appears as a Russian soldier in one if his very rare film appearances. The film earned Rohmer the Grand Prix spécial du Jury at Cannes in 1976.

The Marquise of O - Talking Pictures Alan Pavelin

This is unique among Eric Rohmer’s films for two reasons: it is the only one not in French, and it is the only one offering the rare opportunity to see what the notoriously reclusive director actually looks like (or looked like in 1976). Some 10 minutes into the film three soldiers are seen awaiting orders; the thin one in the middle is Rohmer.

Based on a novella by the esteemed German writer Heinrich von Kleist, Die Marquise von O . . . is one of Rohmer’s ventures into what is popularly known as “costume drama”, the others being Perceval, The Lady and the Duke, and Triple Agent. It is also a rare literary adaptation for a director best known for his portrayals of the amorous holiday adventures of beautiful but talkative young Parisians.

The story, set during the Napoleonic wars around 1800, tells of the young widowed marquise Julietta (Edith Clever) who, after being saved by a dashing Count (Bruno Ganz) from being ravished by an unruly mob of soldiers, finds herself inexplicably pregnant anyway. Banished by her parents, she puts an advert in the paper promising to marry the father if he will only make himself known to her (this is the opening scene). The fairly predictable outcome does not remotely detract from the immense pleasures afforded by the film.

This is one of the most beautifully shot films I have seen, thanks to the legendary cinematographer Nestor Almendros. Clearly striving to achieve the look of German romantic painting, such as the works of Friedrich, Rohmer and Almendros have imbued it with a stunning and sumptuous selection of browns, wonderfully and delicately lit and with ample use made of doorways and mirrors. The acting style is deliberately theatrical, wholly different from the improvisational style of, say, The Green Ray, and one can easily imagine a Victorian melodrama being performed in this manner, with its exaggerated facial expressions and swooning women. Yet this seems wholly appropriate to the material and to Rohmer’s treatment of it.

Rohmer’s films are unfairly described by some as “reactionary”, quoting for example the apparent sympathy for the monarchist side in The Lady and the Duke and the perceived espousal of traditional sexual morality by most of his leading characters. “Conservative” (with a small “c”) would be a better word. His Catholicism inspired much of his film criticism of the 1950s, and his films often include, almost surreptitiously, shots of churches, quite apart from scenes inside churches which are instrumental to the story (in Die Marquise von O . . . , a wedding scene). Like Yasujiro Ozu, a comparison anyone would envy, Rohmer is sometimes accused of making the same film over and over again, namely a portrayal of the ethical dilemmas of young people falling in and out of love and of the ways they delude themselves. Die Marquise von O . . . is one variation on this theme, transferred to 200 years ago. The motives of the Count in offering Julietta his hand in marriage, and the longing looks which the two main “suspects” give her while she sleeps, are typical Rohmer teases of the viewer. The theme of class is also a crucial element of the film, the footman Leopardo being one of Rohmer’s rare representations of a member of the “lower orders”.

Die Marquise von O . . . is an absolute delight, a potentially scurrilous subject being treated in a totally chaste and gently humorous manner. And the stunning look of the film is a marvel. One of Rohmer’s best.

The Marquise of O... and Effi Briest Women oppressed, by Renny Harrigan from Jump Cut, 1977

Die Marquise von O… (1976 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum Monthly Film Bulletin, December 2, 1976

dOc DVD Review: The Marquise of O (1976) Mark Zimmer

Movie Review - La Marquise d'O... - Rohmer's 'The Marquise of O ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

PERCEVAL LE GALLOIS

France (140 mi) 1978

Perceval | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Eric Rohmer's least typical and least popular film also happens to be his best: a wonderful version of Chretien de Troyes' 12th-century epic poem, set to music, about the adventures of an innocent knight. Deliberately artificial in style and setting—the perspectives are as flat as in medieval tapestries, the colors bright and vivid, the musical deliveries strange and often comic—the film is as faithful to its source as it can be, given the limited material available about the period. Rohmer's fidelity to the text compels him to include narrative descriptions as well as dialogue in the sung passages. Absolutely unique—a must for medievalists, as well as filmgoers looking for something different. This film also features the acting debut of the late and very talented Pascal Ogier (1978).

Perceval le Gallois Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Rohmer's adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes 12th century Arthurian poem is a unique film, combining cinema, theatre, medieval music, iconography, mime and verse to create a stylised and surprisingly coherent spectacle: shot totally in the studio, its sets alone are worth the price of a ticket. But more astonishing, perhaps, is the way in which Rohmer translates the text into a moral investigation which frequently resembles his contemporary comedies as selfish young innocent Perceval, whose very naiveté literally disarms his enemies, undergoes a sentimental education in the codes of Chivalry, Courtship, and Faith. His odyssey is observed with ironic wit and revealing distance; not surprisingly for Rohmer, a key stage in his development occurs when he learns the dangers of talking too much or too little. Far more accessible and entertaining than Bresson's Lancelot du Lac or Syberberg's Parsifal, and relevant in a sense undreamed of by Excalibur, the film marries medieval passion with modern perspective and sires its own special magic.

Perceval le Gallois (1978) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Brought up by his widowed mother to know nothing about war and pageantry, the Welsh youth Perceval is awe-struck when he meets a knight for the first time. He leaves his mother and heads off to the court of King Arthur so that he too can become a knight. Having won the King’s favour, the newly knighted Perceval takes lessons in chivalry and wins the heart of the fair maiden Blanchefeur. Perceval’s thirst for adventure leads him to the Holy Grail...

Eric Rohmer’s second historical film (after Die Marquise von O…) is his most provocative and uncharacteristic work to date. It is based on a Twelfth century poem by the French writer Chrétien de Troyes, which tells the life of the Arthurian hero, Perceval of Wales.

Rohmer’s intention was to recreate the lyrical style of the poem in the medium of film, whilst capturing the essence of the period in which it is set. To that end, the costumes and sets are based closely on religious paintings of the Middle Ages, with the direction and acting being equally stylised. To make the film accessible to a modern audience, Rohmer updated Chrétien de Troyes’ work to modern French, whilst retaining the structure of the poem and the use of rhyming couplets.

Although the result is not quite Rohmer’s most polished or satisfying work, it is nonetheless a work of considerable artistic merit. The film possesses an uncanny timeless quality which provides an experience which is far more theatrical than cinematic, spiritual than corporeal. Rohmer’s panache for humour is noticeable (as in all of his films) in both the text and the performances. It is this which provides the film with much of its humanity and prevents it from ever being a sterile exercise in intellectual self-indulgence.

The film’s distinctive visual style is dominated by the Spartan set design, which includes miniature gold castles and forests of metallic trees in front of a simple painted backdrop. This is a far cry from the usual lavish historical drama which most devotees of French cinema are used to, but then there is altogether a different kind of film. Rohmer seeks to evoke the essence of the age of chivalry without the gory details, through simple imagery, poetry and music. This is not so much a film in the traditional sense; rather it is a quintessentially Rohmeresque meditation on the nature of desire and faith, transposed to a child’s idealised picture of Arthurian legend.

Perceval le Gallois Jaime Christley from Unexamined Essentials, April 3, 2009

The more one sees of Rohmer, the more one is convinced that, contrary to what his reputation suggests, each film is powerfully unique and idiosyncratic. It's likely, however, that nothing in the world will prepare you for Perceval le Gallois, a trailblazer in the category of "strange for the auteur, strange for any auteur" alongside Josef von Sternberg's Anatahan and Jacques Tati's Parade, among others. Like those two films, Perceval in no way attempts to hide its artificial construction. In fact, Rohmer doesn't let a moment go by without reminding us that the film was made on a soundstage, with painted backdrops, and plywood castles. (Much is recycled from scene to scene, as well, playing up the strangeness through repetition.) Artifice also structures performance: actors and singers provide almost all of the exposition - truly a filmed epic poem - while "action" is diminished to a handful of key moments.

Still, it is crucial that the boundaries that circumscribe Rohmer's staging of Chrétien de Troyes's tale don't simply indicate the absence of verisimilitude, but throw into sharp relief the extraordinary qualities of what they contain. Unexpectedly the filmmaker best known for "talk" has made one of the great movie musicals, with clear, balanced colors and the precise lines of a medieval tapestry (the film was shot by the impossibly versatile Nestor Almendros, who won the Oscar the same year for a completely different kind of film, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven) and a brilliantly arranged and performed, period-inspired musical score.

In fact, everything that is not absent is important. For example, the level of detail in the costumes - a medievalist can judge their fidelity or lack thereof - is proportional to their importance to the narrative, in which much is made of a knight's armor, the second skin of his chain-mail, and the disintegration of a much-abused maiden's gown. Also, for a director who abhors violence, several briskly exciting set pieces stand out: the first of which (Perceval vanquishes his opponent with a spear) is accomplished with a Bressonian exactitude that is almost subliminal. (There should be an entire book written about the sudden jump-cuts and extreme closeups in Rohmer, for they are beautiful in their rarity.) The finale (a visualization by Perceval, we presume) transforms the erstwhile medieval heroes into figures in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, in which muted violence and brilliantly "artificial" staging renders a horrifying depiction because, unlike the more famous Mel Gibson film of 2003, The Passion of the Christ, most details are left to the audience to imagine.

The Tale of Perceval le Gallois and the Young Althusserians • Senses ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus]

THE AVIATOR’S WIFE

France (108 mi) 1981

The Aviator's Wife Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

The first in Rohmer's series Comédies et Proverbes, this gentle comedy laced with pain is a delight from start to finish. Erroneously assuming that his more experienced girlfriend is being unfaithful, a young student decides to investigate the identity of the man he sees leaving her room early one morning. Following the man through Paris, he meets up with a pert schoolgirl, obviously attracted but bemused by his actions, who offers to help in his ludicrous detection. The whole thing would remain at the level of whimsical farce, were it not for Rohmer's emphasis on the very real pain, confusion and wasted attempts at happiness underlying the complicated intrigues of the characters. As always, Rohmer makes clear the enormous gulf between feelings and words, intention and effect. The result is a hilarious, wonderfully bitter-sweet acknowlegment of the chasms between people trying desperately to understand and be understood.

La Femme de l’aviateur (1980) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

A postal worker, François, is about to visit his girlfriend, Anne, early one morning, when he sees another man leaving her apartment. When she is confronted by François later that day, Anne tells him nothing about the incident. In fact, the mysterious man was one of Anne’s former lovers, an airline pilot named Christian, who only visited her to say goodbye after deciding to return to his pregnant wife. François later glimpses Christian walking in the park with another woman, and he decides to follow them. On the way, he meets a 15 year old schoolgirl, Lucie, with whom he strikes up an immediate friendship. Together they set out to solve the mystery of the well-dressed stranger...

The first in Eric Rohmer’s series Comédies et proverbes is this enchanting portrait of love, jealousy and suspicion. As in most of Rohmer’s works, the characters are excellently well drawn and beautifully interpreted by his actors. The stubborn possessiveness of François contrasts with the casual attitudes of the two women he spends the time with in this film.

Lucie, a school girl, flirts with François, although it is clear nothing serious is going to develop. Likewise Anne only appears to need François to comfort her in her moments of depression, and is quite irritated by his unwelcome attentions. There is a sense of post-modern irony here, with the hard-working man looking for commitment from laid-back women who appear to consider men as little more than accessories to their otherwise complete lives.

Those who appreciate Rohmer’s gentle comedies will certainly appreciate this film, which is one of his most playful and entertaining. As ever, the script is excellently written, displaying Rohmer’s ability to communicate with his unique style of lucidity and spontaneity.

One striking aspect of the film is the way Rohmer uses his surroundings to emphasise the mood of his characters. An overcast morning brightens up into a sunny afternoon, which soon fades to an increasingly melancholic evening – influencing the mood of his audience, not just his characters in the film. It is device which Rohmer uses in many of his films, most famously in his captivating Four Seasons cycle of the 1990s.

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Michael J. Anderson, ' Face & Form in Rohmer: From Ma nuit chez Maud’s Talking Cinema to the Denial of Eloquence in Le Rayon vert', Tativille, August 9, 2009

The House Next Door [Aaron Cutler]

DVD Times Gary Couzens

EyeForFilm.co.uk Koukla Maclehose

aviator's wife - review at videovista Paul Higson

'AVAITOR'S WIFE' OF ROHMER Janet Maslin from The New York Times, October 7, 1981

A Good Marriage | Film Society of Lincoln Center

A GOOD MARRIAGE (Le Beau Mariage)

France (97 mi) 1982

“Who has not built castles in Spain?” Art-student Sabine (Béatrice Romand, the teenager in Claire’s Knee) swears off affairs with married men in favor of finding a good husband. But there’s a small problem with her selection process: she decides to pursue lawyer Edmond (André Dussollier) after meeting him just once at a party (thanks to matchmaker friend Clarisse, played by Arielle Dombasle). And dashing Edmond is not exactly on board with the program… The second of Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs films goes out to anyone who ever made a decision and stuck with it to the tragic end.

Le Beau Mariage Tom Milne from Time Out London

The second in Rohmer's series of 'Comedies and Proverbs' tells the cautionary tale of a girl who impulsively decides to marry, picks out a suitable mate in the conviction that he finds her equally eligible, and then suffers agonies of humiliation when she discovers that he does not. Funny, touching and beautifully acted, Le Beau Mariage is acutely exact both psychologically and socially, not least in the way the troubled heroine shuttles between the busy highways of Paris and the ancient cobbled streets of Le Mans, with the different settings ironically reflecting the paradox that this paragon of women's lib chooses to see liberation as means to allowing her to live like a Victorian lady of leisure.

Le Beau mariage (1982) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Sabine, a 25 year old arts student, is having an affair with a married man, Simon. When she realises that he will never leave his wife for her, Sabine decides to go out and find herself a husband. At a wedding party, her friend Clarisse introduces her to a 25 year old lawyer named Edmond. In an instant, Sabine decides that Edmond is the man she will marry, but he disappears before they have chance to speak properly together. Obsessed with the idea of marrying Edmond, Sabine repeatedly calls him, not realising that marriage is the last thing on Edmond’s mind...

The second of Eric Rohmer’s Comédies et proverbes, Le Beau mariage is a wryly satirical romantic comedy where the central heroine, a headstrong middle-class young woman, pursues a mad fantasy to its logical conclusion and ends up humiliating herself. It is perhaps the cruellest of Rohmer’s romantic films, and even if Sabine gets all that she deserves, the outcome of her mad pursuit of Edmond is rather touching and shows something which most people can identify with – the aching sense of disappointment when one realises the folly of one’s self-delusion. Building castles in the air may initially be a harmless occupation, but as the film shows, it can also result in an excruciatingly painful outcome if carried too far.

Although Le Beau mariage is ultimately quite poignant, it is predominantly a very funny film, probably the most intentionally comical of Rohmer’s films. Béatrice Romand (who previously starred in the fifth of Rohmer’s Moral Tales Le Genou de Claire as the manipulative teenager Laura) is perfectly cast, playing Sabine, a typically headstrong Rohmeresque heroine whose ideals are muddled, contradictory but stubbornly forceful. Sabine’s victim, Edmond, is played magnificently by André Dussollier, whose body language throughout his scenes with Romand is so expressive that his dialogue is almost superfluous. Rohmer is also well-served by his usual troupe of actors, including the captivating Arielle Dombasle, who plays the totally unscrupulous matchmaker, Clarisse.

Ironic, witty, intelligent and so, so true to life, Le Beau mariage is, despite its evident cruelty, unquestionably one of Eric Rohmer’s most delightful and entertaining films.

Le beau mariage Jaime Christley from Unexamined Essentials, March 21, 2009

In Beatrice Romand, Eric Rohmer found one of his most obstinate, emotionally volatile protagonists, and conducts his interrogation accordingly. Like many heroes and heroines of his films, the mercurial Sabine gets it into her head that she can change the weather through the application of her will. Her notion - which occurs to her either at the beginning of the film or before it - is to get herself a husband. From there, Rohmer dissects the decision-making process Sabine supposes she underwent, or (via one hastily-constructed rationalization after another) continues to make throughout the course of the narrative. Sabine's behavior in the film is structured around a handful of tendencies that seem to circumvent or conflict with what several other characters in the film (and audience members) may more reasonably determine, but with just the right degree of plausible human nature so as not to preclude a necessary measure of identification. First, she is dissatisfied with her ruling habit of carrying out affairs with married men. Second, she is apt to take up the cause of self-interest and put together the pieces only afterward - setting about the task of getting married the same way a cowhand might try to lasso a bull by leading the animal to the noose and persuading it, by enumerating a series of reasoned arguments, that it's the best place to put its head. Third, she is stricken with a nearly crippling confirmation bias, armoring herself heavily against reason and good sense. Finally, she is sincerely in love, or at least has (in the manner of a psychosomatic illness) grown the symptoms of infatuation from the Petri dish of her headstrong mind.

Because this is a comedy, however, Rohmer grounds the course of Sabine's journey to a very fundamental track, i.e. that things don't seem like they're going to be all right, but they are. With great dexterity, Rohmer keeps Sabine's volatility at a safe distance, but takes her seriously, as well. She may be acting and thinking under a certain amount of (mostly self-applied) strain, and some of her more grown-up emotional compasses seem not yet to have been duly calibrated, but within that framework her conflict is very real, her quarry is troublingly elusive, she does deserve a shot at happiness, and she does not lack for intelligence and, for want of a better word, pluck. The super-layer of Le beau marriage, as with many a Rohmer comedy, shows that there are forces at work that easily dwarf our best-laid schemes.

Romand, who acted less frequently than many of Rohmer's leads (less one film, her most recent role was in the director's 1998 Autumn Tale) has a short, lean, rigid profile that describes her obstinacy but also lends her great fragility when she has more attention than she thought she'd bargained for (at her birthday party, drooping like a stood-up prom date, and later, in Edmond's law office). Her performance uses the involuntary jerks and stutters of her misaligned nervous system, occasionally achieving ladylike tranquility only by way of a miracle. Everything else, however, is shaking loose - she bites her lip, can't keep herself from staring (in awe, in petulance, in preparation), and gradually loses most of her sense of propriety by phone-stalking eligible bachelor/attorney Andre Dussollier, who may or may not have led her on as David Farrar may or may not have given Kathleen Bryon the wrong idea in Black Narcissus. Rohmer's 35mm images build Sabine's world as a series of boxes and frames, or passages between boxes and frames, lit primarily by lamps and (for a Rohmer) rather more than the expected number of shadows. Sabine claims she has no business sense and no head for sales, but she also allots for herself almost no time for leisure or repose, except to recharge her batteries for another offensive maneuver.

In a novel or story by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who often used mental disorders such as schizophrenia in building his characters or charting their course across a narrative, Sabine would fit right in. Only, unlike Rohmer, Dick would probably nudge her delusional state beyond the threshold of what her friends and family are willing to accept (as such, her ear-splitting outbursts are taken by everyone in stride), and her maladjusted state would become the subject of her story, rather than a lens through which Rohmer conducts his inquiry.

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

DVD Times Gary Couzens

Comedies And Proverbs: An Eric Rohmer Retrospective - kamera.co.uk Edmund Hardy

Éric Rohmer: Comedies and Proverbs - doc films - University of Chicago Ivan Albertson, Fall 2015

'LE BEAU MARIAGE,' ROHMER'S NEW COMEDY Vincent Canby from The New York Times, August 27, 1982

The Eric Rohmer Collection - Arielle Dombasle - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

PAULINE AT THE BEACH

France (94 mi) 1983

Pauline à la Plage Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Rohmer, in the third of his 'Comedies and Proverbs', may still be tiptoeing delightfully through the same verbose ground that he's covered for years, but no other director so clearly reveals the distances between words and meaning, thought and action. Here his 15-year-old heroine (Langlet) goes on holiday, and instead of fun finds a perverse, sometimes painful lesson in the emotional games of the adult world: as her older cousin (Dombasle) rejects a boring old flame and lurches into an affair with a sly advocate of freedom in relationships, she witnesses the trio's discussions, double standards, and deceit. Dispensing with heavy plotting as he coolly observes and dissects well-meaning but frequently cruel human interaction, Rohmer yet again proves his ability to merge poignancy and humour by means of delicately nuanced performances

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Eric Fuerst

The 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet) drifts through the background of countless shots in PAULINE AT THE BEACH, bearing witness to the romantic schemes played by the adults who occupy a seaside resort in Normandy. She, as it turns out, will not be impervious to these entanglements, later chastising her new boyfriend for his willingness to participate in what she calls, “their [adult] games.” This third entry of Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” series invents six distinct characters who all play a part in what turns out to be a traditional sex farce. The irony is that they each delude themselves into either fervently playing into or actively betraying the role that they identify themselves with. Despite the way that the film foregrounds the incongruities in a character’s spoken philosophies vs. their actions, Rohmer isn’t so much interested in parading their naïveté as he is in finding the small tragedies and ironies that occur in their various romantic involvements. A comedy that plays like particularly tantalizing gossip, PAULINE AT THE BEACH exhibits Rohmer at his most amusing.

Pauline à la plage (1983) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Fifteen year old Pauline and her older cousin, Marion, share a holiday on the Atlantic French coast. Marion meets up with a former friend, Pierre, who maintains a deep attraction for her. However, Marion prefers the more adventurous Henri, even though she knows the relationship will be short-lived. Meanwhile, Pauline is having a romance of her own with an over-sexed teenage boy, Sylvain. Henri uses Pauline’s new boyfriend to get himself out of a tricky situation with Marion, and Pauline is none too pleased...

The third in Eric Rohmer’s series Comédies et proverbes is this light comedy of summer romance, in which Rohmer explores the conflicting desires between men and women. As is often the case with Rohmer, the director introduces contrasting characters to emphasise the variety in human behaviour and to show how differently indivuals can react in similar situations.

Marion is a very attractive woman who has little difficulty in attracting suitors, but she seems to prefer the mad passionate fling that Henri gives her to the sustained loving relationship that Pierre offers. This is set aside the fragile and tentative first love of Pauline, which is as easily extinguished as it is rekindled.

The film is certainly one of Rohmer’s most playful films, which could account for its popularity in the United States. It perhaps lacks the maturity and depth of his subsequent films but it is nonetheless a charming piece of minimalist cinema.

Pauline at the Beach Robert Horton from The Crop Duster, January 11, 2009, also seen here: The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]

lights in the dusk: Pauline at the Beach March 2, 2010

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Michael J. Anderson, ' Face & Form in Rohmer: From Ma nuit chez Maud’s Talking Cinema to the Denial of Eloquence in Le Rayon vert', Tativille, August 9, 2009

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Pauline at the Beach Review (1983) Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image

DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Pauline at the Beach Howard Schumann from Talking Pictures UK

ERICH ROHMER, 'PAULINE AT THE BEACH' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, July 29, 1983

FULL MOON IN PARIS (Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune)

France (100 mi) 1984

Full Moon in Paris Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Ogier and Karyo are an ill-matched couple; she longs for freedom, love and excitement, and moves out into her own Parisian pied-à-terre in order to see him only at weekends. But rumours, misunderstandings and flirtations hold sway with such vengeance that Ogier's double life backfires. It's as elegant and incisive a comedy of manners as ever from Rohmer, deriving much wit and subtlety from the simplest of plots, merely by concentrating on conversations and the mixed-up motives that fuel them. But accusations that the film is too literary or verbal miss the point entirely: performance, decor and composition - not to mention narrative structure - are all at the service of the film's meaning, perhaps most notably in a marvellous party scene where the body language of dancing and glances speaks volumes.

Full Moon in Paris | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Eric Rohmer's shift from a subjective to an objective viewpoint for his “Comedies and Proverbs” series brought with it a gradual darkening of tone: his characters no longer live in a world colored by their personal attitudes and expectations, but are trapped in a universe that blankly refuses to take their desires into account. Full Moon in Paris (1984, 101 min.), the fourth in the series, is bleaker than any of its predecessors: the heroine (Pascale Ogier) lives with a lover in the suburbs of Paris, but takes a small apartment in town as a way of asserting her freedom. But no one is truly free in the network of relationships Rohmer sketches around her, and by asserting her independence she upsets the delicate equilibrium that has provided her with a measure of happiness. With Fabrice Luchine (Rohmer's Perceval), Tcheky Karyo, and Christian Vadim.

DVD Beaver [Gary W. Tooze]

Like Jean-Pierre Melville, Eric Rohmer so thoroughly constructs his own worlds that he can also forge proverbs to go with them: "He who has two women loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind." The heroine (Pascale Ogier) wants two houses, a pied-à-terre away from the Parisian apartment she shares with her beau (Tchéky Karyo) so she can experience the full effect of her independence (she looks forward to "loneliness and the pain it causes"). Her friend (Fabrice Luchini) is a pale aesthete who envisions himself as an undying seducer; he ponders Ogier’s petite, Elaine Benis-ish frame and commends her "fierce amazon look." In her freshly redecorated room, she calls up four fellas, one after another with no luck, then settles for a couple of books from the shelf, the screen fades out on the vacant bed (two unbroken takes). The plot thickens: Ogier becomes interested in having a fling as long as it’s "purely physical," then gets suspicious that Karyo is himself seeing someone. Luchini, who may have witnessed the liaison, is no help ("One doesn’t see a woman, one sees... ‘Woman’"). Out of this Lubitschian tangle Rohmer finds Le Beau Mariage in reverse, and couches it in terms of pure rhythm still unappreciated by bookish critics. The wordless sequence with Ogier testing her freedom by alternately chasing and being chased by a cutie (Christian Vadim) on the dance floor is a lambent stretto; the heroine completely stripped in the bedroom is a sobering bit of repose, like a Roderic O'Conor nude; the placidness of the café, with the philosophical owl (László Szabó) and his moonstruck drawings, reminds her of order, Nature, contradictory grace. "When I’m in one, I want to be in the other." At the close she steps out into the morning light, wounded but with mind and soul regained. With Virginie Thévenet.

Les Nuits de la pleine lune (1984) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Trainee designer Louise lives with her boyfriend, Rémi, in the outskirts of Paris. Whilst Rémi wants to get married, Louise is reluctant to let go of her freedom, and so she starts to spend part of her time in her apartment in the centre of Paris, believing this will strengthen their relationship. Things do not go quite as planned, however. Bored with her new solitary life in Paris, Louise sees more of her writer friend, Octave, and starts to flirt with a young musician, Bastien...

He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind. This is the proverb around which the fourth film in Eric Rohmer’s series of Comédies et proverbes is based. As in the other films in this series, Les Nuits de la pleine lune is largely concerned with a young woman who has an excessively idealistic notion about love which sends her in an unexpected direction. Here, that woman is one of Rohmer’s most sophisticated and complex heroines, played with an unusual mix of sensuality and sensitivity by Pascale Ogier (the daughter of Bulle Ogier).

The film also features a pleasing performance from Fabrice Luchini, whose unceasing intellectual ruminations provide much of the film’s comedy. His on-screen rival is played by Christian Vadim, who is perhaps (unfairly) best known as the love child of Catherine Deneuve and director Roger Vadim.

Compared with most of Rohmer’s other films, certainly those in the Comédies et proverbes series, Les Nuits de la pleine lune is a melancholic work, shot with an almost Bresson-like austerity. The film is punctuated by long pauses of silence as the heroine Louise reflects on her situation and decides on her next course of action, whilst the sombre photography (predominantly an ethereal blue) helps to create a mood of solemnity which emphasises Louise’s isolation.

The film also has a supernatural dimension (i.e. references to the full moon influencing Louise’s behaviour), which is a recurring feature of Rohmer’s films. Here, this is perhaps intended merely to suggest that subconscious impulses rather than conscious thought is what is motivating Louise’s actions. Maybe she moves into her new apartment in anticipation that her relationship with her boyfriend Rémi might be starting to fall apart?

Film of the Week: Full Moon in Paris - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, April 16, 2015

For me, watching Eric Rohmer’s 1984 film Full Moon in Paris—Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, re-released this week—was a pure dose of that fabled malady, Proustian Rush. This is one of those Rohmer films that capture their particular moment perfectly, in this case 1980s Paris in its high phase of post-modernist chic. You might think of Rohmer as a quintessential Sixties and early-Seventies director because of his Moral Tales series, but for me he embodies French cinema in the Eighties. It’s partly because that’s when I started to spend a lot of time in Paris (and therefore, inevitably, at the movies), and partly because of Rohmer’s extremely regular output in that decade; it feels as if I measured the passage of the Eighties in episodes of his six-film series “Comedies and Proverbs,” made between 1981 and 1987.

Not all Rohmer films are tied indissolubly to their moment. The first in that series, The Aviator’s Wife (81), with its landscape of parks, cafés, and bedsits, is set in a Paris that would not have been so different two decades earlier, while some of his later films, including episodes in the “Four Seasons” series (90-98), could easily be made today without much discrepancy. But Full Moon in Paris* is entirely a snapshot of its instant. Visually and sonically, 1984 is present throughout. It’s there in the music, a frothy neo-yé-yé electro-pop score by duo Elli and Jacno, alumni of pioneering French punk band Stinky Toys (singer Elli Medeiros is glimpsed dancing in a party scene). And it’s there in the décor: grey walls, Mondrian prints, “witty” lamps (heroine Louise is a trendy creative who makes her own lights, presumably because she’s unable to afford Memphis creations). Other design touches include the neo-classical pillar in Louise’s apartment, and novelty furnishings like the trompe l’oeil sofa at her workplace (at first, I thought it was held together by masking tape, then realized it was painted to resemble the table in front of it, complete with vase of flowers—oh, that crazy design decade).

This is also entirely a film of its time in its depiction of Louise, who is Mademoiselle 1984 to the hilt. Full Moon in Paris is one of the rare Rohmer films to feature a fully-fledged star—by contrast to “Comedies and Proverbs’ actresses like Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, who seem to have wandered in off the street, and prove absolutely riveting and memorable. But Full Moon features a star insofar as its heroine is herself a star, a charismatic scenester whose problem, she complains, is that everyone loves her too much, which doesn’t leave her much time to herself. Louise’s life seems to be a permanent, hyper-elegant performance, as witness the way she’s constantly positioning herself, head cocked just so against walls and in doorways. And yet, this performance seems absolutely natural and artless; as well as elegant, Louise is also oddly gauche, in the way that only hyper-sophisticates can be.

Louise is played—or since the fit is so close, perhaps it’s better to say embodied—by the late Pascale Ogier, who was 25 when she made the film. The daughter of Bulle Ogier, Pascale memorably teamed up with her mother to co-write and star in Jacques Rivette’s enigmatic psychogeographical romp Le Pont du Nord (81); playing a motorbiking free spirit and tracker of conspiracies, she comes across as at once leather-tough, otherworldly, and impishly comical. She then appeared in arguably the ultimate intellectual-chic oddity of the decade, Ken McMullen’s essay/fiction Ghost Dance (83), in which she quizzes Jacques Derrida on the nature of ghosts. After that, Pascale made Full Moon in Paris, which won her the Best Actress award in Venice—shortly before she died in October 1984 of an overdose-related heart attack, the day before her 26th birthday.

So Full Moon in Paris is deeply poignant to watch again, especially, if like me, you had it bad for Ogier at the time. In 1984, she seemed impeccably glamorous, in a witty, wildly offbeat way; seen today in Full Moon, she looks oddly awkward and childlike, especially with that high-pitched sing-song voice that some French actresses (but by no means all) contrive to use to great effect. The clothes that seemed so cool, by the then modish but accessible design house Dorothée bis, look faintly ridiculous now—the flat shoes, bulbous sack-like coats, oddly tapered trousers. Add to that the vast bouffant hairstyle tied with a Minnie Mouse bow, somewhere between Versailles and early Madonna, but now irresistibly suggesting Seinfeld’s Elaine, some five years early.

In many ways, Full Moon in Paris is a portrait of Pascale Ogier’s moment, and of her personality and taste. She created her own interior designs for the film, using works by designer friends, and one assumes she was largely responsible for the prominent use of Mondrian prints—an artist whom Rohmer disparagingly said at the time had come to be seen as “more of a design accessory than a painter.”

Full Moon in Paris is an account of the sort of dilemmas that a woman like Louise, or Pascale, might have faced in Paris at the time, balancing the demands of autonomy, hipness, and having a love life. An intern in a design company located in the upmarket Place des Victoires (in the same building as Kenzo’s HQ, one shot reveals), Louise lives with her older boyfriend Rémi (Tchéky Karyo), an urban planner, in the drab new town of Marne-la-Vallée—which DP Renato Berta makes resemble nothing more or less than a lunar wasteland in the opening and closing shots. Rémi is a physical type, first seen working out on their balcony, but prone to stay at in the evenings, while Louise likes to go to parties in town and occasionally spend the whole night out (chastely, it’s suggested—for the moment, at least). But Louise doesn’t seem sure whether she wants Rémi to accompany her on her sorties, or to give her space; apparently, she wants both, and neither. She’s always saying she wants solitude, yet doesn’t seem happy being alone; too popular for comfort, she’s the opposite of Delphine in The Green Ray (86), who yearns for company but backs off whenever anyone invites her on holiday.

Meanwhile, Louise keeps her options open by retaining her Paris apartment as a pied à terre. To complicate matters, she’s invariably accompanied by writer Octave (Fabrice Luchini), a platonic pal who doesn’t want to stay platonic. A highbrow (ostensibly) unthreatening best male buddy, he is to Louise somewhat as Duckie was to Molly Ringwald’s Andie in Pretty in Pink—at once her confidant, flattering courtier, resident highbrow jester, and her “walker” at parties, where she’s likely to go off and dance with more muscular types. Octave is what, in a 17th- or 18th-century French comedy, would have been called Louise’s “follower”—but he wants to be more than that, as becomes apparent when he starts disparaging her taste in men, while slyly, fondly stroking her arm.

While Ogier’s untimely death leaves her frozen in her moment, it comes as a rather comical shock to see the slender, effete, youngish (33-year-old) Luchini here—then just settling into his career of playing pompous, self-deluding intellectuals, but decades and a whole different body away from the boorish, bourgeois patriarch of François Ozon’s Potiche (10) or the grizzled grandee of French theater (famed, among other things, for his staged readings of Céline and other literary texts). Luchini’s Octave is charming, comical, absurdly mannered as he widens his eyes and declaims the sort of finely carved but hollow nonsense that Rohmer characters often spout when they think they’re being insightful and original—but does Octave really believe that he’s the first person to suggest that cities are more restful than the country, or the first to come up with the idea of writing in cafés?

However, Octave (whose name inescapably evokes the morally tainted social gadfly that Jean Renoir played in The Rules of the Game) is more than ridiculous. He is, I’d argue, the only out-and-out villain in Rohmer’s films. Watching Full Moon in Paris again, he now strikes me as quite loathsome. It’s not only because, married as he is, he comes on to Louise in his apartment, with his daughter and her babysitter on the premises—it’s also because he’s so unpleasantly high-handed with that babysitter. But he’s also filled with self-congratulatory contempt for others, showing a monstrous sense of his own superiority when he sneers at her penchant for men of “an animality that’s pathetically bestial.” Just because he’s forever stopping to jot down his pensées in a notebook doesn’t mean that he’s not pathetically bestial himself—as his increasingly frequent lunges at Louise make clear.

Then there’s the villainous stroke he pulls off when out in a café with her. Louise has just spotted Rémi on the premises, and when she tells Octave, he says he’s pretty sure that Rémi was with Louise’s friend Camille (Virginie Thévenet). At least, he thinks it was Camille, but he can’t be sure: “I have a selective memory—I don’t remember people who bore me.” You really want to see Octave get a kicking, but the only violence in the film—and, so far as I can remember, in any Rohmer film—is Rémi literally beating himself up in frustration at his and Louise’s inability to communicate.

Things come to a head when Louise finally hooks up with sax player Bastien, played by Christian Vadim in a sleeveless T-shirt and a Billy Idol sneer. Bastien’s preposterous cool marks him out as one of those bestial boys that Louise can’t resist; early on, in a terrific extended dance-floor shot, he and Louise slowly, unfailingly gravitate towards each other, driven by the common certainty that they’re the sexiest people present. Eventually Louise has a wild night with Bastien—but that only sends her off restlessly pacing the moonlit Paris night. Taking refuge in a café, she ends up listening to words of wisdom from a chance confidant (Nouvelle Vague stalwart Laszlo Szabo) and expressing her plight in concisely geographical manner: once convinced that her suburban apartment was a place of exile, Louise says she now feels exiled in Paris, while it’s Marne that suddenly seems like the centre of things.

The comedy plays out in a way that’s finally tragicomic, with Louise seemingly hoist by the petard of her contradictory desires. There’s irony but no cruelty here; Rohmer is not making Louise the butt of the joke or saying “serve her right.” It’s simply in the nature of stories illustrating a proverb that someone is bound to suffer from the principle at stake. Louise simply incarnates the plight of an attractive, intelligent, independent Parisian woman of her time, following her own will, but coming uncomfortably to terms with the fact that a lot of people want her too, and not always in a way that suits her. Louise’s chic furnishings reminded me of the John Cooper Clarke lines—“Just a tiger rug and a telephone / Say a postwar glamour girl’s never alone”—except here it’s an angular neon lamp and a grey telephone to match the walls. For Ogier’s postmodern glamour girl, never being alone is her curse, and finally her tragicomic lesson—but, because of Rohmer’s characteristic empathy, decidedly not her punishment.

*The fourth in the “Comedies and Proverbs” series, Full Moon in Paris claims to illustrate the dictum, “He one who has two wives loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind”—which appears to have been entirely made up by Rohmer.

The Grace of Suffering: Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris • Senses of Cinema Alexander C. Ives from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

ERIC ROHMER'S 'FULL MOON IN PARIS' OPENS Vincent Canby from The New York Times, September 7, 1984

LE RAYON VERT (Summer) B 88

France (98 mi) 1986

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1986, and the fifth of Éric Rohmer's six-film cycle of Comédies et Proverbes, this plays out like an interior road movie, something of a travelogue to various summer vacation destinations in France, as expressed through the existential ambivalence of the weary traveler, Marie Rivière as Delphine, a girl who gets dumped over the phone in the opening moments of the film, where what’s really troubling her is not the failed relationship or losing the guy, but her two week summer vacation is coming up and she’ll have no one to spend it with. This sends her into a tailspin of despair continually questioning her failing self-esteem. Using a diary-like progression, where the passing days are listed on the screen, Rohmer reveals sketchy little episodes from her life, which could, over time, reveal the complexities of her character as it becomes more and more exposed, but instead she remains stifled in an emotional standstill with a petrifying fear of intimacy. Delphine feels particularly delicate and fragile, where it’s easy to feel sorry for herself, refusing the positive overtures expressed from her Parisian friends, suggesting this is an opportunity to meet someone new, all of whom seem to have friends or relatives with empty summer homes that are available in August, when nearly the entire country takes their vacations. While Delphine herself is a secretary, not at all a high paying position, there is no explanation for the sudden display of wealth except to suggest they all may come from wealthy families, so her problems reflect the income range and social status of those who have the luxury to perpetually dwell on themselves for days on end. Unable to spend her vacation alone, she initially discovers the port city of Cherbourg, which she visits with a friend and her family that openly welcome her, but she returns to Paris almost immediately, feeling out of place and uncomfortable, as she can’t really explain what she’s doing there, and every feeble attempt only makes her feel worse, where she’s constantly on the defensive having to justify being alone.

One of the beauties of this film is the cinéma vérité style, using natural sound and a camera that follows Delphine for the entire duration of the film, shot on 16 mm, then blown up to 35 mm, using a 4:3 box aspect ratio that continually focuses the attention on the central figure. In this manner, despite her visits to colorful outdoor locations, she remains confined in this box, unable to escape the trap she has seemingly set for herself. Now resigned to accept the inevitable, having to spend the rest of her vacation alone, she travels instead to the mountains where a friend is holding a key, but after a hike to a superlative panoramic view of the Alps, she returns back to Paris the same day, worn out and defeated, but mostly disgusted with herself. Her constant return to her own misery does become annoying after awhile, a cyclical broken record playing again and again, yet that is the central premise of the film, self-disgust, which ironically takes place at some of the most stunningly beautiful locations in France. When she hits the sunny beaches of Biarritz, a beautiful coastal city lined with hotels, where the beaches are filled with playful activities and everyone seems happy, it’s like a drearily realistic counterpunch to Jacques Tati’s MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953), which continually pokes fun at the stress people endure in the pretense of convincing others that they’re actually having fun. Delphine is under no such illusion. When a beautiful young topless Swedish blond (Carita, one has to wonder how could she have never made another film?) struts her way through the teeming throng at the beach, her cheerful, liberated body language the exact opposite of Delphine’s dour repression, finding her towel next to Delphine’s, she strikes up an instant friendship, convinced she knows how to overcome her defeatist mood, immediately picking up a couple of guys. But this kind of obnoxiously forced intimacy makes Delphine flee in disgust, unable to endure another moment.

While this style of endurance test narrative may even be somewhat conventional by now, much like the Biblical struggles of Job, where one must be put to the ultimate test before discovering what really matters in life, Marie Rivière apparently improvised a great deal of her extensive role, where Rohmer actually names her as a collaborative screenwriter. While she plays a relatively young character, her complete mistrust of being alone may puzzle some people, as one doesn’t always play out their interior psychological dramas in full public view, as she does here, never opting for alone time. Delphine carries a book with her in public, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but despite the gorgeous locales, we never see her reading alone, where many find this an excellent way to nourish scarred or damaged souls. Instead she openly parades her melancholia, doing little on her own to rebuild her shattered confidence. Purely by chance, she overhears an avid discussion about the Jules Verne novel Le Rayon Vert, something of a fairy tale love story that hints at a rare magical moment just after a perfectly clear sundown, nearly impossible to see, where legend has it that in the last instant, just after the sun sets, a flash of green is the last thing seen by the human eye, where if you’re fortunate enough to see it, you can read your own feelings and those of others as well, where your perceptions are greatly illuminated at that moment. In the book, the young lovers who have been searching for the green light become fixated on the love in each other’s eyes, never bothering to look on the horizon. With this in mind, Rohmer gives himself some leeway, as after a meticulous exposé of blistering honesty, where basically Rivière just won’t shut up about her problems, an uncomfortable human drama that leaves many in the audience disillusioned by her building distrust for the entire human race, the director builds himself a pathway to the horizon, where real or imagined, fate may ultimately have the upper hand.

The Green Ray Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

It's July, and Delphine (Rivière), a young Parisian secretary, is suddenly at a loss regarding her holiday; a friend has just backed out of a trip to Greece, her other companions have boyfriends, and Delphine can't bear spending August in Paris. She also hopes to find a dream lover, but receives only the unwelcome attentions of pushy predators, until... There's a whiff of fairytale to this particular slice of realism à la Rohmer, but what's perhaps most remarkable is that the film was almost completely improvised; though not so as you'd know it. It's as flawlessly constructed, shot and performed as ever, with France's greatest living director effortlessly evoking the morose moods of holidaying alone among crowds, and revelling in the particulars of place, weather and time of day. Deceptively simple, the film oozes honesty and spontaneity; the word, quite bluntly, is masterpiece.

User reviews from imdb Author: anasu

I'm a big Rohmer fan - loved the recent Tale series, especially Tale of Autumn and Tale of Winter. This is one of my favorite Rohmer films which I can see again and again. The main character (wonderfully played by Marie Riviere) is depressed, moody, lonely and annoying -- which describes most of us, doesn't it -- and she's transformed by love, but only after she undergoes a journey that takes her deeper into herself.

What is it about Eric Rohmer? His main characters are usually a pain, they talk incessantly about trivial things, and they're bored and depressed. But Rohmer draws you in, absorbs you -- and somehow everything becomes quite soulful and profound and the films resonate in your head for days. Rohmer has what Nabokov called "shamantzen" -- spellbinding power -- the power of great storytellers.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: ShootingShark from Dundee, Scotland

Delphine is lovelorn. She wants a romantic relationship, but finds it hard to socialise or adhere to the conventions of dating. During the summer, she has nobody to vacation with but doesn't like travelling by herself. Is she destined to be alone ?

This lovely, thought-provoking little film, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1986, is typical of Rohmer's gentle but insightful drama. Delphine has an age-old problem; she's mature enough to be looking for something more meaningful than sex and partying, but young enough to be self-centred and dismissive of social expectations. When her friends encourage her to loosen up and flirt they just don't get that she wouldn't want to be with anyone she might meet using that strategy. Her frustration is beautifully played by Riviere, and is frequently uncomfortable to watch as she struggles to reconcile her longing with her prickliness and self-doubt. The film is full of richly observed little vignettes, like the dinner-table discussion of vegetarianism, or the central metaphor of the green flash (which is a real meteorological phenomena, as well as an 1886 novel by Jules Verne), and the locations in the Normandy port of Cherbourg and Basque seaside town of Biarritz are terrific. If you are unfamiliar with this gifted and prolific director's work (he made about thirty movies over forty years) this is a good introduction to his unpretentious but absorbing low-key dramas, as is his 1971 classic Le Genou De Claire. I don't think I've ever come across a filmmaker as honest as he is. This was the fifth in his series of six Comédies Et Proverbes works, coming between Les Nuits De La Pleine Lune and L'Ami De Mon Amie. English title - The Green Ray.

Le Rayon vert (1986) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Delphine, a young secretary who lives in Paris, has her holiday plans upset when her fiancé and then her friend dump her. Half-heartedly, she agrees to accompany another friend to Cherbourg, but upset, she soon heads back to Paris. After an equally fruitless trip to the Alps, she heads for Biarritz, where she overhears the tale of the Green Ray. Lonely and unsure what to do, she tries to fill time, little thinking that the Green Ray will soon change her life...

Arguably the most visually poetic of Rohmer’s films in his series of Comédies et Proverbes, Le Rayon vert is an engaging, wistful tale which easily evokes the sense of yearning and isolation which marks many of Rohmer’s better films. There are some strong similarities with the director’s more recent film, La Conte d’été , although here the central character, Delphine (magnificently portrayed by Marie Rivière, who improvised much of the dialogue) appears to be locked into a hopeless situation where she has no choices to improve her situation, quite the opposite to La Conte d’été . With its allusions to fortune reading and supernatural influences, Le Rayon vert is much more about chance than individual choice.

As in all of Rohmer’s films, the cinematographic style takes precedence over the narrative, although this film appears to be more directionless than most of his films. Whilst this creates a sense of frustration at times, the mesmerising effect of Rohmer’s approach, with its emphasis on capturing life as it really is, reinforced with strong natural sounds, maintains the viewer’s attention. The film’s beautiful resolution, a harmonious fusion of the spiritual and the corporeal, makes this both a memorable and immensely satisfying work of cinema.

Slant Magazine [Bill Weber]

As Delphine, the lonely but defiant Paris secretary at the center of Le Rayon Vert, Marie Rivière creates an emotionally rich portrait of a young woman disappointed in love who transfers her energies into an anxious quest for the ideal summer vacation. In this fifth of Eric Rohmer's six-film cycle of "Comedies and Proverbs," the writer-director spends the first 80 of its 98 minutes treading territory that most movie romances consign to the backstory, as Delphine, in the wake of a two-year-old broken engagement she has yet to put behind her, makes unfulfilling trips to a trio of resorts, encountering souls both nonplussed and sympathetic while, by her expectations as a modern single female, not "meeting anyone." Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult—that is, demanding because they are three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs—might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker's most generously etched characters, perhaps given its extra layer of vigor by Rivière's credit as a collaborator on the scenario.

Retitled Summer for American release, the film opens in a stifling Paris of early July. Delphine complains that her Left Bank apartment holds the heat all too well, and a retired elder who advises her that a holiday by the sea is entirely unnecessary—"We have the Seine!"—is answered with a single close-up of the filthy river. When her partner in a journey to Greece bails two weeks before their trip, Delphine casts about frenetically for an alternative, balking at camping in Ireland with her sister's family, and receiving little succor from friends: "Look at how sad you are!" scolds one. A jaunt to Cherbourg with extroverted, big-haired pal Françoise (Rosette) turns sour when her friend's family is put off by Delphine's vegetarianism, seasickness, and solitary walks in the woods; "You're a plant," she's bluntly told. An Alpine trek lasts only a few hours before one of her regular crying jags sends the frustrated dilettante back to the city, and then, heading south to Biarritz, she finds the shore packed with hordes of bathers, including a topless Swedish coquette (Carita) who draws her into an abortive foursome with a par of cruising bozos. Only Delphine accidentally overhearing a beachside discussion of a Jules Verne novel concerning the "flash of green" that can be seen at the last moment of a clear-skied sunset hints at deliverance; seeing the green ray, goes its legend, means "you can read your own feelings and others too."

Because this Rayon Vert is a comedy, Rohmer and Rivière supply a closer encounter with the flash for a climax, along with the appearance of a promising stranger (Vincent Gauthier), yet without seeming to cure Delphine's darkness and doubt with a human or mythical panacea. Isolating his depressed protagonist with deceptively simple long shots of her lone wanderings, or placing her in front of the churning foam of waves hitting a seawall, Rohmer ultimately rebuts her gloomy monologues of self-denial: "I'm not the adventurous type…If I had anything to give, people would see it." Delphine's ultimate acceptance of her innate adventurousness and worth results, for an audience appreciative of Rohmer's wit and humanist fire, in a yelp timed to an atmospheric phenomenon, but birthed by the transcendence of self-recognition.

Following The Law of One's Own Being: The Crying Woman in The ... Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, 4, April 2010

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Michael J. Anderson, ' Face & Form in Rohmer: From Ma nuit chez Maud’s Talking Cinema to the Denial of Eloquence in Le Rayon vert', Tativille, August 9, 2009

Salon Arts & Entertainment | Glum in the sun Charles Taylor from Salon, June 21, 1999

Nick Pinkerton - Archive - Reverse Shot Where There Is Sorrow,There Is Holy Ground, by Nick Pinkerton, February 24, 2004

Talking Pictures [Alan Pavelin and Howard Schumann]

The Green Ray 1986 - The Focus Pull Mervyn Marshall, January 19, 2015

The Green Ray | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

User reviews from imdb Author: danielhsf (danielhsf@hotmail.com) from Singapore

green ray - review at videovista.net Paul Higson

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Rayon Vert, Le Review (1986) Simon Davis from The Spinning Image

User reviews from imdb Author: oOgiandujaOo from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: johnnyboyz (j_l_h_m@yahoo.co.uk) from Hampshire, England

User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: writers_reign from London, England

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

The Green Ray review – Rohmer's slender but serious classic | Film ... Jonathan Romney from The Guardian

Delphine, why didn't I fall for you 15 years ago? Philip French from The Observer, April 21, 2002

Washington Post [Paul Attanasio]

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

THE SCREEN: 'SUMMER,' ERIC ROHMER COMEDY Vincent Canby from The New York Times, August 29, 1986

The Green Ray (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Green Ray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jules Verne novel

FOUR ADVENTURES OF REINETTE AND MIRABELLE B 89

France (95 mi) 1987

This is a delightful series of four short films, one of the most enjoyable and amusing in the entire Rohmer repertoire, unraveling with the conceptual detail of short stories, each starring the darling duo of Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) and Mirabelle (Jessica Ford), something of a variation on the theme of Rivette’s quirky adventurists, Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974). Another cinéma vérité film shot on 16 mm, blown up to 35 mm, it was allegedly made very quickly while Rohmer was waiting for sunset shots in his previous film Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986), using many non-professional actors in the cast who were given plenty of leeway to improvise, accounting, perhaps, for a more free-wheeling style than usual. Set in a highly colorful scheme of bright pastels dominated by the color red, the work is a personality driven film, where the charming spirit of these two women is thrust to the forefront. The stories themselves are vignettes dominated by smaller moments, not life changing decisions, the kinds of things they experience every day, where they each obviously have an impact on the other’s life. Reinette’s younger, idealistic enthusiasm and zeal is countered by Mirabelle’s acerbic tongue, dry wit, and more laid back approach, where their differences are inevitably highlighted, yet their friendship endures, becoming extremely familiar after awhile, as if we grew up knowing them.

The Blue Hour (L'heure bleue)

Opening in the beautiful empty spaces of a rural country road, Mirabelle pulls her bike off to the side of the road, but can’t fix her flat due to a tire puncture. Reinette, who lives nearby, offers assistance, where we literally witness her repairing the puncture in real time, fast becoming friends, where Reinette offers her a place to stay for awhile. Mirabelle is a Parisian on holiday with her parents nearby, but has never experienced the countryside, something Reinette is intimately familiar with, living in what Mirabelle describes as a hayloft which has been converted to her living quarters, offering plenty of space and light, essential ingredients for a painter. Much of this is spent discovering the rustic charm of rural life, where people grow their own food to eat and raise livestock, where the chirping sounds in the air seem quiet compared to the noisy Parisian streets. Reinette’s favorite sound, however, is the utter silence in the country that lasts for perhaps a minute, a pre-dawn transcendental moment occurring between darkness and light just after the night animals go to sleep and just before the day animals awaken, where you have to get up early to experience it. Nonetheless, through a bit of perseverance, which also includes a wildly inventive dance number, they eventually experience the blue hour together.

The Coffee-Shop's Waiter (Le garçon de café)

Leaving the country for the city, Mirabelle invites Reinette to be her roommate in Paris when she attends art school, both university students at different schools, where they decide to meet at an outdoor café after class one day. Featuring the grouchy irritability of Philippe Laudenbach as the ill-mannered waiter, a guy who takes rudeness to higher levels, making the simple transaction of making change to a customer an act of indignation and outright refusal, refusing on the grounds the customer doesn’t have smaller bills. While this is exaggerated farce, much like handing the waiter a hundred dollar bill for a cup of coffee, where the establishment holds the customer hostage and in contempt, it instead turns into an extended essay on morals and honesty, as Reinette insists she be taken seriously when she says she’ll pay, but as neither have small enough bills, they instead flee the scene, exactly as the rude waiter suggests they would. The verbal fireworks here grow repetitive, but they establish the high minded principles that the fiery Reinette lives by.

The Beggar, The Kleptomaniac and The Swindler (Le mendiant, la kleptomane et l'arnaqueuse)

Reinette reveals she’s not so jaded as city cynics when she offers small change to needy panhandlers, which catches Mirabelle off guard, as there are so many on the streets, you simply can’t support them all. Reinette claims her system is to decipher those in need and offer something she can afford. It’s amusing afterwards to see Mirabelle filling the coffers of needy beggars. Taking place almost entirely in a neighborhood grocery, Mirabelle appears to be considering shoplifting when she instead is surprised to see another customer blatantly steal an item and place it in her zip-up shoulder bag, taking even greater interest when she notices the customer being followed by store detectives. This turns into a veritable Keystone Cops episode of classic misdirection, which is then discussed afterwards by the duo at home, where both offer surprisingly individualistic philosophic views on just what is considered grounds for righteous indignation, which is immediately put to the test when they meet Marie Rivière performing a con solicitation act which Reinette initially falls for and later wants to exact justice.

Selling the Painting (La vente du tableau)

Reinette is a surprisingly good self-taught Surrealist painter, which means her lack of training actually offers her insight not shared by those painters who uniformly follow the teachings of others. But she has a philosophy that art should be met with silence, that words come afterwards when attempting to fathom the subject. After a non-stop talkathon by Reinette, where despite several hints to cease and desist, she’s all wound up and just won’t shut up, Mirabelle challenges her to a day of silence. But when an art dealer calls (Fabrice Luchini) to offer an appraisal of one of her works, they concoct a plan to go into the gallery one at a time, hoping to get the best deal, where the results are surprising. The audience knows something is up, but they haven’t a clue just what’s in store. It’s a clever segment, made even more interesting by the dubious behavior of the unscrupulous dealer, where the element of surprise makes this an absurd, sleight-of-hand theater piece.

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Four tales about Reinette (Joelle Miquel), a country girl who paints and operates according to certain principles, and Mirabelle (Jessica Forde), her less rigorous friend from the city; they meet in the country in the first episode and share an apartment in Paris during the remaining three. This feature was shot in 16-millimeter by Eric Rohmer in 1986, shortly before he completed Summer in the same format and with the same method of letting his leading actors improvise dialogue rather than strictly following scripts. Not part of Rohmer's “Comedies and Proverbs” series, and deliberately light and nonambitious (very little of consequence occurs in any of the tales), this nevertheless shows the filmmaker at nearly peak form—sharply attentive to the sights and sounds of country and city alike and to the temperamental differences between his two heroines.

4 Adventures of Reinette & Mirabelle Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

In Rohmer's slight but delightful low-key account of the up-and-down friendship between two teenage girls, the naturalistic performances are, as ever, supremely credible, with unknowns Miquel and Forde stealing the honours as the eponymous heroines. Reinette is a charming if changeable country girl longing to become a successful painter, Mirabelle the Parisian student who offers to share her flat in town. The four largely un-dramatic adventures, first in the remote countryside, then in Paris, concentrate on their different reactions to the world: nature, social injustice, money, and in the wonderful final sequence, the familiar Rohmeresque problem of too much talk. It's all inescapably French (in the best sense) and concerned with the joys not only of good conversation but of seeing. Finally, for all its deliciously light humour and anecdotal quality, the film is essentially about people. Which other film-maker loves us, warts and all, so perceptively or so generously? Therein lies Rohmer's abiding genius.

Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (1987) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

During a holiday in the countryside, a Parisian teenager Mirabelle meets a country girl Reinette, who lives in a converted barn and whose interests include nature and art. The two girls quickly become friends and Mirabelle offers to share her Paris apartment with Reinette when the latter says she is planning to attend art classes there. Through a series of everyday incidents, involving a stroppy waiter, a shoplifter, a confidence trickster and an art dealer, the two girls discover huge differences in their moral judgements and in the way they treat others...

Having completed his film cycle Comédies et proverbes and before starting his next cycle Contes des quatres saisons, Eric Rohmer wrote and directed this enchanting film which comprises four modern parables about morality and conscience in modern life. With its pleasing combination of comedy and intelligent dialogue, it is possibly the director’s most accessible film, and it is certainly one of his most entertaining.

The first part of the film introduces the two girls Reinette and Mirabelle and contrasts their attitudes and personalities. Reinette is self-taught, a solitary person who cannot stop talking when she is in the company of others. Mirabelle is more mature, less idealistic, but whereas she has been conditioned by her state education, Reinette has had the opportunity to form her own views, although some of these are embarrassingly naïve. The two girls form a bond of friendship when they experience the magical "blue hour", a brief moment of silence in the early hours of the morning.

The film then shifts to Paris for the next instalment, where Reinette becomes the victim of both an ill-mannered café waiter and her over-developed conscience. If she had endured the same, Mirabelle would have stuck up two fingers and walked away. Reinette, however, is determined to score a moral victory – in vain.

In the third adventure, Rohmer uses the two girls to argue opposing views in a number of moral dilemmas about when it is appropriate to help others – should you give money to beggars, should you help a shoplifter to avoid being arrested, and so on – showing that to every moral perspective there is an equally valid counter viewpoint.

The film ends with a quirky satire about exploitation, where Reinette uses emotional blackmail to sell a painting to an art-dealer who originally set out to exploit her. The two girls naively think they have won the day, but of course they haven’t: the world is much wiser than they think they are.

Although the film is noticeably lighter than much of Rohmer’s other work (occasionally veering towards farce), it has a great deal in common with some of his better known films. The dialogue has that uniquely Rohmeresque combination of well thought-out incisiveness and spontaneity, the two main characters are so fully developed that you feel you have known them for years. The eye-pleasing documentary-style photography creates the illusion that most of the film was shot from real life, totally unscripted.

What is most striking about this film, particular to those who are familiar with Rohmer’s work, is the extent to which the director uses comedy. Some parts of the film are outrageously funny, in the best tradition of intelligent comic satire. One reason why the film is so entertaining is because the audience can easily recognise their own experiences in the comic situations – the best example being the scene with the congenitally rude Parisian waiter, in which every American tourist’s worst experience of Paris is condensed into a side-splittingly funny five minute sketch.

It should be some consolation to anyone who's reached 30, 40, or even 50 without feeling like they've accomplished anything of consequence that Eric Rohmer was past 30 when he made his first few shorts (which, in retrospect, were rather like vaguely promising doodles—though one starred a fresh-faced, 20-year-old Jean-Luc Godard), 38 when he finally made a feature (The Sign of the Lion, a very good film, but a false start, career-switch-wise; he was editing Cahiers du Cinema at the time), and 49 when My Night at Maud's, the film that announced his arrival as a filmmaker to be reckoned with, premiered at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Even so, critics contemporaneous of Rohmer's subsequent output often treated his unfolding filmography as if it wasn't much more than an unending series of sophomore efforts, each failing to live up to My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee's incomparable one-two punch. By the close of the 1980s, it must have seemed to some that he was willfully making pastel trifles about romance among beachfront properties and picturesque vineyards, a career reduced to one-after-another attempts to recapture Claire's Knee's alchemical, lightning-in-a-bottle wonder. It also doesn't help that Rohmer's attitude toward visual style is deceptively simple, bordering at times on indifferent; you would be right in some respects, and wrong in others, to conclude that he was only concerned with "depicting" action and conversation in a visually agnostic manner. It often doesn't look like he's doing anything with the camera, but with adequate exposure to his work, even the greenhorn cinephile can spot a "Rohmer shot" from a mile away.

Looking across his whole body of work, it's clear that it's as diverse and substantial as anyone's, from Fassbinder to Ford. His character as an artist, how he controls and generates the specific style and rhythms, how his attitude shapes his work, is more accurately determined by studying the differences between one film and another, rather than reflexively noting their surface similarities and lazily building on the tacit agreement among film critics that Rohmer's films let you feel smart while taking in the real-estate porn and contemplating the limber specimens of French youth.

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle appeared at the tail end of Rohmer's busiest decade. The 1980s also saw the director make three, arguably four game-changing masterpieces (The Aviator's Wife, The Good Marriage, Full Moon in Paris and, mightiest of them all, Le Rayon Vert); he was also enjoying a phase of freewheeling experimentation, a fluid rearrangement of tones, attitudes, and concerns that would ultimately lead to his triumphant "Tales of the Four Seasons" series in the 1990s, and to tackle digital, delve further into period stories, and face his most pessimistic and romantic extremes, in his final decade.

Four Adventures uses a country-mouse-and-city-mouse template to explore morality, aesthetic sense, urban and rural savvy, and a host of other concerns. Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) meets Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) when the latter's bicycle catches a flat on the country road near Reinette's home. It's hard not to connect the first episode with Le Rayon Vert: In both, a pair of characters makes a special effort to witness an unusual natural phenomenon (the green flash of sunset, there; the "blue hour," i.e. the silent, pre-dawn moment between night birds signing off and day birds waking up, here), and in his unique, low-key fashion, Rohmer creates evocative, Murnau-esque lighting effects as the pair waits patiently in the darkened field in their bedclothes.

The shared experience leads to the pair moving into Mirabelle's Paris flat. The other three adventures see Reinette getting accustomed to rough-and-tumble city life and trying to reconcile differing moral codes (hers rigid, Mirabelle's defiantly wobbly) that threaten to divide the pair. The final chapter is an enormously entertaining and satisfying illustration of how far Reinette and Mirabelle have come to find each other; fast friends trade in a tenuous, circumstantial bond for a real one.

If the film has any weaknesses, it can be said that the sequence involving the misanthropic sidewalk cafe waiter plays a little artlessly to a broader comic space than the otherwise subtle, contemplative film can hope to accommodate. It plays like a Chaplin short, perhaps even pretty well, but the mix feels off. The finale is a much more characteristic Rohmer comedy, as it manages to juggle a narrative ellipsis (we sort of know what they plan to do, but we don't know how it's going to happen), misunderstanding, misdirection, a touch of theater, takes full advantage of a Rohmer regular (Perceval star Fabrice Luchini, in peak form), and caps it off with a punchline that can go toe-to-toe anytime with Hecht/MacArthur's "That son of a bitch stole my watch."

The 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle • Senses of Cinema Aaron Goldberg from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Friday Editor’s Pick: Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) Alt Screen

User reviews from imdb Author: Aw-komon from Westwood, CA

User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

User reviews from imdb Author: realreel from United States

Review/Film; 'Reinette and Mirabelle,' a New Eric Rohmer Tale Caryn James from The New York Times, July 21, 1989

BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS (L'Ami de Mon Amie)

aka: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend

France (103 mi) 1987

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

The sixth in Rohmer's glorious series of 'Comedies and Proverbs'. As ever, the plot is slight: shy civil servant Blanche escapes the loneliness of her new life in a Parisian suburb through her friendship with self-assured computer programmer Léa. When Léa goes on holiday, Blanche, who initially fancies herself enamoured of handsome engineer Alexandre, finds herself growing closer to her friend's lover Fabien. Questions of fidelity and betrayal, delusion and deceit lie at the film's heart, which is large indeed, extending ample compassion to the characters. Once again the performances of the young cast are miraculously naturalistic, and equally impressive is Rohmer's mastery of mood: a chaste and silent stroll along a canal towpath is tense with gentle eroticism, a summer party becomes fraught with embarrassment and unspoken feelings. Funny, moving, and full of insights that other directors barely dream of, it is quite simply an absolute charmer.

L’Ami de mon amie (1987) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

In a pristine new town on the outskirts of Paris, a young civil servant, Blanche, strikes up a friendship with a computer programmer, Léa. Whilst Léa has a steady boyfriend, Fabien, Blanche has not had a relationship for some time, but she instantly falls in love when she meets a handsome engineer, Alexandre. When Léa goes away, apparently having broken up with Fabian, the latter starts to take an interest in Blanche...

For the final instalment in his series of six films entitled Comédies et proverbes , Eric Rohmer takes has his starting point the adage that "my friend’s friend is also my friend". From this he constructs an enchanting tale of friendship and fidelity which is embroidered with gentle irony and tenderness.

In many ways, L’Ami de mon amie is the best and most satisfying of the six Comédies et proverbes. This is partly because of the quality of the acting, which is exceptional even by Rohmer’s standards. More significantly, you feel that Rohmer has fully exploited the resources at his disposal (including the location, his cast and technical crew) to a greater extent than usual. A good example of this is the beautiful yet totally artificial location for the film, a new University town just outside Paris. The coldness of the surroundings emphasises the shallowness and vulnerability of the four main characters in the film, modern "yuppy" types who have the same sense of false beauty and self-contented pomposity.

In fact, at first sight, none of the four lead characters has a great deal to engage our sympathy. Blanche is a self-pitying loner who hasn’t a single friend; Léa is a capricious flirt who has scant regard for her boyfriend’s feelings; Fabien bitterly resents the success of others and appears to regard women as mere sex objects; Alexandre, the worst of the bunch, a sickeningly greasy serial womaniser who is obsessed with himself. Despite this, Rohmer manages to make the characters appear sympathetic and interesting, through their evolving relationships and individual responses to the events we witness in the film.

The film works so well primarily because Rohmer is such a keen observer of human behaviour and because he understands human nature so well. The dialogue and the performances are so in tune with our own experiences that we often feel that we are sharing the feelings being portrayed on the screen. Few directors have this ability to engage so intimately with the audience, and Rohmer’s skill is evident here perhaps more than ever as he manages to coerce us into feeling something for a group of people we would normally shun.

kamera.co.uk - film review - L'Ami de Mon Amie directed by <STRONG ... Edward Lamberti from kamera.co.uk

Arrow Film Distributors have started to release Eric Rohmer films on DVD. L'Ami de mon amie/My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (1987) is the final part of his series of 'Comedies et proverbes'. The proverb in question is 'The friends of my friends are my friends', although it might more aptly have been entitled, 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave'. This quiet, wry drama of romance between a group of young Parisians is emblematic of his style and preoccupations.

Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet) and Lea (Sophie Renoir) meet in a cafe and strike up a casual friendship. Lea is a tall, statuesque brunette, outwardly self-assured and man-hungry, involved in a relationship with Fabien (Eric Viellard). Blanche, rather more demure and lacking in self-confidence, is infatuated with the charming Alexandre (Francois-Eric Grendon). The film pits these characters against each other in a succession of meetings and observes how the friendships stand up to conflicting loyalties.

One of the key aspects of Rohmer's direction is his 'invisible' camerawork. L'Ami de mon amie is shot on film but the end result is so cheap-looking, it could almost be an office training film. The cinematography, by Bernard Lutic, utilises natural light for the most part (or, certainly, the effect of natural light) and the camera tends to remain, on the whole, in mid-shot or at three-quarter length, to film conversations in static set-ups or functional shot-reverse-shots. So perhaps the initial impression we have is of a filmmaker whose movies lack style, imagination, and symbolic resonance - the pleasures perhaps most readily associated with 'cinema'.

But Rohmer's flat shooting style is not to be dismissed. As in Bunuel and Rossellini's work, the plainness allows easy access into the world of the film. Thus in L'Ami de mon amie we witness the unfolding of the friendship between Blanche and Lea in a casual way, so that when the emotional entanglements start to accumulate, the result is compellingly life-like. Consider, for example, the strength of feeling that comes through in the scene in which Alexandre reveals that his type is buxom forty-year-old women, and Blanche, who adores him but is the opposite of his type, realises that she doesn't stand a chance.

Of course, Rohmer's technique is as much a style as any other, his choices carefully designed to elicit our responses. There isn't the space here to enter into a comprehensive survey of 'realist' theories. L'Ami de mon amie is well worth seeking out - it's one of the strongest of Rohmer's films for its delightfully relaxed presentation of the convoluted nature of the relationships. It manages, as well, to offer a vision of Paris not usually seen on the screen - the tranquil, modern suburban existence played out within sight of the Eiffel Tower. Rohmer is an acquired taste, not so much due to the subject matter or sensibility, but rather because his aesthetic makes the bombastic music and emphatic camera angles and acting of so many other movies seem grossly overdetermined.

Games of Passion: Eric Rohmer's Boyfriends and Girlfriends • Senses ... Adam Bingham from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

my girlfriend's boyfriend - review at videovista.net Paul Higson from Video Vista

Siskel & Ebert (video)

Film: 'Ami de Mon Amie' Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 9, 1987

New Face: Emmanuelle Chaulet; Learning From Eric Rohmer G.S. Bourdain from The New York Times, September 2, 1988

A TALE OF SPRINGTIME (Conte de Printemps)

France (108 mi) 1990

Conte de printemps Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Inaugurating a new Rohmer series (Tales of the Four Seasons), this begins with an atypically wordless sequence which effectively introduces the mood of mystery and ambiguity that will recur throughout. Caught between apartments, philosophy graduate Jeanne (Teyssèdre) attends a party, where a young girl, Natasha (Darel), invites her to stay at the flat she shares with her father Igor (Quester). So far so innocent, but presently Jeanne finds herself witness to, then participating in, recriminatory scenes between daughter, father and his youthful lover Eve (Bennett): jealous Natasha detests Eve, accusing her of theft, while Igor - encouraged by Natasha? - seems more than willing to be left alone with Jeanne. As ever, Rohmer examines their hidden motives and analyses the consequences of their actions with great lucidity, repeatedly delving beneath words to uncover, through gesture and intonation, their real meaning; nobody is wholly innocent, no one completely blameless, in the web of intrigue spun between Jeanne and her hosts. Rohmer may not be breaking new ground, but who else could explore his familiar territory so fruitfully?

Conte de printemps (1990) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Jeanne is a high school philosophy teacher who decides that she cannot bear to stay in her fiancé’s untidy flat whilst he is away from home. Unfortunately, she has already loaned her own flat to a friend. At a party she meets a young girl, Natacha, who offers to let her stay in her flat. She loans Jeanne the room belonging to her father, who is usually away, living with his girlfriend, Eve, of whom Natacha does not approve. Although at first grateful for the offer of accommodation, Jeanne soon begins to suspect that Natasha is trying to pair her up with her father...

Conte de printemps is the first instalment in Eric Rohmer’s four-part cycle entitled Contes des quatre saisons (The Four Seasons Tales). All four films involve a romantic theme played against a particular season of the year, the season reflecting the nature of the subject.

The style of the film is uniquely Rohmer: an intimate examination of the interaction between a small number of people, with feelings and ideas expressed though some excellent dialogue. By using inexperienced actors, Rohmer achieves an engaging feeling of spontaneity which heightens the believability of the situations into which he places his characters. The result is compelling cinema which, because it feels so real, strikes an immediate chord with the viewer.

A major theme for Conte de printemps is how negative thoughts, such as jealousy or suspicion, can poison human relationships and result in conflict. Natacha is on the surface a very pleasant middle-class adolescent, but she sees the worst in her father’s girlfriend because she believes she stole her necklace. Similarly, when she finds herself alone with Natacha’s father, Jeanne immediately suspects that is the victim of some blatant matchmaking. Natacha’s father reaches the same conclusion but he is more willing to exploit the situation. The way in which these negative thoughts change the characters’ outlook and moderate their behaviour, in such subtle, unpredictable ways, is what makes this film so compelling. It is rare in cinema that such human responses are conveyed in such an engaging way and believable way.

Although not quite as satisfying as some of the later films in the Four Seasons cycle, this is a pleasing film which certainly encourages you to watch the other films.

A Tale of Springtime • Senses of Cinema Dan Harper from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

What's Sex Got to Do With It? | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 5, 1992

Apollo Movie Guide [Jamie Gillies]

Tales of the Four Seasons | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

A Tale of Springtime Howard Schumann from Talking Pictures UK

Movie Review: 'Tale of Springtime' | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly

DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]

Review/Film; Rohmer's Love, Games and Deja Vu Vincent Canby from The New York Times, September 25, 1990

Review/Film; The Paris Of Rohmer's 'Springtime' The New York Times, July 17, 1992

A WINTER’S TALE (Conte d'Hiver)

France (114 mi) 1992

Conte d'hiver Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Summer in Brittany: tearfully parting after an idyllic holiday romance with Charles (Van Den Driessche), hairdresser Félicie accidentally gives him an incorrect home address. Four years on, it's Christmas and he still hasn't contacted her; but such is her undying love for him - and the daughter he sired - that she finds it impossible to choose between two adoring suitors: her stolid boss Maxence (Voletti) and intellectual librarian Loïc (Furic). Reluctant to compromise her memories and dreams of true passion, she is hoping against hope for a miracle. In focusing on an often irritatingly indecisive heroine devoted to a barely reasonable romantic ideal, the second of Rohmer's 'Tales of the Four Seasons' is reminiscent of The Green Ray, while its wintry study of the varieties of love, faith and religious belief recalls the similarly sublime My Night with Maud. This is Rohmer at his very best, effortlessly and unsentimentally charting the absurd complexities of human psychology, while creating a compelling contemporary fairytale firmly rooted in the banality of everyday existence. It has, as ever, enormous compassion, wit and insight, and its ending is exquisitely affecting.

Conte d’hiver (1992) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

During a summer holiday, Félicie and Charles meet and have a whirlwind romance. Due to a mix-up with their addresses, they lose track of one another, even though Félicie is carrying Charles’ child. Five years later, Félicie is working in Paris as a hairdresser for Maxence, who is in love with her and who wants her to move with him to open a new salon in Nevers. She is also loved by a young librarian Loïc, but Félicie still clings to her first love, Charles, even though the chance of her meeting him again is remote...

The second of four films in Rohmer’s Four Seasons cycle, Conte d’hiver is a fine example of post-New Wave French romantic cinema. It illustrates perfectly Rohmer’s gift for telling a simple story in an effective and moving way, with believable characters in everyday situations.

As in many of Rohmer’s films, there is a much greater emphasis on dialogue than on action. However, the dialogue is so natural, intelligent and insightful that the film maintains a balanced momentum throughout and never appears slow or stilted. Rohmer manages to achieve this because his characters – particularly Félicie – are so naturally articulate and expressive, offering a clear insight into their mood and innermost thoughts.

We quickly get to know the characters, to the extent that we can almost predict their behaviour and responses – not because the film is necessarily predictable, but because we understand the characters so well. This is a reflection of Rohmer’s excellent writing as well as some fine acting performances.

The only thing that mars the film – or, at least, appears grossly unsubtle – is the lengthy scene where the characters Félicie and Loïc watch a theatre performance of Shakespeare’s play A Winter’s Tale. In an earlier scene, Loïc already explained the plot in sufficient detail to allow us to make the connection between Félicie’s love story and Shakespeare’s play. Having then to sit through this protracted piece of Shakespearean theatre feels at best unnecessary, at worst indulgent on the part of Rohmer. Far from reinforcing the parallels it unnecessarily stalls the plot and creates a false expectation that the film is going to have a fairy tale ending.

However, that is a very minor fault in an otherwise near-perfect piece of French cinema from a popular and unceasingly perceptive film maker. Watch this film and you feel duty-bound to watch the other three instalments in the Four Seasons cycle.

At the beginning of "A Tale of Winter," French director Eric Rohmer's tender, exquisitely graceful love story, the camera captures a pair of young lovers in the midst of a summer idyll so sun-dappled and romantic that it verges on cliche. Like Watteau nymphs, Charles (Frederic Van Dren Driessche) and Felicie (Charlotte Very) indulge themselves in the sensual bliss of their blossoming new love, splashing about nude in the surf, napping and sweetly making love. On their faces is an expression of sublime innocence and contentment and hopeful expectation. As their vacation ends, Felicie scribbles down her address for Charles and boards her train for home, certain that soon, she and her lover will be together again.

Suddenly, as a title informs us, it's five years later.

Charles and Felicie never found each other or even spoke after parting. By mistake, Felicie gave him the wrong address. And because Charles, who's an American, was moving around a lot, he didn't give her his. "A dumb glitch," Felicie says.

Since then, Felicie has made an effort to go on with her life. At present, she is involved with not one, but two, men. The first, Maxence (Michel Voletti), a largish, supposedly cultivated man who manages the hair salon where she works, has left his wife so the two of them can run off together. The second, Loic (Herve Furic), looks closer to her age and works as a librarian.

But neither of them is a great love, not like Charles. As she and Maxence stroll the cramped streets of Nevers together, sightseeing and smooching, it's apparent that she feels affection for this cuddly bear of a guy but not the spark of excitement she felt with Charles, or the sense of belonging.

In fact, Charles is a constant presence in her life because of the daughter he fathered but never saw. As Felicie talks about the love she has lost, explaining to both her current suitors that her heart still belongs to him, she begins to take on the look of a tragic dreamer who has sacrificed her life to an impossible ideal.

For three decades, Rohmer has been one of the cinema's most challenging, literate voices, and in "A Tale of Winter" -- the second installment in his "Tales of Four Seasons" -- he builds his story with the same intelligence and passion for detail that he has in the past. But while much of the director's recent work has been dry and inconsequential, "A Tale of Winter" has the feel of vital and ambiguous life.

As usual, the characters reveal themselves through brilliant talk, debating incessantly with their friends and feeling out their own ideas in the process. Felicie's friends -- Loic and Maxence included -- think she is a fool; some even imply that the relationship meant more to her than it did to Charles -- that Charles had his fling and moved on.

Felicie is one of Rohmer's strongest characters in years. Stubborn, willful, and petulantly self-centered, she is a tremendous pain, going where she likes and hurting whomever she pleases. For most of the picture, her blather about Charles seems to spring from some neurotic delusion designed to protect herself from getting involved with the people in front of her.

Still, she believes with her whole heart that Charles longs for her just the same as she longs for him, and knows just as surely that their love was special. Their daughter is proof. In almost every aspect, Felicie is an ordinary woman; only by clinging to this love is she distinguished. Her lover may or may not ever appear, but, in the end, the longing itself becomes heroic. And ultimately, of greater importance than even the lover. Rohmer's "A Tale of Winter" is like a minimalist short story, measured, nuanced and rich with intimations. It's a small work, but nearly perfect.

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

A TALE OF WINTER (Eric Rohmer, 1992) | Dennis Grunes

Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]

Tale of Winter, A (aka Conte d'Hiver) (France, 1991) Edwin Jahiel

A Tale of Winter (1992) Goatdog’s Movies (Michael W. Phiillips, Jr.)

Tales of the Four Seasons | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

A Tale of Winter Howard Schumann from Talking Pictures UK

Review/Film Festival; Another Seasonal Tale From Rohmer Vincent Canby from The New York Times, October 2, 1992

FILM; Eric Rohmer Writes His Own 'Winter's Tale' John Rockwell from The New York Times, March 27, 1994

Review/Film; A Romance Of Missed Connections The New York Times, April 1, 1994

THE TREE, THE MAYOR, AND THE MEDIATHEQUE

France (105 mi) 1993

L'Arbre, le Maire et la Médiathèque ou Les Sept Hasards Time Out London

The mayor presides over a village in the Vendée, the médiathèque is the sports and culture complex he's trying to build and the tree is a schoolmaster's cherished willow which stands in the middle of the proposed development. The film hinges together are long conversations about town versus country, about ecology (progressive or reactionary?), about local and national politics. Usually with Rohmer, characters reveal themselves via their shifting affections for one another; here character emerges in discussion of the issues. The finale is also somewhat of a departure, with the actors bursting into Demy-esque song. Telling the story in seven chapters, all beginning, 'If it hadn't been for...', is a characteristic framework for a less than characteristic movie.

The Tree, the Mayor, and the Mediatheque Jaime Christley from Unexamined Essentials, February 18, 2009

Ranking alongside Perceval le Gallois and The Lady and the Duke as one of Rohmer's boldest experimental films - the director's 1993 fiction-documentary hybrid is certainly not alone in the director's filmography in terms of upsetting expectations, something he did nearly as often as he went to work building and reinforcing the sensibility that brought him the most acclaim and fanfare. Using a tightly-knit cast of regulars (including Pascal Greggory, Arielle Dombasle, and the brilliant Fabrice Luchini), mixing them up with a gallery of non-actors (presumably the real citizens of the small town in which the majority of the film is set), Rohmer refracts his balance of direction and indirection against the mirror of local and national politics and meditates on its array of contradictory systems: political parties, rural and urban mentalities, aesthetics versus utility, beauty versus ugliness, and the role of mankind to make use of the earth as if it's his duty, or preserve what he hasn't yet ruined, which may be even more divinely inspired. With a greater quantity of ellipses than in one of the filmmaker's Comedies or Moral Tales (in fact, each chapter is headed by a deliberate ellipsis, inspired by the school lesson that opens the film, the title cards suggesting premises that begin with "If..." and imposing upon the subsequent action to respond), The Tree, the Mayor, and the Mediatheque nevertheless has in common with them the establishment of dramatic spaces as a forum for dialogue, in which men and women cannot help but to use words as icons - or tools - of their will, their opinions, and their philosophy. All the while, Rohmer builds a case against their unlimited autonomy from the laws of structures (chance, fate, or faith) that supersede their earthly plans. (That doesn't stop the wisest among them - the principal's daughter, played by an amazing Galaxie Barbouth, from incorrectly taking credit for one of fate's decisive cuts.)

L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

The mayor of a provincial French town manages to get funding to build a media centre, in a picturesque location amidst green fields and old stone houses. Needless-to-say the scheme meets with some fierce opposition from the locals, particularly a primary school teacher and his politically astute pre-teenage daughter.

A very topical film, Rohmer’s satire of some of the absurdities of French regional politics is very witty and surprisingly fresh. The notion that a mayor can find it easier to obtain funding for a grotesque white elephant than for restoring the existing stone buildings has more than a ring of truth about it.

Arielle Dombasle’s portrayal of the mayor’s partner is the film’s winning card. A confirmed city-phile who has never seen lettuces outside of a plastic wrapper in the supermarket, it is left to her to persuade the architect that it might be a good idea to try to blend the proposed concrete monstrosity into its surroundings. Equally entertaining is the mixed, and largely unpredictable, responses of the local people to the venture. Ultimately, only a young girl has the guts to tell the mayor what a damn fool idea he is pursuing – although of course, being just a little girl and not even eligible to vote, her words fall on deaf ears.

Can politician’s really be so stupid and blinkered? Rohmer’s analysis is scathing and his conclusion an unequivocal oui. Build a massive media complex in a community of a few dozen families? The fact that the mere idea doesn’t immediately strike the film’s audience as being absurd suggest all to well that we have already become inured to the idiotic schemes of regional politicians.

With some Godard-esque direction and unpolished acting performances (looking as if the entire film was improvised), the film has a very effective documentary feel about it. This techinque serves the film well, allowing Rohmer to make his political comments rather like a very capable ventiloquist: the dialogue appears to come straight from the heads of the actors and not from the pages of some well-rehearsed script.

Whilst it suffers a little from a lack of structure, the film is nevertheless an entertaining satire of contemporary French poltics. It is also a treat to see Fabrice Luchini (now a very popular actor in France) erupting in a number of spirited outbursts of fury and eloquence that no one could possibly have scripted.

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Only the Cinema: The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque Ed Howard, April 4, 2011

L'Arbre, le Maire et la Mediatheque the Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque Movie Review Lisa Nesselson from Variety

Smart and Smarter: Films That Tickle the Mind Stephen Holden from The New York Times, February 24, 1996

RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS (Les Rendez-vous de Paris)

France (94 mi) 1995

Les Rendez-vous de Paris Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Three short stories chart the effects of chance encounters of the amorous kind in contemporary Paris. In the first, a student, doubtful of her lover's fidelity, is chatted up in a market by a youth who may or may not be a thief; in the second, a teacher's attempts to seduce a woman already in a long-term relationship are both stimulated and frustrated by her feelings about the public places in which they are forced to meet; in the third, an artist playing host to a Swedish visitor decides to ignore her in favour of a woman he follows through the streets to the Picasso Museum. Slight tales, perhaps, but Rohmer turns a seemingly inconsequential confection into yet another of his subtle studies of modern love. What gives this particular piece a lift is that Rohmer shot it so casually, on 16mm and a minimal budget, so it's something of a return to the ideals of the nouvelle vague; and that it's very much a love-letter to Paris. The acute feeling for milieu is not decorative but crucial, in that the relationships we see are profoundly affected by the mood, population and topography of the places in which they develop. Witty, touching, perceptive, this is a film that belies Rohmer's 70-odd years.

Rendezvous in Paris Jaime Christley from Unexamined Essentials, February 12, 2009

One of Rohmer's infrequent forays into the short form - this feature is comprised of three short films that are narratively independent but overlap thematically, like a Venn diagram. The connective theme is coincidence - unexpected encounters and associations. Fate, dumb luck, whimsical acts of a higher power, these became favored devices of American filmmakers since Paul Thomas Anderson foregrounded their existence and effects in his sprawling 1999 drama Magnolia, but even after a decade of serendipity-ennui, Rohmer's use of it remains fresh. Partly this is because his characters recognize and discuss improbability openly, and partly because they don't make a big deal about it. In another film, the revelation of shared lovers, shared knowledge, or shared spaces is delivered not only as dramatic payoff, but dressed up as the stuff of meta-fictional, mythic wonder. Certainly Rohmer knows how to get a laugh, but if anything he discourages any deeper reading and directs us instead to the real meat of each vignette: a girl who is betrayed by two separate men, a married woman whose complacency in carrying out an affair is shattered, and a young painter whose attempts to articulate painterly aesthetics (his own, Picasso's) are as embarrassing as his struggle to communicate his sudden infatuation with a chance encounter at an art museum. This being Rohmer, the girl in the first segment is revitalized rather than crushed by the men who'd done her wrong, the painter's fumbling attempts to woo a stranger are deeply felt rather than pretentious, so that it's possible that his artistic life has been saved even after his romantic slate has been wiped clean. The middle tale is the most nuanced, charting the course of a touchy affair that gradually warms and solidifies into a genuine, mutual bond. Unforeseen coincidence is the catalyst, not the active agent, of the sorrowful conclusion.

Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Three tales where an amorous rendezvous in Paris ends with an unexpected twist. In the first, ‘Le Rendez-vous de 7 heures’, a young woman, Esther, is mulling over whether her boyfriend is cheating on her when another young man tries to chat her up. She agrees to meet up with the latter and later realises she has lost her purse. That same day, the purse is returned to her by a stranger and together, half-suspecting the purse was stolen by the young man who accosted Esther earlier, they set out to keep the agreed rendezvous – and both get a shock. In the second tale, ‘Les Blancs de Paris’, another young woman wanders around Paris with her lover, a university professor, and agonises over whether she should leave her fiancé or not. She has the answer when she and her lover agree to spend a night at a hotel in Montmartre. Finally, in ‘Mère et enfant 1907’, a young artist takes his Swedish girlfriend to an art gallery where he meets a young woman who shares his obsession for Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ portrait. He abandons his girlfriend to pursue the stranger and finally manages to lure her back to his studio. The outcome is not what he expected but proves to be worthwhile.

Less substantial than Rohmer’s other films, Les Rendez-vous de Paris is nonetheless an engaging diversion, comprising three loosely connected tales of romantic trysts, each showing the director’s unique ability to portray human relationships in a convincing yet poignant way.

The first, and perhaps best, of the three tales is a charming but typically cruel kind of morality tale, which echoes some Rohmer’s earlier and most popular romantic comedies. The other two tales are less striking but contain some memorable moments, making this a lightweight and fairly accessible Rohmeresque study in male-female relationships.

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

DVD Outsider [L.K. Weston]

Rendezvous in Paris Mike D’Angelo

Steve Rhodes

Movie Magazine International [Mary Weems]

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Rendezvous in Paris - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Russell Smith

Parables That Blend Love and Philosophy Janet Maslin from The New York Times, August 9, 1996

Slant Magazine [Nick McCarthy]

A SUMMER’S TALE (Conte d'été) A 95

France (113 mi) 1996

While this is not generally considered among the major works of Rohmer, the third of his Contes des quatre saisons (Tales of the Four Seasons, 1990–98), described as “mid-level Rohmer,” as generally his Contes moraux (Six Moral Tales, 1963–72) receive the highest praise, with An Autumn Tale (Conte D’Automne) (1998) considered the best of the Four Seasons, one might argue, however, that the critics got it wrong. Never released in the United States until now, as for some strange reason they were never able to negotiate acceptable distribution agreements, so despite being released in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1996, few outside of France have actually seen this film. In fact, according to Box Office/Business from IMDb, only 175,000 customers in France saw the film the year it was released, so certainly the film is due for a reappraisal. Rohmer was a literature teacher, novelist, magazine editor, and film critic, where he was ten years older than any of the other young film critics in the Cahiers du Cinéma group of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, all writers before subsequently becoming the founding filmmakers of the French New Wave, joining the staff in 1951 when Rohmer had already taught literature at school, published a novel Elizabeth (1946) under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier, and spent three years as a film critic with such prestigious journals as La Revue du Cinéma and Sartre’s Les Temps modernes.

Rohmer shot his first film JOURNAL D’UN SCÉLÉRAT (1950) the same year he founded Gazette du Cinema along with Godard and Rivette before joining André Bazin’s film journal at Cahiers, serving as editor-in-chief from 1956 to 1963, a group whose function was watching and writing about films screened by Henri Langlois and his Paris Cinémathèque. Perhaps in contrast to the condescension shown to film criticism in America, which was often at odds with a culture that considered cinema a second rate form of entertainment, the French, and Europeans in general, wholeheartedly embraced their artists, putting it on the same level as their own intellectual and artistic pursuits, finding cinema a form of expression to be taken seriously. Rohmer’s films may show more in common with the preceding generation of Renoir and Bresson (Introduction to Bresson) than the young guns of Cahiers, but by the end of his career, the director left behind the term Rohmer-esque to describe spare, dialogue-driven films about relationships between men and women, often presented as parts of a multi-episodic series, exploring the awkward romantic entanglements, emotional turmoil, and moral dilemmas that develop between characters who are often amusingly caught between two or more objects of desire. Rohmer’s distinct style can be seen in the work of directors from Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas to Woody Allen and Richard Linklater.

In my mind at least, this is in the realm of best Rohmer film, rivaling even the classic My Night at Maud's (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) (1969) for that elevated territory. The film makes the best use of locations of any Rohmer film since his first feature, The Sign of Leo (Le signe du lion) (1959), a bleak, black and white near documentary film where the city itself stands for the doomed protagonist’s deteriorating state of mind, where poverty is shown to have a debilitating effect, as the normally welcoming City of Lights turns into a nightmarish world of utter indifference. In stark contrast, this couldn’t be a brighter, sunnier film, uniquely opening in a wordless ten-minute sequence as we watch the introverted Gaspard (a young Melvil Poupard is literally perfect for the part, as no Rohmer character is better suited as a stand-in for the director) arrive on the ferry boat and wander alone through the streets of Dinard, a picturesque Brittany seaside resort town. While the setting is divine, overlooking a sandy beach filled with holiday revelers enjoying the ocean air, Gaspard sits in his room playing guitar, eats various street offerings or at local restaurants, but generally avoids contact with others. He’s quickly recognized on the beach by a waitress that served him the day before, Margot, Amanda Langlet from PAULINE AT THE BEACH (1983), who cheerfully asks him to join her. While she sees him as a lonesome puppy dog off his leash, shy, and in need of companionship, Gaspard avoids several social invitations, preferring instead to sit home and explore his music.

Rohmer uses a day-by-day chapter heading like diary entries, showing the significance of time passing, as they grow fond of each other while developing trust, where they appear to be able to tell each other their innermost secrets, where Margot’s in love with a man who’s off in the South Seas working for the Peace Corps, while Gaspard’s sweetheart Lena may or may not be his girlfriend, as he’s not sure how much she likes him, but he came to Dinard hoping to run into her, but she hasn’t written or left her address, leaving him in a state of limbo. Days pass as they go on long scenic hikes by the sea, also visiting nearby Saint Malo and Saint Lunaire, sensuously photographed by cinematographer Diane Baratier, where she’s as gregarious and open as he is guarded and reserved, showing more maturity and self-assured poise, reminding him “It’s easier to be yourself with a friend than with a lover. You don’t have to pretend.” Her overall presence seems to anchor the film emotionally and provide needed stability, despite having a few changes of heart herself, but she objects to being used as the second or third option, the safe fallback position, the last choice after the others have been exhausted, where she’s viewed as the leftovers. What sets this apart from other Rohmer films is the ease in which these actors play their parts, especially Poupard and Langlet, as the performances have never seemed so comfortable, without an ounce of the pretentiousness that seems to plague so many other characters throughout his work, as their awkwardness and fickle changeability completely suits the indecisiveness of youth.

Stylistically this resembles the long tracking shots of extended conversations that develop while walking, thriving on the spontaneity of the moment in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). This is one of the more spontaneous Rohmer films as well, where humor is much more prevalent. With Margot having a sunny disposition and a PhD in ethnography, they develop a comfortable kind of platonic intimacy, where she reminds him “I’m comfortable with everyone. It’s my training,” while Gaspard grows moody and deeper into self-loathing, becoming downright morose, pouting “Since no one loves me, I don’t love anyone,” claiming he hates groups, but enjoys people’s company one at a time. This film borders on the brooding, existential territory of Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur) (1971), showing how isolated and self-absorbed kids can be during the innocence of youth, where they’re still discovering who they are and what they believe in, not sure yet how they fit into society, yet ready impulsively to make that leap. Margot invites him to come along when she meets an old Newfoundlander sailor (Aimé Lefèvre), a guy familiar with the Celtic history of Brittany who’s spent his life at sea, singing them a sea shanty where music, as it does in the Bresson film, seems to have an intoxicating effect, not only bringing these two characters closer but inspiring Gaspard to go home and write a similar song.

At the urging of Margot, who senses Gaspard’s growing restlessness, she introduces him to a local friend Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), a girl Gaspard previously avoided claiming she was not “his type,” whose beauty and confidence in herself both intimidates and enthralls him, changing gears in midstream, offering her all of his attention, going all-in so to speak, riding the wave of spontaneity. He teaches her the love song he just wrote that expresses the fierce individualism of a pirate’s daughter embracing the spirit of an all-encompassing love as she sails the seas, giving her the song he actually wrote for Lena (who still hasn’t shown up yet), joining her family for an afternoon boat ride where they all sing together in unison accompanied by an accordion player, where this may be the centerpiece of the film, where art achieves an almost perfect harmony. But just as the kissing begins and at the moment for them to consummate their newfound love, she introduces certain relationship principles, among which includes never sleeping with a guy on the first date. Instead they make plans (as he did with Margot) to visit the scenic isle of Ouessant, which takes on an almost mythical quality in this film, thought of as a land where dreams come true. In the course of a week, Gaspard promises to go to there with all three women, as out of the blue Lena (Aurélia Nolin) shows up, full of excuses, evasive when it comes to the idea of commitments, or even meeting at a designated time, just leaving him in the lurch, without a word, yet expecting his full and undivided attention afterwards.

Lena is easily the most childish of the three, a blond who is also the most pampered and overprotected, where one day she loves you, the next day she avoids you, driving Gaspard a little crazy, who’s already completely indecisive about what to do. While he’s most faithful to Margot, but sex is out of the question, or so he believes, yet he can’t say no to Solène, who literally forces him to choose her when she wants him, but falls upon her “principles” apparently to avoid sex. Lena lives in a fantasy world where Gaspard can’t find a place, much as he’d love to, where she insists that he act in a certain way towards her, always at her beck and call, and if he can’t do that then he can only lead to disappointment. Men as a social group are dumped on by these women, and rightly so, as Gaspar can’t commit to any of them, so he plays the field, hoping for the best outcome. Rohmer, in his seventies when he made this film, brings together these fits of youthful indecision with remarkable clarity and humor, showing love to be a walking contradiction where the closer you get to it, the farther it is away, like a fickle mirage. Expressing warmth toward all his characters, Rohmer has cleverly delivered one of his most delightfully charming films, where it doesn’t have that sense of melancholy that lingers over many of his other films, but instead features a rapturous view of youthful exuberance, disguised as it is in secrets and ulterior motives that are constantly evolving, yet like the musical theme, retains a sunny optimism for life that is positively enchanting.

A Summer's Tale | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Keith Uhlich

From the verbose intellectuals in his 1969 classic My Night at Maud’s to the loquacious lovers of 2007’s erotic The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, director Eric Rohmer has always loved talk. Yet in this sublime 1996 love story, nearly ten minutes elapse before a line of dialogue is spoken—a tension-generating exception to the norm. During that time we observe introverted young adult Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) as he wanders the streets of a seaside resort town, eating at restaurants, noodling on his guitar and generally avoiding eye contact. In short order, he’s approached by waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, a Rohmer veteran), who gets the full story: Gaspard is two weeks away from starting a new job and is spending his downtime waiting for flaky sorta-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin) to arrive. Will she? Won’t she?

Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws. Margot has a rapport with Gaspard, though she denies any attraction—until maybe she doesn’t. Then there’s local girl Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), who becomes smitten with the young man, but senses that his mind is elsewhere and continually challenges him about it. And, of course, the emotionally volatile girlfriend does show up—to Gaspard’s initial delight and eventual dismay. Conversation is a way for the characters to continually put off that crucial moment when a decision must be made. A long, enthralling interlude during which Solene and Gaspard hem and haw, evading any intimate expression (the scene’s punch line is killer) is the film in miniature. Think of it as a thriller by Hitchcock—a Rohmer favorite—only with words, not knives, that cut straight to the heart.

The third film in Eric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons series, A Summer's Tale, begins with a soft, lyrical whistle that plays atop the opening credits. The pleasant tune serves as a charming aural primer for the film itself, which is a breezy, balmy respite to a day spent baking in the sun. It rolls on, like an eloquent, earworm-y whisper into your heart and mind. Melvil Poupaud stars as Gaspar, a moppish-haired recent math graduate on the precipice of starting his first adult job. He arrives in Dinard, a coastal village in the Brittany region of France, with grunge attire, a large backpack, a guitar case, and ambivalence to spare. He's the quintessence of the lovelorn and philosophically strong-willed persona that characterizes so much of Rohmer's humane oeuvre.

Gaspar, whose mind is as cloudy as the sea is blue, has traveled to this holiday hotspot with the hopes of reuniting with his idealized may-or-may-not-be girlfriend, Léna (Aurelia Nolin), who he believes to have a connection with, but whose affection isn't always requited. One day he strikes up a conversation with Margot (Amanda Langlet), a freckled ethnology grad student who waits tables at a restaurant he recently dined at. Despite her flirtatious candor, she admits she's in a faithful long-distance relationship and soon they become beach buddies. "I'm comfortable with everyone. It's my training," she tosses off with convivial aplomb. She's smitten with his shyness and bombards him with questions, claiming it's a humanistic impulse: "I'm curious about people. No one's totally uninteresting." Gaspar agrees, but with a grumpy caveat: "Not as individuals, but as groups, yes. I hate groups." And Rohmer seems to share their sentiments, given how he focuses exclusively on the tête-à-têtes between characters, seemingly disinterested in capturing the class customs and social structures of the society they inhabit.

Gaspar is easily discouraged in matters of the heart ("Since no one loves me, I don't love anyone," he pouts), and as his relationship with Margot remains platonic, he strikes up a fling with an acquaintance of Margot's, Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), just before Léna arrives full of excuses and affection. When he has the opportunity to spend a brief seaside sojourn on the scenic island of Ouessant, the place takes on an almost mythic quality—the conceptual land where his perpetual equivocation will be reconciled. In the face of indecision, he must confront his constant searching for someone or something that can make him feel true to himself as well as others. Despite its googly-eyed missive to the power of romance fueling confidence and comfort, A Summer's Tale is most salient when addressing the bonds of friendship, as when Gaspar tells Margot he's deciding between going to Ouessant with Solène or Léna and she incredulously says, "Friendships are a gag, but trifles are serious?"

A Summer's Tale's linear structure and sense of observation is simple yet inspired. Intertitles delineate the start of each day (the film begins on Monday, July 17th and ends on Saturday, August 5th), evoking pages being ripped out of a well-worn journal. And instead of dubiously tip-toeing around his characters' solipsism, Rohmer embraces their inward-looking mindsets, extrapolating emotions that are occasionally almost too rational to represent pure feelings. Which isn't to say their interior selves are pedantically presented or explicitly overstated. Rohmer coyly and cleverly leaves their conundrums unresolved; they verbosely ramble about their feelings of loneliness, rejection, and fulfillment, but it's the audience's own experience that organically fills in the gaps of introspection and judgment.

In one scene, Gaspar shares with Solène a sea chanty he once wrote that was inspired by a traditional Seafarer's song that on old sailor sang to him and Margot, and which revived his love of music. Gaspar plucks just a few strings on an old guitar as Solène beautifully sings the simple lyrics about a pirate's daughter, and there appears to be a consummation of communication between the two, even when she pauses momentarily to state that her singing is a bit off-key. This minor, yet exceedingly tender, moment is most reflective of Rohmer's elegant filmmaking style as a mode of seemingly improvised collaboration, and as a whole, A Summer's Tale not only attests to his status as a master of perspective and characterization, but one with a keen eye for sun-drenched, luscious landscapes and all the fineries of human interaction that they rouse.

Review: A Summer's Tale | Film Comment Max Nelson, June 20, 2014

A Summer’s Tale initially seems like the odd installment out. Like its protagonist—the only male hero in the series—it lolls along lazily and indecisively, indulging in lengthy life-story conversations and stealing moments of pleasure from, among other things, the ebb and flow of a sea shanty, the weather of Brittany, and the faces and bodies of its three female leads. Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) is an aspiring young musician who winds up—it’s not entirely clear how—bumming around post-graduation in a friend’s home on France’s Northwestern coast at the peak of the summer vacation. He comes off initially as surly and antisocial; the company he likes best is, it seems, that of his acoustic guitar. He is waiting for his on-and-off girlfriend Léna (Aurélia Nolin) to arrive, but his heart—despite his own protestations, to himself and others—isn’t in it. He seems more intrigued by two girls he meets during the wait: Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), whose powerful sexual presence and rigid sense of propriety both intimidates and attracts him, and Margot (Amanda Langlet), an ethnologist with whom he strikes up a fast friendship.

Rohmer is brilliant at capturing the peculiar nature of platonic straight-guy-straight-girl friendships, with their occasional crosscurrents of unspoken desire and their potential, however unrealized, to transform into courtships or love affairs. In Gaspard and Margot’s case, the fault lines lie in his evident attraction to her, the gap between her social ease and his hermitlike social discomfort, their mutual need for acknowledgment and her desire to be trusted with more than he is willing to give her. The pair’s interactions nearly always take the form of rambling, mobile conversations, but the tensions between them—and their methods of resolving those tensions—emerge most clearly in the way they glance back at each other simultaneously after waving goodbye for the day, the way she casually, good-naturedly rebuffs him after he first kisses her, or the way, near the end of the film, they sit together in the woods stroking each other’s arms and shoulders at once absentmindedly and imploringly, having succeeded in channeling their sexual tension into a deeper, more comfortable kind of intimacy. “It’s easier to be yourself with a friend than with a lover,” she tells him then. “You don’t have to pretend.” Her behavior throughout the scene, all glinting eyes and self-assured poise, manages to be both a confirmation of this point and a virtuosic, carefully modulated social performance.

Solène, like Margot, selects Gaspard as a potential companion and pursues him in spite—or possibly because of—his failure to commit. For him, she is the more carnal counterpart to the flinty, fickle Léna: more comfortable with her own sexuality, surer of her desires and more direct in their expression. (Likewise, with her windswept dark hair, pouting lips and full figure, she makes a striking physical contrast with Léna’s more straight-laced brand of slim, blonde beauty.) In one of the movie’s most prolonged romantic teases, she invites Gaspard to spend an afternoon and evening at sea by her easygoing uncle’s place, then, when she seems about to go to bed with him, tells him that she never sleeps with men she’s just met. The emergence of her “principles” unsettles him, in part by uniting her with the two women he associates with the limits and codes of, respectively, friendship (Margot) and chivalry (Léna). Eventually, he over-commits himself to each of the three. Like the heroes of the moral tales, he is brought to the brink of making a decisive choice; unlike most of them, he is “saved” by being given a sudden, unexpected out.

The waterside summer setting, the chronically passive man, the conspiratorial friend, the lusty, forward brunette, the chilly, distant blonde: so far, so Claire’s Knee. But unlike that film, A Summer’s Tale rarely concerns itself with judging its hero or exposing his self-delusions. Instead, the primary issue at stake here is the same problem that runs through all the seasonal tales: the characters’ struggle to preserve their autonomy, or at least their idea of their autonomy, despite the fact that their lives appear to be governed by circumstances outside of their control. Rohmer has always structured his narratives around chance occurrences and accidental run-ins, but it’s in the seasonal tales that this principle becomes a real and present problem for the movies’ characters. Jeanne happens to meet Natacha at a party early in A Tale of Springtime, happens to find herself alone with the girl’s father much later after a series of improbable coincidences force two other major characters out of the picture, and redeems herself after falling out with Natacha by means of a miraculous chance discovery. Chance, in effect, makes a problem for her and then solves it, just as it does—even more dramatically—to Félicie in A Tale of Winter, and, in the end, to Gaspard in A Summer’s Tale. (By contrast, Isabelle and Rosine in A Tale of Autumn make scrupulous efforts to place the other film’s characters into circumstances over which the two of them have total control. Whether or not they succeed is one of the movie’s many open questions.)

The first two seasonal tales seem to end happily. The twist that comes in the last minutes of A Summer’s Tale is slightly more ambiguous; its status as a happy ending depends on how much you are willing to dignify Gaspard’s inability to choose between the three women competing for his affections. But the fact that all three films end on miraculous, unprompted reversals should, I think, be a cause for some concern, in the same way that the readiness of the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to change their affections at the turn of a dime should be a cause for concern. Gaspard is happy enough to have sheer chance do his work for him, but it’s not at all clear that he ought to be satisfied with the results. The way the camera watches Margot walk away in the movie’s final moments has a similar effect to the way it lingers on Jeanne’s apartment—with its associations of both domestic happiness and imprisonment—at the end of A Tale of Springtime, or the way it sticks with a group of previously unglimpsed schoolkids, all of them oblivious to the miracle that we have just witnessed, in the closing bars of A Tale of Winter, as if to say: can chance be trusted to work things out for the better, let alone the best? And if not, what is there for us to do about it?

The deeper ambiguity of the seasonal tales, however, is that this riddle somehow finds its expression in a series of films that—in the sensuousness of their textures, the worldly, practical slant of their language and the causal, offhand grace of their movements—seem in many respects to share the horreur de l’ambiguïté expressed by that philosophy teacher early in A Tale of Autumn. The toughest, softest, sexiest and most concrete film of the four, A Summer’s Tale could be said to operate in the series as the “solid part” in contrast to A Tale of Winter’s blurring of the boundaries between life and dream. If its lacks its predecessor’s subtlety and depth, it compensates with its own abundance of more immediate pleasures. It’s perhaps the series’ final ambiguity that, in the final assessment, one part is no deeper than the other.

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Spectrum Culture [Jesse Cataldo]

Review: Éric Rohmer's 'A Summer's Tale' - Film School ... Landon Palmer from Film School Rejects

A Summer's Tale | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Alan Zilberman

Eric Rohmer's Tribute to His Younger Self - The New Yorker Richard Brody

ICPlaces [Chris Knipp]

In Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale, a young man and a ... Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader

[Review] A Summer's Tale - The Film Stage Peter Labuza

A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été) | The Reviews Ken B.

'A Summer's Tale' - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon

doc DVD Review: A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été) (1996) Jeff Ulmer from digitallyOBSESSED

A Summer's Tale | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Tales of the Four Seasons | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]

Urban Cinefile (Australia) Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban

Film Scouts Reviews: Conte d'été David Sterritt

A Summer's Tale Feels Like a Great Beach Read of a Movie ... Jonathan Kiefer From The Village Voice

Odds and Ends: A Summer’s Tale and Life Itself Michael Glover Smith from White City Cinema

Conte d’été (1996) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Rohmer Talk - Senses of Cinema April 2000

Eric Rohmer - Senses of Cinema Tamara Tracz, January 2003

Secrets and Lies: Three Documentaries About Eric Rohmer Bruce Perkins from Senses of Cinema, April 2010

PopMatters [Jose Solis] interview with actor Melvil Poupaud, July 1, 2014

A Summer's Tale | Variety Todd McCarthy

BBCi - Films Tom Dawson

Sunday Telegraph [Anne Billson]

Conte d'été | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew

A Summer's Tale | From the Guardian | The Guardian Andrew Pulver

'A Summer's Tale' movie review - Washington Post Mark Jenkins

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]

Austin Chronicle [Josh Kupecki]

'A Summer's Tale': Young love and doubt ebbs and flows ... Tom Keogh from The Seattle Times

The Oregonian [Jamie S. Rich]

San Francisco Examiner [Walter Addiego]

Review: 'A Summer's Tale' a belated glimpse of Eric Rohmer ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, July 17, 2014

It all adds up in Eric Rohmer's magical 'A Summer's Tale ... Susan King from The LA Times, July 17, 2014

A Summer's Tale Movie Review & Film Summary (2014 ... Glenn Kenny from Roger Ebert site

A Romantic Guessing Game Stephen Holden from The New York Times, May 12, 2002, also seen here: 'A Summer's Tale,' From Eric Rohmer's 'Seasons' Cycle ...

A Summer's Tale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AN AUTUMN TALE A- 93

France (112 mi) 1998

I want all men to love me—especially those I don’t love. —Isabelle (Marie Rivière)

The final installment of Rohmer’s Tales of Four Seasons (Contes des quatre saisons, 1990–98) is vintage Rohmer, as the subject itself is the art of conversation, where one might think of this as the endless dinner conversation of Louis Malle’s MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ (1981), but instead taking place between three women in the pastoral elegance of rural France nestled in the sun-lit, open air vineyards of the Rhône valley. The film is almost entirely told in light-hearted conversation and in the light of day, usually accentuating the female point of view. Of interest, probably as much to Rohmer as to the audience, the director has brought back two women who played lead roles in earlier Rohmer films while in the full bloom of youth, now returning as mature adults, including Béatrice Romand, who played the alluring 17-year old teenager in CLAIRE’S KNEE (1970), while Marie Rivière began her collaboration in THE AVIATOR’S WIFE (1981), both now in their 40’s. What they bring to this film is a sense of effortlessness working with Rohmer, where a fictionalized story very much resembles the realism of a documentary from the extensive degree of naturalism displayed throughout, which is essential in a charming, short story kind of way, where meticulous attention to details is what makes it so interesting.

Romand plays Magali, a widow on her own with wild, unattended hair who spends all her time tinkering around her small vineyard left to her by her family, hoping she can create a work of art, never venturing out much to socialize or reacquaint herself with the opposite sex, while Rivière plays her best friend Isabelle, who runs a bookstore in town but is rarely if ever there, instead spending as much free time in the country as she can. She’s happily married and her daughter is about to be married, a major event in any small town, yet it’s barely mentioned except as an excuse to get Magali out of the house. Magali’s son Léo has a girl friend Rosine, the irrepressibly gorgeous Alexia Portal, a student who had been conducting an affair with one of her professors, Étienne (Didier Sandre), a pleasant but emotionally unappealing intellectual, so now she prefers Magali’s company to Léo’s, claiming it was she that interested her in the first place, that Léo was only an afterthought. Unforced, relaxed, and self-assured, the film oozes charm and witty intellect from the 78-year old filmmaker, where the emphasis is on the conversation between the characters, who reveal their feelings and how they relate to each other and the world around them at this particular point in their lives.

The gist of the story involves matchmaking, females plotting behind other people’s backs, planning and scheming and mapping out people’s lives for their own devious purposes while of course claiming good intentions. Both Isabelle and Rosine secretly conspire to find appropriate suitors for Magali, unbeknownst to her and each not knowing of the other’s similar intentions. Rosine tries to pawn off her old professor, although it appears her motives may also be to keep his paws off her, as he is reluctant to let her go, while Isabelle takes it a step further and places an ad in the personals, attracting a middle aged business man, Gérald (Alain Libolt). It’s a bit of a surprise when Isabelle herself shows up, obviously wanting to attract his interest, slowly gaining his trust by going out on afternoon soirée’s, garnering attention that she desperately needs. Only then does she turn the tables and report she’s only been checking him out for a friend. The befuddled Gérald has no choice but to accept the terms of the game, here completely defined by Isabelle, who then invites him to her daughter’s wedding reception where he can meet Magali, a woman who supposedly has everything in life she could possibly want, except a companion, believing it is too late in life for her to find the right man, so for Gérald an opportunity presents itself.

Arriving on the scene, there are twists and turns, with disguises and conniving tricks, where this turns into a comedy or errors and misdirection, where motive, opportunity, and misunderstood feelings mix with desire and attraction and a long-felt, pent-up loneliness, where there is more than a hint of melancholy in the air. Rather than jump right into things like headstrong young lovers, there’s a feeling out process that takes time, where relationships for mature adults in the autumn of their lives resemble the care and attention needed in aging a fine wine, which if drunk too early in youth will never reach its desired complexity. While it’s all so simple, really, and the story is told in endless conversations where the characters are so perfectly defined through the time the audience spends with them onscreen. Other than Professor Étienne and suitor Gérald, men are all but absent in this film, mentioned, but disappearing at the first available chance. Despite a few difficulties along route, the film is surprisingly upbeat, featuring a few exquisite locations and plenty of time with characters sitting around leisurely sipping wine as they pleasantly pass the afternoons away. The dialogue written by Rohmer is smart, concise, and most important of all engaging, remaining subtly sophisticated and clever. It’s a non-pretentious style of filmmaking that belongs to Rohmer alone, as there’s nothing large here, very little action to speak of, simply the charm and elegance of observing human behavior, watching people behaving wonderfully most of the time.

Rohmer's cinema is unmistakable, dedicated as it is to the art of conversation and the rules of attraction. Still, it's a pleasant surprise to see your quintessential Rohmerian nubile young heroine upstaged here by two formidable women 'of a certain age'. Magali (Romand) is a lonely wine maker whose two best friends are Isabelle (Rivière) and her son's girlfriend Rosine (Portal). The latter wants to fix Megali up with her professor (her own blatantly unsuited ex), while Isabelle secretly places a lonely hearts ad, then auditions the likeliest candidate while masquerading as her friend. It's a leisurely comedy, to be sure, but immensely charming. One to savour.

The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review

Autumn Tale is also French, and there the similarity ends. It is a gentle comedy from veteran Eric Rohmer about matchmaking and the silly games and hesitancies of courtship. I've seen several of the famous early films by Rohmer from the 60s, and now I've seen a couple from his old age, and I have to say that I think the elderly Rohmer seems much the better and wiser artist. This one goes down like a mellow wine. There's rather more plot than is usual in a Rohmer picture. In fact, there's something of the drawing room comedy and bedroom farce in this story. Serene, self-confident Isabelle (Marie Riviere) wants to find a man for her old friend, a widowed vineyard owner named Magali (Beatrice Romand). Since Magali would never dream of putting an ad in the personals, Isabelle does it for her without telling her, pretending that she is Magali until she springs the surprise switch on one of the ad's respondents. Meanwhile, a young student who adores Magali (the impossibly beautiful Alexia Portal) also plays matchmaker, trying to set her up with her ex-boyfriend, a womanizing intellectual. All this busybody activity is, of course, ridiculous - and in Isabelle's case, even a bit reprehensible. We all know what the road to hell is paved with. Rohmer's approach is to laugh, rather than wag his finger. As it turns out, the comedy of errors reveals Magali to be the most interesting and mature character (Romand is wonderful), someone whose supposed eccentricity is really a sign of health. Portal's character really comes off the worst - so bright and earnest and affectionate, so unaware of her own real motives - but the film forgives everyone because the point of view is one of happiness. This is what I realized about Rohmer while watching Autumn Tale. He is not an artist of angst. His satire has no savagery, no misanthropy. No shallow optimism either. He takes the position of basic, fallible goodness, of essential happiness. In this he is different from almost every major artist of our time. Certainly there is a trace of the miniaturist about him - he doesn't tackle big world-political themes. But I, for one, find his perspective refreshing. People fail and do foolish things - can't we, instead of raging all the time, forgive them and ourselves?

Here, in vigorous old age, comes another master: Eric Rohmer, age 79, whose Autumn Tale is now brightening the lives of all who watch it.

As attentive to the seasons as the author of Eyes Wide Shut but incapable of his ponderousness, Rohmer ventures for this film into the Rhône valley, at a moment when grapes are being harvested, students are returning to school and the middle-aged are learning to hope that they might love again. Magali (Béatrice Romand), brusque in widowhood, runs a small vineyard the way she manages her hair: The first is half-choked with wild vegetation, the second sprouts untamed about her head, and both can claim to be more flavorful for being left to grow. Gérald (Alain Libolt), shy and tentative in divorce, keeps his own hair slicked down, as a salesman must, but hints at a southern warmth beneath his too-polite manner. You can't doubt that these people were meant for each other. But it takes a while for them to meet, given the mixed motives of the women who are helping to fix up Magali.

Her friend Isabelle (Marie Rivière) undertakes the project with a certain deviousness, as if searching for a romance of her own. (She's perfectly content in her marriage, she says, just before taking out a personal ad.) As for Magali's second helper, she's another of Eric Rohmer's beautiful, articulate, iron-willed young women. This one is a college student named Rosine (Alexia Portal); and though her methods are far more straightforward than Isabelle's, her aims are even more convoluted.

Typical Rohmer, you might say. The scenery is lovely, though it's interrupted by the cooling towers of a nuclear plant. The people are charming, though they're willful and conniving. The plot is simple, though it meanders all over the countryside. Unforced, relaxed, self-assured and utterly absorbing, Autumn Tale is the work of a master with nothing left to prove but everything to give.

New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review

In the 100-plus years of cinema, the most important, influential and long-lasting "movement" (which, like Expressionism, Poetic Realism, Neorealism, etc. was not a real movement-- but I'll skip the lecture) was the French New Wave of the late 1950s and the 1960s. The best directors and writer-directors included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer. They're all unclassifiable, yet for many viewers some key words may come to mind: Godard= avant-garde, Truffaut= romantic, Resnais= thinker, Chabrol=satirist, Rivette=lengthy, Rohmer=searching.

Abroad, they are all admired film giants. In the United States, Truffaut is/was the best-known and by far the most popular; Godard, the most imitated (badly); Resnais, by now, little known; Chabrol too, though when known, entertaining for his Hitchcockisms; Rivette, hardly seen; Rohmer, beloved by specialists only.

Rohmer, born in 1920, may be even less classifiable than the others. His films are talky, as are almost all French movies, but then Rohmerian talk is the mainspring of his works, not just an adjunct or a part of them. All develop via dialogue, yet there is nothing "theatrical" about them. Oddly enough though, Rohmer, who came to cinema through literature, is, in original ways, closer to the great 18th century playwright Marivaux and to the best 19th century French playwright, Alfred de Musset.

Most Rohmer movies deal with people, predominantly young and younger, who talk of love and get in and out of relationships. And the older Rohmer gets the younger his movies seems to be. His characters argue, prod, discuss, flirt, advise, shift, all in what appear to be ordinary or at least real settings and situations. The movies are low budget, non-studio-ish, beautifully shot in cities, beaches, apartments and subtly symbolic nature. The dialogues are carefully crafted to be convincingly true, as well as improvised.

Rohmer, among his other works, has concentrated in groupings: Six Moral Tales; Six Comedies and Proverbs (a la Musset); Tales of the Four Seasons, the last and latest of which is Autumn Tale.

It is the story of two women in their mid-40s, best friends for ages, in the Cotes du Rhone wine-growing region. The actresses are veterans of Rohmer films. The rest of the perfect cast are unknowns or little-known. Magali, a vineyard owner, is widowed with children (grownup). Isabelle, a married bookseller, secretly decides that it is time for her friend to have a man in her life. In the matchmaking process, there are twists and turns, disguises and tricks, surprises and shocks, complications, quid pro quos, confusions, mix-ups, and, and. . . No, I will not drop any hints -- see for yourself. It is all wonderful, intelligent, subtly sophisticated, clever but not smarty-pantsy, touching but not penny-dreadful-sentimental. It is funny, humorous and witty.

What's familiar for Rohmer habitués may be that the (at the time of filming) 78-year old maker has an unmatched understanding of people, including the youths. Also (look at the credits) the importance of women as his collaborators. What is new is that Rohmer has upped the age of his protagonists. Which brings me to a "review" I ran into but I can't find, alas. So I'll give you what I remember. The writer, a male, said in effect that the film was dull especially because he sees movies to look at beautiful chicks, and the two women protagonists were old and homely.

Anyway, Rohmer movies are made for gourmets, sophisticated cognoscenti who know their film cuisine.

FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - #2 - Conte d'automne The Caprices of Rosine or the Follies of a Fortnight: Parallel Intrigues in Eric Rohmer’s “Conte d'automne,” by Jacob Leigh, July 2006

Eric Rohmer's Canvas - Boston Review — Home Alan A. Stone from The Boston Review, Summer 1999, also seen here: Boston Review (Alan A. Stone) review

Magic Realism in Conte d'automne (Autumn Tale) • Senses of Cinema Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000

Love and Desire in Eric Rohmer's 'Comedies and Proverbs' and 'Tales ... Fiona Handyside from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

Short Take Tributes on Rohmer • Senses of Cinema An Autumn Afternoon: Notes On the End of Eric Rohmer’s Four Seasons, by Adam Bingham from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2010

BFI | Sight & Sound | An Autumn Tale (1998) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, April 1999

Master of Reality | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 19, 1999

Before the Fall J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, July 6, 1999

AN AUTUMN TALE (Eric Rohmer, 1998) | Dennis Grunes

Conte d’automne (1998) James Travers and Dennis Grunes from FilmsdeFrance

Short Take Tributes on Rohmer • Senses of Cinema various contributors, April 4, 2010

Autumn Tale - James Bowman

Nitrate Online (David Luty) review

New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review

AUTUMN TALE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Tales of the Four Seasons | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere

Autumn Tale (France, 1998; US release 1999). Movie reviews by Dr ... Edwin Jahiel

Mike D'Angelo, The Man Who Viewed Too Much

Reel.com review [3/4] Mike Gregory

Film Monthly.com – Autumn Tale (1998) Michael Koenig

The Tech (MIT) [Bence Olveczky]

Provence: The Ten Best Films [Sheila Johnston]

The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Ray Conlogue

The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough

Autumn Tale Cynthia Fuchs from the Philadelphia City Paper

Minneapolis : Autumn Tale (Conte d'automne) Phil Anderson from the Minneapolis City Pages

Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold

DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]

The Elaborate Fantasies of Love and Longing Stephen Holden from The New York Times, October 2, 1998

SUMMER FILMS: INTERNATIONAL; Rohmer in the Vineyards The New York Times, May 2, 1999

FILM REVIEW; Mellow and Full of Charm Under the Autumn Sun The New York Times, July 9, 1999

THE LADY AND THE DUKE (L'Anglaise et le Duc)

France (129 mi) 2001

The Lady & the Duke Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Rohmer's third historical feature and literary adaptation is taken from the memoirs of Grace Elliott (Russell, even more impressive than she was in Chris Nolan's Following), a wealthy, well-connected Brit trapped in Paris at the time of the Revolution. Though an intimate of an influential Republican, the Duc d'Orléans (Dreyfus), she nevertheless falls under suspicion after reluctantly helping the governor of the Tuileries to evade the guillotine. Partly a suspense drama, partly a very relevant study in how political ideals may be tainted by fanaticism, partly a typically astute moral disquisition, this magisterial film finds the octogenarian auteur embracing the new opportunities afforded by digital - it resembles a contemporary painting come exquisitely to life. A splendid and remarkable achievement.

L'anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke) Full of Grace, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, May 23, 2002

The English lady of L’Anglaise et le duc ("The Lady and the Duke") is Grace Elliott. Formerly the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Grace became the protégée of the Duke of Orléans, cousin of King Louis XVI of France. An ardent royalist, she lived in France during the Revolution and wrote about it in her memoirs.

In his film of her book, Eric Rohmer has chosen to concentrate on the relationship between Grace (Lucy Russell) and Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). This approach allows him to outline a debate over the legitimacy of the Revolution, which Orléans supported. But because Rohmer emphasizes the qualities of the text as a text — that is, not so much as literature but as a written report of the conversations of exquisitely verbal people — he never lets us forget that we are looking through the lens of Grace’s unconditional royalism. Since the ideology is so apparent, we’re able to discount it and attend to other matters.

L’Anglaise et le duc is, above all, a tribute to friendship — in particular, that friendship of which the pleasant and cynical maid in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game says that "you might as well talk about the moon at midday": the friendship between a man and a woman. What’s remarkable about Rohmer’s film is that, considered just as a narrative (and L’Anglaise et le duc, like certain films by Griffith, Feuillade, and Lang, presents itself as pure narrative), it deals with the aftermath of a love affair that’s never shown. Grace and Orléans sometimes allude to an earlier, idyllic state of affairs — but only in an oblique and conventional manner that excludes neither nostalgia nor irony and leaves us guessing how far things went between them. Rohmer forces us to adjust to a way of talking about love and friendship that’s utterly different from how we now conceive of these things. And it takes almost the whole of the film, perhaps, before you realize that for these people, "friendship" is not just code for "love," and "I love you" not just a conventional way of saying "I am your friend," but that these words translate an esteem and a devotion that sustain both love and friendship.

Which is not to say that the carnal has no place in L’Anglaise et le duc — on the contrary, the physical is suffocatingly present. With dry factuality, Rohmer shows us details of mortified flesh: legs of corpses piled in a wagon; a princess’s head on a pole; the body of a bony, lame, half-extinguished marquis (Léonard Cobiant) jammed between two mattresses to elude a Jacobin patrol. And there’s Grace’s often semi-undressed body (many scenes take place in her bedroom), of whose graces we’re reminded by the leers and obscenities of the louts into whose hands she falls.

In the exterior scenes, Rohmer (who shot the film on digital video) composits images of actors over paintings representing the streets, boulevards, and houses of Revolution-era Paris and Meudon. The very guilelessness of such artificiality is appealing, and in such details as a crescent moon overlooking Grace’s nocturnal flight from Paris, or a little road winding up a hill at the end of a street, L’Anglaise et le duc surpasses any recent digital superproduction in its love of pure pictorialism (for which the key precedent in Rohmer’s work is Perceval le Gallois, with its painted medieval backgrounds).

The splendid decorum of both the film and its actors (Russell, Bette Davis–like in her passionate self-possession, is ideal, as is the florid, punctilious Dreyfus) lets Rohmer make great cinema out of movements that would go for nothing in an ordinary film. The textuality is so heady and so nuanced that when Grace steps forward at her trial before the Comité de Surveillance to read a letter, the moment is epiphanic. So is her final tribute to the Duke, which takes the form of an adjustment to the décor of her salon. The dual strength of Rohmer’s filmmaking — its patience with the intricacies of dialogue and its sensitivity to the spiritual qualities of architecture and landscape — finds in these scenes a triumphant reaffirmation.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: The Lady & the Duke (2001) Philip Horne for Sight and Sound, February 2002

Why has Eric Rohmer turned to historical drama and anti-realism

Eric Rohmer said not long ago that, 'I... try hard each time to give something new to my spectators.' His admirers have long been struck by the powers of self-reinvention he has shown in more than two dozen features since 1959. Despite a partiality for a trademark style of serious-talking comedy, he has repeatedly, in Ezra Pound's phrase, 'made it new.' Even so, when the veteran director brought out in 1998 the charmingly mellow An Autumn Tale (Conte d'automne), the last instalment in the Tales of the Four Seasons series that had occupied him for the previous decade, it seemed the perfect moment for a graceful and well-earned retirement. Aged 81, the creator of subtly varied studies of modern life in the series Moral Tales (Contes moraux, 1962-72), Comedies and Proverbs (Comédies et proverbes, 1980-87) and Tales of the Four Seasons (Contes des quatre saisons) looked unlikely to make any ambitious new departures. So no one could have predicted The Lady & the Duke (L'Anglaise et le duc) - a surprise on at least two fronts.

First, in terms of subject matter. Here Rohmer jumps back to the 1790s and the period of the Terror during the French Revolution to tell the tale of a female Scarlet Pimpernel - Grace Elliott, the passionate but proper former lover of the British Prince of Wales and of Philippe, Duke of Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus, best known for a very different role in Delicatessen). By Rohmer's standards the film is action packed, and indeed it has a body count to match Die Hard's. The royalist Elliott (Lucy Russell, from Christopher Nolan's Following) repeatedly risks her life to help an aristocrat escape the guillotine, undergoes night-time house searches by unruly revolutionary patrols and comes up against Robespierre and his Comité de Surveillance in a frighteningly farcical show trial. After being imprisoned among other aristocrats, many of whom go to the block, she is finally saved only by Robespierre's fall.

This thrilling material, remarkably, is based closely on the real-life Grace Dalrymple Elliott's memoir Journal of My Life during the French Revolution, written at the beginning of the 19th century 'at the express desire of His Majesty King George the Third', as an editor noted in 1859. (This may partly account for its fiercely royalist tinge, as Rohmer has pointed out: 'She is probably less of a royalist than she says, given that she wrote her book in anti-Revolutionary England.') Rohmer learned of this wonderfully vivid text (last reprinted in English c. 1959) from a digest in a history magazine.

Elliott's manner in the book is strikingly plain and frank (though there are doubtless distortions and suppressions, and she never admits to having been Orléans' mistress). When she has sheltered the wounded aristocratic fugitive the Marquis de Champcenetz (Léonard Cobiant) during the September massacres despite Orléans' warnings, her reaction is forthright: 'I told him [Orléans] that I had not been fortunate enough to save anybody in the dreadful night; that I wished it had been in my power to do it even at the risk of my own life; that I thought the scenes of yesterday and this night were horrible; and I hoped they would cure all the admirers of the abominable Revolution.'

Rohmer has said he was touched by 'her British stiff upper lip: a certain modesty and self-control, a completely unaffected way of talking about herself and above all a way of looking at events that makes her the heroine of a novel.' Certainly the admirable aristocratic restraint of the dialogue her memoir inspired has a classical theatrical force to which Russell and Dreyfus do full justice. And though Rohmer has denied the film was made for 'any political reasons', Elliott's horror at the Terror's gruesome atrocities must have chimed with the thinking he expressed in a 1983 interview with Jean Narboni: 'I think that in order to build, we mustn't destroy... That's why, politically, I'm a reformist rather than a revolutionary.'

Rohmer evidently also recognised the core of a tragic love story in the vexed, tender, courteous but free-spoken relationship between Elliott and the ill-fated duke; and perhaps also Elliott's familial resemblance to his talkative, insistent but often touchingly inconsistent heroines. His characteristic insight gives emotional depth to Elliott's revulsion at the duke's treacherous vote for the king's execution. In the memoir it is presented as moral and political: 'I never felt such horror for anybody in my life as I did at that moment at the duke's conduct.' But the film subtly connects the intensity of Elliott's feelings to the duke's espousal of a new mistress with revolutionary leanings, and to Elliott's bitterness at her abandonment by the man she still loves: 'I've never felt so revolted by anyone. Having belonged to him once, I cannot bear myself.'

The second great cause for surprise in The Lady & the Duke is its wholesale use of digital technology, its overt combination of painted sets and backdrops based on pictures, engravings and street maps of the period with live-action figures and animated elements - actual birds fiying above engraved streets, a real Seine fiowing under a painted bridge. We never leave the studio - a distinctly unsettling departure for one of cinema's most sensitive renderers of natural light, weather and place, who said in Positif of An Autumn Tale: 'I work from the actors' surroundings, from what they themselves can sense.' Working against blue or green screens is hardly going to yield the acute response to nature that is unforgettable in, say, The Green Ray (Le Rayon vert, 1985), where Marie Rivière is brought to tears by the sway and rustle of a summer breeze in the treetops. The rules of this new game take some learning, at the hands of a Rohmer who now says in interview: 'I do think that resorting to a highly visible artifice gives me truth.' The method provides an image of reality without supporting a full illusion of it, a self-conscious stylisation that's at the opposite end of the spectrum of CGI historical recreation from the realism of Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

There is a precedent in Rohmer's career for this radical simplification. His Perceval le Gallois (1979), a presentation of the medieval poem by Chrétien de Troyes, espoused an extreme theatricality - what he called 'a mise en scène which deliberately turns its back on ordinary cinematographic realism, a theatrical mise en scène, if you like, inspired by medieval scene painting, but also by the lessons of modern theatre in the round.' The film emphasised, in what Rohmer probably wouldn't call a Brechtian style, its studio-bound artifice and origin in a written text. As Rohmer said, 'The actors in the film are narrators who, caught up by their text, finish by acting out what they had intended simply to recite.' The audience thus - if it stayed the course - consciously participated in the creation of the story.

In The Lady & the Duke, Grace Elliott's text comes to life in a slightly different way, as the static picture-book images of the opening start to move (perhaps echoing the very inception of cinema, the Lumière showings where still images suddenly jerked into motion). But the paradoxical effect is similar: the artificiality of the film's look, the sincerity of the enterprise of storytelling and the paring-down to the essential concentrate our attention on the human complexities of a tragic tale that is well worth retelling.

BrothersJudd.com - Review of Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke ...

Viva Revolution | Village Voice J. Hoberman, May 7, 2002

All Talk: Eric Rohmer Lives On | Village Voice J. Hoberman, August 18, 2010

L’Anglaise et le duc (2001) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

PopMatters John Demetry

kamera.co.uk - film review - The Lady and the Duke directed by ... Sameer Padania

filmcritic.com dines with the Lady and the Duke Jeremiah Kipp, also seen here: Jeremiah Kipp

“The Lady and the Duke” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, May 15, 2002

Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "fairly stodgy" (5/10)

Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez

Jonathan F. Richards

Lady and the Duke, The (L'Anglaise et le Duc) (France, 2001) Edwin Jahiel

dOc DVD Review: The Lady and the Duke (L'Anglaise et le duc) (2001) Jeff Ulmer from digitallyOBSESSED

DVD Verdict Review - The Lady And The Duke Barrie Maxwell from DVD Verdict

THE LADY AND THE DUKE Erica Abeel from Film Journal International

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Jon Popick also seen here: Planet Sick-Boy

iofilm.co.uk The Wolf

Shadows on the Wall by Rich Cline

lady & the duke - review at videovista.net Debbie Moon from Video Vista

Movie Magazine International [Moira Sullivan]

Interview with Eric Rohmer Tobias Grey interview from The Guardian, September 2, 2001

Off with her head Stuart Jeffries interviews actress Lucy Walker from The Guardian, February 14, 2002

Filmfour.com

Variety.com [Lisa Nesselson]

BBCi - Films Stephen Applebaum

French Revolution film causes furore Jon Henley from The Guardian, September 13, 2001

Roads lead to Rohmer Akin Ojumu from The Observer, December 30, 2001

Déjà vu revisited Philip French from The Observer, February 17, 2002

Washington Post [Sarah Kaufman]

Washington Diplomat [Ky N. Nguyen]

San Francisco Chronicle [Carla Meyer]

Movie review, 'The Lady and the Duke' - chicagotribune.com Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune

AT THE MOVIES; Revolutionary Production Dave Kehr from The New York Times, July 4, 2000

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; A Revolution Witnessed, Not Just Reconstructed A.O. Scott from The New York Times, October 5, 2001

FILM; Eric Rohmer's Gorgeous Terror Leslie Camhi from The New York Times, May 5, 2002

FILM REVIEW; Two Views of Honor, One of Love The New York Times, May 10, 2002

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 5-12-02: PROCESS; Paint It Forward Robert Mackey from The New York Times, May 12, 2002

TRIPLE AGENT

France Italy Spain Greece Russia (115 mi) 2004

Triple Agent Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Rohmer’s latest – an espionage drama set in mid-’30s Paris – might seem an anomalous addition to his oeuvre, but it’s soon clear it’s an exquisitely subtle conversation piece that treats his usual themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, trust and suspicion. Fyodor Vorodin (Serge Renko), a White Russian general in exile, handles intelligence for a veterans’ association; his Greek wife Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou), a painter, pays scant attention to his discussions with friends and neighbours – until she hears he was seen, during a trip ‘to Brussels’, in Berlin. Who is he working for, and why? Does he himself even know?

Inspired by a real unsolved mystery, and making powerful use of newsreel footage, the film ignores the mechanics of spying to focus on the murky ethics, labyrinthine thinking and emotional cost of espionage: when deceit, concealment and conspiracy are the norm, how can one believe anyone or anything? While reflecting on shifts between the Soviets, the Nazis and the French, the film is more concerned with the (wonderfully played) central relationship, which forms the basis for an unusually mature but profoundly poignant love story. As events beyond the couple’s control take over, the ambiguities and ironies of what is a very human drama acquire a tragic force, so that the film takes its place alongside ‘The Lady and the Duke’ as an admirably complex (and relevant) historical film. Though the account of a marriage eroded by doubt evokes Hitchcock at times, the sheer classical purity of Rohmer’s narrative and images is both beautiful and bracing; the final sequence, especially, is magnificently matter-of- fact in its abrupt cruelty and unsentimental compassion. Magisterial stuff.

Triple agent (2004) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

1937. Europe is in political turmoil, as two opposing forces muster strength: Nazi Germany on the one hand, Communist Russia on the other. With the election of the Popular Front in 1936, France finds herself with a weak and ineffective government, and Spain is being torn apart by civil war… A former general in the Russian army, Fiodor Vorodin has lived in France with his Greek wife Arsinoé since the Bolshevik revolution. He supports the cause of the anti-Soviet White Russians by working for a group known as the Russian Army Veterans organisation, headed by General Dobrinsky. As her husband is increasingly absent from home, Arsinoé becomes suspicious that Fiodor may be involved in espionage activities. But who is he working for? The White Russians, as he claims, or their communist enemies? Or is he indeed on the side of Nazi Germany...

Eric Rohmer’s fourth period drama (which comes straight after his widely acclaimed L’Anglaise et le Duc, 2001) is this compelling political thriller set on the eve of World War II. Inspired by a true story, the film is concerned with a Russian agent who is implicated in the kidnapping of a White Russian general before he himself disappears. As in all of Rohmer’s films, the emphasis is on character and dialogue, not action, and the film is as much a study in the psychology of deceit and betrayal as it is a portrait of an extraordinary period in Western history.

Use of newsreel footage of the time is an effective albeit somewhat lazy way of establishing the background to the unfolding human drama. What most characterises Rohmer’s cinema is the way in which he sets up situations where we gain an intimate acquaintance with a small number of characters. His films have great humanity and charm, and it is easy to be absorbed by this refreshingly naturalistic style of cinema. Triple agent is no exception. Most of the film focuses on the relationship between a Russian émigré and his wife and it is painful to see how external circumstances gradually erode their mutual trust and drive them inexorably to their tragic end. Like Arsinoé, the film’s artistic heroine, Rohmer’s skill lies in painting intimate scenes of everyday life, not grandiose frescos or baffling abstract canvases.

Where the film moves away from the two central characters, the audience’s attention is likely to waver. Anyone not acquainted with the period in which the film is set may want to dip into the history books before watching it, since a lot of the conversation involves a great deal of political discussion which will be over the heads of most spectators. Rohmer himself has admitted that this is one of his most dialogue-heavy films, and it is easy to lose the thread in some of the more erudite exhibitions of wordplay. The film is also marred by a somewhat superfluous epilogue which adds nothing to the drama but effectively diminishes the impact of the tragic denouement.

Triple agent is certainly not the kind of spy thriller that most cinemagoers would recognise. There are no action scenes, just an abundance of well-written dialogue in a beautifully filmed piece of drama. It is probably Eric Rohmer’s most demanding film to date, and requires at least two or three viewings for a full appreciation of the director’s art. Although it is noticeably more ponderous and detached than much of Rohmer’s previous work, it is nonetheless a compelling and poignant piece of cinema.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Triple Agent (2003) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, November 2004

Eric Rohmer's twenty-second feature forms part of his historical series, a minority strand in a long filmography dominated by contemporary comedies of manners: the 'Moral Tales' of the 1960s and 1970s, the 'Comedies and Proverbs' of the 1980s, the 'Tales of the Four Seasons' of the 1990s. His Die Marquise von O (1976), from the German author Heinrich von Kleist, and the medieval tale Perceval Le Gallois (1979) were marginal, distant stories both historically and geographically; the popular L'Anglaise et le Duc (2001), set during the French Revolution, moved closer to contemporary French concerns. With Triple Agent Rohmer draws nearer still: to the complex years of the Popular Front of 1936-7 and World War II. Like L'Anglaise et le Duc, Triple Agent remains on the periphery of the momentous events it evokes, and opts - almost perversely - to take a counter-view of those on the 'wrong' side: in L'Anglaise et le Duc a Royalist English woman, in Triple Agent a White Russian émigré.

Fiodor Vorodin (Serge Renko), a former general in the Tsar's army, works for the Russian Army Veterans' Federation, headed by General Dobrinsky (Dimitri Rafalsky), whose authority Fiodor begins to question. Fiodor and his Greek artist wife Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou) seem a loving couple, but he nevertheless keeps her (and us) in the dark about his activities. Does he betray his White Russian employers and work for the Communists and/or the Nazis? What is his involvement in the kidnapping of Dobrinsky by Soviet officers disguised as Germans?

We will never know the answers - not least because the real case on which Rohmer based his script was never fully resolved. But this also enables the director to explore a theme common to all his films: the opaqueness of human motivations. Rohmer's cinema always revolves around a fateful misunderstanding, a flawed interpretation of evidence, usually relating to a love triangle: someone sees the wrong man or woman and draws the wrong conclusion. Here he elevates the device to shape the entire movie.

Fiodor parades the truth so as to lie more convincingly. The film stages several conversations where characters ask him questions about the international situation or the Soviet Union; he always answers obligingly but often contradictorily, his flow of information confusing his listener as well as the audience. Yet in retrospect - in particular in relation to the possibility of a rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler - we recognise that he is speaking the truth, but a truth so fantastic we assume it must be false. Ever the secret agent, he insists, "I never cite my sources. I pull strings behind the scenes" - a modus operandi that applies equally well to the director of the film. What Fiodor does during the crucial 'missing' hour while his wife is at the dressmaker - as well as his eventual fate - remain mysteries Rohmer refuses to clear up: "It's good for there to be no clear solutions to the questions being posed. It's much more interesting." So Triple Agent is all plot (or plotting) and no resolution, though this by no means diminishes its satisfaction.

Triple Agent is a spy story in which we see no spying. The flat below the Russian Army Veterans' Federation office is revealed to be a Soviet spy hideout only at the very end of the film, and in keeping its purpose hidden throughout the director keeps his audience in the dark just as Fiodor does the characters in the fiction. However, if Triple Agent doesn't offer traditional spy-story thrills, it certainly delivers the pleasures we expect from Rohmer: cruel moral dilemmas, sophisticated settings and the unparalleled use of language as the main constituent in the drama.

The moral dilemmas here are particularly painful. The charming Fiodor loves his wife yet subjects her to public humiliation (she learns about rumours that he's a spy from her friend Maguy). Maguy (played by the excellent Cyrielle Clair) is dressed in the latest Paris fashions in comparison with the relatively frumpish Arsinoé, she and her husband Boris are wealthier than the other couple, Maguy knows more about what Fiodor gets up to than his wife does, and she speaks French as her mother tongue, putting Arsinoé at a considerable disadvantage. That Fiodor hides the truth from his wife also forces her to lie for him and eventually - if indirectly - leads to her tragic fate: imprisonment and death in jail.

In terms of language, Triple Agent - which Rohmer claims is "the film of mine where people speak most" - sparkles with polished dialogue (the director bent historical accuracy to make Fiodor's wife Greek rather than Russian so they can plausibly talk French together). Rohmer's choice of non-French actors for his two lead roles - Renko is French of Ukrainian origin, Didaskalou is Greek - may seem odd, and indeed on first viewing Renko's performance appears flat and Didaskalou's hesitant. Yet Renko's subdued exterior fits perfectly with his triple life - it is crucial that he should appear bland - while Didaskalou's listless manner is appropriate for a woman who is ill and whose creativity is secondary to the narrative. Even the way the French actors pronounce certain words - for instance, 'fascism' - is (correctly) different from today's usage: language is thus a material component of the story, not just a vehicle; it is historical rather than a frivolous distraction from history.

History itself is merely suggested yet is ever-present: in the newsreels about the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War and the 1937 Exhibition, in the use of Shostakovich's Communist song for the opening and closing credits, in the discussions between Fiodor and Arsinoé or Fiodor and Boris. While seemingly flirting or making light conversation, Fiodor discusses Stalinist purges and hints at the possibility of a Russian-German pact in the forthcoming war. The lost world of the Russian émigré community in France (princes turned taxi drivers, Russian restaurants and churches) is evoked through the use of existing 1920s blocks of flats and period clothes. Yet if Rohmer eschews the leftist stance of most French films about the period - Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), Duvivier's La Belle Equipe (1936), René Gilson's Ma blonde entends-tu dans la ville (1980) - he also avoids the fetishisation of 'retro fashion' movies such as Stavisky or La Banquière. Here the characters' knitwear looks home-made rather than unearthed from the props department.

Faithful to New Wave principles, Triple Agent is a reflection on both art and life. The discussions with neighbours Janine and André about painting (the French Communists love the abstraction hated by Stalin and Fiodor, who prefers the figurative pictures Arsinoé paints) demonstrate that art exists within a historical context but can also escape ideological interpretation. Arsinoé herself describes her highly codified 'genre scenes' as an attempt "to paint people in their natural environment" - and there could hardly be a better definition of Rohmer's cinema.

Triple Agent: Portrait of the Unknowable Other ... - Senses of Cinema Tamara Tracz from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005

Triple Agent (Éric Rohmer, 2004) • Senses of Cinema Lee Hill, March 27, 2017

Stranger than fact: Nabokov's "The Assistant Producer" and Rohmer's "Triple Agent" Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, January 14, 2010

Filmjourney Doug Cummings, November 10, 2004

d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman] also seen here: Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film

Secret Agent: Rohmer's Espionage Thriller Debuts ... - Village Voice Michael Atkinson, January 3, 2006

Close-Up Film [Gus Alvarez]

Triple Agent : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Svet Atanasov from DVD Talk

DVD Town [James Plath]

Triple Agent Jon Danziger from digitallyOBSESSED

triple agent - review at videovista Paul Higson at Video Vista

Offoffoff -- The Guide to Alternative New York Joshua Tanzer

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Bright Lights Film Journal | New ...

The Verve Is Back: The New York Film Festival 2004 Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2004 (5 paragraphs from the end)

Variety.com [Derek Elley]

BBCi - Films Jamie Russell

Agent provocateur Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, October 26, 2004

Plots and Pans Philip French from The Observer, October 31, 2004

The Times [Ian Johns]

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Love, Czarists and Deceit Tangle the Spying Threads Stephen Holden from The New York Times, October 2, 2004

THE ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON (Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon) B+ 90

France Italy Spain (109 mi) 2007

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players —Jaques, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, by William Shakespeare, published in 1623

Rohmer often comes across somewhat flat emotionally, over-intellectualizing, planting meanings under subtexts of hidden meanings, much of which is too subtle to even grasp as you’re watching his films. In other words, lots of talk while not much happens, usually accompanied by an underlying sensuality where sex and love rarely meet while the much discussed subject is approached from a discreet distance. Rohmer’s films display a detached reserve that some might find slow and languid, as his characters take their time, analyze and over-analyze their actions, as if every look and every gesture had some inner meaning that was apparent to the entire world, but missed, of course, by the one it was intended to arouse. There’s a dry comic wit on display, but it’s so understated many may not notice it at all. Certainly all is not what it seems here, as Rohmer has chosen to adapt a 17th century romantic novel by Honoré d'Urfé called L'Astrée, which was set in 5th century Gaul, to be viewed by a 21st century audience with modern sensibilities.

One should acknowledge flat out that the depiction of a historical costume drama set in a time so long ago with a literary language that feels read, not spoken, will lose more than half the audience who will find it ridiculous. A theater audience, on the other hand, might be more amenable, but nonetheless, in what is his final film, Rohmer has turned the world at large into a mythical fairy tale, an idyllic paradise where shepherds pass their time playing a flute in the fields while tending to their sheep, while also wooing maidens at every available opportunity. Dressed in off the shoulder white tunics, the women with long, flowing curly hair, wandering from pasture to wood, this has an Old Testament era feel to it, but the characters here follow the post-Roman, pre-Christian teachings of druids, considered especially learned, and make pilgrimages to visit them from time to time. Along the way the subject of love is much discussed, and sometimes even sung about.

It’s hard not to like this film, as it’s so uniquely different from what we’re used to seeing, and there’s literally nothing else out there like it, making it a unique challenge where one develops an affection for the archaic language played so straight. The film is more about the innocence and purity of love, truth, devotion, fidelity, notions that in the modern world have been altered to such a degree they are nearly unrecognizable. Rohmer adapts a tale where they still resonated with the characters, where words affected responses, which had immediate impact in their lives. The Druids also believed in only one God, but the Romans mangled the interpretations to fit their own culture, creating statues for each of their own gods, confusing the populace for generations to come. There’s a single conversation in the film that clarifies their original intent. They could just as easily have been talking about how Supreme Court cases have mangled the original intent of the founders of the Constitution, how decades or centuries of misinformation have transformed the views of the public. The purity of intent becomes the subject of young lovers.

As Rohmer was 87 at the time of the film’s release, it is interesting to note another film that comes to mind, especially in its languorous pace, Manoel De Olveira’s INQUIETUDE (1998), who was 90 when that film was released, in particular the third section of De Olveira’s triptych, which is a series of three one-act plays combined to form a single narrative, filmed entirely outdoors where Irene Pappas plays an ancient river nymph, which appears set during the times of Greek mythology. Here similarly Druids and nymphs mix with shepherds and shepherdesses in this bucolic mix of pastoral bliss. But from the outset, something is not right, as Astréa (Stéphanie Crayencour) catches her guy Céladon (Andy Gillet) kissing another maiden, an act of appeasement meant to please warring families, but causing her to tell him in anger that she never wants to see him again. Taking her words literally, Céladon believes he has no choice but death, so immediately throws himself into the river and is believed drowned, as there is no sign of him afterwards. Astréa, of course, has a change of heart, and blames herself mercilessly for losing the love of her life. But Druid nymphs secretly rescue Céladon and nurse him back to health, where he actually believes he’s died and gone to heaven, as he may as well be in another world, which could just as easily be Valhalla or Tolkien’s Gray Havens. Uncomfortable with such perfection, Céladon wants to be thrown back into his world where he remains shunned forever from Astréa, believing his devotion to her is abiding by her will when she commanded him to leave her sight. Despite all rational discourse to the contrary, Céladon lives the life of a hermit hidden deep in the forest away from his true love.

His reticence is challenged when Astréa joins a pilgrimage to the Druid castle, where Céladon finds Astréa still fast asleep in a state of sensual repose, where Rohmer’s camera lingers over her inert body gazing along with the character who secretly disguises himself as a Druid maiden to remain true to his oath. This takes on comical dimensions as he continues to stumble all over himself to avoid revealing his true identity, as they immediately become the closest of friends, like The Magic Flute’s Papageno and Papagena, where their flirtatious behavior draws the notice of all except Astréa who is totally smitten by this new Druid maiden. While remaining chaste and pure may have little relevance in the modern era where sex before marriage is fairly standard, not in the 5th century, where the concept of love retained its original intent, expressed here like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, where Astréa like Venus, the goddess of beauty, retains her immortal aura of innocence and pure love. Rohmer seems to be implying how far we’ve come in altering (or butchering, much like the Romans) the essence of meaning over time, giving us a before and after snapshot, where the screen reminds us of our Renaissance-like idyllic roots, while our own lives serve as a crass and shallow alteration, reminding us how far we’ve strayed from what was once understood to be the transformative powers of love.

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival

Octogenarian French director Eric Rohmer continues to step outside his comfort zone of contemporary romantic comedies and dramas. This romantic tale of first-century French peasants in the idealized, fertile paradise of rural Gaul in the Roman era is a gently stylized period piece based on a 17th-century novel and filled with chivalrous notions of love and devotion. But take away the Renaissance Faire fashions, the elevated diction (even the shepherds speak as if reciting poetry) and a beautiful boy (Andy Gillet) passing himself off as a girl, and it's another tale of gorgeous young people earnestly engaged in philosophical discussions of the meaning of love and devotion. This is no historical portrait of ancient life but a dreamy reflection of 17th-century romanticism of the past, right down to their Celtic culture refracted through a Christian sensibility. There's a purity to the emotional turmoil of tormented lovers, but it's the rich simplicity of the filmmaking and the seductive sensuality of a bucolic Eden where maidens innocently fall out of their artfully revealing dresses that makes the romantic frolic so delicious.

According to rumours, the last but as-ever charming film by Rohmer is a bucolic 'moral tale' situated in the fifth century in Gall. The young shepherd Céladon is rejected by his betrothed Astrée. He doesn't want to live any more and throws himself in the river, but is saved by nymphs. With sheep.

NY : "Wild poetry and bucolic charm" are promised - and, to some extent delivered - by this exceedingly quaint tale of old-fashioned courtship, middle-ages style. The story is refracted through various historical lenses: it's ostensibly set in the 5th century, but is based on a 17th-century recounting of the tale and presented, in the 21st century, in the way the director imagines the 17th-century reader might have envisioned it. Though somewhat over-complicated, this process of refraction adds much-needed ambiguity to what's otherwise a decidedly quaint sort of chaste 'romance' - performed pretty much entirely straight, and seemingly made entirely without irony or cleverness. As such, it's a deceptively radical kind of picture to make in 2007/8 - endearingly unadorned, straightforward in its artlessness. It's rather refreshing to watch these well-scrubbed rustics going about their business among such sun-dappled paysage, accompanied by near-incessant birdsong: an evanescent reverie of an impossible, imagined past.

San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review

Finally, some fresh air. In The Romance of Astréa and Celadon, 88-year-old Eric Rohmer follows 5th-century nymphs, shepherds, and druids instead of the modern dreamers from his most beloved art-house hits (Claire's Knee, Chloe in the Afternoon). What are a few tunics, however, when you've been contemplating morality and romance for five decades? Astréa (Stéphanie Crayencour) catches her beau Celadon (Andy Gillet) innocently kissing another maiden, and forbids him to ever speak to her again. Distraught, Celadon declares his intention to toss himself into the river, and does so; he survives and finds himself in the castle of beautiful, smitten Galatea (Véronique Reymond) while the bereft Astréa laments the loss of her true love. Recovered but on self-imposed exile, he contents himself with a lute on which to play his longing: "She ordered me to stay away. Love commands me to obey her." I remember seeing Astréa and Celadon on a double-bill with the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, and thinking of Rohmer's picture as by far the more aesthetically radical of the two. "Quaint"?! It's a Chinese-box bazaar in here: A 5th-century pastoral drama imagined by 17th-century performers and finally presented by a Nouvelle Vague master in the new millennium. The movie's alien quality stems from the manner Rohmer combines this playfully self-reflexive erudition with a directness and gravity of feeling that cuts right through the purposely archaic gestures. What other film this year radiates as much carnality as the moment Celadon runs his gaze over the sleeping Astréa's bare leg and foot, while a narrator speaks of the character's wish to have "eyes all over his body"? And the cross-dressing denouement between the two young lovers is a bit of gender-blurring sublimity can claim its place next to Some Like It Hot or Twelfth Night. The Romance of Astréa and Celadon is blissful -- if it turns out to be Rohmer's final work, then he could not have picked a more crystalline conte moral for a swan song.

The films of Eric Rohmer, who directed "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon" at age 87, are the opposite of an acquired taste: People tend to like them or dislike them.

Those who like them tend to like them generically, not out of consumer loyalty, but because of Rohmer's adherence to a single concern and a particular aesthetic. He makes films about love, usually young love, involving people who are usually self-analytical and loquacious. Emotions are dissected. Time is taken. Camera work is modest. Close-ups are used, but sparingly. For some reason, it works beautifully for Rohmer, though people who hate his movies not only hate them but also suspect that everyone who claims to like them is lying.

For his latest film, Rohmer chose to adapt an early 17th century verse novel by Honoré d'Urfé, set in fifth century Gaul, far away from the Roman Empire. It's a world of hills and streams, shepherds and shepherdesses, and druids and nymphs. Rohmer's intention isn't to re-create that period but rather to realize the 17th century's romantic vision of pre-Christian France.

Because that vision does not include hyperintelligent young women talking forever about their every nuance of thought, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon" is a bit quieter than most Rohmer films. In fact, for those versed in the French New Wave, it would probably take 10 minutes or so to be able to identify its director as Rohmer and not Jacques Rivette. Like Rivette's historical films, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon" has a presentational quality that seems, at first, impassive and coldly observant. It's only when young Celadon (Andy Gillet), rejected by Astrea (Stéphanie Crayencour) because of a misunderstanding, announces, "I shall drown myself at once," that we recognize the impulsiveness and romantic distraction of the Rohmer universe.

Thinking changes from era to era. Emotions stay the same. Rohmer balances both truths. Throughout "Astrea and Celadon," Rohmer succeeds in taking us into the characters' pain, while showing us the foreignness of their customs and thought. Celadon tries to drown himself but is rescued and nursed back to health by nymphs, including Galathee (Véronique Reymond), who decides she likes him and, for a time, keeps him in luxurious imprisonment. But even when free, Celadon feels he cannot seek out Astrea, having vowed never to see her again.

Rohmer's knack for fable is manifest even in his modern-dress films, and in "Astrea and Celadon" a feeling of fable - of more to this story than meets the eye - is ever-present. Perhaps because Rohmer almost completely eschews close-ups, he prevents his audience from identifying with his characters, thus enabling viewers to see them as archetypes and romantic abstractions.

Yet somehow this doesn't create a feeling of off-putting distance. On the contrary, Rohmer builds within the audience an intense desire for Astrea and Celadon to be happily reunited - though how he does it is the mystery of his art.

-- Advisory: There's a topless shepherdess. They wore very loose robes in those days. Fifth century department stores were apparently one-size-fits-all.

Screen International review Jonathan Romney in Venice

There are two Eric Rohmers. The more popular is the detached comic observer of modern emotional dilemmas, the maker of the Moral Comedies and Four Seasons series. The other is a sometimes forbidding experimental contriver of historical and literary dramas, such as Perceval le Gallois, La Marquise d'O and The Lady and the Duke. Rohmer's new feature belongs in the latter camp and shows the veteran taking a perversely abstruse stance that may mystify even his hardcore admirers.

Based on a seventeenth-century novel more noted in literary histories than actually read, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon is a recherche exploration of an archaic literary form, the pastoral romance. Pointedly out of synch with cinematic fashion, this eccentric project will strike many viewers as arcane, even academic. Yet it is executed with Rohmer's typical sober poise, and its surprising sexual thematics make it an object of considerable fascination. Sheer oddity will limit exports to faithful Rohmer markets, but after its inclusion in competition at Venice, festivals will welcome it as a bold statement from one of Europe 's last surviving doyens of auteur cinema.

The film's source is L'Astree, a novel by Honoré d'Urfé, published between 1607 and 1627 and running in some editions to 5000 pages. Rohmer extracts a concise narrative, concerning the troubled courtship between young shepherdess Astrea (de Crayencour) and her beloved swain Celadon (Gillet). The setting is ancient Gaul, imagined as an idyllic landscape populated by innocent rurals, aristocratic nymphs and wise druids. At the start, Astrea chides Celadon after he, for the noblest of reasons, is seen flirting with another girl at a rural festival. A despairing Celadon throws himself in the nearest river, but is rescued by nymph Galathea (Reymond), who happens to be passing.

She and her handmaidens carry him to Galathea's castle, where the nymph falls for his androgynous beauty. Celadon decamps but is loath to return home, and hides out in the woods. His eventual reunion with Astrea - thanks to a spot of cross-dressing - comes about with help from kindly druid Adamas (Renko).

The sight of all these florally-strewn maidens and strapping youths in floppy straw hats initially strikes the viewer as absurd, but Rohmer very consciously exploits the story's preciousness and its anachronism. The film's fifth-century Gaul is really, as the opening titles point out, a fantasy land imagined by seventeenth-century French society, and it's this ambivalent vision that the film evokes. Rohmer makes us very aware that we are really watching present-day actors performing a sort of ritual among real French landscapes. In other words, the film demands to be seen as a conceptual piece.

But the film also has a powerfully sexual undercurrent, fascinatingly at odds with its imaginary age of child-like, pre-sexual purity. Reymond's statuesque Galathea is a drop-dead gorgeous amazon, she and her attendants turning Celadon's head with off-the-shoulder dresses that flop revealingly with every other breath. As Celadon, the square-jawed Gillet has an androgynous beauty that comes into its own in the finale, when disguised in dress and pigtails, he embarks on a friendship with Astrea that gets close to sapphic before his true identity is revealed.

But the film is nowhere near as stylistically striking as, say, Perceval le Gallois, nor as notable a departure as Rohmer's last film, the sombre Triple Agent. The visual textures too are a little more muted than is satisfying, and stylised acting - running the gamut from stiff to flamboyant - isn't always easy to swallow. Nevertheless, Astrea and Celadon shows that the old master, though working in a decidedly minor key, is still capable of flouting convention in a major fashion.

Rohmer has often alluded to classic literary texts in his modern-day stories, and in his latest film, he's essentially returning to the original source of French romantic narrative. In many ways, this story - with its misunderstandings, deferrals and very Rohmeresque happy ending - is not that different from his Tales of the Four Seasons.

As well as being an elegant, if studiedly small-scale landscape film, the film is also texturally rich. A treasure trove for semiologists, the narrative is strewn with texts - recitations, inscriptions, poems engraved on tree trunks - which characters pause to read, interpret and debate. The pastoral codes of love are discussed - notably in Celadon's argument with a cynical troubadour - and a lengthy theological digression has Adamas explaining the difference between the Roman pantheon and a three-named Gallic divinity, manifestly d'Urfé's Christian treatise on the Holy Trinity.

The Lumière Reader Steve Garden

NO OTHER film in this year’s Festival arrived with more divided critical opinion than Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Céladon. Rohmer has intimated that this will be his last film, so critics and reviewers have looked to it for the kind of life’s-work summation that neatly enables them to acclaim the artistic continuity of one of the great auteurs. However, many haven’t been able to get past what they regard as its banal anachronistic superficiality. It’s unlikely that Rohmer set out to scuttle them, but this one-time critic has nevertheless produced a work that appears to challenge the cine-literacy of many film commentators. Admittedly, it isn’t immediately apparent where Rohmer is going with this relatively straightforward tale of a romantic misunderstanding that inevitably works out happily-ever-after. We’ve seen it all before, and we’re bound to see it many more times before we see nothing at all, but I wager that few filmmakers will manage such buoyancy and critical potency. Contrary to its seeming triviality, there’s a teasing sense of subtext behind every frame of this deceptively simple film.

He may be almost 90-years-old, but like Manoel de Oliveira (some ten years his senior!), Rohmer’s cinematic heart beats with the clear-eyed integrity of an iconoclastic youngster. Rohmer has proven time and again that he is an insightful observer of human foibles and a master at depicting romantic self-deception. His films are remarkable for their sophisticated and penetrating perception, intelligence, compassion, wit and wisdom. No matter how absurd or embarrassing things get, we never lose empathy for Rohmer’s characters, but in Astrea and Céladon he tests that more than ever.

At the beginning of this partial adaptation of Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astree, we are told that the film will depict a 5th century tale of romance refracted through the 17th century sensibilities of the folk it was originally intended for. What Rohmer doesn’t tell us is that it’s actually an examination of 21st century cultural and social mores told from a 21st century perspective. Put simply, it’s really about us. We’re also told that it was shot in a location far from where the novel was originally set because that area has been replaced by concrete jungles. This tells us something about Rohmer’s green-tinged sensibilities, and an early indication that the film is likely to have a contemporary critical component. Rohmer doesn’t hide the fact that everything is staged expressly to illustrate his themes, and if one commits to looking beyond the surface frivolity, one might discover a deeply felt criticism of socio-political intolerance and manipulation. There are big themes behind the deceptive facade of this bucolic fable of pure and inevitably triumphant love, but Rohmer’s life-affirming optimism and faith in humanity is never in doubt.

Taking the form of a pastoral romance (which recalls, and might even be a passing homage to Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Ane), the whimsical theatricality barely conceals the fact that this is another of Rohmer’s wry meditations on the intricacies of love, replete with philosophical ruminations on morality, fidelity and the temptations of hedonism. At times the narrative is reminiscent of mythic stories where the gods (embodied here by druids and nymphs, but subtly implicating filmmaker and audience alike) amuse themselves by manipulating the passions and destiny of their lowly human playthings. While Rohmer’s film is as breezy as the gossamer fabrics that drape the numerous nubile damsels on parade, it gradually reveals a thematically modern concern for the vulnerability of the innocent and gullible in the face of powerfully persuasive forces (religious, political, social, etc.) intent on perpetuating ignorance in order to exert control and influence. The implications stretch to the equally manipulative tropes of commercial mainstream cinema and our acquiescent relationship to it: the proliferation of stories that pander to (and reinforce) expectations of safe and reassuring notions of the world.

A key to appreciating the film is the realisation that the deception under examination this time is not that of Astrea and Celadon so much as that of the audience. As I see it, Rohmer has thrown down a subtle gauntlet. In light of the mixed response to his film, one might be tempted to say that it was too subtle, but the more one thinks about it the more one realises that he couldn’t have pitched his argument better, particularly as it seems to have been very effective at separating the sheep from the goats within the critical community. The film’s critical subtext is balanced by an abiding faith in the clarifying and transformative power of love, which is as genuine as the attractive and unforced eroticism, handled with chaste delicacy and without a hint of prudishness. As such, the film can be seen as a heart-felt plea for tolerance: sexual, political, religious, etc. The fact that love eventually wins the day constitutes a rare happy ending for Rohmer, an ending that leaves us in no doubt about the point he ultimately wants to make. He expresses tender affection for those who are smitten by passion, and therefore willing to embrace the requisite naivety romantic love demands. To confuse the gaiety and optimism of the film’s ending with the facile habit of mainstream cinema is to miss the conviction and relevance of Rohmer’s gentle wisdom. As relaxed and sensual as a warm summer’s evening, the film is as insightful as anything in Rohmer’s oeuvre, and those willing to suspend disbelief and delve beneath its surface charms will be richly rewarded.

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) • Senses of Cinema Xanthe Ashburner, March 17, 2017

Critique. Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon Shepherds in the Wind, Arnaud Macé from Cahiers du Cinéma, September 2007

Not Reconciled: Close-Up on Eric Rohmer's "The Romance of Astrea ... James Slaymaker from Mubi, August 12, 2017

The House Next Door [Dan Callahan]

www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review

notcoming.com | The Romance of Astrea and Celadon Leo Goldsmith

Chabrol and Rohmer Keep Doing What They Do Best | Village Voice J. Hoberman, August 12, 2008

Slant Magazine review Akiva Gottlieb

Eric Rohmer:The Romance of Astrée and Céladon (2007)--NYFF Chris Knipp

The Romance of Astrée and Céladon - Reviews - Reverse Shot Nathan Kosub, September 3, 2008

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) Review | CultureVulture Arthur Lazere

d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les amours d'Astrée et de ... Gary Couzens from The Digital Fix

The Romance of Astrea & Celadon Jaime Christley from Unexamined Essentials, January 7, 2009

THE ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON - DVD Travis Mackenzie Hoover from Film Freak Central

Cinemattraction.com [Sarah Manvel]

'The Romance of Astrea and Celadon': The Hopeful Romantic - August ... S. James Snyder from The New York Sun

Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review

SpoutBlog [Karina Longworth]

The Romance of Astreé and Céladon Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack

Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (2007) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

Our Nights Chez Rohmer Geoffrey O’Brien from The New York Review of Books (opening paragraphs only, subscription required)

culturevulture.net - review George Wu

Les Amours d'Astree et de Celadon - The Romance of Astrea and ... James Travers from Films de France

Eye for Film (Andrew Robertson) review [2/5]

OhmyNews (Howard Schumann) also seen here: CineScene [Howard Schumann]

DVD Verdict [Daryl Loomis]

Romance of Astrea and Celadon, The - DVD review (1 of 2) - DVD Town Christopher Long from DVD Talk

Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [5/6]

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon JR Jones from The Reader

Review: The Romance of Astrea and Céladon Ray Pride from New City

Variety review Ronnie Scheib

Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]

Time Out New York (David Fear) review [2/6]

Film review: The Romance of Astrea and Celadon | Film | The Guardian Jason Solomons

Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]

Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]

DVDBeaver [Per-Olof Strandberg]

The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review also seen here: Shepherds, Nymphs, Despair and Love - The New York Times

Romance of Astree and Celadon - Wikipedia

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Rohrwacher, Alice

CORPO CELESTE

Italy France (98 mi) 2011

Corpo Celeste Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily, May 17, 2011

Grittily real but somehow dreamlike at the same time, coming of age tale Corpo Celeste is a quietly impressive feature debut for documentary maker Alice Rohrwacher, sister of actress Alba. It plays like a southern Italian Dardenne brothers fable, mashed up with a critique of Catholicism that recalls a certain strand of neo-Neapolitan auteur cinema.

Though there’s less dramatic tension and less of a character arc than the Dardennes generally supply, the story at least feels fresh and authentic, sticking close to soignée but also stubbornly independent 13-year-old Marta (a feisty Yile Vianello) as she adjusts to life in the messy and menacing urban jungle of Reggio Calabria, where her family has returned after ten years in Switzerland.

With its handheld camerawork and its deliberate probing of ugliness in a degraded city suburb and the degraded church that serves it, Corpo Celeste is not always a pretty film to watch, and will inevitably play at the more resilient end of the arthouse market both at home and abroad - where it should nevertheless chalk up a handful of sales, with co-production territory France looking like its safest berth.

The title, which translates as ‘Heavenly Body’, seems to have a double reference - to the otherness of Alba, whose pale complexion and strawberry blonde hair mark her out from the rest of her family and neighbours in Italy’s deep South; and to the body of Jesus, which dominates the film’s finale, and its open-ended argument about Catholicism.

We are told next to nothing about why Alba’s family has moved back to the southern city or what they did in Switzerland; but it’s clear from the jerry-built house they live in, overlooking a spaghetti junction, that they’re not well off. Affectionate but passive mother Rita (Caprioli) seems to have some energy-sapping illness and spends most of her time at home; she encourages Alba to join the catechism class at the local church so as to make friends. Run by plump Santa (Scuncia), who treats her adolescent charges as children and seems alarmed when they answer back as teenagers, the class prepares for confirmation with quizzes, and embarrassingly ‘up to date’ songs with words like “I’m tuning in to God - he’s on the right channel”.

Like the boxy modern church itself, with its vile neon cross, the classes force us to pose the question of whether spirituality be expressed in the language and the forms of a value-free TV-obsessed generation. The adults responsible for grooming the younger generation to embrace Jesus hardly even seem aware of the problem. Short-tempered local priest, Don Mario (Cantalupo, excellent), spends his time angling for promotion and canvassing votes for the church’s favoured candidate in the forthcoming mayoral elections.

The film sides with Alba to document these horrors: like the camera, she is a mostly silent observer, rebelling only when adult hypocrisy becomes too much to bear. Yet there is an odd beauty too in the urban decay that she observes from her favourite rooftop perch: distant groups of kids salvaging the detritus that people have abandoned seem to signal some fragile hope.

The director’s only real misstep is the occasional brief abandonment of Alba’s point of view. But mostly her combination of documentary rigour with a more resonantly symbolic treatment of the passage into adulthood is convincing - thanks also to the sensitive cinematography of cinematographer Helene Louvart, fresh from her work on Wim Wenders’ Pina.

Corpo Celeste: Cannes 2011 Review Jordan Mintzer at Cannes from The Hollywood Review, May 17, 2011

A gritty exploration of a young girl's Catholic confirmation from promising new talent Alice Rohrwacher.

CANNES -- Promising new talent Alice Rohrwacher explores a young girl’s troubled Catholic confirmation in the gritty coming-of-age dramedy, Corpo Celeste. Set in the dilapidated seaside cities of Calabria, Italy, the Italian-French-Swiss co-production should find brethren among Euro and boutique distributors following its Directors’ Fortnight bow.

Having recently returned to her native region after living in Switzerland, 13-year-old Marta [Yile Vianello] is left pretty much to her own demise while her loving but worn-out mother [Anita Caprioli] toils away at an industrial bakery. Living off frozen pizzas and wandering around neighboring junkyards, Marta’s only source of socialization is the local church, where she attends a series of catechism classes in preparation for her upcoming confirmation.

Yet the doctrines of Roman Catholicism, as they’re comically explained via cheesy pop songs and untranslated Latin, offer little in terms of life lessons or consolation for the skinny, highly introverted Marta. Rather, she soon catches on to the hypocrisy of the parish, whose priest, Don Mario [Salvatore Cantalupo], is in cahoots with a right-wing candidate, and whose instructor, Santa [Pasqualina Scuncia], uses her piety as a means to escape a miserable small-town existence.

Shot with a raw, documentary aesthetic that recalls the early work of Ken Loach and Barbara Kopple , the film begins with a ramshackle religious procession held beneath a highway overpass, and then works its way up to the confirmation ceremony, where a few tragic-comic twists become tests of faith for both Marta and Don Mario. The action does, however, suffer from some mid-section slowness, and that fact that Marta says very little throughout the movie may be trying for some viewers.

Still, writer-director Rohrwacher and cinematographer Helene Louvart [The Beaches of Agnes] show a keen eye for naturalistic detail, while the dialogue reveals the chasm separating the teachings of Christ from the lifestyles of contemporary Italians: Santa tells her students that “seeing the Spirit is like wearing really cool sunglasses,” while Marta’s devout uncle warns about eating calamari that’s “fed off the flesh of Lampedusa immigrants.”

Eventually, Martha manages to forge her very own way of the cross [for which Rohrwacher cleverly makes use of blood, a giant crucifix and other symbols], which turns out to have much less to do with God than with her own climb towards adulthood. As the title suggests, any body could be celestial, including that of a teenage girl.

THE WONDERS (Le meraviglie) B+ 91

Italy Switzerland Germany (110 mi) 2014 Official site [Italy]

While there are notorious brother combinations in cinema, the Lumière brothers, the Marx brothers, the Taviani brothers, the Dardennes brothers, Albert and David Maysles, Tony and Ridley Scott, John Michael and Martin McDonagh, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, or the Coen brothers, to name a few, also brother and sister combinations in Andy and transgender sister Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski, Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, John and Joan Cusack, or Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, also a mixed bunch like the Arquette, Barrymore, Carradine, Fonda, Huston, Redgrave, Cassavetes, or Coppola families. Sister combinations are rare, but would have to include Canadian twin sisters, Jen and Sylvia Soska, who wrote and directed American Mary (2012), Meg and Jennifer Tilly, and the Ephron sisters, writer/director Nora and Delia, who sometimes shared writing credits, such as YOU’VE GOT MAIL (1998). To this group we would have to add the Rohrwacher sisters, where Italian writer/director Alice directs her older sister Alba in this film, which adds an unmistakable element of intimacy and familiarity. Something of an astute choice by a jury led by Jane Campion, this was the Grand Prix (2nd Place) winner at Cannes in 2014, won by Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu), with a shared 3rd prize going to Xavier Dolan’s Mommy and Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D (Adieu au langage), where it’s taken this film a year longer than the others to be screened internationally. Part of the problem is the often repeated criticism of a lack of female directors at Cannes, which only exposes the larger issue, which is the festival’s growing trend to cling to its short list of established directors that are routinely invited back into competition, placing less importance on new discoveries, where rising talent inevitably ends up screening out of competition in the less glamorous categories where they are rarely awarded for the distinctly diverse voices they bring to the festival. Thankfully, this was an exception, though the smaller scale and intimate nature of the subject may leave this film with a more limited viewing audience than the others, a German, Swiss, Italian production, produced by Oscilloscope Pictures in the United States, a production company that distributes Kelly Reichardt films, for instance, or smaller independent films like the equally exquisite These Birds Walk (2013), Stand Clear of the Closing Doors (2013), or Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente) (2015), which simply can’t match the financial backing of bigger name films.

Described by the director as “Personal, not autobiographical,” claiming male directors would not even be asked this question, this is a more challenging and delicate work, mystifyingly strange and atmospheric, set in the isolation and openness of the Tuscan countryside where neighbors are rarely ever seen, centering around an offbeat family where the transplanted German father Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) actually sleeps outdoors under the stars, where he is viewed as something of an outsider continually barking out orders at his family all day long, seemingly never satisfied with their efforts, while his much calmer wife Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher) and 4 children (all girls), along with his wife’s sister Cocò (Sabine Timoteo), all sleep inside their run down farmhouse that they are on the verge of losing from lack of payment. While her previous film CORPO CELESTE (2011) premiered at Cannes in the Director’s Fortnight, another impressive coming-of-age portrait of a preteen girl, this story centers around the life of conscientiously soft-spoken Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), which was Giuletta Masina’s name in Fellini’s LA STRADA (1954), played with more subtle reserve by a young 12-year old, the oldest daughter who is for all practical purposes the head of the household, already running the family business of beekeeping, where her special talent is keeping a watchful eye on her younger sisters while making them all participate in the creation of honey. Her role is interestingly modeled after older sister Alba, as the Tuscan born director was raised by a German father and an Italian mother, where they were, in fact, multilingual beekeepers, so what particularly stands out is the attention to detail, shot mostly using handheld cameras by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, where the overriding sense of naturalism is beautifully expressed in the social realist tradition where there isn’t an ounce of artifice anywhere to be seen. That is, until they accidentally run into an on-location television photoshoot that borders on the surreal, adding an absurd element of reality TV spectacle and overreach, especially as dramatized by the female host Milly Catena, Monica Bellucci as a mythological goddess in an all-white Brünnhilde wig wearing any number of gigantic, misshapen hats on her head, usually surrounded by a cast of adoring servants dressed in togas or wearing laurel wreathes from ancient historical times, yet to Gelsomina, she’s the most beautiful woman that she’s ever seen.

While there’s a mythical aura surrounding the promises of this TV show, called Village Wonders, where judges evaluate local products from the most “traditional” family for quality and authenticity, the first place prize money could actually save their farm. Wolfgang refuses to participate on principle, as he doesn’t want outside sources meddling into his business, while Gelsomina doesn’t see the harm in signing up, especially when the family is so financially strapped that they take on a young teenage German boy named Martin (Luis Huilca Logrono) in order to receive parental foster payments, but the boy almost never speaks and comes with a questionable criminal background. What Wolfgang doesn’t want the outside world to see is how he benefits from an existing system driven by child labor, where he routinely skirts laws and health standards regarding farm produce, as he can’t afford to upgrade, continuing to operate in an old-fashioned, backwards era manner where exploiting youth is his best option. While a darker cloud is always hovering somewhere within the vicinity, the beauty of the film is how it so lovingly captures the elusiveness of youth, largely seen through the eyes of the young sisters who parade around the premises as if they own the place, where they are literally rooted to the land, each one an extension of the other, showing a surprising degree of sensitivity to how the world is seen with an almost magical innocence. Even as they are called back into the house, the two youngest nonchalantly return as instructed, but not before they each trounce through the only mud puddle that can be seen lying in the middle of the road, where their giddy delight is one of the unspoken pleasures of the film. Constantly filling the screen with their childlike curiosities, the film seems to accentuate the natural order of things, where Gelsomina guides the others with a firm but gentle hand, where whatever tumultuous relationship exists between her parents largely exists offscreen, where her father’s firecracker temper becomes expected after awhile, but she exists on a completely different rhythm altogether, showing an interest in Martin, even as the others generally avoid him, as he never says anything. His quiet sensitivity matches her own reticence, where the intrusion of the vulgar realities from the TV show make a mockery of the instilled values that they embrace, leading to several scenes of near transcendent poetry, a dreamlike sequence where Martin runs away and gets lost on a nearby island, taking refuge in a cave at night, only to be discovered by Gelsomina, where the dancing shadows reflected on the illuminated walls lit by a burning fire suggest an altogether different mindset than what is portrayed onscreen, while the final shots, after everything has been sold or given away, reveal the bareness of an empty farmhouse, a graceful reminder of the life that once filled these rooms.

Hot Property: The Wonders - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, November/December, 2014

The eldest child in the shaggily maintained household of The Wonders is named Gelsomina. The reference to Fellini’s La Strada might be confirmed by the photo of Giulietta Masina’s character pasted into a production sketch on the Italian film’s website. There you can also learn that this story’s cluttered farmhouse previously belonged not to beekeepers but to five wild horses, who slept in the barn and ate in the garden. Something about that last detail evokes the natural sense of mystery that graces Alice Rohrwacher’s ineffably lovely second feature, a coming-of-age story that conjures an effortless naturalism.

The teenage Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) helps take care of the bees with her overbearing father, Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck), who rules over the household, which includes her mother as well as her three sisters and aunt. The family lives in the shadow of his decrees and schemes (like taking in a foster child in order to receive state benefit money), and it is his strict back-to-the-land leftism that’s led them to this overgrown rural backwater. Dutiful as she is, Gelsomina harbors some unsatisfied yearning that’s uncovered by the possibility of appearing on a hokey Italian TV showcase of rural traditions (hosted by Monica Bellucci). But this is only one of the little dramas that hum along in any big family, here in scenes that are elegantly attenuated without turning anecdotal or feeling inconsequential.

Rohrwacher and DP Hélène Louvart, who teamed up on her Catholicism-focused 2011 debut Corpo Celeste, shot on 16mm. The softly vibrant colors suggest an earlier era and an organic earthiness that helps the film truly live up to its title.

Films not so fragiles - Film Comment Dennis Lim, July/August, 2014

The general rule at Cannes is to tune out the chattering white noise that, even more than the thudding Eurodisco that floods the Croisette nightly, constitutes the festival’s most grating soundtrack. But sometimes the received wisdom and idle blather that surround a given film can be revealing. Such was the case with Alice Rohrwacher’s second feature, The Wonders, one of the more striking films in this year’s Competition and yet persistently described, even by many of its admirers, as “slight,” “minor,” and “small.”

Like Rohrwacher’s debut, Corpo Celeste, a Directors’ Fortnight selection in 2011, The Wonders is a coming-of-age story. The focus is on a family in rural central Italy—German-speaking father, Italian mother, four girls, a young woman who may be their aunt—that keeps bees and produces honey. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina: the father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a child welfare program and a television crew shows up to enlist the local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host).

Unlike countless movies of its ilk, The Wonders is neither precious nor predictable in describing teenage yearning and confusion. Rohrwacher grew up in a multilingual family with beekeeping parents and her sister, Alba, plays the mother. Whether or not the film is autobiographical in its details, it suggests a collection of sense memories, combining a documentary attention to daily ritual, including the arduous work of honey harvesting, with an evocative atmosphere of mystery. Family dynamics and backstory (are they doomsday cultists? political radicals?) surface only in partial glimpses, and as in Corpo Celeste, Rohrwacher conjures a richly concrete world that is nonetheless subject to the magical thinking of adolescence. The Wonders never announces its themes, which is probably one reason so many dismissed it, but it’s a film with plenty on its mind, not least the ways in which old traditions survive in the modern world, as acts of resistance or repackaged as commodities. (Bonus points for being shot, by veteran French DP Hélène Louvart, in the all-but-extinct 16mm film format.)

Rohrwacher won the runner-up Grand Prix, confirming the oft-repeated, rather patronizing assumption that at least one of the two women in Competition (the other being—who else—Naomi Kawase) would be rewarded by jury president Jane Campion. As frustrating as it was to see a film this accomplished reduced to the gender of its director, an equally chronic problem apparent in the conversation around The Wonders is the festival’s increasingly pronounced bias against the new. A film like this might not have seemed so out of place in the Competition if the gatekeepers were more welcoming to emerging voices. Instead Cannes clings stubbornly to an annual regimen of old masters and usual suspects. The ostensible reason, some say, is to protect the more challenging and delicate work—les films fragiles, as the French call them—from the unforgiving main spotlight. Whatever the intention, the impression left behind is of a festival that puts little stock in discovery. This year, Cannes had the opportunity to anoint two rising talents in addition to Rohrwacher: Israel’s Nadav Lapid and Sweden’s Ruben Östlund, who both had new films that confirm their wholly distinctive voices. But Cannes deemed neither ready for its pantheon. Östlund landed in Un Certain Regard while Lapid had to make do with an out-of-Competition slot in Critics’ Week.

Cannes 2014 | The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher, Italy ... Tom Charity from Cinema Scope

For those “in the know,” the Grand Jury Prize accorded to Alice Rohrwacher’s second film was the one surprise on a night where Jane Campion’s jury otherwise played things safe and sure, dispensing awards with dutiful nods to all sides. (Libération described it as the one prize with the flavour of a personal choice.)

Of course there were some who speculated that it was a politically correct sop, the natural extension of Campion’s introductory complaints about institutionalized sexism in the industry and the paucity of female directors among the ranks of Cannes’ Palmares. Alice Rohrwacher and Naomi Kawase were outnumbered 16-2 in this year’s lineup, and while The Homesman and Timbuktu were not the only films in the Official Selection with feminist themes, the women in these movies had a gruelling time of it: hysteria, rape, suicide, murder, not to mention the grunting favours of Timothy Spall’s J.W. Turner.

The Wonders eschews such melodrama. Outwardly modest, even self-effacing, it’s a coming-of-age film, like Rohrwacher’s debut Corpo celeste (2011). As the title hints, there is an element of fairy tale here, enchantment and dream, even carnival, but it’s rooted in grubby naturalism and authenticity, the soil and toil of a rundown farm in Umbria in the late ’80s or early ’90s. Before Corpo celeste, Rohrwacher worked in documentary, and DP Hélène Louvart (who has worked with Sandrine Veysette, Jacques Doillon, Christophe Honoré, and Agnès Varda) mostly shoots in the handheld, organic style popularized by those other former documentarians the Dardennes. Shooting on film, she vividly conjures the textures and colours of an adolescent summer without self-consciousness, fanfare or fuss. Not for nothing does an early sequence observe the mayhem when a younger sibling awkwardly wakes up the entire household with her insistence on getting up to poop in a home she’s still unsure about—as Godard points out in his Jury Prize winner Adieu au langage, taking a shit may be the last word in equality, the messy stuff of life.

In some ways The Wonders feels even more like a first film than Corpo celeste. “Personal, not autobiographical,” was the filmmaker’s disclaimer, though, yes, her sister Alba plays the mother here, and yes, the Tuscan-born Rohrwacher had a German father and an Italian mother, and yes, she was a beekeeper in a previous life—just like Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), the watchful, conscientious 12-year-old who aids her father in minding the hives and draining off the honey as they attempt to carve out a new, self-sufficient existence safe from what he believes is the impending Collapse. (The process of beekeeping is observed closely enough that you might be tempted to use the film as a training tool, and Lord knows you’ll remember to change the bucket!)

It’s a fraught project. Gelsomina and her three younger sisters constitute a cost-effective (if unreliable) labour force, Dad is the demanding, determined farmer, while his wife and her sister (speaking Italian between themselves and sometimes French to him) seem more keenly aware of what’s lacking—money, naturally; creature comforts; and the kind of investment that will bring the farm up to Brussels’ health and safety codes.

Rohrwacher deftly sketches the stress points within the family, but the film’s real focus is the bond between eldest daughter and father. At the beginning of the summer Gelso is appreciative of her role as Wolfgang’s most trusted helper (as well as default child-minder), even if she’s also dimly apprehensive of her dad’s short fuse, his coercive methods, and obsessive personality. He’s the patriarch, but also an outsider in a house overflowing with women and girls (literally: he sleeps on a mattress out under the stars). Over the course of a couple of months, the film traces how the balance shifts from admiration towards a more nuanced understanding of Wolfgang’s shortcomings, a trajectory from daddy’s girl towards the first stirrings of Gelsomina’s emancipation and womanhood.

Two incursions from the outside world serve as catalysts. The first comes in the form of a TV show, a weirdly kitsch “celebration” of tradition, local produce, and rural colour disconcertingly incarnated by presenter Milly (Monica Bellucci) and no doubt broadcast on one of Berlusconi’s channels. Introduced as a vision of the feminine divine—a river goddess, perhaps, or a muse, modelling improbably swank Etruscan gowns and headwear when the girls discover her shooting an exotic scene-setting piece upstream from the beach where they have been playing—she’s the most glamorous being Gelso has ever seen, the film’s first eye-opening Wonder, and as she immediately intuits, a tacit threat to the Father’s isolationist idyll. (Bellucci is indeed marvellous in this faintly absurd cameo role, imbuing her handful of scenes with a star’s grace and charisma.)

The second incursion is more conventional: a teenage boy, Martin, a German youth offender, whom the family agrees to billet as part of a rehabilitation program (in return for some extra income), and whose case worker’s vehement denunciation of Wolfgang’s paranoia will be an eye-opener for Gelsomina. If Martin is scarcely fleshed out enough to transcend the status of dramatic device, this subplot’s sketchiness could more generously be interpreted as restraint, never quite succumbing to the romance we expect. Certainly Rohrwacher’s knack for implication—show, not tell—is one of her defining strengths, so that when Gelso’s aunt clumsily attempts to contrive a first kiss between her niece and Martin, the moment expresses something about her own sentimentality and desire, as well as the seemingly broken relationship between the girl’s parents.

The movie’s singular showpiece sequence (not quite the climax) is the recording of Milly’s television show, with local farmers competing to prove their traditional bona fides with a mixture of party pieces, hand-on-heart pitches to camera, and product samplings, all in an ancient system of caves on a nearby Etruscan island. It’s a bizarre spectacle, part comedy, part tragedy, as Wolfgang definitively flunks his big chance to explain himself and put the world to rights even after Gelso has gifted him the perfect opportunity. The producers cut away as soon as they get a whiff of whatever craziness is eating him up, as well they might. But Rohrwacher doesn’t need to spell out the irony. A couple of decades on, Wolfgang’s concerns for a purer, environmentally sustainable life—a countryside that’s for agriculture, not just sightseeing—seem unerringly prescient. After all, it’s not just the bees facing colony collapse.

Grounded in direct experience but alive to the unexpected, to transformative moments of revelation and unchecked (if often unspoken) emotion, The Wonders signals the maturation of a significant cinematic talent, and kudos to Jane Campion and her jury for recognizing as much.

Cannes Special: The Wonders - Film Comment Giovanni Vimercati, May 29, 2014

Can a film covered in honey be bitter? To answer the question we need to retrace the carbon footprints that nature and pre-industrial societies left on the machinery of cinema and the stories that came out of its factories. The cultural dimension of the “agrarian question” has crossed paths with the history of postwar Italian cinema on a regular basis, sparking debates and speculations on the value and supposed idyllic nature of pre-consumerist life. For a country still preserving in its living memory the recollections of a life organized around the cycles of nature, progress has always occupied an ambivalent place in the national subconscious. A strange mix of backward Catholicism and vulgar Marxism has often viewed technological progress with a certain degree of suspicion, barring some exceptions (the Futurists, for instance). The passage from rural to consumer society, still relatively fresh in Italy's short memory, was characterized by a nostalgic reluctance when not opposed in the name of conservative anxiety.

Sectors of Italy's cinematic elite were not exempt from this reactionary nostalgia which implicitly saw agricultural societies as intrinsically happier and less corrupted than modern ones, especially in moral terms. From Bertolucci's fetishistic idealization of peasantry in 1900 to Pasolini's sensualist absolution of the underclasses, passing through Ermanno Olmi's tender obsession with pastoral stories, Italian cinema has consistently and naively romanticized non-industrial life. Neorealism too had insistently idealized the supposed virtues of the impoverished while always making sure never to examine the structural causes of poverty, let alone depicting its real, ugly face. Needless to say, none of these directors ever woke up at five in the morning to hoe the ground under the scorching sun all day long and end up in bed with blisters on their hands and very little in their stomachs. Ironically, it took a (literally) aristocratic director like Luchino Visconti to portray accurately the hardships of pre-industrial life and the provincial hypocrisy within its communities in La Terra Trema. Visconti also lucidly explored the painful and conflicted passage from rural life to modernity, countryside to the city, south to north in Rocco and His Brothers, one of the greatest cinematic renditions of that crucial phase in modern Italian history.

The romantic infatuation with nature and the life that revolves around it, away from the noise of progress, is not an exclusive prerogative of Italian directors. At a time when the bright promises of modernization have not only been dashed but have ushered in a dystopian scenario of imminent catastrophe and corporate totalitarianism, the lure of a life (or even better a film) far away from the gentrified nightmare of our cities is enjoying a certain popularity. Films like those of Ben Rivers, for instance, convey this utopian illusion whereby freedom apparently can only be found in the wilderness, far from civilization, ideally alone. This kind of primitivist fantasy and the aesthetic reverence with which it’s depicted bespeaks a hip resignation and capitulation to a nihilistic escapism. Dare I suggest that even the universal cinephiliac admiration for the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, dare I insinuate, is symptomatic of a rather desperate need for holistic authenticity, for the contemplative dimension that our daily lives have been robbed of. Though many of us watching these films would have a hard time dealing with, say, a frog, from the safe distance that a screen always puts between us and reality we revel in and marvel at the bucolic poetry of life and its natural unfolding. Traumatized by the severed bond between us (as an animal species, after all), and what once used to be our habitat, nature, we long for a lost balance, a betrayed, natural harmony. The truth is that nature is neither harmonic nor intrinsically fit to give us a freer existence; quite to the contrary, nature’s life cycles are often relentless, physically taxing, and poetry-free.

If the separation from agrarian life has been traumatic, no amount of slow food will render the reverse journey any less problematic. Though the overexploitation of shrinking natural resources will somehow force us into a probably painful reorganization of life, there is no lost Eden to return to. For the wonders of nature are ugly indeed, as Alice Rohwacher's new feature candidly suggests. Rohwacher's The Wonders (Le Meraviglie) tells a genetically modified story, hard to digest or process, which leaves a bitter aftertaste lingering in the spectator's mouth. Here is a film that the slow-food generation will choke on, a cultural land-mine to shake the rotten foundations of the Eataly franchise, a film that shows, in simpler and more sinister words, how far from nature we have irremediably grown. Shot with a documentary-like attention to detail, dreamt like a nightmare, The Wonders is an introspective film that discreetly gazes at the surface of objects and human relations to unearth the profound complexities behind them.

“The earth is dying!” the apocalyptic beekeeper Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) shouts to a deaf planet in the film’s opening, as the distant menace of hunters' rifles echoes in the darkness. Surrounded by his daughters and bees, Wolfgang lives with his extended family in a farm in central Italy (the film was shot in Umbria); together they produce and sell honey, but that doesn't seem to do the trick as far as the family finances are concerned. Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungo), the oldest daughter, is a pivotal asset in the life of the family and its business despite her tender age. Along with her father she tends to the laborious procedures of beekeeping and the related harvesting of honey, and though assisted by her younger sisters, she clearly bears the most responsibility. The mother (Alba Rohrwacher, the director's sister) sedatedly manages the household, tempering her husband’s recurring tantrums while trying to evenly distribute her loving warmth over all the family members.

One day, while bathing in the lake, Wolfgang and his daughters chance upon the set of a reality show presumably being filmed by a small crew from regional television. Starring as the centerpiece and host is Monica Bellucci, draped in a weird costume halfway between an Etruscan show girl and a Fellini-esque white sheik, calling for local farmers to enter a contest. Obviously struck by the primeval appeal of showbiz, no matter how tacky, the girls start nosing around the set, half shy and half excited, only to incur their short-tempered father’s ire. “Let's go,” Wolfgang tells his daughters. “It's all bullshit anyway.” But Gelsomina senses the glittering possibility of a life away from the monotonous and draining rituals of her family farm, and tries to convince her mother to take part in the TV contest.

Already wracked with feelings of displacement, the family takes on another member, a troubled boy sent there by social services. Wolfgang, until then the lone male in the family, seems happy to finally have a young man to train. Increasingly isolated in his almost demented quest for an ecologically sustainable existence, the family's life goes on as if haunted by the unfolding preparations for the TV show. A batch of bees dies due to the chemical products used by a neighbor, who's more interested in taking part in the faux-rural show than defending his land from speculation and mass farming. Despite Wolfgang's wrathful reluctance, the family will eventually sign up for the televisual horror show, which is an uncanny celebration of the region's Etruscan past and culinary tradition.

Words may not suffice to describe The Wonders simply because the very expressive core of the film relies more on symptoms than declarations. The director seems more interested in picking up moods than passing judgments. If anything, the film shows the quiet, anachronistic despair besieging those attempting to live according to nature in a world bent on its methodical destruction. Here we are in a world where the anthropological holocaust Pasolini warned us about has passed through and left in its wake a demented humanity, willing to swallow poison for their 15 minutes of celebrity. Even at its most grotesque, though, the film is never ironic; instead, there is always a mournful reverence when laying bare the contaminated body of rural life. The sequences involving the TV show are Fellini-esque bad trips, convincingly staging the terrifying depths into which Italian culture has plunged. When faced by the narcotizing lens of the camera, Wolfgang's vocal rage goes mute, unable to denounce the eco-illogical disaster in front of his eyes.

The acid colors of Hélène Louvart’s cinematography illustrate this artificial estrangement towards a poisoned land that has sold out to the hyperrealistic illusion of television and its perverted mantra, turning all authenticity into a profit-driven mendacity. Despite their natural methods, Wolfgang and his family will never produce “natural” honey, for the very planet under our feet is forever poisoned, in what would seem to be the unstated tragedy underlying the film.

The ecological dissonance of a landscape that's no longer natural is reflected in the surface imperfections of the film according to narrative elements and even languages are as arbitrary as a banana in a Swedish supermarket. With the dreams of green capitalism growing in popularity at the same speed as organic breweries and biological grocery stores pop up, The Wonders is a timely counterpoint to their ambiguous ideology and ultimate unfeasibility. Like a psychic wound, calmly unnerving, the film injures (or maybe unhinges) the romantic devices of the green economy, gently debunking its myths. Rohrwacher's film sketches the fundamental fallacy of anthropocentrism—its cultural suprematism and damage—and does away with the benevolent prejudices of eco-friendliness, leaving spectators alone in front of a man-made landscape increasingly unfit for life itself.

Interview: Alice Rohrwacher - Film Comment Violet Lucca interview,October 10, 2014

At the Cannes press conference for The Wonders, the first thing director Alice Rohrwacher said was: “This is not an autobiographical film.” Certain elements are indeed drawn from her life—she grew up in the Italian countryside on a bee farm, and her father is German—but the story Rohrwacher tells is too complex and richly philosophical to be simply a confessional or a padded-out memoir. The eldest of four sisters, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) assists her father (Sam Louwyck) in the family’s apiary and keeps an eye on things whenever he’s away. She becomes fascinated by a televised regional contest that showcases artisanal foods—“The Countryside Wonders,” its host played by Monica Bellucci—and enters their household in a competition to appear on the show, against her father’s wishes. Though his politics are never spelled out, it’s obvious that their rural bohemian lifestyle is a remnant of some ultra-left-wing, commune-like ethos. Gelsomina’s place in the family is also challenged by the arrival of a German juvenile delinquent, who’s ostensibly there to be fostered and “rehabilitated” but instead gets used for free labor.

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke to Rohrwacher shortly after the film screened in the New York Film Festival, where her last film, Corpo Celeste (11), also had its U.S. premiere. The Wonders opens on Friday.

Television plays a big role in the film. Can you talk about your relationship to it?

On one hand, the thing about TV is its hypnotic power. I’m hypnotized by it. The same way that fairy tales have hypnotic power, because these magic elements hypnotize you. But in reality, these same elements can be quite dangerous and very negative. In Italian there’s a fairy tale called “Prezzemolina,” about a little girl who is given a series of tasks to save her mother from fairies, but all along her path are these little distractions, these little things that are trying to take her away from what she is trying to accomplish. I wanted to relieve myself of this—to say that TV is really inside a tomb, it’s already dead—and I wanted to look at it with a certain tenderness, as if it belonged to a kind of stone age.

But you didn’t grow up with TV?

No.

How did you go about imagining how it looks in the film? It has a very distinct look.

There are many things we can imagine that we didn’t grow up with. For example, I didn’t grow up within the church or within organized religion, but that made me very free to look at it with fresh eyes in Corpo Celeste. I didn’t grow up with TV but that allows me to look at with a sense of surprise. I’m looking at TV, not as something that is bad, although certainly in its history it has been very bad, but as something that is here now, something that I looked at etymologically as a captive animal.

You have a background in theater. How do you approach directing actors in the theater versus for a film?

I was only ever an assistant in the theater—I was a girl that brought the coffee. But I tried to bring a lot of coffee during this movie and sing some songs.

I think theater is something that, when it’s good, restores your trust in human beings and your trust in what happens in life, because there’s a relationship between the person that is watching and the person that is acting. In cinema it is this relationship between human beings and then between cinema and these human beings on screen.

You said the idea for this film came from Saskia Sassen’s book about how every city is becoming like a theme park. What drew you to that material? Was it more of an idea or an image?

I can’t have an idea without an image. They are so very deeply connected that I can’t say that I have an idea without there being an image connected to that idea.

And what was that image, or what sort of images did you get?

I realized that there is something that is happening to my country, with all of these attempts to preserve things that have survived. Preservation efforts are too focused on turning things into a museum—the idea of a monument as a symbolic concept, for the sake of attracting tourism. It is a shame, because, instead, what does have to be conserved, what has to be kept alive, is all of the life that is there, all of the things that are involved in that place, whether it is a public square or a movie theater or the theater itself. All of the things that surround that monument, rather than this sole focus on monuments themselves.

How involved are you in the editing process?

Well, I don’t really leave much choice [laughs]. In my case, I only shoot in one way. Other people get frustrated and say: “Try this other frame just for safety’s sake.” But I leave very little margin for the editing. And I always regret this. But while I’m shooting, I have this vision of the editing process with which I am involved daily.

What is that image? Or what makes you see something through the viewfinder and say, “That’s what I want”?

It’s very simple. I just ask myself: “Where am I? What is happening in front of me?” I’m like this very privileged traveler on this trip, and I have to react. I’m alive, I’m there, and I have to ask what is happening. I ask myself “Where am I” and not where is the story going and what is the viewer going to see. If I absolve my responsibility in showing my point of view, others will take on their responsibility for their points of view.

In terms of how the film looks, like the costumes, how did you communicate that?

I’m very picky.

But this is different from Corpo Celeste, where people were wearing everyday clothes, whereas this included more fantastical costumed portions.

Well, I’m fussy, as I was saying before. The costumes give a certain sensibility to the story, a particular meaning. If you look at the way I’m dressed today, I bought these shoes five years ago, my pants are new, my sister gave this shirt to me. The way we live cuts across different eras of time. In most films they try to be so specific about an era, so they choose things that only belong to that era, and it has a flattening effect. So instead I choose—in translating, [the translator] has been saying “I,” but I always say “we,” because I work with very weird people—we choose to focus on just a few elements that show you a lot about these people and how they passed clothes back and forth to each other: how the big sister gives something to the little sister, which then she gives to the mother, who then exchanges that to the father. You might see a shirt changing hands that way, and these portend the various ties that are behind these people. But there is also a very symbolic value in the way that I use color.

The symbolic aspect of the costumes is much more connected to fairy tales. For example, in scenes with the TV crew, the host [Monica Bellucci] is in white and all the men in black, which is a sort of childish element, but then we mix it up with a bit of realism. But these are magical elements.

So when you’re writing a film, how much is written and how much do you improvise or leave to chance?

Everything is written. Everything is deliberate and nothing is accidental. So even if something works it is also as a result of a choice.

There’s this saying in Hollywood, I think from W.C. Fields, that you should never work with children or animals, and in this film there are both. Did you experience any problems with that?

I think W.C. Fields must have had a very boring life. I had many problems, but I love problems. As soon as I see a problem, I go running towards it.

Look at the honey in the film. The honey is illegal in the film, but it is very good. The production of honey involves child labor, violation of health laws, but it is a very good honey. And that’s sort of like the way we worked. There are a lot of laws, and it wasn’t always possible to observe laws to the letter. You aren’t supposed to shoot with bees because then the insurance won’t cover you, because bees are considered a wild animal, and they cannot be put down right away, so they’re classified as dangerous. In Italy there is a day when no one works—including the police—which is August 15, so we shot all the scenes with the bees on August 15.

Why do you think that people so often confuse something that is personal with something that is autobiographical?

I think that we’re in pretty bad shape today, because people are no longer appreciating the complexity of words and of sentences. So you say “difficult” and everyone instantly thinks “hard,” and that’s a bad thing, difficulty. And we say “personal” and people identify that with “autobiographical,” and we lose a sense of nuance. It is very hard for people to believe that something can be personal without being a literal part of your personal history.

And do you think that problem is compounded because you’re one of the very few internationally known female directors?

What’s really laughable is that even if I were to make a film where people are mowing each other down left and right with machine guns, and I had one scene of a leaf falling from a tree, the critics would say it had a delicate feminine gaze and was a very sensitive picture. I think there is this desire to identify only one quality of womanhood and of being feminine as being feminine out of all the things that are being found. That is what’s happening with this film, this attempt to find this one female aspect to the film, when in fact everything is female. And since the traditional role of women is to be at home and to wash dishes and to talk about the family, then instantly the father is identified as my father, the mother as my mother—the type of questions you wouldn’t ask of a male director.

What are your plans after this?

Tonight? Let’s go to a place with music, please.

Sight & Sound [Violet Lucca] July 18, 2015

Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]

Old Ways Meet the New Reality in the Wondrous 'The ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice

Review: Alice Rohrwacher's Unique And Admirably ... Oliver Lyttelton from The Playlist

PopMatters [Stephen Mayne]

Slant Magazine [Elise Nakhnikian]

'The Wonders' Of Family And Change : NPR Ella Taylor

[Review] The Wonders - The Film Stage Nick Newman

Filmleaf [Chris Knipp]

"The Wonders" Accomplishes The Impossible | Movie ... Veronika Ferdman from Movie Mezzanine

Sound On Sight [Zach Lewis]

Spectrum Culture [Pat Padua]

theartsdesk.com [Kieron Tyler]

Cinematic Essential [Jaskee Hickman]

Review: THE WONDERS, A Poetic Realist Portrait ... - Twitch Ben Croll

Cinemablographer: Israeli Film Fest Review: 'The Wonders' Pat Mullen from The Cinemablographer

Film Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]

Film-Forward.com [Caroline Ely]

Wylie Writes [Addison Wylie]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]

Grolsch Film Works [Ashley Clark]

Little White Lies [Adam Woodward] also seen here: Little White Lies: "The Wonders," from 2014

MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters

Childhood memories inform Alice Rohrwacher's film 'The ... Susan King interview from The LA Times, November 25, 2015

Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]

Variety [Jay Weissberg]

The Observer (Mark Kermode)

The Wonders review - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

The Wonders and the spirit of the beehive - The Globe and Mail Nathalie Atkinson

John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film/TV

Movie review: In 'The Wonders,' simple life isn't so simple after all Stephen Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

Film: THE WONDERS - Austin Film Society

“Wonders” gives a spiritual glow to tale of a family - SFGate Walter Addiego

Off-center 'The Wonders' finds sweetness in unlikely places Sheri Linden from The LA Times

The Wonders - Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz

In 'The Wonders,' Tasting the Nectar of an Artisanal Life in Tuscany ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Rojas, Juliana and Marco Dutra

HARD LABOR

Brazil (99 mi) 2011

Hard Labor (Trabalhar cansa): Cannes Review Deborah Young at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 2011

CANNES -- Horror elements delicately brush over a realistic tale about a middle-class Brazilian family facing economic difficulties in Hard Labor, an ambitious first feature written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, that promises more than it’s actually able to deliver. Strange things begin happening when the husband loses his job and the wife opens a grocery store; but apart from a few mildly disturbing events, little of interest is going on here and the film seems aimed more at critics and film festivals than international audiences.

In a prolonged set-up, a cast of humorless characters is carefully positioned in their social context. Helena (Helena Albergaria), a serious housewife and mother of an equally grave little girl, plunges into the adventure of opening her own business, just as her white-collar husband Otavio (Marat Descartes) gets the sack. While he trudges to a series of humiliating job interviews, Helena hires young Paula (Naloana Lima) as a live-in maid and baby-sitter, then interviews candidates to work in her small grocery store. So much screen time is taken up describing the characters’ economic relationship to each other, particularly the awkward reversal when the wife becomes the bread-winner in the family, that the film could pass for a sociological study.

Enter a snarling black dog in front of the store; then a foul-smelling, black liquid that oozes out of the floor. A large tooth is found, then a giant dog collar that could have belonged to the hound of the Baskervilles. Disquieting, disturbing things no doubt. But what connection do they have to a story fundamentally about work?

Puzzling horror films are never very satisfying. Perhaps the mysterious elements are best viewed as the externalized expressions of a stressful, anxiety-inducing economy that swallows up everyone indiscriminately, from businessmen to housemaids.

The directors and many of the actors have been members of the Filmes do Caixote filmmaking collective, making award-winning short films for 10 years. Their familiarity shows in the self-assured direction of the cast. There is a darkness in all these “average” characters, underlined by low-key acting and the film’s sinisterly calm, measured pace.

Albergaria’s strong, courageous but somewhat heartless Helena is a woman with a perpetually worried look. As her frustrated, depressed husband, Descartes has a silent dignity that lends nobility to the rampant unemployment of our time. It is easy to satirize the pep talks of management gurus, but much harder to portray, as Descartes does, the suppressed rage of the downsized. Noteworthy in a smaller role, Lima is statically zen as the quiet young maid who is exploited as a matter of habit.

Hard Labour Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Lee Marshall

All is not well in the neighbourhood grocery game in this four-hander Brazilian curio. Coming on at first as an employment and family relationship drama in the mould of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, the film gradually shifts into horror-tinged territory. The pressures of the work market in today’s recessionary times creates monsters of us all, the young writer-directors seem to be saying - but the audience is left free to extract other messages, or none at all, from the film’s dabble with the dark side.

Emotionally perceptive, refreshing in its lack of self-importance, sometimes amusing, and just occasionally scary, the film nevertheless doesn’t quite add up as a genre-bending exercise - it ends with a yell from its male protagonist, but more of a shrug from the audience.

Despite its horror-thriller forays, Hard Labour (Trabalhar Cansa) is one for the arthouse rather than the genre fanboys, who will find its frights far too tame. The well-constructed story is full of parallels and ironic mirrors, but simply less absorbing, less urgent than those contemporary benchmarks of reality-grounded supernatural arthouse films, Let the Right One In and The Host. Limited arthouse action and some speciality TV slots look to be Hard Labour’s workaday destiny.

Middle-manager Ottavio (Descartes) is fired from his job of ten years on the very day when his can-do wife Helena (Albergaria) signs the lease on an empty shop that she plans to turn into a grocery store. Despite the setback, and against her husband’s advice, she decides to go ahead with the venture anyway. To help clean the house and look after the couple’s daughter Vanessa (Flores), Helena hires a maid, Paula (Lima), paying her under the table to avoid employment tax.

Paula has the sort of sullen manner that suggests a lurking threat, but the script surprises us here, with the jeopardy coming from another direction - the store itself, which had mysterious previous owners that nobody wants to talk about. A sledgehammer and chain are found behind a display case, a mechanical Santa falls apart and leaks black oil. Meanwhile Ottavio is struggling to get back into the job market, attending interviews that expect him to roleplay with other candidates, and being told by an employment advisor that he should sign up for a motivational seminar.

Our sympathies are played with inventively through the script’s layered and nuanced employment waltz, with Helena becoming an increasingly imperious boss, Ottavio losing his self-respect, Paula growing into hers, and even little Vanessa acting in a school play about the end of slavery in Brazil (one of several ironic lobs that are left up the audience to hit over the net).

The look of the film is distinctive, though not always consistently so, with bright theatrical lighting and make up, and deliberate, sometimes ponderous dialogue creating a hyper-real tone. There’s a low-budget look about the special-effect props, when we finally get to them, but the film is kept on track by the cast’s grounded performances - especially Albergaria as Helena.

Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from The Playlist on the indieWIRE Blog, May 13, 2011

Cannes Film Festival 2011: Day Two – We Need to Talk About Kevin, Trabalhar Cansa, and Polisse Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from The House Next Door, May 12, 2011

Cannes 2011. Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas's "Hard Labor" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 13, 2011

Anny Gomes interviewing Marco Dutra from Ion Cinema, May 8, 2011

Jay Weissberg at Cannes from Variety

Romanek, Mark

ONE HOUR PHOTO

USA (96 mi) 2002

BFI | Sight & Sound | One Hour Photo (2002) Peter Matthews for Sight and Sound, September 2002

Romero, George A.

SEASON OF THE WITCH

USA (104 mi) 1973

Season of the Witch Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead wasn't an overnight success, but a success it was, eventually screening at the Museum of Modern Art. But he resisted being typecast as a horror director. Instead, his first couple of budget-malnourished follow-up features point up Romero's other enduring auteurist imprint: his blunt social observation, which outside of his zombie-vehicle metaphors comes off as too free-form and unacademic to be called criticism, and yet too naturalistic and bemused to read as satire. Jack's Wife (Romero's preferred title for the film Anchor Bay has released under the alternate name Season of the Witch, which is at least preferable to the original distributor's porn chic Hungry Wives) is Romero's own Belle du Jour (Belle du Nuit?), a tale of a lonely, neglected housewife whose discontent and suppressed erotic desires are efficiently conveyed in a series of bondage-tinged dream sequences.

Only instead of finding solace from the bourgeois monotony of her position in a day brothel, Jack's wife Joan (played with an insouciant Lynda Carter-esque iciness by Jan White) is drawn to the casual mystique of the neighborhood's tarot-reading, rec room witch-cum-housewife. Romero's carefully organized, schematically impressive script (in many ways his very best—one can hardly blame him for speaking of his desire to remake the film) charts her progression toward the black arts from its spark out of enervated dilettantism to her fevered zeal over what becomes her new religion, even as his lamentably cheap-jack financial backing undercuts his every formal conceit, rendering every flourish that seems suspiciously like crafted artifice a probably happy accident. (Though it's interesting to note that it's a movie about the middle class made on a "checks cashed here" budget, as well as a movie about a desperate woman on a leash struggling to release herself from gender stereotypes filmed by a man desperate to unfasten the shackles of genre pigeonholing.)

Jack's Wife is Romero's precursor to Martin (his own justifiably favorite film), both psychological studies set against a clarified, ethnographically rigid backdrop, where the former reacts against the latter with self-delusion and maladaption. Joan's best friend, the blowsy middle-aged Shirley (Ann Muffly, in a near-operatic performance straight out of the ashes of Cassavetes's Faces), and Joan's daughter's fuck-buddy TA (Ray Laine) both have Joan's number when they suggest to the fledgling pythoness that it's all just another hobby, a scene, a happening, no different really than her increasingly groovy eyeliner. Maybe a tad more hip than gin martinis and wife-swapping (or, in the case of Shirley's husband, homosexual experimentation), but nonetheless a futile vial of snake oil for what they believe is a terminal malaise. (Not unlike Dr. Logan's attempt to train Bub in Day of the Dead.)

Romero hardly disagrees—the final scene finds Joan at another cocktail party, proffering "I'm a witch" to anyone who will listen but still being introduced as "Jack's wife" (despite the fact that there is considerably less reason to introduce her as such as there would've been earlier in the film). Jack's Wife might look, to warp a phrase from Godard, like a film found in a pawn shop or, as the title for "costumes and furnishings" indicates, Gimbel's. But Romero's commitment to un-snarky examinations of life (or a life deferred) along the border between suburbia and rural America is even still undervalued against his visions of what, exactly, it looks like when a zombie yanks a human head from its neck.

DAWN OF THE DEAD

USA (126 mi) 1978 director’s cut (139 mi)

Dawn of the Dead Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Night of the Living Dead began with comic, petty sibling rivalry and ended with a grainy, no survivors photo montage. It would be tough to envision a grimmer slide into pure nihilism. One decade later, George A. Romero opened his post-apocalyptic sequel Dawn of the Dead with a horrifying SWAT raid through a zombie-infested ghetto tenement, complete with make-up artist Tom Savini's Karo-filled-condom gore fireworks, and concluded with, among other absurdities, a pie fight and final credits to the lunatic polka accompaniment of "The Gonk." Though this emphatic tonal inversion could be written off in any number of ways (not the least of which could be: "Romero's finally snapped"), I think it's the key to understanding the film and its relation to its predecessor.

Dawn begins more or less at the same point that Night left off, with chaos reigning and a fragmented populace suicidally dividing itself over how to handle the zombie invasion (though the social concerns of the '60s are notably in the distant past). Two SWAT cops and a pair of young lovers from the city TV station hop aboard a helicopter and seek refuge somewhere, anywhere away from the volatile wasteland of their urban environment. This is the first of Romero's reversals. Night's besieged would-be survivors were trapped in a rural farmhouse, and their only hope for survival was represented by the hope for escape to the City. Like much of America in era, Dawn's pampered protagonists abandon the unpredictable, ethnically diverse city in favor of the comforting anonymity of suburban USA—specifically, the suburban mall at which they land and eventually inhabit. Romero's distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can't be underestimated when explaining Dawn's appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the center of a community that couldn't be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney's shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.

Once the four make unto themselves an idyllic paradise inside the mall, cleansing it of zombies and sealing if off for themselves, they inevitably cave in to the buyer's delight, so buried in furs, guns, diamonds, and leather (and, ludicrously, cash) that they ultimately end up oblivious to the approaching motorcycle gang that threatens to crash the party. Eventually the gang breaks through the barricades (and, somehow, the moat of zombies still drawn to the mall because, according to one character, it reminds them of something they used to need) and anarchically turn the film upside down, transgressively taunting the zombies, stealing their jewelry, smashing their pusses with cream pies, and chopping their heads off for sport, not survival. Again, the way Romero portrays the roving gang is a distinct retraction from how, for instance, he painted Karl Hardman's tantrum-prone Harry Cooper character in Night. As least in the first film, opposition didn't equal antagonism. Here, Romero's world contains strains of humanity (probably detritus on exodus from the City) that, as demonstrated by their lack of respect for the zombies, could be justifiably considered "worse" than death.

As countless undergrad thesis papers have already delved into in far greater detail, the cumulative effect of these thematic reversals points to Romero's big message: that if the often bleak '60s of Night were defined by their radical political activism, then the insipidly optimistic '70s of Dawn are a testament to the politics of retrenchment, consumerist balm and self-immobilization. (Even Dawn's Tempra paint blood is like eye candy—I've got to buy it!—compared to the brackish smears of chocolate syrup in Night.) Many of Romero's other disturbing propositions still remain (for example, what happens to the souls of the living who are devoured by the dead, given they don't experience the same pseudo-reincarnation?), but Dawn's most unsettling aspect is in how it shows us how little we've changed as a culture.

Alien and Dawn Of The Dead Hi Tech Horror, by Ernest Larsen from Jump Cut, November 1979

THE DAY OF THE DEAD

USA (101 mi) 1985

The Day of the Dead Eric Henderson from Slant magazine

Day of the Dead is unquestionably the most controversial and debated entry in George A. Romero's unrivaled zombie trilogy. Critics who respected Night of the Living Dead for both its raw verité pulpiness as well as its social commentary didn't care much for Day of the Dead. Zombie fanatics raised on the luscious, lasagna-gut goriness and the capitalistic anarchy of Dawn of the Dead also didn't go for the film. During production of Day of the Dead, Romero himself admitted time and again that the script he ended up with was far different from the film he envisioned capping off his cinematic touchtone. And at the time of the film's release, no one seemed satisfied with the end result short of the real gorehounds (who would have you believe that make-up artist Tom Savini was the film's true auteur and consider Dario Argento one of Dawn of the Dead's true muses). But a not-so-unexpected revisionism has finally kicked in and has begun to save the black sheep of Romero's zombie films and isolate it for what it is: an unapologetically nihilistic coda that adds unbearable gravity to a formula earlier presented with at least a faint glimmer of hope. If Day of the Dead's reputation pales when held up against Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, it's because fanboys and critics got the message all too clear: with Day of the Dead, Romero is through fucking around with allegory.

The considerable reputations of Romero's first two zombie films—aside from being fantastically scary, of course—rest primarily on their amazingly perceptive attunement to the mood of their respective contemporary time periods. Night of the Living Dead's take on the '60s famously invokes the gritty sense of a society living moment by intense moment and being torn apart by a myriad moral schisms. With Dawn of the Dead, Romero went the next step and proposed for the first time that not much separates the zombies from the humans. Both apparently love shopping malls. The anti-consumerist critique of the second film seems to have even more resonance today. If there was little societal change that had taken place between the first and second films, more frightening is just how little had changed between the second and third.

The pop cultural relevance of the first two films may be partially responsible for Day of the Dead's continued neglect. Who needs a new social problem put through Romero's allegorical wringer when the pathologies of the first two films are still pervasive today? Which is exactly why Day of the Dead is worth serious discussion: recognizing Romero's attempt to eschew the distancing effect of satire by refusing to invoke the social ills of the Reagan era alone. With this film, Romero chose to directly address the nature of human emotions and prejudices that tear us apart regardless of whatever global hot spot is inspiring newspaper headlines and political debates. That Romero has yet to get the long-rumored Twilight of the Dead into the works is telling. Day of the Dead's resistance to being pigeonholed into its decade frees it from merely being the '80s zombie movie.

Day of the Dead opens with a straight-on shot of Sara (Lori Cardille, the human protagonist by default) alone in an empty white room, sitting on the floor with her head down. With the film's intro, Romero suggests the comfort of a cozy and unattainable dream world, a respite from the brutality of her real-life situation: being stuck in an underground shelter with nutcase scientists and hair-trigger militia all at each other's throats. Dawn of the Dead opened on a similar frenzied high-note, only at this point in the zombie epidemic the physical fatigue of what remains of the human race has all but obliterated any possibilities of survival ("We're outnumbered now," the mad Dr. Logan explains, "400,000 to 1, by my estimation.") One aspect of Day of the Dead that likely turned off many viewers is just how unsparing and focused Romero's portrayal of humanity's last stand really is. Unlike the two earlier films, there's little-to-no suspense spent over who will survive and who will be torn limb from limb.

For some the way to "enter" Day of the Dead is through the touching teacher-student relationship Dr. Logan shares with the docile zombie Bub (and the winning performances given by Richard Liberty and Howard Sherman, respectively). Because the zombies' overwhelming majority over the human race makes killing them all but a pipe dream, Dr. Logan's attempts to convince the film's shortsighted military thugs that humanity's last hope rests on a complete reassessment of their moral and scientific priorities. Logan argues that instead of futilely attempting to find a "cure" for the zombie disease, the monsters should be completely retrained "like good little boys and girls." Romero's thoughtful and sympathetic staging of the scenes where Logan re-teaches Bub how to use a walkman and a telephone indicate that he believes in the doctor's notion that saving humanity means making radical, compassionate and perhaps somewhat idealistic leaps of faith. At the same time, Romero's argument is tinged with the sadness of knowing the brutality of human nature under duress. In the end, Logan's Quixotic quest is, quite naturally, cut short by violence (committed, importantly, not by the zombies but by the other living refugees).

With the notable exception of Bub's goofy-yet-endearing pet tricks, which are meant to pointedly draw viewer sympathies toward the zombie brigade, Romero can't be bothered to concoct the cute little paradiddles that endeared themselves to so many cult fans of Dawn of the Dead such as Gaylen Ross letting the nun zombie survive or another zombie's almost nonchalant death by helicopter blades. No, the first two-thirds of Day of the Dead are a grueling, systematically repetitious snit fit between the two warring human factions, followed by an orgy of violence that's a far cry from Dawn of the Dead's TV Dinner gore. (Kubrick used this bifurcated structure with his Vietnam psych-out Full Metal Jacket.) The mild comic relief of the first two films (zombie pratfalls slay 'em every time) is nowhere to be found here. The closest Day of the Dead comes to a joke is when one of the doomed soldiers unleashes a chipmunk scream as his head is pulled off, his stretching vocal cords causing his voice to ascend octaves before it dies away completely.

Paradoxically, some find Day of the Dead to be the most hopeful of the trilogy, thanks mostly to its pseudo-upbeat coda and how it seems to reinforce some people's Dante-esque notion of a trilogy structure guiding them through the Inferno of Night of the Living Dead and into the tropical Paradiso that closes Day of the Dead. But to only see escape and respite in the final Caribbean tableau is to ignore the film that precedes it. Aside from the fact that the underground hide-out also had its own faux-paradise (both are musically underscored with the same amusingly naïve marimba-laden John Harrison music) that proved to be no oasis, Romero also uses the motif of Sara awaking from nightmares throughout the film. Each dream that Sara suffers speaks as much of future dangers as it addresses past traumas. Romero seems to be saying, dream all you want but the nightmare is never over.

Watching Day of the Dead with visions of sugary Dawn of the Dead tableaus dancing in your head, one is struck with the almost angry deconstruction of the Zombie legend Romero unleashes with this savage finale to the trilogy. (With this film, Romero all but laid the repulsive framework for a nearly forgotten '80s splatterpunk movement, an explosive collision of gore and apocalypse subgenres.) Though still unmistakably allegorical, much of the irony and parable foreshadowing of the first two films has all but vanished, leaving behind bitterness, lament and cynicism. In a world that seems to drift further and further into a diplomatic declaration of martial law with each and every Presidential address, the overriding voice of Day of the Dead speaks for the universal rage of all displaced peoples, backed into a corner and certain that they are in the oppressed minority. Day of the Dead is the synthesis of all the racial, tribal, social and governmental concerns of the first two films, and Romero's notions are not pretty.

Early in the film, when Sara visits Dr. Logan's lair, the scientist shows her a zombie with his digestive system completely hollowed out. When he waves a hand above his mouth and the creature still lunges for his human flesh, he theorizes that the zombie is not acting out of hunger but from pure instinct. Romero juxtaposes this scene with a tense meeting between the survivors' military and scientific subgroups. Many critics at the time of the film's release complained that the humans were by and large indistinguishable from their flesh-eating nemeses. But clearly Romero's overriding statement with this Reagan-era zombie chapter is to be found in this exact shift. Day of the Dead represents a swing from viewing humanity as a protagonist to seeing humanity as antagonist. As Dr. Logan suggests, the film's zombies are the imperfections within ourselves, just as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead portrayed the zombies as an unmistakable "other." Day of the Dead offers a frightening glimpse at humanity's instinctual proclivity to destroy itself. The racial tensions of the first film are but one aspect of this habit. Here, a pessimistic Romero dares to tackle the very essence of man's inhumanity to man. And in the end, Day of the Dead is every bit as compelling and unsettling as its more lauded predecessors.

LAND OF THE DEAD

USA Canada France 2005

BFI | Sight & Sound | Land of the Dead (2005) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, October 2005

America, a few years after the collapse of society brought about by the rising of the dead as flesh-eating ghouls whose bite reduces the living to the same condition. Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), a tycoon, has established an enclave within a ruined city, maintaining a luxury lifestyle for his cronies inside a high-rise development called Fiddler's Green. Everyone else is left to get by in slums. Kaufman employs mercenaries to roam the outlands in Dead Reckoning, a heavily-armoured truck, to bring in supplies and cull the zombies, who can be killed by shots to the head. Riley (Simon Baker), designer of the Dead Reckoning, and his friend Charlie (Robert Joy), a slightly slow-witted sharpshooter, intend to quit Kaufman's army and head for the wilderness, while Cholo (John Leguizamo), Riley's second in command, hopes to buy his way into Fiddler's Green.

The Dead Reckoning attracts the attention of Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), an evolved zombie who is regaining his intelligence, and the vengeful creature leads a horde of the dead towards the city. When Kaufman refuses Cholo a place in Fiddler's Green, the latter steals Dead Reckoning and threatens to use the vehicle's armaments to launch a strike against the building unless he's paid off. Kaufman has to ask Riley, whom he has previously had jailed, to prevent this. Riley sets out on his mission with Charlie, ex-hooker Slack and some of Kaufman's soldiers. Big Daddy's army attacks the city, even invading Fiddler's Green. Riley and his crew take the Dead Reckoning back from Cholo, who is bitten and infected. Kaufman tries to evacuate, but is attacked by Big Daddy and then the zombie Cholo. Kaufman and Cholo are burned to death. Riley returns to the city and helps save the remaining population - but lets Big Daddy survive and wander off. The Dead Reckoning leaves the city and heads north.

Review

In Land of the Dead George A Romero returns to territory the director can claim to own, but which has been usurped by many others. With Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero redefined the American horror film. His instant imitators noticed the extreme gore, the downbeat plotting and the suspense mechanics, but usually missed the social comment and the edgy, uncomfortable characterisation. With Dawn of the Dead (1978), the splatter and the satire became more explicit, but post-hippy regret for lost opportunities for change added a wistful melancholia. And Day of the Dead (1985) was at once more despairing about living humanity and more open to the possibility that the dead might have something useful to contribute.

Every time Romero has returned to the world of Night of the Living Dead, he has delivered a sequel but also a reboot - each film seems to reflect the years in which it was made. Night was informed by Vietnam and the civil rights movement; Dawn by materialism and the increasing social divide; Day by militarism and the bleak underside of Reaganomics. While Romero has been away from his signature series because of career reversals - since The Dark Half (1993), he has directed only one film, the little-seen Bruiser (2000) - there's also a sense he might have been waiting for America to become terrible again, in a sufficiently different way to need a new Dead picture.

Drawing on elements from an ambitious Day of the Dead script he abandoned in the early 1980s, Land of the Dead is, nevertheless, a cartoon of Bush II-era cruel America, with the evocatively named tower-block mall Fiddler's Green surrounded by shantytowns and bars where tourists can bet on cage matches between the hungry dead. There are socially incisive details throughout. At one point, for instance, aspiring Fiddler's Green resident Cholo brings the tower's tycoon owner Kaufman bottles of scavenged champagne in an attempt to buy his way into (to quote The Omega Man) "this honky paradise". He pours two measures in whisky glasses, and Kaufman only has to decant his into the proper flute to put the Hispanic outsider in his place before decreeing that he has no further use for him. Later, when bitten by a zombie, Cholo refuses a friend's offer to despatch him execution-style, which is the usual treatment for still-living infectees. "You know I always wanted to see how the other half lives," says the middleman, now acutely aware of his place in the social order and that if he cannot enter the penthouse he might as well join the hordes in the graveyards.

Paradoxically, this is the most hopeful film in the series, in that it presents a genuine movie-style hero in Simon Baker's handsome and compassionate Riley, as well as Asia Argento's all-purpose action heroine. Romero's drop-out heroes, rebel outlaws or desperate survivalists always constitute 1968-like rainbow alliances, a connection made most explicit in the jousting bikers of Knightriders (1981). One thread that carries through the Living Dead films is the depiction of black men as repositories of sense who are victimised by a bigoted America, from Duane Jones shot through the head by the posse in Night and Ken Foree's Swat team leader in Dawn to Terry Alexander's Jamaican slacker in Day. With Baker the whitest imaginable lead, this role is taken in Land of the Dead by Eugene Clark's Big Daddy, the zombie who - picking up on an evolutionary process that has developed by increments over the series - is on the point of regaining real intelligence, overcoming the dead's tendency to repeat meaningless tasks parodic of their former lives.

It's ironic that Romero's return to zombie territory was made commercially possible by the success of the Dawn remake and the sincere, surprisingly smart parody Shaun of the Dead - not to mention the co-opting of the director's strategies in the computer game Resident Evil. There was a risk that such a return would show him respected but less in tune with the way things are now done. There is some use of new effects techniques, and individual zombie make-ups are more elaborate than before. But we're back to the slow-moving dead, who mostly seem a nuisance rather than truly dangerous but devour with bloody ferocity. The 'gags' that are so much a part of the series recur (a belly ring is shown being ripped out), though the necessity to secure an R rating in the US means that this aspect is less prominent than in the last two unrated sequels.

As always in Romero's films, the zombie threat is the backdrop rather than the whole story, which here boils down to an argument over how a society with limited resources should be run. But the dead press in when the living abdicate responsibility. All the sequels end with survivors moving on in search of a better place, but without much hope. In this film, in a sole mellow touch, there's a sense that some justice has been done in that the devoured have mostly been villains. The good guys seem to have faith that there is at least a probability of a utopian refuge away from the corruptions of civilisation and even a possible détente with the dead.

by Michael Sicinski Land of the Dead, from Cinema Scope

It could take days, maybe weeks, to read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Hardt and Negri’s Empire, and watch The Battle of Algiers (1965) and Gunner Palace (2004). And of course, it would be time well spent. (Well, maybe not watching Gunner Palace, a documentary so eager to be down with the boys in uniform that it’s never willing to take a stand.) But you could save some time, and probably have more fun, by going to see Land of the Dead instead. The latest from George A. Romero is, predictably, a right-on-time communiqué pertaining to the guerres du jour, those being waged on the poor in Bush’s dis-United States and in the Middle East. Land of the Dead does precisely what any good political film should do—it connects “here” and “elsewhere.” It brings the war home. But part of its acuity is its willingness to plunge headlong into the ambiguities of democracy-at-gunpoint. Land of the Dead is about the need to make clear distinctions and the increasing impossibility of doing so. Just as the exportation of good government today means drawing legalistic Maginot Lines between, say, kicking the Koran and flushing it down the toilet, Romero’s 21st century is, in essence, the dawn of a new dead era, in which “zombie” is less a firm designation than a point along a continuum of rot.

This represents a shift in strategy for Romero. Part of why Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) were rightly hailed as B-movie masterworks is because they functioned so nicely as allegories. Night was a national reckoning with Vietnam; Dawn was a critique of suburban consumerism. This is the strand that Zach Snyder’s Dawn 2004 remake picks up and runs with in the most obvious terms possible, playing up shopping-mall kitsch in order to goose the under-16 set (who were, naturally, watching the film inside a mall). From early Romero to Snyder, we can observe the decay of the allegorical impulse, its reduction to the kind of one-to-one correspondences that Land of the Dead confounds. Since the zombies in the earlier films were fairly clear stand-ins for a different kind of problem, questions of identity or burgeoning zombie subjectivity were skirted.

Dawn of the Dead is the perfection of this mode. Inside the plot, zombies are things to extinguish, because they will eat you. Meta-textually, they are the self-propelled operation of a single concept, lumbering allegorical tropes. And, perhaps most importantly, they were good for target practice. But Romero executed this B-movie logic with a stripped-down elegance. The premise allowed for meticulous, task-oriented action sequences that played out along the skittering surface of the subtext. It was Bressonianism with entrails, or better yet, Grand Union minimalist choreography as viewed through a rifle scope. All body, all tissue, all in a single space with a single meaning.

Day of the Dead (1985), usually seen as the weak link in the series, comes out the other side, as all bullets eventually do. Shrill and nihilistic, the film stages the complete breakdown of civilization as a claustrophobic shouting match punctuated by the sweet relief of disembowelment. The us/them opposition has become delusional: human beings were zombies, end of story. But in 2005, flipping the script won’t cut it, and Romero clearly understands this. Perhaps this change in perspective was a response to last year’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), which re-invested the zombie scenario with existential heft. Despite being played for comedy, Shaun refutes walking-dead anonymity by forcing its protagonist to watch his loved ones turn. The result is that an individual (living) human has to step up and face his own destiny. Romero expressed admiration for Shaun, and its director and star are awarded with cameos in Land of the Dead. But Romero, social critic that he is, isn’t content to leave the future to charismatic individuality.

Instead, he plunges us into zombie dialectics. Land of the Dead isn’t about private grief: It is about the need to contend with fundamental definitions. Some of this is announced quite explicitly. “Look at them, pretending to be alive,” one soldier marvels. Riley (Simon Baker), the downcast pragmatist and anonymous Everyman, retorts, “Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Throughout the film, boundaries are established and then blurred, deemed impregnable only to be traversed. Some of this is physical, as when Riley’s sharpshooter sidekick Charlie (Robert Joy) is introduced—at first we mistake his blind open eye for the blank gaze of zombiedom. But much of it has to do with subtexts and situations that remain indeterminate and unclear. Some critics have found fault with the film on these grounds, but it’s clearly an ethical position Romero is staking out. The “zombie problem” is about facing the limits of our understanding.

For example, a bread-and-circuses street carnival features direct visual quotations from Abu Ghraib, with chained zombies arranged in humiliating poses while guilelessly cruel Americans get their pictures taken with them. Are the zombies invaders, or the invaded? Soon after, we glimpse a concession booth operated by two women engaged in open-mouthed kissing. A zombie then breaks in, stage right, and begins chowing down on them. This scene has given some leftist viewers pause—have the zombies come to restore some “natural order,” or are they perhaps Qutb-inspired Islamists out to curtail Western decadence? (This would parallel the horrifying moment in The Battle of Algiers when young militants beat the crap out of an Algerian wino.) Or was the dead guy just trying to get a bite to eat?

It is not a flaw that Land of the Dead fails to keep these ideological strands straight, because doing so has become increasingly impossible. And yet, the complete unfathomability of the zombies gives way to a kind of transformation and achievement of a higher state, a Hegelian sublation. We get to know one nameless zombie, later identified in the credits as “Big Daddy” (Eugene Clark), a former gas-station attendant and middle-aged black man, now just “walking dead.” We follow him as he bears witness to the desecration of the dead by the living, prompting him to howl in rage. We watch him learn to handle weapons, and eventually teach other zombies to do the same. Regardless of his or any other zombie’s past, they are now united for one purpose—to eke out survival with as much dignity as their material situation allows. Romero is staging nothing less than the rise of the Multitude, as per Hardt and Negri’s theory of global revolt. Eventually, class antagonisms, racial divides, and national borders will all become moot, as the masses tap into a single-minded agenda for overcoming oppression. Like the zombies, the Multitude looks from the outside like the absolute Other. Comprised of rebels and insurgents across the globe, the Unified Dead simply will not compute in the minds of the living, whose last thought when the revolution comes knocking might well be, “Why am I suddenly so irresistibly delicious?”

In this regard, the combination of intra-American antagonisms with clear echoes of Iraq makes perfect sense. Romero is at pains to show us that on either front, we’re in the midst of the same Total War, a battle to make the world safe for the super-rich at any human cost. Dennis Hopper’s thug/politico/real-estate mogul lords it over a fortified American zone, with roving patrols pillaging for resources and attempting to subdue the locals. The film’s double-movement of confounded ideology is summed up in Hopper’s private tank, dubbed “Dead Reckoning.” Like all army doublespeak, it’s a name designed to read well in the media, a catchy tagline. (“Our machine is the behemoth that the dead must reckon with.”) But in fact, it gives itself away. Fighting the zombies, like the Iraq misadventure, is one wild stab in the dark after another, for an unclear, never-ending purpose.

And this leads to one other supposed fault of Land of the Dead, the lack of a summative, kick-ass battle royale. Romero fails to deliver on the action-movie promise of more guns, more gore, and some definitive social statement that, like the allegories of the preceding films, would tell us where we have to go. I am sympathetic to complaints that the film peters out, but I think this is necessary and intentional. As Riley sadly observes, gazing across the battlefield and locking eyes with his undead opposite number, the gas-station attendant, “They’re just looking for somewhere to be.” There can be no conclusive final battle, only a plangent recognition that the struggle continues, that the dead and the living must somehow share the earth. In other words, when it comes to zombies, there’s no exit strategy, and no timetable for withdrawal. Suitably enough, the conclusion of Land of the Dead brings us full-circle. Gulf War 2005, like Vietnam 1968, leads Romero to propose the most logical solution for those eager to remain human: head for Canada.

Land of the Dead Tony Williams from Rouge, 2005

George Romero’s Land of the Dead Henry Sheehan

"Dead Director Rises Again" Scott Foundas from LA Weekly

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD

USA Canada (90 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Time Out New York review[4/5] Keith Uhlich

Another year, another George Romero Dead film. But wait, there’s plenty to delight in his sixth zombie eat-’em-up, which follows a rogue group of soldiers who come between warring clans on an isolated island. The tone this time out is primarily comic: The patriarchs of the feuding families, Patrick O’Flynn (Welsh) and Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), wield dynamite and blow buckshot like Looney Tunes adversaries, and they’ll be damned if some pesky staggering corpses are gonna stop them. Caught in the middle are Sarge “Nicotine” Crocket (Van Sprang) and his devoted F Troop, who just want a cadaverless place to kick back and wait out the plague.

Romero’s more recent Dead (Land of…, Diary of…) have tended to spell out their subtext, not always detrimentally. The surprising thing here is that he focuses on story first, and allows the themes to remain tantalizingly cloaked underneath the cartoon surface—the film doesn’t die if you see only Tom and Jerry instead of Israel and Palestine. Survival of the Dead’s formal qualities are beautifully B-movie: Two lateral tracks through an autumnal forest recall several of the lyrical compositions in Romero’s underrated The Crazies, and the film’s final image is a mythopoetic doozy, hilarious and humbling all at once.

The Onion A.V. Club review[C+] Noel Murray

Compared to most recent low-budget horror fare, George A. Romero’s Survival Of The Dead isn’t half-bad. The movie’s “how to train your zombie” plot is cleverly constructed, and peppered with exciting sequences where arrogance and short-sightedness leave humans open to the onslaught of the undead. But as a Romero project, Survival Of The Dead is a frustrating disappointment, nowhere close to the director’s classic ’70s films—though it is better than Romero’s last “reboot” zombie effort, Diary Of The Dead. Survival follows one of Diary’s minor characters, rogue soldier Alan Van Sprang, as he leads a band of scavengers toward an island rumored to be a safe haven. There, he and his crew discover two long-feuding families with conflicting ideas about how to handle the coming plague. One group wants to kill all zombies on sight; the other says that since the zombies on their isolated properties are mostly family, the monsters should be caged and preserved until a cure for zombie-ism is found. So while the humans square off on opposite sides of the island, the real threats rattle around in their pens, ready to render the conflict moot.

Unlike the largely witless and strained Diary, Survival Of The Dead is an honest-to-goodness movie, shot in decent-looking locations with actual actors, and with a script that’s classically Romero-ian in its emphasis on how people solve their problems in stages. (“Go there to get that so we can do this,” etc.) But while it’s a more likeable movie overall, Survival lacks the kind of grand theme that gives the best Romero zombie movies their oomph. There’s a little here about family values and religious indoctrination, but not enough to generate any satirical heat. The Romero of old would tease his audience with graphic violence so he could comment on social ills, but lately, he’s been shoehorning in the commentary around scenes that play to that core base of fans who dress up as zombies and cheer on every clever kill. Survival has lots of those clever kills; Romero just doesn’t provide enough reason for them to be.

Twitch [Todd Brown]

Why is it that George Romero has chosen to include his name in the title of his latest film? Could it be that he's aware that without it all you're left with is a mediocre at best zombie picture, one unlikely to attract a second glance? No mistake about it, the creator is the attraction here, not the film, and it is frankly time to acknowledge that the Romero well has run dry and it's past time for the man to move on to greener pastures and fresh ideas if he wants to continue making films without damaging his own legacy.

Building around a minor character from Diary of the Dead, Survival follows a small band of soldiers who have abandoned their posts to try and find themselves a safe place to live, a contained place, a place where a low population will mean an equally low potential for undead attack. And they think they have discovered just the place with Plum Island.

But the undead aren't the only threat in this world and Plum Island is already populated by humans, a pair of clans - the O'Flynns and the Muldoons - that have been clashing for generations and see no reason to stop now. Wars weren't enough to stop their aggression, so why should a few zombies?

With Survival of the Dead Romero attempts a return to form - a move away from the large scale epic of Land of the Dead and experiments in form with Diary of the Dead in favor of a film more in his classic style, one that fuses comedy with horror and graphic gore with social commentary. But rather than being a triumph, Survival just feels flat and tired, a film failed by a weak script and even weaker performances.

The thrust of the satiric element is clear - the futility of conflict and mankind's self destructive nature - but the execution is incredibly clumsy, the clan conflict that rests at the center of the film extraordinarily cliched. None of the characters are ever allowed to grow beyond caricature, their aims and goals implausible in the extreme. While the gore quotient is certainly high enough to satisfy most horror fans - and there are several very inventive kill sequences - the effects are only mid-grade and the performances and script weak enough that it is difficult to engage with any of the characters enough to actually care much about what happens to them on screen.

When Romero returned to the zombie genre with Land of the Dead it was met with much excitement by fans only to be widely turned on and declared unsatisfying. And while Diary of the Dead generally fared a little better, old school fans were still not convinced and the film did little to draw new fans into the fold. And with Survival coming in as the weakest of the three someone simply needs to point out to the aging master that its time to stop. He's adding nothing to his canon with these films, accomplishing nothing but diluting his own body of work.

Now in Theaters: "Survival of the Dead" (George A. Romero, Canada) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from Mubi, May 28, 2010

Cinefantastique [Steve Biodrowski]

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George A. Romero Bites Again (Both Ways) in Survival ... - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton, May 25, 2010

Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review[3.5/4]

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Rønning, Joachim and Espen Sandberg

KON-TIKI (Expedição Kon Tiki) B 85

Norway Denmark Great Britain Germany (118 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site [no]

Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl filmed his own epic 4300 mile crossing of the Pacific Ocean on a balsa wood raft in 1947, turning it into a 77-minute documentary film KON-TIKI (1950), winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film in 1951, where interestingly a young Louis Malle beautifully documented the ocean expeditions by Jacques Cousteau in A SILENT WORLD (1956) to win another Best Documentary Award in 1957, so gloriously photographed ocean exploration was a peculiar fascination of the world in the 1950’s. More than a half a century later, this new Norwegian film by the same name received the first ever Norwegian Golden Globe nomination and was among the 5 nominated films for Best Foreign Film, eventually won by the heavily favored Cannes winner Amour (Love) (2012), where it was the highest-grossing film of 2012 in Norway and at $16 million dollars the country's most expensive production to date. As might be expected, the film is a sprawling epic actually spoken in English, simultaneously shooting on alternate days another version in Norwegian, where the sumptuous cinematography by Geir Hartly Andreassen is an essential component to the movie experience. Shooting two film versions was a common practice during the transition from Silent to talking motion pictures in the early 1930’s, but few movies have maintained a lasting value, the exception being Josef von Sternberg’s DER BLAUE ENGEL in 1930, the first major German sound film that turned a young Marlene Dietrich into an international star, released in a 124-minute German version, while THE BLUE ANGEL, the alternate language English version, initially thought lost, but recently discovered in a German film archive and restored in 2009, used quicker cuts and was only 100-minutes, where we’ll perhaps never know if this was the director’s intent, or purely accidental. Jean Renoir’s THE GOLDEN COACH (1953), starring Italian actress Anna Magnani, shot at the Cinecittà Italian studio with a largely Italian cast, was shot separately in English, Italian, and French versions, while Werner Herzog’s NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979) was shot in both German and English versions. Dubbing is a common practice that avoids the expense of double shooting, but it’s impossible to get the language synchronized with the mouth movements. The point here is that double shooting into multiple languages is a rare occurrence, but parallels the practice of translating books into different languages, where Heyerdahl wrote a book in 1948 about the expedition, The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, which sold out in fifteen days before it was translated into 70 languages and sold more than 50 millions copies around the world.

If you want to know who’s responsible for the proliferation of all those Polynesian South Sea island adorned Tiki bars featuring exotic rum-flavored tropical drinks garnished with fruit and toothpicked umbrellas on top, featuring names like Zombies, Singapore Sling, Scorpion, and Mai Tai’s that sneak up on you before they knock you on your ass, not to mention indoor waterfalls and pools, plastic palm trees, fire torches, and a collection of mask carvings of various Tiki gods—well it’s this guy, Thor Heyerdahl and his mad adventure across the globe, like a veritable Richard Halliburton experience. A folk hero in his homeland, Heyerdahl was nothing if not a public relations genius, way ahead of his time in understanding the power of the media and how he could leverage his adventure into money and fame. While it’s a shame he could not be played by Klaus Kinski, with that look of demented messianic madness in his eye that he displays in Herzog’s AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), where he would rather die than be proven wrong, stubbornly risking his life and those of his crew on an unsubstantiated theory, the film stars Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen as Thor Heyerdahl, seen in the idyllic opening scenes with his wife Agnes Kittelsen from Happy Happy (Sykt Lykkelig) (2010), as they bathe naked under natural waterfalls and frolic among the natives on a Polynesian island, spending ten years there as a natural scientist. It was there that he developed his thesis that the Polynesian islands were populated largely from the East and from South America, where despite the distance, boats would be flowing with the current, rather than the prevailing theory that the islands were populated from Asia, where boats would have to struggle against the current. Heyerdahl encountered a brick wall when attempting to sell his story with the publishing houses in New York, as the prevailing scientific community found the idea preposterous, suggesting he would have to conduct the voyage himself to prove it could be done before anyone would believe him. So that’s exactly what he decided to do, calling his wife in Norway from New York to inform her he was going to have to miss Christmas with the two kids this year, as he was flying instead to South America to embark upon a voyage on a primitive raft across the Pacific Ocean to prove a point, and that he’d call her three or four months later once he’d landed. That’s the way they did it in the old days, where everything was about proving a point. So of course this dashingly handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed reincarnate of Peter O’Toole in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) shows his headstrong invincibility by accepting the challenge, running off to Peru to build his raft with all home-grown materials, while assembling a crew of 6 men, all Norwegian except one Swede, and a pet parrot.

While the raft was built using only the materials and technologies available to people in pre-Columbian times, they also brought along with them some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, where Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey. There’s a surprising amount of tension early on when the raft appears to be drifting towards the Galapagos Islands, too far north to catch the South Equatorial Current needed to carry them to their destination, also increasing doubt about whether they could actually pull this off, as any number of questions about the raft’s durability just couldn’t be answered. Heyerdahl insisted all was well in his telegraphed reports and that morale was high even as the threat of mutiny crept into his crew, led by an engineer forced to work in the refrigerator business, off on his first adventure, whose scientific queries led to Heyerdahl’s unscientific response that they would have to rely upon faith, not exactly a comforting answer. All the disasters seem to occur early on, where giant whales swim directly under their raft which could easily tip over, or erupting storms create horrific wind gales that nearly throw them all into the drink. The aforementioned engineer, bloodsoaked from carving up a captured shark, then takes a spill into the ocean with circling sharks, where the blood has driven them into a frenzy, yet he is miraculously saved by one of the other crew members who risks his own life. So there is plenty of heroism on display, but nothing expresses their collective joy of relief as the realization that they have caught the boundary current and are oncourse, as a certain idleness sets in where time ceases to matter, as Heyerdahl continuously sends a volley of telegraph messages imploring the success of the mission, turning him into an international celebrity while he was still at sea. To the ethereal music by Johan Söderqvist, there is a centerpiece spectacular shot that takes the viewer on a close-up view of the raft in the vast ocean, pulling back farther until it can still be seen below the clouds, pulling farther back until you are literally out of the stratosphere and into outer space, shifting the focus of the camera to the celestial bodies and other galaxies of the universe before returning the shot back down to the isolated raft surrounded by this immense ocean—easily the shot of the film, changing the perspective of the entire experience into something of an accomplishment that will live in time immemorial. The film was shot in eight different countries over the course of three and a half months, trying to shoot as much as possible on the open seas, most of it near Malta, minimalizing the use of a large water tank, as despite plentiful use of computer graphic effects, this strengthens the overall look of authenticity. While scientists continue to doubt Heyerdahl’s theory, and even his role as a scientist, he is one of the first modern era adventurists to capture the world’s imagination by recounting his experiences as they were happening, something even astronauts continue to do from outer space. Interestingly, on April 28, 2006, another Norwegian team, which included Heyerdahl’s grandson Olav, successfully duplicated the Kon-Tiki voyage using a similarly built raft, known as the Tangaroa Expedition, including modern navigation and communication equipment, even solar panels and computer equipment, maintaining constant postings on their website, some of which is recorded here Tangaroa Expedition English! by Fredrik Dahl on Prezi.

Kon-Tiki: movie review | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New York

Driven by crazy currents and the blue-eyed ferocity of its lead actor, Pål Sverre Hagen, this Norwegian retelling of Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Pacific-crossing adventure ought to come with a Jackass-style warning: Don’t try this at home, kids, even though you’ll want to follow in the movie’s inspiring, methodical steps. In short order, the plot throws
down a scientific gauntlet: Could Polynesia, the site of young Thor’s early anthropological studies, have been populated not by westerly Asia but by ancient sailors traveling 5,000 miles from coastal Peru? In a lushly re-created Brooklyn, a now-convinced Heyerdahl assembles his team, starting with a tubby, good-natured refrigerator salesman (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), and begins drafting raft designs on scraps of paper.

When the six-man crew casts off in buttoned-down white shirts and sturdy resolve, you might be reminded of a Duran Duran video, but give the movie some time. Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg are unusually committed to maritime mechanics, and the excitement grows as steadily as the sailors’ beards. The radio shorts out, sharks swirl menacingly (one is even dragged on deck) and waves churn their spirits and stomachs. Kon-Tiki is boys’-own adventure to an extreme degree; the fun and imaginative curiosity race neck and neck. The film’s message is sometimes clouded by sentiment, but mainly, we’re told to follow our heads and our sextants, a good thing to hear on occasion.

'Kon-Tiki' is Norway's most expensive film ever | StarTribune.com Colin Covert interviews the director, May 2, 2013

He wrote an international bestseller about his perilous ocean voyage, directed a 1951 documentary of his adventures that won Norway’s only Academy Award, and fueled the proliferation of Polynesian-themed tiki bars. Sixty-five years after his epic trip across the Pacific on the balsawood raft Kon-Tiki, the late Thor Heyerdahl remains a folk hero in his homeland.

“People regard him as a role model,” said Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, whose biographical drama “Kon-Tiki” stars Pål Hagen as the intrepid explorer. “Kind of a hero. In academic circles, he’s not a hero,” he added with a laugh.

“I would say his true genius was P.R. He understood the media and the power and money that could give him.”

Rønning leveraged his subject’s fame to raise international funding for his $16 million project, the most expensive Norwegian film ever. “Kon-Tiki” balances admiration for Heyerdahl’s courage and leadership with an awareness that globe-trotting adventurers don’t make the best scientists or family men. Norwegian actor Hagen has a glint of messianic madness in his eye that flares at times of stress. “He would rather die out there than have his theory be wrong,” Rønning said of his movie’s hero. “That, and the fact he couldn’t swim, all made for a great movie character.”

Rønning and co-director Espen Sandberg have been collaborators since they began making movies at age 10. This was their first experience shooting for a month on open seas (with Malta doubling for the South Pacific). As a further complication, they filmed English and Norwegian-language versions on alternate days.

The biggest challenge of all was the computer-generated imagery of whales and marauding sharks, he said.

“All the fish around the raft were created in the computer. The raft’s crash into the reef [at the end of its voyage] contained lots of effects. That was daunting because we had no idea how it would look. There’s over 500 effects shots. For a Scandinavian film, that’s unheard of. All that nature and adventure was such an important part of the film. He didn’t sell 50 million copies of the book because people were interested in migration theories!”

Review: Norway's Oscar-Nominated 'Kon-Tiki' Is A Fun ... - Indiewire Jessica Kiang

Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 raft trip from Peru to Polynesia, which forms the story of “Kon-Tiki,” is already the stuff of legend – particularly overseas. Heyerdahl’s own 1950 book was an international bestseller (indeed this writer remembers a battered paperback knocking around her childhood home), and the documentary he filmed during the trip itself won an Academy Award back in 1951. Which makes it a pleasing narrative to have this film, over six decades later, achieve a similar feat in getting nominated for a Foreign Language Oscar. But we have to wonder if there’s a certain sentimentality at play there (Hollywood does love a self-referential story, after all) because there is little more to “Kon-Tiki” than a fun, handsomely-mounted, old-style adventure story. And as impressive a feat as that is to achieve, especially outside of Hollywood, which kind of specialises in this sort of thing, those looking for something with more depth from this category may come away a little disappointed.

After spending ten years living as a natural scientist among the natives on a Polynesian island with his wife, conspicuously tall, blond, blue-eyed Thor Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen) has come to the conclusion that the accepted wisdom about how those islands were populated from Asia is wrong, and despite a lack of boat-building experitise, native South Americans could have drifted and sailed the 4,300 miles on rafts, following the path of the setting sun. Trying to sell his thesis to various publishers, he’s met with a stone wall until he decides to put his own life at risk, and the lives of the motley crew of friends and followers he gathers around him, by attempting to recreate the journey himself. The six men build the titular raft and set off on a journey of 101 days that sees them menaced by threats both external and internal, with their faith in each other, in Heyerdahl, his theory and the ancient Sun God Tiki all severely tested along the way while they become progressively blonder, buffer, bronzier, and way, way, beardier.

The whales and sharks, the flying fish and the glowing squid are all rendered spectacularly well, and some of the notoriously tricky water/storm sequences are as thrilling as any we’ve seen. So as a kind of Boy’s-Own thrill ride, “Kon-Tiki” fares very well, glorying in an old-fashioned and endearingly innocent way in its one-man-against-the-world narrative. But when it attempts a little more than that, the film paradoxically highlights what is really missing, and that means it falls short of really top-tier epics; hints and allusions to the psychology behind Heyerdahl’s obsessive, self-promoting and ultimately rather unlikeable, manipulative persona, are peppered throughout, but the character study is frustratingly underdeveloped. Lead actor Pål Sverre Hagen certainly looks the part in a Peter O'Toole-meets-Ryan Gosling way, but does not quite own the room the way those actors can, or the way that Heyerdahl must have, so it’s quite difficult to really relate to the supporting characters’ steadfast loyalty, let alone to Heyerdahl’s own inner turmoil. It’s commendable that they don’t want to paint him as an all-round heroic figure, however if the filmmakers want us to feel some kind of empathy for the personal toll the pursuit of this dangerous dream takes, well, the characterisation falls some way short. There is an interesting story to be told about the kind of quasi-religious attraction that certainty can exert, and that seems to be what Heyerdahl was offering, but, unlike the Pacific Ocean, this theme is simply not explored enough here. Heyerdahl remains out of the reach of our emotions, and the stakes therefore suffer.

There are other flaws too: the period settings can feel a bit anachronistic, especially in the New York sequence where, for example, the taxis, while period-specific are so blindingly clean and highly polished that they look like the lovingly-restored museum pieces that they probably are. And it is perhaps a factor in the source material too, but aside from the suspenders and fedoras there’s very little sense of where we are in history. Considering this journey happened just two years after the end of World War II, in which Norway was heavily involved, we might expect a little more context than one supporting character mentioning his role in the war one time. Similarly, the film’s sole female character has kind of a thankless task, though actress Agnes Kittelsen acquits herself well, as do all the supporting cast.

Our quibbles are, in the end, less important to the overall experience than the film’s good-natured competence in mounting the kind of old-timey tale of exploration and the pioneering spirit that we see rarely in our postmodern, deconstructionist times. And there are a few stylistic flourishes, like a lovely time ellipsis that sees us spin up through the clouds away from the tiny raft at night only to turn and fall back down to it in daytime, that point to a willingness to experiment with the strict classicism of the film’s form elsewhere. But in a category that traditionally allows Academy voters to show off their arthouse credentials, or their social awareness, “Kon-Tiki” may prove simply too lacking in both, too escapist and popcorny, to really figure in the race to the podium, especially against heavyweight competition from “Amour” in particular. However, having this film, which seems tailor-made for Hollywood, be made by Norwegian directors (the Hollywood-bound team of Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg) with a largely Scandinavian cast and crew, co-financed by countries across the region, and then to have it enjoy the kind of success it already has, is quite an achievement in itself; all wrapped up in a very enjoyable, if hardly challenging, high-seas adventure tale.

Kon-Tiki: water sims & digital sharks - FXGuide Ian Failes from FX Guide, December 28, 2012

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Kon-Tiki | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Sam Adams

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[Review] Kon-Tiki - The Film Stage Dan Mecca

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The Reel Critic.com [Lisa Minzey]

Typographical Era [Aaron Westerman]

“Kon-Tiki” is old fashioned in all the best ways - Movie Nation Roger Moore

Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]

hoopla.nu [Stuart Wilson]

Two Versions of 'Kon-Tiki' in Two Different Lanugages - NYTimes.com Larry Rohter interview the directors, April 12, 2013

The Hollywood Reporter [Sheri Linden]

Variety [Andrew Barker]

Kon-Tiki: How to transform a ripping yarn into a ho-hum checklist ... Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail

Movie review: 'Kon-Tiki' - A&E - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe

Kon-Tiki movie review - Chicago Tribune Kenneth Turan

RogerEbert.com (Donald Liebenson)

Kon-Tiki - Movies - The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Kon-Tiki (2012 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kon-Tiki (1950 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kon-Tiki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Early sound film and multiple language versions - Dubbing and ... film reference

Ronnow-Klarlund, Anders

THE EIGHTEENTH A 95

Denmark (86 mi) 1996

Clever and fresh filmmaking, made with the support of Lars von Trier’s production company, three seemingly unrelated stories all take place on one day, 5-18-93, the day of the national referendum to decide whether Denmark will join the European Union. The vote passed in favor of joining. Filmed entirely in black and white, a man “prone to violence” escapes from an insane asylum with a girl who refuses to talk, instead she listens to “The Blue Danube” on her walkman and loves to roller skate. They accidentally run over a young girl on her 8^th birthday who is running away from two boys who lured her with apples into a barn, while a businessman tries to make a 5 million dollar deal with some Italians by using call girls as business associates, recognized by some of the other men as hookers, causing the Italians to get into a fight, ultimately locked up in prison. The businessman gets the call girls, while eventually the little girl, who represents the hope and future of the European Union, dies.

Roonaraine, Rupert

THE TERROR AND THE TIME

Guyana (70 mi) 1979

Terror And The Time A New Guyanese Cinema, by Bert Hogenkamp from Jump Cut, December 1981

Terror And The Time Poetry as Weapon, by John Hess from Jump Cut, December 1981

Rupert Roopnaraine interview by Monica Jardine and Andaiye from Jump Cut, December 1981

Victor Jara Collective Update Lewanne Jones from Jump Cut, December 1981

Rosales, Jaime

THE HOURS OF THE DAY D 55

Spain (110 mi) d: Jaime Rosales

A Spanish remake of the Virginia Woolf story? Actually, it’s as if this first time filmmaker has only just discovered Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMANN, or Fassbinder’s WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? This film simply follows the same format of establishing normal habits and routine for 110 minutes, where, really, nothing at all happens until around minutes 40 to 45, and again around 95 to 100, when the lead character goes beserko. Other than that, you could come in and out of this humorless film and not miss a thing. But while Akerman and Fassbinder’s works are radical social commentaries, where, in response to the pressures of society, the individuals break out of their suffocating, repressive routines, this film’s leading male lives in a world where everybody’s basically nice to him, where he’s surrounded by caring people, where he’s basically just bored with himself. So the film makes no sense other than to copy other artist’s works – my least favorite film of the fest and a good film to walk out on.

SOLITARY FRAGMENTS (La Soledad)

Spain (135 mi) 2007

review: La soledad (Solitary Fragments) Boyd van Hoeij from European-Films

Spanish director Jaime Rosales presented his second film La soledad (Solitary Fragments), his fully formed meditation on contemporary life and loneliness, in the Un certain regard section here at Cannes. Working with split screens, a rigidly controlled sense of composition and a fabulous cast of unknowns, Rosales’s film is one of the most mesmerizing ways to spend two hours on the Croisette this year, though the film is unlikely to become an overnight boxoffice sensation anytime soon. Further festival exposure and limited arthouse engagements are more likely, though further exposure would be deserved.

The story offers two strands: one follows Antonia (Petra Martínez), the mother of three grown daughters and the other Adela (Paloma Mozo), mother of a small boy who just celebrated his first birthday. The stories only overlap in that Adela moves into the same shared apartment as Inès (Miriam Correa), who is one of Adela’s daughters Their problems are the problems of daily life: finding a place to live or finding a job, money trouble, sibling rivalry, overcoming disease or loss and coping with one’s children or siblings.

For about a third of the film, actions are shown in split screen or what the director refers to as "polyvision" (recalling the technique invented for Abel Gance’s influential 1927 classic Napoléon). Here it consists of dividing the widescreen image into two halves, showing contemporary events from two different angles on the left and the right of the screen, with the cameras often placed at a ninety degree angle and encompassing more than one space (for example a kitchen and the dining room next to it, with the characters’ movement from one to the other showing how they are connected).

In this age of reality TV sensationalism, the split screen footage at first seem to recall the prying camera images from the Big Brother house, though La soledad’s story of several women trying to get by is so devoid of sensationalism and grounded in everyday life that any hint of sensationalism evaporates quickly and makes way for something more subtle and disturbing.

When a character leaves one room and goes into the other, occupying one space in favour of the other while both spaces continue to be shown on screen, it amplifies the physical presence of the character by also showing the absence of it elsewhere, which is an apt visual metaphor for Rosales’s story of people as islands or separate entities that might want to connect but never really do.

La soledad radiates with the intensity yet the normalit of daily life as few films do. It is Big Brother without the sensationalism, a soap without the artifice and a documentary without the wobbly camerawork and dark interiors. Remarkably, Rosales’s rigid sense of composition and impeccable attention to technical detail (the images, the sound design, the elliptical editing) actually help to locate it in an everyday reality rather than elevate it into the realms of art and artifice.

THE DREAM AND THE SILENCE

Spain France (110 mi) 2012

The Dream And The Silence Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily

Spanish director Jamie Rosales is determined to let the cards fall as they may in The Dream And The Silence (Sueno y silencio)- his actors improvise every scene, he only shoots one take, he’s opted for black-and-white film stock using available light, etc. These “liberating” rules can prove to be just as much of a cage as any other cinematic convention, however, and despite moments of raw power, The Dream And The Silence struggles to break out of its aesthetic to make a sustained connection with the audience.

There is much to admire in Rosales’ (The Hours of the Day, La Soledad) uncompromising, Ozu-influenced worldview. A total lack of expository dialogue, for example, puts the viewer properly and uncomfortably in the right place as an uninvited interloper on a family tragedy (it takes almost an hour to be fully certain of events, which have a tendency to jump, and relationships, which are never explained).

And stylistically, Rosales sticks firmly to shooting on 35mm black-and-white film stock using available light and ambient sound with the exception of two short bursts of colour. The results aren’t particularly pretty, with bleached-out foregrounds and unsatisfying depth-of-field. Actors wander off camera and their disembodied voices carry on with the scene. The camera views them straight-on

It’s interesting that the story can still emerge from these self-imposed bonds to flash moments of truth and power, but Rosales’ rigor could deter mainstream and even arthouse audiences, marking this as a festival and specialty treat. Galleries may also take note: Rosales collaborated with one of Spain’s greatest living artists, Miquel Barcelo, on The Dream And The Silence (the artist is shown in a brief prologue and epilogue and his work can be spotted hanging in scenes). Barcelo’s work with Inaki Lacuestra on the equally experimental The Double Steps won the top prize at San Sebastian last year.

The success of The Dream And The Silence depends on how much the viewer wants to fight to be involved in it - Rosales’ fragmentary narrative isn’t particularly welcoming to a casual approach. Oriol (Oriol Rosello) and Yolanda (Yolanda Galocha) work as an architect and Spanish teacher respectively in Paris where they enjoy a close family relationship with their two young daughters, Alba (Alba Rose Montet) and Celia (Celia Correas).

Oriol, who is under pressure at work from his British boss, takes Celia for a holiday in Spain’s Delta del Ebro, a national park in Tarragona where her grandparents, Jaume and Laura (Jaume Terradas and Laura Latorre) live. There’s a terrible accident.

Rosales’ film gathers power as individual family members confront what has happened and their resulting grief. The scenes are improvised by the actors and there’s a great sense of truth in monologues dealing with loss. In the closing sequences in particular, Rosales’ stylistic choices finally knit together to make a retrospectively strong case for his approach.

The Dream And The Silence’s deliberate non-style is as much a part of this film as anyone in it, and cinematographer Oscar Duran must have worked under severe pressure to produce this picture. One can’t help but wonder whether some of the editing choices (there are varying levels of quality) came about because of lack of alternate material. Whatever the case, The Dream and the Silence draws further attention to the new wave of uncompromising film-making which seems to be emerging from Catalunya at the moment.

The Dream and the Silence: Cannes Review - The Hollywood ... Deborah Young from The Hollywood Reporter, May 24, 2012

The loss of a child and its devastating effect on a young mother are painstakingly dissected in The Dream and the Silence, an art film shot in uncompromising black and white that keeps the audience at a cold arm’s length, despite its potentially moving subject. Following his much-admired The Hours of the Day about a serial killer and two tales involving the victims of Basque terrorism, Bullet in the Head and Solitary Fragments, Spanish director Jaime Rosales continues his exploration of the way unexpected acts of violence brutally alter the course of human lives. This film, like its predecessors not a taste for the many, should find much the same committed supporters and in any case will be difficult to see outside a festival context.

Opening and closing shots of an artist at work sets the grim tone, as he expertly sketches monstrous lizards hanging from a series of crosses. This scene rhymes with a man (Oriol Rosello) reading a children’s picture book to his two young daughters. That leads to the girls’ happy game-playing and then to mother Yolanda’s (Yolanda Galocha) work as a schoolteacher, and his job as an architect. Everything is shot preferably in ill-lit rooms, at the end of hallways and through half-open doors, usually in distanced long shot. A visit to Oriol’s parents’ country home introduces a talkative grandmother (Laura Latorre) whose restless banter contrasts with her husband’s (Jaume Terradas) dignified silence. For a long time nothing much is happening and the feeling of directorial self-indulgence is tangible.

The accident that marks the turning point in the story takes place off-screen, denoted simply as sunlight flashing off the front window of a car. Rosales’ and Enric Rufus’ screenplay maddeningly refuses to explain what happened, why Yolanda and her daughter Alba are tensely waiting in the hospital, or even who is being buried in the cemetery. Counting the characters, one can narrow down the possibilities; meanwhile the audience’s emotional involvement in the tragedy is totally and deliberately undercut.

Recovering from his injuries, Oriol can’t remember the accident. Worse, he can’t remember his dead child, leaving Yolanda in an atrocious limbo of lonely mourning. (The audience, too, will have trouble remembering which of the barely seen daughters is no longer present.) The rest of the film mostly follows her pain as she tries to return to her job while coming to terms with grief. She refuses to talk it through with her husband, becoming sarcastic and bitter when he tries to get through to her, as though she blamed him but won’t say it.

It’s a simple story shot in a complex, often frustrating way. Even the stony naturalistic acting refuses to help pull viewers in. Sometimes cinematographer Oscar Duran’s black and white images are beautiful to watch, as in a rare tracking shot through a sunny park full of families and kids playing. But no easy solutions are offered, and the viewer steps away with fiercely little comfort, particularly when those crosses appear again on the artist’s canvas.

Rose, Bernard

ivansxtc B 89

USA (94 mi) 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | ivansxtc. (1999) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, August 2002

Rosen, Peter

WHO GETS TO CALL IT ART? B+ 90

USA (80 mi) 2005

A multi-dimension look back at art curator Henry Geldzahler, who introduced American Pop art to the Metropolitan Art Museum in the 60’s, featuring plenty of talking points from several of the New York artists from that period who were shown in the foreground in the present, while the background was largely a moving canvas of archival film footage of those same artists thirty or forty years ago at work, or exhibiting their work, or just goofing around, while underneath it all was a constant stream of music from that period, featuring the likes of the Velvet Underground, CAN, Eric Dolphy, and the Monks. Geldzahler himself was from Belgium, where his entire family was in the diamond industry, so he broke from tradition to establish his own niche, which happened to be recognizing the value and importance of a new movement of American art that most established art critics easily dismissed. Breaking from a movement of more solemn and introspective abstract expressionism, which was darker and exhibited little humor, these young artists were reflective of their turbulent times when radical social change first took root in mainstream America, much of it spawned from the effects of the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War, which basically purged the expressionist sins of the past and opened up an entirely new playing field.

Geldzahler was fortunate to find two art ambassadors that introduced him and included him in their world, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Stella narrated a good part of the film and offered insightful glimpses of how Geldzahler (Call me Henry...just Henry) was accepted by all the artists, as he wasn’t himself an artist, so he posed no threat to anyone. Additionally, Henry had an amazing gift at being able to immediately assess this new art, to choose the good from the bad, where history has shown through the passage of time that he knew what he was talking about. He was right about art. Some of the film simply showed some of the blazing colors and outstanding imagery that reflected those times, much like leafing through page after page of an art book, identifying the name of the work and the artist.

Since art has been radically reduced or even eliminated from the public school classrooms, this film serves much like an art appreciation class as seen through the eyes of the one historic art curator who was fortunate enough to discover the significance of this new creative period in art and then in one mammoth exhibition, gasp, remove all of the European art from the walls of the Metropolitan Art Museum and replace the entire museum with his own selections of New York artists like Stella and Warhol, or David Hockney, Willem de Koonig, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollack, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Franceso Clemente, James Rosenquist or Mark di Suvero. One of them indicated he had 15 paintings exhibited, and many were thirty feet long, so the gigantic expanse of the entire museum was utilized to the fullest extent to display what was at that time largely unseen artists, entitled New York Painting and Sculpture 1940 - 1970. The New York Times art critics, following the lead of many disgruntled artists who were not included in this exhibition, skewered Geldzahler and the exhibition, calling it a colossal failure, belittling much of it as third rate art, but what they were really saying, according to Stella, was that they missed the point. This was a historic exhibition of great art, which reflected a never before expressed radical optimism of a new era, which was, of course, quickly quashed by the current trends of cynical conservatism that wished to eradicate much of that newfound openness. But in the world of art, once the doors are open, they never really close. They remain a part of the public record, open to anyone who wishes to see for themselves.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan – film writer

www.jonathanrosenbaum.com official website

Chicago Reader - Profile

On Film Criticism Girish

Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1000 Essential Films - Film Diary listed by decade, also listing Rosenbaum’s Top 100 films, from Also Life Like

SCREENVILLE :: Rosenbaum's top1000 :: TO SEE 1000 best movies available in DVD format, listed by year and by director

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top 100 - Film Diary in chronological order, from Also Life Like

Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1000 Essential Films - Movies List on MUBI

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006 compiled by Eric C. Johnson, the Second Most Dangerous Man in the Universe

Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum bibliography Articles by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Chicago Reader Feature: Jonathan Rosenbaum's Alternative 100 Top ... List-o-Mania: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love American Movies, June 25, 1998

Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media ... - Senses of Cinema “Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See,” by Jonathan Rosenbaum, book review by Steve Erickson from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000

Interview with Rosenbaum on Orson Welles by Lawrence French from Wellesnet, Pt I (Fall/1998), Pt II (January/2003)

CineScene interview Interview by Josh Timmerman (2003)

Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the media limit ... - Screening the Past Richard Armstrong reviews Rosenbaum’s book, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See, from Screening the Past, June 27, 2003

The House Next Door blog interview by Jeremiah Kipp, October 11, 2006

2007 video interview - Unseen Orson Welles - a Conversation With Jonathan Rosenbaum (70 mi)

Junket wars (Rosenbaum) Movie Wars. How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2000, Excerpt from Chapter 3 at Screenville, August 10, 2010

SCREENVILLE: American Isolationism 1 (Rosenbaum) Excerpt from Chapter 7, Pt. 1 at Screenville, August 26, 2010

American Isolationism (Rosenbaum) part 2 Excerpt from Chapter 7, Pt. 2 at Screenville, September 1, 2010

The Cine-Files » Jonathan Rosenbaum Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Spring 2012

a home designed by Wright for his parents Jonathan Rosenbaum’s childhood Frank Lloyd Wright home in Alabama

Jonathan Rosenbaum (film critic) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosenberg, Stuart

COOL HAND LUKE

USA (126 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

By the end the film takes itself much too seriously, as the director really doesn't know what to do with all these quirky side characters, turning it into a religious parable, quite repetitive, also losing every ounce of humor by the end, and there's plenty of it in this movie. However, it’s still one of the great irascible, non-conformist characters of all time, and an excellent portrait of the non-conformist era where people felt driven to challenge old-school systems that didn’t work. Despite the brutal physical punishment inflicted upon the man, this is one of Newman’s most endearing characters.

Time Out review Tom Milne

A caustically witty look at the American South and its still-surviving chain gangs, with Newman in fine sardonic form as the boss-baiter who refuses to submit and becomes a hero to his fellow-prisoners. Underlying the hard-bitten surface is a slightly uncomfortable allegory which identifies Newman as a Christ figure (and reminds one that Rosenberg once directed the awful, Moral Rearmament-ish Question 7). But this scarcely detracts from the brilliantly idiosyncratic script (by Donn Pearce from his own novel) or from Conrad Hall's glittering camerawork (which survives Rosenberg's penchant for the zoom lens and shots reflected in sun-glasses).

Cool Hand Luke - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

During his reign as a top box office star in the sixties, Paul Newman made his mark in films featuring rebellious, anti-establishment characters. Cool Hand Luke (1967) is a perfect example and one of his most audience-pleasing movies. Unlike the characters he played in The Hustler or Hud, Luke is actually based on a real-life character, Donald Graham Garrison, who was a convicted safecracker. In the course of his career, Garrison stole between $4 and $5 million dollars. Garrison's exploits inspired a novel by Donn Pearce, another ex-convict, who combined details from his own incarceration with Garrison's story to create a compelling anti-hero. Pearce even makes a brief cameo in the film as an ex-con named Sailor.

Cool Hand Luke was set in the Deep South but actually filmed on location in Stockton, California. While the movie painted an authentic visual portrait of life on a chain gang, it was individual scenes that earned Cool Hand Luke a cult reputation: Strother Martin as the head jailer uttering the famous line, "What we got here is a failure to communicate," Newman's egg-eating contest, and the brutal boxing match between Newman and his fellow in-mate George Kennedy. The movie makes for particularly interesting viewing today due to its eclectic and fascinating supporting cast - Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Wayne Rogers (from the TV series M.A.S.H.), Ralph Waite (from the TV series The Waltons), Joe Don Baker, Anthony Zerbe, and Richard Davalos, who appeared with James Dean in East of Eden.

The biggest surprise in Cool Hand Luke, however, is George Kennedy's breakout performance as Dragline, the hulking chain gang leader who at first despises Luke and then comes to admire him. Kennedy, who had previously been typecast mostly as heavies, walked off with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the film. The other Academy Award nominations were for Best Actor (Newman lost to Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score.

Jerry's Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts]

Films are the most important of all the arts. They are the most expressive, the most engaging, and the most debated. The most important aspect of this art form is the fact that it is the great mile marker of our times. A film can put a time stamp on the era in which it is made and forever express how people saw their world and their society at that precise moment. They can express attitudes about times and places as no other medium can.

I think In the Heat of the Night is intended to be such a film. This crime drama, about the efforts of a white Mississippi sheriff and black Chicago police detective, to solve the murder of a local businessman, had good intentions but is not quite as challenging as it might have been. The strength of the film lies in the performances by Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier, who both give spendid performances in an otherwise ordinary film. Both actors were nominated but Steiger took home the Oscar. I am not really sure why, his character isn't all that special and hardly changes over the course of the film.

In the Heat of the Night was intended to be a mirror of its time, but I think Cool Hand Luke does a much better job. Released in the same year as the "summer of love," it also came out in the midst of one of the most violent periods of the 20th century, when the images of violence between protesters and police were becoming an uncomfortable routine. This film correctly displays the way most Americans saw their country and felt about the authority that was running it. It features Paul Newman's single greatest performance and one of the most painful ordeals for a single actor. Paul Newman not only deserved an Oscar, I think he deserved a medal. I can't think of another character in movie history that has gone through more grueling physical punishment and psychological torture.

The film's opening image stays with me. We see a close-up of a green traffic light that turns red, signaling the stranglehold that the law will have on our hero. We first see Luke Jackson, drunk and committing the childish crime of knocking the heads off parking meters. Thrown into a work camp, he immediately falls under the thumb of the Captain (Strother Martin), a man small in stature with the voice of a sweet old granny and a famous observation about Luke's misbehavior that "What we got here is failure to communicate," and the reminder to his men that "Some men, you just can't reach." Luke is addicted to his own misbehavior and the rest of the film becomes a tug-of-war between he and the captain over his seeming addiction to resisting authority.

Life in the prison camp is brilliantly established in the landscape. This is the south in the scorching heat as the men work and are covered in sweat and dirt. They do road work, they dig ditches, they put fresh tar on the pavement, and cinematographer Conrad Hall has moments where he turns the camera up toward the sun and back down to the glistening sweat on the inmate's bodies. Escape is deterred by an outsized Boss Godfrey (Morgan Woodward), who never speaks and never takes off his reflective sunglasses. He has a fearsome mystique and his rifle is always at hand.

The prisoners are lorded over by Dragline (Supporting Actor winner George Kennedy), a large imposing inmate who ends up in the boxing ring with Luke when the new man challenges his authority. In a standard drama, Luke would have been beaten and then at the last moment, come back and uppercut his opponent, knocking him cold, but that's not the point here. Luke is beaten unmercifully by Dragline but he keeps getting up and keeps taking more punishment. His refusal to be down but not out earns him Dragline's respect and the respect of his fellow inmates who admire his tenacity.

The point becomes Luke's struggle against authority. He escapes several times only to be dragged back to the camp to be put to work doing harder and harder tasks. Where is he escaping to? What will he do when he gets there? I don't think that's the point, I think the point is how much this man can take. Time and again he is beaten, time and again he is forced to do harder and harder work. Why? Is he addicted to misdeeds? Or is he addicted to the punishment? Does he see himself at a redeemer? We know that he can never win, that he can never escape and that the same routine will occur over and over again. I think Luke is addicted to seeing just how far he can go, proving to himself that he can be down but never out.

Much had been made by film historians of Luke being a figure that represents Christ with all his suffering and his attempts to redeem himself. In the end, he is holed up in a small church and asks God if he has been forsaken. I don't really see the connection to Christ; I think Luke represents those in America in the late 1960s who resisted authority, resisted the cruel and the corrupt and were beaten and hit with water cannons for their trouble. They could never win but they could not back down from a system that seemed to be trying to devalue them.

I think Luke is also challenging his maker. At the end he cries out to God, "It's beginnin' to look like you got things fixed so I can't never win out. Inside, outside, all them rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Just where am I supposed to fit in? Ol' Man, I gotta tell ya. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it's beginnin' to get to me. When does it end?" I think many people at that time were asking the same question.

The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]

Cool Hand Luke (1967) - Articles - TCM.com

Arctic Shores Contemporary Reviews (Bob Miller) review

Slant Magazine review Bill Weber

filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]

Cool Hand Luke | Nothing is Written Groggy Dundee

DVD Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review

UTK Daily Beacon [Patrick Corcoran] 1967 embodies rebellion, innovation, an essay that incorporates the Velvet Underground

Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) dvd review

DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Deluxe Edition]

DVD Talk (Paul Mavis) dvd review [4/5] [Deluxe Edition]

DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Deluxe Edition] Colin Jacobson

DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [9/10] Blu-Ray version

Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, Blu-Ray version

HighDefDiscNews [Justin Sluss] Blu-Ray version

dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]

Prisonmovies.net [Eric Penumbra]

George Chabot's Review of Cool Hand Luke also seen here: Viewpoints

Prison Flicks review revealing the entire movie

Three Movie Buffs review [4/4]

filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [53/100]

Walter Frith retrospective

Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review

Brad Laidman: Elvis Needs Boats review

Movie-Vault.com (Carl Langley) review [10/10]

Anthony's Film Review

'Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand' - a review by GLake

The Popkorn Junkie review [4/4] Billy Ray

Classic Film Guide

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B-] Ken Tucker

Region 4 [Bill Craske]

Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review

Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] December 3, 1967

Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] July 10, 2008

DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze

WUSA

USA (115 mi) 1970 ‘Scope

Newman plays an alcoholic right wing radio nut who is pushed even further right by rich and powerful zealots behind the scenes who own the station. Newman typically plays a drifter who's simply happy to have a job, who with the prodding of Joanne Woodward and Geraldine Page, eventually develops a conscious to stand up to the rat bastards who dupe and manipulate the public while hiding behind American flags and fake patriotism, all while conspiring to pad their own corporate coffers with criminal behavior. The film was shot in New Orleans and showed an untypically progressive view of blacks at the time, where Anthony Perkins as a white census taker who's supposed to count how many blacks are living in segregated black areas gets a mouthful of distrustful angry black sentiment that was suprising to hear even in those days and is mercilessly ridiculed whenever he attempts to enter the black community to "do his job." One of the few early films that was actually a discussion on race relations and political hypocrisy.

All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]

Of all his work, this is Newman's personal favourite. It's easy to see why. Rosenberg's film is the kind of liberal soapbox upon which stars of Newman's league occasionally like to position themselves - so they feel less bad about the insane, selfish world that is their profession. A semi-sophisticated political picture about a drifter who takes a job with an aggressively right-wing radio station in New Orleans, where he helps them do down their greatest foes: welfare dependants, single mothers and other lost sinners. An interesting subject, but one which Rosenberg uses mainly to congratulate his audience for being so enlightened as to watch it.

Paul Newman served as co-producer of this allegorical drama and stars as Rheinhardt, a opportunistic drifter who ends up in New Orleans and hits up his old friend Farley (Laurence Harvey), a con man-turned-phony preacher, for a job. Farley is able to get Rheinhardt hired on as an announcer at a local radio station, WUSA, but the station is a right-wing propaganda mill that devotes its air time to venomous tirades against political and social progress. Rheinhardt is happy to be making decent money, and he makes the friendly acquaintance of a local working girl, Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), so he refuses to look his gift horse in the mouth. However, when he finds out that WUSA is actually involved in shadowy political actions, he is at a loss for what to do, especially after a naïve and troubled social worker (Anthony Perkins) is tricked into starting a race riot. Robert Stone wrote the screenplay, adapted from his novel A Hall of Mirrors.

User reviews from imdb Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

Perhaps because the drama is so overwrought, Newman's acute underplaying is effective… Rheinhardt is his most thorough cynic: a failure at marriage and as a musician, he's become a wandering, alcoholic opportunist, so spineless and corrupt he thinks nothing of taking a job as announcer for WUSA… At last—a Newman character who's abandoned all ideals, ambitions and principles, who concentrates exclusively on surviving at all costs…

He's even worse than "Hud," because he realizes his corruption but persists… In fact, he uses his self-knowledge to pretend superiority—to laugh secretly at the Neo-Fascists, while working for them… He acts cynically and viciously toward liberal Do-Gooders because presumably he "knows the score," although he really envies their idealism; and he rises above it all to a liquor-soaked detachment… His only ability is the put-on—once the essence of Harper's charm, now exposed as the weapon of a destructive mind…

Rheinhardt's first appearance—he drifts into New Orleans, unshaven, tired, defeated, broke—is like Fast Eddie's after his loss to Fats… Like Eddie, he picks up a despairing, fallen woman, Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), a former hooker who, like Sarah, is physically and emotionally scarred… As always, Woodward flawlessly portrays the fragile, easily hurt woman who is wary of Newman, but who ends up giving him more affection than he can return… They have some tender scenes, but with her, as with everyone else, he's most1y indifferent and uninvolved…

"WUSA" suffers from conversations that sound like speeches, heavy-handed direction, and a paradoxical reluctance really to meet the issues head-on…

Movie Review - Wusa - Screen: Allusive 'WUSA':Newman Stars in Tale ... Roger Greenspun from The New York Times

Booze in his thermos, a garment bag slung over his shoulder, out of the morning strolls Paul Newman, itinerant radio announcer, to offer his services to WUSA, patriotic hate station broadcasting from New Orleans.

To Newman comes Joanne Woodward, a wandering harlot with a heart of gold, a loving nature, a carved-up face, a certain vulnerability, and a fund of moral rectitude deep enough to float a generation of movie whores. And to them both comes Tony Perkins, shy social worker engaged among the black poor in a mysterious research project—which he learns too late is a fraud designed to discredit welfare, a fraud perpetrated by Pat Hingle, power-mad master of WUSA.

Thus Stuart Rosenberg's "WUSA," which opened yesterday at the Penthouse and Plaza theaters, sets the stage for what it clearly intends as a major understanding of social forces at work in America—reactionary social forces, and in the South.

If it were an ordinary bad movie (and it is a very bad movie), "WUSA" might, in spite of the distinguished names, and less distinguished presence, of its leading actors, be dismissed with no more than a nod to the tension between Rosenberg's ponderously emphatic direction, and Robert Stone's ponderously allusive screenplay. I suspect Stone wins out, for "WUSA" feels more like poor theater than poor moviemaking—so, that it continually suggests a failed version of "The Balcony," even though it strives to fall short of "The Manchurian Candidate."

But at least in its ambitions, "WUSA" is not an ordinary bad movie. For in its climax, a huge white-power rally sponsored by WUSA, it means to hold a mirror up to middle America, to show the hate behind the innocence, the chaos implicit in the call to law and order.

So, while Perkins stalks the auditorium catwalks with high-powered rifle, like the shade of Laurence Harvey (who is also in this movie, but in another role), Newman prepares to purge himself, to tell the country what it is like it is, when all hell breaks loose after the firing of the would-be assassin's bullet.

In this sequence, during which Newman explains Vietnam to a panic-ridden, rioting mass of the thin-lipped pinch-faced silent majority, "WUSA" has its crucial image, and, presumably, its rational. But in this sequence it displays most brazenly the utter gratuitousness of all its images, the bad faith that informs its self-righteous view of Southern demagoguery, the poverty not of mainstream America but of its own ideas about mainstream America.

Despite its obsession with collecting evidence, and its handy school of pseudo-documentary, "WUSA" fights unreal battles with an unseen enemy. Lacking either the grace of art of the vitality of guerrilla theater, it can offer only the coarsest nourishment—and only to the elaborately self-deceived.

User reviews from imdb Author: Tom May (joycean_chap@hotmail.com) from United Kingdom

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dsolgoo-net from Canada

eFilmCritic.com review [2/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine

TV Guide which reveals the entire movie

POCKET MONEY

USA (102 mi) 1972

What we're gonna to do is walk right through that door. —Leonard (Lee Marvin)

Now Leonard. —Jim Kane (Paul Newman)

Pocket Money, with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, is surprisingly good, perhaps the best directed of Rosenberg’s work with Newman, unusually low key for films of that era. Terrence Malick helped write the screenplay!! Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider, That Cold Day in the Park, Five Easy Pieces, New York New York) did the memorable photography. One other familiar face in all these movies with Newman is Strother Martin, who shows up like Henry Gibson does in Altman flicks, usually with comical effect. Rosenberg is just not a skilled director, and one must lay the blame at his feet for why such well written films that he worked on didn't turn out better.

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [3.5/4]

Third of the Rosenberg/Newman collaborations, and a wry, leisurely relief after the heavyweight experiences of Cool Hand Luke and WUSA. The lazily incongruous character studies of naive Newman, hard-drinking, slow-witted Marvin, and a strong support cast, come from a script by Terrence Malick, revving up on this and the equally off-the-wall Gravy Train for his own Badlands; while the barest bones of plot (the ill-suited pair stumble through Mexico on a crooked cattle-dealing assignment) are down to the source novel, JPS Brown's Jim Kane.

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: michael swindle (dallasvaughnmichaels) from United States

Pocket Money is one great film. If you have been to Mexico and understand the people , Pocket Money shows the underbelly of Mexican business dealings and sociological aspects of almost "old west" life. Newmans character is almost HUDDISH. I watch the film over and over. One of my favorite scenes is when Newman and " Leonard" confront Strother Martin and Stretch Russell in the hotel room and Newman throws the TV out the window. Another memorable scene is when, around the campfire, Marvin toys with some old 38 pistol. Throughout the film with Newman's constant " Now Leonard" line makes them seem so tied together as brothers from different mothers. It reminds me of the relationship between a friend and I in Vietnam in 68; nagging, griping and yet constantly trusting and working together.

Pocket Money is, in addition to being an excellent film, an example of a couple interesting things. First, it’s a 1970s character study, which is a different genre than what currently passes for a character study (if there are character studies at all anymore, since Michael Mann and Wes Anderson stopped doing them). The 1970s character study (Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is a good example of another) works in a kind of short-hand with the viewer. While the first act of Pocket Money takes maybe twenty minutes, Paul Newman’s character is fully established in the first five. Paul Newman’s a movie star, so there’s an expectation of him and Pocket Money breaks that expectation, but then sets him up again... in about those five minutes. Maybe six. There’s no established goal to these films (more modern character studies add a goal, something to give the story some drama). Pocket Money is following some cowboy, who isn’t too bright, but is amiable. The film never raises a single expectation of what’s going to come next. I can’t imagine what the trailer must have looked like.

Second (I almost forgot--not really), Terrence Malick wrote the screenplay. Pocket Money would have been his highest profile work at that point, followed by Badlands the next year. Obviously, Badlands looks and sounds different from the rest of Malick’s work, but Pocket Money sounds a lot like Badlands. This Malick is the one who still enjoys dialogue for dialogue’s sake, who likes to make people laugh. Since the film co-stars Lee Marvin, who delivers Malick’s comic lines (Newman’s got plenty of comic lines and a few of the exchanges sound a lot like Lucky Number Slevin of all films) with his gravelly, earthy voice, they are a lot of great comedic moments in the film.

Stuart Rosenberg directed Pocket Money. He directed a number of other Newman films, Cool Hand Luke being their most famous collaboration. Actually, he seems to have replaced Martin Ritt--Newman did a number of films with both directors and when Ritt stops, Rosenberg starts. Whatever. Rosenberg’s impressive. He distances the viewer from the actors at the right times and he pulls them in at the right times. Pocket Money’s got a great supporting cast--Strother Martin, Wayne Rogers and Hector Elizondo--and Rosenberg knows how to use them.

Since DVD’s advent and AMC’s full commercialization, a number of films have fallen to the dust. I was just thinking this morning about the difference between DVD enthusiasts and film enthusiasts. A DVD enthusiast is passive, he or she takes what is available. A film enthusiast has to look around, has to find things. Pocket Money is no longer particularly hard to find (it just aired on INHD, so there’s a beautiful print of it--it has great Laszlo Kovacs cinematography--for the someday DVD) and I hope people try to see it. While it’s never as outstanding as the first twenty minutes, it’s an excellent film.

Loose Change(s): Pocket Money and the “Post ... - Senses of Cinema Adam Bingam, April 22, 2004

DVD Verdict-The Paul Newman Collection [Brendan Babish]

User reviews from imdb Author: Stephen Johnson (stepjohn@mindspring.com) from USA

User reviews from imdb Author: bobbobwhite from san ramon ca

User reviews from imdb Author: whitecargo from Philadelphia, USA

User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico, USA

Classic Film Guide review

Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review

DVDBeaver dvd review Paul W. Tooze

THE DROWNING POOL

USA (108 mi) 1975 ‘Scope

You can tell from the credit sequence—when Paul Newman takes four minutes to execute a simple expository gag—that this Stuart Rosenberg sequel to Harper is likely to be an interminable drag. And the opener is really the high point of an alleged thriller that wastes the talents of Newman, Joanne Woodward, Murray Hamilton, and Tony Franciosa, and telegraphs all its narrative twists with the subtlety of a Chicago building inspector explaining how to avoid a violation.

The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [2.5/4]

Newman, playing Ross Macdonald's private eye for the second time (the first was in Harper), embarks on a Deep South excursion through broads, nymphet daughters, twitchy cops, hookers, hoods, and gangsters of a more refined but dangerous sort. As so often with Macdonald, it's the corruption of rich families that is exposed: dominated by a grotesque mother figure (Browne) who is at least morally responsible for their sins, both weak and strong are warped by perversions. What matters in this type of film is not so much the plot as the way in which an atmosphere is created. Unfortunately, Rosenberg directs flatly, hopping from one set piece to the next, disjointedly throwing characters of varying interest across Newman's path, while the latter - in his coarsest performance yet - remains content to wisecrack and ham outrageously. Murray Hamilton scores as the villain, however, and the title sequence offers some sort of compensation.

The Drowning Pool is a strange sequel. Not only doesn't it continue Harper's attempt to make PIs hip and modern (more hip than modern, actually), it's also doesn't seem like the same character. In Drowning Pool, Newman's Harper is the standard 1970s Newman character. He's sick of the world, but he can't quite give up on it. And even though Drowning Pool has a familiar cast, it doesn't have the Technocolor glow Harper did. When the film started, I noticed there was nothing going on for Newman in the film, it was all about his exploration of the events around him. It all works out beautifully in the end. It's like a Chandler set in the modern day, without drawing attention to the time between the novel being written and the film being produced. It's a rather simple mystery, the kind Hollywood made all the time in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and have always been the standard for mystery novels. (They're too expensive for Hollywood to make any more and probably even in the 1970s... except Drowning Pool had Newman and he was the biggest or second biggest star in the world in the 1970s).

As a mystery, it's not particularly surprising. Detective stories like this one--in that Chandler vein--aren't so much about the surprising motive or the identity of the killer, but about the detective's adventures forcing his way through the case. In The Drowning Pool, Newman's surrounded by interesting people to interact with. The film's got a number of great performances: Murray Hamilton's fantastic as a crazy oil baron (crazy as in criminally insane, not ha ha funny crazy), Gail Strickland's great as his wife, Andrew Robinson is good. The best performance--besides Newman, who's perfect at this world weary thing--is Anthony Franciosa. His character goes through the most change and Franciosa just gets better throughout. Joanne Woodward's good, though she seems like she belongs in a different movie, not just more serious, but one centered around her. The only bad performances are Melanie Griffith and Richard Jaeckel. Griffith's limp, basically repeating her performance from Night Moves, only with more to do and she can't handle it. Jaeckel's just bad.

The Drowning Pool's greatest asset, however, is the production quality. Stuart Rosenberg's got some amazing shots, one after the other--though I'm not thrilled by the editor--and the way Gordon Willis shoots Louisiana is something particularly special. Whoever did the sound design--maybe Hal Barns (it's hard to tell from IMDb)--did an amazing job.

It all comes together very nicely. The Drowning Pool, as a mystery, isn't rewarding in that sudden, rousing way. But a bunch of people who knew what they were doing put together a film and they did a pretty damn good job.

The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] Newspaper print review, July 14, 1975

DVD Verdict-The Paul Newman Collection [Brendan Babish]

The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review

… he moved like a man whose conscience was clear, or lacking. Max Cairnduff on Macdondald’s novel from Pechorin’s Journal, June 15, 2010

Looking for Lew (part two) Nicolas Pillai from Squeezegut Alley, July 13, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 1 Chad’s Incredible Blog, July 25, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 2 Chad’s Incredible Blog, July 27, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 3 Chad’s Incredible Blog, July 29, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 4 Chad’s Incredible Blog, August 2, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 5 Chad’s Incredible Blog, August 5, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 6 Chad’s Incredible Blog, August 14, 2010

Ross Macdonald, Part 7 Chad’s Incredible Blog, August 16, 2010

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

DVDBeaver dvd review

Rosenblatt, Jay

THE FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT A 95

USA 1990 – 2000 (80 mi)

fascinating stuff

truly imaginative

some of the better stuff

i've been exposed to all year

i liked it better than GEORGE WASHINGTON

and felt, in many ways,

that it succeeded in expressing

what that film could only attempt to say

it's just a more mature artist

who is more skilled, like Bresson,

at eliminating everything extraneous

so all that is left is perfectly suited to the subject matter

currently running with 5 short films

the films of jay rosenblatt 1990 - 2000

short of breath

watching the little kid peek around the door

idle curiosity

then what he sees

it's like his breath has been punched out of him

and he crawls under the covers and hides

- where is motherhood?

here he captures my attention

smell of burning ants

morbidity

then we see another little kid

the narrator

who reveals he was actually coerced to punch another kid

someone towards whom he had no ill feelings

he was just being part of the group

he was just demonstrating

a male baptism of being and

becoming so deliberately and casually cruel

here he makes me feel he understands his subject matter

human remains

then we see the century's most cruel men

reduced to simple banalities

this is a brilliant narrative

each man perfectly revealed to be

nothing more than a product of their own bodily irritations

each with a perfect and concise ending

here he makes me believe this is great writing

restricted

a one minute short?

how could this not be for comic relief?

it was

brief

and to the point

here he gives me pause to wonder

king of the jews

the finale

how could i not think of guy maddin?

this is a german expressionist crucifixion

using archival film stock

whereas guy maddin created his own

this guy created the exact place

the exact moment

in the 20th century

where everyone in the world could agree

what it was to be a Jew

even the non-believers knew

that at auschwitz

they cremated the Jews

the music here is Arvo Part

"...in Memory of Benjamin Britten,"

it was also featured in WINTER SLEEPERS

and for my money

there is no more transcendent feeling

than this

here he extinguishes all doubts

all negativity

and allows us to rediscover

that elusive enemy

joy

Men Will Be Boys - Page 2 - Movies - New York - Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice

San Francisco-based Jay Rosenblatt has another sort of recycling act. Rosenblatt fashions his short essayistic narratives from '50s classroom films and old home movies, among other sorts of found footage. His assemblages are more prosaic than those of Bruce Conner (who invented the mode back around the time Eastwood's astronaut first trained for outer space). They're also less delirious than the political extravaganzas devised by Rosenblatt's contemporary, Craig Baldwin, another Bay Area practitioner.

According to his biographical notes, Rosenblatt was a mental health counselor before he began making movies, and his interest in therapy remains. The grim 10-minute Short of Breath (1990) uses footage found, he says, in a dumpster outside a mental hospital, to construct a sort of universal psychoanalytic session complete with flashbacks to a primal scene and a climactic suicide; the longer Smell of Burning Ants (1994) culls footage from the insect world and the playground to meditate on the nature of male socialization. (Perhaps it might be shown as a short subject with Hollow Man.) Rosenblatt is not a connoisseur of weirdness. He doesn't liberate the visionary aspects of his found material so much as use it to illustrate a thesis. As straightforward as they are, his movies are scarcely less literal-minded and didactic than the raw material they recast.

Rosenblatt has little interest in film per se, although his most recent works are predicated on the idea of film as history. The 30-minute Human Remains (1998), constructed mainly of newsreels and employing an imaginary first-person voice-over, puts four dictators—Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and Mao—on the couch. King of the Jews (2000), Rosenblatt's most intriguing film to date, is a movie about anti-Semitism that marries the filmmaker's account of his childhood fear of Jesus Christ to a dense montage of historical and Hollywood material.

Rosi, Francesco

Francesco Rosi, 1922-2015 | Obituary | Sight & Sound | BFI Pasquale Iannone, January 12, 2015

The past week’s terrorist murders in France have strengthened the belief that artists should always be free to ask uncomfortable questions of those with power. Few filmmakers felt this more keenly than Naples-born Francesco Rosi, whose career was characterised above all by rigorous socio-political engagement.

Rosi’s father worked in the shipping industry but was also a cartoonist who at one time had fallen foul of the authorities for his satirical drawings of Mussolini and King Vittorio Emmanuele III. The young Rosi followed in his father’s footsteps and by the end of World War II was working as an illustrator for children’s books. He contributed to the local newspaper Sud and radio station Radio Napoli before leaving Naples for Milan in late 1946 where he spent a short period working for another newspaper, Milano Sera.

He soon found himself in Rome where fellow Neapolitan Ettore Giannini invited him to collaborate on a theatrical production of Salvatore Di Giacomo’s O Voto. Rosi not only served as Giannini’s assistant, he also took on an acting role and designed the playbill.

After this experience in the theatre, Rosi planned to apply for Italy’s prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia film school, but his entry into the world of film was expedited when a mutual friend introduced him to the director Luchino Visconti, who was about to embark on his second feature, La Terra Trema (1948). Chronicling the lives of a family of Sicilian fishermen, the project was a major undertaking. Not only was it to be shot on location, it would feature non-professional actors speaking in Sicilian dialect.

Rosi worked as Visconti’s assistant (alongside Franco Zeffirelli) and also supervised the film’s dubbing into a more widely intelligible Italian. “This first extraordinary experience allowed me to enter the world of film through the front door,” he told Aldo Tassone in 1979. Visconti “took a Verghian nineteenth-century structure [Giovanni Verga’s 1881 novel The House by the Medlar Tree] and made it his own. I believe that my experience with Visconti on La Terra Trema was fundamental to my way of working.”

Rosi’s collaboration with the Milanese director continued into the 1950s, on films as diverse as Bellissima (1951) and Senso (1954), but he also worked with Luciano Emmer (A Sunday in August, 1950), Raffaello Matarazzo (Torment and Nobody’s Children, both 1951), Michelangelo Antonioni (I Vinti, 1952) and Mario Monicelli (Proibito, 1955) before making his own feature debut with 1958’s The Challenge. Based on the life of Neapolitan gangster Pasquale Simonetti (aka Pascalone ’e Nola), the film drew heavily on the post-war American realism of directors such as Jules Dassin (The Naked City, Thieves Highway) and Elia Kazan (Panic in the Streets) as well as lessons learned during his apprenticeship with Visconti.

The Challenge was the first time Rosi addressed issues of the Italian South and he would return to the meridione for several of his best works. “I’m a man of the South with certain Northern characteristics,” the director remarked in the 1979 Tassone interview. “The choice of themes for my films reflects above all else my fundamental desire to rationalise, to gain knowledge [of a particular subject].”

After 1959’s I Magliari – about a group of Italian workers living in Germany – Rosi made two of his most celebrated film d’inchiesta (cine-investigations). Although Salvatore Giuliano (1962) bore the name of the infamous Sicilian bandit (born just 24 hours after Rosi), it was by no means a traditional biopic. Giuliano is absent for most of the film and Rosi instead explores the forces on both sides of the law that made possible Giuliano’s bloody seven-year reign on the island. “I’ve always thought that if you want to look at problems and their dynamics in the social, economic and political context of a country, one of the ways is to look at characters that have represented that particular world, those that have actually determined it, or maybe they have been expelled from it,” the director told Tassone.

Rosi moved to the Italian mainland for his next picture, remaining in the meridione to address the problem of high-level corruption in Naples. The film featured American actor Rod Steiger as a property developer with political ambitions, but Hands Over the City (1963), like Salvatore Giuliano, is less a psychological study of one particular character and more an examination of the wider forces at play. Rosi would use a similar approach in The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973) – both featuring regular collaborator Gian-Maria Volontè.

Rosi made historical films (More than a Miracle, 1967), war pictures (Many Wars Ago, 1970; The Truce, 1996) and family dramas (Three Brothers, 1980) in a directorial career that spanned almost four decades, but he will be remembered above all as the master of the ‘cine-investigation’ and an influence on several generations of artists, including the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roberto Saviano and Paolo Sorrentino.

Francesco Rosi: Information from Answers.com biography

Francesco Rosi | Italian director | Britannica.com biography

Francesco Rosi • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, May 22, 2003

Carmen by Georges Bizet – A Film by Francesco Rosi - medici.tv

Francesco Rosi - Strictly Film School Acquarello reviews

Derek Malcolm' s 100 greatest movies: Salvatore Giuliano | Global ... Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, January 3, 2001, also seen here: Francesco Rosi: Salvatore Giuliano – Derek Malcolm

Michel Ciment pays homage to Francesco Rosi Michel Ciment from The Guardian, December 3, 2005

• View topic - Francesco Rosi Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, April 22, 2007

Dossier: Francesco Rosi — The Illustrious Cinema of a Major Italian ... Pacific Cinematheque, May 27 – June 10, 2010

A retrospective highlighting the dark worldview of Francesco Rosi ... Simon Abrams from Politico, August 5, 2011

MODERNIST MASTER: THE CINEMA OF FRANCESCO ROSI Michael Guillen from Screen Anarchy, July 8, 2010

I Magliari • Senses of Cinema Pasquale Iannone, March 18, 2012

Salvatore Giuliano • Senses of Cinema Darragh O'Donoghue, March 18, 2012

Francesco Rosi: Poet of Civic Courage Steve Williams from Take One, September 7, 2012

Salvatore Giuliano Steve Williams from Take One, September 19, 2012

The Mattei Affair Hiu M. Chan from Take One, September 20, 2012

Hands Over The City (Le Mani Sulla Città) Rosy from Take One, September 21, 2012

Different Strokes: Illustrious Corpses Steve Williams from Take One, September 30, 2012

MoMA | Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano Charles Silver from MOMA, September 3, 2013

Francesco Rosi's Odd Bout of Irrealism in 'More Than a Miracle ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, June 4, 2014

Francesco Rosi Dead: Italian Director Was 92 | Variety Nick Vivarelli, January 10, 2015

Francesco Rosi Dead At 92 | Hollywood Reporter Ariston Anderson, January 10, 2015

Italian Post Neo-Realist Director Francesco Rosi, Dead at 92 | Deadline Anthony D’Alessandro, January 10, 2015

Francesco Rosi obituary | Film | The Guardian David Robinson and John Francis Lane, January 11, 2015

Francesco Rosi, Italian Filmmaker With Political Bent, Dies at 92 - The ... Obituary from The New York Times, January 12, 2015

Italian director Francesco Rosi dies at 92 - BBC News January 12, 2015

Francesco Rosi, left 'indelible mark' on Italian filmmaking, dies at 92 ... Colleen Barry from The LA Times, January 13, 2015

Francesco Rosi, acclaimed Italian film director and writer, dies at 92 ... The Washington Post, January 13, 2015

Francesco Rosi: Director the best of whose work engaged with Italy's ... Celluloid Liberation Front from The Independent, January 18, 2015

Francesco Rosi, film director - obituary - Telegraph January 30, 2015

The Secrets of Our Soil: Francesco Rosi's The Mattei Affair ... Samm Deighan from Diablolique magazine, June 27, 2017

TSPDT - Francesco Rosi

Francesco Rosi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Opera Film CARMEN de Bizet Di Francesco Rosi 1984 on Vimeo (11:12)

THE SWINDLERS (I magliari)

Italy France (132 mi) 1959

User Reviews imdb Author: GrandeMarguerite from France, April 3, 2007

Released in 1959, "I Magliari" is one of the numerous politically-engaged and socially-committed films Italian director Francesco Rosi has made throughout the 1950s and 1960s. A story of itinerant sellers in Germany, the film features Alberto Sordi and Renato Salvatori as the two male stars, and British actress Belinda Lee who died only a couple of years after the making of this movie. The film was shot entirely in Germany (Hannover and Hamburg) where a group of Italian emigrants try to make their fortune by engaging in a series of organized scams that appear to revolve around the sale of poor quality textiles as genuine quality fabric to Germans at inflated prices. Although the latter part of the film develops into a love story between the rather good-hearted young Tuscan expatriate, Mario (Renato Salvatori, a moving Brad Pitt look-alike, on his way to international fame -- see "Rocco and his Brothers" directed by Visconti in 1960), and the pretty and somewhat mysterious Paula Mayer (Belinda Lee), the wife of the German boss, much of the film focuses on male groups exercising, challenging and negotiating power in a desperate effort to secure spoils and territory. Hence the rather unusual blend of several styles (Italian comedy, romance, and documentary-like scenes about the living conditions of Italian emigrants in post-war Western Germany). Alberto Sordi is extraordinary as a pitiful crook, big-mouthed and cynical. One of the scenes shows Sordi at his best when he tries to sell a whole batch of carpets to a nice and gullible German housewife. The scene is the comical peak of the film, which is on the other hand not so funny. The story deals mainly with the theme of emigration and is still worth watching today, as the North-South problem is still increasing. This flashback into the '50s is a salutary one and is certainly no "small work" from F. Rosi. For those who like music of the '50s, the score features several hits of that time.

User Reviews imdb Author: jotix100 from New York, March 20, 2009

"I migliari", directed by Francesco Rosi showed up, unexpectedly, on a cable channel not long ago. It's not a film that is seen often, so we decided to watch it because anything by its director, Francesco Rosi, is worth a look. This 1959 Italian feature takes us to the Germany that was way ahead of the rest of some European countries in recovering from the ravages of the the second world war.

We are taken to the underworld, where most of the characters live. At the center of it is Totonno who is a somewhat successful scam artist. He sells inferior merchandise pretending it has a quality that is not there. Around Totonno there we find a group of Italian immigrants eking a life in Germany relying on their wits to survive in a more secure environment. After all, their own country was still recovering, sending a lot of the population to other European countries where work was plentiful.

The second plot deals with the illicit relationship between Mario, a handsome young man, and Paula Mayer, the wife of a wealthy German man that is behind the schemes of the immigrants. Mario, who falls head over heels with Paula, wants to take her away from that world, but she wants no part in his world of poverty. After all, she has seen it all. She comes clean to Mario as she reveals her past.

The atmosphere of the film gives the viewer a bird's eye view of the Germany of that time. Shot mainly in Hannover and Hamburg, this movie reflects the tastes of a lot of Italian film makers of the post war ere in shooting in the streets and a frank depiction of the lives of these small time criminals. Best of all, Alberto Sordi, probably the most versatile of the Italian actors of his generation. Also appealing is Renato Salvatori, a handsome actor that gives an excellent portrait of the complex Mario. Belinda Lee, appears as the beautiful Paula Mayer.

Giovanni DiVenanzo's black and white cinematography serves well the story as well as the score by Piero Piccioni. Francesco Rosi delivered with this enjoyable film that should be seen by fans of the director and its stars.

I Magliari • Senses of Cinema Pasquale Iannone, March 18, 2012

SALVATORE GIULANO

Italy (123 mi) 1962

Salvatore Giuliano | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Set just after World War II, Francesco Rosi's 1961 feature about a Sicilian outlaw hero brought Rosi international fame. Clearly it's one of his best—although his later films used variations on its flashback structure again and again, ultimately making some of it seem less fresh. Still, this is arguably as good as or better than anything Rosi has done since.

Time Out London: Tom Milne

The film that first brought Rosi international recognition: a masterly semi-documentary about – or rather around – the notorious Sicilian bandit, told in a series of flashbacks taking off from scenes recreating the discovery of his bullet-riddled body in July 1950, his laying-out and burial, and the trial of his associates. If Giuliano himself remains an enigma as the centrepiece of the jigsaw – deliberately so, since Rosi refuses to guess at mysteries – the complex lessons offered by his life and death in terms of Sicilian society and Mafia politics are laid out with exemplary clarity. Stunningly shot in stark black-and-white by Gianni Di Venanzo.

Salvatore Giuliano | Movie Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader Ted Shen

The title character of Francesco Rosi's 1962 feature, a notorious real-life bandit who galvanized Sicily's poor after World War II, is seen only as a corpse, an object to be venerated and investigated. How his bullet-riddled body ended up in Palermo's town square, and who was responsible for the crime, isn't clear. Rosi's scrupulously researched journalistic expose, scripted with Franco Solinas (The Battle of Algiers), suggests there was a conspiracy between the state (local and national) and the Mafia, an alliance of convenience that safeguarded landowners and their interests. (The church, curiously, is missing from the presumed guilty.) Yet the film (unlike Michael Cimino's lurid remake, The Sicilian) largely shies away from mythologizing Giuliano and his gang, who are depicted as petty hoodlums hired by the Mafia to gun down procommunist demonstrators. By staying objective, partly through an omniscient narration, Rosi invites us to appreciate the moral compromises plaguing high and low in the shifting political currents of postwar Sicily; we must sort out for ourselves the "truth" from the accounts of those who knew Giuliano. Still, there are plenty of visual clues that indicate Rosi's sympathies in the crisp, austere cinematography (courtesy of Gianni di Venanzo, with an assist from Pasqualino De Santis): the crowd movements that recall Eisenstein, the grotesque close-ups of conspirators. Rosi's hero, in true Marxist fashion, is not an individual but the Sicilian peasants, with their deep attachment to seemingly inhospitable environs. This is a key work from the Italian cinema of the 60s, and an antidote to Fellini's and Visconti's bourgeois ennui.

Film Comment: Stuart Klawans January/February 1995

EXTERIOR: DAY. A young man lies face-down in a Sicilian courtyard, bloodstains visible on his shirt, a handgun and a rifle by his side. Around him are gathered perhaps a dozen living men–cops and town officials. One, circling the corpse, is busy dictating an inventory; item by item, he translates the enigmatic physical reality of this scene into bureaucratic language, which will soon prove to be no less enigmatic, and no less disturbing, than the body itself. Such is the opening of Salvatore Giuliano, the film that established Francesco Rosi’s reputation. Using a gambit he would frequently play again, Rosi hooks the audience with the mystery of a violent death, then spends the next 107 minutes refusing to solve it. Why should he? In that opening sequence, Rosi already has laid bare what he conceives to be the real mystery: the process by which potentially disruptive events yield to official control. Bureaucratic language turns out to be the most dangerous weapon used in Salvatore Giuliano–so dangerous that the town official, in describing the corpse, might be said to murder the title character right before our eyes.

“In the general economy of the stories,” Rosi told Overbey, “personal lives have no real importance.” Some of the protagonists bore the names and manners of well-known figures; others were entirely made up. But during these key years, Rosi’s view of character was consistently long-distance, so audiences would understand that his films were not so much “based on a true story” as “based on a true social force Watching Salvatore Giuliano, we rarely see the Sicilian bandit leader, who comes into closeup only when laid out for burial. Nottola, the politician and real estate developer who is at the center of Hands Over the City (’63), goes through the entire film with his son in hiding from the police; yet we don’t hear him voice any concern, nor do we get a single glimpse of his family life. The title character of Lucky Luciano (’73) does come before the camera; every few minutes he even speaks occasionally; but he never does much of anything, except to smile knowingly and eat his dinner. As for Rogas, the detective who provides the point of view for Illustrious Corpses, Rosi grants him one scene at home, which is just enough to establish that he is divorced and lonely–and, more important, that he realizes his phone is tapped. Salvatore Giuliano “was the first film in which I felt I had mastered the delicate balance between reality itself and an interpretation of reality,” Rosi has said.

Derek Malcolm' s 100 greatest movies: Salvatore Giuliano | Global ... Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, January 3, 2001, also seen here: Francesco Rosi: Salvatore Giuliano – Derek Malcolm

Francesco Rosi, once called the heavy conscience of the Italian cinema, was born in Naples – a possible reason why most of his films are about corruption. His most famous film, though, was made in Sicily.

It is almost certainly the best film about the social and political forces that have shaped that benighted island. It looks almost like a documentary as it traces the career and downfall of Salvatore Giuliano, a bandit who became a legend on the island after his violent death in 1950. Yet the word Mafia is never once mentioned, and Giuliano himself is hardly seen. All the superficial cliches of a well-known genre are thus subverted.

Rosi performed the voiceover himself, at least in the Italian version, and structured the film round the bandit’s death. Giuliano is seen as a corpse in the first sequence, with a city official reading a detailed description of his death. This gives us no clue to the questions we want answered – a deliberate ploy by Rosi, who is determined that we should think for ourselves as the film progresses. He merely provides evidence, often elliptical. But the result is a fascinating study not only of the tentacles of crime, but of a whole way of life.

We are not allowed to be passive spectators because we see Giuliano only briefly, with Rosi using flashbacks chronicling his story from the end of the second world war. We witness the growth of the Sicilian separatist movement, an attack on a communist peasant gathering, a kidnapping and the government, separatists, police and army linking up at various times with the criminal forces they are supposed to oppose.

Using local non-professionals as actors and with his camera sweeping over the mountainous terrain that concealed Giuliano from his enemies, Rosi builds up a formidable picture of a time and place. It is a style that has its roots in neo-realism, but Rosi is interested more in society than in the individual characters that other directors (such as Vittorio de Sica) examined so sympathetically. Giuliano remains a legend throughout; the nearest we get to a conventional figure is his murderer, who emerges from the background only as the film reaches its final stretch.

Everything in the film was based on extensive historical research, including official court records and journalistic accounts. But Rosi makes no attempt to make complete sense of them, since it is virtually impossible to do so. At the end of the film, what Rosi has carefully assembled is not so much the facts as a reading of what lies behind the confused story of Giuliano’s life.

Possibly only Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers managed so brilliantly to summarise a slice of by now half-remembered history, and Rosi never quite achieved the same mastery of tone and atmosphere again. Later, he made Lucky Luciano, a more conventional Mafia story, and films such as The Mattei Case and Illustrious Corpses, dossiers on power and corruption that relied on a much more ornate style and the brilliance of actors such as the great Gian Maria Volonte to sustain their considerable eloquence.

But Salvatore Giuliano has never been bettered as an interpretation of history without resort to special pleading. It’s as if the film-maker is standing back and providing clues that we have to interpret ourselves. This is something Hollywood would never do, and justifies European cinema as much as any other film of what now looks like a golden period.

Salvatore Giuliano Criterion essay by Michel Ciment, February 23, 2004

Salvatore Giuliano (1962) - The Criterion Collection

Salvatore Giuliano • Senses of Cinema Darragh O'Donoghue, March 18, 2012

Salvatore Giuliano (1962) - #228 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee

Scott Reviews Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano [Arrow Films Blu ... Scott Nye from Criterion Cast

Salvatore Giuliano (1962) - Alt Screen

Salvatore Giuliano - Qnetwork.com James Kendrick, Criterion

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Images Movie Journal David Gurevish, Criterion

Salvatore Giuliano - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... John Sinnott, Criterion

The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: Salvatore Giuliano: The Criterion ... Clarence Beaks, Criterion

Salvatore Giuliano: Criterion Collection • Blu-ray Authority

Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Berlin Film Festival 2008

The L Magazine: Elina Alter

Salvatore Giuliano (film) - Wikipedia

HANDS OVER THE CITY (Le mani sulla città)

Italy (101 mi) 1963

Hands Over the City | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This 1963 Italian film by Francesco Rosi features Rod Steiger as a real estate developer in Naples, one of whose tenement buildings collapses. Like many of Rosi's films, it's an intricate political and social analysis, and Rosi actually managed to cast some real-life Neapolitan town councillors as deputies.

Time Out Tony Rayns

Rosi on property development rackets and political manoeuvring in the Naples city council is every bit as tough and forthright as Rosi on Sicily (Salvatore Giuliano) and on oil diplomacy (The Mattei Affair). His film follows the irresistible rise of the speculator Nottola (Steiger, excellently cast) as he channels the public building programme on to his own land, shrugs off the collapse of a slum tenement in an area that needs redevelopment, and cold-bloodedly shifts the balance of power in the council to his own advantage. It's not only totally convincing as an analysis of civic corruption, but also one of the very few left wing movies that one can imagine actually reaching the mass audience it's aimed at.

cinehouse [Shane James]

Francesco Rosi’s masterful Hands Over the City ends on the following statement, “The characters and events shown are imaginary, the social and environmental context is real.” The words appear over aerial shots of Naples, mirroring the aerial shots of the title sequence. The sequences show the extent of housing expansion in the city, panning over rows of tower blocks perched precariously atop the sloping land. These images bring the film full circle, their intention to show the continuous cycle of political corruption, with the closing statement there to illustrate the reality surrounding the films context. As Rosi says, “I wanted to make a film on something very precise, the dishonourable actions of those in political and economic power in a city that was undergoing change.”

The film opens on an arid stretch of agricultural ground a stone’s throw away from the encroaching city. Edoardo Nottola (Rod Steiger), a right-wing councilman and wealthy developer, addresses a group of potential partners, arguing for the profit potential of buying up this undeveloped land. The film cuts to a model of the proposed construction, the scene making it immediately clear that Nottola’s position within the ruling government gets him what he wants, with the money he earns from the real estate investments flowing back into the party. The narrative takes off after the title sequence when a building adjacent to one of Nottola’s construction sites collapses, killing two people and leaving a child seriously injured. Left-wing councillor De Vita (Carlo Fermariello, himself a real-life councillor) is angered by this incident and calls for an inquiry into Nottola’s complicity in the tragedy.

With the aid of Gianni Di Venanzo’s sublime cinematography, the rest of the film concerns itself with the political meetings taking place in the city council chambers, offices, archives, and private residences, as those involved with the inquiry try to find a consensus. Rosi meticulously unpicking the tangled mess of political corruption to bring the film full circle. In paralleling the beginning of the film at its end, what Hands Over the City does is make visible the perpetual cycle of corruption that occurs in society and points out the difficulties in attaining political reform. As Rosi says, “I asked myself very openly about the problems which seemed to block any chance of serious reform.” The realisation that the films message remains pertinent today is hard to take.

Hands over the City: Confidential Reports—The Investigative Thrillers of Francesco Rosi Criterion essay by Stuart Klawans, October 23, 2006

Hands over the City (1963) - The Criterion Collection

Hands Over the City (1963) - #355 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee

DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] Criterion

dOc DVD Review: Hands Over the City (1963) - Digitally Obsessed Jon Danziger, Criterion

Hands Over the City | Film Review | Slant Magazine Fernando F. Croce, Criterion

Hands Over the City - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Gerry Putzer, Criterion

Criterion on the Brain: #355: Hands Over the City Criterion

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Hands over the City DVD review – Philip French on Francesco Rosi's ... Philip French from The Guardian

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THE MOMENT OF TRUTH (Il momento della verità)

Italy Spain (103 mi) 1965

Cinema Viewfinder [Tony Dayoub]

First up is The Moment of Truth (Il momento della verità), by Francesco Rosi. In brilliant Technicolor, the post-neorealist Rosi documents the short lived rise to stardom of Miguel (Miguel Mateo), from down-and-out migrant worker to top-ranked matador. Miguel leaves his poverty-stricken hometown to come to the city for work before succumbing to the lure of quick, big money as a bullfighter. After training under the watchful eye of retired torero Pedrucho (playing himself), Miguel begins his rapid ascent to fame and fortune as Miguelín (the same name Mateo went by in his real-life occupation as a toreador). After surviving being gored, the increasingly shaken Miguelín seems bent on pulling out of his hazardous career as soon as he fulfills some contracted corridas at the behest of his greedy agent (José Gómez Sevillano). Unfortunately, anyone familiar with the heist or fight movie trope in which the hero promises he'll retire after one last big score or match can guess what fate awaits the naive Miguelín.

The Moment of Truth uses actual bullfighting footage to lend itself some authenticity, so some may feel, whether for reasons ethical, philosophical or just plain nauseating, that this movie may not be right for them. Having grown up accustomed to ancestral stories of the nobility of such matches between man and bull, I wasn't as averse as some might be. At the very least, from a purely anthropological point of view, it is quite fascinating to see the rituals attached to what many call a bloodsport. Rosi trains his voyeuristic eye on everything from Pamplona's running of the bulls during the festival of San Fermín to the careful suiting up of Miguelín in his traditional traje de luces (literally, "suit of lights"). Each time Rosi elevates bullfighting to a nearly spiritual level.

Of course, the exploitation of Miguelín—a young, handsome, athletic man with no other opportunity to provide for himself and his family—deliberately belies the sublime religiosity of bullfighting that Rosi presents. Certainly, the director is sympathetic to Miguelín's plight. But when, at one point, Miguelín's agents and sponsors intimidate him into returning to the ring before he has completely healed from his goring, the parallels between the profiteering off of the matador and the protracted barbarism of the animal's execution becomes apparent. Like his former mentor, Luschino Visconti, Rosi uses color and photographic virtuosity to highlight the plight of the proletariat while mourning the passing of an era of nobility, in this case one in which bullfighting represented something nobler than the lucrative gladiatorial sport it has become.

Criterion Corner: The Moment of Truth (1965) - Reviewed Andrew Kotwicki from Spoiler Free Movie Sleuth

After the breakout success of Francesco Rosi’s Italian neorealist gangster epic Salvatore Guiliano and taking home the prestigious Golden Lion for Hands Over the City, the ordinarily politically charged filmmaker set his sights on what would become the closest thing he would make to a documentary film: The Moment of Truth. The director’s first color film began initially as a documentary chronicling Spanish life before evolving into a quasi-fictional feature which managed to capture on film at the time the crispest, most extraordinarily detailed and unflinchingly brutal images of bullfighting in cinema history!

Chronicling the meteoric rise and subsequent fall of a farm boy turned torero maestro, the film functions simultaneously as a visually spectacular if not shocking blood-sports docudrama, a critique of how the impoverished region can foster fearlessness of death and finally a loose character study of an ordinary man experiencing existential crisis at the height of his superstardom. Played by real-life matador Miguel Mateo (Miguelin), The Moment of Truth is that rare near-Mondo film which places you the viewer in the thick of the carnage soaked bullfighting ring surrounded by hundreds of spectators and still manages to make a statement about the co-dependent nature of bullfighting and the surrounding area housing it.

Much like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, the film begins with downtrodden characters on the outskirts of society before transforming into a purely visceral thriller as they step up to the podium to look death in the eye itself. Though a bit superficial at times with passable but not stellar acting from Miguelin and enough animal cruelty to rustle the jimmies of activists, The Moment of Truth is a heart stopping feat of astonishing physical acting on the part of Miguelin. Whatever your personal stance on the controversial bloodsport, there’s no denying what Miguelin does on camera here is simply incredible! The footage captured in the ring as Miguelin gets closer to these wild and angry bulls than most people are comfortable is so electrifying and pure, you can’t take your eyes off it!

Rosi fans tend to consider The Moment of Truth to be one of the auteur’s lesser works when compared to the ones that took home the Golden Lion and soon after the coveted Palme d’Or. While I can agree there was infinitely more complex dramatic depth to Salvador Guiliano, The Moment of Truth possesses such magnetic and raw visceral power that you’re likely to be stopped dead in your tracks. It is also, above all things, a testament to man’s ability to push himself to the limits of his existence without fear and the inseparability of beauty and horror in what is still one of the deadliest and most controversial blood sports between human and animal on the face of the Earth.

The Moment of Truth: The Blood of Beasts Criterion essay by Peter Matthews, January 25, 2012

The Moment of Truth (1965) - The Criterion Collection

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Martin Teller

MORE THAN A MIRACLE (C'era una volta)

Italy France (104 mi) 1967 ‘Scope

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film [Richard Scheib]

A quirky but uninteresting comedy presented as a whimsical old-fashioned rustic Neapolitan fairytale. The beautifully filmed fantasy-romance was more appropriately titled in Europe "Cinderella, Italian Style." Francesco Rosi ("Three Brothers"/"Christ Stopped at Eboli "/"Hands Over the City") directs from a story by Tonino Guerra that's written by Rosi, Guerra, Giuseppe Patrino Griffi and Raffaele la Capria. It was excruciatingly painful watching such an odd mixture of far-fetched fancy that has flying monks, dullish jousting tournaments, silly cackling witches, a nunnery with a urine cure and, of all things, a dishwashing contest. Less an adult pic than a kiddie one, but subtitles alone would eliminate it as a kiddie film; on top of that, there's Sophia prancing around barefooted showing off her natural assets and the subject of some lame ribald humor.

It's set in 17th century Italy (shot in the countryside surrounding Naples). The arrogant, handsome, carefree Spanish Prince Rodrigo (Omar Sharif) refuses to choose a bride from the seven marriageable princesses whom his nagging marriage-minded mother (Dolores del Rio) has selected. Fleeing from mom's nagging, the Prince's white horse throws him in a meadow by a monastery. There he meets the magical Brother Joseph (Leslie French), who is flying like Superman to the amusement of the local kiddies. When he sets down on land, Brother Joseph says the Prince should get married and presents him with a donkey and a bag of flour and tells him to search for a woman who will make him seven dumplings. The Brother also claims the Prince won't be able to eat all seven. Thereby the Prince comes to a field and meets the feisty sexpot peasant Isabella (Sophia Loren), who has taken his horse and won't return it without putting up a fuss. Lusting after her beauty, the Prince has the peasant girl make him seven dumplings. But there's one shy as the hungry Isabella wolfed one of them down before serving him, and the uptight Prince feigns death until he gets all seven dumplings. When he doesn't he disappears, leaving Isabella grief-stricken thinking she caused his demise. So she consults three witches, but she goofs up the magical incantation and as a result the prince is paralyzed. Poor Isabella is punished by the Prince by being nailed inside a barrel and is rolled toward the sea. At this point I lost interest, and realized this might have worked as a kidpic but for adults it had only two things going for it: the natural resources of the splendid countryside scenery and Sophia's pulchritude. When the filmmaker opted to put one of the assets in a barrel, I had a hard time staying with this one to the finish--especially when it was obvious where all this nonsense was heading.

The film never found an audience outside its own country, which it thought it can get through its international cast. The only thing of interest that caught my attention was Sophia clad in a great array of peasant blouses, each with a button ready to pop.

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich]

Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]

New York Times [Roger Greenspun]

THE MATTEI AFFAIR

Italy (116 mi) 1972

User Reviews imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States, January 6, 2002

THE MATTEI AFFAIR is the fascinating story of Enrico Mattei, a man who helped change Italy's destiny "from a land of song and dance to an industrial nation," as he himself put it. By promoting methane gas as one of the country's greatest natural resources, he was able to bring Italy into the world market and make himself both powerful and hated. He became head of ENI, a state body formed for the development of oil resources. He was socialist by conviction, led a very modest private life, and had conflicts with powerful American oil capitalists. There is a memorable scene in the film in which in a meeting with these oil moguls, he is insultingly treated as a peon. His 1962 death in a private plane crash outside of Milan was believed to have been an assassination, and his death remains shrouded in mystery. This is not a documentary. It is a thought-provoking and intriguing drama about a great man, brilliantly portrayed by the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte' and made by the great Italian director Francesco Rosi.

User Reviews imdb Author: Arca1943 from Montréal, Canada, May 14, 2005

One thing I find very Cinecittà, very Francesco Rosi about The Mattei Affair is how the authors (which also include writer Tonino Guerra and star Gian Maria Volontè) succeed at making us grasp both the negative and positive impacts of Mattei and his action on post-war Italy.

At one point in the film, you hear a character saying that the Italian "economic miracle" (early sixties) is mostly due to the great Enrico Mattei. At some other point, another character says that had the dangerous Enrico Mattei succeeded, democracy in Italy was «finished». Well, without stating it in the open, the film has a way to convey that both these points of view are equally blatant exaggerations; that the truth about Enrico Mattei is a complicated mix, to be exposed in a very short, very concentrated two-hour movie.

Indeed, to succeed at conveying the essential about Mattei IN ONLY TWO HOURS is a already a tour de force.

So you have the sincere Mattei and the demagogic Mattei. You have Mattei the antifascist leader - he fought with the Christian Democrats, by the way, not the Socialists, Mr. De Luca - and then you have the postwar public-sector mogul who compromises (however briefly) in maneuvering with the Neo-Fascist party (MSI) in order to bring about some by-law he needed for ENI's ends. You have Mattei the genius of management, who performed miracles and made the Italian State a fierce competitor against American, British and French petroleum companies, but also the Mattei whose massive and creative use of public money was out of control (he launched a daily newspaper, among other things, in order to promote ENI's interests). You have Mattei the patriot, the man of vision who understood that his country, compared with most other Western countries, was the most devoid of energy resources and had somehow to get around this infrastructural weakness by a bold, risky development policy that included playing rough'n'tough against the British-American petroleum monopoly. But then you have the most dangerous Mattei who, especially after the death of Foreign Affairs minister Carlo Sforza in 1952, started to impose his own foreign-affairs agenda on the Italian government by placing it in front of a series of accomplished facts. And this, by the way, explains how Italy in the 50s could be one of Washington's most solid political allies in Europe on the one hand, while dealing on the other hand with the Soviet Union for a prolongation of a Soviet pipe-line that would reach to Italy through the Balkans.

I could continue like this for many more paragraphs. When I first saw L'Affaire Mattei (in its excellent French version, back in the late 70s when I was a not-too-bright teenager watching TV), I knew zilch about Italy. But this outstanding film, as well as a flock of other Italian movies of the same miraculous era, convinced me that this country like no other was really worth learning more about. How true that was, I still can't believe it today.

One more thing : the De Mauro affair. In 1970, journalist Mauro de Mauro was hired by filmmaker Francesco Rosi in order to document the last days of Enrico Mattei, who died in the crash of his plane. A crash whose cause is still controversial : as of right now, with the documents actually available, neither accident nor murder can be ruled out.

So journalist De Mauro was hired by Rosi to inquire in Sicily about Mattei's death - and he vanished. His body was never found. Two police bodies investigated the matter. The conclusions of the Carabinieri were that De Mauro's murder (murder in all likeliness) was a Mafia action linked to a series of papers he had recently published about the drug trade. The conclusions of the Questura (national police) was that De Mauro had been murdered as a direct result of his investigation on Enrico Mattei's death.

As could be expected, both versions are given equal importance in this Francesco Rosi film. But now, just for kicks, let's imagine it's the Questura investigators who had it right : then it would mean that a film that was meant to be ABOUT the Mattei affair became A PART of the Mattei affair. Anyway, whatever the truth on this issue, that much is clear : Mr. Rosi and his friends were filming in hot water.

And speaking of hot water, il caso Mattei was released in 1972 - roughly a year before the first petroleum shock.

And to top it all, Mattei is interpreted by the mesmerizing Gian Maria Volontè ! He alone is worth the show.

To me, the Mattei Affair is one of the best political films ever made.

ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES (Cadaveri Eccellenti)

Italy France (120 mi) 1976

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Perhaps Francesco Rosi's most pointed and incisive social examination of the widespread instability, scandal, injustice, and corruption of (then) contemporary postwar politics, Illustrious Corpses opens to the image of a somber, elderly judge named Varga (Charles Vanel) as he walks pensively through the catacombs of a church, observing in painstaking detail the recesses and contours of the rows and rows of mummified corpses that curiously line the eerie, dimly lit passageways before emerging from the church entrance into the sunlight to continue his leisurely, routine morning walk. This silent communion between the judge and the ominous, seemingly endless succession of scattered, mummified corpses appropriately prefigures the evolution of the film's dark tale of conspiracy and murder as well when, only moments later, Varga is felled by a single rifle shot to the head as he reaches up to pluck a flower from an overgrown courtyard tree. No sooner has Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura) installed himself within the cadre of pall bearers for Varga's funeral in order to conduct a low-key surveillance of potential suspects when he learns that a second assassination of a federal judge bearing a similar signature of calculated precision has taken place in another city, an implicit, high profile connection that immediately brings the country teetering ever closer to the brink of instability as word of a serial political assassin working to disrupt the justice system - and ultimately, the very fabric of society's sense of law and order - begin to grip the nation with inconclusive, often conflicting news of the victims and the progress of the investigation. Operating under a theory that the murders may not be politically motivated, but instead, connected by a personal vendetta carried out by someone who had been jointly prosecuted - perhaps unjustly - by the judges in the same court, Rogas begins to follow a tortuous, often unpredictable trail culled from a list of wrongfully convicted former defendants and exonerated prisoners that would inevitably bring him into the nebulous company of a genial, but politically savvy Security Minister (Fernando Rey) whose insinuation into the company of left-wing political leaders betrays his own unscrupulous ambitions to retain power and weather any potential shifts in the political tide, a potential third target named Judge Rasto (Alain Cuny) who had transcribed some of the proceedings of the trials and now shutters himself in his home in constant fear of the faceless assassin, an enigmatic socialite named Madame Cres (Maria Carta) who may have planted incriminating evidence in order to frame her own husband for her attempted murder, Rogas' trusted friend and scientist (Paolo Bonacelli) who begins to question the simple motive of vengeance for the murders as the logical realization of a sophisticated, ever widening (and deepening) level of conspiracy becomes increasingly inescapable, an ideologically rigid magistrate (Max von Sydow) who summarily rejects the intrusion of humanity or compassion into the dispensation of the law, even as he arbitrarily breaches it with illegal wiretaps and surveillance of those whom he deems to be a threat to social order. Incorporating familiar elements that have come to define Rosi's cinema - elliptical narrative, estranged perspective, and illuminating dream sequences - Illustrious Corpses encapsulates the volatile, often incestuous relationships between the government, organized crime, political opposition, religious authorities, radicals, terrorists, and the media that have irreparably shaped the murky, turbulent landscape of 1970s Italian politics, a climate of protracted instability that would culminate with the kidnapping and murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade in 1978 (the subject of Marco Bellocchio's penetrating docu-fiction, Good Morning Night). In its unflinching depiction of the abuse of power, heavy-handed governance, egregious alliances, and Machiavellian sense of justice and privilege, the film serves as a trenchant, contemporary, and relevant exposition into the ingrained political culture of corruption, arrogance, tenuous ideology, and delusive righteousness.

The Spinning Image [Enoch Sneed]

When a senior judge is murdered, shot down in the street in broad daylight, immediately followed by another who was walking his dog, the authorities decide a top-level detective is needed to handle the case. Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura) is sent from Rome to the south of Italy to investigate.

A world-weary cop who has seen most of the underside of human behaviour, Rogas arrives just as another judge is shot by a sniper through the window of a bank. He begins by looking for links between the three victims and finds they all presided over three cases which were later overturned as miscarriages of justice. Rogas decides one of the victims of these cases is out for revenge.

Rogas tracks down two of the men. One is now a down-and-out tramp, another living in obscurity trying to avoid his past, but the third, Cres, falsely convicted of trying to poison his wife, has completely disappeared.

As Rogas continues his investigations he encounters some very dubious characters and situations. Another judge in the Cres case is an obsessive-compulsive who washes immediately after shaking Rogas’s hand, and has to hit his left hand against the wash stand to keep it under control (shades of Dr Strangelove), while the Chief Justice (a brief but excellent cameo by Max von Sydow) extols the virtues of strong government and likens a judge in court to a priest in church with the same sacred duty and cloak of infallibility: “Miscarriages of justice do not exist.” Both are murdered immediately after Rogas leaves.

The investigation proceeds against a background of political unrest, strikes and popular protest (particularly by the young) opposing the corruption of the political class. Rogas begins to suspect Cres is somehow simply being used as a convenient scapegoat, and contacts a journalist friend (Luigi Pistili) who is a senior figure in the Communist Party to see if he can discover if a conspiracy is at work.

Refusing to listen to Rogas's theories concerning Cres, the Chief of Police (Tino Carraro) moves him to the force’s Political Unit, seemingly so he can have access to their information.

Exposed to the world of political policing, Rogas becomes increasingly paranoid and afraid. His home phone is bugged, he sees a convoy of cars carrying senior military and political figures from the home of the Chief Justice, including the Police Chief who denies any such meeting took place. At a party at the Security Minister’s (Fernando Rey) home Rogas finds not only government officials and the ‘revolutionary’ opposition rubbing shoulders with each other, but Mrs Cres and (glimpsed briefly in a distorted reflection) Cres himself.

By now desperate to get to the bottom of the mystery Rogas arranges to meet the Communist Party Secretary-General in a museum. As they begin to talk two shots are heard and both men fall dead to the floor. The Police Chief makes a television broadcast stating that frustration with the case had made Rogas mentally ill, that he believed the murder of the judges was a communist conspiracy, and he assassinated the Secretary-General before shooting himself.

Meanwhile the military prepares to subdue the unrest in the streets.

Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri Eccellenti, in Italian) is a classic European political thriller, rich in themes and imagery, in which an apparently straightforward police procedural becomes a nightmare of intrigue where nothing and no-one is what it seems.

The film itself is ultimately inconclusive. Who is behind the conspiracy and what is it meant to achieve? It appears to be neither ‘right-wing’ nor ‘left-wing’, just a cynical means of maintaining an elite clique in its place – despite their public political differences, everyone seems very friendly at the swanky party. The last line of the film: “The truth is not always revolutionary” gives a hint at Rosi’s point-of-view, basically don’t trust anyone, a potent message during Italy's "Years of Lead" (Anni di piombo) in the 1970's.

Rogas himself is an ordinary working-class guy, doggedly using traditional methods, who trusts his superiors (at least at first) and is totally out of place in the corridors of power and unused to the methods of political policing (at one point he walks in on an interrogation session and backs out of the room without saying anything as people stare silently at this intruder). Ventura underplays the role brilliantly and convincingly, particularly when the tough-guy cop (not above roughing up a suspect) realises what he has stumbled into and becomes a haunted, vulnerable human being.

We get some background to Rogas’s character. He is divorced, never sees his former family, and lives in a semi-furnished flat in a neighbourhood of new, anonymous concrete apartment blocks. A local farmer faced with eviction says that’s what ‘they’ wanted and shows the new concrete town on the hillside which will soon overwhelm his little homestead, something which is actually happening near my home in Portugal, even while I am writing this.

A sense of place is very close to the heart of the film, where locations switch from archetypal sunbaked Sicilian towns to concrete and plate glass modernity, and Rogas’s move to the Political Unit sees a change from dusty offices piled with paper files to a hygienic modern building (presumably newly-founded) where men in white coats analyse taped phone conversations and surveillance films.

It is here that Rogas witnesses attempts to force confessions and doctor evidence to make a case for the judges’ murders against some young political activists which backfires when a prostitute witness (Tina Aumont) refuses to change her story to fit the official scenario. She is a character who remains resolutely an ‘outsider’ with her own views and opinions.

Another feature of the film is an impression of the overwhelming weight of the past – from the mummified bishops of the opening scene (a macabre mockery of worldly glory) to the museum at the climax where the murders of Rogas and the Secretary-General are witnessed by the statues of Roman emperors.

This scene seems to deliver the final message of the film: there has always been, and will always be, a political class pulling the strings of power and ruthlessly doing anything it considers necessary to hold on to them.

[A new DVD release is finally available with English subtitles. Strictly a no-frills release and with no attempt at restoration, but welcome as an opportunity to view this rarely-seen film.]

The Celluloid Highway [Shaun Anderson]

filmsdefrance.com [James Travers]

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CHRIST STOPPPED AT EBOLI (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)

Italy France (150 mi) 1979

Christ Stopped at Eboli Acquarello from Strictly Film School

In 1935, a distinguished artist and intellectual turned escorted political prisoner from Turin named Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonté) arrives at the railroad terminal station at Eboli for further transportation - first by a series of public buses, then by a waiting automobile dispatched by the regional mayor Don Luigi (Paolo Bonacelli) - into the remote district of Lucania (now Basilicata) in southern Italy where he is turned over to local officials to serve out his sentence of monitored confinement in the desolate town. After receiving a brief and informal (and highly irregular) orientation on the local customs and expected behavior - along with a healthy dose of village gossip - from Don Luigi (who seems more eager to make a good impression on the prominent detained "guest" than to enforce state regulation), Don Carlo is released into the population where his privileged life, medical degree, and progressive thinking seem at odds with the townspeople's stubborn observation of ancient superstitions and outmoded, feudal customs. Resigned to an uneventful and leisurely existence, Don Carlo spends his empty days wandering aimlessly through the provincial town and spending quiet evenings at the boarding house. However, the seemingly predictable rhythm of his idyllic (if not idle) routine inevitably begins to be disrupted when a group of desperate mothers visit him one evening to seek out medical assistance for their ailing children, and soon, word of the non-practicing physician's competency (and above all, willingness to help the destitute villagers) spreads through the insular village. Further motivated out of his inertia by his devoted sister Luisa (Lea Massari), a conscientious physician who witnesses first-hand the inadequacy of health care in the region, Don Carlo moves into his own home, and with the help of his diligent housekeeper Giulia (Irene Papas), begins to occupy his time in his studio and makeshift infirmary, in the process, finds renewed purpose in his state-imposed isolation.

A faithful adaptation of artist, physician, and author Carlo Levi's autobiographical novel chronicling his detention and house arrest (confino) in Lucania as a political prisoner during the Abyssinian War, Christ Stopped at Eboli - a figurative expression for the local population's enduring mysticism (that continues to exist despite the peasants' respectful assimilation of the Catholic church) and sentiment of profound spiritual and moral desolation - is a thoughtful and sensitively realized portrait of isolation, resilience, and humanity. Francesco Rosi illustrates the region's austere topography and natural environment through direct and unintrusive camerawork, capturing the author's socio-political meditation on Lucania's isolation and seemingly anachronistic coexistence between ancient and contemporary civilization that (perhaps deliberately) serve to estrange the population from the rest of the nation and, consequently, results in their perennial marginalization (if not, exclusion) by ruling governments. Exploring similar themes of isolation and rural depopulation (specifically, village men who immigrate to America, often abandoning their families) as Theo Angelopoulos within the objective framework of Levi's experiences and observations during his confinement in the remote region, the film transcends the humanist tale of personal redemption to create a haunting, melancholic, and incisive commentary on cultural oppression and indigenous exile.

Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi | commentary Raymond Rosenthal, September 1, 1947

Humanist in Exile
Christ Stopped at Eboli.
by Carlo Levi.
Translated by Frances Frenaye. New York, Farrar, Straus, 1947. 268 pp. $3.00.

Beyond the penumbra of the great metropolitan centers, though not beyond the long reach of the police, tax collectors, and radios of its omnivorous state, Carlo Levi discovered a cutoff and abandoned culture and, what is much rarer, a community of unstandardized individuals. They were the peasants of Lucania, a poverty-stricken, landlord-squeezed province in Italy’s southern “instep,” and they were living in a world of pre-Christian pagan myth and stoical fatalism.

It was the year 1935, the year of Mussolini’s preparations for the Ethiopian war, when Levi, a political suspect (actually he was one of the founders and leaders of the most intellectually influential underground group, the Justice and Liberty movement) and therefore a possible center of resistance, was transported under guard to live in “exile” in the villages of this region of eroded mountains and malarial swamps. Christ Stopped at Eboli is the lyrical and imaginative record of that year’s experience.

Like so many recent books from Europe, the appearance of Christ Stopped at Eboli was linked in Italy with a companion volume of essays, entitled Paura della Libertà (“The Fear of Freedom”), which had been written a number of years before and presents Levi’s philosophical position. Though its title will inevitably provoke associations with Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytical study, Levi’s treatment has few points of similarity. Originally, it was intended for publication under the Fascist regime. As a result, it is written in that highly allusive style which Italian anti-fascist writers had become skilled in contriving in order to evade the censorship. Camouflaged also by a purposefully recondite symbolism, Levi launches in his book of essays a bitter attack on the idolatrous religion of the state as embodied most effectively and viciously in the programs and activities of the Nazis. Owing to its double-talk, the book’s argument is difficult to follow in all of its nuances, yet the main thesis is quite clear and bears an important relation to Christ Stopped at Eboli.

Levi contends that man’s escape from freedom is into idolatry, which, in his view, includes the gamut of organized myths, from primitive magic and Christianity down to the modern religion of the mammoth and centralized state. Man escapes because he is afraid of the chaos of life, its indifferentiation, as Levi puts it, and wishes to flee the human responsibility of freedom. He freezes the flux and spontaneity of living relationships into the unnatural and inhuman forms of a ritual, be it the ritual of organized religion or the ritual of the totalitarian state. Every idolatry is a denial of the living, for it sets up in its place a static and debasing image that exists to suppress the spontaneous, the freedom of individual creativity. Only the artist, Levi implies, who can combine within himself “the two opposing forces of differentiation and indifferentiation,” that is, of chaos and individuality, can achieve communication in truly human terms and thus attain to freedom.

In the light of this philosophy, much that is unclear in Christ Stopped at Eboli (though hardly what is equally so in the philosophy) will disappear. There is an evident irony throughout the book. The peasants’ remark is that “Christ stopped at Eboli [the town where the highway turns off]; he didn’t come this far,” and all their resentment and anger loads this local proverb. But the proverb has more than one significance. Levi depicts the peasant sunk in an idolatry of primitive myth and magic which, nevertheless, is far superior in its human quality and spontaneity to those savage and baleful idolatries that have been on the rampage in recent European history. Even so, Levi regards the peasant as trapped in turn by his own “fear of freedom.” Levi himself does not surrender to the charm of peasant existence as readily as many other intellectuals who have traveled the road that leads from the city to the country.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is an unusual combination of the modern—its theme the most fundamental of contemporary social and political problems—and the decidedly old-fashioned. Carlo Levi represents a kind of European intellectual who, disillusioned with liberalism, yet intent on preserving some sort of cultural continuity, has not appeared so forcefully in European literature for many years. He is outside the tradition, both Marxist and Christian, that was responsible for molding such writers as Ignazio Silone and André Malraux. Perhaps one can explain the unfamiliar accent of his thought by Italy’s long exile from the mainstream of modern culture. In any case, one naturally goes back to the Renaissance for his identifying image. It is Machiavelli in his exile among the peasants, and the picture he gives us of himself returning to his house after a day of trudging in the mud of the countryside. He removes his mud-bespattered clothes, and then, with a gesture of consecration, dons his robes and reads the classics.

The gesture of consecration and the mood of detachment, both part of feeling oneself the spiritual protagonist of a culture, and with this, the intense sympathy that binds him to those others, the peasants in the muddy fields—this is Levi’s real quality. As expressed in Christ Stopped at Eboli it is, I believe, the most creative affirmation of humanistic faith yet to be produced by a survivor of Europe’s spiritual collapse.

Humanism is perhaps the vaguest word in the liberal vocabulary, so one is required to be specific. By humanism, I mean the recognition of human diversity and particularity, their exploration by the poetic methods of sympathy and intuition, and, finally, the celebration of what has been discovered. It is the prime cultural task. When it is done properly, links and continuities are established, traditions are discarded or revived, end the forces of human possibility are splendidly evoked. The authentic humanist does not give up his quest when he finds man, as Levi found the peasants, more beastly than divine, swamped in superstition, unaware of the claims of history and of reason—in sum, more a part of the landscape than a personality. Even here there is a living element beneath the dead layers, and it must be grasped and related to human destiny.

It is with such a purpose that Levi approaches the peasants of Lucania. His sympathy for them is grounded in something more experienced and actual than the slogans of a political party. When he ironically praises the peasants’ condition of exile, one realizes that he and the peasants are in the same boat. And when he dwells too fondly on the peasant’s most questionable virtue, his capacity for stoic endurance, one remembers that this is hardly a foreign emotion to an anti-fascist who has endured more than twenty years of Mussolini’s tragic and provincial dictatorship.

Yet, though always responsive and sensitive, Levi never for a moment relinquishes his role of the city intellectual, the mediator between two widely divergent and conflicting cultures. It is at the same time his great distinction and his great fault. While not following the example of writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Knut Hamsun, who became reactionary critics of the city and its ideologies after plunging themselves into the muddy current of the peasant’s instinctual round, Levi holds his stance as arbiter and conscience at the cost of precisely that sense of participation in, and abandonment to, a dominating reality which marks these other writers.

But in maintaining this stance, he carries on the intellectual’s work of clarifying, of understanding, of making connections. One sees this best in his approach to the peasant’s political attitudes. Levi is an anti-fascist of long and honorable standing, but when living with the peasants, he made no effort to indoctrinate them. Rather, he patiently went about the job of discovering what their beliefs were. To a generation so accustomed to aggressive proselytizing, Levi’s political tactics may seem too passive and lacking in militant assertion. Yet he does find out what the peasant thinks. “Their enmity toward a foreign or hostile government [the Mussolini regime],” he explains, “went hand in hand (paradoxical as it may seem) with a natural respect for justice, a spontaneous understanding of what Government and State should be, namely, the will of the people expressed in terms of law. ‘Lawful’ is one of the words they most commonly use, not in the meaning of something sanctioned and codified, but rather in the sense of genuine and authentic. A man is ‘lawful’ if he behaves as he should; a wine is ‘lawful’ if it is not watered.”

That is the method, and by this means Levi has revealed many phases of peasant existence never so perceptively recorded. He sees them cut off by more than the isolation imposed by geography, from the civilization symbolized by the twin capitals, Rome, the capital of political chicanery, and New York, the capital of wealth and gadgets.

In an essay at the end of his book, Levi sums up the situation of his peasants. The chief obstacle to the solution of their problem, he claims, is not only economic, or in a narrow sense political, but resides in the cult of the state. “We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis. For the juridical and abstract concept of the individual, we must substitute a new concept, more expressive of reality, one that will do away with the now unbridgeable gulf between the individual and the state. The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind.” Levi espouses a radical form of federalism, organized on the principle of the democratic and local autonomy of all participating units.

One can easily attack this formulation as vague and ambiguous. Yet Levi has the right to talk in terms of the individual and of the autonomy of the region, for he has backed up his politics by the richly demonstrative substance of his book. What it all boils down to is this: either you imagine that technique pure and simple can solve the political impasse or you take Levi’s position that the imaginative, myth-making side of man is at least as important as a Five Year Plan or a New Deal; and that if this is so, the preservation of the individual and his sense of cultural integrity within the group is in reality an important factor in the ideal political program.

Inevitably, Levi will be compared with Ignazio Silone. And if one regards literature as a conversation between men passionately concerned with a community of problems and experiences, then Carlo Levi’s work is in direct colloquy with the novels written by Silone. A very similar feeling pervades the work of both men, what has been called the Mediterranean feeling—that is, the willingness to take man at his deepest moral level and to capture there all that is authentically friendly in his nature. But here the resemblance ends. For Levi, the peasant lives in an autonomous reality which he, the writer, cannot and does not want to share, while Silone is the disillusioned intellectual who wishes to submerge himself in the ethos of the countryside.

So the differences (and it is only when they exist that a real conversation takes place) are much more important than the similarities. Levi approaches the peasant as a detached observer and artist, not as a prophet, a messianic organizer of revolt. In contrast to this, Silone views the peasant world as the perfect moral landscape into which he can project and embody the drama of the fusion of Christian doctrine and Socialist theory.

Does this comparison imply that Silone is a less powerful writer than Levi? No, it is merely to show their individuality, one against the other. No definitive comparison can be made, for the good reason that Levi’s work has just begun. And Silone’s two fine novels, Bread and Wine and Fontamara, still stand secure and unrivaled in modern Italian literature.

There are a few further points to be made. What one understands at last about the peasants is surely more than what Levi intended to tell us. His sharp dichotomy of separate and hostile worlds is contradicted by facts he himself presents; the great influence of New York on the peasants is but one example. Not only is New York the peasant’s earthly paradise, his real capital, but it is also the place from which he gets his metal tools and agricultural implements. The picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt hangs side by side with that of the pagan deity, the Black-Faced Madonna. One can presume that the wall Levi erects between the two civilizations is not so solid after all.

As a matter of fact, the peasants living in a region only twenty or so miles above Lucania still had the same attitude in 1943 toward New York and America. “We want to be the forty-ninth state of the United States,” they hopefully told American soldiers soon after the invasion. “Italy’s finished. What we need is a strong rich country like America to belong to.” This analysis, presented by the peasants instinctively and on the spur of the moment, has not been improved upon by the political leaders of Italy’s various crisis governments.

The peasant that Levi describes for us is on all counts a superior human being. Levi was a city man, a doctor and a painter, besides being a Jew. The peasants accepted Levi because they delighted in his difference. It is an unusual reaction. The primitive people of most other countries, the sharecroppers of America, say, fear and distrust the “foreigner.” The Italian peasant welcomes him, secretly hoping he is a god or a miracle-worker in disguise. Now, although the superstition is less than a rationalist would wish, it is certainly better that human friendliness is created than that it be squelched by an atmosphere of pseudo-science. One can be sure that the Southern sharecropper’s hatred and fear of strangers can be ascribed as much to his lack of a mythic pattern, into which strangers and strangeness can be welcomed and tamed, as to any other single factor.

Lastly, Levi’s assertion that the peasant is living entirely cut off from Italian culture is denied by his very choice of title for his book. Imagine a sharecropper in Mississippi expressing his hatred for the city by saying: “Christ stopped at Jackson.” Such a phrase would never occur to him. That it comes naturally to the Italian peasant is certainly an indication of his profound connection with a culture, even if that culture excludes him. It is also the heartening reminder that at the lowest levels of European society, the need for continuity with a greater scheme still persists.

Christ Stopped At Eboli The Story Of A Year : Carlo Levi : Free ... the entire book is available online

CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (Francesco Rosi, 1979) | Dennis Grunes

Cristo si e Fermato a Eboli - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Julian Petley from Film Reference

Shedding Light on Franceso Rosi - H-Net Reviews

Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) - Vernon Johns

KONANGAL: 15th Jan 2012; Francesco Rosi's Christ Stopped At Eboli

Christ Stopped at Eboli a film website

Printable list: Mike Sragow's 115 favorite films - Baltimore Sun

Christ Stopped at Eboli (film) - Wikipedia

THREE BROTHERS (Tre fratelli)

Italy France (113 mi) 1981

Flickering Myth [Robert W Monk]

Francesco Rosi’s emotive and multi-layered study of three characters – and by extension Italian life and dynamics as a whole – is a haunting, dream-like work of cinematic art.

Three Brothers (Tre Fratelli), adapted from Andrei Platanov’s The Third Son and directed with aplomb by Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, The Moment of Truth), tells the story of Italy’s past, present and possible future through the memories, dreams and imaginings of the central characters.

Beginning with an extreme close-up of rats crawling around a filthy urban floor, the audience is left in no doubt as to the earnestness of the film’s aims. Indeed, this is a production that takes both a poetic and uncompromisingly journalistic approach in its examinations. But far from only being a reportage on the socio political status of Italy in the early 1980s, it also takes an approach that goes beyond words to comment on emotional bonds and feelings that go beyond mere words. The blending of the artful and the dramatic is key to the success of this deeply contemplative film.

The set up is this. The eldest of the brothers Raffaele (Phillippe Noiret) is a well-respected and experienced judge in Rome. His concerns are largely directed towards his family’s and his own safety, especially as law makers and officials have recently been threatened by terrorists and militants. The middle brother Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) is a counsellor for a home for delinquent boys in Naples. It is through his dreams and hopes for the troubled youth that we see a section of society that holds the future for a section of Italy. The youngest, Nicola (Michele Placido), is a radical left wing factory worker in Turin, recently separated from his wife and mother of his daughter (Marta Zoffoli).

All three – Nicola accompanied by his young daughter – travel down to the heel of Italy to be with their father (Charles Vanel) to prepare for the funeral arrangements and pay last respects to their late mother. When they are all there – together and yet distinctly separated, both in social standing and political ideas – the film takes us on a journey through their innermost thoughts and concerns.

The film is at its best and most effective when the visual palette gives balance to the intense political and philosophical arguments on display. Using the young Marta as an echo of her grandmother in the thoughts of her grandfather holds a powerful pull, and it one of the most impressive sections of the piece. Her love of the farm and a simple, rural life in the south of Italy and an almost psychic link to her grandmother is captured beautifully in two scenes. The first follows Marta as she explores her grandfather’s farm. She plays with the fine grain seed and covers her hands in the vital farming resource . This scene is echoed in her grandfather’s reminiscences of his late wife. She appears in his memory at a day they spend at the beach. The camera follows her, delicately observing as she buries her hands deep in the sand. It is this sort of visual poetry, and a sensitivity to familial concerns, that makes the film well worthy of investigation.

Three Brothers is available now on dual format Blu-ray and DVD from Arrow Films.

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Three Brothers opens to an oddly sterile medium shot of a building wall (made even colder and more impersonal by the black and white photography) as the amplified sound of a heartbeat discordantly accompanies an elegiac melody, before a jarring chromatic shift focuses the camera in extreme close-up at the center of a littered, derelict vacant lot amid a pack of rats scavenging for food. The strangely primal image serves to wake the pensive and introverted Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) from his discomforting sleep, who then subsequently opens his door to reveal the bustling sight of rambunctious, troubled adolescents in their sleeping quarters at a juvenile reformatory facility in Naples. An early morning visit from the local police seemingly reinforces his own sense of crisis over the efficacy of his selfless efforts to rescue the children entrusted to his care as their investigation into a series of petty thefts has been traced back to several unidentified young delinquents who have devised a means to scale the walls of the institute at night to sneak into town, then return to the facility unobserved by morning, and have asked Rocco for his assistance in identifying the perpetrators. The theme of protective and isolating walls carries through to the image of Rocco's elderly father Donato (Charles Vanel) as he leaves the gates of his remote mountainside villa in southern Italy and, while walking through an open field, has a surreal encounter with his wife Catalina as she attempts to recapture an errant rabbit that had escaped from the kitchen. Donato's subsequent arrival at a telegram office in town reveals the source of the old man's melancholic bewilderment over the unexpected rendezvous as he initiates a series of telegrams to his grown children informing them of their mother's death. The eldest son Raffaelle (Philippe Noiret), a successful, often publicized judge in Rome who has presided over a series of high profile cases involving organized crime and domestic terrorism, has been asked to assume yet another volatile (and consequently, potentially dangerous) case from a retiring, disillusioned judge. Weighing the entreaties of his apprehensive wife (Andréa Ferréol) to reject the proposed judicial appointment out of safety concerns with his own moral imperative to dispense law fairly in the belief that the simple (but often courageous) act of upholding justice reinforces the nation's underlying fabric of democracy, Rafaelle seizes his unexpected trip to his ancestral home away from the familial pressures of his own wife and son as an opportunity to reflect on what could become a fatal decision. In contrast to the well-established Rafaelle, the youngest son Nicola (Michele Placido), estranged from his northern-born wife, leads a near transient life as a factory worker in Turin, constantly championing the cause of the working class by participating in worker strikes and management intimidation. Bringing along his warm and affectionate young daughter Marta (Marta Zoffoli) home for the funeral, his life has been defined by the instability of his personal and professional relationships. Brought together by tragedy, the three ideologically dissimilar brothers are compelled to reflect on their own personal direction in the gravity of their profound, shared grief.

Loosely adapted from Andrei Platonov's novel The Third Son by Francesco Rosi and renowned screenwriter Tonino Guerra, Three Brothers is an elegantly muted, thoughtful, and provocative observation of the sociopolitical climate of 1970s Italy, as the national struggle with widespread corruption, economic disparity, organized crime, delinquency, and domestic terrorism (by the young radicals of the Red Brigade) seemed escalating and interminable. By integrating extended dream sequences into a naturalistic, social realist framework, Rosi illustrates the underlying idealism and sense of human decency that pervade the seemingly conflicting actions and divergent life calling of the three brothers as each strives to improve social conditions through dedicated service. Rosi further incorporates recurring imagery of life in the bucolic southern village through dreams and flashbacks in order to reflect a timelessness and perpetuity of Donato and Catalina's simple, unhurried life in the country: Donato's dissemination of the tragic news through outmoded telegrams (in the absence of a telephone in the house) that is inferred in Rocco's memory of the delayed arrival of Allied soldiers on a lone tank into town (and into the sight of an puzzled, surrendering village) to announce the end of war; Marta's oblivious playing at a grain storage barn that mirrors a flashback of a newly married Catalina (Simonetta Stefanelli) burying her feet in the sand on a beach and subsequently losing her wedding ring; the couple's joyful outdoor wedding celebration despite the interruption of rain that is contrasted against constant reminders of their sons' fractured (Nicola), voluntarily separated (Raffaelle), and nonexistent (Rocco) families. It is this sentimental incongruence that inevitably defines the seeming cultural irreconcilability between the rooted Donato and his emigrated children - an understanding of one's humble sense of purpose within the unpredictable and disillusioning chaos of his environment - the patience to carry out the minutiae of life's forbidding, existential task, diligently sifting through the metaphoric sands of time, to recover an irreplaceable piece of one's soul.

Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]

Blood Brothers [Matt Reifschneider]

10k Bullets [Michael Den Boer]

DVD Compare [Paul Lewis] (UK Blu-ray)

WithoutYourHead.com [Jason Minton]

Irish Film Critic [Victor C. Leroi]

Fire at Sea - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Rosi, Gianfranco

FIRE AT SEA (Fuocoammare) B 84

Italy France (108 mi) 2016 Official site [UK]

The island of Lampedusa has a surface area of 20 square km, lies 70km from the African coast and 120 miles from that of Sicily. In the past 20 years 400,000 migrants have landed on Lampedusa. In the attempt to cross the Strait of Sicily to reach Europe it is estimated 15,000 people have died. —opening innertitles

While it’s impossible to see this film and not think about Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), this is the kind of film that infuriates some, adding obvious fictional aspects into what is ostensibly a documentary film, where some do it well, like Jia Zhang-ke in 24 CITY (2008) or I WISH I KNEW (2010), or Haskell Wexler who invented the mold in Medium Cool (1969), creating a documentary-fiction hybrid that has become more prominently used today. While this is more of an impressionistic film essay that often loses its way, what ultimately catches the viewer’s attention is the artful manner in which this film addresses the refugee crisis, arguably the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, with more than 60 million forcibly displaced people around the world by the end of 2014, where nearly 20 million were refugees flooding out of Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, where at its peak nearly 60,000 refugees per month were arriving in Greece by sea (curtailed significantly by the implementation of the EU-Turkey Deal on Migrant Crisis in March 2016), yet there were also record numbers of deaths from those who drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea, often on flimsy, home-made crafts or overloaded boats with poor equipment. Looking exclusively from the vantage point of Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island between Sicily and the African continent, only about 45 miles from Tunisia in Africa and 120 miles from the southern Italian coast, with a population of only 6,000, they are on the front lines in the attempt to rescue refugees arriving in ships at risk, mostly from North Africa or the Middle East, providing rescue teams of helicopters and patrol boats, though often they arrive too late, with reportedly as many as 15,000 people having lost their lives just off the coast of the island. But this doesn’t provide newsreel coverage like one can view on nightly news broadcasts, but instead creates a glimpse of life in a faraway part of the world that is disrupted by harrowing events occurring just off their shores. Many will likely be disappointed that there is not more footage devoted to refugees, perhaps only 20% of the film, with the camera continually wandering elsewhere, mostly following a young kid, and while this remains the heart of the picture, the filmmaker takes the unusual steps of making only tangential references to the crisis, showing how easily it gets lost to the banality of everyday existence.

Winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin for Best Film, the first documentary film to win the 1^st Place prize, awarded by a jury headed by Meryl Streep who applauded the film, “It’s a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do. It is urgent, imaginative, and necessary filmmaking.” Born in Eritrea and raised in Italy, Rosi spent a year on the island, initially intending to spend a few weeks and shoot a 10-minute short, but he met Dr. Pietro Bartolo in the island’s emergency room, who recounted many of his experiences over the years, which shifted the focus of the film. Instead Rosi got to know the residents before ever turning a camera on them, where according to the director, “The films are basically two separate stories — the island, the people of the island — and the migrants arriving on the island. They never interact, they barely touch each other, and in between there is this [reception] institution, and there is the doctor who is somehow in between the two things.” While he has months to interact with the residents, the same can’t be said for the refugees, who were much more challenging to film, passing through the personnel of rescue operations, examined for health risks by the doctor, then moved to a detention center where he didn’t know any of them, with most long gone after only two days, heading for the mainland. The film is more of a character study of the residents on the island, including the doctor, the lone medical practitioner on the island for years, who bridges the cultural divide between escaping refugees in crisis and local residents. 10-year old Samuele Pucillo, whose name we don’t even know until we’re well into the film, is initially seen climbing trees, removing the bark to make a homemade slingshot, then crossing the landscape to find objects to target, such as birds and cactus plants, filmed from a variety of angles. We also meet his grandmother Maria, who listens to the same radio broadcast every day, calling in to the local deejay to request one of her five favorite songs, including a 50’s song by the same name as the film title, Fuocoammare (OST) by Giuseppe Fragapane on Spotify, that recounts World War II and the dangerous conditions for fishermen who went to sea during artillery fire, often forced to endure “fire at sea.” For generations, the island residents’ biggest fear was dying at sea. Now the close proximity to Africa has brought that fear to their doorstep in the form of a trail of refugees who live that reality daily, bringing to life the myths of Virgil and the ancient Greek tragedies of Homer, with adventurers crossing that same sea route from Carthage in northern Africa to Sicily.

Other than the doctor and rescue teams, the residents of the island have little contact with the steady flow of refugees, and mostly hear by radio news reports, as otherwise there’s no interaction. According to Rosi, “Lampedusa became a microcosm of what is Europe: these two worlds that barely touch each other, but somehow there is never an interaction.” Samuele is the innocent protagonist of the film, too young to understand the implications of what’s happening around him, and to some degree provides the comic relief, as he’s seen playfully scampering around the island, lighting firecrackers on the beach, willing to talk endlessly to anyone who comes near, seen making wild gestures when expressing himself, also butchering the English language in classes at school, even making a mess while he eats his grandmother’s spaghetti. The irony is he’s expected to be a fisherman, like his father, grandfather, and all the fathers that came before, but he suffers from the effects of sea sickness, hypertension, has a lazy eye problem, shortness of breath, chronic panic attacks, and amusingly displays the typical behavior of a hypochondriac. But what he does have is what all the refugees passing through don’t have — a loving family and a home, seen treated by the same doctor that treats all the incoming refugees. Side by side with Samuele’s daily routines are scenes of a hangar door opening for a rescue helicopter, the coast guard unloading refugees that appear more dead than alive, emotionally devastated by the journey, where not everyone survives. There is a choreography of routines on display, as new arrivals are slowly processed, sitting behind walled compounds waiting for a judge to decide their fates, lives marked by poverty and war. A Nigerian preacher sings his lament in oral tradition, surrounded by other Africans, engaging in a solemn group prayer describing how they fled their homes in Eritrea, Mali, Syria, Nigeria, or Sudan, avoiding falling bombs from the sky, so they crossed the Saharan desert, were forced to drink their own piss, were tortured and driven out of Libya, before being forced out to sea. The only spark of joy captured is a spontaneous soccer game in near darkness at the detention center. Dr. Bartolo is the moral center of the film, a man of decency and good will, whose sense of purpose is undeniable, whose only comment is an off-handed remark, “It’s the duty of every human being, if you’re human, to help these people.” By the end, however, as the coast guard unloads a newly arrived boat, we hear first-hand accounts of more horrors at sea, bodies piled on top of bodies, some unconscious, some in convulsions, others in hysterics screaming uncontrollably, a man viciously beaten, unable to speak, signs of chemical burns caused by diesel fuel mixed with sea water, dehydration, hunger, with the camera lingering on the stack of lifeless bodies in the lower deck where all perished. Stuck in the back of our heads is the sound of that Nigerian chant, “The sea is not a place to pass by… The sea is not a road… On the journey on the sea too many passengers died. They got lost in the sea. A boat was carrying 90 passengers. Only 30 were rescued and the rest died. Today we are alive.”

Interesting observations from this year’s Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Finland by Antti Alanen on his website, Antti Alanen: Film Diary: Fuocoammare / Fire at Sea:

On 16 June when I asked Rosi whether he felt any affinity with neorealism he denied it. Yet while digesting Fuocoammare I kept thinking about Visconti (La terra trema), Rossellini (Stromboli) and Antonioni (he started as a documentarist, there is a strong documentary impulse in L’avventura, and late in his career he made documentaries such as Ritorno a Lisca Bianca, and Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale). All three directors had a documentary impulse and a strong social consciousness.

Rosi’s answers to the morning discussion’s obligatory questions: 1) the first film you saw: he said that the first film that really impressed him was Antonioni’s La signora senza camelie, 2) the desert island film: Buñuel’s Los olvidados. His summation of a documentarist’s calling was of anthology quality.

Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of a Mediterranean island where hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but devotes most of the film to the daily rhythms of Lampedusa, seen through the eyes of a doctor who treats casualties and performs autopsies, and a feisty but anxious pre-teen from a family of fishermen for whom it is simply a peripheral fact of life. With its emphasis on the quotidian, the film reclaims an ongoing tragedy from the abstract sensationalism of media headlines. A Kino Lorber release.

Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, Italy/France) — Masters - Cinema Scope Alysia Urrutia

Hailing from the same breed of striking experimentation that initially garnered Italian director Gianfranco Rosi international acclaim, this riveting new essay on the European migration crisis became the first documentary ever to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Steeped in verité yet still novel in its approach, Fire at Sea’s withdrawn yet intimate fly-on-the-wall approach refrains from drawing any condemning conclusions or didactic calls to action. Bearing witness to the atrocious refugee experience in all of its forms is a slippery subject for such an untethered, contemplative film to fully grapple with, yet Fire at Sea makes virtue of its distance by interweaving what are really two completely separate worlds into one account. To what extent the film’s randomly picked subjects on the small Sicilian island of Lampedusa (a major, unofficial debarkation point for illegal migrants fleeing to Europe) show compassion towards the influx of expats in their midst lies in the eye of the beholder, for Rosi does little to prompt a critique of their reaction, or lack thereof. Whether through blissful ignorance or overwhelming altruism, the discordant receptions scattered across Lampedusa feel all the more ample and unrepressed in comparison to the unfortunate conditions at sea. The film raises more questions about collective coping than it answers, yet it’s the deft contrast between these parallel blades of Rosi’s double-edged sword that ultimately pierces.

Preview of the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival, 10/21/16 to 10/27/16 Scott Pfeiffer from The Moving World

Not to be missed is Gianfranco Rosi's unique documentary Fire at Sea, playing Saturday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. and Tuesday, October 25 at 6:15 p.m., a great work of humanism and a storehouse of powerful imagery. (It won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and it's the Italian submission for the foreign-language Academy Award.) The setting is Lampedusa, an ancient, tiny Italian fishing island, which for years has been the gateway to Europe for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Syria, and points beyond. There is no narration or editorializing, but the situation is ripped straight from the headlines: souls crossing the sea on small, rickety, overstuffed boats, looking for freedom, knowing they'll die if they stay at home. Some 15,000 have died trying to make it. We follow the Coast Guard on rescue ops. They drag the sickest migrants off the boat, more dead than alive. Then, there is horrifying footage from the hold underneath: cadavers strewn with trash. Rosi secures rare footage from inside the immigrant holding center. At night, these largely North African men, who often turn up on the island burned with diesel fuel, look like gilded silhouettes in their gold-foil reflector ponchos. We meet a haunted, compassionate doctor tasked with examining the migrants after their sea voyage. Often, he must handle dead children. ("It is the duty of every human being," he says, "to help these people.") We also follow a young island boy with a lazy eye and no particular aptitude for being a sailor, the historic role for every Lampedusa boy. He might as well be on a different planet than the migrants. For great stretches there is no dialogue or music, and all of our information comes from Rosi's poetic visuals. I think of the deep quiet at the bottom of the sea as we follow a deep-sea fisherman, or the still of the early morning as a rescue chopper is wheeled out on the Coast Guard carrier's hangar. We occasionally visit the studio of the island's DJ, then cut to the boy's grandparents as they happily listen to the radio, the grandma serving the grandpa tea. As I watched the old lady make her bed, I mused over an old photograph on her nightstand. Suddenly, she picked it up, kissed it and spoke to it. It's a small moment, but it's indicative of this film's great, quiet heart.

Film Comment: Olaf Möller April 29, 2016

All of which is cautiously forgiven in light of the Golden Bear, which most deservedly went to Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea—a look at the island of Lampedusa that’s in equal parts inspired by Vittorio de Seta and Cesare Zavattini. Rosi’s film wasn’t to everyone’s taste, to put it mildly. In discussions, it often got pitted against Philip Scheffner’s Havarie, one of the most morally abject works the Berlinale 2016 had on offer, in the Forum.

Change is sometimes dirty and deeply tiring work, as Gianfranco Rosi shows in Fire at Sea—something many a Scheffner-ite found most objectionable. Yes, Rosi shows refugees at Lampedusa who are more dead than alive, emotionally drained and physically wasted after a gruesome journey that invariably not everybody survives. He shows body bags, and by observing the rescuers’ difficulties moving them suggests how much a human life weighs, literally as well as symbolically. Rosi also shows the routines, the choreographies developed over the years by the people involved in processing the newly arrived. He has a doctor show the picture of a body disfigured by chemical burns and explain how these happen on those journeys by boat. He shows the refugees as divided among each other, then for a few moments united as one in the memory of what they went through, only to sit finally in a walled compound waiting for a judge to decide their fate—a brief respite from an existence almost always marked by poverty, and too often by war. In contrast to that, there’s Samuele, a boy of 12 who teaches his friends to carve slingshots and has trouble with one of his eyes—it’s lazy, and needs to be forced into action through a patch over his good eye. The little master marksman now barely hits a tree where only a few weeks ago he’d have been able to shoot down a fruit. The path of Samuele, a true child of Lampedusa, never properly crosses those of the refugees, except for the doctor who looks after all of them.

People objected to Rosi showing suffering and death, and they objected to his method, best described as fiction filmmaking featuring people playing themselves, with a genuine documentary impulse. They also objected to the film’s devastating beauty—one perhaps doesn’t want to know how many sea rescues Rosi must have observed to finally be able to shoot one in a fashion almost Fordian in its nocturnal grandeur and feeling for ritual as the core of human existence. Yet Rosi shows people who do something and who live with what they have experienced. They’re exemplary, even if most of them are merely doing their “jobs” the guys processing the refugees upon arrival don’t come off as nice people, but if in the depth of their hearts they didn’t mean well, why would they be there, at the front line of humanity’s struggle?

Fire at Sea is a prime example of muscular humanism that heeds the conclusion of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: that it’s not enough to just look and recognize suffering, but that it needs to be told, narrated, made into a story—something people can act upon. Being a witness, reporting, offering a first narrative, actively showing a sense of solidarity with the oppressed and the persecuted also helps, as testified by Wáng Bìng’s Ta’ang, an urgent account of a refugee crisis that Western media so far has rarely looked at: that of the Ta’ang fleeing the civil war in their native Burma, hoping to find sanctuary and shelter in the PRC. Rosi and Wáng most probably would have your back when the shit hits the fan, but don’t wait for Scheffner—his sort might come only when everything is over.

Review: Fire at Sea Fuocoammare | Gianfranco Rosi - Film Comment Stuart Klawans, September/October 2016

On a map, the island of Lampedusa looks like a flat pebble that Sicily has kicked toward Tunisia. Up close, it’s a hilly, semi-arid terrain of winding streets and scrub vegetation. The settled population of 6,000 Italians, many engaged in the traditional business of fishing, is augmented today by tourists who enjoy Lampedusa’s beach hotels, and by the hundreds of desperate migrants who have survived the smugglers’ passage from Africa and now crowd the island’s holding camps, which sometimes catch fire. One of the most recent blazes was reported in May, a few months after Gianfranco Rosi’s superb documentary about the refugee route to Lampedusa, Fire at Sea, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin festival.

Rosi does not bother with the tourists. He does show you the migrants in their wretchedness and the places where they’re kept, sometimes being cared for graciously and sometimes just processed. You see the ships and helicopters sent to rescue the migrants from their foundering boats and recover the corpses. You also see the coast, with its cliffs poking like splayed fingers into the sea; the fishermen’s workaday harbor; the landscape with its cactus patches and gnarly trees; and one ordinary local family, whose 12-year-old boy Samuele is the opposite of a point-of-view character. We see what he doesn’t.

Rosi’s previous film, Sacro GRA (2013), presented glimpses of various people’s lives on and around a single location, the highway that encircles Rome. In a similar spirit, Fire at Sea examines a ceaseless mass movement through the paradoxical method of constructing a deep sense of place. After the film’s opening text—a bit of exposition that is Rosi’s only authorial intervention, citing the number of boat people who have tried to reach Europe through Lampedusa over the past 20 years, and the number who have perished—the first scene is not a picture of migrants at sea but of Samuele on land, busily exploring an overgrown yard. Rosi watches patiently as Samuele tramps through the brush, climbs a tree, and selects a branch to cut. (He’s making a slingshot.) At this point, despite the introductory text, you might imagine that Fire at Sea is going to be about a crewcut Italian boy in blue jeans and how well he’s embedded in his surroundings.

Then Rosi cuts to his main theme—but you still don’t see any migrants. You just hear them on a distress call, over an image of rotating antennas, with a coast guard officer insistently asking “What is your position?” while a woman’s voice answers only, “Please, we beg you.” The deck of a ship comes into view. A searchlight cuts through the night, playing over the water. Nothing. Whatever happened is invisible for the moment, and distant from Samuele. His grandmother learns about it from the radio the next morning as she bustles around the kitchen. Another boat sunk. Two hundred fifty dead.

For the rest of Fire at Sea, Rosi’s game is to bring the migrants and their plight gradually closer. You see some of them rescued by men in hazmat suits, questioned and photographed. In a pair of unforgettable scenes, a Nigerian man at a prayer service chants about the agonies his group endured and the deaths so many suffered, and an Italian doctor at his desk speaks of the unending horrors he’s dealt with and his sleepless nights. Eventually, toward the end, Rosi shows you the worst.

Meanwhile, in the alternating scenes, Samuele goes on as if oblivious. Is he? You can’t blame a kid for living a normal life—but the boy turns out to have anxiety attacks and an eye that doesn’t work, and something he’s been absorbing from the air moves him to want to kill songbirds and mimic the recoil of a machine gun. On his island, how much normality is possible?

Rosi, of course, does not explicitly pose such questions. His restraint is reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s—though his use of second-unit cinematography and Foley bring his work a step closer to fiction. Constructed as much as reported, Fire at Sea is a beautiful artifact presented for your contemplation. It is also an act of conscience. And it is harrowing.

Fuocoammare (Gianfranco Rosi) - International Cinephile Society Marc van de Klashorst

Director Gianfranco Rosi on his Berlinale winner Fire at Sea - Seventh ... Alex Heeny from The Seventh Row

Reverse Shot: Jeff Reichert October 08, 2016

'Fire at Sea' Shows the Front Lines of the Migrant Crisis. Don't Look ... Barbie Natza Nadeau from The Daily Beast

Antti Alanen: Film Diary: Fuocoammare / Fire at Sea

A critique of Europe's refugee policy: On the Berlinale's Golden Bear ... Verena Nees and Bernd Reinhardt from the World Socialist Web Site

Sight & Sound: Trevor Johnston June 10, 2016

Fire at Sea | Film Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard

The Film Stage: Giovanni Marchini Camia

Seongyong's Prviate Place [Seongyong Cho]

ScreenAnarchy [Thomas Humphrey]

Filmmaker: Howard Feinstein October 07, 2016

Little White Lies: David Jenkins

Telluride Film Festival 2016 Janina Ciezadlo from Merely Circulating

Fire At Sea · Film Review Fire At Sea is two good documentaries that ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club

Brooklyn Magazine: Michael Joshua Rowin September 27, 2016

MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman February 18, 2016

Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew February 15, 2016

ScreenAnarchy.com (Dustin Chang)

Gianfranco Rosi's 'Fire at Sea' examines the people of Lampedusa and its tide of refugees Maria Garcia from Film Journal International

POV Magazine [Pat Mullen]

Vague Visages [Jordan Brooks]

CineVue [Harriet Warman]

At Filmnomenon [Eternality Tan]

BOMB: Elina Alter

The Upcoming [Sean Gallen]

Dog And Wolf [Mark Wilshin]

AnOther: Carmen Gray July 18, 2016

Letterboxd: Mike D'Angelo

Daily | NYFF 2016 | Gianfranco Rosi's FIRE AT SEA | Keyframe ... David Hudson

Why migrants will risk death to escape - Fire at Sea director ... Patrick Kingsley interview from The Guardian, June 9, 2016

Read our interview with Gianfranco Rosi David Jenkins interview from Little White Lies, June 9, 2016

'Fire at Sea' ('Fuocoammare'): Berlin Review | Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young

Berlin Film Review: 'Fire at Sea' - Variety Peter Debruge

Fire at Sea review – masterly and moving look at the migrant crisis ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Fire at Sea shows Europe's refugee crisis in slow motion - review Robbie Collin from The Telegraph

South China Morning Post [James Mottram]

Juxtaposition of the Refugee Crisis and the Old Europe Justin Chang from The LA Times

'Fire at Sea' Is Not the Documentary You'd Expect About the Migrant Crisis. It's Better. A.O. Scott from The New York Times, October 20, 2016

'Fire at Sea' Strikes a Nerve on the Migrant Crisis: 'What Can I Do?' Rachel Donadio from The New York Times, October 7, 2016

Fire at Sea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roskam, Michaël R.

BULLHEAD (Rundskop) A- 94

Belgium (124 mi) 2011 ‘Scope

A brutally dark and uncompromising film that encompasses many different styles, veering into film noir, but most often using the suspenseful manner of a thriller featuring a loner character on-the-edge who’s capable of doing anything, often coming very close to the cringe factor, as this film ventures into territory few would wish to explore. Despite the exquisite direction, which is never showy or ever intended to draw attention to itself, it’s quite surprising this film, from a first time director, was chosen by Belgium over the nation’s patron saints of cinema, the Dardennes Brothers’ latest Cannes offering The Kid With a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) (2011) as the country’s selection for Best Foreign Film, and even more surprising that the American Academy Award Foreign Film Selection committee, which has had fits in this category in year’s past, overlooking what many felt were the best films, named this as one of the five finalists for 2012. Because of the uncomfortable subject matter, which keeps the audience at an arm’s distance while simultaneously telling a riveting story, brilliantly using old-fashioned film techniques like storytelling through editing and camera movement, integrating the sound design or changing the film speed, it’s a daring and superb choice, one that chooses art over individual comfort. If truth be told, there are literally hundreds of films that explore damaged women, who have been raped or abused in some manner, where the psychological implications become the narrative of the film. Isabelle Huppert has made a living playing this kind of part. It’s quite rare, however, to see such an accomplished examination of a brutally damaged man, especially one exhibiting this degree of skill behind the camera. We saw glimpses of it with Michael Fassbender in Shame (2011), but this is something different altogether. Written by the director, cinematography by Nicolas Karakatsanis, there is an immediate connection to the screen from the opening shot, a superb rural landscape, where one doesn’t wish to look away to read the subtitles, as there’s also a brief opening narration which gives the audience a clue what to expect when there is an imbalance in nature.

Among the many things happening in this film is a playful dig at Belgium’s own split culture, the Dutch-speaking Flanders and the French-speaking Wallonia, where each side refuses to learn the language of the other, as they’ve basically grown up to despise the other half, where lifelong prejudices rule the day, which becomes somewhat comical in this film as the story plays into this built-in prejudice. Heavily grounded in near documentary style realism, it’s also an examination of machismo, especially as defined in rural outbacks or in the criminal element that remains outside the bounds of mainstream society. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Jaky, who gained 60 pounds of muscle to bulk up for this role, using bodybuilding techniques to become a hulking muscular mass, a kind of gentle giant walking among us who has the strength to tear any man apart, yet he works quietly on his family farm with his own parents raising cattle. What separates them from other farmers is they inject illegal hormones into their beef in order to fatten them up prematurely, where bigger cattle means more money, also saving money in the long run as they don’t have to keep them as long. This is as much a family way of life as cooking crystal meth is in the Ozarks, or bootlegging moonshine whisky in Kentucky. It’s regional, becoming cultural through the years, and it’s outside the law. Despite efforts to stop it, the practice continues as it’s become ingrained with organized crime. As Jacky’s small group of outsiders attempts to extend their territory into crime-infested Wallonia, all hell breaks loose, including the killing of a policeman, which doesn’t exactly do wonders for business and sets the tone for a thorough investigation. Through flashback sequences back to childhood, we learn the devastating origins of Jacky’s own personal trauma, one which remains a lifelong skeleton in his closet, and a clue to his behavior.

The film is also something of a police procedural mixed together with bits and pieces of Jaky’s past which resurface with the police killing and the attempted entry into forbidden territory, where Jaky has to come to terms with what’s haunted him his entire life. He’s such an imposing presence, bulking up by injecting the same drugs he uses on the animals, which affects his mental outlook, creating such an unstable force the audience recognizes a potential train wreck when they see one. It’s significant to recall, however, just what little harm he’s caused others up to this point, as he largely keeps to himself and his small circle of friends. It’s this unfortunate business on the other side that’s creating havoc, stirring up something inside, which plays out like long lost memories rising to the surface. Once the external circumstances are revealed, the director changes focus and moves inward, becoming a hyper intense interior examination of personal tragedy, where Jaky is continually battling his internal demons. Set largely in the rural outskirts away from the mainstream of life, they set their own laws out there and define their own cultural traditions, where this concept of macho strength and male personal fortitude has a different definition altogether, becoming an intense character study. Schoenaerts truly offers an astonishing, testosterone-laden performance, chasing the boundaries of inner rage, where his behavior grows more erratic and unpredictable, becoming a human timebomb waiting to explode. Darkly disturbing, but also internally complex, the audience may feel alienated from the brutality, but drawn to the impressive craftsmanship of the director who really pulls it all together in this psychologically probing and constantly inventive work that challenges our own preconceived notions of masculinity.

Twitch [Todd Brown]

Set in the shadowy underworld of agricultural and illegal hormone trading, Bullhead introduces a significant new talent in Belgian writer-director Michael Roskam. It is a morally complex, constantly surprising picture, one that constantly changes shapes just as you think you've got it figured out, one that nimbly treads the line between arthouse drama and gripping thriller to create something quite unique. And while it could arguably stand to be slightly more focused than it is Bullhead is a movie that will not be easily forgotten.

Matthias Schoenaerts anchors the picture with an absolutely riveting performance as Jacky Vanmarsenille, a young man with a troubled past who pumps himself as full of illegal hormones as he does the cattle on his family's farm. Jacky is a brute of a man, an alarmingly physical presence seemingly always teetering on the edge of a violent outburst thanks to the vials of testosterone coursing through his system.

On the larger scale of things the Vanmarsenille farm is a small player in the overall scheme of hormone trading but they have the opportunity to move up when a ruthless larger scale provider needs a new source after police bring down his largest supplier. It's a chance to make some easy money but one with large risks. The cop in charge of bringing down this new client has turned up dead and the man sent to negotiate terms with the Vanmarsenille's has ties to Jacky's tragic past. And though Jacky wants nothing to do with it, it may be too late to stop the wheels that have already begun turning.

Laid out that way it seems quite clear what sort of film Bullhead is. and, on one level, a gritty crime thriller is exactly what the film delivers. But there is another level as well, one that delivers a far more satisfying reward. And that level is anchored in Jacky himself.

Schoenaerts - who underwent a physical transformation every bit as dramatic as Tom Hardy's in Bronson for this film - delivers an astounding, mesmerizing performance as Jacky and it is Jacky who fills the core of the film. We meet his as a brute but as we begin to understand Jacky's history and the forces that are driving him, he becomes something entirely different. He becomes a damaged little boy drastically overcompensating for past events completely out of his control. Jacky Vanmarsenille is one of the most complex, most compelling characters put on screen in recent years and Schoenaerts delivers him to the screen in a performance that should make him a major international star in the years to come. Though the film as a whole is somewhat over-plotted and the structure bulkier than it needs to be Schoenaerts is a positively magnetic force in it from start to finish.

Beautifully shot and flawlessly performed, Bullhead is a strong, compelling debut feature from Michael Roskam. Remember the name for you will surely be hearing more from him in the future.

Screen Daily (English) Fionnuala Halligan

Bullhead is a disturbingly visceral male drama with a brooding central performance from Matthais Schoenaerts. It’s a violent and complex work which requires the viewer to be completely engaged for 129 minutes as the intricacies of plot and character interact.

While Bullhead isn’t for the faint-hearted, there is a significant payoff for those who stay the course. With the right critical support, Celluloid Dreams could notch interest from bold distributors looking for an upscale challenge. Major European territories should accept the Flemish/French dialogue, although English-speaking audiences may find the Belgian topography challenging ground.

Most reminiscent, perhaps, of Tom Hardy’s transformation in Bronson, Matthias Schoenaerts bulks up shockingly to play the central role of Jacky Vanmarsenille, a hulking Flemish farmer in Limburgh. His performance, which will surely attract awards attention, is almost entirely internalised, and all the more remarkable for it.

Jacky’s family breeds cattle and dabbles in illegal hormones to enhance their meat. This is mirrored in Jacky’s own sparse life, as he abuses his body with testosterone and other drugs for reasons which become slowly and painfully clear to the viewer.

Directing his first feature, Michael R Roskam has not made things easy for his audience; a thuggish criminal gang circles around Jacky’s world. These men have murdered a policeman who tried to disband their hormone-smuggling mafia.

There’s also a gay police informant called Diederik (confusingly called Ricky at times), who has multiple connections to Jacky’s life, including a vital part in a devastating incident which took place 20 years ago. And two hapless French-speaking mechanics, charged with destroying the getaway car, look set to inadvertently seal Jacky’s fate. A moment’s inattention will cost the viewer the plot.

Much of the action in Bullhead takes place in darkened interiors - a brutally tense sequence in a nightclub, for example, or the film’s ultimate burst of violence, which is almost unwatchable. The Flanders farmyards are a flat and uncommenting backdrop to a sealed-off provincial life in which grudges are played out across the generations.

Despite its stylistic flourishes - and this is a notably stylish film - all eyes are drawn to Schoenaerts as Jacky, the inarticulate, disintegrating, fatally wounded “Bullhead” of the title. Roksam depicts a world of men into which this man cannot enter; of animals and flesh and impotence; of the very essence of maleness in the agricultural world. Schoenaerts, helped by young actor Valvekens in the crucial flashback sequences, present Jacky as a raging bull whose tragedy we can identify with even as his fury terrifies us - and seals his own fate.

Twitch [James Marsh]

With his first feature, Michael Roskam has delivered an assured and attention-grabbing debut that sits comfortably alongside Matteo Garrone's GOMORRAH and Daniel Espinosa's SNABBA CASH as one of the most original crime films in recent memory. Roskam exposes the shady Belgian beef industry as a world run by gangsters and opportunists where corruption, hormone peddling and even murder have become all-too-common occurrences. Within this unlikely, but always fascinating setting, the film hones its focus on the very personal tragedy of a single, profoundly troubled individual and his ongoing struggle to embody the macho persona he so desperately projects.

As with any business, the beef industry is competitive and dependent on a consistent and reliable supply. When a shady veterinarian offers the family-run Vanmarsenille cattle farm the opportunity to strike a profitable deal with a notorious Flemish beef trader, it seems an unmissable opportunity to set them up for long-term profit. However, nephew and primary enforcer Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) stalls the deal when his new business partners are implicated in the murder of a police officer and the arrival of an unwelcome face from his past forces him to address a long-buried personal horror.

Much like the cattle he tends to so passionately, the insular, lumbering Jacky is also artificially enhanced, entombed in a body enhanced by a chronic testosterone addiction which has lead not only to him injecting increasingly large and unhealthy doses of the hormone into his body each day, but perpetuating his already deep-seated paranoia and personal insecurities. Jacky hides the truth about his identity in much the same way these gangsters parade themselves as legitimate farmers. Nobody is who they appear to be, not his family, friends, not even the cows themselves, the industry, or Roskam's film.

For all its film noir tropes, BULLHEAD is really a story of personal tragedy and the turbulent efforts of our deeply flawed anti-hero to accept himself and have others do the same. The film's greatest irony is that its strongest character is also its weakest and for all its industrial intrigue and police procedurial elements, the real conflict takes place within the mind and body of a deeply insecure and enraged man looking for someone to take out his anger on. Schoenaerts' performance is an entirely convincing depiction of the kind of broken, hulking masculinity De Niro won an Oscar for in RAGING BULL. The entire film rests upon Jacky's broad, lumbering shoulders but with just a few expressions and only a handful of discernible lines of dialogue, he creates a riveting and emotionally challenged character that we care for even as he intimidates the crap out of us.

With a deftness that seems at once effortless and painstakingly conceived, Roskam's script reflects a very personal deception within a much grander charade that defines an entire industry and affects an entire nation. It is the story of a personal tragedy enveloped within a national crisis, a story that feels both universal and deeply personal. BULLHEAD wrong-foots its audience in the most exciting and assured ways, defying viewers' expectations as adeptly as Denis Villeneuve's devastating INCENDIES, and likewise is a film that deserves to be approached cold, hence the vague nature of this review. The resulting film, however, is a strong, confident and assured thriller about lies and deception that is both deeply vulnerable and achingly fragile.

PSIFF 2012: BULLHEAD (RUNDSKOP, 2011)—Q&A Session With ... Michael Guillen interviews the director from The Evening Class, February 2, 2012

Sound On Sight Ricky D

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Bullhead Dana Stevens from Slate

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THE DROP B+ 92

USA (106 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site

Everybody has a past…There are some sins that you commit, that you can’t come back from, no matter how hard you try.

—Bob Saginowski

Listen, listen, just take it easy. Listen to me. That is life. That’s what it is. People like me, coming along when you’re not looking.

—Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts)

Only Roskam’s second film, following the international acclaim received with the bleak but riveting Belgian film 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #6 Bullhead (Rundskop) , which immediately caught the attention of Hollywood executives who invited him to make his second film in America, offering him the script of well-known screenwriter, Dennis Lehane, who penned Clint Eastwood’s MYSTIC RIVER (2003), Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007), and Martin Scorsese’s SHUTTER ISLAND (2010), not to mention several episodes of the popular television show The Wire (2004 – 08), so he is a proven commodity. Working with Lehane’s short story Animal Rescue set in Boston, the filmmaker has assembled an extraordinary international cast and makes the most of it, transporting the film to a non-descript Brooklyn neighborhood where dirty money changes hands on a nightly basis. The story centers around a neighborhood dive bar known as Cousin Marv’s, the name of the former owner, the late James Gandolfini in his final role, wearing a New York Jets hoodie, hanging Yankees and Giants posters on the walls, who lost his bar nearly a decade ago to Chechen gangsters, but continues to run the place, making regular payments to the mob, who make deals, investments, collect on bets won or lost, and at the end of the night the money has to end up somewhere, where the last stop along the way is a money drop funneling cash to organized crime in an underworld network of Brooklyn bars, where the location changes from day to day to keep the heat off of any one specific bar. The noirish inner narration is provided by Marv’s street savvy bartender, Bob Saginowski, Tom Hardy from Locke (2013) channeling Brando’s Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), where he’s a local kid from the neighborhood seemingly without much education, who doesn’t talk much but is a straight up guy, honest, hard working, and dependable, where Marv is his actual cousin, and the two have a familiar way of talking to one another as if they’ve known each other for years, which of course they have. Nothing phases these two guys, as they’ve been through it all, but they’re a bit taken aback when a couple of punks wearing masks rob the place one night, taking $5000 of mob money out of the register. A visit from Chovka (Michael Aronov) and his heavies wanting their money back doesn’t make them rest any easier, where they’re on the hook for the missing money.

When an overly curious cop (John Ortiz) shows up sniffing around for clues, he recognizes Bob from seeing him at mass, but also that he hasn’t taken communion in over twenty years, suggesting his watchful eyes and ears are everywhere. At about the same time, Bob discovers a wounded pit bull puppy abandoned in a trash can, where the home owner, Nadia (Noomi Rapace), invites him in and helps clean up the dog, where they become friends, of a sort, where both seem to be harboring a world of secrets, scarred and wounded souls themselves that are otherwise nearly completely disconnected from the rest of the world with no friends, no social life, no real prospects for the future, but go about their daily business in the light of day seemingly invisible to others. These are the kinds of characters that inhabit Lehane stories, thieves, thugs, and hard guys, as he specializes in establishing authenticity in working class neighborhoods, where cinematically retaining his attention to detail is essential, filled with characters who are dark and moody, usually still haunted by disturbing incidents or horrible choices from their past, living lives of sin and redemption, where it’s not at all surprising to find some that are nearly doomed, as tragedy awaits their every step. After Bob takes the dog home and tries to provide a normal and stable environment, he’s visited by an ominously dangerous figure, Eric Deeds, Matthias Schoenaerts from Bullhead (Rundskop) (2011) and Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os) (2011), who likely inflicted the damage to both the dog and Nadia, whose brooding presence, and the knowledge that he likely killed one of Marv’s old customers, is a continuous threat. Both men are lonesome characters defined by keeping things to themselves, hiding some sort of shady past, but have now apparently gone straight. Bob’s connection to Nadia has been transforming, both for the dog and himself, but Eric wants them both back, threatening to inflict more damage on the dog if there is any trouble. While Bob is busy dealing with the insane presence of Eric, reminiscent of the demented criminality of Peter Stormare in Fargo (1996), Marv has the mob to answer to, where this mysterious interplay in and out of a shadowy world provides tense and creepy atmosphere throughout. The film is a pensive, darkly troubling slow burn of unfolding events, where the somber music by Marco Beltrami and Raf Keunen never interferes, remaining quietly atmospheric in the background, where the film accentuates the performances of the characters, trusting the depth and complexity they bring to the screen.

While the short story was written ten years ago, Lehane expanded the screenplay for the making of the movie, and only afterwards wrote a short novel to support the film. Opening with a group of men toasting a friend who died (or was murdered) ten years ago, a kid named Richie Whalen, aka Glory Days, where Marv offers free shots on the house, while muttering to Bob that these men “need to move on.” Marv is a kind of gloomy character who will never be satisfied because life didn’t turn out the way he wanted, so he nitpicks and harps on every last little detail, believing life doesn’t offer anybody a chance. When the mob money mysteriously arrives all covered in blood in a plastic sack, after a long pause awaiting the verdict, Chovka is satisfied with the results, announcing the biggest drop of the year will take place in the bar on Super Bowl Sunday. Drenched in brooding atmosphere, the film is a parade of compelling characters that are continually underplayed throughout, where in the criminal world emotions are viewed as a weakness, so instead this is a minimalist film noir that continually explores the dark side of human nature. Violence in this film is continually alluded to, but comes infrequently, yet the effect can be startling, where lives are spinning in the balance, as Roskam does an excellent job drawing the audience into this bleak yet lurid world, inhabited by such world-weary figures. As Eric, who is little more than a thug, puts pressure on Bob to return his dog, he decides to take ten grand for the dog as his final offer, due by the next day. When Bob protests that some stranger can’t just walk into somebody’s life and expect ten grand, Eric has the perfect answer that may as well be the theme of the film, “Listen, listen, just take it easy. Listen to me. That is life. That’s what it is. People like me, coming along when you’re not looking.” True enough, this is a film that plays with the audience’s expectations, that dangles possibilities out there like a carrot on a stick and then goes in another direction, as the real beauty of the film is figuring out what lays underneath the surface, where people dwell on the past, but not always on what you think, as often it’s different than what they tell you, offering a smokescreen to hide the real truth. Roskam has the audience guessing as to the true nature of each of these characters, where the grizzled performances are among the year’s best, especially Tom Hardy, who literally transforms himself into the role, the kind of part Harvey Keitel would play in the Scorsese movies, as despite the seedy world that surrounds him, he never wants to move far from the moral center, even as he deals with such brutally dark extremes, where mob guys are capable of anything. The story has a savage center, where the beast is in man, yet so is the possibility of redemption.

The Drop | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jesse Cataldo

Transplanted from the Dorchester setting of Dennis Lehane's short story "Animal Rescue," The Drop plays out on the fringes of New York City, in the heart of old-school, pre-cool Brooklyn, the domain of dive bars, unkempt backyards, and single-family houses. Despite an introductory shot which sets the underworld-focused tone, with the inverted underside of the Manhattan Bridge reflected in the murky surface of a puddle, the film emphasizes the everyday nature of its location, in which keeping mum about illegal neighborhood business is only one of many tribal codes governing this tight-knit, family-oriented milieu. None of this is a problem for simple bartender Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy), who's not one to question the way things are, living sparsely in a house passed down from his deceased parents, old plastic coating still clinging to the vintage furniture.

While some parts of this world have inevitably changed, namely the intrusion of brutally efficient Chechen immigrants in the organized crime circuit and the gradual conversion of the neighborhood cathedral into condos, the past lives on in the profusion of hand-me-down objects and old-fashioned characters. The titular "drop" is itself a quaintly traditional bit of business, in which mob-controlled bars are selected on a rotational basis to collect an entire borough's worth of dirty money, transferred briefly into a secure lockbox, with the gangsters arriving at the end of the night to pick up the haul. In a different movie this might feel like the silly stuff of expansive criminal conspiracies, but in keeping with its overall homespun feel, The Drop keeps things intimate, cataloguing a steady accretion of small cash envelopes.

Much of the film takes place in one of these drop bars, a cozy watering hole run by Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), whose name on the front adds to the overall family feel. Marv himself isn't particularly avuncular; once something of a local heavy, he now labors in grumpy servitude under the Chechens, who took control of his bar after a short struggle eight years earlier. Marv's dissatisfaction progresses to something more acute when the bar is suspiciously robbed on one of its nights serving as the drop, losing five thousand dollars of mob money which Marv and his trusty bartender are expected to recover themselves.

This is one of many challenges for the quiet, impassive Bob, who's also dealing with the adoption of an abused puppy, an equally damaged love interest (Noomi Rapace), and the aggressive advances of a local thug with ties to both (Matthias Schoenaerts). These elements are all incorporated within the pulpy narrative, which unfolds with satisfying precision, anchored by a well-constructed script from veteran novelist Lehane, stylish direction from Belgian import Michaël Roskam, and strong performances all around. A standard gangster story on its surface, The Drop patiently develops some interesting ideas as it progresses, minimizing the focus on money and playing up the concept of a gangster demimonde fueled primarily by insecurity, with pointless squabbles over reputation and petty personal grudges keeping the cycle of violence flowing.

All this leads up to a suitably nasty conclusion, which both expands and explains the grim pall of Catholic guilt that's been looming throughout. But the film unfortunately gets greedy with an oddly optimistic capper, making room for sunshine and bright flowers in a movie that's been identified almost exclusively by frost and darkness. It's a nice last moment for some hard-luck characters, but it's also a complete violation of the preceding final twist, which swaps out earlier notions of masculine insecurity for a chilling final statement on the banality of evil. By offering last-minute salvation to a character who seems to have accepted his own cursed status, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past—be it plastic coated furniture, fading tough-guy status, or tribal notions of heroic aggression—and how such blind adherence perpetuates toxic systems of violence. Robbed of this idea, The Drop becomes something far more ordinary, another story of hard men doing terrible things to one another for very little reason.

The Drop / The Dissolve Tasha Robinson

Dennis Lehane’s short story “Animal Rescue” is a strange but appealing mixture of brute efficiency and literary flourish. It’s a simple boy-meets-girl yarn set in Lehane’s favorite environs: the grubby working-class Boston that also formed the backdrop for his novels-turned-films Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone. The story is short and to the point—lonely lunk rescues puppy, meets woman, bonds with both, and makes a few important choices—but Lehane’s prose is especially lovely, full of carefully crafted furbelows and poetic images. For all its tiny ornate touches, though, it’s still sleek and swift, operating with an A-to-B-to-C economy. The film version, in virtually all respects, is the exact opposite.

The Drop is enjoyable enough in its low-key, cloistered way, but it’s strange how closely it adapts “Animal Rescue” while wasting energy on additional details that go nowhere. Lehane scripted the adaptation himself; while his producers pushed him to move the action to Brooklyn, it’s still recognizably his work, steeped in the glum, head-down, get-the-work-done attitudes that so often mark his characters. Tom Hardy (Locke, The Dark Knight Rises) stars as Bob, who tends bar at a divey neighborhood watering hole called Cousin Marv’s. The man whose name is on the sign actually is his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini, in his final completed role), but Marv doesn’t own the place anymore: He was muscled out close to a decade ago by a mobbed-up Chechen gang whose local boss now treats Bob and Marv as something halfway between slaves and entertaining pets. Cousin Marv’s sometimes acts as a “drop bar,” a dropoff and pickup point for mob money, which leads a couple of neighborhood mooks to rob it on a non-drop night, as a test run for a possible bigger haul down the line. That leaves Marv and Bob $5,000 in the hole, with the gangsters breathing down their necks for the cash.

Meanwhile, Bob finds a bleeding, traumatized pit-bull pup in a neighborhood trash can and takes it in, with some help from the trash can’s cautious owner, Nadia (Noomi Rapace). Bob and Nadia are both introverts who seem like loners more from long habit and well-earned global mistrust than by choice, but as they feint at friendship, the dog’s abusive owner turns up to complicate things.

The Drop feels more than a little like a darker remake of Mad Dog And Glory, with the bar owner/gangster separated into two characters, the menace dialed up, and the dog turned literal. (This may be the biggest starring role for a cute puppy since the last installment in the Air Buddies franchise.) Director Michaël R. Roskam, following up his blunt, Oscar-nominated 2011 debut Bullhead, gives The Drop the same quiet, close-to-the-chest vibe Mad Dog has, with the same sense of anger in one corner, desperation in another, and sheer crazy in a third, all ready to come out swinging at any moment. The entire film vibrates with understated tension, but almost never raises its voice above a hissed threat or a discomfited mutter. For a film with so many life-or-death choices on the line, it’s almost perversely passive.

The material lends itself to that kind of restraint, but the even keel becomes a problem as Lehane packs in side business that doesn’t contribute much to the story. Marv now lives with an adult sister and cares for a comatose father, but these details spin out into nothing except an extra bit of unnecessary motivation for a man already well-defined by his long-ago failures and the tiny spark of pride and resentment still burning inside. (Gandolfini’s performance, while more consistent with past roles than exceptional in any way, is still warmly welcome.) A cheerful detective (John Ortiz) doggedly works the robbery, pressuring Bob for details and turning up at inopportune times, but his scenes similarly come to nothing in particular. Of the added material, only Michael Aronov’s scenes as Marv’s well-connected Chechen leash-tugger add lean meat instead of loose skin to the body of the film. Aronov brings in the kind of the unpredictability that seems likely to explode at any minute.

A handful of other scenes have the same menace. Hardy is pointedly reserved, playing the entire film with a strained, forehead-wrinkling frown that looks like he’s struggling to understand a difficult concept. Rapace similarly has doom hanging over her head. And Matthias Schoenaerts—star of Roskam’s Bullhead—walks an impressive line between frightening and pathetic as the neighborhood bum with a claim on Bob’s new dog. Most of the film’s best scenes involve some combination of these three actors, who all perfectly capture their characters’ impotence and frustration as they’re driven to desperation by needs they can’t verbalize, or don’t want to risk admitting. The original story focused entirely on them, and when the film returns to them, it’s often electric. But the extra material around them—lightly integrated at best, and obviously unnecessary at worst—keeps blowing the fuses, and leaving the film floundering in the dark.

“the drop”: a masterful brooklyn thriller — and james ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir

The stylized and claustrophobic crime thriller “The Drop,” which is full of twists and traps for both its characters and the audience, doesn’t so much take place in the real Brooklyn of 2014 as in a fictional Brooklyn of the mind wrought from the borough’s colorful history. I’m sure someone will write in to tell me that old-time nay-buh-hood tough guys like the ones played by Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini in this movie can still be found in corners of Bensonhurst or Sheepshead Bay or wherever, but that’s not really the point. This vision of Brooklyn is the creation of crime novelist Dennis Lehane (who adapted the screenplay for this film from his short story “Animal Rescue”), who has established himself, across “Gone Baby Gone” and “Mystic River” and numerous other movie-friendly books, as the poet laureate of the white Catholic urban Northeast even as it fades toward extinction.

There are many reasons to admire this tense and tightly constructed film, which marks the impressive English-language debut of Oscar-nominated Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam, but one of the best lies in the alternately vulnerable and terrifying performance by Gandolfini, in his final film role. He isn’t playing Tony Soprano here, but a corrupt small-time goon named Cousin Marv, a guy more like one of the low-level mobsters whom Tony terrorizes and dominates, and who yearns to find a way to fight back. Marv was once the owner of the divey neighborhood tavern, and his name is still above the door, but years ago he had to settle a mysterious debt by surrendering the bar to a glossy-haired Chechen mobster called Chovka (the terrific Michael Aronov). So Marv lumbers on through life, doing a younger man’s bidding, bossing around his bartender and cousin, Bob (played by Hardy), and living in one of those tiny, knickknack-encrusted, outer-borough bungalows with his sister Dottie (Ann Dowd).

In the borderline-surrealist universe created by Roskam, cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis and their design team, Marv’s existence is like a living death, or a slow-motion version of hell: When Dottie dares to express the idea that they should cash in their house and their savings accounts and go travel, “go see things,” Marv answers without looking up from the sports page: “What things?” There are a couple of lines in “The Drop” that made the audience audibly gasp at the screening I attended, most notably the one when Marv tells one of his no-account acquaintances, “We’re all dead men walking. We just don’t know it yet.” We’re meant to see an immediate contrast between the battered and embittered Marv and Bob, the proverbial decent guy in an indecent situation. Bob narrates the beginning and end of the film, and he isn’t anywhere near as slow on the uptake as he first appears. But he has a position of Switzerland-like neutrality to uphold; he knows what goes on in the neighborhood but steers clear of the obvious bad guys, while trying to remain a mild nonentity in the eyes of the cops.

This is Lehane’s first produced screenplay (he has previously written episodes of “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Wire”), and you’re either going to respond to his hard-boiled, zinger-laden dialogue or you’re not. For my money this is a highly potent pairing of writer and director; Roskam pushes the suspense and paranoia to horror-movie levels as the mysterious events and aphoristic, misleading conversations of Lehane’s script begin to close around Marv and Bob like an invisible net. Cousin Marv’s Corner is one of a rotating network of bars used by Chovka’s crew as “drops,” where an entire evening’s illegal receipts for gambling and drugs and whatever else, from all over Brooklyn, will be gathered and collected. It isn’t a “drop night” when Marv’s gets stuck up by a couple of masked hoodlums, thankfully, but Chovka still isn’t delighted to have $5,000 of his money disappear into the night, and Bob and Marv need to do their utmost to get it back.

That mishap is not fatal, or at least not for the bar proprietors, but it attracts a lot of attention from undesirable quarters, including the seemingly friendly Detective Torres (John Ortiz), who attends 8 o’clock Mass with Bob every morning — at a soon-to-be-closed Catholic church, a nice Lehane-ian touch — and can’t help noticing that he never takes confession. Concerned that Bob and Marv are staging or planning a big inside job, Chovka insists that they handle the million-dollar drop for the biggest gambling day of the year: Super Bowl Sunday. (Snippets from the actual Denver-Seattle game earlier this year are overheard, a marketing and licensing triumph of sorts.) While they prepare for the big event, Marv and Bob need to wash off a bunch of blood-stained cash, get rid of a severed arm (with a stopped watch) and – oh yeah! – discuss Bob’s unexpected acquisition of a new girlfriend and a new puppy.

At first, the abused pit bull that Bob finds in a trash can outside the house of a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace) seems entirely unrelated to the story about Bob and Marv and Chovka and the money, and the question of who is double-crossing whom and why. Except no, it actually doesn’t. Roskam understands the essential dream-logic at work in Lehane’s best stories, where nothing is ever coincidental. It’s obvious that Nadia has some relationship to the dog, either literal or metaphorical – the first thing Bob notices about her are the potato-peeler scars on her neck. And Nadia’s tentative romance with Bob, cemented by their mutual adoption of Rocco the (irresistible) puppy, lures in a notorious local character called Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts, the star of Roskam’s memorable first feature, “Bullhead,” as well as Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone”).

In case you’re keeping score, that makes an Englishman, a Swedish woman and a Belgian, playing the three legs of a potentially violent Noo Yawk triangle. That sounds like a disastrous multinational farrago, but honestly they’re all terrific and I never had a problem with it. If Hardy’s Brooklyn accent feels a little studied, he’s such a powerful physical actor that he commands the screen anyway. Rapace is playing a Russian immigrant, which is no problem, and she can do hunted, haunted and damaged like nobody’s business. Schoenaerts is so scary and so convincing as Eric that I didn’t realize he was a foreigner until I looked him up later. As I’ve said, the world of “The Drop” isn’t entirely naturalistic and isn’t meant to be. Even if you want to argue that these characters represent some plausible 21st-century urban reality, they’re also specters or projections or archetypes drawn from all the other crime stories we’ve read or seen.

If you know Lehane’s work, you don’t need me to tell you that none of these people, Bob and Nadia included, is entirely as they seem to be on the surface. I suppose we can except Chovka, who never pretends to be anything other than a slimy, murderous and manipulative Chechen crime lord. (Aronov deserves an Oscar for the way he milks an extended moment when Marv and Bob serve him a shot of small-batch Irish whiskey and stand around hoping he’ll like it.) Oh, and here’s a small but necessary spoiler: Rocco the dog has no dark secrets, and is just fine. Look, be warned: “The Drop” is a bloody and downbeat fable whose final twists are not going to send you out of the theater humming the “Ode to Joy” or anything. But I found this dark odyssey through an amoral dream Brooklyn curiously invigorating; it’s a masterful construction that held me rapt from first shot to last, that builds intense electrical energy and then releases it. While it’s heartbreaking to see the grace and grief and tragedy of Gandolfini’s final performance and realize that he’s gone, it’s one hell of a movie to go out with.

Erik Lundegaard [Erik Lundegaard]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") [Goat]

PopMatters [Chris Barsanti]

Drop, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

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The Drop : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jamie S. Rich

DVDizzy.com Luke Bonnano

The Drop (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ryan Keefer

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Patrick Bromley]

Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]

Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]

Toronto 2014 Review: Roskam's THE DROP Is A Top Notch Ryan Aldrich from Twitch

Film Racket [Bill Gibron]

Dog And Wolf [Dave O'Flanagan]

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]

Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie]

Spectrum Culture [Drew Hunt]

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

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'The Drop': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

'The Drop' Review: Tom Hardy Stars in Dennis ... - Variety Justin Chang

The Drop review - The Guardian Paul MacInnes

The Drop review - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

The Drop review – Brooklyn neo-noir | Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode from The Observer

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seenhere: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Examiner.com [Michael Adams]

'The Drop' movie review: Dennis Lehane takes James ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Joseph Anthony]

The Drop finds new life in lowlifes | City Pages Chuck Wilson

Kansas City Star [Jon Niccum]

Alibi.com [Devin D. O'Leary]

'The Drop' Movie review by Kenneth Turan - LA Times

'The Drop' reviews: A well-acted shaggy-dog noir, critics say Oliver Gettell from The LA Times

The Drop (and Gandolfini) Find New Life in Lowlifes | Film ... Chuck Wilson from The LA Weekly

The Drop Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna

'The Drop' Unfolds in a Brooklyn Underworld A.O. Scott from The New York Times

Ross, Gary

PLEASANTVILLE

USA (124 mi) 1998

BFI | Sight & Sound | Pleasantville (1998) Andrew O'Hehir from Sight and Sound, March 1999

The USA, the present. Teenage brother and sister David and Jennifer are transported by a mysterious television repairman into the fictional world of David's favourite show, a black-and-white 50s sitcom called Pleasantville, where they become Bud and Mary Sue Parker, children of the show's central family. David/Bud suggests they play along with Pleasantville's universe - where sex is unknown, the basketball team never loses, and all the library books are blank - until he can make contact with the repairman again. But Jennifer/Mary Sue refuses. Instead she seduces Skip, the captain of the basketball team. Pleasantville's universe becomes unstable - the basketball team loses, books fill with words and the like.

As carnal knowledge - along with literature, art and geography - begins to spread, certain objects and people in Pleasantville begin to bloom into colour. Betty, Bud and Mary Sue's mother, becomes "coloured" and leaves home to live with Bill Johnson, the diner owner who has taken up modernist painting, while their father George remains in black and white. Mobs of enraged black-and-white citizens destroy Bill's diner and attack "coloureds" in the street until Big Bob, the town's mayor, decrees a restrictive code of conduct aimed at stopping the spread of colour. But David/Bud and Bill paint a mural on the police station, leading to a court case that ends with David/Bud turning the whole town coloured. Jennifer decides she will stay behind in Pleasantville as Mary Sue to pursue her new-found interest in literature, while David uses the repairman's magic remote control to return to his divorced mother in the present day.

Review

It is rare that one can criticise a big-budget Hollywood movie for having too many ideas, and by that standard alone Gary Ross' Pleasantville is a signal event. Ross - whose penchant for outsized fantasy was made clear in his screenplays for Big and Dave - tries to pack his directorial debut with everything from Milton and Blake to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), ending up with a muddled liberal fairytale about freedom and tolerance in the Frank Capra tradition. That's nothing to be ashamed of, especially when Pleasantville also emulates the visual lustre and genuine, big-hearted sentimentality of Capra's best work. Unlike The Truman Show, with which it will inevitably be compared, Pleasantville's ideas are visual and cinematic as well as theoretical, making it gloriously enjoyable entertainment without Truman's slight but unmistakable aroma of postmodern pedantry.

Sympathetic portrayals of high-school geek losers are endemic in American movies (the popular-jock caste having produced few film-makers, it seems). Even so, Tobey Maguire's performance as David, suddenly transported to a world he understands better than he does his own life, is an exceptionally nuanced one. Wearing the same wry, wounded, older-than-his-years expression he employed so well in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, Maguire gives us a lonely young man who wants nothing more than to succeed in the real world. Mastering the minutiae of the Pleasantville series is an enthusiasm and an escape, but David doesn't want to live in the show any more than his randy sister does. In fact, it is the wilfully trampy Jennifer (played with the requisite sauciness by Reese Witherspoon) who is responsible for the greater act of imagination. In refusing to restrain her own desires - in order to collaborate with the Pleasantville ethos - she liberates the town into all the chaos and disorder of sensuality.

From a genial spoof of the Fall, featuring Don Knotts' geriatric television repairman as a misguided Jehovah and the unchanging world of a televisual small town as Paradise, Pleasantville careens through a dizzying range of cultural, historical and mythic references. When sitcom mom Betty Parker (whose balance of parody and pathos is affectingly captured by Joan Allen) experiences her sexual awakening, the film seems redolent of The Scarlet Letter, or perhaps A Doll's House. When Big Bob and his band of angry 'black-and-white' men in bowling shirts ban rock 'n' roll and coloured paint, it briefly becomes Rebel without a Cause. When it seeks to evoke both Kristallnacht and the Jim Crow South simultaneously, it overreaches itself.

Like The Wizard of Oz, whose structure it parallels closely, Pleasantville overcomes its moralising and occasional pomposity with magical photographic effects (the scene in which pink cherry blossoms fall on the black-and-white road to Lovers' Lane will linger in viewers' memories for years); moments of dry humour, as when television dad George Parker (the hilariously deadpan William H. Macy) admits to David/Bud that he has eaten nothing but cocktail olives since Betty's departure, as he understands neither the freezer nor the stove; and commanding central performances. In place of Judy Garland's irrepressible Depression lass, Ross and Maguire offer a rueful 90s boy-Adam who learns what he already knew: perfect systems always decay, so human beings have no option but to choose uncertainty. It's not quite that there's no place like home - in the end, even in Pleasantville, there's no place but home.

Ross, Herbert

THE TURNING POINT

USA (119 mi) 1977

Spirituality & Health (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)

A film about classical ballet which is also about friendship, usually the cinematic prerogative of men. From a deceptively simple script - renewed acquaintance between an ageing ballerina (Bancroft) and a former colleague (MacLaine) who is now a housewife with a daughter just starting out as a dancer - emerge jealousies and resentments about lost chances, maternity-vs-career, comfort-vs-austere dedication; conflicts all purged in Bancroft and MacLaine's magnificent fishwife scene. There's some beautiful dancing and a wealth of detail about the world of classical ballet. Interesting and entertaining.

First Julia and now The Turning Point — sensitive and ideaslitic film-goers at last have something to celebrate! Two movies about women who are complicated human beings rather than cardboard figures, inviduals who express their emotions in a genuine and moving way. Julia revealed the depth of a female friendship and probed the kind of reciprocal commitment that enabled Jane Fonda as Jillian Hellman to risk her own life for her friend. The Turning Point explores the breadth of another friendship. Scripter Arthur Laurents examines the strains of the love-hate relationship between two women who met while studying and dancing ballet.

Deedee (Shirly MacLaine), who now lives in Kansas, chose to marry and raise a family. Emma (Anne Bancroct) kept on in dance and became a prima ballerina. They meet again after many years apart when the dance company comes to Kansas on tour. Peering into each other's lives, they both wonder about the wisdom of their choirces made so long ago.

Deedee is trouble by jealousy — a longing for the acclaim she would have received if Emma had not cleverly persuaded her to marry Wayne (Tom Skerritt), another dancer. And Emma, surrounded by her scrapbooks, old shoes, and memories, secretly rues the fact that her career is almost over and she has no one who really loves her. Deedee's daughter Emily (Leslie Browne) has become a fine ballerina and is the joy of her parents. She is asked to dance in New York with Emma's company. Although Deedee goes with Emily to the city, she soon finds herself displaced. No longer a dancer, she plays second fiddle to Emma who dotes on her daughter.

In the climactic scene of the film, Deedee confronts her friend with her jealousy and resentment. They argue in a bar and move outside where they physically battle — only to finally fall into each other's arms exhausted and cleansed. Emma admits to Deedee that she did counsel her to get married so she could get the prized role which would lead to success.

Anne Bancroft's performance as Emma is of Academy Award proportions. She captures the inner anxiety of a charming and graceful star who is painfully aware of her body's swift decline and her spirit's slow fall into sadness. Shirly MacLaine's Deedee is an affecting depiction of a woman in isolation, nagged by regrets and depleted by self-devaluation. Herbert Ross (The Sunshine Boys, Funny Girl, The Seven Per-Cent Solution) has drawn out splendid performances from these stars. The supporting cast is excellent: Tom Skerritt as Deedee's tender and understanding husband, James Mitchell as a choreographer who cares about old friends, and Martha Scott as the shrewd and frequently gauche manager of the ballet company.

Ross not only excels in the direction of the cast, he also manages to make the world of ballet come to life on the screen in a way that has never been done before. Part of that comes naturally since he was once a choreographer for the American Ballet Theatre. This superb company of dancers play a major role in the film. We watch them in grueling exercises, repeated rehearsals, and then in actual performances. Leslie Browne and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who in the context of the film are lovers for a while, treat us to some stunning dance numbers. There is no dance movement in which grace and power are so perfectly conveyed as in the leap. And Baryshnikov is the master of this movement. Cinematographer Robert Surtees captures these leaps and all other graceful, fluid, and breath taking moments of ballet.

The Turning Point, then, is doubly rich — a well-acted and engaging portrait of friendship regained and a luminous and illuminating glimpse into the world of ballet. After experiencing this superb movie, only a champagne cocktail and a good friend will do!

Julia. Turning Point Notes on Female Bonding, by Pam Rosenthal from Jump Cut, December 1978

Lesbians in "Nice" Films Claudette Charboneau and Lucy Winer from Jump Cut, March 1981

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]

The New York Times (Vincent Canby)

Ross, Matt

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC C+ 79

USA (118 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller

Welcome to the 60’s counterculture, or at least the leftover remnants of what was once a thriving cultural phenomena, an anti-establishment movement of young idealists that thought they could change the world by making better decisions in their generation by challenging existing norms, broadening their base to include women and minorities, reestablishing new priorities that included ending the war in Vietnam and breaking the stranglehold on power that led to an elite and privileged white class that made all the important decisions of the country. People actually thought education would be the key, as given a differing set of narratives, stay the course or embark anew, it would be in everyone’s best interest to establish a new criteria of success, where the societal divisions that wealth and privilege produced were no longer the desired dream, but personal happiness, which would include holding the nation to higher standards. To that end, there was an extreme amount of social progress made in that decade and beyond, but rather than continue on an agenda of social change, the country instead skidded to an abrupt stop with the accumulated effects of the assassinations of notable leaders that included President Kennedy, followed in short order by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, the last of which led to the bloodied demonstrators at the hands of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic Convention, which ultimately split the party and doomed their chances, leading to the election of Richard Nixon, the law and order, status quo candidate who all but guaranteed an end to any hope of progress. All that was half a century ago and is considered yesterday’s dreams. New generations have come and gone, while the real splash in generating societal changes has been the advent of the computer and the Internet, where in the palm of your hand you now have 24-hour instant access to just about anything you can think of, where all you have to do is click on a few links and you’re free to pursue any interest under the sun. While it’s still questionable whether this has actually increased personal happiness or made people’s lives better, there is no question that being connected is more convenient, as it has certainly made people’s lives easier. Perhaps the bigger question is whether it has added to the overall tension and anxiety that exists in the world, which certainly appears more divided than ever before, less tolerant, less open to discussion, where the Internet seems to have contributed to the formation of communities of like-minded followers, “where a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Rather than bring people together, the lines of division have never been stronger. To that end, this film is not likely to open anyone’s minds to the ideas being offered, as most of it is lost in a satirical attempt to poke fun at the participants. Those that dare to be different are, in fact, mocked in this film, where there’s not much sympathy when there’s so little effort to actually understand what they’re trying to do, instead it’s easy to exclude those that were always outsiders anyway, which is a troubling aspect of the film, as if these kids deserve to be scorned because they are obviously different, labeled freaks or outcasts, where to many the word “cult” might come to mind, sending a resoundingly negative message about those who are different, so by the end it all feels so mournfully short-sighted, like the empty feeling that develops in the pit of your stomach following a funeral.

The film surprisingly won the Best Directing prize of Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2016, probably thinking it had more to say about addressing superficialities in American culture, chosen by a largely European jury headed by Swiss actress Marthe Keller, but also including Swedish director Ruben Östlund, French actress Céline Sallette, Austrian director Jessica Hausner, and Mexican actor Diego Luna. Set in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, Viggo Mortensen as Ben Cash is the Dad and spiritual leader of his family of six kids ranging from 8 to 18, each one smart, athletic, and highly individualistic, while encouraged to be so. The mom has been away at a hospital for several months, yet life goes on without her, as Ben rallies the troops each and every day, waking them to a reveille by bagpipes before leading them in group activities that includes calisthenics, running up mountain trails, performing vigorous outdoor activities like rock or mountain climbing, while also including moments of serenity, like yoga exercises overlooking a mountain overlook. The family is also involved in hunting their own food, including killing animals by bow and arrow or a sharp knife, and then skinning them, while also preparing daily meals, much of which is organically home grown. Each one is challenged to read and think critically, facing a series of probing questions about how it makes them feel and what they find most significant. While they enjoy playing musical instruments and singing songs together, there seems to be a balance of group time and individual time, existing in the wild without technology, making the most of their primitive situation of communing with nature. While Ben makes occasional trips to town to restock necessary items, where the kids are more starstruck than engaged with the regular population, their social skills may resemble that of the Amish, as they’ve remained isolated and kept away from towns by choice, where the kid’s interactions that take place are like visitors from another planet, often generating plenty of stares by other kids in town. The kid’s personalities, however, once you spend time with them, couldn’t be more charming and adorable, as their unique views and activities include Black Panther slogans from the 60’s, like “Stick it to the man” or “Power to the people.” The juxtaposition of their innocence with some radical ideology feels hilarious, like the scenes in ANNIE HALL (1977) where kids are staring at the camera while telling the audience what they become when they grow up, Alvey's School Days and Ours .. - YouTube (1:36), as there’s something totally incongruous about their ages and the subject matter. One of the most effective concerns the youngest child of eight, Charlie Shotwell as Nai, either seen wearing a lynx fur over his head or a gas mask, who has created his own private space in a treehouse, including photos of Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot along with an assemblage of animal skulls and skins, a dire warning of the coming apocalypse. It’s all played for laughs, including the celebration of Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas, where there’s a leftist slant to the ideology the children have been taught. When they learn their mother died, and more significantly that she took her own life, suffering from a mental disorder that included bipolar mood swings, Ben doesn’t sugar coat what happened to the children, explaining honestly and openly, where the family apparently holds no secrets, which includes a warning from her father to stay away from the funeral, as he’ll have Ben arrested on sight.

Death doesn’t take a holiday in this film, as the spirit is prominently featured throughout, where the dilemma becomes what to do about seeing their mother one last time and giving her a proper farewell. Their ideas about what to do includes singing and a life celebration, where she expressly wished to be cremated in accordance with her Buddhist philosophy, while the rest of the family prefers a church service followed by a burial in a casket. While their initial inclination was that power prevails, as that’s the message in a capitalistic society, and “you just have to accept it,” or, on second thought, “Stick it to the man,” their rallying cry where they are hellbent to see their mother. Driving halfway across the country in an old school bus, the film resorts to sight gags and pop references to make light of their situation, stopping at a diner were they’ve never seen any of the items on the menu before, with Dad describing coca cola as “poison water” before raiding a grocery store with Dad feigning a heart attack as a diversion while the kids steal the store blind with needed provisions. While it’s easy to make light of this, as if it’s all in good fun, it’s clear humor takes precedence over any of the actual ideas, which is the prevailing message throughout. While there are solemn moments, or sequences of seriously staged drama, none of this has anything to do with living off the land, as most of it is all window dressing for the comedy, turning this more into a lighthearted romp than a film that expounds profound ideas. Of course there is a culture shock when this unorthodox family intrudes into a suburban Arizona neighborhood to mingle with a sister-in-law (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband (Steve Zahn), where the meeting of the minds is a disaster, as child-rearing practices are decidedly different. Of course, the same thing occurs when they march into the funeral services, late, making something of a spectacle of themselves in the entrance before Ben tries unsuccessfully to take over the service but makes such a fuss that he’s kicked out of the church, banned by his wife’s staunchly conservative father Jack (Frank Langella) who threatens to have him arrested. “Grandpa can’t oppress us!” Nai exclaims, but they don’t want to lose their father so soon after losing their mother. What follows is a mutiny by one of the children, Nicholas Hamilton as Rellian, joining forces with the dark side, confessing all to his grandfather about his supposed continual mistreatment at the hands of his father. Calls for abuse and neglect charges greet Ben as he’s being shown the door, without his kids, reduced in a heap of utter exasperation, feeling for the first time that perhaps he’s failed as a father, getting a real comeuppance in this film, where many, depending on which side of the political spectrum you come from, will believe he fully deserves it. For a while, Ben believes it, leaving his brood behind in the hands of his arch nemesis, driving away as a solitary figure in an empty bus where the world has lost all meaning. The director is not afraid of emotional manipulation or overkill, where scenes are intentionally designed for tears, yet there’s an unmistaken understanding that no one loves these kids more than their father, who is forced to compromise his principles and acknowledge perhaps he overdid it. It’s an unfortunate turn, as some good ideas get lost in the debacle, where all parents wonder if they’re doing the right thing, making this much less interesting than it could have been.

Reviving the 60’s concept of getting “back to the garden,” a return-to-nature mantra expressed in the Joni Mitchell counterculture anthem “Woodstock,” Joni Mitchell ~ Woodstock - YouTube (4:35), many took this philosophy to heart and literally dropped out of society, where it’s particularly prevalent on the West Coast, but also Vermont, where in 1970 hippies constituted one-third of the entire state population, where there were as many as 75 communes thriving just in that one state alone. Many still thrive decades later, rejecting the consumer-oriented, traditional way of life that measures success by material wealth, yet at the time, with Whole Earth Catalogs and Mother Earth News magazines in hand, it was an opportunity for hundreds of thousands of young idealists to change the American Dream and leave the congestion of the urban areas and live a more peaceful and harmonious life co-existing with nature. In many respects, this led to the birth of the organic farming movement, as there was a progressive movement that turned away from a reliance on industrial farming and processed foods, railing against toxic pesticide use and the growing disconnect between Americans and their food supply. Others headed into the forests and countrysides of Northern California to become marijuana growers, developing unique horticultural techniques that produced the most potent cannabis in the country, aided by an American government decision in the late 70’s to spray toxic chemicals on the Mexican marijuana crops which at the time accounted for 90 percent of the marijuana smoked in the United States. This provided an opening for a home-grown product that was actually superior in every respect, as the trick was to remove male plants before pollination, producing seedless female flowers known as sinsemilla that produce much more resin, a sticky substance known for enhancing the potency, where now Humboldt County in California has become America’s marijuana capital. But let’s not be naïve, as the Mexican narco traffickers have also moved into similar regions, where marijuana patches guarded by men with Uzis have also sprung up in the national parks and forests, often viewed as trigger-happy competitors, where farming pot in the U.S. is much more profitable than smuggling it across the border. Their methods are more toxic, however, growing plants laced with illegal pesticides, leaving behind dead animals, loads of trash, while polluting the natural water supplies, making the narco traffickers the very antithesis of Thoreau’s utopian vision of Walden, which is largely seen as a quest for spiritual transcendence through self-reliance. It’s curious that both sides cohabitate the same space, as their aims are diametrically opposed to one another. This is similar, however, to the political divisions of the 60’s, where there were radical elements that resorted to violence and others that were strictly peace abiding. Both shared similar ideals but veered dramatically in different directions when it came to achieving those goals. This film attempts to raise similar questions about unorthodox methods used to raise children, including home-schooling methods that often include strict religious or philosophical principles whose pre-determined dogmatic adherence resembles parental brainwashing, suggesting it’s impossible to provide a perfect childhood upbringing by overcontrolling their environment, that it’s more about unconditional love and instilling moral values.

This is where Hollywood goes wrong, however, as even though this is a smaller indie format with good intentions, claiming to be made in the same likeable spirit as LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2006), a darling of independent film festivals that comically straddled the line between the grotesque, the tasteless, and the hilarious, they still fuck up the neighborhood, as despite a cast of Viggo Mortensen surrounded by six adorable children, like the von Trapp family living off the grid somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific Northwest woods, the film takes great pains to show the rigor and discipline of their subsistence living lifestyle, as they have a daily exercise regimen while learning survival skills, with each child seriously brain-challenged by a dedicated home-schooling program, where these kids are sharp as a tack. And that is where this film falls off the rails, as Hollywood stereotypes always depict outsider groups as having to be smarter than the norm, like Stanley Kramer’s unintentionally offensive GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967), where Sidney Poitier as a black man had to be universally recognized as having the same brains and moral values as whites, but in the movies, it’s always exaggerated so they are also the smartest person in the room, leaving no doubt, or so the film suggests, that blacks share the same humanity as whites. Of course, in making this message, they dumb down the message so that “all whites” will sympathize, so while supposedly promoting racial equality, blacks actually have to be “superior” to whites, so their humanity credentials simply can’t be questioned. However, in promoting a liberal cause, they actually made it harder for ordinary blacks to succeed in similar situations as whites, as Hollywood rarely focuses on real personal struggles, but instead promoted blacks as “supermen.” Another example is the huge success of the documentary MARCH OF THE PENGUINS (2005), making penguins cute and cuddly, giving them human characteristics of being “lovable,” where the adoration of this film only made it that much harder for other serious documentaries to offer a complex message, as in order to succeed, or so the thinking goes in Hollywood, the product has to be wrapped in cute and cuddly to succeed. Count the animated penguin movies that have followed, starting with MADAGASCAR (2005) and the many follow-ups, or cute ocean critters in FINDING NEMO (2003) and now FINDING DORY (2016), or going back as far as the ICE AGE (2002), with its many sequels, as theaters have been playing to this formula ever since, as it sends customers through the turnstyles. The same thing happens here in this movie, where if you see something that’s too good to be true, it’s likely not real. As much as people like this movie, and it’s perfectly enjoyable on the surface, there’s little doubt that it follows the same business model for success. Why does Hollywood always have to mythologize humanity in order to tell their stories, exaggerating beauty or intelligence in order to make characters more interesting? Because that’s the crowd pleasing business template for selling a Hollywood product, where one need look no further than any decent commercial advertisement that wants you to willingly buy their product. So do not be fooled, as this is sheer fabrication, a glossy surface covering up damaged goods.

Review: Captain Fantastic - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, July/August 2016

The Robinson Crusoe fantasy seems to hold a peculiar grip on American indies. With some regularity, films like Captain Fantastic (and Swiss Army Man) appear, featuring outliers who patch together their homes and personal styles from outré or whimsical sources. Perhaps certain indie directors identify with these DIYers, who often see their idiosyncratic visions come crashing up against limits imposed by the rest of the world.

Single dad of six Ben (Viggo Mortensen) is the latest go-it-aloner to hit screens, prominent in ad stills in a retro red wedding suit alongside his Scooby Doo–palette family. Living with his well-trained kids in mountain-man isolation, he’s a fiercely protective, unreconstructed leftist like Daniel Day-Lewis’s in The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Until… family drama! The deer-gutting, Bill of Rights–quoting children start asking questions, and a road trip leads the brood into the clutches of a rich, square grandfather (Frank Langella).

Writer-director Ross lapses into contrivance, narrative and emotional, but it’d be worse without Mortensen’s utter conviction and that rugged, out-of-time mien which has served him well in stories of extremity from The Road to Jauja. A very surprised Ross won a major prize at Cannes for his efforts, months after the film’s Sundance debut, but for my money, nothing improves upon the opening drone-like shot of sunny mountain woods, the perspective faintly curved, a perverse snow-globe snapshot of isolation.

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]

A sort of Swiss Family Robinson for the hipster generation, the clan at the heart of actor-turned-director Matt Ross's latest film have not been shipwrecked but deliberately isolated out in the woods by their patriarch Ben (a bushy bearded Viggo Mortenson). There, his six children more or less have the run of the landscape, their lives ruled by a rota of training that involves, but is not limited to, risking life and limb climbing rocky crags, donning camouflage and killing animals with a bow and knife before, in their off-hours, discussing wholemeal, fat-free literature such as Middlemarch all the while avoiding "non-words" such as "interesting". In short, they are precocious with a twee level bordering on critical and bear absolutely no relation to any child you will ever have met.

There are those who will find their cheerful otherness attractive - even their names, Bodevan (George Mackay), Kieylr (Samantha Isler), Vespyr (Annalise Basso), Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton), Zaja (Shree Crooks) and Nai (Charlie Shotwell) have been invented so each is unique - but just as many will find it far-fetched and insufferable. Their mum has been spending time in hospital because of frail mental health and the plot kicks into gear when she commits suicide, prompting her parents (Frank Langella on perma-grim setting and Ann Dowd) to plan for a traditional funeral, which sets them at clear odds with Ben, who wants to honour his wife's more out there wishes.

Packing his family in an achingly whimsical adapted school bus, they head out of the woods and into the thicket of a modern world that no amount of Marxism and fireside philosophy can prepare the kids for. The trip is not without its moments, with a fun episode involving the police seeing the (atheist, natch), children pretending to be a God squad in order to get out of trouble, and a nicely pitched emotional sequence in which Bodevan, who has already been tentatively reaching beyond his family's backyard, has his first brush with romance. Ross also shows good control of his large cast so that each child is distinct and no one is side-lined.

Taken as a whole, however, the director is trying too hard, pushing this family so far into caricature that we lose sight of the story of grief that is underpinning the shenanigans. He also hero-worships Ben to a ridiculous degree, painting all who live in the 'real world' as uninteresting dullards, at best. The broader comedy moments sit uncomfortably with the more upper-middle class jokes. Gags such as Noam Chomsky Day stretch credibility to the limit and are likely to sail over the heads of many non-US audiences, while waspish one-liners such as, "We don't make fun of people...except Christians" are unattractively supercilious. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Captain Fantastic suffers from strange and sudden outbursts of sugary sentiment that never fully gel with the humour. Worst of all are the multiple endings, which ramble on for what seems like a quarter of the runtime, each less satisfying than the last.

Captain Fantastic · Film Review Captain Fantastic is a road movie not ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club

Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) doesn’t just live his values. He passes them on to his children like a gospel, molding their minds and bodies to his perfect ideal. Deep within the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, the man raises a small brood of self-sufficient, socially conscious brainiacs—six kids, ages 7 to 18, roughing it off the grid like a countercultural Swiss Family Robinson. They hunt and grow their own food. They rely on little modern technology. And they adhere to rigorous regimens of physical and intellectual exercise, scaling treacherous bluffs before lunch and getting a crash course in science, politics, philosophy, and literature afterward. To Ben, this secluded incubator—and the extreme homeschooling practiced within it—is a paradise on Earth. To those outside his bubble, it can look at best like a form of child abuse, at worse like a cult: the nuclear family as survivalist militia.

But audiences weaned on a certain strain of festival favorite, the kind brought of age in the charitable hype chamber of Sundance, will see something cuddlier and more familiar in the Cash family. What are Ben and his offspring really but the latest in a long line of lovable misfits too free-spirited to be tamed by “normal” society? Captain Fantastic comes on like a portrait of life on the fringe, set in a backwoods boot camp for perfect citizens in training. Then the bad news arrives: Leslie (Trin Miller), the bipolar matriarch of this unusual clan, has lost her battle with depression, taking her own life in an institution. Ben, a newly single parent, packs his half dozen charges into a van and heads south to New Mexico for his wife’s funeral, despite strict instructions from her resentful parents to stay far, far away. Tragedy leads paradoxically to comedy, and suddenly Captain Fantastic is conforming to the crowd-pleasing template of a road movie, as Ben’s principles clash with the plugged-in culture encountered en route. Little Miss Sunshine has some new company in the carpool lane.

Mortensen’s efforts here are downright heroic. It’s hard to imagine anyone better in this role, for bringing out the authenticity in a character teetering on the precipice of caricature. Ben, a self-made anachronism, is a perfect fit for an actor who excels at playing mythic loners of the distant past; Mortensen seems most at home when plopped into any era but his own—a quality that also makes him qualified to embody a luddite, carving out his own reality on the edge of civilization. He’s not afraid to make the guy complicated, even occasionally unsympathetic: With an unkempt forest of facial hair, Mortensen looks a little like Charles Manson, and there’s certainly a touch of cultish intensity to the character’s worldview, the way he sees everyone who’s not hip to his analog lifestyle through a tunnel of moral superiority. But Ben isn’t quite humorless; Mortensen reveals little cracks of levity in his tough-love parenting style—a gentle tinkle of self-awareness.

He’s definitely more well-rounded, more adaptable than his gaggle of trivia-spouting munchkin prodigies, who are like miniature versions of the most self-possessed graduate student you’ve ever met. To his credit, writer-director Matt Ross, who’s better-known as an actor (he’s delectably villainous as Gavin Belson on Silicon Valley), sometimes challenges his protagonist’s utopian ideals as well as the effect they have on his hopelessly sheltered spawn. The movie makes a pit stop at the suburban home of Ben’s sister (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband (Steve Zahn), mostly for the purpose of allowing the two to raise serious questions about how he’s preparing his kids for the “real” world. Likewise, Ross casts Frank Langella and Ann Dowd as the grieving, disapproving in-laws, which is a pretty good way to make the objections sound sensible. Captain Fantastic is at its best, in other words, when creating a dialogue about parenting. Ben clearly gave up a whole other life for fatherhood, but is his grand experiment in child-rearing really just an excuse to withdraw from the world? Isn’t he just programming his kids, too, the way every parent imprints their own values on their young?

Captain Fantastic flirts with seriously dissecting Ben’s methods and philosophies, only to pull the cinematic equivalent of that old high-school term-paper trick: address the opposing viewpoint, then double down on the “right” one. Ross stacks the deck heavily, painting the nieces and nephews as brain-dead electronics junkies, before letting freak flags fly in the severely sentimental backstretch, capped by a family-band sing-along of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Mostly, however, Ben’s whole alternative life plan is just a pretext for lightly amusing fish-out-of-water comedy, as Captain Fantastic scores easy laughs from a pint-sized tyke throwing around five-dollar expressions like “fascist capitalism,” the eldest son (George MacKay) coming on too strong during a fledgling stab at romance, and the whole family shoplifting from a grocery store to properly celebrate Noam Chomsky Day. (“But Noam’s birthday isn’t until December 7,” one of the annoyingly precocious kids protests.) That Ross treats the death of a loved one as little more than a plot catalyst—a way to get everyone on the road—is in keeping with the tidy manner in which his film sorts through messy material. Were these wunderkinds real, they’d surely detect the irony: A film about thinking (and living) outside the box fits snugly into it.

The Counter-Superhero Calibrations of “Captain Fantastic” Richard Brody from The New Yorker

Slant Magazine [Keith Watson]

The Playlist [Russ Fischer]

Review: Captain Fantastic's Wild, Radical Ride -- Vulture David Edelstein

Captain Fantastic Review: Viggo Mortensen Stars In Something ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

Captain Fantastic :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Melissa Weller

'Captain Fantastic': Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Anthony Kaufman

Spectrum Culture [Madeleine Saaf]

Captain Fantastic Review - Den of Geek Edward Douglas

PopOptiq [Lane Scarberry]

The Film Stage [Dan Mecca]

SLUGMag.com [Alex Springer]

Captain Fantastic – first look review - Little White Lies Ed Frankl

The Upcoming [Jasmin Valjas]

Wylie Writes [Shannon Page]

MovieswithMae.com [Mae Abdulbaki]

'Captain Fantastic': Sundance Review - Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin

'Captain Fantastic' Review: Viggo Mortensen as World's ... - Variety Peter Debruge

BBC - Culture - Sundance review: Captain Fantastic Owen Gleiberman

Captain Fantastic: a heart-wrenching look at an unconventional 'hippie ... Brian Moylan from The Guardian

Irish Film Critic [Jim Land]

Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]

Review: Mortensen flirts with utopia in 'Captain Fantastic' | Metro Lindsey Bahr from Metro US

Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

'Captain Fantastic': Tale of a charismatic off-the-gridder raising a brood ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]

Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]

Northwest scenery for “Captain Fantastic,” a new movie starring Viggo Mortensen, features Artist Point, near Mount ... Dean Kahn from The Bellingham Herald

Viggo Mortensen Gets Comfortable in 'Captain Fantastic' Sean Axmaker from Seattle Weekly

Father doesn't always know best in the slick 'Captain Fantastic' - LA ... Justin Chang from The LA Times

Captain Fantastic (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Captain Fantastic Movie Review (2016) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley

Review: Viggo Mortensen Captivates in 'Captain Fantastic' - The New ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times

Rossellini, Roberto

“I don’t interpret. I don’t transmit any message. I avoid expressing theories and forcing meanings. I reconstruct documents, I offer information which leaves to the spectator the entire responsibility for his own judgments.”

—Roberto Rossellini

Box Set Pick: 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman ... Patrick Friel from Film Comment, November/December 2013

Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (50), Europe ’51 (52), and Journey to Italy (54) are three of the most emotionally devastating films you will ever see: anguished cries into a postwar void that seem to question the very point of existence. Together they form a loose trilogy of spiritual quests in the modern world—attempts to find purpose and a sense of place in the face of an increasingly dehumanizing society. All starring Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini’s mistress-turned-wife, the films extend the psychic turmoil her characters experienced in Gaslight and Notorious, revealing an inner malaise—a very different kind of horror.

In each of the films Bergman plays a woman come unmoored: a war refugee brought to her new husband’s home village on a rocky island wasteland; a socialite who after the death of her son seeks solace through aiding the poor; and a vacationer whose marriage is unraveling while in Italy. Narrative in the films has become intractable, leading to bleak or at best provisionally hopeful endings that seem inevitable, unalterable.

It was here that Rossellini began the first steps toward the radical modernism of his late period, with its increasingly spare aesthetic. Not yet as minimalist as his later historical films would be, the trio of features finds Rossellini still using formal techniques—framing, editing—in a more overtly expressive manner. Hints of the cool, distanced theatrical style that would dominate a decade later are present, though, particularly in Bergman’s reserved performances. As in his Neorealist films, landscape and locale continue to play a dominant role, but instead of acting as signifiers of realism and authenticity they become metaphorical markers of Bergman’s inner states—desolate volcanic terrain, barren tenement housing tracts, and claustrophobic streets reflecting her psychological distress.

Respected and influential, these films have been increasingly difficult to see, previously released in the U.S. only on VHS. For this collection, they’re presented in versions as close to definitive as possible, transferred from a variety of newly restored and archival sources. The set includes both the English-language and Italian versions of Stromboli and Europe ’51, which have slightly different running times. Criterion has included an embarrassment of riches with the bonus material: an 84-page booklet; short films by Rossellini, and his daughter Isabella; documentaries on Rossellini, Stromboli, and Bergman; vintage interviews; home-movie footage; and new visual essays by James Quandt and Tag Gallagher. It’s a set worthy of these remarkable masterpieces.

Rossellini Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, August 2005

Although Roberto Rossellini was indisputably one of the most influential of European directors, the fact that his influence was founded upon a philosophical or conceptual attitude rather than upon the imitation of stylistic devices or thematic preoccupations has meant that Anglo-American film historians in particular tend to pay little more than lip service to his achievement, when not ignoring it altogether. Yet such indifference constitutes a major injustice not merely to a director who redefined the parameters of the cinema but to one of the supreme "documenters," in any art form, of the latter half of the 20th century.

—Gilbert Adair

Roberto Rossellini is one of those curious figures in world cinema who seems to generate more respect than admiration. As Adair accurately points out, the reverence typically paid to the director is little more than tokenism. Certainly, his realist aesthetic -- location shooting, natural light, non-professional actors, longer-duration takes -- has benefited filmmakers of sparse means the world over. He is remembered as a figure of undeniable historical significance without being thought of as the equal to directors of a similar influence (such as Griffith, Renoir, Welles, Bresson, Godard). He certainly lacks the devotion many hold for his best-known countrymen, from Fellini to Antonioni to Bertolucci, among others. However, I would submit that he is at once their superior and the greatest of all Italian directors, without even making any allowance for his firm place in film history. This is to say that his corpus speaks for itself, outside of history, as one of the most beautiful and inspired that the medium has yet seen.

Yet, again he is underestimated. The reason for this, it would seem to me, is that Rossellini's style is too often considered for its historical circumstances, its facility for assimilation, and even for what he expresses through this style (or less opaquely, his themes) rather than for what this style says about the director's viewpoint. Indeed, it is in an examination of its conceptual genesis that a unity emerges to Rossellini's corpus, marking him as one of the medium's best.

Specifically, it seems to me that the key to appreciating Rossellini rests in his epistemological ideas. For Rossellini, the truth is evident on the surface of things. From his early, immediately post-war films (Rome, Open City [1945], Paisa [1946], Germany, Year Zero [1948]) to his Bergman cycle (including Stromboli [1950], Voyage in Italy [1953] and Fear [1954]), his historical recreations (The Flowers of St. Francis [1950] and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV [1966] among others) and more proper documentaries (such as India [1958]), what marks his entire body of mature work is a faith in humankind's perception of truth. Take the somewhat forgotten, small masterwork Fear: throughout the picture, Bergman's character attempts to conceal the truth of an adulterous affair. However, her body language belies the secret she is attempting to hide -- at one point her blackmailer asks rhetorically why she blushes, why her hands trembled and why she was so quick to give away her money. In other words, in spite of a shared Catholic faith with Robert Bresson, Rossellini departs from the Frenchmen (as well as from such directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai, and even Eric Rohmer in Triple Agent [2004]) in the his view that psychology is discernible in gesture.

As it has been claimed, this basic understanding of the comprehensibility of truth is not limited in fact to the psychologically-intensive Bergman cycle, but manifests itself throughout his ouevre. The post-war texts offer their morals within the context (another key theme in Rossellini) of a war-ravaged Europe. In seeing the condition of Germany in the 1948 film, one understands the despair of the child protagonist. Surface reality discloses truth. Similarly, The Flowers of St. Francis, perhaps his greatest work, shows (key theme number three) the basic rhythm of a long-since extinct life -- a life lived absent of any goals other than the service of the Lord -- which as such reveals Christianity's distinct understanding of time; less abstractly, India proposes that its presentation of Indian life is sufficient to reveal essential truths of the nation.

In this basic understanding of epistemology, I would argue, Rossellini shows himself to be an artist seeking a form to express his ideas, not simply the innovator of a technique born of historical circumstance. It is in this consistency of viewpoint, manifesting itself in his form, that the beauty of his work becomes clear. Rossellini's cinema deserves to be appreciated not only for its historical value, but indeed for the beauty of its expression of content. In this lies its grace.

Roberto Rossellini | Italian director | Britannica.com biography

Roberto Rossellini: Biography from Answers.com biography

Roberto Rossellini biography from Novel Guide

Overview for Roberto Rossellini biography from Turner Classic Movies, lso seen here: Roberto Rossellini Profile - TCM.com

All-Movie Guide biography

Roberto Rossellini - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Stephen L. Hanson essay from Film Reference

Roberto Rossellini • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Hugo Salas overview from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002

Film Reference Stephen L. Hanson profile essay

Roberto Rossellini and his Italian Cinema: The Search for Realism Karen Arnone expansive biographical essay

Roberto Rossellini - Features - Film - Time Out London Wally Hammond profile essay

BBC - BBC Four Cinema - Roberto Rossellini: Profile BBC Profile by Chris Wiegand

Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) bio from Jahsonic

Roberto Rossellini - Filmbug short bio from Filmbug

Roberto Rossellini short bio from NNDB

Roberto Rossellini - Director by Film Rank Films 101

Roberto Rossellini Mubi

The films of Roberto Rossellini, Ranked - Movies List on MUBI

The Films of Roberto Rossellini - by Michael E. Grost

Roberto Rossellini - Strictly Film School Acquarello reviews

Rossellini Yoel Meranda from Ways of Seeing (Undated)

Realism in film history - Realism - actor, children, movie ... origins of realism in cinema, from Film Reference

jacques-rivette.com: Jacques Rivette's Classical Illusion - DVD Beaver Letter on Rossellini, by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1955, from Rivette’s website

Rome, Open City and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV Re-evaluating Rossellini, by Martin Walsh from Jump Cut, 1977

Roberto Rossellini, Noted Italian Filmmaker, Dies - The Washington Post June 4, 1977

Celluloide Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996 A Review by Luca Prono, University of Nottingham, UK Scope

Roberto Rossellini - Google Books Result Peter Brunette’s book (425 pages), 1996

Roberto Rossellini and his Italian Cinema: The Search for Realism Karen Arnone, 1996

Tocce on Bondanella Respecting Rossellini, by Vincent Tocce, a review of Peter Bondanella’s book, The Films of Roberto Rossellini, from Film Philosophy, April 10, 1998

Roberto Rossellini: The Rise To Power Of Louis XIV | Film ... Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, March 18, 1999

On Giovanna d'Arco al rogo (1955) Tad Gallagher’s essay on Rossellini’s Joan of Arc, from Screening the Past, March 1, 2000

Always a Window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini - Screening the Past Adrian Martin reviews Tag Gallagher’s book The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini (852 pages), released in 1998, from Screening the Past, March 1, 2000

Zooming through Space Chris Fujiwara from Hermenaut, July 22, 2000

Stromboli • Senses of Cinema John Flaus from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2000

Volcano Girl | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Fred Camper from The Chicago Reader, September 29, 2000, also seen here: Review of Roberto Rossellini's film, "Stromboli," by Fred Camper, from ...

Profile: Roberto Rossellini: sexual adventurer and master film-maker ... The Love Pirate, Roberto Rossellini as gambler, sexual adventurer and master film-maker, by Tom Dewe Matthews from The Guardian, November 30, 2000

Roberto Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero: A ... - Senses of Cinema Roberto Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero: A Child's Journey through the Crumbling Skeleton of War-torn Germany, by Tina Marie Camilleri from Senses of Cinema, December 2000

Rome Open City - Scope | About book review of Rome Open City, by David Forgacs, and Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, edited by Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, by Luca Prono from Scope, November 2002

Beginning Again from Zero: Post-War Reconstruction: Germany Year ... Megan Carrigy from Senses of Cinema, May 22, 2003

Making Reality • Senses of Cinema Tag Gallagher from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004

Richard Gibson: Roberto Rossellini writes to Ingrid Bergman Rossellini letter reprinted at the Richard Gibson blog, September 7, 2005

Le Varianti Trasparenti: I Film con Ingrid Bergman di Roberto ... Geoffrey Nowell-Smith reviews Elena Dagrada’s book, Le varianti trasparenti: I film con Ingrid Bergman di Roberto Rossellini, from Senses of Cinema, February 7, 2006

The Elusive Realism of Rossellini - New York Times Manohla Dargis, November 10, 2006

Roberto Rossellini | Feature | Slant Magazine Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine, November 15, 2006

a_film_by : Message: Re: Roberto Rossellini's "Socrate" comments from a_film_by, a film discussion group, December 28, 2006

Roberto Rossellini and Italian Neorealism - Österreichisches ... Notes on a Rossellini retrospective, January 10 to February 8, 2007

Chickenscratch Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, February 15, 2007

BFI | Sight & Sound | You Must Be Joking Guido Bonsaver on The Flowers of St, Francis from Sight and Sound, May 2007

Roberto Rossellini: 1906–1977, 02/02/08, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs February 2, 2008

Entries for Monday 18 February 2008, Kinoeye various comments and links on Rome, Open City, from Kinoeye, February 18, 2008

Out of the Past : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, February 2, 2009

Film Notes From the CMA Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective, by Dennis Toth, April 19, 2009

Rome, Open City • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

Paisà • Senses of Cinema Allan James Thomas from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

Germany, Year Zero • Senses of Cinema Pasquale Iannone from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

L'amore • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno, July 9, 2009

The Machine that Kills Bad People • Senses of Cinema Constantin Parvulescu from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

Voyage to Italy • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, July 9, 2009

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” | Filmwell Mike Hertenstein from Filmwell, January 26, 2010

Revisiting Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy. Nathaniel Rich from Slate, February 9, 2010

Roberto Rossellini and World War II: Part One John Bailey from The American Society of Cinematographers, June 7, 2010, also seen here: The Trilogy According to John Bailey

Roberto Rossellini and World War II: Part Two John Bailey from The American Society of Cinematographers, June 14, 2010

Roberto Rossellini and World War II: Part Three John Bailey from The American Society of Cinematographers, June 21, 2010

Is Roberto Rossellini Underrated? Mubi film discussion forum, September 2010

Roberto Rossellini and Italian neorealism (2/3) | Le blog du festival October 7, 2011

Roberto Rossellini in The New Yorker | The New Yorker Richard Brody, January 12, 2012

3 Films By Roberto Rossellini - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo, October 2, 2013

Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman Together Created Monuments ... Jose Solis from Pop Matters, November 8, 2013

Ingrid Bergman / Roberto Rossellini films analysis - Senses of Cinema Greg Gerke, December 17, 2013

David Thomson on Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini | New ... The Art of Scandal, by David Thomson from The New Republic, May 2, 2014

The Female Archetypes Through the Lens of Roberto Rossellini | Bitch ... Giselle Defares from Bitch Flicks, December 31, 2014

The Roberto Rossellini Ingrid Bergman Collection review – a ... Philip French from The Guardian, August 30, 2015

TSPDT - Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini Interview by James Blue on Vimeo Video interview at the Rice Media Center (Houston, Texas) in 1972 (2:39)

Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)

Fringe Benefits

Fred Camper's Top 10 Directors

Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Images for Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini a video site, featuring a listing of significant scenes

The religion of director Roberto Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini (1906 - 1977) - Find A Grave Memorial

Roberto Rossellini - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A PILOT RETURNS

Italy (87 mi) 1942

User reviews from imdb Author: Edgar Soberón Torchia (estorchia@gmail.com) from Panama

For the first time I've seen a film by Roberto Rossellini prior to his Neorealist classics, based on a story by il Duce's son, Vittorio Mussolini (credited with the anagram Tito Silvio Mursino). So by its date and origin it may be labeled a "Fascist film", but not surprisingly Rossellini avoids any overt reference to or exaltation of the regime, from a screenplay co-written with Michelangelo Antonioni, among others. At first I thought I was going to see a sort of Italian "Top Gun" as the movie takes around 20 minutes describing the activities of Italian pilots, but soon the airplane of the title hero (Massimo Girotti, the star of Visconti's "Ossessione") is knocked down and he is imprisoned by the British officers. Suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted, and Rossellini elaborates on his belief that personal stories are illustrations of history and politics: the pilot is nothing but a puppet of his country's foreign policy. Rossellini then describes the state of the prisoners, as they endure cold, hunger and disease, and are taken by the British from an old farm to a port in the Mediterranean, while bombs are dropped over roads, fields and bridges, to a patriotic ending (that is revealed by the title). Rossellini tells this story in 85 minutes, with early examples of what Bazin would describe as "image fact": long takes, where the camera moves (including a 360° turn) not to advance the story, but to show the environment, the conditions where the characters interact. Rossellini narrates fast and synthesizes the fable, though his economy was not determined --as in "Romà, citta aperta"-- by the surrounding events (war), showing the development of a style that would grow during the Neorealist movement

L’UOMO DALLA CROCE

Italy (72 mi) 1943

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Made during the fascist years ,this is par excellence a propaganda movie.Roberto Rossellini 's work is sometimes preachy,mainly in the third part,when his hero tries to convince -and succeeds- the Russians that he is no sorcerer and that God loves everyone provided that he redeems his soul and comes back on the right way.The final recalls Jesus's death on the cross,the converted man playing the the good thief's part.Besides ,everybody speaks Italian and that does not help the credibility of the situations.

But Rossellini's genius -which would blossom is such works as " Europa 51" "Roma cita aperta " or " Germano anno zero " occasionally surfaces: except for the opening scenes -one of the first pictures shows doves-,the world depicted in "uomo della croce" is an apocalyptic one,we keep hearing shots during almost the whole movie : overwhelming sequences display a little boy screaming,a woman having her baby as a man is dying near her,while,outside,man's madness knows no bounds.

That said ,the cross,the hammer and sickle subject will be much better applied on "Europa 51" .

The movie is dedicated to the military chaplains.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Roberto Rossellini opens and closes with a sprawling lateral pan, first to locate Italian soldiers sunning by the Russian meadow and lastly to herald the charge of their cavalry. Between them lies a "crusade against the Godless barbarians," a Fascist pamphlet pimped by a saintly military chaplain (Alberto Tavazzi) stationed on the Eastern Front. The soldiers mimic a chicken's cluck-cluck to get eggs from peasants, the countryside filled with tanks is a gag from Vidor's Comrade X; the padre stays behind with a soldier with a fractured skull, who, in a sample of the silent movie-worth level of bathos, is propped up to look at the starry sky because he knows his wife will also be looking at that same moment. The bulk of the drama is staged in a bombed-out village hut suspiciously reminiscent of General Rufus T. Firefly's last stand, where the "Catholic witch doctor" helps the Russians see the light while an Armageddon of machine-gun fire and flamethrowers rages outside. Issues of despair and faith are broached with sledgehammers in the most propagandistic of Rossellini's pre-Open City efforts -- Tavazzi dodges explosives to get water for a stable-set baptism, a disconsolate comrade (Roswita Schmidt) seethes about how a man loves a woman only "like a glass of liquor in a winter night, for meat and game." Il Duce's rhetoric cannot subjugate the director's humanistic impulses, however, and compassion for all sides caught in the conflict lingers long after the trumpet-blowing has faded. A Russian soldier stumbles through the deep-focus screen until his charred face comes into close-up, a pietà is improvised amid the rubble, children are already witnesses to atrocities and bearers of hope. In black and white.

ROME, OPEN CITY (Roma, città aperta) A 100

Italy (100 mi) 1945

Roma, Città Aperta Time Out London

Rossellini's film, one of the definitive works of the Italian neo-realist period, was shot under extremely difficult circumstances at the end of WWII. Its greatest achievement remains its study and placing of the Resistance movement - and on a wider level, the war itself - against a background of everyday events. The film evolved from a documentary about a priest serving in the Resistance, which perhaps accounts for its refusal to compromise or to entertain conventional notions of heroism.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs

No film defines the post-WWII Italian Neorealist movement better than Roberto Rossellini's ROME OPEN CITY, a work of great humanism, political conviction, and stylistic invention. Rossellini shot this story about Nazi-occupied Rome entirely on location just two months after the European theater of WWII declared its ceasefire. The drama is constructed from the rhythms, places, and literal debris of reality, and it's difficult to imagine any independent fiction filmmaker who isn't in some way touched its example. (Dave Kehr once wrote that Rossellini invented modern cinema, which would make OPEN CITY the first modern film.) While viewers often remember the film for its newsreel-inspired look, OPEN CITY is also colored by high melodrama. One subplot concerning a partisan priest refusing to talk under Nazi interrogation could have been written by Ernest Hemingway, but under Rossellini's direction one never questions its authenticity.

by George Kaltsounakis Rome, Open City: Neorealism Wasn't Built in a Day, from Cinema Scope

Anyone with a superficial grasp of that revolutionary advance in cinematic conventions known as Italian neorealism would no doubt be perplexed by the disparity between the term’s purported stylistics and the aesthetics of Rossellini’s landmark, Rome, Open City (1945), the flagship of the “movement” (a group with no clear leader or manifesto). Film historians, however, have generally come to acknowledge that the perception of Rossellini’s film as prototype is mostly a matter of convenience. Like Visconti’s Ossessione (1942) and De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946), Open City was merely another step away from the rigidity of traditional narrative cinema toward a new stylistic asymptote born out of frustration with artistic stagnation. But even more problematic than situating the film as neorealist is the prospect of attaining a viable definition of the term, given that the major filmmakers most closely associated with it (the three mentioned above, and to a much lesser extent, Fellini) had competing definitions of neorealism, and an aesthetic approach that quickly challenged, outgrew, or completely reinvented its amorphous parameters. The variant, though overlapping conceptions of this inherently hazy term first coined by Italian critic Umberto Barbaro in 1943 (in reference to French cinema of the 30s!) seem to apply only partially and ill-fittingly to any one film.

The purest form of neorealism was advocated by Cesare Zavattini and concisely summarized by one of its most passionate champions, André Bazin, who wrote that “The dream of Zavattini is just to make a ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” An important thinker and writer who rarely directed, Zavattini argued for the equation of real time and screen time, that drama could and should be found in the most mundane, quotidian subject matter, and that montage should not be used to manufacture a false sense of temporality. In this regard and in theory, Rossellini was eminently neorealist, as he too disavowed the use of montage as anachronistic (in practice, however, there are instances of montage in Open City that would make D.W. Griffith proud). Ironically, Rossellini, a wealthy Roman who began his career in cinema in 1938 as a writer, first made creative inroads on neorealism’s aspiration of verisimilitude in a trilogy of wartime propaganda films made for Mussolini’s Fascist government, in which he would begin to experiment with the deft intercutting of drama and documentary.

Open City of course displays many of the characteristics most often associated with neorealism, namely “gritty” footage reminiscent of the era’s newsreels that imparts a feel of documentary realism, the use of locations as opposed to constructed sets in an effort to eschew excessive artifice of any kind, employment of non-professional actors (including children), political commitment, and historical veracity. However, what is striking about Open City to modern eyes is the extent to which its reliance on the tried and true traits of narrative cinema eclipses these innovations. It is interesting to compare Open City to Visconti’s formidable La Terra Trema (1948) or De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), which, though both made only three years later, are so much closer to the aesthetic spirit of the neorealist ethos (as is Rossellini’s own Paisàn [1946] for that matter). Despite its crucial engagement with contemporary social and political reality, Open City doesn’t convince as a wholly authentic rendering of a specific time and place because of its frequent adherence to an aesthetic whose obsolescence it hastened through its own radical stylistic and historically specific aspects. Made partly in reaction to the Italian “white telephone” dramas, facile Hollywood imports, and apolitical genre films, it is very much a bridge between its period’s dominant modes of storytelling and the future of cinema, a bridge conceived as much out of necessity as design.

The salient points of the film’s production history are the stuff of legend. Rossellini could only obtain permission from the Allied authorities to make a documentary, and shot the film with scant financial backing barely two months after the German army vacated Rome, utilizing bits of cheap film stock he bought from photographers. It was filmed without synch sound and daily rushes, and the actors had to dub their dialogue after it was edited. From these humble and constrictive origins, Rossellini fashioned a film that helped chart a new course for narrative cinema. The plot revolves around the members of the Italian resistance in Nazi-occupied Rome: Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), a priest; Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a Communist engineer and key figure in the underground; and Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet) and Pina (Anna Magnani, trumping the hallowed neorealist prescription of non-professional actors), two ordinary people fighting for the cause and a semblance of normality under the inhuman circumstances of war.

Rossellini’s eye for the urban landscape is still impressive today, and one can imagine how jarring it must have been at the time—Open City was the highest-grossing domestic release of 1945, a fate sadly not even remotely shared with most other neorealist films in the ensuing years—to watch a film that is, sporadically, so free from studio artifice, so rough-hewn and dramatic at the same time. These traits, however, remains at odds with its theatricality and other “regressive” qualities: its frequent melodramatic notes, quite Christian concepts of moral authority, characters that often represent Manichaean stereotypes of good and evil, and the idealization of heroic virtues. A spectacular synthesis of all these features occurs when Don Pietro furiously inveighs against the Nazis after they’ve tortured and killed Manfredi; his murderers literally recoil from the irate padre as if his faith and the justice of his cause had been made manifest before them, as if in fear of the impending wrath of God Himself. An exemplary instance of crackling dramatic propaganda, this scene also invokes quasi-divine approval for its hagiographic affirmation of Italy’s wartime resistance.

Still, Open City retains startling complexity, a sense of humour, and boundless irony. Witness the scene early on involving the sexton who takes a stolen pastry from a woman while himself refusing to engage in looting—the woman snatches the pastry back and tells him, “Then you’ll get pastries in heaven!” This episode quite comically decries the hypocrisy of defending one’s cowardice with misplaced religious beliefs. Then there’s the effeminate, sadistic German major and his vampiric lesbian accomplice, two extreme types in themselves, balanced by the drunken German officer who, on a philosophical tirade, scornfully rejects the Nazi philosophy of racial hygiene but nevertheless mercilessly executes Don Pietro the following day when his soldiers won’t.

These ironies and contradictions, over and above the film’s formal ingenuity and neorealist advances, make for an extraordinary work of cinema. With centenary plans afoot to strike new prints of Rossellini’s films and an upcoming retrospective at Cinematheque Ontario, the time is ripe for a reappraisal of the moving, momentous, and eternal Open City, and its vanguard role in the neorealist pantheon.

The author is indebted to Peter Bondanella’s Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present.

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - The Criterion Collection

"It's my duty to help those in need" - Don Pietro Pellegrini

Open City took the world by storm in late 1945 and early 1946, ushering in a new filmmaking movement called neorealism. These movies changed the face of filmmaking forever, particularly by blowing away the previous standard of cinematic realism. While neorealism lasted less than 10 years, the movies influenced future directors from Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard.

The movement was brief because it was a sign of the times, but more defined by the times than anything else. Open City was shot just after German occupation of Italy, when the country was quite simply ravaged by the effects of World War II. Cinecitta, like virtually everything else, was in shambles and money for movies was considered frivolous considering everything that needed rebuilding. Those who wanted to work in the industry were forced to take to the streets.

Rossellini shot his film almost entirely on location, mainly with natural lighting. Rebelling against the studio product much like the French New Wave a decade and a half later, Luchino Visconti had actually done this two years earlier in his very good film Ossessione. Unfortunately, the first and best version of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice wasn't seen worldwide because Visconti didn't purchase the rights to the novel. To me Visconti's film is a stylized melodrama that looks more like a film-noir shot outside during the day than it does any subsequent neorealist efforts, but depending on how narrowly you define neorealism, it can be considered the first film of the type and in fact the name comes from a comment on the look of Ossessione. Anway, working with a budget of just $20,000, Rossellini used two professional actors to carry the film that was otherwise filled with non-professional locals. Times were so tough that they were forced to shoot on scrap film stock and pretty much just paste it together. The film has all kinds of imperfections including inconsistencies in lighting, film stock, and sound as well as power outages during shooting.

That an exceptional director like Roberto Rossellini is almost only remembered for this shaky work is really sad. In spite of it's obvious flaws Open City is inarguably a remarkable achievement. However, it is far more a testament to Rossellini's thriftiness, spirit, fortitude, resourcefulness, and ingenuity than his skill as a director. It's not until the final segment of Paisan that he shows himself to be a great director, with his skill and diversity becoming more readily apparent in his subsequent films that are now rarely seen in the US. This is a man who continued to challenge himself after he'd made his name. It should have been obvious how he was maturing as a director in the stories he told and the way he told them, with Stomboli anticipating Michelangelo Antonioni's much more famous L' Avventura, but critics and audiences held him to the standard of this choppy film.

Rossellini's goal in making Open City obviously wasn't just to restart his career; it was to restart and rejuvenate his country. His film shows what film can be. It's entertaining yet informative. It's fiction yet it tackles legitimate problems of real people. It's servers multiple purposes for people at home as well as abroad. It shows life as it is, making one want to work for what it could be. The look might be what makes neorealism distinct, but these purposes behind the narrative were the heart and soul of the movement.

Rome, Open City is certainly a highly memorable film of tremendous power. While I've pointed it some of it's many technical flaws, if the subject matter isn't able to gain from some of them, it's certainly able to rise above them. This is a stark gritty realistic document that captures the shocking desolate look of Italy at that time and the plight of its people. It builds on a desperate tragic yet hopeful mood. It depicts the humanity, spirit, determination, and tenacity of the Italian people. It shows the heart and soul of a nation struggling to survive oppression, clinging to maintain their tradition and regain their freedom. And it does so with a great deal of urgency and immediacy because the present would determine the future of the nation.

Clearly, this is a propaganda film. It's not so much political as a cry out to the nation to do what's necessary to restore Italy to a livable country rather than a place of poverty and suffering. At the same time, it's a cry out to the world to see the Italians as human beings, have compassion for them, and help out. I think Rossellini's primary goal is the health of his country, but if he had his way clearly he'd choose a socialist government to lead the way (which forgets that the communists record for senseless death was also less than stellar).

Each Italian person with a notable role represents a human quality such as love, faith, and rebellion. In all fairness, not all the Italians are portrayed as good noble people because the character Marina (Maria Michi) is motivated by greed. However, Marina is only bad so the point can be made that it may be to late for you and your loved ones if you don't do start doing the right thing immediately.

One of the keys to the success of Open City is all the time Rossellini devotes to developing the ordinary Italian. The characters are distinct enough, but there's also a general life and collective spirit to what's left of the humble little country. The first 45 minutes are spent making the viewer care for the Italians and Italy as a whole. Some people find this portion to be slow but, while the Nazi presence is unmistakable, it allows you to concentrate on the "innocent" starving people that are trying to move on. Then, when the Nazis rear their ugly head and kill one off the favorite characters for no reason, it's such a startling, infuriating event. The scene placed at the beginning of the film would have a certain amount of power, but it's the bond you've formed with this character that allows it to rip you apart.

The standout character is clearly Pina (Anna Magnani), a worn down penniless widow raising two children in a crowded apartment and about to have her third. She has real problems other than the Nazis, and makes us focus on the embarrassment and shame of the Italian people. Pina has been so busy trying to keep her family afloat that she hasn't even had time to get married yet, and even today pregnancy means marriage in religious Italy. Most of her problems aren't her fault, yet she blames herself and tells the priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi) she's lived a bad life. While Pina is the most well rounded and best developed character, much of her strength comes from the powerful emotional portrayal of the great Anna Magnani. Her Pina is a real earthy person with inner strength and fiery sometimes uncontrollable emotion.

The Nazis are pretty much interchangeable caricatures straight from the stockyard. They are excessively cruel animals that torture and kill for the Reich. I realize that they actually did these things and even 57 years later it's hard to see the humanity in the Nazis, but this film goes out of its way to make us hate them that much more, even making their inhumanity hereditary. It portrays them as the anti-Italian. The Italians are the great family people with a simple intimate life built around love, while the decadent individualist Nazis are so anti-family that they are a bunch of prissy homosexuals. Like much of the film the homosexuality of the Nazis was actually ahead of its time, but in this case that's obviously not something to commend it for.

What's surprising about the poorness of Rossellini's treatment of the Nazis in the first part and worst part of his trilogy of war is that the third and most consistently great part of the trilogy, Germany Year Zero, is designed to make people forgive the Germans so the world can move on to a long period of peace. That, of course, is a film that goes out of its way to differentiate between the evil Nazis we see here and the "innocent" Germans that are trying to start anew. That said, in spite of his total forgiveness, he still feels the need to take the homosexuality nonsense one step closer to the gutter by making the denounced teacher and his friend come off as pedophiles. Open City also tries hard to make a point against future war, but does so very poorly by overly relying on a lame premise that by not giving in to Nazi torture (they want the captured Italians to undermine the resistance) the Italians have proven the idea of a master race, the reason for the war, faulty. Anyway, the idea that Open City is documenting the facts is by far it's strength, but the Nazis being lumped into a big one-dimensional group partially undermines the believability of the Italian characters that, while obviously sympathetically drawn as the good hardworking but suffering and impoverished people, by all means really did exist.

The plot of Open City isn't particularly original. In fact, if not for the other aspects like the look, the shock of outsiders seeing the decimated wartime, the message, and the general sense of urgency all this creates, it could be a generic Hollywood melodrama. One thing that makes the film a standout is that it's so involving that you might not realize the plot isn't new and some of the politics are bad.

The film is set in '43 or '44 when Nazis controlled the open city (a supposed demilitarized zone that can't be attacked) of Rome. It's partly based on the real story of the catholic priest Don Morosi that was publicly executed, but this story is convoluted with another and winds up being not nearly as simplistic as subsequent neorealist masterpieces like Germany Year Zero or De Sica's Bicycle Thief & Umberto D that focus on one or two characters. That said, the many characters were necessary to show the spirit of the nation as a whole and the film has always rightfully been hailed for the understandable manner in which it delivers its messages. One of the most important things the film shows is that everyone from a pregnant woman to a priest to a child can do their part to rebuild the country.

There are a number of good scenes in the film. Some lighten the film and make it more watchable like the scene where the priest Don Pietro is picking up money to support the military junta and he pauses in the shop to turn the statue of the naked woman away from the statue of the saint. This doesn't work since she's totally naked, so he turns the saint as well. This leads to a sad funny scene where he returns to the now smelly rectory and argues with the sexton Agostino (Nando Bruno).

Pietro: I told you not to cook here!…and cabbage!
Agostino (not knowing the priest is helping the revolution and the books contain the money): I'd rather cook chicken. We've no food and you buy books!

Tension is very high from the beginning of the film with high-ranking revolutionary Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) going from one rooftop to another to escape the pursuing Nazis. What's important about this scene is that it's not a stunt and he's not made into anything resembling a superhero. This is not a film about skill or agility. The heroic deeds involve risk, pain, or even death, but are something anyone could do for their country if they had a great enough desire.

Open City does something that few films do today. It tells a bleak unsettling tragic story where the key characters die with the idea that people will understand how it can be uplifting. These characters are heroic for maintaining their dignity and for not revealing the secrets that would undermine the resistance movement. It's not really about heroism though; it's about people doing what's necessary.

The film ends with Italy still needing to resist even though filming started after the country had been liberated, most likely because it wants to help shape Italy's new government that's in opposition of the fascists. It's the courage of their fellow people that is uplifting and is meant to give the nation the strength and intestinal fortitude to carry on. Although all the deaths leave indelible images in our mind, the key to the ending is not the assassination. It's the saddened children of the revolution that had gathered around and whistled moving on, together.

Rome Open City: A Star Is Born Criterion essay by Irene Bignardi, January 26, 2010

Roberto Rossellini and World War II: Part One John Bailey from The American Society of Cinematographers, June 7, 2010, also seen here: The Trilogy According to John Bailey

Criterion in Bologna July 7, 2010

Press Notes: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy February 1, 2010

Città Aperta Roma - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Stephen L. Hanson from Film Reference

Rome, Open City • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

Rome, Open City and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV Re-evaluating Rossellini, by Martin Walsh from Jump Cut, 1977

Celluloide Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996 A Review by Luca Prono, University of Nottingham, UK Scope

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” | Filmwell Mike Hertenstein from Filmwell, January 26, 2010

Revisiting Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy. Nathaniel Rich from Slate, February 9, 2010

moviediva, for the last word on classic films

Film as Art [Danél Griffin]

Rome Open City Review (1945) Dan Schneider from The Spinning Image

Open City Felicia Feaster from Turner Classic Movies

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus] listed as one of the 15 films in the category "Values" on the Vatican film list

Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy Steven D. Greydamus, January 26, 2010

Film Notes From the CMA Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective, by Dennis Toth, April 19, 2009

All Roads Lead to Rome Open City Michael Glover Smith from White City Cinema, January 5, 2011

Old School Reviews [John Nesbit] also seen here: John Nesbit review

Brandon's movie memory » Rome, Open City (1945, Roberto Rossellini) January 25, 2011

Rome, Open City (aka Roma, Città Aperta, Open City) Harvey O’Brien

Roma, Città Aperta aka Rome, Open City (1945) Roberto Rossellini's Neorealist Masterpiece Dennis Grunes

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

Picture Show Pundits [Ray Bonilla]

The Films of Roberto Rossellini - by Michael E. Grost

rome, open city - review at videovista Tom Matic from Video Vista

EyeForFilm.co.uk Steven Yates

Open City Acquarello from Strictly Film School

EatSleepLiveFilm.com [Jordan McGrath]

MyReviewer.com [Curtis Owen] Criterion Collection

The Magic of the Movies [Alex Christensen]

Celluloid Dreams [Simon Hill]

Bible Films Blog [Matt Page]

Rome File

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Roberto Rossellini: 1906–1977, 02/02/08, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs February 2, 2008

Entries for Monday 18 February 2008, Kinoeye various comments and links on Rome, Open City, from Kinoeye, February 18, 2008

CriterionForum.org: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy DVD Review Chris Galloway, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’S WAR TRILOGY Nelson Kim from Hammer to Nail, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy: ROME OPEN CITY/ PAISAN/ GERMANY ... Mary Lee Grisanti from Films in Review, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Some Kind of Realism: Rossellini's War Trilogy Zach Campbell from Mubi, March 1, 2010

Popdose Bob Cashill, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber from Slant magazine, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy < PopMatters Stuart Henderson from Pop Matters, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Savant Review: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy: Rome Open ... Glenn Erickson from DVD Talk, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Verdict- Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy [Dan Mancini] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) (3 ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (Rome Open City/Paisan/Germany ... Matt Hough from Home Theater Forum, War Trilogy

DVD Review: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - The Criterion ... Dusty Somers from Blog Critics, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” on DVD : The New Yorker The Ex-Axis, by Richard Brody from The New Yorker, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Review Rossellini's War Trilogy - Rossellini's War Trilogy DVD ... Ivana Redwine from About.com, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Some Came Running: And we are not saved: Rossellini's War Trilogy Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, January 25, 2010

Rai TV on Roma Citta Aperta

New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther, also here: Movie Review - Open City - THE SCREEN; How Italy Resisted ...

The Elusive Realism of Rossellini - New York Times Manohla Dargis, November 10, 2006

DVDs - In Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy, Naturalism Survives ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, January 22, 2010

Wikipedia on Roma Citta Aperta

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - Criterion Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver

DESIRE (Desiderio)

Italy (91 mi) 1946 co-director: Marcello Pagliero

User reviews from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

Released in the United States in the early 50's under the title of WOMAN, this obscure early Rossellini film was made at the end of the war and completed by Marcello Pagliero. It is a sensational little tragedy about a prostitute who returns from the city to her home town where she is variously loved, spurned, and lusted over. The grim, fatalistic atmosphere bears a good deal of resemblance to the much better known contemporary masterpiece OSSESSIONE, by Luchino Visconti. In fact Massimo Girotti appears in both films. Elli Parvo is quite riveting in the main role.

PAISAN (Paisà)

Italy (120 mi) 1946

Paisà Tony Rayns from Time Out London

Rossellini recounts the liberation of Italy during WWII in six distinct episodes. The film's style is the foundation on which the whole aesthetic of neo-realism was built: endless establishing shots, and long 'neutral' takes that allow each viewer to make up his own mind about the characters. But the choked-back sentimentality of much of the action (GI doesn't recognise prostitute as the girl he once loved, etc) belongs to a very much older tradition than the visual style. Only the long, final episode in the Po Valley remains wholly impressive: its view of the sheer arbitrariness of warfare anticipates some of Jancsó's abstractions.

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - The Criterion Collection

If documenting "the facts" is the goal of neorealism, then purists should consider Roberto Rossellini's follow up to Open City the genre's finest accomplishment. What separates Paisan from its peers is it's episodic nature. It's the most authentic and truthful film of the group because instead of playing by the rules of a drama and tying most characters and events together, it essentially gives you reenactments of situations that really did happen in some form.

As the second part of Rossellini's trilogy of war, Paisan presents sketches of what it was like to live in Italy from 1943-45 while the Allied troops invaded Sicily and ultimately liberated the country from Nazi control. Each segment begins with a map and a narration explaining where the Allies have progressed up the boot. A reader informed me of an American misconception regarding the title. "Paisa" has been translated it into "Paisan" meaning "fellow-countryman", however the word Paisa is a Neopolitan word meaning something along the lines of "little town." Thus each episode takes place in a different area of Italy so as to represent the Paisa variance of the time.

Open City reeked of propaganda, but Paisan leaves me feeling just the opposite. Rossellini might not have totally restrained himself politically, but he's clearly pointed out the bogusness of government sponsored newsreels. It's supposed to be the film that's fiction (and of course it is because it's not a true truthful documentary) and the newsreel that's fact. Now, I don't believe that a government could really get these segments in the same form because they are more intimate & personal, detailed & concise. However, Paisan gives you six very newsreel-esque episodes that no government would dare to show for a few reasons. Most prominently, the focus isn't steeped toward any one country, people are more concerned with staying alive than with politics and flag waving, and Rossellini shows the tragic reality while refusing to make the people and events look good.

I don't want to make Paisan sound like a major downer. It's once again very humanistic with involving stories that are hardly all doom and gloom. They are handled directly without any fluff, but if anything that only enhances the comedy, romance, tension, and so on. Of course, there are episodes that are dark and bleak (although not to the extent of Open City since there's reason to believe the Germans will lose control), but what stands out is more the folly of it all. It's sad and urgent sure, but for example many problems would be easily avoidable if everyone spoke one language or took the time to learn the other people's. As you'd expect in these situations the Italians certainly come out looking better than anyone else, but the film still feels almost entirely objective. A key to this is that it's their country and they know it better than anyone. For the most part they are the only ones that understand their language, so it's logical that they would have a better understanding of the situation and, if everything were equal, would come out on top. The communication barrier makes for several funny moments, but nobody wins in war and again the "heroism" is more in risking your life for your fellow man than anything else.

If I'm sounding a little wishy-washy in the above paragraph, it's probably because the episodes are very different. Each story focuses on a small group of people dealing with the problems of living through these troubled times. The people are all in the same country, but Rossellini realizes they are different people with different lives. Thus, while wartime may breed more similarity than peacetime, everyone still has different difficulties, feelings, and emotions. The film feels objective because Rossellini is rarely commenting on his material. He's not presenting the same ideas or themes over and over, and he's certainly not beating them into your skull like Steven "you will feel what I feel" Spielbum. Rossellini is instead living or dying on the material alone, but of course the situations are strong and honest enough that he has no trouble surviving. The definitive of Paisan is not any one slice, but all of them together give you close to a full understanding of what it was like to live in Italy during the liberation period.

When Rossellini is at his neorealist best, as he usually is here but particularly in the final episode, it seems like he has no style at all. The material he's presenting is so strong that it has a huge emotional impact without needing to be heightened. By far the flaw of Paisan is brother Renzo Rossellini's score that at times calls unnecessary attention to itself. It works in the Rome episode since it's a love story and the Po River episode because it's very visual, but generally goes against what Roberto is doing, which is taking the position of the invisible onlooker. It seems as if he's told cinematographer Otello Martelli to just role tape, to follow the action without offering any perspective or personal touches. Writing that sounds almost idiotically simplistic, but in any case Rossellini's "stylelessness" can be remarkably effective.

Aside from although not totally excluding the final segment, technical imperfections abound. Not nearly to the level of Open City, but certainly there are scenes that are naturally underlit, although that in a way goes along with the dark tone of the piece. The acting here is not as good as Open City because there aren't even a few professionals. The honesty and awkwardness of the performers adds to the realism in some cases though. Some people find the film melodramatic, but Open City was the one that was melodramatic and manipulative. If Paisan occasionally seems to dip into melodrama it's probably because the actors aren't good or experienced, and in the end bad acting has a lot of similarities even if the intentions are different.

The first, second and sixth segments are the great ones in my opinion. The first is definitely the most moving. The Italians don't believe the Americans have come even though the soldiers are right before their eyes. They don't trust them at all until one of them starts speaking Italian, and even then... The Americans don't trust the Italians either, but one soldier figures out that there's less to fear from the young woman Carmela (Carmela Sazio) that claims to know her way around the mines than from the mines themselves. Both sides look stupid during this segment. While the soldiers are trying to secure the area, you have a ranting woman going on in Italian about whether they harmed her son Licata who they obviously wouldn't know even if he were around. As the soldiers don't let Carmela look for her missing father and brother like she came along for and they need their one man that speaks Italian, she gets stuck staying with a homesick soldier from New Jersey named Joe (Robert Van Loon). Joe tries to make the best of the situation, but the pouting rebellious Carmela is tired of being ordered around by men with guns and Joe only knows seven Italian words if you count Mussolini and Carmela. Joe is a comedian of sorts, but he's only content that Carmela understands him if she repeats the word in English. When they finally begin to form a bond, Joe, who has no clue of the danger, uses his cigarette lighter again because he didn't understand why Carmela objected the first time and it has tragic consequences for both of them.

"I wouldn't be surprised to find a battleship in your pocket!" The second segment shows the desperation and poverty of newly reclaimed Naples. The children have grown up way too quickly. They've learned to do whatever it takes to survive including selling a drunken American M.P. that's there to help them and stealing his shoes when he's asleep. The lonely M.P., also named Joe (Dots Johnson), happens to be black. The kid he calls Paisan (Alfonsino Pasca) takes him to a puppet show and he's enjoying it at first until he realizes the Moor is just fodder for the white knight. Deciding not to stand for this racism, the drunken soldier hops onto the stage and takes over for the Moor jobber, which nearly causes a riot. I think this is the funniest segment of the bunch because once Joe sobers up he just rambles on endlessly, so thrilled to have an audience even if one that doesn't understand a word he's saying. It's particularly funny that he doesn't know his audience is the same as the shoe thief, telling Paisan kids like this thief have made him cynical and he'll find the one that stole them and boot him in the butt so hard he'll see stars.

The outstanding segment is the final one, an isolated action where Italian partisans fight alongside allied soldiers deep behind enemy lines in the marshes of the Po River Valley. This is a daring segment with two almost wordless battle sections. Legendary French film critic Andre Bazin, the key to getting respect for "washed up" Rossellini's initially reviled Voyage in Italy, said Rossellini's technique during these portions gave the audience the exact equivalent of the inner feelings of these men. While Open City was choppy and had the feel of something that they better get right the first time because they couldn't afford to shoot it again, here we see great ambition. It's ambition that's fully realized too with the camerawork, editing, score, and ambience all coming together perfectly. Considering what the skirmishes in Open City look like, I don't think it's a stretch to say this is nothing you'd expect from neorealism. However, in it's own way it's as great a segment as there is in neorealism and the one time where you can hold neorealism up against any of its peers from a technical perspective.

Central to the first battle is a Partisan boat floating in the middle of the river that a few Allies are trying to retrieve. This boat contains a dead Partisan marked as a traitor, showing the Partisans are as good as dead if captured because they are considered renegades and thus not protected under the Geneva treaty. The Allies retrieval strategy is smart, but that doesn't make their plan any less dangerous. Although there are few words, shifting focal lengths, and several cuts, because the movements are clearly conveyed without that disorienting stuff that can work but seems to have become an excuse to not bother writing anything solid, one always understands exactly what the soldiers are doing and why.

The camera circles the Partisan boat from a distance so smoothly, as if it's floating too. These scenes are intercut with a few soldiers from both sides. What's so impressive about these shots is that the camera follows the action without ever altering the plane, as if like the soldier going a little too high or to one direction will be the difference between survival and getting your brains blown out. These battle scenes mount unbelievable tension and are a perfect climax to a great film, particularly because Rossellini doesn't turn the episode into a bunch of harping on the obvious inhuman practice of killing off "rebels" that "aren't war prisoners."

Paisan: More Real Than Real Criterion essay from Colin MacCabe, January 26, 2010

Roberto Rossellini and World War II: Part Two John Bailey from The American Society of Cinematographers, June 14, 2010

Press Notes: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy February 1, 2010

Paisà - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Charles L. P. Silet from Film Reference

Paisà • Senses of Cinema Allan James Thomas from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

Paisan Review (1946) Dan Schneider from The Spinning Image

The Films of Roberto Rossellini - by Michael E. Grost

Paisan - TCM.com Frank Miller from Turner Classic Movies

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” | Filmwell Mike Hertenstein from Filmwell, January 26, 2010

Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy Steven D. Greydamus, January 26, 2010

Revisiting Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy. Nathaniel Rich from Slate, February 9, 2010

"Paisan" by Roberto Rossellini Lecture notes by Art Sandler

Film Notes From the CMA Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective, by Dennis Toth, April 19, 2009

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

Paisà - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roberto Rossellini - Paisà aka Paisan (1946) excellent photos from Cinema of the World

CriterionForum.org: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy DVD Review Chris Galloway, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’S WAR TRILOGY Nelson Kim from Hammer to Nail, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy: ROME OPEN CITY/ PAISAN/ GERMANY ... Mary Lee Grisanti from Films in Review, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Some Kind of Realism: Rossellini's War Trilogy Zach Campbell from Mubi, March 1, 2010

Popdose Bob Cashill, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber from Slant magazine, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy < PopMatters Stuart Henderson from Pop Matters, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Savant Review: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy: Rome Open ... Glenn Erickson from DVD Talk, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Verdict- Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy [Dan Mancini] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) (3 ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (Rome Open City/Paisan/Germany ... Matt Hough from Home Theater Forum, War Trilogy

DVD Review: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - The Criterion ... Dusty Somers from Blog Critics, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” on DVD : The New Yorker The Ex-Axis, by Richard Brody from The New Yorker, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Review Rossellini's War Trilogy - Rossellini's War Trilogy DVD ... Ivana Redwine from About.com, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Some Came Running: And we are not saved: Rossellini's War Trilogy Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, January 25, 2010

Movie Review - Paisan - 'Paisan,' Italian Importation, Tops Four ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

The Elusive Realism of Rossellini - New York Times Manohla Dargis, November 10, 2006

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - Criterion Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver

L’AMORE

Italy (79 mi) 1948

L'Amore Time Out London

Rossellini's two-part showcase for Magnani's operatic excess. In The Miracle, she plays a retarded goatherd who confuses her seducer with St Joseph and her illegitimate child with a new Messiah; in The Human Voice (based on Cocteau's play), a middle-aged bourgeoise abandoned by her lover and clinging to the telephone as if to a lifebuoy. Basically, the first is claptrap, the second reeks of greasepaint, but the demented virtuosity of their interpreter carries all before it.

User reviews from imdb Author: M. J Arocena from New Zealand

This is Roberto Rossellini's extraordinary tribute to the art of Anna Magnani in two parts. The first part, based on Jean Cocteau's "The Human Voice" is a relentless, desperate plea from a woman to the man she loves. Love (Amore) Magnani style. Shattering, all consuming. The voice of her love comes through a telephone line and the camera invades the desolation in her eyes with savage determination. The second part is a devastating fairy tale. Magnani is a semi demented inhabitant of a village where she meets a stranger, played by Federico Fellini, that she believes to be Saint Joseph. He makes her drink and rapes her. She gets pregnant, convinced that she will give birth to Jesus himself. I'm not even going to try and tell you what Anna Magnani does with this character. You have to see it to believe it. Unique!

Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Written by Fellini (excerpt)

Drawn from 1948, two years before Federico Fellini made his directorial debut with Variety Lights, the pair of features in this Sunday program provide valuable insight into the prehistory of a filmmaking legend. Half of Roberto Rossellini's omnibus feature L'Amore, the Fellini-scripted The Miracle clearly foreshadows what was to come. Anna Magnani, to whose "art" the film is dedicated, plays a stout peasant woman whose vision of St. Joseph (beatifically played by Federico himself) is scorned by her putatively religious neighbors, especially once her divine revelation begins to manifest itself as an ostensibly immaculate conception. Re-enacting Christ's walk to Golgotha with a washbasin for a crown, Magnani wrings every sacrosanct drop from the role, although she doesn't quite match the hairpin-turn theatrics of L'Amore's Cocteau-scripted first half (not part of the program). Although the story's erotic Catholic mysticism is textbook Fellini, Rossellini's style predominates, producing a fascinating, if not wholly successful, frisson.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal

A deceptively intimate movie that must have looked positively tinny in the wake of Roberto Rossellini’s socio-political frescoes ROME: OPEN CITY and PAISAN, L’AMORE is an anthology film spun around the flimsiest of themes—namely, the virtuosic versatility of La Magnani. The first segment, “The Human Voice,” taken from Jean Cocteau’s one-act play, is an exercise in minimalism: a single set, a straight-forward premise, and only one character with a speaking part. (It’s no slight to Anna Magnani to acknowledge that her canine companion nearly steals the show.) Magnani sulks around her flat waiting for her lover’s telephone call and becomes no less emotional when the telephone rings. At times the scenario suggests a dusty topical play revived as-is, with the novelty of telephonic communication treated with equal doses of fascination and weariness. No wonder contemporary Italian reviewers dismissed it as something that didn’t quite constitute a movie. We only hear Magnani’s half of the conversation, and Rossellini uses this intermittently intelligible exchange to poeticize silence. Identified by Jonathan Rosenbaum as the first Italian film to be shot with direct sound, “The Human Voice” gains gravity through its ambient soundscape—a mix of creaky floorboards, overheard conversations, and the slightest hint of a world outside. The second segment, “The Miracle,” from an original scenario by Federico Fellini, is probably more readily recalled today by law students than by cinephiles. Like THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST some four decades later, “The Miracle” was met with charges of blasphemy because it challenged audiences to take the Bible seriously. After Magnani’s simpleton shepherdess finds herself pregnant after a night with a drifter she believed to be St. Joseph, she’s pilloried by the peasants and the priests alike for her allegedly immaculate conception. What makes these believers so inured to the possibility of a miracle in their own time? A condemnation of small-minded Christianity that moves with the overpowering fleetness of a fable, “The Miracle” truly wound up doing God’s work: Rossellini’s film nudged the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the Mutual precedent, declare movies a form of expression worthy of First Amendment protections, and rule that “sacrilege” was insufficient and unconstitutional grounds for banning a film. Even after the Supreme Court ruling, the City of Chicago managed to ban it anyway (on the grounds of “immorality,” not “sacrilege”), leaving it to Doc Films and the ACLU to screen “The Miracle” for assorted civil libertarians, lapsed Catholics, pinkos, and film enthusiasts. One more thing: due to rights issues that prevented the distribution of “The Human Voice” in the U.S., “The Miracle” was released stateside as part of a different omnibus film, THE WAYS OF LOVE, which also featured Jean Renoir’s “A Day in the Country” and Marcel Pagnol’s “Jofroi.” More than sixty years later, it’s still rare to see L’AMORE in its integral form, so make haste.

L’Amore (1948, Roberto Rossellini) Brandon’s Movie Memory, March 22, 2011

For a while there, I dismissed all Italian movies. Their horror is badly acted and makes no sense, 98% of their movies have awful lipsync and among the higher-quality pics I’ve seen are The Leopard (which I hate) and flicks starring Roberto Benigni. Sure, I admit Antonioni and Fellini can be great, and I liked Suspiria a whole lot, so I figured I’d give the country another shot this year via poster-boy Rossellini. Rome, Open City was wonderful, but before moving on to Paisan I took a pit stop with L’Amore, wanting more Anna Magnani – and what a pit it was.

L’Amore is actually a film and a half, or an hour-long feature preceded by a short. First off is The Human Voice, a one-woman play written in 1930 by Jean Cocteau. I’d heard it performed before, on an LP by Ingrid Bergman recorded sometime after her divorce from Rossellini and return to Hollywood. So two Rossellini lovers recorded the same French monologue – coincidence? The play is pretty straightforward, a woman who’s been dumped awaits a call from her ex-guy, talks to him through a failing connection, going through various levels of grief. Should be a showy actresses’s dream role. The Bergman LP sold it better, as far as I’m concerned, sounding more like an actual phone call, all the visuals imagined. Rossellini’s version adds straightforward visuals – an unkempt Magnani on the phone in her room, with no fancy editing or showy camerawork. The biggest problem is the sound, distractingly out of sync (distracting even for me, who was busily reading subtitles), harsh and shrill, Magnani’s whining getting on my nerves until I finally turned the volume waaay down. You’d suppose a one-person movie in a single room would have been a good chance for the Italians to try recording synchronized sound for the first time ever, but even the pioneering Rossellini didn’t think to try that.

In the second part, The Miracle, from a story by Fellini, simple Nanni has a religious mania. While up in the mountains herding goats, she meets a lone dude, whom she welcomes as Saint Joseph (as in the stepfather of Jesus). They share some wine and she wakes up later, wanders back to work. A few months later she’s pregnant. Neighbors taunt and joke with her, a devilish midget throws her from her “home,” which looked like a pile of clothes in a plaza, then literally the entire town comes out to throw her a fake parade then throw stuff at her. So she flees up the mountain, delivers the baby herself.

G. Moliterno: “… largely made, as Rossellini himself acknowledges in the film’s epigraph, to showcase the consummate acting talents of Anna Magnani.”

He also mentions that the Human Voice segment was shot in Paris during prep for Germany Year Zero. “A clear indication of Rossellini’s greater than usual attention to visual style here is given by the pronounced presence of mirrors throughout the film in order to underscore the ongoing fragmentation of the self.”

And if I may overquote from the same source:

[Nanni] clearly anticipates the characters of Gelsomina and Cabiria in Fellini’s La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, but Magnani channels an animistic vitality into the role that makes the poetry of Fellini’s two later creatures appear wan in comparison. And in fact, despite Fellini’s own appearance in the film as the silent and mysterious vagabond who prompts Nanni’s religious delirium… Nannì brings to mind the “durochka” or holy fool, of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. … [Appeals against the film's banning in the States] also overturned the Court’s own decision in 1915 which had for decades denied films the status of self-expression and thus protection under the First Amendment. Part of the miracle of Il miracolo, then, turned out to be its role in initiating the beginning of the demise of film censorship in the United States.

L'amore • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno, July 9, 2009

L'Amore - TCM.com Jay Carr

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

Movie Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]

User reviews from imdb Author: Kalaman from Ottawa

User reviews from imdb Author: doctorlightning from United States

GERMANY, YEAR ZERO

Italy (78 mi) 1947

Germany, Year Zero Time Out London

A long opening tracking shot through Berlin's ruins under the Occupation in 1945 is both documentary and a hallucinatory voyage through a stone age city, the perfect illustration that realist film can also forge fantasy. It sparks against the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who works the black market, sells Hitler souvenirs for chewing-gum, and who will kill his sick father out of naïve mercy and regard for the whisperings of his old Nazi teacher. A horror movie that declines to tease.

Roberto Rossellini followed Open City and Paisan with this film, the final chapter in what's come to be known as his “War Trilogy.” Filmed in the bombed-out Berlin of 1947, it deals with the aftermath of the war, a pervading moral crisis, and the fate of a young German boy. To the critics of the time, it seemed that Rossellini had betrayed the tenets of neorealism by introducing melodrama, an elliptical narrative, and intimations of a Christian consciousness. It now appears as Rossellini's first mature work, pointing to his masterpieces of the 50s. In German with subtitles. 78 min.

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - The Criterion Collection

"Did you hear, papa? Maybe you'll go to the hospital!...Imagine you'll eat what you want. You'll get three meals a day. Yes, something warm" - Eva

Germany Year Zero is the final installment of Rossellini's trilogy of war. In a rare accomplishment, I find each film to be an improvement over the previous, but this one didn't please audiences and critics like the first two and has since fallen into the obscurity like most of Rossellini's ill-kept archives.

There are many reasons this film didn't please people, starting with the fact that just two years after World War II Rossellini forgives the Germans. For this, I admire him not only for his courage but also for his wisdom. I'm fed up with the supposed sexiness and seductiveness of revenge that's peddled constantly and ingrained in everyone's mind. These things lead on, on and on and on until someone decides not to seek vengeance. The "War To End All Wars" is perhaps the best example one can give against revenge because it was more like The War to Start the Next War due to the victors unwillingness to forgive the Germans. The situation we left them in bred the bitterness and contempt that allowed Adolf Hitler to gain support by feeding not only on that anger but the fact that the Germans weren't an inferior life form (of course neither were the people Hitler in turn persecuted). While Open City & Paisan featured the spirit and "heroism" of the Italians, this is set in the rubble of Germany and only features unknown "enemies." In actuality though, the film does for the Germans what Open City did for the Italians, makes you see them as human beings. It's a more detached film, darker and less hopeful, but these things don't make it good or bad.

I'll never understand the "logic" of uplifting being a positive comment and depressing being a negative comment. That says exactly nothing about the quality or success of the film, only that this person is unwilling to take anything more from it than the final mood. The idea that the meaning and importance of a work is limited to a final feeling is laughable. If you take the life of any great deceased figure, does it somehow have less merit and worth because they eventually died? Of course not, but tell someone that the main character dies in the end and you've automatically cut your audience in half not because you've ruined the story but because they don't want to be sad. Whether it's happiness, tragedy, whatever, a characteristic doesn't make a good film, and if you can only think of one reason that it was a good film then it probably wasn't one. If it's interesting and involving, shows observation, logic, and honesty, gives you situations to wrestle with and makes you live through the characters but also want to question some of their decisions then I say run with it no matter what emotion it's supposedly producing. In introducing the film on TCM, the great Martin Scorsese rightfully said, "I see this film as a prayer from Rossellini to the post war world, a prayer for compassion."

Another thing that annoys me is the idea that all films are out to make us feel a certain way. When you make a film I should hope you have an inspiration, but fools allow most films not to because they regularly pay for these generics that coddle them like babies and please them with the same useless happy formulas of "hero" succeeding in love or war. It's all about preserving the status quo and taking people's money while they wish they had more. Now, the main point of making this film is rather obvious, in fact it doesn't get much more obvious than writing it at the beginning, and I certainly have a big problem with it's pretentious assertion that Christian morality and piety is "the very foundation of human life". However, I attest that if this film moved you, you were moved by the material rather than the filmmaking. The film doesn't harp nor do your work for you, it unfolds in a free yet relentless manner. At first it offers different situations and perspectives that are not necessarily "right", but definitely sensible given the characters situation and background. Like Paisan it closes with a largely wordless section, although this time it's charting every movement of the climaxes results rather than presenting a separate story. It's certainly a story, but even though the focus is on one boy the characters are well drawn and their plight is very real, real enough that there is no need (and really no attempt with only the wordless sections being scored in a non-manipulative manner where Renzo Rosselli shows big improvement by doing so) to manipulate. And that's basically what neorealism is all about, taking actual situations and working them into something cohesive that depicts the essence of the people it's focusing on. The people in these films have it tough, but that's because, while there are obviously very different degrees, real life is a struggle for most people (especially in the period of neorealism where governments had just finished beating each other's brains out). It's mainly in Hollywood films where 20-something characters are funded by invisible forces and are "cool" because they have everything we are supposed to want.

Germany Year Zero is about a frail, common 12-year-old boy named Edmund Koeler (Edmund Moeschke) that stalks rigidly through the ruins of Berlin with his head down and his half shut eyes looking at the ground in sadness, shame, and despair. Edmund, of course, in many senses represents Germany as a whole. As the nation tries to start over with very little money and resources his life becomes one of confusion, hardship, destitution, and ultimately rejection. One could argue over how much guilt and remorse the survivors felt, but certainly they'd have to deal with the actions of their country - which will never be forgotten - for the rest of their lives.

Edmund is not the most common case because he's trying not only survive but to support his family. The film to his dedicated to Rossellini's son Romano, who died at that age the year before while his father was finishing Paisan. Rossellini was incredibly smart in making his protagonist this age though. He's not only too young to be responsible for any of the wretched Nazi policies, he's a little too young to have a chance of carrying his family like a man.

The first scene shows Edmund working in a graveyard. You are sorry and disgusted to see the others betray him by telling the boss that he's not old enough (15), resulting in him getting nothing for the work he did. Part of you wants to be glad because he's really too puny to be doing this kind of work on a consistent basis, but then you think back to what you saw just before Edmund. This isn't a job that's being done by a bunch of rugged powerful men; it's all people you wouldn't expect, mainly old women. One of them says, "What's the use? We'll die no matter what." Another is told, "If you're tired throw yourself in that grave," when she's looking for a break because she's been slaving away all day. Obviously the situation is beyond desperate, and while the ideal job for him might be out there the chances of getting any job much less that one are extremely slim.

Edmund has a father (Ernst Pittschau) and a brother, Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Kruger), that are well within the age of supporting the family. However, his father is bedridden and his brother doesn't have the courage to present himself to the authorities. Karl-Heinz was a soldier in a regiment that fought all the way home, and he fears when he registers for his food card and work eligibility they'll instead cart him off to a concentration camp. The problem is that not registering can only end in disaster for the whole family, which he realizes even saying, "Now I'm less than worthless - an extra mouth to feed."

Edmund's sister Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) is left to do almost everything, but she also can't find work. After taking care of the house and the two burdens all day, she spends her night at a club escorting Americans in hopes they'll give her a cigarette that she can trade at the black market. Her friend that finds her clients at the club keeps prodding her to whore herself too, prompting Eva's best dialogue while they stand in the food line figuring it will run out before they get their share. "So I waste my evenings for cigarettes, would I get more if I gave in? What are you getting out of it? You're just as hungry and miserable as I am, like the others are. Don't you see?"

I mentioned a house, but it's not the Koeler's. The Housing Superintendent placed them in the Rademaker's place, which now has five families. It's not so much that it's overcrowded, but that the laws limit based on the house rather than the number of families or occupants, so the electricity is soon cut off after Rademaker's harebrain scheme to steal the extra they need backfires. It's easy to say Rademaker is a real bastard because he's always accusing the Koeler's of everything and blaming them for all his problems, but he once had a good situation. The presence of all the other families just takes away from what's available to him, and there are a lot of people in that house. The characters aren't really selfish, they are just so desperate and miserable from the horrible conditions that they wind up at each other's throats even when their intentions are good (although Rademaker's rarely are).

The story though is all about Edmund and his quest to save his family. His character certainly attempts to be "heroic", but the situation is so different it calls for almost a complete reversal of the typical neorealist portrayal of children. The child is still the brunt of adult insanity. However, one attempt after another to be helpful goes totally awry because he's simply not old, wise, strong, or experienced enough for the task the conditions force on him until he's another casualty of the surrounding madness.

Edmund's odyssey begins when he gets Rademaker to agree to allow him to sell his scale on the black market. Edmund is still innocent at this point, so he's in way over his head. An adult predator immediately smells easy prey and takes the scale out of his hand, handing him two cans of meat and driving off while Edmund balks that it's not a fair trade and asks for the scale back.

Edmund runs into his old school teacher Mr. Enning (Erich Guhne). He lost his credentials when the Nazis lost power, but is still clinging to the regime's ideas as he struggles to get by through unspecified shady activities. The Enning character is necessary because the film wouldn't be believable if everyone was an "innocent" that had nothing to do with Hitler. Rossellini rightfully doesn't expect the bad people to suddenly turn good, but the film is about giving the youth the chance to live, love life, and decide for themselves. That said, Rossellini makes a cheap unnecessary point by having Enning and his friend be pedophiles. It's never stated or explicitly acted upon, but the way Enning touches Edmund makes it obvious to everyone but Edmond who doesn't know about that kind of affection yet and probably just assumes it's the kind he does know.

Enning is the only one that will give Edmund work, but it's selling a record of a Hitler speech on the black market. He sends them off with an older streetwise kid named Jo and his tagalong Kristen. Through a haunting scene where the Fuhrer speech blasts in the ruins of one of his old stomping grounds as the camera shows where those ideas left Germany and an equally memorable one where Jo easily gives a lady a nice deduction on soap because he's just going to keep it and run off with whatever amount she pulls out of her pocketbook, Edmund kind of learns what it takes to get by in year zero. He needs something to sell to pull the Jo scam off though. Foolishly thinking spending a day with Jo makes them pals, he gives Jo his 10 mark commission from Enning for what turns out to be the useless ripped open soap packaging and only gets a small share of the potatoes they ripped off because that's "all Jo can fit in his bag."

As Edmund is trying to grow up and learn this new way of life, he wisely looks for guidance from the older people he knows. The problem is these people are totally disillusioned with what passes for life and he's not capable of knowing what to listen to. He can't tell when to take things at face value and when to realize people are just letting out their misery and self pity, so he's constantly lead down the wrong path. With all the suffering, much of the talk centers on death. Karl-Heinz says, "I'd be better off jumping out the window," while Edmund's father says, "I'm of no use anymore. It would be better if I die. I've even considered killing myself, but I don't lack the courage."

Things are easier on the Koeler's when the father's condition deteriorates to the point he needs hospitalization, but starvation is something that eats you away slowly. He recovers enough to return home, but even without having him to feed the rest of his family has grown weaker trying to survive without any income. Enning's Nazi and Social Darwinist beliefs produce a speech that changes Edmund's life forever. "Enough of this sentimentality. Life is what it is. We've been shaped by different conditions. You're afraid of your father dying. Learn from the natural world. The strong eliminate the weak. You need the courage to sacrifice the weak. It's a natural law, for humans as well."

The scenes have less and less light as the film goes on. The light, used as a representation of childhood innocence and purity, is slowly disappearing from Edmund's life to the point it almost looks like Rossellini is only using natural lighting in the middle of the night.

When Edmund kills his father by secretly poisoning him, that's not at all a low point for him. It obviously doesn't make him happy, but like a good little sheep he feels he's completed his task, done what was courageous and necessary to improve his situation. The film gets bright again when he goes to Enning's to inform him of his successful mission. Edmund is sent reeling though when Enning reacts in terror, "I didn't tell you anything. You're crazy…a monster!" and slaps Edmund. This is Edmund's awakening. He realizes that he's been living in tragedy as if that was the only way to live. He seeks to purge himself from his guilt and return to having an actual life, not realizing it's no longer an option in this broken society.

The final portion has Edmund leave his family claiming he's an adult when they have to move in with the neighbors until his father's body is taken away. Everything he does from that point though is an attempt to regain his childhood. He wanders though the remnants of his country trying to amuse himself as an escape, but the hopelessness is all encompassing and releasing nervous energy isn't satisfying. These scenes create an incredible level of helplessness in the viewer because you have no choice but to keep your and watch the world spit him out.

Rossellini follows Edmund at a distance in documentary style, letting faces that are old, hollow, and weary when they shouldn't even have hit their prime, as well as the rubble of the country do much of his talking. At the same time, the audio of his actions is so distinct that it calls attention to his solitude. Another reason the conclusion is so memorable is that the time lapses are diminished until it's almost real time, which really brings out Edmund's isolation.

The most memorable scene has him trying to play ball with a bunch of younger children that are still really kids (they have an adult to feed their "worthless mouths"). They tell him to leave them alone and quickly walk off with the ball and set up elsewhere when he won't listen. It's as if he's become another species, the situation has left him with no one and nothing in this world.

Germany Year Zero: The Humanity of the Defeated Criterion essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 26, 2010

Roberto Rossellini and World War II: Part Three John Bailey from The American Society of Cinematographers, June 21, 2010

Press Notes: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy February 1, 2010

Germany, Year Zero • Senses of Cinema Pasquale Iannone from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

Beginning Again from Zero: Post-War Reconstruction: Germany Year ... Megan Carrigy from Senses of Cinema, May 22, 2003

Germany Year Zero Review (1947) - The Spinning Image Dan Schneider from The Spinning Image

GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (Roberto Rossellini, 1947) « Dennis Grunes February 27, 2007

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” | Filmwell Mike Hertenstein from Filmwell, January 26, 2010

Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy Steven D. Greydamus, January 26, 2010

Revisiting Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy. Nathaniel Rich from Slate, February 9, 2010

Film Notes From the CMA Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective, by Dennis Toth, April 19, 2009

The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

MyReviewer.com [Curtis Owen]

Strictly Film School Acquarello

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

CriterionForum.org: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy DVD Review Chris Galloway, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVDTalk.com [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’S WAR TRILOGY Nelson Kim from Hammer to Nail, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy: ROME OPEN CITY/ PAISAN/ GERMANY ... Mary Lee Grisanti from Films in Review, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Some Kind of Realism: Rossellini's War Trilogy Zach Campbell from Mubi, March 1, 2010

Popdose Bob Cashill, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill Weber from Slant magazine, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy < PopMatters Stuart Henderson from Pop Matters, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Savant Review: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy: Rome Open ... Glenn Erickson from DVD Talk, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Verdict- Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy [Dan Mancini] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (The Criterion Collection) (3 ... Christopher Long from DVD Town, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy (Rome Open City/Paisan/Germany ... Matt Hough from Home Theater Forum, War Trilogy

DVD Review: Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - The Criterion ... Dusty Somers from Blog Critics, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Roberto Rossellini's “War Trilogy” on DVD : The New Yorker The Ex-Axis, by Richard Brody from The New Yorker, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

seanax.com [Sean Axmaker] Criterion Collection War Trilogy

DVD Review Rossellini's War Trilogy - Rossellini's War Trilogy DVD ... Ivana Redwine from About.com, Criterion Collection War Trilogy

Some Came Running: And we are not saved: Rossellini's War Trilogy Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running, January 25, 2010

Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]

Germany Year Zero Chris Dashiell from CineScene

Letterboxd: Alice Stoehr

Germany, Year Zero - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: doctorlightning from United States

User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil

Movie Review - Germany, Year Zero - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

The Elusive Realism of Rossellini - New York Times Manohla Dargis, November 10, 2006

Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy - Criterion Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver

STROMBOLI A 96

Italy USA (107 mi) 1950 USA Howard Hughes edit (81 mi)

This is a ghost island. Nobody lives here. —Karin (Ingrid Bergman)

This is yet another film that failed at the box office, yet much of this lies in the awkward lead-up to the release, which is confusing by anyone’s standards. Most of the controversy surrounding this film happened before it was ever completed, when actress Ingrid Bergman left her husband and entered into a scandalous affair with the married director, becoming pregnant with the first of three children they would have together, where they eventually got married after the film’s release, but divorced seven years later. STROMBOLI was the first of five features Bergman and Rossellini would make together, but it is the one that most defied audience expectations, especially coming after her roles as a nun in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S (1945) and a saint in Victor Fleming’s JOAN OF ARC (1948). Hollywood blacklisted her from working there again until after she left Rossellini in 1956, where Colorado Senator Edwin C. Johnson called Rossellini a “degenerate” in the American press and a “scoundrel” in the Italian press, while Bergman was called a “disgrace not only to her profession but to all American women” by Lloyd T. Binford, the head of the Memphis Censor Board, refusing to show the film, creating such a fervor that the Hollywood news review Variety broke with their tradition of reviewing only released films and reviewed preview screenings, where they asserted “probably no film in history has received as much publicity as Stromboli.” Paparazzi hounded the shoot, causing the picture to go over schedule and over budget, where it had always been agreed there would be an Italian and an English version of the film, but RKO owner Howard Hughes was so furious with the delays that he dubbed and cut the American version himself, a good 25 minutes shorter, and a version Rossellini disowned, while the director edited the Italian version which wasn’t shown in the United States until half a century later.

After shooting several movies in the bombed-out ruins of war, this completely unorthodox film deals with the unseen interior ramifications, where the war left many emotionally scarred, literally streams of traumatized victims, where it was never easy returning to the world afterwards. In typical Rossellini fashion, this film was shot without a script, which was certainly alien to Bergman, yet it plays into her character that from start to finish has a psychologically alienating relationship with herself and the world around her. Opening in an Italian internment camp after the war, using a largely untranslated, multi-language opening, followed by some often badly dubbed English, Karin (Bergman) is a Lithuanian refugee with nowhere to go, but is wooed on the other side of the barbed wire fence by Antonio (Mario Vitale), a young Italian soldier who offers to marry her and bring her home to his island. With some reservations, she agrees, understanding each knows little about the other, but she figures once she’s out into the world, she can establish other contacts. Her arrival onto the island, however, is a crushing surprise, as it’s nearly uninhabited, situated directly under a live volcano where the residents live under an everpresent threat of peril. What’s truly realistic here is how pitiless and unfriendly Bergman is from the outset, as far away from a Hollywood star portrayal as one could imagine, who doesn’t just express dissatisfaction, but a rather haughty attitude from the moment of her arrival. Her behavior is deplorable, reacting like a spoiled and ungrateful aristocrat, whose treatment of a man who took her out of an internment center is despicable, as from here she’s free to make choices she wouldn’t have had otherwise, but she doesn’t see it that way. Instead, she feels just as confined, perhaps more so, than at the camp, where she at least had friends. Here she’s melodramatic and hysterical, forcing her distraught feelings of anguish and isolation onto her husband before he has a chance to do anything about it, becoming insufferable, taking it all out on him, as if he’s responsible for the war and its aftermath, where she basically tells him he can’t afford a woman like her, that she’s too good for this place, “I’m different, very different from you. I belong to another class.”

The stark images of poverty are overwhelming, yet sublimely realistic, a tiny town nestled under the force and influence of an immense mountain that occasionally spews fire and gas. Shot on a desolate island with primitive conditions providing raw physical images, the film reveals the internal world through ordinary, everyday images, where there’s little story to speak of, more a series of occurrences, including many gorgeous shots of fishermen at sea, or children playing in the water alongside sand and jagged rocks, where there’s an interesting use of a baby crying alongside her emotional meltdown, an innocence broken by circumstances beyond their control. What this film does do is keep the camera on Bergman, whose entrapment is recorded in long takes, extended scenes of her ongoing, existential crisis and her resultant loss of faith. There’s a brilliant overhead shot of Bergman trapped like a rat in a maze, where she desperately cries to herself “I want to get out,” exasperated by the turn of the events, the heightened emotional music (written by the director’s brother), as well as the continued cries of a baby throughout. Karin has little understanding of the effect she has on others, where just to be seen with another man is scandalous (sound familiar?), where she is spied upon and treated with vile contempt as an unwanted outsider, until eventually even her husband turns against her. Rossellini tends to focus upon landscapes, where after a volcanic eruption, the entire village moves to safety at sea, where what’s significant is the internal imbalance and discord everywhere, not just in Karin’s life. But after an inappropriate attempt to seduce the priest for desperately needed money supposedly leaves her no way out, she tries to escape on foot, thinking she can reach larger boats (with motors!) on the other side of the island. The mountain erupts with fire and gas along the way, as she’s literally consumed by sulphurous fumes (a member of the crew actually died of a heart attack), where all the fumes they breathed in the shooting are real Stromboli Final Scene - YouTube (in Italian 8:20). The final eruption sequence has a poetic ambiguity about it, as like Moses on Mount Sinai, she has an existential crisis of confidence not only with God, but with her doubting faith in herself, where her ravaged inner spirit is on the brink of exhaustion. The question of whether she, or anyone in the film, can transcend the disillusioning boundaries of their human confinement remains unanswered, as in the end she resembles the crying child, where like learning to crawl and stand on her own, this is still something she has yet to grasp.

Stromboli, Terra di Dio Time Out London

In Rossellini's first film with Bergman, the overpowering symbol of the volcanic island almost overwhelms its delicate story: a World War II refugee (Bergman) marries a young fisherman to escape from an internment camp. Brutalised by war, but coming to loathe the terrifying savagery of the island, her drama is a conflict between self-pity and acceptance of Something Greater. Praised as an example of cinema devoid of the excesses of formal artifice, a 'lesson in humility', its achievement is less modest: a sequence of tunny-fishing remains one of the most amazing ever filmed. (The English-language version distributed by RKO was cut to 82 minutes.)

User reviews from imdb Author: cogs from (e.g. London, England)

"Stromboli" is a fascinating examination of suffering, desperation, faith and the desire for redemption. I've never liked Rossellini's films as much as Bresson's but I think the two directors often dealt with the same themes in similar ways, with minor stylistic variations. Where Rossellini used actors and non-actors who gave performances, Bresson used models and types who were instructed to remain impassive. Where Rossellini's films focused on passionate characters and emotional situations, Bresson approached his stories with a scientist's dispassion. I've always found Rossellini's films strange – they are often parables that invest heavily in domestic melodrama and the histrionics of their characters. Nevertheless, I think "Stromboli" is one of his most successful films. Karin suffers so much--a war refugee, internment camp resident and then harried wife and social pariah on a desolate island--that it is easy to see how she is blind to faith. Despite her eventual redemption Rossellini doesn't paint Karin as a saint. Her protestations regarding the social politics of the island develop into a crusade to transgress their customs and protocols, often in self-righteous objection to the constraints placed on her. And her willingness to exploit her sexuality further confirms her all too human (and flawed) nature. The scenes where Karin attempts to seduce the priest and later seduces the lighthouse keeper are brimming with carnal sensuality. Bergman, as always, is excellent.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs

Rossellini's trilogy of WWII-related films (1945-48) was a historical necessity, movies that bore witness to the reality of war-ravaged Europe while generating sympathy for war's victims through the power of fiction. But the movies he made directly afterwards were no less integral to the development of cinema. Continuing to blend documentary and fiction in unpredictable ways, Rossellini went further in the direction of melodrama, not only in plotting but in his embrace (often literal) of movie stars. The result did not negate the imposing truths that defined Rossellini's major work - stark locations, markers of social inequality - but rather elevated melodramatic sentiment to the level of spiritual importance. After the experimental diptych AMORE (1948), this new approach yielded its first breakthrough with STROMBOLI, a film that feels biblical in its fable-like directness and opacity of meaning. Ingrid Bergman plays Karin, a Lithuanian woman who marries an Italian fisherman to get out of a refugee camp. She's taken to the small island for which the film is named - a forbidding, sparsely populated place marked by poverty and religious superstition. As an outsider, Karin raises suspicion almost immediately; and her resistance to the island's patriarchal ways results in escalating persecution. As in the second segment of AMORE or the final third of EUROPA '51 (his next collaboration with Bergman), Rossellini creates a scenario of terrible suffering to imagine what sainthood might look like in modern, even secular, terms. For some, Bergman's plight in STROMBOLI looks more like martyrdom than sainthood (The film culminates, famously, on top of an active volcano), but the film's underlying moral seriousness cannot be mistaken. Although Doc will be screening the infamous Howard Hughes edit of the movie, which is a full 25 minutes shorter than Rossellini's version, these images remain crucial viewing. (1950, 81 min, 16mm)

Stromboli Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader

Roberto Rossellini's first filmic encounter with Ingrid Bergman, made in the wilds in 1949 around the same time the neorealist director and the Hollywood star were being denounced in the U.S. Senate for their adulterous romance. Widely regarded as a masterpiece today, the film was so badly mutilated by Howard Hughes's RKO (which added offscreen narration, reshuffled some sequences, and deleted others) that Rossellini sued the studio (and lost). The Italian version, which Rossellini approved, has come out on video, and this rarely screened English-language version is very close to it. A Lithuanian-born Czech refugee living in an internment camp (Bergman) marries an Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) in order to escape, but she winds up on a bare, impoverished island with an active volcano, where most of the locals regard her with hostility. The film is most modern and remarkable when the camera is alone with Bergman, though Rossellini wisely shows neither the wife nor the husband with full sympathy. Eschewing psychology, the film remains a kind of ambiguous pieta whose religious ending is as controversial as that of Rossellini and Bergman's subsequent Voyage to Italy (though its metaphoric and rhetorical power make it easier to take). Rossellini's blend of documentary and fiction is as provocative as usual, but it also makes the film choppy and awkward; the English dialogue is often stiff, and Renzo Cesana as a pontificating local priest is almost as clumsy here as in Cyril Endfield's subsequent Try and Get Me! Nor is the brutality of Rossellini's Catholicism to every taste; Eric Rohmer all but praised the film for its lack of affection toward Bergman, yet the film stands or falls on the strength of her emotional performance—and I believe it stands. 107 min.

Stromboli - TCM.com Jeff Stafford from Turner Classic Films

Volcanic is the perfect word to describe the emotional landscape of Stromboli (1949), Ingrid Bergman's first film with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Not only is the film set on an isolated island in the Tyrrhenian Sea with an active volcano but the scandal that arose from the subsequent production sent resounding tremors through the Hollywood community. Bergman fell in love with her director during the filming, left her husband and daughter Pia, and became pregnant, bearing Rossellini a son. The public's outrage, fanned by unforgiving gossip columnists, helped end Bergman's career in Hollywood for many years and greatly tarnished her image as the wholesome Swedish beauty who had won a Best Actress Oscar for Gaslight (1944) and achieved screen immortality as Ilsa, opposite Humphrey Bogart's Rick, in Casablanca (1942).

Bergman's relationship with Rossellini began when she saw two of his films, inspiring her to write a letter. According to her autobiography, Ingrid Bergman: My Story, the note read, "Dear Mr. Rossellini, I saw your films Open City [1946] and Paisan [1946], and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who, in Italian knows only "ti amo" I am ready to come and make a film with you." The letter was sent to Rossellini's attention at Minerva Films in Italy but soon after its delivery the studio was destroyed in an accidental fire. Strangely enough, Bergman's note was found intact in the ashes and delivered to Rossellini.

No one was more surprised than Bergman to receive a response to her half serious suggestion. "Dear Mrs. Bergman," Rossellini replied. "I have waited a long time before writing, because I wanted to make sure what I was going to propose to you. But first of all I must say that my way of working is extremely personal. I do not prepare a scenario, which, I think terribly limits the scope of work...I start out with very precise ideas and a mixture of dialogues and intentions which, as things go on, I select and improve." The director went on to describe the plot of Stromboli (the working title was After the Storm) which depicts the plight of Karin Bjiorsen, a Lithuanian war refugee who marries an Italian fisherman in order to escape an interment camp: "She followed this man, being certain she had found an uncommon creature, a savior...instead she is stranded in this savage island, all shaken up by the vomiting volcano, and where the earth is so dark and the sea looks like mud saturated with sulfur." Unhappy in her new life and unable to fit in with the islanders, Karin becomes desperate to escape after learning she is pregnant. A lighthouse keeper agrees to help her, leading her out of the village and over the mountaintop where they are threatened by a volcanic eruption. In the dramatic resolution to the story, Karin reconsiders her actions and returns home to her husband.

The actual filming of Stromboli on a primitive island with no modern conveniences proved to be a physically exhausting experience for Bergman and her co-workers. It was also frustrating for an actress used to working with Hollywood professionals. Now she was acting with amateurs who rarely knew their lines or when to deliver them. "So to solve it," Bergman wrote in her autobiography, "Roberto attached a string to one of their big toes inside their shoes. Then he stood there, holding this bunch of strings, and first he'd pull that string and one man spoke, and then he'd pull another string and another man spoke. I didn't have a string on my toe, so I didn't know when I was supposed to speak. And this was realistic filmmaking! The dialogue was never ready, or there never was any dialogue. I thought I was going crazy."

For Bergman, who was already pregnant by this point, the most difficult scene to shoot was her climactic emotional breakdown on the top of the crater. In As Time Goes By: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, biographer Laurence Leamer wrote, "Ingrid got on one mule, and she and Roberto and the film crew set off for the volcano. The mules struggled upward, jumping across the smaller gullies, scratching for a foothold on the black gravelly surface. Roberto had the camera set up near the cone of the volcano. For her scene walking up to the volcano, Ingrid wore thin sandals, scant protection against the black lava sands, as hot as a tar roof on a summer afternoon...Roberto was usually fond of quick takes, but he rehearsed this scene over and over. Repeatedly Ingrid struggled upward, through the fumes and the stench of sulfur. She was soaked with sweat...When Ingrid and the others returned to the village at noon, they were on foot. To save time, they had slid two thousand feet down the mountain on their behinds. Their faces were black and sweat-streaked." Yet they would return to the volcano repeatedly for more scenes and one production executive, Lodovici Muratori, was eventually overcome by the fumes and died from a heart attack.

Initially, Rossellini planned to film Stromboli with Anna Magnani (his mistress at the time) until Ingrid Bergman entered the picture. Yet, he still insisted in his contract with RKO that he wouldn't direct Stromboli unless the studio also financed a film with Magnani. So, RKO produced Volcano (1949), directed by William Dieterle and starring Magnani as a prostitute from Naples who returns to her fishing village on an island near Stromboli. The film even ends with a similar volcanic eruption.

RKO Studios (under the ownership of Howard Hughes) was unhappy with Rossellini's final 117 minute cut of Stromboli and released it in a drastically cut version (81 minutes) in the U.S. Most critics panned the film (in some cities it was boycotted by religious groups), choosing to focus instead on the scandalous behind-the-scenes relationship between Bergman and Rossellini (the couple were legally married in 1950). Audiences, who attended Stromboli out of curiosity, found the film both depressing and decidedly un-erotic. Seen today, however, Stromboli is clearly a pivotal film in both Rossellini and Bergman's careers, representing a unique fusion of the documentary form with Hollywood melodrama. The rugged landscape of the volcanic island provides a truly spectacular setting and the scene where Karin observes the fishermen catching tuna at sea is one of the most visually remarkable sequences in Italian cinema. Bergman and Rossellini would go on to film five more movies together with Viaggio in Italia (aka Voyage to Italy, 1953) generally considered their best collaboration.

Stromboli • Senses of Cinema John Flaus from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2000

Volcano Girl | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Fred Camper from The Chicago Reader, September 29, 2000, also seen here: Review of Roberto Rossellini's film, "Stromboli," by Fred Camper, from ...

Ingrid Bergman / Roberto Rossellini films analysis - Senses of Cinema Greg Gerke, December 17, 2013

Stromboli - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Julian Petley from Film Reference

Stromboli (1950) - Notes - TCM.com

Brandon's movie memory » Stromboli (1949, Roberto Rossellini)

Stromboli, terra di Dio - World Cinema Directory Adam Bingham

Eruptions of God. Roberto Rossellini. Stromboli - Deleuze Cinema ... Visual essay by Corry Shores from Deleuze Cinema Project 1, January 28, 2010

User reviews from imdb Author: The Big Combo

The Films of Roberto Rossellini - by Michael E. Grost

Film Notes From the CMA Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective, by Dennis Toth, April 19, 2009

Gone Fishin'? Rossellini's Stromboli , Visconti's La Terra Trema ... Paul Thomas from Film Quarterly (Page 1 only, subscription required) Winter 2005

David Thomson on Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini | New ... The Art of Scandal, by David Thomson from The New Republic, May 2, 2014

Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman Together Created Monuments ... Jose Solis from Pop Matters, November 8, 2013

Box Set Pick: 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman ... Patrick Friel from Film Comment, November/December 2013

3 Films By Roberto Rossellini - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo, October 2, 2013

CineScene.com Chris Dashiell

Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Stromboli – Stromboli, Terra di Dio (Roberto Rossellini – 1950 ... Café Pellicola

User reviews from imdb Author: Daryl Chin (lqualls-dchin) from Brooklyn, New York

Stromboli Dave Kehr from the Chicago Reader

Do you think of neorealism as realistic? - Film Forum on mubi.com

Stromboli - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi

Stromboli (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Variety.com [Variety Staff] also seen here: Variety

The Roberto Rossellini Ingrid Bergman Collection review – a ... Philip French from The Guardian, August 30, 2015

Movie Review - Stromboli - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'Stromboli ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times, also seen here: The New York Times

The Elusive Realism of Rossellini - New York Times Manohla Dargis, November 10, 2006

Rossellini & Bergman In Italy For 'Stromboli' - LIFE.com Life magazine photo

Stromboli: Information from Answers.com

THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS (Francesco Giullare di Dio)

aka: Francis, God’s Jester

Italy (75 mi) 1950

Francesco, giullare di Dio Time Out London

Like Rome, Open City and Paisà, this was co-written by Federico Fellini. Inspired by the Little Flowers of St Francis, it's the story of Francis of Assisi and his acolytes, the first Franciscans. They're a motley crew - simple, humble, joyful - quite prepared to give away anything they have (even their cassocks!) if it is required. Rossellini's film shares their qualities. How you react to it probably depends on your own state of grace... or your sense of humour.

The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) - The Criterion Collection

Made in 1950, just five years after Open City, this first entry in Robert Rossellini's career-long exploration of biopic figurativism is also the great moralist's most devout movie—a Christian film busy with life struggle and uninhabited by God. Faith and divinity aren't the issues; the icon-shaped episodes (detailing the attempts at ascetic righteousness made by Francis and his motley club of monks) deal instead with folly, humility, and happiness. No other European film has staked out early Catholicism's semi-Buddhist tenor quite like this. But what's most surprising is the movie's buoyant silliness and fond humor—is this Rossellini's only comedy? The brothers' narrative pickles sometimes verge on slapstick, in a movie about sainthood! (The Italian title is Francis, Jester of God.) Using a cast of actual monastery Franciscans, Rossellini's movie is loose, generous, and deceptively modest, just like its subject. The extras include a thick booklet of critical assessments (including a Rossellini-evangelizing 1955 letter from André Bazin to cranky Italian critic Guido Aristarco), the original American prologue contextualizing the film with medieval art, and new interviews: a historian, an Italian priest-critic, and Isabella.

The Flowers of St. Francis | Film Review | Slant Magazine Fernando F. Croce

Faith is the hardest thing to depict onscreen—what more proof is needed than Mel Gibson orchestrating a soulless, hate-mongering bloodbath out of the lessons of the Bible? Long before catechism was envisioned as a Lethal Weaponesque distillation, the true masters (Dreyer, Bresson, Buñuel, Tarkovsky, Bergman) had already been grappling with spiritual unrest and the need to believe, though not without enriching their portraits of sainthood with layers of ambiguity. Yet leave it to Roberto Rossellini, the Italian Neo-Realist pioneer with his country's postwar wounds still bleeding, to come up with cinema's purest, least cynical vision of faith as a way of viewing and receiving the world around us. Indeed, the director was always fascinated with the hardships of spirituality, which in Stromboli and Europa '51 propelled muse Ingrid Bergman into snapshots of anguished modern-day saints, emerging at its most explicit in The Flowers of St. Francis, the air-filled masterpiece he all but tossed off in between his twirls with La Bergman.

Francis of Assisi, of course, the most literal of the gospel's followers, who ditched material comfort for a simple life closer to God and nature—"crazy," as Bergman is to discover the next year when she tries the same uncomplicated goodness in contemporary Rome. But these are medieval times, and Francis (played by Brother Nazario Gerardi) arrives with his disciples (all portrayed by real-life members of the Nocere Inferiore Monastery) in the midst of a torrential downpour, scrambling to find shelter in the tiny hut they've built in the woods. A farmer has camped in with his donkey, and drives the monks out into the mud; Francis's response settles the tone: "Have we not now reason to rejoice? Providence has made us useful to others." Off they go to rebuild a dilapidated chapel and reenact Middle Ages fioretti lessons, the "flowers" of the title, in skit-like episodes of Zen enlightenment: how they tidy up the place to receive Sister Chiara, how Fra Ginepro cuts off a pig's hoof for an ailing brother, how actions win souls more than words, et al. Throughout, Francis nods benevolently, swallow perched on shoulder.

Handled by virtually any other director, the same scenes would soak in the ponderous faux-piety of the standard religious epic, all agony and no ecstasy. Just as in his sublime, late-career historical recreations, Rossellini refuses to entomb his characters in the plaster of posterity, and through the saint-to-be we feel body and soul, earth, animals, and elements, all in the same visceral, present-tense timbre of Open City. A flame nearly devours Francis's cassock, yet there's a sense of cosmic harmony and wholeness with the universe; centuries removed from Rossellini's (and Italy's) present, the movie is his most utopian contemplation of reality. Paradoxically, it is no less a cri de coeur than Germany Year Zero, his devastating 1948 tract of moral squalor amid the ruins of Berlin—far from pointing back to regression, Rossellini understands how people can court revolution by altering their view of the universe. When Francis hears the stay-away chimes of the leper and kisses the ravaged man's face instead of fleeing him, the transcendent sequence channels an awe-inspiring blend of compassion, disgust, fear, and love, all melding into truly practicing what you preach.

The theme is less the simplicity of religion than the religiosity of simplicity, and The Flowers for St. Francis, shot from a 28-page treatment by three people (including Federico Fellini), is limber and exuberant, boasting a sprinting tempo. Francis may be "God's Jester" (the film's original title), but he remains straight-man to his batch of followers, and it is startling and enlivening how often Rossellini's treatment of Franciscan humility comes close to forehead-slapping, slapstick farce. Forever returning home in his briefs after compulsively giving away his clothes to the poor, Ginepro is the film's soulful bumbler, stuck babysitting dotty, hug-happy Giovanni until finally allowed to go preaching, only to end up in a camp of beastly barbarians who spend their free time slugging each other's noses just to see the blood flow out. The friar comes within a hair of being gutted, yet when Ginepro's beatific passivity dismantles the spiky armor of the tyrant Nicolaio (mugged up tremendously by Aldo Fabrizi), the movie displays a profound understanding of the political connotations of faith. Ready to embark on their individual journeys, the brothers spin in circles to dizzily fall down toward their destinations, and the scene's solemnity is promptly deflated by Giovanni's improvised remark that he's fallen toward some bird flying nearby. Francis and the others laugh, and so, one imagines, does Rossellini behind the camera—the sublime cannot exist without the ridiculous, humans cannot separate grace from the physical world, and an ad-libbed joke can become the "Amen" to the director's celebratory stanzas.

The Flowers of St. Francis: God’s Jester Criterion essay by Peter Brunette, August 22, 2005

Bazin Season Colin MacCabe, December 21, 2008

Remembering Peter Brunette June 23, 2010

BFI | Sight & Sound | You Must Be Joking Guido Bonsaver from Sight and Sound, May 2007

The Film Sufi MKP

Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus] also one of the 15 films listed in the category “Religion” on the Vatican film list

The Flowers of St. Francis - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco from Turner Classic Movies

Flowers of St. Francis (1950) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeff Stafford

Pacze Moj

The Films of Roberto Rossellini - by Michael E. Grost

dOc DVD Review: The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco, giullare di ... Nate Myers from digitallyOBSESSED

Strictly Film School Acquarello

The Flowers of St. Francis Chris Dashiell from CineScene

Francesco giullare di Dio | Film at The Digital Fix Anthony Nield

DVD Savant Review: The Flowers of St. Francis Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection

Flowers of St Francis : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Ian Jane from DVD Talk, Criterion Collection

DVD Town [Christopher Long] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Joe Armenio] Criterion Collection

Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann] Criterion Collection

notcoming.com | Francesco, giullare di Dio Matt Bailey from Not Coming to a Theater Near You

filmcritic.com Christopher Null

Movie Review - The Flowers of St. Francis - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (Les Sept péchés capitaux)
Yves Allégret segment "Luxure, La/Lust"

Claude Autant-Lara segment "Orgueil, L'/Pride"

Eduardo De Filippo segment "Avarice et la colère, L'/Avarice and Anger"

Jean Dréville segment "Paresse, La/Sloth"

Georges Lacombe segment "Huitième péché, Le/Eighth Sin, The"

Carlo Rim segment "Gourmandise, La/Gluttony"

Roberto Rossellini segment "Envie, L'/Envy"

Italy France (148 mi) 1952 omnibus film with seven different directors

“Envy” from THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (Roberto Rossellini, 1952) Dennis Grunes, August 22, 2010

I cannot tell you what goes on in Colette’s 1933 story “La chatte,” upon which it is based, but Camilla, the newly married woman in Roberto Rossellini’s “Envy,” has no rational basis for her antipathy for her husband Olivier’s adorable Saha. Although he could be more sensitive to the “period of adjustment” that Camilla is undergoing in their marriage, while his maintenance of his lifestyle can make him seem at times infuriatingly self-contained, it is certainly not the case that Olivier (in the story, Alain, and based on Colette’s own brother) loves his pet more than he does his wife. And even if this were the case, how does that accrue to the fault of the cat? Rather, I would say that Olivier loves Olivier best—a truth about Italian husbands long before Olivier even had a cat. For the record, Rossellini himself had married Ingrid Bergman less than two years earlier. The couple made films together in English because English, which originally belonged to neither of them, was a language that they both knew.

“Envy” is Rossellini’s contribution, one of two Italian entries, to the Franco-Italian anthology, or portmanteau film, Les sept péchés capitaux, which is most famous for Claude Autant-Lara’s “Pride” starring (as daughter and mother) Michèle Morgan and Françoise Rosay. Gérard Philipe’s appropriately, though unexpectedly, vulgar, animated carnival barker imposes a delightful semblance of continuity on the far-ranging material. Rossellini, who had a hand in the script of “Envy,” is the only “heavy hitter” in the comedy’s roster of directors.

Spectacular are the inserts of the snowy white cat upon which Camilla projects volition for the undermining of her marriage. What is wrong with Olivier? Why is he blind to Saha’s intent?

The inserts of the cat keyed to Camilla’s point of view—call them reaction shots—grease the film’s slide into subjectivity. Camilla pushes Saha over the ledge of the couple’s high-rise apartment, provoking Olivier’s attentive nursing; gently, he strokes Saha’s paws, condemning Camilla’s envy as an ever tighter closeup of Camilla’s hateful face further indicates herself as the actual source of this condemnation. From what we see, Camilla is a vampire vis-à-vis Saha, a sweet and innocent creature domesticated for comfort, companionship and humanity’s pleasure. Perhaps Camilla is terrified that her own role in her marriage is no different. Postwar, however, perhaps the difference is largely up to her. Perhaps Italian patriarchy, now shook up, can no longer be dependably blamed for every inequity under the sun—especially in a universe, like Rossellini’s, where the Church isn’t automatically invoked to shore it up.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

A film made up of sketches which Gerard Philipe, cast as a carnival barker at a fair, introduces. It is not the first one about the famous sins (two were made before and a new/old wave version would appear in the early sixties). This is an uneven compilation.

SEGMENT ONE: avarice and anger (de Philippo) or "the rent is always due." A ruthless landlord demands his rents. A poor music teacher is completely broke and he asks for a miracle: he finds a wallet,but it's the landlord's one.

An entertaining story with enough twists to sustain the interest throughout.

SEGMENT TWO: sloth (Dreville) or "slow down world." God sends Saint Peter on earth to slow it down for he thinks that people live too fast.

In spite of Noel-Noel 's presence, this is a boring sketch. God's voice from a woofer is not really funny.

SEGMENT THREE: lust (Allégret) or "the forbidden fruit." A thirteen-year -old girl is in love with her mother's lover. She says that she's pregnant by him .

It begins well in a country fair where the girl tells the priest (a very young Maurice Ronet) she's expecting a child. But when the truth is revealed, there's nothing exciting and the last minutes are a waste of film.

SEGMENT FOUR: "gluttony" (Carlo-Rim) or "cheese or cheesecake?" Henri tells his guests about one of his granddaddy's adventures. He was a doctor and one night he had to stop on a farm for the night. For dinner,he had a delicious fromage frais. The farmer, a grumpy man, allows him to share the marriage bed. As the hubby begins to snore, the lady asks the stranger:"do you feel like?do you?"

Generally dismissed as vulgar by the critics, Carlo-Rim's contribution to this bill of fare is nevertheless the funniest (not the best, it's Autant-Lara who wins hands down). Even if we guess the ending, it's a short bawdy sketch which Pier Paolo Pasolini would have liked.

SEGMENT FIVE: "Envy"(Rossellini) or "Every cat has her day." From writer Colette .A man loves his cat Sarah more than he loves his wife. She (the woman) gets jealous and her hate for the animal knows no bounds.

Another sketch which the critics did not like. It's an interesting one, though,thanks to Andrée Debar's androgynous look. But the cat steals the show anyway. A distant relative of the sketch "Bobo" in "terror tract!"

SEGMENT SIX: "Pride" (Autant-Lara) or "pride has no price." Two aristocrats short of the readies, mother and daughter, live in a seedy house. There will be a ball in the local aristocracy: will the girl be invited?

Easily the best moment .Last but not least. Françoise Rosay, as a grumpy penniless dowager and Michele Morgan as her gorgeous frail daughter shine. The score is very important; it is based on an old French folk song "Le Pont de Nantes " aka "Le Pont du Nord": it tells the story of a girl who wants to go to dance on a bridge but her mother refuses. Autant-Lara shows himself unrelenting when he depicts the selfishness, the snobbery and the cruelty of the wealthy, recalling the best moments of "Douce" (1943)

SEGMENT SEVEN:"the eighth sin"(Lacombe) or " There's less to the picture than meets the eye." Shady people meet in a dark place.One thinks of very bad things. But...

An unexpected final twist .Georges Lacombe, who has got a good sense of mystery ("Le Denier des Six"(1939) was a good thriller), does a good little job.

THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE

Italy (84 mi) 1952

The Machine That Kills Bad People Tom Milne from Time Out London

Minor but mildly pleasing Rossellini, set in a small town in Southern Italy thrown into a tizzy by the machinations of a mysterious old man. Saint or devil, he endows a camera with the power not merely to kill people, but to ferret out sources of wealth. Cue for a flurry of treachery and greed, all casually swept under the carpet in a final pirouette. The neo-realist techniques don't always mix too comfortably with the fantasy, making it an Ealing comedy with an edifying bent.

The Machine to Kill Bad People | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This rarely shown early film by Roberto Rossellini (1948), one of his few comedies, anticipates with remarkable prescience the conceits of Godard and others about photography in the 60s. A professional small-town photographer finds that he has the power to kill his subjects by taking their picture, turning them into statues of themselves. Rossellini left this project before it was finished, and it was edited and released a few years later without his approval—but it still comes across as a remarkably suggestive fable.

Film Notes From the CMA Roberto Rossellini: The Neo-Realist Perspective, by Dennis Toth, April 19, 2009

The satiric vein of The Machine to Kill Bad People (Italy 1948) was an unusual departure for Rossellini and it is no secret that he lost interest in the film just before the end of filming, leaving it to be completed by another director. Yet the film not only works as a surprisingly deft comedy, but its allegorical narrative actually delineates the philosophic attitudes of the Neo-Realist filmmakers to the photographic image. The camera was not a passive instrument for them, but rather a powerful weapon. The gaze of the lenses was not impassive, but rather a forum for moral judgement and political determination. Neither film nor photography were neutral, but rather loud voices in the greater struggles of the society.

The Machine that Kills Bad People - TCM.com Nathaniel Thompson

Perhaps the oddest film in one of Italian cinema's most storied careers, The Machine That Kills Bad People (1952, La macchina ammazzacattivi) belongs to the longstanding European tradition of morality tales in which the devil insinuates himself into society, exploiting the inherent flaws in the people on earth to teach a valuable lesson to members of the audience. This tactic was popular for several decades on movie screens as well, with entries ranging from France (Marcel Carné's Les visiteurs du soir, 1942) to Italy (Ettore Scola's The Devil in Love, 1966).

Sandwiched somewhere in between is this atypical 1952 film by Roberto Rossellini, a director primarily known at the time for his sober dramas like Rome, Open City (1945) and The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). Released during the director's much-publicized marriage to Ingrid Bergman but shot much earlier, The Machine That Kills Bad People leaps into the realms of both fantasy and comedy with a tale about Celestino (Gennaro Pisano), a photographer in a small Sicilian seaside village where greed, apathy, and exploitation run amok. One evening an elderly stranger claiming to be St. Andrea, the town's patron saint, gives Celestino the power to kill evildoers with his camera, an ability he claims is mandated by God. However, it appears the benefactor might be from another, decidedly more southern realm as Celestino's gift for snuffing out "bad people" (who expire in the positions captured by his camera) begins to run rampant, soon aiming at the poor people Celestino once championed.

A man who had seen quite a bit of humanity at both its lowest and highest points during World War II in Italy, Roberto Rossellini is still largely thought of as a neorealist filmmaker due to his first three narrative films and his initial background in documentaries. However, he also branched out into other areas including period pieces, thrillers, and television biographies. However, the combination of genres here may have been too much for him, as the filmmaker essentially abandoned the project before completion in 1948, leaving it to be completed without his participation and released four years later. For decades the film languished as an obscure footnote in the director's career, resurfacing very rarely and even being considered lost until its festival revivals in 2011 and 2012.

Seen today, the film's placement in Rossellini's career is a bit revelatory; it was the first film he shot after the completion of his famed neorealist trilogy, with Germany Year Zero (1948) forming the final chapter. In fact, after working on this film in 1948 he wouldn't complete another entire feature by himself until two years later with the release of the far more famous The Flowers of St. Francis and Stromboli (1950), both of which are far more straightforward dramatic pieces. In fact, Rossellini never explored his affinity for outright comedy so completely again; however, he shows as much skill for it here as many of his contemporaries like Vittorio De Sica and manages to include a consistent helping of social commentary aimed at both Italian citizens, officials, and even American tourists in one of the most outlandish highlights.

Having proven his propensity for working with professional actors as well as amateur ones, Rossellini moved on from this film to his more renowned collaborations with Bergman and the aforementioned historical films, all of which are considered important cycles in his career.

Interestingly, Rossellini never again returned so forcefully to the idea of the camera - be it for still photography or shooting motion pictures - as a potent social force, with its ability to "kill" in many ways prefiguring the "mondo" reality craze that would sweep through Italy in the following two decades thanks to Mondo Cane (1962) and its progeny. This film may have been too minor to be considered influential, but despite its lighthearted and fantastic aspects, one can find traces of its themes in later films ranging from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), Paolo Cavara's The Wild Eye (1967), and numerous films by Brian De Palma, among others. Rossellini's supernatural farce isn't as significant as some of those, of course, but it would make an oddly appropriate double feature with any of them.

The Machine that Kills Bad People • Senses of Cinema Constantin Parvulescu from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009

A Quick Note on Rossellini and Realism Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, December 5, 2007

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The Machine That Kills Bad People: BAMcinemaFest Review ... Jophn DeFore from The Hollywood Reporter

EUROPA ‘51 B+ 91

aka: The Greatest Love

Italy (113 mi) 1952

In each of us there's the jester side and its opposite; there is the tendency towards concreteness and the tendency towards fantasy. Today there is a tendency to suppress the second quite brutally. The world is more and more divided in two, between those who want to kill fantasy and those who want to save it, those who want to die and those who want to live. This is the problem I confront in Europa '51. There is a danger of forgetting the second tendency, the tendency towards fantasy, and killing every feeling of humanity left in us, creating robot man, who must think in only one way, the concrete way. In Europa '51 this inhuman threat is openly and violently denounced. I wanted to state my own opinion quite frankly, in my own interest and in my children's. That was the aim of this latest film.

—Roberto Rossellini

Remember when you first arrived here in Italy, in ’47 wasn’t it? The things that have changed, and the things that have happened since then. In those days you were rather selfish and frivolous, now you’re full of enthusiasm and concern for the class struggle.

—Andréa Casatti (Ettore Giannini)

It was like being condemned. Those workers seemed like the slaves of some evil God. —Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman)

Ingrid joins the working class, before

The working class goes to Heaven

This film is a perfect example of contrasting styles that don’t necessarily work well together, where Rossellini works largely without a script, using non-professional actors to authenticate realism onscreen, while Ingrid Bergman relies upon a script and works in the grand Hollywood tradition, where this film is largely undone by her over-the-top, operatic acting performance in an otherwise small story that accentuates realism, where the melodramatic excess in many ways subverts the working class message of the film. This is an odd film, where the dubbed voices make it even more peculiar, something of an offshoot of his earlier work, THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS (1950), a Rossellini favorite on the life of St. Francis, making another film about a saint, this time using Bergman as a woman in contemporary society whose motives would likely be completely misunderstood. While Rossellini was not a practicing Catholic, he had a strong interest in Christian values and the ethical teachings of the church in a materialistic world. Bergman was pregnant with her twin daughters Isabella and Isotta at the time of the shoot, which took place during a sweltering heat wave, so much of the shooting took place at night. The film is actually comprised of two different halves, before and after a transformation, where in the first Bergman and Alexander Knox play Irene and George Girard, a wealthy married couple living and raising a young son in post-war Rome, where their lives are more devoted to the party life of society socialites than raising their son, who is rightfully bored and upset after spending all day by himself and now he’s again shuffled out of sight and instructed to go to bed while the adults in the next room can thoroughly enjoy themselves. A fall down the outside staircase causes a scene, later determined to be a suicide attempt, where after a brief improvement, the son dies tragically from a blood clot, reminiscent of an earlier child suicide in GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (1948). Enormously upset, Irene falls into a fit of depression, blaming herself for what happened, where the absolute horror of the suicide provokes a traumatic moment where she’s literally unable to live with her former self anymore.

But Irene takes interest when her communist cousin Andréa (Ettore Giannini) mentions the plight of some people worse off than she is, exposing her to a different world, identifying a particular woman whose child will likely die because she can’t afford the medicine he needs. Irene immediately agrees to pay whatever sum is needed to save the life of a child, where she perks up a bit by visiting the family with Andréa, all of whom are overjoyed to express their gratitude. The picture of life in the housing projects is noisy and overly grim, where everyone is stacked on top of one another, including large families stuffed into one-room apartments. This has an effect on Irene, as these are people in genuine need just surviving day to day, as opposed to her wealthy husband who has all and more than he could ever need. Rossellini does an excellent job contrasting the two worlds, drawing attention to the needs of the poor, where Irene discovers several young children at a drowning site, where she and the oldest of six children help return them safely home, where none other than Gulietta Masina, in a role (though unfortunately dubbed) reminiscent of NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), plays the vibrantly alive and spirited mother who obviously has her hands full. When Andréa finds the mother a job, the start date falls on the same day she has a date with her boyfriend, something she decides is more important, leaving Irene to fill in for her at work. A day at the factory completely changes the texture of the film, returning to the neorealist visualization of the film, where the middle class whims have disappeared, replaced by a blowing factory whistle, where the entire city population seems to show up for work, with an industrial wasteland surrounding the factory. In a powerful sequence, Irene is seen entering the factory in documentary style with real workers, where the overwhelming noise and massive machines dwarf the people inside, suggesting an immense industrial world, where one day on an assembly line job leaves Irene in a state of shock, as it’s beyond her comprehension what ordinary workers endure. In a life-changing moment, clearly disappointed with an easily exploited worker state, Irene decides what’s needed is a spiritual transformation.

One of the most interesting shots in the film is a view of Irene climbing the stairs to the entryway of the church, viewed as an actual ascension, but she remains something of an outsider, not a convert. Nonetheless, when she finds a sick and ill-tempered prostitute on the street coughing uncontrollably, she helps her home and calls a doctor, discovering she has untreatable tuberculosis, where she’s placed in a position to watch over her death in a matter of days, leaving her anguished and utterly heartbroken afterwards. When she breaks up an armed robbery in progress in the apartment next door, where a teenage child is scared half out of his wits, Irene urges the kid to flee to the police station and turn himself in. The police, however, find that it was her actions that allowed the boy to escape, even though he later does turn himself in. When her family is called to the station, her mother wearing pearls and a fur coat, they are completely baffled by her behavior, where the husband assumes she’s under the influence of Andréa and covering up an affair, all agreeing that she be sent to a sanitarium for psychiatric observation. Depending on one’s faith, people may have different takes on her fragile mental state, as she continually suppresses any notion of her former self, claiming she loathes that person, and reaches out in benevolence and love to anyone in need, literally stepping into the shoes of St. Francis of Assisi. However she’s evaluated by several layers of society, including her family, the court, a treating psychiatrist, the chief resident at the mental institution, a local priest, other patients, and several of the people in town whose lives she affected. All weigh in on her sanity, as they can’t understand her behavior without being inspired by the blessings of the church or a political organization to motivate her actions. Someone that freely expresses a spirit of love on their own to anyone they meet is more reminiscent of the supposed feeble-minded Johannes in Dreyer’s faith-based masterwork ORDET (1955), as Irene is seen as a perceived threat to the recovering post-war Italian society, where large portions of the population are left marginalized and dehumanized from the deteriorating economic conditions, circumstances that all but call out for grace and forgiveness. Two other films that seem inspired by EUROPA ‘51, and in particular Bergman’s extraordinary characterization, include the family’s forced institutionalization of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974), and also Fassbinder’s MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975), a film shot with two separate endings, where radical political organizations cynically manipulate a tragic death for their own self-serving purposes, unconcerned with the effect this has on those most affected by the loss. By the end, the film feels loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, an essay from The Brothers Karamazov that suggests if Christ returned today, the Church, protecting their own interests in their interpretation of the Biblical narration, would charge him with heresy and blasphemy, as they need him to stay in heaven where he supposedly ascended.

Italy | Brandon's movie memory - Deeper Into Movies

Europa '51 departs from the other two installments in Rossellini's second trilogy by emphasising the holy, rather than the abject, dimension of Ingrid Bergman's purgation. As a result, the purgatorial landscapes that occupy those films - Stromboli in Stromboli, Vesuvius in Voyage To Italy - are replaced by a divine brilliance that is not merely the result of overlighting, and predominates at those moments at which Irene Girard (Bergman) apprehends genuine human 'communication' as the Christian humanist equivalent of communism, extrapolating a generalised, maternal beneficence from her insatiable, but belated, love for her son. Unfortunately, this scenario encourages all Rossellini's discursive tendencies, producing a series of tortured discussions, whose self- defeating circularities nicely corroborate Irene's insistence that revelatory communion is more productive than rational conversation, but make for a fairly bland cinematic experience. In fact, the strongest moments are still those in which Rossellini's topological tendencies rupture this discursive surface - or, alternatively, in which this divine light is raised to a sufficient pitch for Irene to cower, terrified, before it, her features brought into grotesque, angular relief. As with the neorealist trilogy, this topological dimension may occur at the level of individual bodies - most spectacularly in the prolonged death of a prostitute, culminating with her shedding tears of blood - or in terms of the cityscape itself, which, despite such visceral asides as a visit to a children's factory, and the recovery of a child's body from a polluted river, finds expression more as a series of surreal, sanitised, bureaucratic emptinesses, whose disorienting potential is poetically embodied in Rossellini's queasy, hallucinatory camera movement, as well as the vertiginous leap down a spiral staircase that opens the narrative, recalling the sudden conclusion of Germany, Year Zero.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The here-and-now thrust of the title puts the dynamics of Roberto Rossellini's moral trek right up front -- a cri de couer over post-war wreckage, built, as in Germany Year Zero, around a child's anguished leap into the precipice. Like young Edmund's suicide in the earlier film, here the boy's (Sandro Franchina) jump down the stairs reveals similarly inconsolable spiritual pain, though the tragedy triggers a beginning rather than an end: the rebirth of Ingrid Bergman, in the outset a bourgeois socialite, bustling with the preparation of a posh dinner gathering, as her son is "in one of his moods." A death, and from proto-Antonioni cocktail party to proto-Antonioni wandering -- distraught Bergman, eaten with guilt, ventures out of her rarified palace into the crowded slums of Rome, a visit to plucky Earth Mama Giuletta Masina and her six children, and a day of real work at the factory weighting in like a prison sentence. Husband Alexander Knox, sympathetic but bemused, begins to wonder: Is his wife falling for Ettore Giannini, the communist intellectual who suggested she work out her grief by meeting the lower classes? Actually, the expansion of Bergman's view is more spiritual than Marxist, but her awakening is, ultimately, more radical than Giannini's lip-service of "class struggle," thus more dangerous. The theme is the anxious search for contemporary sainthood, the Franciscan humility of The Flowers of St. Francis transported to a morally degraded Europe, only to be force-fed into outlets (psychiatry, propaganda, even organized religion) as ill-fitting as Bergman's cosmopolitan frame for housing transcendental yearnings. Yet, behold, for Rossellini's scrutiny of his nervous muse reveals a change cosmic and corporeal, make-up rubbed off and frayed nerves exposed to the surface, sense dawning amid chaos during vigil over a whore (Teresa Pellati) coughing up blood. Baby-faced criminals, arrests, and haunted stares at the insane asylum -- dazed with melodrama yet purefied, the film locates the heroine's newfound freedom behind bars, her soul no longer prisoner to her body, and a sublime close-up, leaning over to sum up Rossellini's spiritually regenerating credo to a bereft fellow inmate: "You are not alone." Cinematography by Aldo Tonti. In black and white.

Europa '51 - TCM.com Jeff Stafford from Turner Classic Movies

The life of a wealthy American woman (Ingrid Bergman) living in Rome is thrown into turmoil when her young son commits suicide over what he perceived to be her lack of affection for him. The woman's grief leads her to the realization that she has been living a shallow, bourgeoise existence and propels her to change her ways. As if on a spiritual quest, she begins devoting her life to helping the less fortunate - a sick prostitute, an unwed mother with numerous children - all of which disturbs her husband (Alexander Knox). When she helps a delinquent youth escape from the police, her husband deems her mentally unbalanced and has her committed to an asylum for life.

The second film collaboration between Italian director Roberto Rossellini and his wife Ingrid Bergman, Europa '51 (1952), was for many years dismissed by critics as a flawed and overtly didactic movie that lacked the passion of Stromboli (1950) or the artistry of Voyage to Italy (aka Viaggio in Italia, 1953). Even Ingrid Bergman, who was pregnant at the time it was filmed, had little to say about the film in her autobiography, My Story, except to note "we were in such a hurry to get through that movie before it showed." At the time of the film's release, however, Bergman was still a figure of considerable controversy for having left her husband and daughter for Rossellini and the public reception of their films was considerably colored by the resulting scandal. Only in recent years has Europa '51 enjoyed a resurgence of interest, partly due to Martin Scorsese's unequivocal praise for it in his documentary on Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy (Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, 1999).

Rossellini first came up with the initial concept for Europa '51 while he was filming The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and later presented a completed story outline to Bergman as a present at Christmas. "Roberto," Ingrid recalled (in The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini by Tag Gallagher), "was talking to me about...what we would do if Saint Francis came back today. What would we do? We would do the same thing. He would be laughed at...He said, 'I am going to make a story about Saint Francis and [Francis is] going to be you. It was just how we would behave in '51 if a woman gives up a rich husband, a rich life, all her friends, everything, and goes out into the street to help the poor.'"

Like most of Rossellini's movies, the actual filming of Europa '51 was often chaotic, unpredictable and full of disruptions. First, it took more than sixteen months for the script to evolve from its early draft penned by Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli (with the help of a Dominican priest) to a screenplay by Jean-Paul Dreyfus aka "Le Chanois" (a Communist writer-director and former member of the French Resistance) to its final form with contributions from Rossellini and countless screenwriters including Donald Ogden Stewart, a former MGM scenarist who was now blacklisted by Hollywood for his political beliefs. Causing further delays was Rossellini's decision to switch producers, dropping his French investors and a Paris location in favor of Rome and a partnership with Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis who agreed not to meddle in his affairs but also didn't grant him a percentage of the picture - something Rossellini had enjoyed since 1943.

Casting Europa '51 was relatively less complicated and memorable supporting roles were filled by Italian director Ettore Giannini as the Communist intellectual (director Luchino Visconti was originally offered the part but turned it down) and Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, as Passerotto, a relentlessly upbeat single mother living in dire poverty with her many children. Masina had made her screen debut in Rossellini's Paisan (1946) and had just completed her first major role in her husband's Variety Lights (1950).

Once filming began on Europa '51, there were new problems to face. Even though most of the cast and crew were Italian, the film was shot in English. "The work was very complicated,"[cinematographer Aldo] Tonti recalled (in Tag Gallagher's Rossellini biography), "We were surrounded by throngs of journalists and photographers all the time, and Roberto was constantly changing the scenario, shooting all over Rome with the troupe, going from one end of the city to the other. What I remember is that Ingrid, ever so calm and serene, would sit in crannies knitting away, always, always, during the wearisome waiting for something to be shot."

According to Donald Spoto in Notorious, his biography of Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini wanted his actors to invent their dialogue as they went along which proved to be an intimidating proposition, especially for Bergman. "...Good actors need good writers, and she was given none," Spoto wrote. "To aggravate the situation, Rome was in the grip of a terrific heat wave, so Roberto decided to film at night and sent his cast to bed by day...In addition, she [Bergman] came down with a heavy cold she could not lose for weeks." Ingrid's co-star, Alexander Knox, also found Rossellini's methods challenging. "Only twice did I have my dialogue the night before a scene was to be shot," said Knox. "Both times, the lines were changed when we met on the set in the morning. All the rest of the time I had no dialogue until a few minutes before the camera turned. Once I was lit for a close-up and the camera had started turning before anyone realized that I had not been given any dialogue. I just sat there, smiling fatuously at Roberto and cameraman Aldo Tonti, and smoking a cigarette. Suddenly, Rossellini spoke. 'Look at Ingrid,' he said, 'and tell her you're not going out tonight.' I laughed, turned again to Ingrid, and said obediently, 'I'm not going out tonight.' The camera was still turning. 'Basta' Rossellini said at length. The camera stopped turning, the lights faded, and I leaned back. 'Well,' I asked, 'am I going out tonight or not?' 'I don't know,' said Roberto. 'But I'll know in a week or two - and I won't have to come back into this set.'" (from The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini by Tag Gallagher).

When it first opened in Italy, Europa '51 was well received by the public and most Italian critics; it even won Rossellini the prestigious International Award at the Venice Film Festival. It was all downhill from there. Released in the U.S. as The Greatest Love, it received less than positive reviews with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, mirroring the opinions of many critics when he called the film a "dismal and dolorous account of the frustrations of a socially distinguished young matron..." The decidedly uncommercial film generated no business in the U.S. and drifted into obscurity. Its reputation wasn't helped in later years when Bergman biographer Donald Spoto wrote that Europa '51 "suffered from abrupt transitions, unclear motivations and an odd mix of religious conviction, social conscience, political outrage and frank sermonizing."

More recently film scholars have come to view the Rossellini-Bergman films in a different light, realizing that both thematically and artistically, Rossellini's work was ahead of its time, particularly in the case of Europa '51. While the film could certainly be viewed as Rossellini's vision of the current state of the world in all its confusion, Europa '51 is also an exploration of Ingrid Bergman's persona. The critic Guarner said it best when he wrote, "An attempt is made to express a far-reaching moral conflict, which is incarnated in a woman's face, merely by means of a series of actions, sketched out in a few strokes with a simplification that touches on abstraction. Ultimately, it is this face that gives coherence to an otherwise discontinuous film, in the same way as the image of Falconetti or Anna Karina fills the gaps in [Dreyer's] La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [1928] and [Godard's] Vivre sa vie [1962]....The film is an ascent from the darkness of the beginning towards a dazzling light of the end, when Irene...regain[s] her inner freedom."

Ingrid Bergman / Roberto Rossellini films analysis - Senses of Cinema Greg Gerke, December 17, 2013

Roberto Rossellini also seen here: 14— Europa '51 (1952) - UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004 ...

Westminster Wisdom: Europa 51 Gracchi

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Roberto Rossellini - Europa 51 (1952) Worldscinema

Voyage to Italy, Before Midnight, and the movie theater as sanctuary ... Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader, June 3, 2013

David Thomson on Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini | New ... The Art of Scandal, by David Thomson from The New Republic, May 2, 2014

Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman Together Created Monuments ... Jose Solis from Pop Matters, November 8, 2013

Box Set Pick: 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman ... Patrick Friel from Film Comment, November/December 2013

3 Films By Roberto Rossellini - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo, October 2, 2013

Europa '51 - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Juliet Clark

Martin Scorsese's Film School: The 85 Films You Need To See To ...

100 Greatest Foreign Films from Movieline Magazine

User Reviews from imdb Author: ringfingers from United States

User Reviews from imdb Author: Kalaman from Ottawa

User Reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

The Roberto Rossellini Ingrid Bergman Collection review – a ... Philip French from The Guardian, August 30, 2015

Movie Review - Europa '51 - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; Ingrid Bergman ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

Realism in film history - Realism - actor, children ... - Film Reference Phil Watts

OF LIFE AND LOVE (Siamo donne)

aka: We, the Women

Gianni Francioini segment – Alida Valli

Alfredo Guarini segment – Concorso 4 Attrici 1 Speranza

Roberto Rossellini segment – Ingrid Bergman

Luchino Visconti segment – Anna Magnani

Luigi Zampa segment – Isa Miranda

Italy (95 mi) 1953 omnibus project with 5 directors

User reviews from imdb Author: david melville (dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland

A real curio, this one. Four famous actresses play themselves in four sketches, each one based (allegedly) on an incident from her own life. Mind you, only a saint or a masochist would have the patience to sit through the first part, directed by producer Alfredo Guarini - where two unknown girls go for screen test at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. Don't worry, this is family entertainment, so no unseemly fumbling about on casting couches for these two.

It does pick up considerably once the divas appear. Alida Valli goes to an engagement party for her humble masseuse, and is taken aback when the other guests treat her 'like a star' - and she herself feels a forbidden attraction to the girl's future husband. Ingrid Bergman engages in a war of nerves with a recalcitrant chicken. (No, I'm not joking!) Isa Miranda drives an injured boy to hospital, and regrets having no children of her own. Anna Magnani rages at a taxi driver who dares charge extra for her toy dog. At the end, she goes onstage and sings. Divinely.

Like any film made up of sketches, Siamo Donne is wildly uneven. The Bergman and Miranda episodes are wafer-thin, and seem overlong even at 15 to 20 minutes. Valli's is beautifully observed, and directed with great sensitivity by Gianni Franciolini. The Magnani sketch may be a one-woman show, but director Luchino Visconti still contrives to show lots of pretty young men posing about in uniform. Good to know some things never change.

The Films of Roberto Rossellini [Michael E. Grost]

Various - Siamo donne aka We, the Women (1953) Worldscinema

Movie Review - Of Life and Love - Screen: Italian Quartet; Baronet ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

DOV’È LA LIBERTÀ…? (Where is Freedom?)

Italy (93 mi) 1954

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce] Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

A double-bill of obscure but inventive films, Lionsgate's Roberto Rossellini: Director's Series set highlights the great Italian director's refusal to simply rest on his neorealist laurels. The older of the two, Dov'è la libertà...?, is a Chaplinesque shaggy-dog tale that, appropriately, uses a scene from Modern Times as its point of departure. Freedom is scarier than imprisonment to Salvatore (legendary Neapolitan comic Totò), a barber who, after spending two decades in jail for killing his wife's lover, finds himself reentering a society he no longer recognizes. Despite the humorous trappings of the story, the Rome Salvatore steps into is still Rossellini's city, a place marked by dilapidated tenements, slaughterhouses and swindlers and chipping away at the protagonist's illusory notions of order. Salvatore's family is a pack of vultures willing to use the Holocaust to fleece a Jewish clan of their riches, and even his wife, whose memory he has sanctified since her death, is revealed as a perfidious schemer. What's left for him to do but scramble back to the stability of his cell? Made with the anxiety one expects of a comedy shoehorned between Europa '51 and Viaggio in Italia, Rossellini's 1954 mid-career curio is peculiarly disjointed (the courtroom-set bracketing sequences were reportedly shot by Federico Fellini and added after Rossellini lost interest in the project). Still, its bitterness fascinates, a bitterness that, Totò's beguiling mix of mugging and courtliness notwithstanding, feels directed less at a shifting world than at a character who'd rather escape from it than struggle with it.

Now on DVD: “Dov'è la libertà...?” (Rossellini, 1954) and “Blackout in Rome” (Rossellini, 1960) Zach Campbell from Mubi, October 30, 2008, also seen here: The Auteurs (excerpt)

Roberto Rossellini’s mid-career output is best known for The Flowers of St. Francis or his Ingrid Bergman collaborations like Voyage to Italy. But we should welcome two films from the period have come out on Lionsgate R1 DVD, Dov’è la libertà…? (Where Is Freedom?, 1954) and Era notte a Roma (Blackout in Rome, 1960). The former is a Carlo Ponti and Dino de Laurentiis-produced vehicle for the legendary comic actor Totò, and the latter is a run-through of many of the very same World War II moral and partisan dilemmas that animated the likes of Roma, città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946). Rossellini, like Max Ophüls and Kenji Mizoguchi, is one of those directors whose DVD representation—particularly in America—has seemed inversely proportional to his greatness. (Slowly, progress is being made for all three.)

Dov’è la libertà works out the same basic problem that animated Rossellini’s much more “serious” Europa ’51 (aka The Greatest Love) made just before—that is, what becomes those whose adherence to a commonly held good leads them, logically, to a destination with which society cannot make sense? In the case of Ingrid Bergman’s character, the virtues of love and charity drove her “mad.” With Totò’s character, Salvatore, it is the very freedom he long thought he desired, spending over two decades in prison after a crime of passion. His character missed World War II, but though Rossellini is responsible for some of the great cinematic reckonings of that conflict, in this film there’s a dry semi-joke made of the war’s impact. When Salvatore gets out of prison, he tries to show a woman he’s just picked up where his old barbershop used to be. When a passerby informs him that it was destroyed long ago, Salvatore asks: “Bombs [i.e., in the war]?” “No, before that—demolition.” But later in the film, a truly dark development takes place, a specter of the war: a Jewish man returns to Salvatore’s in-laws to demand reparation, for they had grown rich off of his beleaguered family’s belongings before Auschwitz claimed most of the clan. Though comedic, the film rummages through the moral and historical rubble of postwar Italy in a sense analogous to the literal rubble of Italian cities in neorealist cinema.

Totò, the moment he steps outside the prison gates, suddenly understands the true nature of his newfound freedom. It appears on his face, and is supplemented by the narration. He had been living in routine comfort, security. He had been carefree, but the responsibility of freedom intimidates. This is no philosophical crisis: this is instead the responsibility of securing room and board for oneself, of being respectable among all the latent miscreants who constitute “honest” society.

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

DVD Savant Review: Rossellini Director's Series Glenn Erickson, Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

DVD Verdict [Tom Becker] Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

DVDBeaver.com - DVD Review [Gary Tooze] Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

JOURNEY TO ITALY (Viaggio in Italia) A 97

aka: Voyage to Italy

Italy France (100 mi) 1954

After eight years of marriage, we don’t know anything about each other. —Alexander Joyce (George Sanders)

Temple of the spirit.

No longer bodies,

but pure ascetic images,

compared to which thought itself

becomes leaden, opaque, heavy.

—Charles Luyton

All men are the same, cynical and cruel. —Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman)

This may be the original love and/or divorce among the ruins film, very much in the manner of Rossellini’s GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (1948), which was set in the devastating post-war ruins of Berlin, Germany, at the time a physically and morally crushed society, where the near documentary horror of setting a story among the actual rubble and debris of war is a shockingly realistic technique, infusing real life into an otherwise fictional rendering. This same method was masterfully utilized by Abbas Kiarostami in his Earthquake Trilogy (1987 – 1994), writing a fictional narrative set among the disastrous aftereffects of a horrific earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people. Rossellini himself was the product of a wealthy Roman family, working for Benito Mussolini’s Fascist-controlled movie industry in the early 1940’s, even co-writing screenplays with his son, Vittorio Mussolini, where his earliest work was a Fascist Trilogy, films that amount to little more than war propaganda. It was only when the Fascist regime collapsed in 1943 that Rossellini resurrected his career and helped form the Italian Neorealism Movement with the anti-Fascist OPEN CITY (1945), the first part of his landmark War Trilogy. JOURNEY TO ITALY represents a major shift in Rossellini’s work in the 50’s, where his realist focus on working class issues move to middle class protagonists, giving way to an interior psychological world later accentuated by Michelangelo Antonioni, who specialized in creating a sense of space between characters in order to heighten the emotional distance. Both directors have a major interest in framing their films through architectural doorways or hallways, almost as if the camera is peering at the characters through the prism of history and civilization. However at the time, the film flopped at the box office and was not well received by critics due to the departure from what was commonly understood at the time as neorealism, though Rossellini brilliantly extends the truth of realism to include the boredom and banality of otherwise comfortable middle class lives. The radical and influential nature of the film was discovered by the New Wave French Cahiers du Cinéma critics, especially Jacques Rivette, who wrote in his essay on Rossellini, “If there is a modern cinema, this is it.”

The film reflects a crumbling relationship between a middle-aged married couple, Alexander and Katherine Joyce (George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman), while also serving as a travelogue of the Italian cities of Naples, Capri, and Pompeii. The opening shots have a thoroughly modernist feel to them, initially accentuating the road to Naples, where the highway and the view on one side of the road can be seen and heard whizzing by. These establishment shots have no dialogue or music, but exist totally in a netherworld of cinema, links to which extend to other films, like Tarkovsky’s extended car sequence in SOLARIS (1972) Solaris Full Highway Scene - YouTube (4:43). This introduces Enzo Serafin’s memorable camerawork, while the first glimpse of the couple is ironically amusing, as Katherine is wearing an outrageous, almost pretentious looking faux leopard skin fur, something only the wealthy would ever consider wearing, as they approach Naples driving a luxury model Rolls Royce. Already bored with each other, this English couple has driven to Italy to combine a vacation with the selling, sight unseen, of a recently inherited Naples property from Alexander’s uncle. Of course, the moment we see the gorgeously elegant estate, one wonders why anyone would sell such an idyllic Italian villa, showing an air of haughty class contempt by the very idea, expressing little interest in the history of how it came to be part of his family. One noticeable problem is that the actors are dubbed, so it is not the bored inflections of Sanders and Bergman that we hear, but uncredited others. Interestingly, Rossellini uses transitional shots much like Ozu, using landscape pans, offscreen sound, often including someone singing, and other natural elements to add heavy doses of realism throughout.

Loosely adapted from the uncredited 1934 French novel Duo by Colette, as Rossellini was unable to secure the rights to the book, the setting has shifted from the south of France to Naples, one of the oldest inhabited cities of the world, where the connection to the past is inevitable, as there are historic sites everywhere, where the intimacy of the camera keeps the audience connected to the city of Naples, along with its picturesque bay, nearby islands, looming volcano, and the nearby site of Pompeii. With the couple drifting apart, Alexander immediately takes refuge with the upper class socialites living in the exclusive setting of Capri, feeling more at home in the company of others than his own wife, as he’s more used to a pampered life of the rich, seen constantly feeding themselves and plying themselves with alcohol, carrying on endless conversations that are little more than gossip and utter contempt for the lower classes. Through Alexander, there are continual signs of an upper crest bourgeoisie proudly displaying their flattering titles, with enormous and luxuriously decorated estates, where they are continually seen walking among statues and relics, all signs of a dead civilization, as if they themselves are lifeless forms of a forgotten era. While Alexander indulges himself, Katherine spends her time driving through the streets of Naples, seen teeming with a life and energy she all but ignores, revealing a street peasantry that knows what it means to live and struggle every day of their lives instead of sleepwalk through it like the idyl rich, choosing instead to seeking out various museums where she hears history explained through various tour guides. Interestingly, however, in the moments when she’s driving alone, she carries on an inner dialogue throughout of fury and disgust, continually raging against that loathsome husband of hers, growing disgusted with his snide indifference. And while these inner thoughts are reflective of her psychological turmoil, they are also among the most bitter sequences of her career.

It is through Katherine, however, that we discover Italy, through her endless travels to museums and historical sites, enriching our own knowledge of history right alongside her, while at the same time she becomes obsessed with seeing lovers everywhere, along with pregnant mothers, babies in strollers, and other signs of domestic bliss, all the things missing in her life. As Alexander enjoys la dolce vita, going to endless parties and flirting with beautiful women, there are idyllic panoramic images of unsurpassed beauty and enchantment, a collection of white houses and villas on the rolling hills of Capri surrounded by the sea, a reflection of a perfect age, which are in stark contrast to Katherine’s hostile inner thoughts of hatred, believing her husband to be arrogant and selfish, and a thoroughly despicable man, something in parallel to the histories of the ancient Roman emperors, each with glaring characters flaws that destroyed their reign. But as Katherine continues to visit famous sculptures, the Naples catacombs, and the ruins of Pompeii, there are continual references to the dead, where she begins to feel smothered by the overwhelming presence, fearing thoughts of her own impending mortality. Often recalling the poems of a young man Katherine once knew, birth and death themes run throughout the film, accentuating a pervasive, all-encompassing homage to the dead, where people make pilgrimages just to look at thousands of year old preserved skulls and corpses, where the dead in many ways are more honored than the living. The gradual accumulation of everything she experiences eventually takes its toll, especially when she and her husband observe a live Pompeii excavation uncovering a husband and wife embraced in each other’s arms at the final moment of life, a transcendant life and death revelation that literally takes her breath away, leaving her dumfounded by her own undescribed emotions. While the pageantry of a melodramatic finale may be overly contrived and unconvincing by today’s standards, with the couple’s feelings suddenly surging back to life, it nonetheless retains an element of poetic ambiguity where life remains a mystery, an urgent reminder of the unforeseen consequences of the living and the dead, where Rossellini’s film remains a blueprint for so many other films to come, like Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), Wong Kar-wai’s HAPPY TOGETHER (1997), and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013).

Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

Jacques Rivette once wrote that Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy “opens a breach (which) all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through.” This is evident from the first shots, sudden and raw—a shaky, forward-driving view down a road to Naples; a glimpse of the landscape going by, and finally two stars, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, shipwrecked far from Hollywood in a plotless, not-quite-picaresque road-movie cruise in which they express the deepest levels of character through terse banalities and simple, mundane gestures.

Nowadays, critics talk about the “comedy of remarriage,” a genre in which couples put their union to the test and, after many complications, reaffirm it. Voyage in Italy is that rarer thing: a drama of remarriage, where the spark of revitalization must be found within the undramatic flow of daily togetherness. The Joyces, Alex (Sanders) and Katherine (Bergman), bored and resentful of each other, are in a state of suspension. Being “on holiday” leaves them disquieted, sometimes distressed by the foreign culture that surrounds them. The food is different, sleep beckons at odd hours under the sun, and there are encounters with strangers who offer distraction or temptation.

And then there is the landscape, the cities of Naples, Capri, and Pompeii. Voyage in Italy typifies the radical turn in Rossellini’s work in the 1950’s: no longer “social issue” neorealism, but an inner, emotional realism, prefiguring Michelangelo Antonioni and especially the Jean-Luc Godard of Contempt (1963). But there is still a sense of documentary reality in the views Katherine sees from her car, in the churches, catacombs, mud pools, and archaeological excavations…This insistent environment adds, context, history, and even mythology to the personal, marital story. It brings the past to bear upon the present, prompting the characters to endlessly recall formative moments. And it places this one, small crisis into a great, cosmic cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Little is explained in Voyage in Italy, but everything is felt: This is a film that can proudly end—just before yet another shot of a passing, ordinary crowd—with a sweeping crane shot and the age-old declaration: “I love you.”

Voyage to Italy | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr, also seen here: Chicago Reader Capsule Review

Roberto Rossellini's finest fiction film (1953, 84 min.), and unmistakably one of the great achievements of the art. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play a long-married British couple grown restless and uncommunicative. On a trip to Italy to dispose of a piece of property, they find their boredom thrown into relief by the Mediterranean landscape—its vitality (Naples) and its desolation (Pompeii). But suddenly, in one of the moments that only Rossellini can film, something lights inside them, and their love is renewed as a bond of the spirit. A crucial work, truthful and mysterious.

User reviews from imdb Author: Dr_Shafea from Canada

"Viaggio in Italia" is a unique experience, a beautiful work of art, and perhaps Rossellini's masterpiece, though I equally cherish GERMANY YEAR ZERO and FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS. It can best be viewed on the big screen in order to fully grasp its mysterious beauties. But, alas, it is not for every taste. The film was a commercial disaster when it opened. But those perceptive "Cahiers du Cinema" critics - Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut - justly hailed it as a modern masterpiece and placed in their list of ten best films of all time. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are nothing short of brilliant as the feuding British couple who travel to Naples to close their holiday home. Rossellini's breathtaking documentary scenes in the Mediterranean background are perfectly melded with the fictional story of the couple and their state of mind. It all comes down to that final miraculous moment that no written words can describe. Subtle, mysterious and beautiful, "Viaggio" ranks with the finest works in cinema.

Journey to Italy | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... Trevor Johnston from Time Out London

Stuck in a dying marriage, far from home – journey to misery is more like it. In this 1954 film, American couple Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are visiting the Naples area to sell a late relative’s property and they come to feel lost in this rugged, foreign environment. They’re also barely at ease having to spend time together. But gradually the ancient, passionate landscape and customs – bristling with song, faith and sensuality – begin to make their mark, as Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini stealthily ushers us towards a sense of heady affirmation so primal that ‘romance’ isn’t a strong enough word for it. A founding influence on the French New Wave and adored by Martin Scorsese, ‘Journey to Italy’ (looking pristine in this restoration) has long had classic status, though newcomers should be warned to expect much tetchy, scratchy unease before this profound film’s real agenda reveals itself. Rossellini and Bergman’s own marriage was crumbling too, so in a sense this goes beyond mere artifice, reaching instead for a wrenchingly sincere expression of vulnerable togetherness in the face of time and mortality.

Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy) – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Roberto Rossellini's mysterious, gripping and moving Viaggio in Italia (1954) – now restored and rereleased – is a cine-ancestor to Antonioni's L'Avventura and Roeg's Don't Look Now. George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman are Alexander and Katherine Joyce, a well-to-do English couple who have come to southern Italy to sell some property and do a little sightseeing, but something in their enforced leisure, the disturbing beauty of the landscape and vertiginous sense of history accelerates a crisis in their troubled marriage. The movie is often characterised as a study in ennui and curdled dolce far niente, a sunbaked torpor and languor that incubates marital despair. But actually, Alexander and Katherine's senses have been peeled; they are more alive than ever, intensely aware of each other and themselves, and although irritated, they are perversely intrigued by one other. It is a kind of delayed anti-honeymoon of dark revelation, made more poignant by the incessant Neapolitan love songs Rossellini creates in the background. Katherine's revelation of a previous tendresse for a young poet associated with the locale – together with the couple's surname – may faintly recall Joyce's short story The Dead. The final sequence in Pompeii, as the stunned couple witness the exhumation of two people at the moment of death, is electrifying and moving. There is real greatness in this movie.

Critical reception and legacy - Neorealism - film, show, director, son ... Peter Bondanella from Film Reference

Besides resistance at the box office, where ordinary Italians preferred Hollywood works or Italian films with a Hollywood flavor, even the most famous neorealist directors soon grew restless at the insistence on the part of Italian intellectuals and social critics that films should always have a social or ideological purpose. In Italian cinematic history this transitional phase of development is often called the "crisis" of neorealism. In retrospect, it was the critics who were suffering an intellectual crisis; Italian cinema was evolving naturally toward a film language concerned more with psychological problems and a visual style no longer defined solely by the use of nonprofessionals, on-location shooting, and documentary effects. Three early films by Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912), Fellini, and Rossellini are crucial to this development. Cronaca di un amore ( Story of a Love Affair , 1950), Antonioni's first feature film, is a film noir in which the director's distinctive photographic signature is already evident, with its characteristic long shots, tracks, and pans following the actors, and modernist editing techniques that attempt to reflect the rhythm of daily life. Fellini's La Strada (1954), awarded an Oscar ^®for Best Foreign Language Film, is a poetic parable that explores a particular Fellinian mythology concerned with spiritual poverty and the necessity for grace or salvation (defined in a strictly secular sense). Rossellini's "cinema of the reconstruction" in Viaggio in Italia ( Voyage in Italy , 1953), starring Ingrid Bergman, marks his move away from the problems of the working class or the partisan experience to explore psychological problems, middle-class protagonists, and a more complex camera style not unlike that developed by Antonioni.

Neorealism's legacy was to be profound. The French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer) embraced neorealism as proof that filmmaking could be possible without a huge industrial structure behind it and that filmmakers could be as creative as novelists.

Voyage in Italy Acquarello from Strictly Film School

Voyage in Italy opens to a shot of a reserved British couple, Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman) traveling in silence down a long, empty, narrow road on the Italian countryside. They are awaiting the sale of an inherited villa in Naples, and have decided to seize the occasion and spend undivided time together by touring the regional attractions. But away from the structure and familiarity of their comfortable life in London, the trip begins to expose the tedium and strain of their relationship. As Alex's demeanor turns from complacent boredom to outward hostility towards the unfamiliar customs of a foreign land, it is evident that he indirectly lashes out at Katherine's misguided, romantic ideas that led them to their lonely, uncomfortable journey. One day, Katherine melancholically recounts the story of a former suitor who became gravely ill after risking his health in order to see her (a thematic reference to James Joyce's The Dead), but Alex remains unmoved by the incident, and dismisses the folly of the young man's actions. As an emotional defense, Katherine withdraws from Alex, wounded by his disaffection for her tale of lost, unrequited love. When Alex shows disinterest in Katherine's touring plans, the two agree to make independent plans during their remaining days in Naples. As Alex joins a company of idle British tourists in Capri, Katherine occupies herself by visiting natural wonders, and symbolically, finds a reflection of her own surfacing emotional conflict over her eroding marriage.

Roberto Rossellini creates a graceful, understated portrait on the dissolution of marriage in Voyage in Italy. A stylistic influence on the bleak industrial landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni, Rossellini introduces the environment as a relevant, dynamic character in the lives of a married couple in crisis, and provides a visual metaphor for suppressed emotions. The echo of the Greek fortress caves and the ionization of the craters near Vesuvius become literal reflections of Katherine's physical actions. Moreover, the contained eruption just beneath the surface of "small Vesuvius", the catacombs of a village church, and the uncovered casts of human bodies at Pompeii further represent Katherine's inner turmoil and marital disillusionment. The final scene shows Katherine figuratively swept away by an environmental tide of emotional abandonment. It is in this confusion that they find themselves desperately searching for each other - hopelessly lost and unable to be together - and realize their own incompleteness and mutual need. It is a resigned reconciliation.

The Film Journal [Ian Johnston]

In his 1950s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini captured his wife and muse in a light completely different from her glamorous Hollywood persona. Drawn, fretful, and confused, the Swedish star wanders through these films as if looking anxiously at the man behind the camera, begging for direction while the exploratory Rossellini sought emotional truth by dropping her into alien landscapes. It's a harrowing series of portrayals of unsettled female consciousness, and also a glimpse into a complex behind-the-scenes romance as revealing as the films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich some 20 years earlier. If not quite their The Devil Is a Woman, the 1954 masterpiece Voyage to Italy is similarly awash in the emotional unease of a relationship racing to its end, a meta sketchbook where the disillusionment of the protagonists seems to irresistibly mirror that of the actress and the filmmaker. That out all of this emerges one of cinema's most transcendently hopeful works is the kind of contradiction surely appreciated by Rossellini, an analytical yet emotive visionary who could film miracles as if they were part of the everyday fabric of life.

The first image finds a road stretching endlessly into the distance; a change in angle reveals Katherine (Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Sanders) driving their car. The Italian countryside is the setting, though, for the visiting British couple peering through the windshield, it might as well be another planet. Traveling to Naples to dispose of an inherited villa, they're thrown together after years virtually separated by their familiar social routines. Katherine is a neurotic romantic who, hungering for meaningful contact, remembers a young poet's love; meanwhile, Alex wears an armor of condescending irony and sees no difference between a poet and a fool. "I realized for the first time that we're like strangers," she tells him in one of the many passive-aggressive barbs exchanged between them. As Katherine visits ancient touristic sites, the Mediterranean location gradually shifts from mere scenery to active character. In a magnificent sequence set in a museum, millenniums-old statues confront her with their staring eyes and sinewy sensuality. At the foot of the Vesuvius volcano, the earth melts and smolders. Alex flirts with having an affair with a socialite and picking up a coolly desperate prostitute, only to return to evading his wife's (as well as his own) painful emotions. A divorce seems inescapable.

As befits a filmmaker who defined as well as challenged the definition of Italian neorealism, Voyage to Italy unfolds as a thorny narrative and a profoundly personal documentary. The fictional tale of a married couple in crisis isn't just a reflection of the brittle Rossellini-Bergman bond, but also a snapshot of a pair of bewildered, irritable Hollywood stars purposefully misdirected by a wily, searching auteur. Nowhere is this combination more astounding than in the famous scene where a real-life excavation amid the ruins of Pompeii is integrated into the body of the story, with the exhumation of the conserved bodies of two lovers hitting Katherine like a ton of bricks. "Life is so short," she abruptly says afterward, the only words she can find to express the weight of the centuries and the frailty of her existence. The discovery of such dimensions is what weaves the cosmic into Rossellini's de-dramatized approach, the humbling recognition of life and mortality, of funeral hearses and baby carriages and pregnant women and rows of skulls. As in Stromboli and Europa '51, the trajectory is a steady progress away from traditional conventions and toward a new understanding dawning on the heroine's face.

It's no secret why Voyage to Italy became a cornerstone of the art films of the 1960s and beyond. Its deliberately vacant spaces and deeply existential spirit ("In a sense we're all shipwrecked, trying so hard to stay afloat," a girl says at a party) can be felt in the alienated wanderings of Antonioni and Wenders, in the inquisitive breakdowns of Godard and Rivette, in the contemplative fusions of Kiarostami and Ceylan. Rejecting simplistic despair, however, Rossellini opts for hope in a wondrous, much debated finale that forces the couple out of the metallic shell of their car and into a turbulent surge of humanity. Swept along by the people at a religious procession, Katherine and Alex are separated and reunited amid cries of "miracolo!" Rossellini in later years would boast of his atheism, yet here he surveys the mysterious happenings from a celestially elevated crane. Clinging to each other as if to a life raft, the reunited protagonists are given no guarantee of a happy ending, but instead something more profound—a new awareness of themselves and of the world around them. A noisy crowd becomes an intimate epiphany, and a rigorously understated film becomes an overwhelming vision.

Voyage to Italy • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, July 9, 2009

Ingrid Bergman / Roberto Rossellini films analysis - Senses of Cinema Greg Gerke, December 17, 2013

Viaggio in Italia - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Robin Wood from Film Reference

Studies in Cinema: Thoughts on Italian Neorealism Jeremy Carr

Viaggio in Italia | Liz Heron`s blog

Realer than realism: Journey to Italy | British Film Institute Geoff Andrew from BFI, May 8, 2013

David Thomson on Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini | New ... The Art of Scandal, by David Thomson from The New Republic, May 2, 2014

Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman Together Created Monuments ... Jose Solis from Pop Matters, November 8, 2013

Box Set Pick: 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman ... Patrick Friel from Film Comment, November/December 2013

3 Films By Roberto Rossellini - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo, October 2, 2013

Journey to Italy - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri

Filmuforia | Journey to Italy, Viaggio In Italia (1954)

Grace and Modernism in “Journey to Italy” (“Viaggio in Italia”) Clint Cullum from The Devouring Flame

the Moving World Film Review: Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1954) Will Emsworth

Viaggio in Italia,1954 - Ferdy on Films Marilyn Ferdinand

VOYAGE IN ITALY (Roberto Rossellini, 1953) « Dennis Grunes

Viaggio in Italia - Parameter Magazine Paul Murphy

Virtual Claude Glass: Viaggio in Italia Gemma

EyeForFilm.co.uk Caro Ness

Ways of Seeing: Yoel Meranda's Web Site - Filmmakers

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] also seen here: kagablog » 1953. Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini)

Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy Journeys the ... - Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Bible Films Blog [Matt Page]

CineVue [Chris Fennell]

Italy | Brandon's movie memory - Deeper Into Movies

Rossellini's Cinema of Poetry: Voyage to Italy

JOURNEY TO ITALY | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubens

Daily | Rossellini's VOYAGE TO ITALY | Keyframe - Explore the ... David Hudson from Fandor

User reviews from imdb Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

User reviews from imdb Author: ackstasis from Australia

Voyage to Italy: movie review | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New York

The Roberto Rossellini Ingrid Bergman Collection review – a ... Philip French from The Guardian, August 30, 2015

'Voyage to Italy,' With Ingrid Bergman - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott from The New York Times, April 20, 2013

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEWS - Scorsese Pays Tribute to Italian Cinema ... The New York Times, October 12, 2001

DVDBeaver [Stan Czarnecki]

FEAR (La Paura)

Italy Germany (81 mi) 1954

Fear Tom Milne from Time Out London

Pretty much passed over at the time, Rossellini's Bergman films are now being touted, not always too convincingly, as supremely personal masterpieces. This one, the last in the series, has a fine central idea: a woman, driven to infidelity and then suicidal angst by her husband's hostility, is viewed as yet another victim of his vivisectional experiments. But the sense of moral preachment that so often marred Rossellini's work remains inescapable.

girish: Rossellini & India

This rarely seen film, much ignored since its unsuccessful release, is based on the book by Stefan Zweig. It completes the cycle of three films Roberto Rossellini ("Europa 51"/"Voyage in Italy") directs with his then wife Ingrid Bergman. They were all personal films, with this being the weakest despite an excellent premise of a woman driven to suicide as she lives in dread of a husband she madly loves finding out about her affair. It takes on the shadowy look of film noir with its German expressionist style and protagonist caught in a seemingly never ending dark psychological web. It plays as a nightmare, leaving a lingering bad aftertaste as it settles in and becomes fixated in moralizing about the virtue of telling the truth no matter the consequences. It's Rossellini at his weakest, when he preaches to the viewer about morality and finds a way to say that adultery might not be the worst thing in the world to overcome.

It opens with Irene Wagner (Ingrid Bergman) telling her boyfriend Erich Baumann (Kurt Kreuger) that their affair is over, that she loves her research scientist husband Albert Wagner (Mathias Wieman). The professor is working on a miracle drug in his plant to find a cure for a disease plaguing the world. Irene, who runs the businesss end of the lab, becomes frightened when confronted by pretty redhead Joanne Schultze (Renate Mannhardt), Erich's ex-girlfriend, who blames Irene for their breakup. Soon Irene is being blackmailed, but after paying the woman small amounts a few times, Joanne snatches Irene's diamond wedding ring during a concert and refuses to return it unless paid the impossible sum of twenty thousand marks.

The damsel-in-distress melodrama has a plot twist that puts an unconvincing happy spin to such a bleak tale. The undisclosed city where the upper-class couple reside is painted as a dark place that breeds poisonous attitudes, contempt and intrigue; while their country residence is the place of light where their children are being raised to feel free taking in the more simple pleasures of life such as fishing.

User reviews from imdb Author: klauskind

Whenever I see La Paura I think of it as a companion piece to Eyes Wide Shut, or maybe it is the other way around. Adultery makes both films tick but in different ways. I think Phillip French was right on the money when he pointed out a Wizard of Oz thing in Kubrick's last work. Like Dorothy, Tom and Nicole go through fantasies and nightmares and at the end Dorothy's reassuring childish motto "there's no place like home" is ironically updated to the adult circumstantial adage "there's no sex like marital sex". Kubrick's take is intellectual, he never leaves the world of ideas to touch the ground. He taunts the audience first with an erotic movie and then with a thriller and refuses to deliver either of them. He was married to his third wife for 40 years, until he died. Rossellini was still married to Ingrid Bergman when he directed La Paura; they had been adulterous lovers and their infidelity widely criticized La Paura is a tale, a noirish one. The noir intrigue is solved and the tale has a happy ending. The city is noir; the country is tale, the territory where childhood is possible. The transition is operated in the most regular way: by car, a long-held shot taken from the front of the car as it rides into the road, as if we were entering a different dimension. Irene (Bergman) starts the movie: we just see a dark city landscape but her voice-over narration tells us of her angst and informs us that the story is a flashback, hers. Bergman's been cheating on her husband. At first guilt is just psychological torture but soon expands into economic blackmail and then grows into something else. From beginning to end the movie focuses on what Bergman feels, every other character is there to make her feel something. Only when the director gives away the plot before the main character can find out does he want us to feel something Bergman still can't. When she finds out, we have already experienced the warped mechanics of the situation and we may focus once again on the emotional impact it has on Bergman's Irene. In La Paura treasons are not imagined but real, nightmares are deliberate and the couple's venom suppurates in bitter ways. Needless to say, Ingrid has another of her rough rides in the movies but Rossellini doesn't dare put her away as he did in Europa 51, nor does he abandon her to the inscrutable impassivity of nature (Stromboli). His gift is less transcendent and fragile than the conclusion of Viaggio in Italia. He just gives his wife as much of a fairy tale ending as a real woman can have, a human landscape where she can finally feel at home. Back to the country, a half lit interior scene where shadows suggest the comfort of sleep. After all, it's the "fairy godmother" who speaks the last words in the movie.

User reviews from imdb Author: Hannamari (hunaja5@yahoo.com) from Spain

GIOVANNA D’ARCO AL ROGO (Joan of Arc)

Italy France (80 mi) 1954

User reviews from imdb Author: Filipe Augusto Chamy Amorim Ferreira (vernebr) from Brazil

That's certainly not the best Ingrid-Rossellini film. Sounds interesting at the beginning, but is more a recorded "opera" than a movie. Ingrid doesn't speak a word for many, many minutes, and these minutes are full of singing (not the kind I like, badly). Despite the one hour and twenty minutes, seems much more longer than actually is. But Ingrid is the most beautiful and remarkable Joan of Arc I've ever saw. It's a rare picture, I saw it on the cinema, in a cultural release. It was an opportunity that I could never lost. Not a film that everybody will love, I recommend just for Ingrid's fans, like me. My evaluation: 7 out of 10.

Giovanna d'Arco al Rogo Time Out London

Anyone acquainted with the writings of the conservative Catholic mystic Paul Claudel will be best placed to fathom what his oratorio, scored by Honegger, is all about. The composer's references to medieval religious music and French folk song might possibly be apt, but this is still a tedious affair. The least of all the Joan of Arc pictures, it is perhaps best understood as a gift (of sorts) from a director to his wife/leading lady: prestigious, 'important' and finally rather private. Rossellini had already staged the oratorio in Milan and elsewhere, but evidently rethought it for the screen, at least to the extent of using glass shots and superimpositions; the colour is soft and soothing.

User reviews from imdb Author: Rheinische from Great Britain

This is generally regarded as a 'minor' work by Rossellini, and in a certain sense one can see why its appeal is limited: a filmed document of an Italian production of a French opera; a stagy Catholic confection with a largely static Bergman at its centre. Anyone expecting something to fit alongside the versions of the Jeanne d'Arc narrative by Dreyer (1928) or Bresson (1962) is likely to be disappointed.

However, there is a strong case to be made for 'Giovannia d'Arco al rogo' as a fascinating and overlooked work. Regardless of what one feels about Honegger's somewhat erratic music (which I felt was not without its charm), the film inadvertently raises various questions about cinematic form. It may be a recording of a theatrical staging, but the act of filming transforms the experience of watching such a staging. There is a dialectical tension between the obvious artifice of opera and the documentary reality of the camera. We see Joan of Arc beholding various theatrical tableaux - her trial depicted as an animal fable; an absurd game between monarchs; some village revellers - but at the same time we also see Ingrid Bergman-as-Joan of Arc, and moreover Ingrid Bergman-as-object of Rossellini's camera eye. I was reminded of some of the opulent pageants of Peter Greenaway ('Prospero's Books', 'The Baby of Macon'), who approached some of these paradoxes in a much more self-conscious manner some 40 years on. To make matters even more Brechtian, the reel in the screening I saw was preceded by what appeared to be some promo/actuality footage, featuring the clapping opera house audience and a smiling Bergman in her dressing room; presumably this juxtaposition was not intended by Rossellini himself, but it adds something to the overall experience.

Unfortunately, this film seems destined to be restricted to retrospectives and the occasional archival screening. In the print I saw (apparently an 80s preservation), the colours had faded to a ghostly pallor, presumably a result of Rossellini's use of volatile Eastmancolor stock. Not an obviously bankable choice for DVD distributors, then. But anyone who has an interest in the philosophy of film in relation to theatre, or mixed modes of artistic representation, should watch it if given the opportunity.

Cultivating the Close Face Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, May 21, 2008

A Quick Note on Rossellini and Realism Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, December 5, 2007

Roberto Rossellini - Giovanna d'Arco al rogo AKA J(1954) great photos from Worldscinema

INDIA: MATRI BHUMI A 95

Italy France (95 mi) 1959

On arrival one feels euphoria. The first surprise is the crowds. One sees tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, forming an endless river which has nevertheless not destroyed the vestiges of the past that Moslems, Persians, and English colonisers built.

As the story goes, sometime after the film was shown at Cannes in 1959, none other than Henri Langlois, noted French film archivist, lent the sole copy of this film to another artist, a sculptor or a painter, where the film languished for decades, believed to be lost, until a surviving relative discovered the film and eventually returned it to the Cinémathèque Française, where they were able to partially restore a badly faded film which had already begun to decompose. The resulting film remains badly faded, where especially the natural shots of lakes, rivers, forests, and sky formations of this highly personalized documentary on India are particularly washed out, leaving the viewer to only imagine what all of this must have looked like initially, as the visuals in this mostly rural setting look enticing. An inevitable comparison might be made to Louis Malle’s epic 6-hour pictorial bonanza Phantom India (L'Inde fantôme) (1969), where Malle himself offers his own gentle narration to one of the most colorful and astonishingly beautiful films ever made. Unfortunately, due to the bleached out colors of this film, this comparison is blatantly unfair, but for what it’s worth, Malle’s film is more non-judgmental and observational in tone, offering quiet, understated reflections, asking the viewer to become immersed in the journey, while Rossellini’s is laden with personality, opening with humor yet becoming utterly somber by the end with a blending of narrators who each offer unique views of their lives, becoming a unified voice molded into one, much like Terrence Malick’s narration of collective voices in THIN RED LINE (1998). Rossellini can be a tough nut to swallow, as he's loved by the auteurists (Rosenbaum and Fred Camper), but can be philosophically oblique, bordering on pompous, occasionally veering towards the arcane by the end of his career. His Italian realist films are easier to comprehend because of their more understandable social settings, but later in life he became spiritually challenged, as if time left him fewer opportunities to complete his relationship with the Eternal. This film however, is highly accessible to people of all ages, as animals are as prominently featured as humans, which is one of the themes of reincarnation, that we are all one.

Opening with the sprawling mass of humanity that greets visitors in the immensely populated city of Bombay (now Mumbai), India, Rossellini moves into the rural areas where we will find what he calls the “authentic” Indian people, which may not be translated correctly, though the translation was privately subtitled by Rossellini biographer and film scholar Tad Gallagher, but this was one of the few unintentionally discordant or contentious remarks heard in the film, as one wonders if urban dwellers are any less real or genuine, but perhaps a clue is to think of people unspoiled or changed from their ancestral heritage. The narrator also concludes that due to the dozens of religious affiliations and tribal groups coexisting within the Indian culture, that it is a tolerant, as opposed to intolerant society. Again, this strikes the viewer as being the idea of an enamored visiting tourist, as this thoroughly disregards the inherent social injustices of the outlawed yet firmly entrenched caste systems that date back thousands of years, creating sub-castes of people who are considered less than human, and overlooks as well India’s violent warring history with their neighbor Pakistan, which goes back to the late 40’s when each obtained their independence from Great Britain, making this, along with similar long standing disputes with China and Nepal, one of the largest land-boundary disputes in the world. The result has been a huge military build up, increasing aggression and hostility on both sides, suggesting a stubborn refusal to seek peaceful political solutions and reflects a glaring religious and cultural intolerance. However, to be fair, in the late 50’s when this film was made, the disputes between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region had not yet escalated to the point of dueling nations taunting each other with nuclear threats, which reached its heights in the late 90’s.

This film however reflects the lives of ordinary people and has an affectionate charm in the first person narration, opening with an elephant handler, who works with several other man-guided elephants logging trees in the forest and hauling the wood on their tusks or carried behind on chains to a specific destination. Initially one thinks of man’s exploitive use of these giant animals, but the narrator reminds us they only work 3 hours early each morning, as it gets too hot for them after that, requiring full-time care for the rest of the day from their handlers who must coddle them, pamper them, bath them, feed them, walk them, cajole them, then feed them again, which leaves them time for little else. His love of the animal is translated to the viewer, as we see him splashing and scrubbing his animal in the river, where he has a thoroughly charming way of describing elephant behavior, including one besmitten elephant couple that needs their space. This parallels his own human behavior when he spots an attractive young girl from a traveling puppet show that arrives in town, and he brings his elephant to feast on a tree behind her house where he can get a good look at her each day, that is until all vegetation from the tree has been eaten. The narrator’s gentle charm and easy going manner reflects a harmony with the natural world around him and with his newly discovered love.

The film then uproots us from this delightful elephant reverie and places us in the middle of a giant dam construction project where the new narrator, whose family unit resembles that of the last narrator, beams with pride just to be able to participate in such an enormous undertaking. But it has a cost, as 190 men have lost their lives working on this project, a small amount when compared to the number of people who would die from flooding if the dam were not built, but there’s a pervasive feel of disconnection to modernity, best expressed by the immediate shift in music, wonderfully written throughout by Philippe Arthuys, which has transformed from the celebratory traditional village music in the opening segment to an eerie experimental sound design, much like the dissonant electronic music from Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), which accentuates man’s alienation to the world around him. But while this narrator affirms his part in the building process, pick by pick, step by step, stone by stone, a human chain working in solidarity until the construction project is complete, the camera gazes at a funeral ceremony where the deceased is burned on a wooden pyre, or catches the couple in a humorous marital spat which is nearly Chaplinesque in its wordless body language and its intentional lack of translation, as his wife is furious at being displaced, as they will have to move to his next job assignment. In contrast to the opening segment, this shows how modernization and human progress separates man from his natural world, leaving him more exposed to face the future alone.

We’re back in the jungle in the next segment, when an elderly man has already retired, whose manicured rice fields are farmed by his sons, allowing him solitary retreats into the jungle, the only place where he can contemplate his place in the order of things, where he understands the sounds that emanate from a pair of courting tigers nearby, but also the danger at living in such close proximity. When the noise from tractors at construction projects nearby scare many of the animals out of the jungle, one of the tigers is wounded by a porcupine it is unnaturally forced to hunt, causing it to even attack humans, as in desperation it can no longer stay away at a careful distance. The villagers meet and decide that for their own protection the tiger must be killed, but the elderly man is revolted by the thought of killing any living creature, as under his spiritual belief of reincarnation, all creatures are descendants of one another and are all brothers, and rises early in the morning and attempts to smoke the tiger out of its familiar territory and force it to move further away where it will remain unharmed.

The warm, playful humor that has been present in the narration throughout suddenly veers into a solemn tone, as dangerous heat levels can also take its toll on human lives. A man with a cutely dressed monkey that he carries tied to a chain on his shoulder passes out and eventually succumbs to heat stroke in a walk through the countryside, leaving the monkey, still chained to the man, to fend for itself as the vultures swarm high above the body and gather ever closer. This is simply stunning footage, as the helplessness of the monkey wordlessly escalates. We later see it in town still carrying a long chain, without any explanation of how it escaped, but we do see how the monkey is ignored by nearly everyone except children who are fascinated that it continues to perform tricks even without its master. The futility of its future becomes evident, even if not shown, as it is spurned by the wild monkeys for having a human smell, as the camera follows other monkeys jumping furiously through the trees, making spectacular leaps, something a monkey still carrying a chain around its neck could never do, suggesting that when the interconnecting bond between humans and animals is broken, death, the ultimate chain we carry around our necks, is inevitable.

India Matri Buhmi Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule review) from the Reader

My favorite Roberto Rossellini film is perhaps the hardest one to see -- the restored French version of this 1959 masterpiece about India, which survives in only one unsubtitled print. (The more accessible Italian version is considerably shorter, and inferior in other respects as well.) Fortunately, the French version has been privately subtitled on video by Rossellini biographer Tag Gallagher, and Chicago Cinema Forum will project it twice this weekend. A sublime symbiosis of fable and nonfiction, India Matri Bhumi simply and poetically interrelates humans and animals, city and village, and society and nature over four separate stories. This visionary work is especially striking in the way its objective and subjective narrators merge into one another, reflecting not only the idea of reincarnation, but also the greater unity to which all of them belong. In French with subtitles. 95 min.

User comments from imdb Author: Kalaman from Ottawa

I first read about "India, Matri Bhumi", an amazingly visionary though largely forgotten documentary from Roberto Rossellini, when one of my favorite critics Andrew Sarris mentioned it in his Film Culture essay on Rossellini back in the 60s. Sarris calls the documentary "one of the prodigious achievements of the century". So it piqued my interest since then. And then I read several critics' writings on the film, including film historian Tag Gallagher in his magnificent recent biography, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBERTO ROSSELLINI. I wasn't able to watch it until recently when I viewed it along with several other Rossellini films. Though it is apparently not for every taste like most of Rossellini's work, "India" is undoubtedly on a short list of director's masterpieces. If you are a fan of the director, this is definitely worth catching. The documentary is basically an episodic portrait on India, circa 1957-1958; It captures life in flux at that moment in time. "India" is divided into four sections, each documenting the strange interaction between humans and animals, tradition and technology. The first section, after the opening shots of people walking in the streets, deals with some elephants taking bath; the second part concerns a labor worker in a dam; the third part is about an old man and a man-eating tiger; the fourth and most remarkable section involves the desperate attempts of a pet monkey whose master has died of heat wave. What surprised me the most about "India" is Rossellini's camera movements. Rossellini uses a combination of circular, swooping tracking shots, pans, and zoom to conjure up a strange yet personal vision of India, something that is almost very hard to describe in words. The color photography is also rich and fascinating.

I definitely recommend reading Gallagher's chapter on "India" in his book on Rossellini.

Filmjourney Doug Cummings, also seen here: India: Matri Bhumi (1958)

Last weekend, the UCLA film archive screened one of Roberto Rossellini's rarest films, India (1958); according to Peter Brunette in his informative book on the filmmaker, the only print available in the US for years was an unsubtitled, black-and-white copy owned by the Pacific Film Archive, so it was a joy to see a rare color print despite its less-than-stellar quality. It's one of Rossellini's most acclaimed films; Godard once mentioned it in the same breath with Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, Murnau's Tabu, and Welles' It's All True; like those works, it's a loving tribute to a foreign land by a traveling artist.

Rossellini's casual and spontaneous (some say anti-formal) filming style often has the surprising effect of intensifying viewer perceptions, lending screen events the impression of fleeting, precious historical moments. The dominant moment here is 1957, just a few years after India's independence, during significant technological and social change. Like Paisan (1946), the film is a collection of dramatic vignettes; in between them it plays in documentary mode, complete with an all-knowing, informing narrator. That this objective, third person perspective continually shifts into subjective, first person perspectives (three of the four vignettes are narrated by their protagonists) is one of Rossellini's structural methods for introducing and immersing Western viewers into the Indian milieu, a method that fuses education, insight and empathy.

As it turns out, the film's belated North American exposure has another historical resonance: its co-screenwriter--one-time Cahiers du cinéma critic, human rights activist, and Iranian diplomat Fereydoun Hoveyda--passed away just last November. Though he doubtless had more important things to do than record DVD commentaries, it's saddening to think what a fascinating cultural, personal, and cinephiliac perspective he could have offered any future video release of this film (or its related French/Italian miniseries.) Alternatively, you can read some brief notes Hoveyda wrote for Anthology Film Archives, here.

The vignette structure suits Rossellini's organic method of filming, but it's also an essential part of his multifaceted and integrative approach to understanding his subject. Instead of offering a single, linear investigation or narrative tale, he offers several tales and entrusts their potential for harmony or divergence to the viewer. Yet certain themes emerge: a story of first love is compared with the mating rituals of elephants; a young father helps build a dam but has to leave the city after its completion; an elderly man struggles with his contemplative life when technology intrudes upon the jungle; a man dies and his trained monkey becomes lost between the human and animal worlds. The film is as much a meditation on the stages of life and human existence as it is a questioning look at the effects of modernization, yet none of these themes are schematically rendered. The film develops them in fluid, undefined ways.

Before and after its vignettes, India is bookended by hurried montages of the sights and sounds of Bombay, emphasizing its vast population and masala cultural diversity (an aspect Rossellini's endlessly curious, magpie mind clearly cherishes) while suggesting a macrocosm for the film's intermediate magnifications. The anonymous narration of these sequences is dryly informative, yet idealizing, warm, and not without humor: after ruminating on the city's impressive cultural tolerance, the film inserts a shot of an eccentric building, to which the narrator quips, "They even tolerate this architecture!" Rossellini's Western romance for India is never in question, but it's tempered with ironies and conundrums that prevent the film from ever becoming sentimentalized.

India is a difficult film to summarize; its whole is much greater than its parts. Its narratives and narrations are basic and its naturalistic style often seems direct to the point of "artlessness," but--without wanting to mystify its accomplishment--its structure renders the Rossellian magic that prompts revelations, which appear unforced, spontaneous, and unending; the film has dominated my thinking all week. Even Godard seemed hard pressed to pinpoint its unique affect, cryptically describing it as "the creation of the world" and promising to write about it at length in a future article of Cahiers (which Tom Milne points out he never did). May it some day be more readily available for the repeated scrutiny it fully deserves.

When Fable and Fact Interact | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (longer review) from the Reader, August 31, 2007, also seen here: When Fable and Fact Interact article enlarged for publication in Outsider Films on India, 1950-1990, edited by Shanay Jhaveri, reprinted June 10, 2008 with photos here: The Creation of the World: Rossellini’s INDIA MATRI BUHMI

The Films of Roberto Rossellini - by Michael E. Grost

Ways of Seeing [Yoel Meranda]

Roberto Rossellini - India: Matri Bhumi (1959) Eleanor Mannikka from worldscinema

Brandon's movie memory » India: Matri Bhumi (1958, Roberto ...

his description Fred Camper on the print quality from a_film_by, May 19, 2005

Chicago Cinema Forum - CINE-FILE Chicago

IL GENERAL DELLA ROVERE

Italy France (132 mi) 1959

Il General Della Rovere | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

One of Roberto Rossellini's few pure potboilers, this is a contrived “humanistic” study of a swindler (Vittorio De Sica) forced to pose as an Italian resistance leader. Very little of Rossellini is visible in the result, but his detachment from the material gives him a chance to indulge in a few technical experiments with the “Pancinor,” the motorized zoom lens he invented, which would later contribute to the unique visual style of his great documentaries (1960).

Unexamined Essentials [Jaime N. Christley]

Il Generale Della Rovere was Roberto Rossellini's only post-Open City film to be critically and commercially successful upon its initial release, a fact that reportedly irritated the great Italian director to no end. To reviewers, the picture signaled a welcome return to the settings and themes of Rossellini's neorealist origins after years of baffling experiments; to Rossellini himself, however, the project marked a step backward toward safe territory after more daring, exploratory works.

Bardone (Vittorio De Sica) is a graying, small-time swindler in 1943 Genoa, supporting his gambling habit by palming off phony jewels and bilking money from the relatives of Gestapo prisoners. Arrested, he's offered a deal by the Nazis: In exchange for a pardon, he will impersonate General Della Rovere, a Resistance hero who was killed prematurely. Bardone is sent to prison in hopes that his disguise will draw information from the other prisoners of war, but as he gets to know their cause and witnesses Nazi tortures, his assignment goes from another charade in the con man's life to the painful awakening of his political conscience.

A fascinating crossroads in Rossellini's career, the film looks back at the furious urgency of his earlier postwar sketches and ahead to the contemplation of his later, stylized portraits. Artifice mingles with rawness: grainy newsreel views of wartime depredations segue into the reconstructed rubble of Cinecittà studio sets, location filming coexists with rear projection. Some critics saw this mix as a betrayal of neorealist ideals, yet it's a strategy that strikingly reflects the impulses increasingly at odds within the protagonist.

General Della Rovere takes its shape from the progress of Bardone's masquerade, from the perfunctory "Be strong, boys" he first gives his awed fellow cellmates to the night he quells air-raid hysteria with a heroic conviction which startles himself above all. The film builds to a characteristically devastating Rossellinian moment, as Bardone becomes Della Rovere by impulsively taking his place in front of the Nazi firing squad. To Rossellini, cinema's great moments are the ones that bridge performance and life, when barriers separating the player and the mask break down. It's no accident that the final image of the executed prisoners, slumped against a fresco of a painted cityscape, functions as both the cast's final bow on a blatant stage and a trenchant glimpse of history's collective horrors.

Insofar as it precedes Rossellini's work in television, Il generale della Rovere's camera scans the streets and caverns of war-torn Italy as if looking for clues, not with the remote-controlled zoom he had developed (which would find exhaustive use with his historical programs), but with a tirelessly investigative eye, all the same. Rovere is one of the only Rossellini films, excepting the series he made with Bergman, to feature a “star performance,” and it’s provided for us by another director, Vittorio de Sica (Bicycle Thieves; despite his reputation as mainstream-arthouse auteur, he made nearly five times as many movies in front of the camera as behind it).

Whether in studio or on location, Rovere’s first half is a symphony of cramped, despairing spaces, in which nothing ever seems to be enough, and it’s always too late. The prison half of the film takes on a more overtly expressionist design, with grandiose geometry, few digressions from the grim business at hand, a series of interactions in a holding cell that recall some of Kafka’s parables – they without moralizing conclusions.

Still, the film – which was Rossellini’s first commercial success since Roma, citta aperta – is not depressing by any means. Rossellini places in an enriching context the screenwriting mechanisms that unveil the reluctant hero’s progression from two-bit scam artist to the spiritual embodiment of the Italian resistance. At times it is de-emphasized, the leaning-on pressures of the early scenes all but lifted away. Rossellini’s eye is sometimes a wandering eye, and the film, which had earlier focused almost ceaselessly on Bardone’s ever-devolving, house-of-cards schemes, now gives way to an editing pattern that gives equal priority to the prison’s inner life, i.e. the Nazi commandant, the other prisoners, etc. Even the most theatrical moment, Bardone’s “moment of transformation,” his oratory during the bombing raid, is superimposed with jailhouse architecture that is at once stagebound (in that it invokes “King Lear,” and gives Bardone an unimpeded theatrical space), magisterial, and mythical. When Bardone's exit is reached, it is filmed in an astonishing wide shot that simultaneously obliterates the individual and assures his ascension into legend. (By contrast, the final zoom-in that closes The Taking of Power by Louis XIV acts as portraiture, interrogation, and embalming.)

Il Generale Della Rovere (1959) - The Criterion Collection

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions

DVD Savant Review: Il Generale Della Rovere Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection

"The Details: Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale della Rovere" Daniel Kasman from Mubi, March 30, 2009

DVDTown [Christopher Long] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] Criterion Collection

dOc DVD Review: Il Generale Della Rovere (1959) Jon Danziger, Criterion Collection

General Della Rovere (Italian Limited Release) (Region 2) : DVD ... Svet Atanasov from DVD Talk

Movie Review - General Della Rovere - The Screen; Rossellini's ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times

DVDBeaver [Gary Tooze]

ESCAPE BY NIGHT (Era Notte a Roma)

aka: Blackout in Rome

Italy France (82 mi) 1960

Era Notte a Roma Geoff Andrew from Time Out London

Stylistically an intriguing (and not wholly successful) mixture of Rossellini's early 'realism', Bergman-period melodrama, and the contemplative didacticism of his later films, this return to the milieu of Nazi-occupied Rome may not have the raw power of Rome, Open City, but is immensely affecting all the same. Three escaped Allied PoWs - a Brit, an American and a Russian - take refuge in the home of Roman black marketeer Ralli, whose Communist lover (Salvatori) is executed when they are betrayed by a corrupt, Nazi-collaborator priest. On one level, it's a fairly straightforward suspense movie, detailing the countless threats to the safety of the fugitives and the woman who provides sanctuary; on another, it's an unsentimental, Paisà-like celebration of the shared humanity that allows the various characters to communicate with one another despite linguistic differences and the wariness born of perilous circumstance. An uneven, flawed, but very intelligent work of enormous humanity.

Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce] Roberto Rossellini’s Collector’s Edition

Released in 1960, Era Notte a Roma contrasts intriguingly with the filmmaker's previous hit, General Della Rovere. Both deal with subjects from Rossellini's breakthrough works—partisan resistance in WWII Italy—while extending an interest in the slender line between saints and impostors. (Notte opens with a trio of hilariously tough-dealing black marketeers disguised as nuns.) Where General focused exclusively on the changing psyche of Vittorio De Sica's redeemed pimp, however, Notte dispels identification through a batch of characters of various nationalities and interests, from the underground dealer reluctantly dragged into heroism (Giovanna Ralli) to the Allied fugitives hiding in her attic (Leo Genn, Peter Baldwin and Sergei Bondarchuk). Also unlike General (and at the opposite pole from Open City), the film displays Rossellini's growing preference for ruminating long takes over urgent montage, a stylistic advance greatly aided by the zoom lens employed to analyze elements within a composition without cutting away from it. (Rossellini's use of the technique here is still tentative, yet several scenes, like the virtuosic crisscross of codes and betrayals in a church meeting between rebels, show an acute understanding of its potential.) If Notte is too diffuse to rank with his other masterpieces, it nevertheless sows the seeds of the contemplative approach of the director's later historical portraits, a characteristically Rossellinian instance of seeming haphazardness leading to new ways of seeing.

Now on DVD: “Dov'è la libertà...?” (Rossellini, 1954) and “Blackout in Rome” (Rossellini, 1960) Zach Campbell from Mubi, October 30, 2008

Like both Ophüls and Mizoguchi, in fact, Rossellini was a filmmaker very deeply concerned with women (though probably the one least likely to earn the label “feminist”). In the earlier movie there is a running line of patriarchal comedy, consistent with the gentle and bemused (and somewhat un-Rossellinian) misanthropy which runs through the entire film, whereby each decent woman turns out to be a selfish schemer “like all the rest.” Era notte a Roma, on the other hand, is less a mainstream project for Rossellini and more a reflective reimagination of his neorealist “roots.” Here he pulls off an intriguing little trick with regard to the figure of Woman. A nun takes in three on-the-run Allied soldiers in the closing weeks of World War II (an Englishman, an American, and a Russian). But the “nun,” Esperia, turns instead out to be a beautiful, small time black marketeer, and a partisan. The way Rossellini handles women characters, as seen in these two films, is I think exemplary of the way he works in general. This is to say, his idealizations can run him into lazy or worn-out directions, even if the films turn out to be good or great. (Tag Gallagher reports in his critical biography of Rossellini that the director ran out of enthusiasm for the project during its production, and Mario Monicelli and Federico Fellini helped finish up the film, which was only released two years later, in 1954.) At the same time, Rossellini’s obstinate visions could sometimes cut through the fog that could accumulate around a concept, and with brio and surprise he could alight upon a clear concept and its image in perfect harmony. Era notte a Roma does not quite deliver on this front to the same extent that Rossellini’s best work does, but it crops up in minor ways all throughout the film, such as a scene where fascists try to root out partisan impostors amidst a group of priests. The truth of who we are, according to Rossellini, is produced from the actions we undertake in moral quandaries of times both great and humble.

A closing note for those who will watch Era notte a Roma. Though the film is in many ways a retread of earlier material, its camera style beckons ever-so-mildly to the films that Rossellini would start making a few years later—the late historical telefilms, four of which will come out on R1 DVD courtesy of Criterion/Eclipse very soon. At several points, in sparely decorated rooms, the camera slides over a small handful of actors inhabiting a single space. A certain artifice occasionally envelops these actors, partisans hiding out in attics and basements. See, for example, around the 51’-54’ mark, particularly the zoom out from Fyodor’s case just as he makes a decision to try to leave the attic. I am convinced that utility alone does not explain this zoom. Rossellini had previously just developed the Pancinor lens which would become his late hallmark. (It allowed him to zoom and pan with greater mobility.) This certainly does not describe the entirety of the film, or even the entirety of any particular scene. But at times we see a movement or a zoom which feels neither “neutral” (i.e., unnoticeable) nor a purely stylized flourish—its smoothness becomes a certain indifference to the coherence of an actor-friendly framed space. What we are seeing is a new way for Rossellini to articulate a relation between the camera and the objects it is filming.

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

DVD Savant Review: Rossellini Director's Series Glenn Erickson, Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

DVD Verdict [Tom Becker] Roberto Rossellini’s 2-disc Collector’s Edition

DVDBeaver.com - DVD Review [Gary Tooze]

Roberto Rossellini - Era notte a Roma AKA Blackout in Rome (1960) worldscinema

User reviews from imdb Author: tentender from France

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Movie Review - It Was Night in Rome - A 1960 ROSSELLINI HAS NEW ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

GARIBALDI (Viva l'Italia!)

Italy France (106 mi) 1961

Viva l'Italia Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, December 5, 2006

In this very rare Rossellini film, fortunately presented in the current retrospective, I became more intimately attuned to Rossellini's framing. If you go here you'll see that le Colonel asserts that "the technology allows you to create a very busy, detailed, turbulent mural representing the trenches at the Somme, and it allows you just as easily to introduce a clean blue bunny rabbit or a gnome or a fairy into that hyperrealistic environment, the big, busy, dense, swooping film image with disconcertingly uniform and crisp focus." Everything becomes allegory.

With Viva l'Italia, a commemorative film of the 1860 Garibaldi exploits, there are several battle or reconnaissance scenes that take advantage of the mountains of Sicilia or southern Italy, presenting huge vistas where large-scale combat sometimes takes place. These battle scenes are superb, and the reason why is not because they're "exciting" or "psychologically-resonant" (codewords for, this film presents battle as riveting!) but because they foreground the limitations of the frame in the process of presenting their images. The difference between Viva l'Italia and something like The Lord of the Rings is that the CGI battles in those Peter Jackson films suggest clarity and predetermination. You--"we"--know that the camera is going where it has been deemed to go, to capture the appropriate action. It's taking something huge and violent and chaotic, making it clear and readable and even fun. But we never know when or where something--a crowd of soldier's, a main character, a building in the foreground, a lake in the distance--will break Rossellini's shots and basically reconstitute the nature of the entire shot itself, which may have started tight and close but ended long, wide, striated. This is part of his engagement with that amorphous thing, 'realism.' It's not about naive indexicality of the image, it's about the demonstration of material largeness and the inadequacies (as well as attempts) of the camera to capture it all ...

User reviews from imdb Author: silverfernvideo (peterohara@me.com) from Canada

It is hard to understand why it is so difficult to view the films of one of the most important directors of Italian cinema and the world. Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica's works are all, fortunately, mostly available. Rossellini "the father of us all" as Martin Scorsese once said, is sadly a legend whose works are vastly unavailable. Legal or copyright reasons should not hamper a persons work, especially one of vast importance to the cinema. Isabella Rossellini said "My dad's films are fading away…My father is slowly being forgotten." However when one experiences a Rossellini picture it is hard to imagine that statement. A viewing of Germany Year Zero will make one remember Rossellini for life, along with a list of other Rossellini masterpieces; Open City, Paisan, Stromboli, Voyage in Italy and many more. I have been fortunate enough to view a great deal of uncut and unavailable Rossellini works at the Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto. Being part of a 20 something generation I can gladly say that Rossellini's films are to another generation just as powerful as they were when they first came out. With Viva L'Italia! Rossellini has created a film that ranks with such classics as Visconti's The Leopard, or even perhaps a war film such as Patton, which may have been influenced by this film. The story is about the Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, who perhaps is not well known throughout North America, but we get an education while watching this film. Although some Italian critics may not have been optimistic about Rossellini's portrayal of Garibaldi, it still evokes interest in the viewer to find out who Giuseppe Garibaldi was and what he did. One of the great beauties of this work is the long sweeping camera shots of the clashing armies. On the big screen it is imperative. This picture is akin to Lawrence of Arabia where it really makes you appreciate cinema on the big screen. There are camera shots setup from high in the mountains looking down on the battle plains below of Garibaldi's advancing armies into a town. You can barely see the men, they are like ants; it is magnificent to look at. With his Neorealistic skills, Rossellini excellently captures the action on the streets of Garibaldi's army fighting the Bourbons. The movie ends on an unusual note, but it evokes such an interest on Garibaldi to the viewer. We are fortunate to have the cinema as an art and a tool of examining and telling stories of our history. It is upsetting to realize that a great work such as this one is extremely difficult for viewing. Martin Scorsese has expressed his concern for Italian Cinema and made the great documentary; My Voyage to Italy. He says, "History remains something that's handed down, something that happens between people. In fact I learnt that by watching these movies, so the best way I have to keep film history alive is to try and share my own enthusiasm, my own experience...Usually people get excited about a movie by hearing about it from somebody else, so I'm simply trying to tell you I saw these movies I didn't read about them or learn about them in school, and they had a powerful effect on me and you should see them."

And along with all of Rossellini's films, you should see this one.

Ways of Seeing [Yoel Meranda]

VANINA VANINI

Italy France (127 mi) 1961

User reviews from imdb Author: tentender from France

A fascinating prelude to Rossellini's series of historical films made for television, Vanina Vanini suffers a bit from the desire to showcase star Sandra Milo (wife of the producer) -- not a very interesting actress -- but its attention to historical detail is extremely interesting. See, for example, the scene in which prisoners are forged into their chains -- astonishing and vivid. Laurent Terzieff is excellent (and looks terrific), as is (and does) Martine Carol. I saw this film at the Cinematheque Francaise in a decent print. It was preceded and followed by talks by an uncredited co-scenarist, Jean Gruault, who revealed that, to highlight Milo, the producer insisted on cutting three reels (about a half hour's running time), most of it focusing on Carol's character. The producer destroyed the negative, but a few years later a print was found of all the missing material. In a dismal twist of fate, a fire in the suburban Paris warehouse where it was stored destroyed -- definitively -- the last remnants of this missing material. Pity, as the film is a little hard to follow as it stands and, according to Gruault, the lost material provided much of the motivation that is lacking.

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

When I was a child, I saw the trailer: it was the story of a princess in love with a shepherd in my child's mind. And of course I did not know who Rossellini was.

I had to wait twenty years or so to have the opportunity to see the film. The precedent user is completely right and his comment is more than useful: Martine Carol's part was reduced to nothing or almost nothing. She only appears at the beginning of the movie then she disappears after two or three scenes, leaving the lion's share to co-star Sandra Milo. The first thirty minutes are very hard to follow and the story really begins when Vanina visits Pietro, a Carbonaro who was injured after his escape from San Angelo Castle and taken in by her father whose motives remain a bit obscure (the precedent user wrote that thirty minutes were cut and that they were essential to understand them).

After a muddled beginning, the film hits its stride and remains absorbing till the very end.Rossellini is one of my favorite Italian directors and even when he was sub-par, he was better than most of his colleagues.

The most original thing in Rossellini's work is his great interest in history and in Christianity. From the Fascist years ( "l'Uomo della Croce" ) to the birth of Neorealism ("Roma Città Aperta" ,"Germania Anno zero" ) and from the Bergman years ("Giovanna d'Arco al Rogo" and "Europa 51" ) to the final years ("la Presa del Potere di Luigi XIV" is the best film about the Sun King I know).

History and Christianity are both present in "Vanina Vanini": Vanina is an aristocrat of the past, she cannot feel History move, she's always a prisoner of a decadent religion, which is still firmly entrenched in the good/bad conflict and she's still afraid of sin and damnation. In direct contrast to her, we have Pietro, an educated carbonaro who was influenced by the French Revolution "which was not made by the populace but by enlightened minds. " Between Vanina's faith and Pietro's solidarity with his companions there is no room for a love as burning as theirs.

Based on a short story by Stendhal, this is probably the most overlooked of all Rossellini's works. Laurent Terzieff is a very gifted actor: although the most "Nouvelle Vague" of all the thespians of the era (late fifties/early sixties), he was never hired by Godard and his clique and found his best parts with "old" brilliant directors (Marcel Carné, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Claude Autant-Lara)

Seth Bookey

Roberto Rossellini - Vanina Vanini aka The Betrayer (1961) worldscinema

Movie Review - Vanina Vanini - Film: 'Vanina Vanini,' Conventional ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

ANIMA NERA

Italy France (97 mi) 1962

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

This movie is icily impersonal. All that made Rossellini one of the greatest directors ever seems to have vanished here. Rossellini's passion was history and the way he used the different backgrounds (WW2 in Italy, Germany after the fall, Europa in the early fifties ("Europa 51" was a revealing title), carbonari, etc) was subtle, engrossing and absorbing. He would continue in that vein with his admirable film about Louis XIV.

The early sixties context is rather vague. Rossellini's directing shows the influence of the French nouvelle vague, not for better (if at least he had borrowed from Antonioni): filming on location in the streets of Roma, a very vague screenplay, a character -well played by Vittorio Gassmann- with frames of mind. We will never really know whether he is a real b... as Eleonora Rossi Drago's baroness claims or simply a child of the war. He is 36 after all, and like his old friend Mimosa, he probably got a raw deal, which his young wife cannot understand. The movie really takes off when Rossi-Drago appears. The first thirty minutes are almost worthless.

If you want to start a Rossellini collection,this is not the one to choose first.

User reviews from imdb Author: david melville (dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland

Written for the stage by camp aesthete Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, but directed for the screen by dour Marxist Roberto Rossellini, this film is a fascinating disaster. It's the wreckage left by two creative talents in head-on collision.

Vittorio Gassman plays the 'black soul' of the title, an upwardly mobile Italian who was once a bisexual rent boy. Now cosily married into the upper bourgeoisie, he and his unsuspecting wife (Annette Stroyberg) are hoping to move into a sumptuous villa he has inherited from a former male lover. Ah, but this is a movie, so sinners must be punished - however photogenic and well-dressed they may be!

Enter his dead lover's sister (Eleonora Rossi Drago) - one of those outrageously glamorous lesbians who live mainly in French and Italian films. She demands that Gassman renounce all claim to the villa, or risk exposure and public scandal. Stroyberg walks out in disgust. Our hero takes refuge with an old 'comrade in arms' - a hooker (Nadja Tiller) who's about to marry a rich American. He tells her how he survived World War II by seducing an SS officer.

Given a sympathetic director - Visconti or Bolognini or Patroni Griffi himself - Anima Nera could be powerful stuff. Rossellini is simply the wrong man for the job. He does make a half-hearted stab at high-style decadence in the obligatory 60s nightclub scene. But his one moment of inspired film-making comes right at the end...

The hero's problems solved (temporarily, at least) his bride starts lecturing him on how to be a proper husband. He presses his face to a window - as if gasping for air - a prisoner of the bourgeois world he has always aspired to.

RO.GO.PA.G.

Jean-Luc Godard segment "Il nuovo mondo"

Ugo Gregoretti segment "Il pollo ruspante"

Pier Paolo Pasolini segment "La ricotta"

Roberto Rossellini segment "Illibatezza" (Chastity)

Italy France (122 mi) 1963 omnibus project with 4 directors

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)

The strange title combines the abbreviations of the four directors (Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the relatively unknown Ugo Gregoretti) responsible for the sketches in this much-better-than-average Italian feature of 1962, when the art of cinema was in an especially lively phase. I don't recall the Gregoretti segment, but the other three make this well worth the price of admission, even if Rossellini's sketch and Godard's “The New World” (a rough draft for Alphaville) are ultimately more interesting than satisfying. Pasolini's episode, about the shooting of a biblical spectacular, with Orson Welles as the Felliniesque director, is mind-bogglingly wonderful. In Italian with subtitles. 122 min.

The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]

RoGoPaG took its title from the surnames of the writer-directors who created each of the four segments: Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and the least well known, Ugo Gregoretti. Rossellini's episode features an air hostess, Annamaria (Rosanna Schiaffino) on a flight to Thailand who is the focus of a lot of interest from one of the passengers, Joe (Bruce Balaban). He is the sort of man who believes everything he reads in Playboy and does his level best to insinuate himself into Annamaria's life, having put her on a pedastal. The camera-obsessed stewardess regularly sends footage of her trip back to her boyfriend, and he and a psychiatrist work out a method to chase Joe away. The psychology used here is amateur at best, and the lasting feeling is of a mere unworthy trifle by the celebrated filmmaker.

A lot of this feeling could apply to Godard's entry, the shortest of the bunch, which concerns a husband (Jean-Marc Bory) who feels his wife (Alexandra Stewart) is growing more distant from him. A series of conversations that don't really go anywhere is what follows, and the sensational news that a huge nuclear bomb has exploded over Paris, where the couple live, does little to electrify the situation. Eventually (I say eventually, it doesn't seem that long at all) the husband reaches an understanding with his missus as the effects of the bomb change attitudes in the city, and a new kind of personal freedom is acheived. This one is largely unilluminating throughout.

But it's not all bad, as Pasolini's story is a lot more sprightly, even if it does build to an unhappy ending. Orson Welles plays a pretentious director (modelled on Pasolini himself? we wonder) who is creating a religious movie with a group of actors and technicians who don't really care about the subject matter, and one of them, Stracci (Mario Cipriani), who plays the Good Thief crucified at Christ's side, is more concerned about his stomach than anything else. Amusing scenes of Stracci trying and failing to fill his tummy provide much of the entertainment, yet cheeky Pasolini is making a serious point about the Church's hypocritical neglect of the needy. Welles, seated in a director's chair for much of his appearance, only makes an impression when interviewed by a journalist who doesn't understand what he's on about.

Coming in second best is Gregoretti's entry, an amused potshot at consumerism which cuts a lecture given by a professor on the subject (who uses an electronic voicebox throughout, for some reason) in amongst scenes of a family visiting a site of what they hope will be their new house. The father (Ugo Tognazzi) is bombarded with ads everywhere, or so he feels, and viewers of a certain age may feel a nostalgic rush when they see Topo Gigio in a TV commercial, if disturbed by his callous treatment. When they hit the road, the father grows ever more irate, and stopping at a restaurant where he is obliged to buy a lot of useless items for his family doesn't ease his temper. There's a nice visual gag here when after he has explained battery chickens to his son, we see the patrons packed into their booths as chickens themselves. RoGoPaG mainly holds interest for the Pasolini episode which had him tackle religion in a less respectful way than his later The Gospel According to St Matthew.

EyeForFilm.co.uk Themroc

Bible Films Blog [Matt Page] August 17, 2007

Bible Films Blog - 'Illibatezza' Segment [Matt Page] June 5, 2007

DVD Times [Noel Megahey] Pasolini Volume 1

User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ACTS OF THE APOSTLES (Atti degli apostolic) – Made for TV mini-series

Italy France Spains Germany Tunisia

User reviews from imdb Author: simon-1303 from United Kingdom

This is a great use of anyone's five hours. Sure, the desert setting and faded print can leave it a touch monochromatic (beige), and the pace can be sedate, but how many films cover the period of what happened in the months and years after the Resurrection? Rossellini masterfully conveys the faith that allowed the early Christians to persist against persecution and, when their teachings fell on stony ground amongst the Jews, to overcome the constraints of tradition and go out to preach amongst the Gentiles. One hears the passionate debates of the very early Church and understands the inner strength of believers that drove every decision to travel from one's home, every willingness to suffer for a greater cause. With largely credible sets and actors and dramatic scenes, one follows every twist and turn with real empathy.

User reviews from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

The second in a series of historical films begun by Roberto Rossellini in the late 1960's was this sublime movie for Italian television which traces the spread of Christianity in the thirty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, according to the accounts of Luke. Most of the first part deals with the successes and failures of Peter in spreading the good news of Jesus and presents an almost documentary view of the first Christian community, the trials before the Sanhedrin, the martyrdom of Philip and Stephen. Most of the second half of this five-hour+ film follows Paul from his conversion en route to Damascus, his work with Barnabas in Antioch of Syria, his debates on the old law versus the new, his arrest. The film ends with his imprisonment in Rome. ACTS OF THE APOSTLES is both a monumental cinematic achievement and a profound inquiry into the foundations of Christian faith. Rossellini's sharp eye for historical context made him the ideal director of this rich material. More importantly, his patient delving into the mystery of faith is never superficial but always suffused with search and wonder, as it had been in FRANCIS, GOD'S JESTER and would be in THE MESSIAH. Those unfamiliar with Rossellini's deliberate and unsensational style may take a while to get accustomed to it, but viewer patience and attention are always rewarded in the Rossellini historical films. Remarkably, one comes away from the film with a powerful sense of who Christ was. His presence fills the movie without his once being seen in it...as though he were just beyond the edges of the frame.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

I had always wanted to check out Rossellini's TV work (which took up most of his later career), if only to make a personal opinion of it – given that it's not a very well regarded period – apart from THE RISE OF LOUIS XIV (1966) – for a film-maker often considered among cinema's greatest.

Unsurprisingly, the ultra low-key approach and use of mostly non-professional actors (the one recognizable face here being "Euro-Cult" favorite Paul Muller) resembles most of all Rossellini's earlier religious film THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS (1950). From the title itself, one realizes that this 'epic' production tackles events from the Bible that are often overlooked; while the character of St. Peter – a prominent figure here – does feature in the likes of QUO VADIS (1951) and THE ROBE (1953), relatively little has been done with the life of St. Paul: he first appears in the second episode, but gradually assumes the central role throughout. Considering that he was the one to convert my native island of Malta to Christianity, it was nice to be able to get a close look at the man – as imagined by a master film-maker, no less – even if the famous shipwreck itself, which landed him over here (allegedly right into the village I hail from), is only alluded to in the film!

Though the talky and uneventful nature of the nearly six-hour long ACTS OF THE APOSTLES hardly lends itself to excitement and spectacle, Rossellini's eye for naturalistic detail – aided by a wistful ethnic score by Mario Nascimbene, light years removed from his rousing signature theme for THE VIKINGS (1958) – gives one a real sense of the time and the place (the film was actually shot in Tunisia). Besides, it does quite well in delineating the way Christianity was misunderstood first of all by the Jews themselves because it went against their assumption of being God's chosen people (and which led to the adoption of circumcision as a sign of identification) – in that this nascent religion decreed that Jesus had died for the absolution of all sins and not for the benefit of just one nation!

Needless to say, I find myself more responsive as a film buff to Rossellini's innovative early "Neo-Realist" work and the thought-provoking series of films with Ingrid Bergman; that said, I'll be following ACTS OF THE APOSTLES with THE MESSIAH (1975) – the director's last work for the cinema which, in narrative terms, obviously precedes this and is, by all accounts, handled in similarly minimalist fashion…

Bible Films Blog [Matt Page] July 4, 2007

Roberto Rossellini - Atti degli apostoli aka Acts of the Apostles (1969) worldscinema

THE TAKING OF POWER BY LOUIS XIV – made for TV B 83

aka: The Rise of Louis XIV

France (102 mi) 1970

Chicago Reader Capsule Review Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of Roberto Rossellini's supreme masterpieces, and perhaps the greatest of the TV films that mark his last period. Made in 1966, the film chronicles the gradual steps taken in the Sun King's seizure of power over 21 years; the treatment is contemplative, wise, and quietly humorous, and Rossellini's innovative trick shots to integrate the real decor of Versailles are deftly executed. The color photography is superb.

La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV Time Out London

'Power is shared by too many hands': the Sun King ponders problems of maintaining monarchic strength in the face of hungry peasants and conniving nobility. Rossellini displays the king's bizarre but effective methods of minimising the threat of insurgence: reserving every governmental decision for himself, assembling the aristocrats full-time at Versailles away from parliament, and forcing them into debt through emulation of his own extravagant tastes in fashion. Brilliantly marshalling performance, colour, dialogue, and above all claustrophobic space, Rossellini reveals the customs, atmosphere and ideology of Louis' reign with an unrivalled lucidity and honesty; at the same time he creates a new moral cinema of history. Draining his account of distracting dramatic artifice, he constructs a cinema of ideas, didactic without being propagandistic, cerebral but highly accessible. It's as inventive as Syberberg's tableaux, but endowed with infinitely greater clarity.

The start of a new phase in Roberto Rossellini's art, The Taking of Power of Louis XIV must have at first disconcerted many of the filmmaker's admirers. A TV production detailing the ascension of the titular 17th-century French monarch, it was largely derided as a stolid and impersonal period piece, a betrayal of the ideas of Italian neorealism by one of its founders. In fact, the film retains several of that movement's strategies, not the least being the use of non-actors: Jean-Marie Patte, a visibly nervous former office clerk, "plays" Louis XIV with rattled-off line readings and the 10-yard stare of somebody looking at his director for help. Patte's stunned helplessness at the center of the story works brilliantly in expressing the resolve of an awkward court puppet who learned how to erect his own power structure. Louis's road to becoming the Sun King involves the eviction of the Queen Mother (Katharina Renn) and the capture of rival Foquet (Pierre Barrat), the building of the Palace of Versailles and the introduction of increasingly ostentatious clothing as a way of keeping the nobility under control. However, Rossellini is less interested in simply illustrating historical facts—the story's most dramatic moment is casually glimpsed from the distance of a tower window—than in contemplating a kingdom's rituals and how they can smother people.

Despite accusations of academic dryness, Louis XIV can be an almost overwhelmingly physical picture. When the dying Cardinal Mazarin (Silvagni) is carried from his bed and bled by a gaggle of doctors, the impact of the moment is, in a quieter but no less striking way, as palpable as Ingrid Bergman facing the heat of the volcano in Stromboli. Few films better capture the cumbersomeness of frilly costumes and chapeaus, or the way wigs and jewelry seem to weigh down on the characters as they struggle to uphold the pose of a decadent society. Louis's triumph rests in mastering this pose, turning such activities as a meal or a picnic into elaborate productions and the court into spectators and, therefore, slaves. It's a claustrophobic world of bizarre, rigid rites (the flourishing of hats, the constant cries of "Le Roi!") that, given a present-tense dimension by the stoic zooms of Rossellini's camerawork, seems less historical than science fiction. (Stanley Kubrick would later adopt the aesthetic for Barry Lyndon, transforming its overly composed tableaux into sarcophaguses for the characters.) "Minds are governed more by appearances than by the true nature of things," the King says. Louis XIV is an absolutely savage and political work in which Rossellini ponders a system's impeccably dressed precipice, a notion never more profoundly examined than in the magnificent final long take: The regent, a blobby figure shorn of his royal layers and alone with the camera, realizes that by mastering the "appearances" he has also become their prisoner.

Critic's Choice - Roberto Rossellini's History Films - NYTimes.com Dave Kehr from The New York Times, January 12, 2009 (excerpt)

The fourth and final stage of Rossellini’s career remains the least familiar, but in many ways it may be the most fascinating. In 1963, after a string of unsatisfying commercial features, he announced he was leaving the movies behind to concentrate on a grand project for television: a series of historical films meant to educate the mass audience, offering essential information and material for argument. Dedicated less to telling stories than to disseminating ideas, these films would abandon the illusionism and emotional involvement of traditional moviemaking in favor of simple, direct communication.

Made for state networks in France and Italy, they have come to be known collectively as Rossellini’s history films, and the Criterion Collection has drawn on them for two new releases: a full-featured edition of “The Taking of Power by Louis XIV,” a 1966 French television production that became an unexpected theatrical success, and “Rossellini’s History Films: Renaissance and Enlightenment,” a four-disc set on Criterion’s no-frills Eclipse label that contains “Blaise Pascal” (1972), “Cartesius” (1974) and the three-part “Age of the Medici” (1973).

The radicalism of Rossellini’s approach is immediately evident in “Louis XIV,” which begins with a group of peasants and tradesmen on a bank of the Seine discussing the great events taking place in the palace across the river. Cardinal Mazarin is dying, and the untested young king (Jean-Marie Patte, a pudgy little man who looks like a particularly debauched member of a 1970s heavy metal band) is about to assume the authority that has been held in reserve for him.

The dialogue is bluntly didactic, with characters telling one another things they would already know entirely for the benefit of the audience. The Louvre, looming in the background, is not an elaborately constructed set but an effect created by painting on glass — one of the earliest and simplest special-effects techniques.

Nothing could be further from the tasteful melodramatics and carefully staged spectacle of Fred Zinnemann’s “Man for All Seasons” (1966), an Oscar-winning exemplar of historical filmmaking. Rossellini is not striving to create an illusion of well-rounded, lifelike characters or immersive historical detail, but to offer an analysis and an argument.

In this case, it’s an argument drawn from the work of the historians Philippe Erlanger and Jean-Dominique de la Rochefoucauld, both consultants on the project: that Louis was able to tame a rebellious aristocracy partly by imposing on them fashions in food, clothing and architecture that were expensive enough to keep them in permanent debt.

Rossellini isn’t asking his viewers to identify with his characters or become caught up in their personal dramas, as Zinnemann does. Instead he creates a detached perspective by dropping the whole system of close-ups and cross-cutting that classical cinema uses to envelop the spectator emotionally. Most scenes are shot in one or two long takes, using camera movements and zooms to close in on details or investigate relationships.

Reportedly, it was Rossellini himself who operated the zooms, using a remote control device of his own invention that allowed him to move in and out of a scene at will. In these films he uses the camera as a kind of scientific instrument — sometimes a microscope, sometimes a telescope — probing the world for information.

Roberto Rossellini: The Rise To Power Of Louis XIV | Film ... Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, March 18, 1999

No director I ever met impressed me more than Roberto Rossellini. He talked with such eloquence and passion about film that you could readily believe there was no greater nor more diverse art. For him, its roots sprung from a documentary tradition he extended as widely as possible, and my choice of his films is one that perfectly illustrates what you can do in this genre: The Rise To Power Of Louis XIV.

The most influential of the Italian neo-realists whose work came to be so admired in the postwar period (even today it is regarded with almost religious fervour in what we used to call the third world), Rossellini was also the director who most thoroughly transcended that label. It wasn't Rome, Open City or Paisan that made Godard acknowledge his influence, great as both these films were. Any literate film-maker would be hard put to deny it. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that, after him, film could never be the same again.

He could make bad films, or at least films that were badly misunderstood, like the extraordinary Stromboli and Voyage To Italy, two of five films he made with his lover Ingrid Bergman - an affair that shocked the world and almost ruined him. But his greatness lay in his ability to make those who watched his films into active participants. There was no way you can be simply entertained by Rossellini. You have to become involved.

Lionel Trilling called him a highly politicised intellectual, but he was also a philosopher of cinema, and certainly his series of didactic reconstructions of history, of which 1966's The Rise To Power Of Louis XIV is the most perfectly achieved, emphasised that.

The film opens with the sickness and death of the powerful and virtually regal Cardinal Mazarin and concentrates on Louis's seizure and retention of power. Almost everything depicted in it, and much of the dialogue, comes directly from documents of the period. But it is also informed by Rossellini's sensibility, which contrasts the ambitious machinations of this world with the inevitability of decay and death.

The demise of Mazarin is brilliantly handled: the doctors sniffing the old man's sweat and faeces before they bleed him through the foot; Mazarin refusing to see the young King until he has applied rouge to his ashen cheeks, like one consummate actor facing another. The triumph of appearance over reality is apparent everywhere.

Later, with Louis triumphant at the end of the film, we see the King alone in his chambers. Having removed his royal clothes and the wig that makes him look taller, Le Roi Soleil reads from La Rochefoucauld: 'Neither the sun nor death can be looked firmly in the face.' Both long sequences illustrate that this is not just a history lesson or a piece of semi-Brechtian polemic but a dramatic and acutely personal reflection on how the acquisition of power is always transient. But the method of gaining that temporary control is brilliantly laid out before us, with impeccable visual and verbal logic. Rossellini uses costumes, decor, architecture, mise en scène and some amazing colour photography to illustrate how Louis created a hierarchy that had nobles fighting to climb the slippery pole, often bankrupting themselves in the process.

The end result makes one regret that Rossellini died before he could make his projected film about Marx - his grasp of social and cultural history might have enlightened us far better than any Russian hagiography or grudging Western homage.

Rossellini made similar works about Socrates, Garibaldi, Pascal, Descartes, St Francis and St Augustine. Louis XIV, however, was the most extraordinary. It remains the film that should be studied not only by anyone interested in the cinema but by anyone attempting the fictionalised documentaries that have been so devalued on television recently. Rossellini never cheated. He attempted simply to explain.

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV: Long Live the Cinema! Criterion essay by Colin MacCabe, December 21, 2008

PRESS NOTES: THE ROYAL TREATMENT January 14, 2009

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, Roberto Rossellini - The ... Criterion Collection

Rome, Open City and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV Re-evaluating Rossellini, by Martin Walsh from Jump Cut, 1977

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CineScene Review Chris Dashiell

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Absolute Power Absolutely Contradicted: “The Taking of Power by Louis XIV” Fernando F. Croce from Mubi, January 28, 2009, also seen here: The Auteurs

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Roberto Rossellini - La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV AKA The Rise of Louis XIV [+Extras] (1966) worldscinema

The Taking of Power by Louis XIV - Roberto Rossellini - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze

SOCRATES – made for TV

Italy Spain France (120 mi) 1971

User reviews from imdb Author: diogenes99 from United States

This is an extremely enjoyable account of the last part of Socrates' life, including his trial and execution. Roberto Rossellini gives us a glimpse into Socrates' discussions in the marketplace and the political events that lead to the trial. Jean Silvère is a perfect choice for Socrates. Except for his wife, played by Anne Caprile, the supporting cast's acting is a bit stiff. Some of the sets have painted backgrounds, but by and large the imagery gives one the feeling of being in Ancient Greece. The English subtitles are sometimes hard to keep up with because there is a lot of fast dialog. The script, however, is strong and captures the essence of the Platonic view of Socrates' last days. I highly recommend this movie.

User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN

Apparently, no one else has seen this. That's a pity. Anyone who has studied Plato would love it, I think. Of course, it doesn't beat the actual reading of Plato's dialogues, but it's a nice supplement. The adaptation is straightforward. The Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo are reduced in size, but their contents are there. Also there is to be found pieces of The Republic and many others that I probably haven't read yet (the Protagoras and Lysias are mentioned directly). The Symposium, which is the only dialogue that I can say I know particularly well, is briefly alluded to. There's also a great scene where a man teases Socrates by citing Aristophanes' The Clouds, which was the play that, according to the Apology, sowed the seeds of his death. Rosselini's direction is subtle and exquisite. The camera moves perfectly. The production design is great. A lot of research went into this to make it as accurate as possible. I don't know of any film that has done as well in these aspects. The acting is also perfect. The man who plays Socrates IS Socrates. 9/10.

The Films of Roberto Rossellini [Michael E. Grost]

The unyielding artist, his beliefs and enemies. Athens is the toga-wrapped brain, Sparta the shield-and-sword brawn; imposing walls are torn down at the beginning, is this "a new era" or postwar Berlin redux? Socrates (Jean Sylvère) ambles through with entourage and defuses a potential showdown via the humbleness of lucidity: "I know I know nothing." Roberto Rossellini has painted temples at his disposal yet pauses to register sandal marks left on the ground, the dirt under Athenian marble -- it takes a great questioner to study another ("the only joy is the search for the truth"). There are extended debates and procedural views of the cradle of democracy as ballots are cast into a pot and fished out by a blindfolded youth. The shooting is marked by dignity and discretion (and also a pinch of Corman's airiness in Atlas), a modernist score overtakes the harps for the occasional foreboding note. Socrates' open-air trail for "corrupting the young" hinges on a filibustering close-up that reveals this as the great, trenchant political work it is, with bits of The Apology and Crito passing before the camera before zoom and dissolve. Rossellini's exchange of Socrates' gayness for a tantrum-throwing wife (Anne Caprile) is an element that, like the vanishing lesbians in Wyler's These Three, nevertheless remains submerged in the character's disposition as an outsider. The philosopher deems himself a midwife of ideas, yet he seems to contribute to the growing age of pedantry as much as dispute it; Socrates' cave is Louis XIV's chamber and Blaise Pascal's dark bedroom, he gulps down poison and takes solace in knowledge. "How are you so calm with death so near?" "I reason." Osborne's Luther is a variant, Snyder's 300 its antithesis. With Ricardo Palacios, Giuseppe Mannajuolo, Antonio Medina, and Julio Morales.

Movie Review - Socrates - ' Socrates' Mirrors the Platonic Touch ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times

BLAISE PASCAL – made for TV

Italy France (131 mi) 1972

Blaise Pascal | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Not a biography of Pascal so much as a panoramic vision of his entire era, Blaise Pascal is one of the best episodes in the monumental historical project that occupied the last years of Rossellini's career. Made for Italian television in 1973, it dramatizes the struggle between reason and faith that informed the 17th century, but it does so with no obvious dramatic devices, or any sense that the action has been manipulated to prove a thesis. In Rossellini's films, observation becomes a high art: to look is to learn.

Blaise Pascal Time Out London

A thrilling, intense chronicle analysing the thought and development of 'a very boring man who never made love in his life' (Rossellini). The 17th century scientist and philosopher struggles with a society which believes in witchcraft and ridicules his discovery of the vacuum. Notions of both are made concrete as the film illustrates Pascal painfully pushing Europe towards Enlightenment. Discoursing with Descartes, he explains the necessity of limits to reason for the existence of God. And the 20th century audience understands, recognising a world explored with extraordinary lucidity and simplicity. Faith grapples with empiricism, reason routs superstition, and with every frame, Rossellini reinvents the historical biography.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

One long take stupefies: A servant awakens on the floor of a luxurious bedroom and rouses his master the Chancellor (Bernard Rigal), who has a morning prayer in bed before moving to his armchair to have hands and feet washed, no rush; about three and a half minutes into the six-minute passage, the guests are called in bearing news of Blaise Pascal's invention, the world's first adding machine. Pascal was "a very boring character," Roberto Rossellini notes, and how to make a movie about a man who never made love in his life? The philosopher-mathematician (Pierre Arditi) is first seen filling in for his father's secretary, tabulating taxes with a quill pen on the edge of the frame, and dies in bed after receiving the sacraments, similarly tucked away in the corner of an august composition. In between, there's the terror of 17th-century France: A trial is rushed along so that taxes can be granted on time, the accused "witch" (Anne Caprile) is brought in, shattered by torture and ready to offer her soul to the system, the slow zoom from her face to the black clothes of her accusers elucidates Rossellini's distillation since Joan at the Stake. "Such things bewilder me," Blaise sighs. Reason stands next to malignant superstition, and also to faith and impulse -- when his sister Jacqueline (Rita Forzano) says that his calculations "will never be as beautiful as God's creatures," Pascal counters that his theorems are just as much a part of the Divine Creation. The protagonist employs syringe and water to verify the existence of a vacuum (thus, of infinity) and wages on the convenience of Heaven; Jacqueline follows emotion and dies in a Jansenist monastery, Pascal hangs on to "clear knowledge" through protracted sickness, and Rossellini honors both sides of the era's metaphysical split. (There's little room for the luminous feeling of wholeness of The Age of the Medici.) It ends as it began, wondrously bare, with the dawning realization that the most Socratic of directors has just given us a surreptitious portrait of Keats. With Giuseppe Addobbati, Christian De Sica, Livio Galassi, and Teresa Ricci.

Rossellini (part I) Zach Campbell from Elusive Lucidity, December 1, 2006

Some aspects of Roberto Rossellini ... triggered by a double bill of Blaise Pascal ('71) and India ('59).

Mystic: A deeply spiritual filmmaker; Nicole Brenez described in her original Movie Mutations letter that Stromboli ('50), whose religiosity offended her leftist anti-clericalism, provided a experience to be scaled like a mountain. It took effort for her to let Rossellini "in." Rossellini is not necessarily concerned with miracles as a rule, however: in his work faith is applied to that which perfectly natural and phenomenological, but whose significance comes out, creeps up, overwhelms the characters and the viewers. Socratic: Blaise Pascal really got me thinking about Rossellini as a Socratic filmmaker. To bring up Brenez again, in her piece on Godard in For Ever Godard she mentions how Godard likened Rossellini to Socrates--'a guy who just asked questions.' Throughout his cinema there are defenses of a free spirit, denunciations of any kind of persecution which limits questions. Formalist: amidst ostensibly unfussy, competent frames we will see a camera movement or a composition slowly fall into place which is breathtaking, as time unfolds we may be aware that Rossellini's kino-eye is submerged within the fabric of all his shots. He's not a showy filmmaker, but there are moments where the rigor comes through, because the images' feeling of naturalism periodically dissolves before our eyes.

Blaise Pascal is part of the often low-budget early modern costume film stratum that seemed to flourish in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In its pulpish forms (such as Matthew Reeves' Conqueror Worm/Witchfinder General and various other torture movies), this barebones staginess often served to underline sensationalism (a cut to or from a gory image; the presence of a violent or erotic shot). That is, unlike something like Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, '97), the images for these kinds of films are often clean, the sets and costumes may be sufficiently ornate but the filmmakers aren't usually going for complicated, deep, sophisticated, lush, porous images, but for flat or simple-perspective ones. Things are spare, and on the soundtrack you can hear footsteps. There are more "artful" early modern costume films of this era, of which Blaise Pascal is an example, who use some of this (possibly budgetary) "plainness" to foreground really ineffable ideas and tones--I'm thinking also of Winstanley ('75), The Immortal Story ('68), A Walk with Love and Death ('69), and the medieval-set films Lancelot du lac ('74) and Blanche ('71). (A counter-example might be Ken Russell's more "baroque" compositions in his amazing film The Devils, or Has' Saragossa Manuscript.)

Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment Criterion essay by Tag Gallagher, December 25, 2008

PRESS NOTES: THE ROYAL TREATMENT January 14, 2009

Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini's History Films—Renaissance and ... Criterion Collection

ways of seeing [Yoel Meranda]

BLAISE PASCAL (Roberto Rossellini, 1971) « Dennis Grunes

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AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO – made for TV

Italy (120 mi) 1972

Augustine of Hippo Time Out London

By concentrating on supremely important questions in a cool, apparently artless way, Rossellini's film (made for TV) forces a very dramatic tension. The life of Saint Augustine during the decadence of the Roman Empire becomes the axis for debates on politics and power, morality and conscience: how can a state survive with Christian morals? From this seemingly impossible (and un-filmable) brief, Rossellini achieves moments of devastating clarity.

User reviews from imdb Author: simon-1303 from United Kingdom

This is generally enjoyable. It does a reasonably good job of situating the drama in 5th century Roman Africa, even though the external sets are obviously contemporary (to Rossellini) Roman remains. The interiors are well done and convincing. The drama is dramatic when it needs to be, though there are some lengthy theological discussions, and one does get a sense of the power of St. Augustine's preaching, of the theological disputes of the time and of the tasks of a bishop. The scenes from his life, though limited till his later life, are well chosen to illustrate his character and accomplishments. I'm not sure that I found the principal character terribly convincing or that characterisation came through strongly, but this two dimensional element fitted the didactic style of the film and the art of the time.

User reviews from imdb Author: kcvtb (kcvtb@yahoo.com) from El Paso TX

I have used this film in class as long ago as the 1970s and found it a very helpful visualization and supplement to textual study of the life and work of Augustine. There was a lot of imagination put into representing the later Roman empire as it really was, and even the specialist will find details to admire and little to quibble with. Having looked for it in VHS/DVD for years, I finally came upon a copy in a bookstore in the Vatican in October 2006 and now see that it can be ordered from the online Italian bookseller, bol.it -- dialogue in Italian and comes also with Italian subtitles. There *was* an English-subtitled film version, but that seems not now available. But if teacher or students have even a little Italian and teacher has a decent knowledge of Augustine, this is well worth it. As the other comment says, leisurely but gripping if you let it.

User reviews from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

This was one of a series of films made by Roberto Rossellini late in his career about important historical figures who changed the world in a significant way. They included "Socrates", "Descartes", "The Messiah", "Blaise Pascal," "The Age of the Medici". The subject here is Saint Augustine (354-430), who became Bishop of Hippo in northern Africa, living and working in that era that marked the fall of the Roman Empire. It is not a devotional film or saintly biography in any conventional sense but an attempt to understand how a visionary and philosophical Christian faced the problems of his age. Augustine had dealings with barbarians, heretics, youth gangs, social misfits of all kinds. Civilization was in great flux and that era bore a great resemblance to our own. Augustine's advice to us is that we must exercise our intellects in the never ending search to know and see things as they are. It is the same advice of Leon Battista Alberti in Rossellini's Medici film and is the same advice the director himself has persistently offered all of us. The film is illustrative, talky, leisurely as are the others in this series, but it has a way of grabbing you and challenging you if you are capable of succumbing to its richness.

THE AGE OF THE MEDICI – made for TV

Italy (255 mi) 1972

The Age of Cosimo de Medici Time Out London

Rossellini's trilogy portraying the eruption of Renaissance Florence was originally made for TV (Part One: The Exile of Cosimo de Medici; Part Two: The Power of Cosimo de Medici; Part Three: Leon Battista Alberti). Cosimo's rise to power, his exile and return, are related in scenes of austere beauty which animate the economic, legal, military, religious and aesthetic structures of a 15th century city state. Cosimo, the artists, the merchants, the tax-collectors and the priests are all vivid Renaissance men, yet men understood not in an individual psychological frame, but in a historical materialist one. Certain sequences force a complete reappraisal of screen history: an explanation of the tax system, a discussion about architecture, an election to the ruling council, open up ways of seeing the past to which British television obstinately remains largely blind. The revealed world is both patently artificial and startlingly real. Rossellini's restless camera analyses and interrogates the continually stimulating debates about power and freewill. And the greatest achievement is the trilogy's final section, focusing on scholar and artist Leon Battista Alberti. Through him we understand the emergence of the humanist consciousness; through him we recognise the birth of our culture.

User reviews from imdb Author: simon-1303 from United Kingdom

This is not really a drama; instead it's social, economic and political history told through sophisticated conversations between the protagonists and the odd set piece confrontation. Interactions are illustrative rather than performed. The positives are the real life settings using period buildings and cityscapes, the fascinating costumes and furnishings and the generally well done portrayal of interactions at the highest level. The subjects range widely: commerce, banking, arts, architecture, politics, diplomacy, government, though they are not covered in detail, with Rosselini skimming the surface in an appealing though superficial way. One might say one gets a feel for the themes of the period and it will be enjoyed more by those who don't know much about the period already.

So it doesn't have much on personal or family relationships, convincing conflict or intrigue, a sense of how the elite actually lived or much at all about the poorer section of the population. Think of it as a traditional history textbook with very rich illustrations.

Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce

The historical epic as rational discourse, which without having to once raise its voice becomes overwhelming. Roberto Rossellini's Renaissance Florence provides a marketplace for ideas, arts, enlightenment, but his three-part work starts out in the dark -- the head of the Medici house lies on a ceremonial slab, Cosimo de Medici (Marcello di Falco) retires to another chamber for the will's reading while intrigue is murmured among the guests. The war goes on, villages are pillaged (a building is invaded and burned down, one unbroken take studied via the zoom); Cosimo is banished but, "a great chess player," he comes back to end the conflict and solidify the church, with a whiff of Mafia in his ruthlessness. The well-oiled economic system assures Florence's artistic prosperity, gold makes it "the center of the world": the traveler who's been to the edges of the globe praises the Medicis for making "plunder an ethic, avarice a philosophy." It's the age of capitalism, yet also of Masaccio and Donatello, all flourishing under the benign dictatorship of Cosimo, a harmony of art and commerce hardly found by the director in the movie business. The most hopeful of Rossellini's avant-garde time-machines, technique transcending itself in a lesson of perspective as the curving pan around the pulpit is followed by a reverse track and finally flattened the zooms -- the style is Preminger's in Saint Joan (the siege at Orleans is heard, second-hand, from a soldier on the road), taken through A Man for All Seasons then passed through the eye of a needle until it is translucent. All of it is incalculably lucid, like the visiting Wadding (Lincoln Tate) pondering "useless beauty" while a Masaccio fresco gets its finishing touches or Leon Battista Alberti (Virgilio Gazzolo) dispelling the mysticism of the magic scrim that so dazzles his guests. When love poems are recited on the streets in strangely disembodied English voices, however, we venture "far from the clarity of Aristotle's logic and into a cloudy world of dreams." Rossellini never separates one from the other, for "the careful analysis of art increases my wonder." With Tom Felleghy, Mario Erpichini, Adriano Amidei Migliano, John Stacy, Sergio Nicolai, and Michel Bardinet.

Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment Criterion essay by Tag Gallagher, December 25, 2008

PRESS NOTES: THE ROYAL TREATMENT January 14, 2009

Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment Criterion essay by Tag Gallagher, December 25, 2008

Making Reality • Senses of Cinema Tag Gallagher from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004

Now on DVD: "The Age of the Medici" (Rossellini, 1973) Daniel Kasman from Mubi, January 20, 2009

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Critic's Choice - Roberto Rossellini's History Films - NYTimes.com Dave Kehr from The New York Times, January 12, 2009

CARTESIUS – made for TV

aka: Descartes

Italy France (152 mi) 1974

User reviews from imdb Author: antonkjacobs from Kansas City, MO, USA

This film is excellent for intellectual history. I've studied Descartes and the history of his time, and this film is spot on accurate, so it seems to me. For those interested in the history of philosophy and the rise of modern science, it is well worth the two-and-a-half-hour watch. For instructors in the classroom: The acting feels a bit staged, and the film is almost entirely seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific debate. So sleep-deprived students would not be able to sit for long viewings without falling asleep. However, particular scenes, especially of key moments in the development of Descartes's philosophy can be selected out and offer terrific visuals to accompany the teaching of Cartesian philosophy and/or the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. Certainly the whole film could be shown in segments in a course entirely on Descartes. The film also captures insights into the religious hegemony and theological debates in Europe at the end of the Reformation. Because the film is in Italian, it would also be an excellent exercise for those studying Italian since every scene is a matter of dialogue.

User reviews from imdb Author: whist from United States

Extremely good value for folks interested in the history of science, history of rationalism, or mid-renaissance thinkers and culture. Rossellini's very sober Cartesius is a chronicle of Descartes' life and times, following him through Europe as he develops his ideas about science and existence. Rossellini shows us the genius Descartes, but also shows us quietly that he could get things wrong and that he was a product of his times.

The production has some weaknesses as well as some strengths. The music, as another reviewer has mentioned, is odd and over-used. The acting is adequate but never more than that. There is a tableau quality to scenes throughout the film – the people are stiff and come across as conduits of the dialogue rather than actually speaking. There are some real pluses too. During the entirety of one scene in which Descartes is describing his philosophy to a printer, two men work a printing press – one placing the blank pages on the type set that he has daubed with ink, and the other turning the screw a half turn, then back. There are several other scenes that show craftspeople engaged in their work. Finally, I found it refreshing that everyone, French, Dutch, and English, spoke Italian - leaving me to figure out nationality by clothing styles and names.

If Cartesius turns out to be your cup of tea, you may like Potop (The Deluge), directed by Jerzy Hoffman, set in Poland around the time of Descartes (and Gustav Adolph). While a very different approach to filmed history, it is a colourful and interesting story.

User reviews from imdb Author: tentender from France

Part of Roberto Rossellini's Italian TV series on philosophers in history (other titles: Socrates, Blaise Pascal), this three hour chunk of television is, like the other titles, riveting in its own unique way. Granted it is a talk fest, but imagine listening to the leading lights of Renaissance Italy, Holland, and France talking for three hours on the subject dearest to their hearts: scientific investigation and its relation to the Church (which meant only one thing at the time, of course: the Roman Catholic church). It is an edifying three hours, but, this may surprise you, a very entertaining three hours as well. Negative points, however, to the rather annoying Mario Nascimbene score (though annoying in a way that doesn't really distract from the action). Rossellini's attention to quotidian detail is always fascinating. (In "Socrates," for example, Socrates goes to market, and his fish is wrapped to go -- in a piece of lettuce!) Shown at the Cinematheque Francaise in a Rossellini complete retrospective, in a print that was, unfortunately, badly faded. But that's videotape for you. FOLLOW-UP, summer 2009: My title is no longer valid, now that the Criterion Eclipse series has released this in a pristine print. The score (now that I have recognized that all the Nascimbene scores for Rossellini are rather interesting wallpaper) annoyed me not at all. While less well-sustained than "Blaise Pascal" (a major masterpiece), "Cartesius" is still quite interesting, though maybe not exactly riveting, for Descartes, it would seem, was not as fully integrated a personality as was Pascal. This is nicely summed up in a scene where Descartes is about to abandon (for work) his child and her mother. "She is beautiful because she is perfect," he says. "For me she is a miracle," says Helene, the mother. "No, she is not a miracle. She is a perfect machine of nature."

Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment Criterion essay by Tag Gallagher, December 25, 2008

PRESS NOTES: THE ROYAL TREATMENT January 14, 2009

Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment Criterion essay by Tag Gallagher, December 25, 2008

A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Roberto Rossellini's ... David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast, October 18, 2010

DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions

DVDTown [Christopher Long] Criterion Collection

DVD Verdict- Rossellini's History Films [Dylan Charles] Criterion Collection

Film as Art [Danél Griffin]

ITALY: YEAR ONE (Anno Uno)

Italy (123 mi) 1974

Italy: Year One Time Out London

Rossellini's return to the cinema after twelve years working for television: a sympathetic, idealised - and almost universally reviled - portrait of Italy's postwar statesman Alcide De Gasperi (played by Vannucchi), the Christian Democrat leader who successfully kept the Communists out of the government, it is indeed hard to swallow. Its flaw is obvious: from 1945's chaos through anti-Communist coalitions, the historical realities are too close to bear De Gasperi's saint-like depiction. Its major saving irony is that it shows the conditions for historical choices in a much more illuminating light than its reactionary ticket would allow. So, although by no means the best, it's the most provocative of Rossellini's historical biographies, looking suspiciously like a triumph for the devil's advocate.

User reviews from imdb Author: tentender from France

Even Rossellini's principal apologist, Tag Gallagher, doesn't make great claims for this film, characterizing it as a talkfest featuring a rather sullen main character. True enough, I suppose. It is also, however, about a subject that could be of particular interest today: how to rule without losing one's conscience and ideals. The scene is post World War II Italy, the country in shambles and political parties unable to form a workable coalition. The film follows the struggle of the Christian Democrats to rule, constantly menaced by, above all, the Communists, who make democratic rule difficult. Christian Democrat leader De Gasperi is the protagonist, and, while he does appear glum (not unlike Rossellini's "Blaise Pascal") he is also superbly eloquent and when he talks (which is a great deal of the time) it is worth listening. As to the specifically filmic side of things: Rossellini's famous long takes (aided strongly by his superb dolly and zoom lens techniques) are much in evidence. The art direction is (apparently) flawless: one doesn't doubt for a moment that one is in postwar Italy. The greater achievement in that the film dates from 1974, when everything on American screens (from The Great Gatsby to The Way We Were) looked like 1974! Consequently, this film has not dated at all. Nor, of course, has it been much seen. (I am shocked that this is the third Rossellini film for which I am the first IMDb reviewer.) It is available (very cheaply) in a Region 2 two-sided DVD in a beautiful print. (The other side is a rather awful print of "11 Fioretti di San Francesco".) French subtitles only (and there are a million of them). If you read French (or speak Italian -- Italian s.t. only) and have a Region 2 player, this is well worth a look.

Anno uno AKA Year One (1974) - Roberto Rossellini worldscinema

IL MESSIA (The Messiah)

Italy France (140 mi) 1975

User reviews from imdb Author: DivineComedy from New York

This is an incredible movie, and for many reasons. No one in Hollywood could make such a low-key, authentic, and INTELLIGENT historic drama, especially considering subject matter. The first 20 minutes is a concise and brilliant history of the Jews. And then the life: It is the life of Jesus without the miracles. Like the priest in Open City (by Rossellini), R understands that the struggle is to live a good life. Most Biblical movies are a total insult. This is extraordinary. The actors are believable. It feels raw -- but controlled raw, if that makes sense. Again: authentic. Believable.

THE MESSIAH (Roberto Rossellini, 1975) « Dennis Grunes April 20, 2007

No matter what impact he has had on history, Jesus Christ has not fared well on film. Discounting symbolic accounts, including those revolving around a Christ figure, only three of heaven knows how many films I have seen have stayed with me. One isn’t even a complete film; it’s an episode in, from Sweden, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (1919). With its open air freshness and spiritual beauty, this remains remarkable Christ material, and the balance of the film isn’t ponderous like the American film on whose structure Dreyer modeled the structure of his: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). At his death in the mid-’60s, Dreyer left unrealized the full-scale film about Jesus he had scripted and planned; given the spiritual intensity of Ordet (1954), perhaps the finest expression of Christian faith in cinema, one doesn’t doubt that Dreyer’s Christ film, had he made it, would have been another of his masterpieces. Two sound films are of interest here, one that surpasses Dreyer’s Leaves and one that does not. The finest rendering of Christ material in cinema remains Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), with its rabble-rousing Leftist Jesus, and the filmmaker’s own mother, Susanna, achingly wonderful as Mary, the mother of Jesus. Patiently filmed by Pasolini, and beautifully photographed in black and white by Tonino delli Colli, this is the film that best conveys the power of the myth of Christ—the deep impression of solemn joy that his miraculous nature brought forth, encompassing the resurrection of Lazarus and Jesus’s own “rising” from the tomb after being killed by Jerusalem’s occupying Romans, according to the tale. His reappearance after death to tell followers “I will be with you always” is, apart from the conclusion of Dreyer’s Ordet, the single most thrilling such moment in cinema, though, of course, in context, Pasolini, a Marxist and a humanist, and not a religionist, is stressing Christ’s legacy of socialism and humane activism. Beautiful film, this, and with a script whose one source is the gospel that gives the film its title.

The other sound film in this group is The Messiah, by Roberto Rossellini. Rossellini himself did not see it released. He completed the film, commissioned for Italian television, in 1975; three years waited before the film saw the light of day, by which time Rossellini had passed from earth. Perhaps he, Dreyer and Pasolini are still comparing notes on the other side.

At the outset let me stipulate a fact and an opinion: I myself am not a believer (and who knows whether Rossellini was, either); part of a body of work of present-tense histories that engaged Rossellini’s interest in the final phase of his career, The Messiah is nowhere near the exalted level of The Rise of Louis XIV (1966), Blaise Pascal (1972) and The Age of Cosimo de Medici (1973), all done for either French or Italian TV. Rossellini was a humanist, not a religionist; and, in truth, the subject matter of a film about Jesus doesn’t make for a perfect fit. On the other hand, Rossellini’s highest attainment, co-written by Federico Fellini, remains Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), about St. Francis—a tremendous work that locates the point where Italian humanism and spiritual faith cross. However, in tone and affect The Messiah is much closer to Rossellini’s Socrates (1971). Teacher though he was, I am not sure that Jesus qualifies as a man of reason, and Rossellini finds no other way of approaching him in the film. Once a humanist, always a humanist.

The Messiah has other problems besides. Its prefatory condensation of Hebrew history, reaching all the way back to the first Hebrew king, Saul, is telescopic foolishness. Eleven centuries of history are hopelessly resistant to such a reduction, especially when the rationale, a turning-in-the-mind of the Hebraic concept of, and ambivalence towards, kingship floats uneasily betwixt the provinces of history and myth. Moreover, the anti-Semitic taint of the enterprise spreads like a cancer through the film. Forget about a single Judas among the disciples; in this film, Judas is a symbolic stand-in for the Pharisees, the whole lot of whom are arrayed against Jesus in a tribal eruption of hate that hews to the ridiculous line, a rationale for anti-Jewish bigotry through the ages, that the crucifixion of Christ can be laid at the feet of the Jewish people. Oh, the Romans? They’re given a pass, with even Pontius Pilate emerging as a man of dignity and fairness who is reluctant to condemn Jesus but for the interminable insistence of all those unkempt, clamorous Jews. This bias betrays itself most blatantly when the incontestably Roman act of nailing Christ to the Cross is relegated to the wilderness of offscreen action. And, as if to add insult to injury, Rossellini has populated his film with Arabs playing Jews—at best an insensitive (if physically convincing) approach to casting the film.

Alas, all this reminds one of Rossellini’s own history. Rossellini remained a Fascist filmmaker until 1943 when, in collaboration with Fellini, he shifted his allegiance to the Resistance with the surreptitiously shot, neorealist Rome, Open City (1945), one of the most politically passionate films ever made. For eight years, then, Rossellini subordinated his art to Mussolini’s interests. I know, I know: as an Italian filmmaker, he couldn’t do otherwise if he wanted to work, and he needed to work in order to develop his craft. (Coming from wealth, though, he did not need the money.) And, indeed, we have all given him a pass on all this for the riches he has given us in return, some of the world’s most probing and incisive films about the Second World War and, in Europe, its conflicted, complex aftermath; and, later, his glorious histories analyzing power and celebrating reason, and demonstrating their combined role in Western accomplishment. I even understand that it may be national pride that moved Rossellini to cast such a favorable light on the Romans, which meant overlooking their brutality and, concomitantly, viewing Jews, except for Jesus, his family and loyal disciples, in a less than flattering light. All the same, The Messiah distresses with the memories it calls up regarding Rossellini’s professional past.

Coming after Blaise Pascal, a brilliant film, for instance, The Messiah is a distinct letdown.

But it’s a remarkable piece of work nevertheless, with an unexpected and tantalizing point of view. For Rossellini’s Messiah reduces Jesus close to invisibility in order to shift focus and clarify its theme. It is the idea of a messiah that is the central interest here; Jesus Christ is of interest only to the extent that he may be the promised deliverer of the Jews. For Rossellini’s cameras, pitched at a distance, threaten to lose the character of Jesus to space and obscurity, and move in on him only when the film has cumulatively advanced that Jesus in and of himself is a nothing, a cipher, on whom his followers project one burden of associations, on whom Jewish doubters project, derisively, another burden of associations, and whom the Romans discount altogether. Contributing to this outcome of meaning, besides the mostly long-shots primarily applied to Jesus early on, is the portrayal of him as the mildest, most recessive rabbi, the most ordinary and uninspiring teacher imaginable, as well as the relative activity of those surrounding him. Jesus Christ, like Moby-Dick, emerges, then, as a dead center, but without the blind force that Melville’s White Whale also possesses.

Everyone notices this about the film. Whereas others see it as an index of Rossellini’s failure, though, I see it as a window in on his intent. For Rossellini’s Christ is a resonant blank, a sincere moral guide perhaps buttressing his low grade of “classroom charisma” by opportunistically tapping into the interest, even hysteria, involving a hoped-for messiah. In the main, however, it is others who make more of him than Jesus is capable of making of himself; his followers are the ones who make him over in their minds to be the way they need him to be. In this light, the carping Pharisees emerge as a grotesque parody of Jesus’s followers, the naysayers reacting less to Jesus than to his yeasayers, who are insisting, on little evidence, that Jesus fulfills scriptural prophecy relating to the coming of a messiah. In the same light, Rossellini’s decision to leave out Christ’s soul-searching comments on the Cross—“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,” “My Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” etc.—makes sense; it keeps the focus from shifting to Jesus even in his most agonizing and ultimate moment on earth. Rossellini, in long-shot, from the vantage of Jesus’s witnessing mother, simply records the crucified man’s head quickly, silently dropping—a mysterious moment, perhaps, but one nevertheless matter-of-fact. In this light, too, the scant long-ago history that the film gives falls into a necessary, if reductive, place; for it sketches in a duo-faceted premise: the hysterical need some have for such a messiah as they believe Jesus to be; the equally hysterical abhorrence of the whole idea that motivates others. Balancing these factions are the reasonable Romans who perceive Jesus, first, as a harmless and, then, as a civilly disruptive phenomenon.

I worry that my “reading” sounds like an infidel’s clever revenge on the film for its whole tenor. But my reading not only fits the film, it nearly unifies it. It’s also Rossellinian. For when Jesus’s tomb, despite having been guarded, is revealed as empty at the end, the cumulative question becomes: What will people make of this? The sense of such a question restores the film to the series of present-tense histories it concludes. One can argue, I suppose, that in treating no less than Jesus Rossellini meant for this film to be a daring departure from the works of his preceding it. After all, Rossellini by no means scripted the death—his own—that lends his Messiah the aura of such radical difference. In fact, Rossellini intended to continue his historical series, with a film about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s later life—the film that became, under Claude Goretta’s inspired direction, The Roads of Exile (1978).

Rossellini’s color cinematographer here, Mario Montuori, is most responsible for deepening Rossellini’s sense of the moment into a hint of timelessness. Montuori believes in The Messiah. I remain unsure that Rossellini was so sure. In any case, his film casts a spell and, like Robert Browning’s amazing poem “An Epistle (Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician),” closes on a note of haunting possibility.

User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Rossen, Robert

BODY AND SOUL A- 94

USA (104 mi) 1947

Money’s got no conscience, Charlie. Here, take it. —Roberts (Lloyd Gough)

According to film critic Jim Hoberman, author of several books and longtime critic for The Village Voice, BODY AND SOUL (1947) is the most Jewish film released between THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) and THE PRODUCERS (1967), where more communists worked on this movie than any other American film, described as the product of the most concentrated leftist radical energy ever seen in Hollywood, released shortly before the House Un-American Activities Committee held nine days of hearings in October 1947 into alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. This was precipitated by a July 29, 1946 column entitled “A Vote for Joe Stalin” written by William R. Wilkerson, publisher and founder of The Hollywood Reporter, who provided a list of alleged communists and their sympathizers. Drawing upon the list, which included 43 subpoenaed names, 19 of whom refused to testify, leading to ten writers and directors known as the Hollywood Ten who were cited for contempt of Congress and immediately fired the next day by the studios, creating a Hollywood blacklist on November 25, 1947. Eventually more than 300 artists, including directors, radio commentators, actors, and most notably screenwriters were blacklisted by the studios in hearings that lasted into the early 1950’s. While the blacklist was rarely made explicit or verifiable, it directly damaged the careers of scores of individuals working in the motion picture industry, some of whom left the country to find work elsewhere, while some worked under aliases, and others remained out of work for over a decade. The blacklist was rooted in events of the 30’s during the Great Depression when two major industry strikes increased tensions between the producers and the unions, particularly the Screen Writers Guild, which came under attack by the House Un-American Activities Committee for the radical leanings of many of its members, which escalated in 1947 when more than a dozen writers were called to testify. Among the films scrutinized by the committee were Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), something of a surprise, and Edward Dmytryk’s CROSSFIRE (1947), a searing portrait of anti-Semitism, where Dmytryk is one of the Hollywood Ten. While there was a wartime alliance against Hitler and Nazi Germany between the United States and the Soviet Union, postwar perceptions changed, with communists increasingly coming under fire, becoming a focus of American fears and hatred. Of interest, in 2012, in a 65^th anniversary article, Wilkerson’s son apologized for the newspaper’s role in the blacklist, claiming his father was motivated by revenge for his own thwarted ambition to own a studio. The committee was always looking for a big named Hollywood star to provide an exclamation point to their work, placing much of their emphasis on John Garfield who was called before the HUAC committee in 1951.

John Garfield was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Russian Jewish immigrants in a poor, working class neighborhood where communists were not unusual and were simply part of the everyday landscape, joining Lee Strasberg’s New York-based Group Theater before moving to Hollywood in the late 30’s where he became associated with gritty, hard-nosed, and working-class characters. While his wife was a communist, as was his secretary, there’s no indication Garfield was ever a member, nonetheless the House Un-American Activities Committee hounded Garfield to his death, as after his original testimony, he learned they were reviewing the transcripts for possible perjury charges, where he died at the age of 39 of a heart attack, allegedly aggravated by the stress of the blacklisting. Director Robert Rossen’s parents were also Russian Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, where both Rossen and Garfield ran in a similar gang-infested world of gamblers, bootleggers, hustlers, and prostitutes, where Rossen was drawn to the Communist Party as a form of social protest against the disillusionment caused by the social and economic hardships of the Depression in the 30’s. Add to this screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, also from Russian Jewish parents in New York, where we begin to see a pattern of real life that left an imprint on each of these artists. Rossen was blacklisted in 1951, one of the 19 unfriendly witnesses who refused to testify in 1947, but felt deceived and disillusioned by the Communist Party’s support of the brutal Russian dictatorship under Stalin, breaking all prior ties with the party in 1949, but was able to work again in 1953 after providing the names of 57 other people who were or had been communists. If one explores the narrative of his later work THE HUSTLER (1961), in many ways it parallels the themes and storyline of BODY AND SOUL. It’s also interesting that ALL THE KING’S MEN (1949), directed before the blacklisting, and THE HUSTLER (1961), directed afterwards, were both selected to the National Film Registry. Both Polonsky and Garfield, teamed up again in Force of Evil (1948), were blacklisted as much for the tone of their films as their politics, where Polonsky’s heroes are cocky, self-assured loners who are outside the mainstream of society, the kind of guys that break the rules in order to get ahead, often disregarding the interests of others, while Garfield was viewed as a working class hero, a kid literally from the streets who became a success in Hollywood bringing a rough-edged authenticity to his characters. These were not the cardboard cut out caricatures of morally righteous men that dominated Hollywood cinema. Polonsky also wrote a part for a washed-up boxer (Canada Lee, a middleweight boxing champion of the 30’s, who also died shortly after being blacklisted) in BODY AND SOUL, one of the earlier examples of a black character portrayed with such humanity, a man exploited whose feelings and emotions mattered, exactly the kind of challenging work that was viewed as critical of America and raised the suspicions of the HUAC Committee.

While perhaps impossible to believe today, but in the 30’s and 40’s perhaps one-third of all boxers were Jewish, as they were the ethnic group rising from the slums to get a chance to make something of themselves. Given such skillful direction by Rossen, along with Polonsky’s blunt cynicism in a screenplay about how the system is fixed, Garfield’s own street swagger makes him born to play boxer Charlie Davis, something of an update on the Clifford Odets Group Theater play The Golden Boy, which tackles a film noir theme of a working class hero who is exploited and eventually brought down by the corrupt forces of capitalism, where the fight promoter Roberts (Lloyd Gough) could just as easily be George C. Scott as the unscrupulous manager Bert Gordon in THE HUSTLER, or Don King during the Muhammad Ali era, as he’s little more than a sophisticated gangster who bankrolls the fights, but takes no chances when it comes to his money, so he fixes the outcome, then makes a killing on the betting odds. The first boxing movie to shine a light on the sport’s ugly underbelly, the sport is still tainted by this underworld association with gambling, where Las Vegas, a town built by organized crime, continues to set the odds. It’s this lurid world of gangsters, sleaze, and trouble that provides the backdrop for the film, much of which is told in an extended flashback to happier times when Charlie was just a young punk from the slums of New York, where his family is barely scraping by running a corner candy store, where Charlie is a legend in the neighborhood, known for his quick hands, going against the wishes of his mother (Anne Revere, yes, actually related to Paul Revere) who tells him “That is no way to live, hitting people and knocking their teeth out.” But his early success draws the attention of Quinn (William Conrad), a local fight promoter with dubious underworld connections, where the dark world of boxing is balanced by the charming innocence of the girl of his dreams, Peg (Lilli Palmer, with just a trace of her native German accent), who could care less about the fight game, but loves him for who he is. The film won an Academy Award for Best Editing, as the early fight sequences streamed together, one after the other in quick succession, resemble newsreel documentary footage, spinning newspaper headlines, traveling in high speed locomotives from town to town, where his name continually rises from being at the bottom of the boxing posters until he’s one of the featured names on top. Notoriety brings the opportunity for fame and fortune, where the lure of money and a chance to fight for the title leads him to Roberts, a mob-connected promoter who dictates the terms of each fight, where the money is too good to turn down. When Peg sees who he’s dealing with, gangsters and hangers-on, and how they “take care” of Shorty (Joseph Pevney), Charlie’s longtime friend from the neighborhood who dies in an accident shortly after being roughed up, she leaves him with all the underworld undesirables, refusing to be part of that world.

With Roberts, however, Charlie rakes in the dough, becoming noticeably more greedy and ruthless, where there’s plenty of money to spread around and he’s suddenly the king of the world, drawing the attention of opportunist lounge-singer Alice (Hazel Brooks), formerly Quinn’s girlfriend, who loves the finer things in life. So long as Charlie provides the money train, she’ll play along, grabbing everything she can get, where Charlie’s too wrapped up in the bright lights to see the real picture. The constant fights, however, and the high living take a toll on him, where a guy can’t fight forever, leading to one final championship fight, seen as the ultimate payday, where like MILDRED PIERCE (1945) the whole film is one long pre-fight flashback, where his entire life is flashing before his eyes. For Charlie and his entourage, it’s all about money and success, as that’s the American Dream, but there’s an interesting scene that plays out in his mother’s kitchen, where a Jewish kid from the neighborhood is delivering his mother’s groceries, and when he sees Charlie, he can’t hold back how proud the whole neighborhood is of him, especially at a time when the Nazi’s are killing Jews in Europe. Interestingly, this 20-second segment was often cut by distributors in the European prints, a practice revealed when the scene was missing from a DVD cut from a European print, but his brief little scene may be the most interesting sequence in the film, suggesting there has to be more to live for than just money, adding a human element that elevates the film. The role of Charlie was based upon real life Jewish boxer Barney Ross, born Dov-Ber Rasofsky (also depicted in André de Toth’s 1957 film MONKEY ON MY BACK), a world champion in three weight divisions and a decorated World War II Marine veteran who fought back from drug addiction, who also came from a hard scrabble working class neighborhood where he ran around with local toughs. A rabbi’s son, where his father was the owner of a small vegetable shop in Chicago's Maxwell Street neighborhood, Ross was idolized and respected by all Americans, but he openly embraced his role not only as a winner in the ring, but as a role model for Jews against the virulent anti-Jewish venom displayed by Hitler, displaying the strength and courage of fighting back. Polonsky’s script includes the heroic view of how others see Charlie, but his view of himself is the larger question, especially when he’s ordered by Roberts to throw the fight. This ethical dilemma has a staggering impact, beautifully set up by Charlie’s rise through the ranks, where he becomes spoiled by his success, showing arrogance and greed. The fluid mobility of the fight sequences, especially the climactic fight, so beautifully shot by cinematographer James Wong Howe, was captured on rollerskates as he glided across the ring with a handheld camera, using eight different cameras in all, three on dollies, two handheld, and three on cranes hovering above, creating a dreamlike flurry of motion, where the screams of the audience and the constant flash of light bulbs from the photographers adds an astonishing level of gritty realism, where Garfield was knocked out and injured during the filming of one of his fight scenes, which is exactly what Martin Scorsese loved about the film when describing its impact on RAGING BULL (1980). But it’s Garfield’s intense personal magnetism and his ability to express human decency, however tarnished, where ultimately he refuses to be humiliated and exploited, that elevate this film to lofty heights, as he paved the way for flawed human characters, including social misfits and outsiders, like Marlon Brando and James Dean, but also fellow New Yorkers Robert de Niro and Al Pacino.

Barney Ross - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At a time—the late 1920s and '30s—when rising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was using propaganda to spread his virulently anti-Jewish philosophy, Ross was seen by American Jews as one of their greatest advocates. He represented the concept of Jews finally fighting back. Idolized and respected by all Americans, Ross showed that Jews could thrive in their new country. He made his stand against Hitler and Nazi Germany a public one. He knew that by winning boxing matches, he was displaying a new kind of strength for Jews. He also understood that Americans loved their sports heroes and if Jews wanted to be embraced in the U.S. they would have to assume such places in society. So even though Ross had lost faith in religion, he openly embraced his role as a leader of his oppressed people.

Body and Soul | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out

With its mean streets and gritty performances, its ringside corruption and low-life integrity, Body and Soul looks like a formula '40s boxing movie: the story of a (Jewish) East Side kid who makes good in the ring, forsakes his love for a nightclub floozie, and comes up against the Mob and his own conscience when he has to take a dive. But the single word which dominates the script is 'money', and it soon emerges that this is a socialist morality on Capital and the Little Man - not surprising, given the collaboration of Rossen, Polonsky (script) and Garfield, all of whom tangled with the HUAC anti-Communist hearings (Polonsky was blacklisted as a result). A curious mixture: European intelligence in an American frame, social criticism disguised as noir anxiety (the whole film is cast as one long pre-fight flashback). But Garfield's bullish performance saves the movie from its stagy moments and episodic script.

CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kyle A. Westphal

Despite his considerable stage success in Clifford Odets's boxing saga GOLDEN BOY, John Garfield was passed over for the 1939 screen version. Rouben Mamoulian's tedious and impersonal adaptation rested on the starchy shoulders of goy toy William Holden, who provided a nondescript anchor to the vaguely ethnic distress that ringed the drama's periphery. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. groomed Garfield (né Jacob Julius Garfinkle) as a coyly generic romantic foil in junk like FOUR DAUGHTERS, while simultaneously and covertly promoting him in the Jewish press as B'nai B'rith's tinsel town emissary. An actor whose Jewishness was essentially invisible to the Gentile audience for the first decade of his career, Garfield was constantly taking two steps forward and one back professionally: he provided amply decorous body heat in M-G-M loan-out THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, but the explicitly Jewish source material for HUMORESQUE was whitewashed into an insufferably self-important vehicle for Joan Crawford. Upon the expiration of his Warner Bros. contract, Garfield entered into a partnership with producer Bob Roberts at Enterprise, the short-lived independent outfit that can lay claim to only nine released features. (We can quibble about Enterprise's business acumen, but not its taste, as that roster includes BODY AND SOUL, Polonsky and Garfield's follow-up FORCE OF EVIL, Ophuls' CAUGHT, de Toth's RAMROD, Fleischer's SO THIS IS NEW YORK, and Milestone's costly fiasco ARCH OF TRIUMPH.) Whether or not Garfield--who would be silenced within five years, hectored into heart failure by HUAC--conceived of BODY AND SOUL as a second shot at GOLDEN BOY, the parallels are unmistakable. Inhabiting his signature role as a slum savant torn between old-world family expectations and the gangsters of modernity, Garfield's struggles are largely outside the boxing ring. Capable of recognizing the ramifications of his actions upon his community in ways that his GOLDEN BOY counterpart cannot, Garfield's Charley Davis is even lionized by his neighbors as the strapping Jewish American answer to Nazi genocide. Though the ethnic pride is still somewhat muted overall, it's a remarkable step up from HUMORESQUE. (By year's end, Garfield would provide the only authentically Jewish note to Fox's big-budget anti-Semitism showcase, GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT.) The political message of BODY AND SOUL hardly reaches beyond elementary Popular Front solidarity. Nevertheless BODY AND SOUL is the product of the most concentrated radical energy ever seen in Hollywood: beyond Garfield, director Robert Rossen, writer Abraham Polonsky, and actors Anne Revere, Lloyd Gough, and Canada Lee all eventually wound up in the crosshairs of the blacklist. The considerable artistry and craft elevate the familiar storyline, imbuing it with new context and urgency. Introduced by New York Times contributor and long-time Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who will offer a post-screening lecture on the connections between Judaism and the radical left.

Body and Soul (1947) - Turner Classic Movies Brian Cady

The influence of Body and Soul (1947) can be seen in every boxing film that followed, including such classics as Champion (1949) and Raging Bull (1980). Gritty realism, harsh lighting and a cynical view of the sport became the standard for fight films after the popular success of Body and Soul.

Star John Garfield had lost the lead role in Clifford Odets' Broadway boxing drama Golden Boy in 1937 despite Odets having written the role with him in mind. Shortly afterwards, Garfield went to Hollywood, signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and became a star in Four Daughters (1938). When the contract ended in 1946, Warner Brothers offered Garfield a new fifteen-year contract but he turned them down. Instead he started his own film company, Enterprise Studios. His first project: a boxing drama based on the life of Barney Ross, the middleweight champion who became a hero in the U.S. Marines, turned to drugs, and fought his way back.

The boxing theme was okay with the censors but any mention of drug addiction was then forbidden. Forced to fictionalize the story, screenwriter Abraham Polonsky devised his own; a fighter rising out of the Jewish ghetto of New York City and going along with the gangsters for a taste of the big money even if it means betraying everyone he loves. To direct, Garfield chose Robert Rossen, another Warner Brothers veteran who had just directed Johnny O'Clock (1947). As for Garfield's original plan to do a film about boxer Barney Ross, United Artists developed it into a movie biography in 1957 entitled Monkey on My Back. The director was Andre De Toth and it starred Cameron Mitchell as Ross.

Garfield pushed himself to the limit for authenticity, suffering a mild heart attack while exercising in one scene and knocking himself out when he collided with a camera boom while filming a fight with former welterweight fighter Art Darrell. This last injury gave him a head wound that took six stitches to close.

It was no wonder Garfield ran into camera equipment. Cinematographer James Wong Howe was not content to park his camera ringside. He got into the ring on roller skates, holding a 16mm camera while an assistant pushed him into the action. Said Howe, "I wanted an effect where the boxer is knocked out and he looks up into a dazzle of lights; with a heavy, fixed camera, you'd never get that."

Body and Soul opened to rave reviews and huge box office returns. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times said, "Altogether this Enterprise picture rolls up a round-by-round triumph on points until it comes through with a climactic knockout that his the all-time high in throat-catching fight films." Garfield was nominated for Best Actor by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as was Abraham Polonsky for his screenplay. Francis Lyon and Robert Parrish won the Oscar for Best Editing.

However, the success of Garfield's Enterprise Studios was short-lived. A self-professed "lifelong Democrat," Garfield hired Hollywood liberals and leftists and quickly became embroiled in the witch-hunt for Communists in Hollywood. Garfield, Polonsky, Rossen and Body and Soul actors Anne Revere and Canada Lee were all called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Their names were added to Hollywood's blacklist and their careers were either long-delayed or ended. Unable to get work in the last two years of his life, Garfield died in 1952 at the age of 49.

Ultimate Book of Sports Movies

Body and Soul was the first boxing movie to shine a light on the sport’s ugly underbelly. Previous boxing films were mostly tender love stories or lighter-than-air comedies, such as the popular Joe Palooka series. So when Body and Soul came out, it hit audiences like an uppercut to the chin.

Body and Soul took its lead from the New York State Senate inquiry into corruption in sports,specifically boxing. The investigation was attracting national headlines at the time and Americans were learning more about the shady dealings between gangsters and many boxing promoters. Body and Soul put real flesh and blood on those headlines. The film is more than 60 years old, yet it still is regarded as one of the best boxing movies ever made.

“Here are the gin and tinsel, squalor and sables of the Depression era, less daring than when first revealed in Dead End or Golden Boy,but more valid and mature because it is shown without sentiment or blur,” wrote the National Board of Review in praising Body and Soul as a triumph for director Robert Rossen and star John Garfield.

Body and Soul is the fictional story of Charlie Davis (Garfield), a Jewish kid from New York’s East Side who piles up an impressive record as an amateur boxer. His father runs a candy store and his mother wants Charlie to forget boxing and get an education. “That is no way to live, hitting people and knocking their teeth out,” she says.

But when Charlie’s father is killed (a bomb meant for the speakeasy next door takes out the candy store instead), his mother applies for welfare. When a woman from the agency comes to the house, Charlie throws her out. “We don’t need your help,” he says.He’s too proud to take a handout.

“Do you think I did it to buy myself fancy clothes?” his mother asks. “Fool, it’s for you. To learn, to get an education, to make something of yourself.”

Enraged, Charlie tells his friend Shorty (Joseph Pevney) to get in touch with Quinn (William Conrad), a boxing manager, and tell him he’s ready to turn pro.

“Tell Quinn to get me a fight,” Charlie says. “I want money,you understand? Money, money.”

“I forbid it,” his mother says. “Better you should buy a gun and shoot yourself.”

“You need money to buy a gun,” Charlie shouts back.

What follows is the standard montage of Charlie, now a professional, knocking out one opponent after another. There are the usual shots of spinning newspaper headlines, pages flipping on a calendar and train wheels rolling down the tracks. This kind of storytelling was hardly new even in 1947.

But Body and Soul takes a sharp turn when a dapper mobster named Roberts (Lloyd Gough) shows up to get his piece of the action. Charlie has been piling up the wins, but they’ve all been in small towns for small purses. If he wants to break into the big time,he’ll have to cut a deal with Roberts. Shorty sees through Roberts right away and tells Charlie that the mobster is bad news.

“He doesn’t care about you,” Shorty says. “He just wants his piece of the pie.”

“What’s the difference?” Charlie replies. “It’ll be a bigger pie, more slices for everybody.”

As soon as Roberts moves in, we see Charlie change. He becomes more greedy and ruthless. He dumps his girlfriend Peg Born (Lilli Palmer) for Alice (Hazel Brooks), a nightclub singer who was seeing Quinn. His relationship with Shorty becomes strained. But Charlie knows Roberts can pave his way to the title and that’s what he wants.

Roberts gets Charlie his shot at champion Ben Chaplin(Canada Lee). Chaplin has a blood clot on the brain, the result of a previous bout, and he is just looking for one more payday. He takes the fight with Davis knowing he will lose, but with the assurance that Davis will take it easy on him. Roberts tells Chaplin and his manager they have nothing to worry about.

“Nobody gets hurt, you have my word,” Roberts says.

But Roberts doesn’t tell Charlie anything. Fighting with his usual ferocity, Charlie knocks out Chaplin and sends him to the hospital.Shorty overhears Chaplin’s manager and Roberts arguing in the dressing room.Learning what happened, Shorty tells Roberts he’s finished with him. “And when Charlie finds out, he’ll quit, too,” Shorty says.

But Charlie doesn’t quit. He feels badly for Chaplin, he knows he got a raw deal, but Charlie also knows Roberts is where the money is.“I’m the champ,” he says. “If I walk away now, what will I do?” Disgusted, Shorty leaves Charlie. (He dies when he is struck by a car outside the nightclub.)

As the champion, Charlie succumbs to the pitfalls of wealth and celebrity. We see him dressed in flashy clothes, slurping down drinks with Alice, ripping up losing tickets at the race track and it’s all subsidized by Roberts, who keeps handing him fat envelopes full of cash with a smile and a slimy, “Here ya go, champ.”

Then one day Charlie comes around for his envelope and Roberts says, “Not so fast.” Uh oh, the bill is coming due. Roberts wants Charlie to fight the top contender, a rising star named Jackie Marlowe. And that’s not all. Roberts wants Charlie to lose.

“It’s time, Charlie,” Roberts says. “You don’t like fighting anymore, you like living too much. Take the money from this fight and buy yourself a restaurant.”

Charlie gets the picture. Roberts has his hooks in Marlowe;that’s his new meal ticket. Charlie is yesterday’s news. He is being tossed onto the trash heap as Ben Chaplin was before him. He doesn’t like the idea of tanking his last fight and he balks until Roberts slaps another fat envelope on the table.

“Money’s got no conscience, Charlie,” Roberts says. “Here, take it.” So he does.

Wrestling with his emotions and with no one else to turn to,Charlie reaches out to his mother and to Peg, his old girlfriend. When he tells them this will be his last fight, they are elated. But when he tells them it’s fixed, the mood changes. Peg slaps him across the face and walks out. . . .

Now, we don’t want to ruin the big fight, but suffice it to say, it brings Body and Soul to a rousing finish.

The film was a career highlight for Garfield, who was nominated for an Academy Award (he lost to Ronald Colman in A Double Life). It drew two other nominations—Best Original Screenplay (Abraham Polonsky) and Best Editing (Francis Lyon, Robert Parrish)—with Lyon and Parrish winning the Oscar.

Yet Body and Soul has a bitter legacy. Many of its cast and crew—including Garfield, Anne Revere, Gough,Lee and Polonsky—were called before the House Un-American Activities Commission for alleged affiliations with the Communist Party. All were blacklisted and their careers effectively ended.

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Hollywood blacklist

THE HUSTLER A 98

USA (134 mi) 1961 ‘Scope

No bar, no pinball machines, no bowling alleys, just pool... nothing else. This is Ames, mister. —cashier (Gordon B. Clarke)

One of the outstanding films of the 60’s, the kind of American classic they just don’t make any more, perhaps modeled after Marlon Brando as Terry Mallow, a guy with mixed emotions and a tormented soul, with dreams of becoming a championship boxer in Elia Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), but the seedy side of the sport gets in the way. While the general consensus for the greatest sports movies ever made tend to thrive on schmaltz and sentimentality, where the names Hoosiers (1986) or MIRACLE (2004) spring to mind, but nothing comes close to the searing realism of this film where winning at all costs is the name of the game, no matter the price, one of the bleaker psychological expressions of an athlete’s interior struggles. Few films depict the dark side of sports as blisteringly truthful as this one, where faded hopes and broken dreams must be crushed in order to overcome the pain of having lost everything. It’s a gritty and bittersweet journey expressed through magnificent black-and-white cinematography shot by Eugen Schüfftan, a master class in lighting and ‘Scope framing, where winning is not redemptive and cannot replace the value of what’s lost, actually making winning a losing proposition. Told with a downbeat tone and a jazzy score from Kenyon Hopkins, much of the film takes place in the smoky confines of a pool hall where with the technical help of 14-time world billiards champion Willie Mosconi, the action literally pops off the screen and the room comes alive, especially the opening 40-minutes of the film which are simply enthralling. Paul Newman is “Fast Eddie” Felson in a performance that arguably represents the peak of his career, showing an intensity that can't be found anywhere else in the actor’s lifetime, working the small-time pool rooms as he makes his way across the country from Oakland to New York, where when he finally reaches the pool palace that is the renown Ames Billiard Academy in Manhattan, home of the best player in the world, the resplendent Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats, also known as the Fat Man, a term affectionately used in the presence of royalty. To Eddie, the room is quiet as a church, a sacred mecca to men in his trade, but to his partner Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick) who’s accompanied him on his cross-country trek, “Looks more like a morgue to me. Those tables are the slabs they lay the stiffs on.”

Rossen and William Carroll co-wrote the brilliant screenplay, adapted from the Walter Tevis novel, where three of his six novels have been turned into movies, including THE HUSTLER (1962), the follow-up THE COLOR OF MONEY (1986), and the sci-fi movie The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Rossen was charged by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a former member of the Communist Party and after refusing to testify he was initially blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, but when he was called back he named 57 people as current or former Communists in order to revive his career. Had he not cooperated, one seriously doubts whether this film would ever have been made. Certainly the pervasive tone of cynicism and bitterness running throughout the film may have originated with his disillusionment from those McCarthy hearings. Rossen’s films reflect his sympathies for the working man, where ambition and a drive for success are common themes, where the hero is undone by flaws in his character and an often exploitive work environment, occasionally basing his screenplays on real subjects. While Minnesota Fats is a fictional character from the book, real life professional pool player Rudolf Wanderone Jr., known as “New York Fats,” always claimed the character was based on himself, turning his momentary fame into book deals and television appearances, including a series of highly publicized matches with Willie Mosconi, who plays the character Willie in the film, also seen is professional boxer Jake LaMotta, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s RAGING BULL (1980), playing a bartender, while an uncredited Blue Washington, a black actor from the early Hollywood Silent era, plays the limping pool attendant at Ames. Of noted significance, both Newman, who trained intently for the performance, and Gleason, already an accomplished player, perform their own pool shots, while several Mosconi-aided specialty shots were added for effect. But the dingy atmosphere, the grime and stench of the poolroom, with 24 hour marathon games going all day and night, are perfectly captured by Rossen, especially the raw emotion of the moment where players are in their element. Newman portrays Felson as a complicated character who thrives on the adrenaline rush, riding the tide where he runs the table with ease, cocky and confident, seemingly unbeatable, but then something happens, or a remark gets under his skin and starts to gnaw at him, literally eating him alive where he dies a little bit with each lost game. He’s a compulsive gambler who doesn’t know when to quit, riding huge winning streaks to giant cash holdings, but then is just as apt to lose it all in a downward tailspin. While the poolroom is the apparent setting, the film is more about the internal trappings of obsession, what you have to sacrifice in your life to win, and what defines a man who is searching just as hard to discover his own long lost character as he is for victories. This moral interior struggle, which is the same for anyone, is the real heart and soul of the film. Newman's iconic performance paved the way for the rebel anti-heroes of the 60’s and even the 70’s, flawed and tormented characters that would lead to the likes of Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Jack Nicholson’s FIVE EASY PIECES (1970), Al Pacino’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver (1976).

With victory so close he could taste it, Eddie revels in the illusory moment of invincibility, all liquored up and preening like a peacock instead of staying in the moment, where Eddie’s descent into defeat is monumental, losing it all, literally collapsing from exhaustion when he realizes it’s over. In this dazed stupor of letting it all get away, he spends the night in a bus station where he meets another ship drifting in the night at a coffee shop, Piper Laurie as Sarah Packard, another bleary-eyed, disillusioned soul who spends too much of her time drinking, mostly to avoid facing the truth about her own pathetic existence. Both from the school of hard knocks who have to learn the hard way, the two play house for a bit, while he recovers what’s left of his wounded pride, but eventually he feels the itch to get back into the game, letting his pent-up pride and vanity get the better of him by wiping a guy off the table and letting him know it, which only gets his thumbs broke in a decrepit warehouse district that doesn’t take kindly to pool hustlers. Sarah nurses him back to health and falls in love with him in the process, where there’s a beautiful scene of the two of them having a picnic overlooking a river where Eddie explains the feeling he gets when everything is going right and he knows he can’t lose, where he can make shots nobody’s ever made before, which is a zone athletes can all relate to, as they’ve been there before, where everything just falls into place, as if by fate. The beauty of this moment is the audience has already seen this with their own eyes in the earlier poolhall sequences, bookended later in the film with this dazzling poolhall montage The Hustler Final Pool Game HD - YouTube (1:28). Despite her declarations of love, this barely registers with Eddie, as all he wants to do is get back into the game, swallowing his pride and turning instead to one of the most vile and ferocious portraits of power and blind ambition, George C. Scott as high stakes gambler and manager Bert Gordon, one of the more thoroughly despicable characters he’s ever played, not that far removed from Lee J. Cobb’s ruthlessly corrupt union boss in ON THE WATERFRONT. Gordon is all about the money, where he’ll step over anybody who stands in his way, showcasing Eddie like he would a prize-winning racehorse. Scott was so upset he didn’t win an Oscar for this performance that he denounced the Academy and refused to accept his Best Actor award in PATTON (1970). But it’s Rossen who finds the cinema magic, beautifully blending all the swirling tragic and heartbreaking elements, perfectly edited by a young Dede Allen, ending not with resounding victory or glory, as everyone dreams of, but with intense grief and a quiet, bewildering dismay. Is this what winning looks like? Described by Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]) as “one of those films where scenes have such psychic weight that they grow in our memories,” this is one of the great character studies where the secondary performers are as memorable as the leads, offering depths of emotion rarely seen anywhere, among the most unforgettable performances ever captured in American film.

Joshua Klein from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:

In The Hustler, Pail Newman plays “Fast Eddie” Felson, a cocky pool shark who spends his time shuttling from pool hall to pool hall searching for a few suckers to scam. The vulture-like middleman George C. Scott sees promise in Eddie, and tries to teach him how keeping your cool is the key to winning, but Newman discovers the hard way that keeping your cool also means excluding everything and everybody from your life save the pool table and the man you’re trying to beat.

The spectacular black-and-white widescreen shots of smiky pool halls aside, The Hustler is a movie about people, and as such it features an array of impressive acting. Along with Newman and Scott, a laconic Jackie Gleason and a sad sack Piper Laurie, who plays Newman’s doomed, alcoholic love interest (though love may be too strong a word to describe what they share). Robert Rossen’s film remains one of the most remarkably bitter and cynical portrayals of human nature ever made, a cold-blooded depiction of a world where loyalty only lasts as long as a winning streak, and victory isn’t always distinguishable from a loss.

Slant Magazine [Arthur Ryel-Lindsey]

Newman is Fast Eddie, doing his best to convince the world that he can take on Minnesota Fats (Gleason) at pool and walk away with the world title. As always with Walter Tevis (the author of the original book), it takes defeat, and a longish dark night of the soul with Laurie, a drunken, lame waif of a woman, before he can summon the self-respect to return to battle. Rossen allows much space to the essentially concentrated, enclosed scenes of the film, and so it rests solidly on its performances. A wonderful hymn to the last true era when men of substance played pool with a vengeance.

Exclaim! James Keast

Paul Newman’s 1961 breakthrough The Hustler -- in which he plays a "born loser” pool hustler who comes up against a legend in the form of Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) -- is a cinematic masterpiece, of that there’s no doubt. That’s why it’s been reissued several times on DVD, most recently in a 2002 "Special Edition,” and now via this two-disc set, inaccurately labelled as "all new.” But a funny thing happened on the way to recycling the features and commentary from the 2002 set -- the perspective on the film changed. Most of the attention in the last "Special Edition” focused on the obvious: Newman’s tour-de-force performance, the bravura scenes around the billiards table and the pool hall culture the film portrays. But in this new version, which retains most of the featurettes while adding three new ones, the focus has shifted slightly to The Hustler as a character journey, one more interested in the arc of Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson than with the chalk-and-cue details. It’s fascinating not because these new featurettes offer much fresh insight but because the film supports both interpretations equally. If you’ve already enjoyed it, don’t be fooled by the fancy packaging -- this hustle is already very familiar. Plus: commentary, trick shot analysis, more.

The Hustler begins with a great hustle. Eddie Felson, brilliantly played by a young and gorgeous Paul Newman, leans low over a barroom pool table, inspecting the cue ball and another ball pinned together on the side rail less than a foot from the end pockets. An impossible shot, and to add to the fun, Felson's drunk. Good thing no one told him; stumbling over to the facing side, he lines up and drains the ball. His partner in this con game is a pudgy fellow named Charlie (Myron McCormick), who has the perfect look of a man so well-acquainted with losing he can see it coming a mile down the pipe and who lays a bet against his boy repeating the magic shot. Eddie tries and misses. Within seconds he has the whole pool hall betting on his chances at his third go-round.

It's a divine trick, the kind of first-scene con that quickly sets up a great many con movies. The difference here is that it's a hustle on the audience as much as the drunks who fall for the game. While Felson looks like a polished, controlled villain, he has no control. He loses more than one match on his hot-headed emotions. He alienates his only friend Charlie, and escapes his humiliations by going home with a woman he meets in the bus station. When she admits she loves him, he cannot return the favor. The only thing he feels for—which he voices in a fantastically written speech—is the poetry of his chosen game, and the chance at being the best there is.

In this way, there is no lonelier American movie than The Hustler, and no better a flawed hero than "Fast" Eddie Felson. Newman's a force of energy on screen—a guy you should never love, but cannot help siding with. Adding George C. Scott's marvelous turn as the professional gambler Bert Gordon, who hires Felson and slowly moves in between him and Sarah, the film's story becomes part Cinderella and a whole lot more Faust. In short, this is the purest examination of an athlete's internal struggle ever mounted for the screen.

The Hustler (1961) - Articles - TCM.com

There are some who wrongfully assume that The Hustler is about pool. It is a natural assumption: much of the action takes place in billiards rooms and pool halls, but this movie is no more about pool than Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is about boxing. Lead character Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) is a pool shark, but change him into a poker player or a golfer, and The Hustler would play out pretty much the same. Robert Rossen's film is far less about Fast Eddie's confrontations with other players than it is about his war with his own demons and his struggle to define the intangible meaning of "character."

When the film opens, Fast Eddie is making a living as a pool hustler, traveling around the country with his mentor and partner, Charlie (Myron McCormick), winning small amounts of cash in bars and other establishments. But Eddie yearns for something more – not only to make a big score, but to play the best. So he sets up a meeting with legendary player Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). The two go at it day and night, with Eddie deep in the black at one point ($18,000). But ego and liquor get the best of Eddie and he keeps playing until he has lost all of his winnings. He leaves a beaten man, then spends the night at a bus station, where he meets the equally rootless Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie). Like Eddie, she lacks meaning in her life. She goes to college two days a week because she's bored, then spends the rest of the time drinking. Eddie ditches Charlie and moves in with Sarah. But his pool match with Minnesota Fats did not go unnoticed. A shady character named Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) saw the whole thing, and he wants Eddie to go to work for him. When Eddie says no, Bert gives him a reality check about the difficulties of hustling without a partner or manager. It's difficult to play pool (or do much else) with two broken thumbs.

The film's central struggle is not between Eddie and Minnesota Fats, although their classic confrontations take up a quarter of the movie's running length. It's also not about Eddie's clashes with Bert, although those too comprise a significant amount of screen time. Rather, it's about Eddie's war with himself. By the end of the film, Eddie has decided who he is and what he wants out of life, but he has to learn some hard lessons to get to that point.

One of the film's key lines comes from Bert. Commenting upon Eddie's first marathon match with Fats, Bert notes that Eddie has the talent to beat the other man, but lacks a key quality that Fats possesses in abundance. When questioned about what that quality is, Bert responds, "character." For the rest of the movie, Eddie is on a quest to define that word. But it means different things to different people. To Bert (and perhaps Fats), it means arrogance and a killer instinct. Ultimately, Eddie finds another definition: integrity.

The biggest influences on Eddie are Bert and Sarah. While Bert is a pernicious, shady individual whose only interest in Eddie (or anyone else for that matter) is financial, Sarah's relationship with him is based on need and (later) love. She is not entirely stable, however. A low self image has made her vulnerable to depression and alcohol, and Bert, seeing her as a rival for Eddie's concentration, finds it an easy task to destroy her. A cutting comment here, a vicious remark there – and Sarah is on the edge. Eddie, blithely unaware of the poisonous undercurrent in Bert and Sarah's interaction, doesn't recognize the situation until it is too late.

Eddie shows all the qualities of the classic obsessive. Away from the pool table, he's a likable, charismatic individual. This is the Eddie who sweeps Sarah off her feet. However, put a cue in his hand, and reason flees. He becomes obsessed not only with winning, but with hammering his opponent into submission. He loses perspective, refuses to quit while ahead, and makes irrational decisions. Every time Eddie gets into trouble, it's because emotion brings him down. He loses to Fats because he won't stop until the “Fat Man” says the game is over (which ends up being when Eddie is out of money). He gets his thumbs broken because he showcases his talent to a lesser hustler, proving to everyone watching (including those who have lost money to him) that he's a pool shark. In classical terms, this is his great character flaw.

In The Hustler, the supporting characters are as well developed as the protagonist. Bert and Sarah aren't just people placed into the script to give Eddie an antagonist and a love interest. Through good acting and solid writing, they attain individuality. Bert is far more than a two-bit gangster. He's a man whose emotional core is so hollow that he needs to dominate and win in order to find a reason to live. George C. Scott gives a towering performance, full of fire and vitriol. He was deservedly nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar, although he did not win. (The loss set up Scott's longtime feud with the Academy, which led to his rejecting his Oscar for Patton. After not winning for The Hustler, he denounced the Academy Awards, saying that they were run by politics.) Sarah is emotionally complex. Piper Laurie plays her not as a pretty face but as a deeply troubled young woman whose tenuous anchor is shattered by her contact with Bert. Her last actions represent a profound statement.

Jackie Gleason, who will always best be remembered as Ralph from "The Honeymooners", exhibits restraint and subtlety in his interpretation of Minnesota Fats. The Fat Man has a commanding presence from the moment he enters a room. This is in large part due to Gleason who, with so little dialogue to fall back on (aside from calling his shots, Fats doesn't say much), employs mannerisms and body language to get the job done. (Note: to clarify something that is occasionally a point of confusion, the real-life Minnesota Fats took his name from the character, not the other way around.)

The Hustler did not put Paul Newman on the map, but it was one of several key films that led to his being considered a bankable, A-list star. Newman is perfectly in synch with his character. During scenes when Eddie is away from the pool table, he is relaxed and charming. But, when in the midst of a match, there is a rush of volcanic emotion, presented alongside an ill-concealed sense of obsessive impatience. Eddie is a complex character who grows a great deal during the course of the movie, and Newman has no difficulty charting the course of the man he plays.

The director of the film is Robert Rossen, who also functioned as producer and co-wrote the screenplay. Rossen was one of many filmmakers targeted by Congress during the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings. Although he initially refused to testify, Rossen eventually reversed his position, admitting to being a Communist and naming 57 others. (Had Rossen not cooperated, it is doubtful that The Hustler ever would have been made.) One can perhaps see echoes of his guilt and remorse in the way Fast Eddie copes with Sarah's ultimate fate.

Viewers do not have to possess even a passing familiarity with pool to appreciate the movie. Since The Hustler is about the characters, not the game, all that's really necessary to know can be learned by watching the first match between Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats. In actuality, most of the shots were accomplished by Gleason (who was a good pool player before filming started) and Newman (who spent numerous hours practicing). Occasionally, however, it became necessary to use the "stunt hands" of Willie Mosconi, the 14-time world billiards champion who functioned as the film's technical advisor.

The public's fascination for Fast Eddie was so great that Martin Scorsese teamed up with Newman (and Tom Cruise) to bring back the character in 1986's The Color of Money, an inferior film that nevertheless offers its share of small pleasures. 25 years late, Newman won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Fast Eddie. Yet, as intriguing as the character is in the Scorsese film, that cinematic representation of the pool shark pales in comparison with the one presented in Rossen's The Hustler, one of the most compelling character-based films to emerge from the decade of the 1960s.

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LILITH B 86

USA (114 mi) 1964

Perhaps hoping to revisit something like the delicately blossoming romance of SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961), at least in the mind of lead actor Warren Beatty, but one thinks director Robert Rossen, in this his final film, had something altogether different in mind. Set almost entirely on the enormous, beautifully landscaped grounds of a high-priced mental sanitarium called Chestnut Lodge, a real-life mental institution in Rockville, Maryland about 15 miles northwest of Washington, D.C, this film remains something of an enigma even fifty years later, but is nonetheless a stylish if downright baffling film to see. Following on the footsteps of other similarly related films set on the grounds of mental institutions, Frank Perry’s DAVID AND LISA (1962) and John Cassavetes’ A Child Is Waiting (1963), those were more straightforward narratives that single out stories of sympathetic child characters. This one stars an adult Jean Seberg as the beautiful but emotionally alienated and distressed patient Lilith who suffers from schizophrenia, often unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, implementing many of the 60’s mind-boggling shot dissolves using superb camera montage techniques from cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, often blending two or three shots into one screen image, showing the expansiveness of human thought with images overlapping into one another. In this manner, a complete 180 degree shift from Rossen’s prior ultra realism, it’s easy to get lost in the different worlds, often accentuated by the changing tempo of Kenyon Hopkins's jazzy score which seems to grow louder or accelerate much like a dizzying carousel ride. Even the opening credit sequence of hand-designed butterflies against a white backdrop suggests a more playful and fanciful theme. Unfortunately, there are various forces at odds against each other in this film that director Rossen could never pull together, leaving an unrealistic and overly sympathetic view of mental health care, perhaps only available to the super rich, which amounts to coddling patients like children, surrounding them with their own artworks, allowing them to do whatever they want, while also veering into horror elements to describe their clearly unbalanced state of mind.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the film is actor Warren Beatty as Vincent Bruce, who appears to be on a much different wavelength than everyone else in the film, especially his acting school style of method acting which never really fits in this picture, drawing too much attention to himself and his mannerisms at the expense of everything else happening onscreen, playing a wounded and tortured soul himself, a returning Korean war veteran who trains to become an occupational therapist in a private mental hospital that caters to the über rich. Simply walking in off the street, much like Judy Garland does in A Child Is Waiting, it feels more like volunteer work than an actual job, where Bruce brings no experience whatsoever into the position, yet the administrative staff allows him full access to all the patients. While Garland is scolded for spending so much time with one particular patient, as the others quite noticeably feel left out, where she seemingly favors one patient’s needs over another, but not Beatty, who spends almost all of his time exclusively with one patient, Lilith, which would have to have a detrimental effect on the other patients. Seberg’s enthralling performance on the other hand shows a full range of her somewhat twisted emotions, where she’s constantly conniving and thoroughly controlling, but Beatty blindly falls for all her traps, as she’s a highly intelligent patient with a thoroughly manipulative use of her temptress sensuality, which she lords over unsuspecting young boys, treating them with the relished fondness of a sick and detestable child molester. Seberg gets away with it because she’s supposedly sick, but the idea of allowing her such free access is one of the film’s faults, as it begs credulity, or perhaps is its intended goal, because allowing schizophrenics full and complete liberation, like the flower children of the 60’s, where they’re free to express themselves any way they choose, often leads to disastrous consequences, as mental patients require responsible guidance and care, as they have a inherent tendency for violent, out of control, or harmful behavior. If there’s an underlying statement about the permissiveness of the over-indulgent generation of the rebellious 60’s counterculture, it’s not one most viewers would accept, though the thought crosses one’s mind, but as one recalls the Beatles first came to American in 1964, the year this film was released, where Haight-Ashbury, the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and the Counterculture of the 1960s came afterwards.

Peter Fonda plays another overly repressed, extremely straight-laced patient who simply blurts out all his inner thoughts to everyone he meets, exhibiting no self-control, where his infatuation with Lilith is mostly all he ever talks about. But Lilith treats him like a pestering child while luring Bruce, seen as her handsome prince, more and more into her secret dream world of butterflies and free love, where she almost makes it her mission to spread her version of love, which accounts for her fond expression for children. Bruce is a bit mesmerized by all this, where her changeable moods might have alerted him or given him some sign, but she has an intoxicating effect on him, like Odysseus and the Sirens in Greek mythology. While Lilith is completely nondescriminate about who she loves, even having a chaperoned lesbian affair with one of the patients (Anne Meacham), all designed to arouse his jealous instincts, Bruce is something of a head case himself, as he never questions Lilith’s motives, or seems overly concerned with her behavior so long as she’s making him happy. The film does an excellent job of keeping the viewer in this seemingly innocent alternate world they live in, where Seberg thrives on her own changeable moods, always appearing happy and sexually desirous so long as she maintains her control over her intended victims, where these scenes are accompanied by tranquil walks by a lake, perhaps the most beautiful scene in the film, where Lilith wades into the water and hikes up her dress, kissing the mirror-like reflection of herself in the water, a sequence where Bruce eventually loses sight of her in the fog. When the two visit a Renaissance Faire, they literal return to medieval times where Bruce hops on a horse, grabs a lance and enters a jousting tournament, becoming her white knight while she plays the fair maiden. These idyllic moments, however, can be transfixing and are the unique strength and originality of the movie, a ponderous film, much of which plays out like trippy acid trip reflections, from the soaring heights of ecstasy to the nightmarish descent into abject despair, while the prevailing weakness is just how much is overlooked, not just by Bruce, but by the hospital administrative staff, Kim Hunter and James Patterson, who allow such an inexperienced novice to play Sir Galahad with one of their more disturbed patients who has already exhibited psychotic behavior in the hopes some miracle will happen. When Bruce falls head over heels in love with her, becoming obsessed with the delirious effect she has over him, disturbing trends ensue with a horrific descent into darkness and the abyss, becoming horribly downbeat, leaving the viewers shell-shocked and a bit bewildered by it all. Infused with a heavy-handed sense of futility, the caretakers hold out little hope that anyone in their care will actually get well, so the idea of providing “help,” the goal of Beatty’s character, is somehow lost in a social consciousness mirage.

On a personal note, this film has tragic overtones, especially considering the highly personal nature of the subject matter, where the director was diagnosed with cancer prior to the shooting of this film and died three years later, never to make another film. In short, Warren Beatty allegedly made such a nuisance of himself on the set that Robert Rossen eventually drank himself to death. After the unanimous acclaim of The Hustler (1961), Rossen was disturbed and disillusioned by the poor reception this film received, though the production was fraught with difficulties from the outset, most notably actor Warren Beatty who was seeking constant attention and guidance, much like director Elia Kazan had given him before every shot in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, but Rossen would have none of it. According to J.R. Salamanca, writer of the controversial 1961 novel Lilith, Rossen told the actor on the set “I hired you because I thought you knew how to act, for Christ’s sake. Don’t ask me how to play the part. You’re supposed to know how to play the part.” Rossen had enough troubles, as he was very ill and frequently passed out on the set. Beatty’s distant relationship to his own alcoholic father left him disillusioned in an enfant terrible stage, where according to Clifford Odets, “Warren Beatty’s need to bond with, and then lose respect for, an idealized father figure – teacher, the same way he had lost respect for his own ‘fallen father.’ Since Beatty, ever the ‘good son,’ witheld his contempt for his own father, he rebelled against his surrogate fathers, expressing his disillusionment with Ira Beatty through painful estrangements with Odets, Inge, and Rossen.” Perhaps most distressing is the arc of Jean Seberg’s life after what is arguably her greatest performance, where she was hounded by the FBI, in particular their COINTELPRO covert operations, targeting her for smear campaigns to discredit her for making sizable contributions to the Black Panther Party, as did many other liberals, by the way, including Leonard Bernstein, described in Thomas Wolfe’s 1970 essay Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. However the extent of the FBI’s discredit campaign led to public charges that she was pregnant by one of the Panthers. This caused sufficient personal distress that Seberg went into premature labor and lost the baby two days later, holding an open coffin funeral to prove the baby was white. Defamation lawsuits recovered some monetary awards, but she never recovered emotionally, where according to FBI files, they continued stalking her, breaking into her home, installing wiretaps, and even monitored her activities while traveling abroad. Seberg, a smalltown girl from Marshalltown, Iowa, eventually committed suicide at the age of 40, taking an overdose of barbiturates while lying in her car close to her Parisian apartment.

Lilith Dave Kehr from The Reader

Robert Rossen's last film (1964) is a masterpiece, and also a complete contradiction of his career. The social critic (All the King's Men, The Hustler) suddenly blossoms into a hothouse romantic, through the dreamy story of an apprentice psychoanalyst (Warren Beatty) who falls in love with one of his patients (Jean Seberg) and the sweet morbidity she represents. Photographed by the great Eugen Schufftan, the film is conceived in shades of white so delicate and elusive that the picture barely seems to brush the screen (a scratched or even mildly dirty print can be fatal to the mood). With Peter Fonda, Kim Hunter, Jessica Walter, and Gene Hackman.

Time Out Capsule Review

Rossen's sadly underrated last film (from a novel by JR Salamanca), an ambitious reworking of legend through the emotional involvement of a trainee therapist (Beatty) with a schizophrenic girl (Seberg). Stylistically, the framework of Lilith is established by the ironic contrasts of the two walks that Vincent (Beatty) completes: the first, a purposeful one towards the asylum, and the last, a desperate zig-zag through the various corridors and stairways of the asylum itself, out into the gardens, and finally winding up where the first one began, with an exhausted and curiously childish plea for help. The irony is extended even to the cry for help, since the same social worker (Hunter) had, in the first instance, politely enquired if she could help him. It is within this framework that Rossen develops the shifting relationship between Vincent and Lilith, beginning as patient and guide, and ending as beguiler and beguiled.

Jean Seberg and Warren Beatty in LILITH - 35mm Vault Print! Portage Theater

After the critical and box office success of The Hustler, writer-director Robert Rossen could have made any film he wanted. He chose this deeply private psychological drama, a near-clinical treatise that regards love as an essentially irrational experience. Jean Seberg delivers a career performance as Lilith, the schizophrenic woman whose advanced withdrawal from society extends to the invention of her own language. After neophyte occupational therapist Warren Beatty makes a breakthrough with the young patient, he finds himself happily seduced by her assertive personality. But Lilith is a mad siren, using her sexuality to seed the world with primal trauma. Described by Dave Kehr as “a masterpiece . . . conceived in shades of white so delicate and elusive that the picture barely seems to brush the screen,” Lilith makes sunlight as unnerving as shadow. Co-stars Kim Hunter, Peter Fonda, and Gene Hackman in his first credited role.

User reviews from imdb Author: Martin Bradley (MOscarbradley@aol.com) from Derry, Ireland

Jean Seberg was a woefully inadequate actress in almost every role in which she was cast but she seemed born to play Lilith, the unstable, deeply amoral 'heroine' of Robert Rossen's last film. It's an extraordinary performance and it's extraordinary because it doesn't appear to have anything to do with 'acting'; it just seems to exist. The theme of the film is madness, not 'mental illness' but madness in the truly Shakespearean sense of the word, and everything about the film is heightened, a little unreal. Eugen Schufftan photographs the film in a hazy monochrome with the emphasis on white. We peer at the characters through shafts of sunlight, (and there is a lot of water on view, too).

And Seberg isn't the only extraordinary performance. There is excellent work, too, from Warren Beatty as the young nurse drawn into Lilith's web, Kim Hunter as the woman who runs the institution where Lilith is housed and Peter Fonda, (the best of his early performances) as another patient obsessed with Lilith. Indeed the whole cast, (which includes a brilliant, early cameo from Gene Hackman), is working at the top of their form.

The film is an adaptation of a J R Salamanca novel but Rossen renders it in wholly visual terms. He uses his camera the way an artist uses his canvas to convey the inner lives of his characters. It isn't a total success. There are times when it dissolves into hysteria and the symbolism tends to get a bit top-heavy, but it is still a fearless, totally uncommercial movie, possibly it's director's best, and a key American movie of the sixties.

User reviews from imdb Author: Dan DeVore (ztruk2001@yahoo.com) from Iowa

Jean Seberg is absolutely captivating in this film. Yes despite the wig she wears, due to the fact her hair was cropped short for her previous films, she is as lovely as ever. One of my favorite films of all time and certainly the best one that deals with insanity in and honest and true way, not only avoiding the cliché' but completely reversing it and debunking the stereotype. Robert Rossen is a great director, one of history's most under-appreciated and few others could helm this story the way he does. Based on the novel by J.R. Salamanca, the story is of a young war vetern who returns home and seeks a job at the local mental institute. There he gets too involved with several of the patients and learns much about their past, which reflects the tragedy in his own life involving his mother.

It's true Warren Beatty does play the role blandly and stiff. While that's a turn off for many people watching the film, I think they fail to understand that just like Ryan O'Neil in Barry Lyndon, it's the character they're playing. Not the actor and certainly not the direction. Wonderful supporting cast from Kim Hunter and Peter Fonda as well as a brilliant cameo by Gene Hackman, which oozes of a marriage gone sour in his bit part.

It's a very hard film to figure out because so much is left untold and rightfully so leaving the audience to decide what happened. Playing on the fable of the past coming back to haunt us it plays deeply on buried memories and traumatic life experiences that were covered up rather than confronted. There is so much positive to say about this amazing film, but even so it's actress Jean Seberg that is the crown jewell in this picture. Criminally underseen, now that it is on DVD anyone interested in deep character studies should make it a point to watch this ASAP.

Lilith - TCM.com Jay Carr

Lilith (1964) was more than Robert Rossen's swan song. His final film, shot while he was ill, marked a change of direction, away from the stylized realistic settings of his successes Body and Soul (1947), All the King's Men (1949) and The Hustler (1961) to a more ambitious psychological reach, rooted in myth. It takes its title from the legendary she-demon of many cultures, who used sexuality to ensnare men. Feminist critics cite the Lilith myth as an example of male projections of fear of female sexuality. Rossen cast the role against type, with Jean Seberg as a temptress more corn-fed and wholesome than gossamer or ethereal. Before he settled on her, Yvette Mimieux, Romy Schneider and at the insistence of co-star Warren Beatty, Samantha Eggar were in the running. Yet Seberg, who was to call Lilith her favorite among her roles, pulls it off, despite a major credibility problem that has nothing to do with her.

The opening frames feature a lot of whiteness and butterfly motifs as background for the credits, before the inevitable spider-web motifs are seen. Its lightness of touch, maintained throughout by cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, sets the stage for the film's way of communicating an increasingly tenuous hold on reality, a delicate blurring of the line between a woman's interior world and the everyday world into which she occasionally allows herself to be led. At first, Seberg's Lilith is ushered out of her private reveries by Warren Beatty's attentive novice occupational therapist. But only, you feel, because she wants to be. This is the Beatty who only three years before made his debut in Splendor in the Grass (1961), still figuring out how to use his good looks, but unable to conceal his awareness of them.

Even that early in his career, he comes on like the young king of hesitations, softly, seemingly tentatively, presumably oblivious to the fact that the windows of Lilith's room are covered with a thick steel wire grill for a reason. Like her fellow inmates, she's a schizophrenic whose family has money to pay for her cushy country-club confinement. His character – a World War II vet who lives with his grandmother in town, is the one with the credibility problem. Even in a film clearly not realistic, we have difficulty believing that he could literally wander in off the street, not be subjected to a background check, be hired on the spot, and in no time be spending a lot of unsupervised time with patients. Lilith is very astute in its portrayals of the quickness of the other inmates to pick up on any ripples in the communal vibe much more rapidly than the staff. There are more than a few things to pick up on, despite the relative pleasantness of an institution that's positively pastoral, as asylums go.

Lilith, confined since the violent death of her brother, eyes the new staffer and allows herself to be drawn out of her solitariness. Seberg convinces us that she's an innocent, entirely true to her nature, uncalculating in that sense, but disturbing, partly because she so naturally uses her considerable personal appeal to satisfy destructive drives. In fact, the arrival of the new staffer protracts the agonies of another inmate, Peter Fonda's lanky, slavish admirer of Lilith, making sheep's eyes at her from behind the thick black frames of his glasses. He's devastated when her attentions turn to Beatty's rookie therapist. In no time, the would-be doc is going on long walks alone with Lilith. This gives Rossen and Schufftan the chance to unfurl visuals that not only match Lilith's seductiveness (it soon becomes clear who's seducing who in the mating dance between Seberg and Beatty), but open doors to lyricism – sunlight glinting off water, shots of rushing water suggesting accelerating appetites, superimpositions of Seberg's face, eyes closed, over the settings of the natural world. They soon include physical interludes. Danger, too, in points of view shot from the top of a cliff. The credibility gap widens, though, when Beatty's new hire begins sleeping with her. Her dreaminess and combination of abandon and instinctive agenda bear out a senior staffer's description of Lilith as being capable of rapture. But isn't anybody riding herd on the new employee?

It's a strength that Beatty's minder, far from a Casanova (although his physicality is urgent and a little rough), seems to be in a bit of daze, not quite aware of what's happening to him. As we watch him fall under Lilith's spell, and have a foreboding that the story will end in tears, bits of his undersupplied background emerge, most notably the fact that his mother died young. Far from getting a handle on the developing situation between him and Lilith, he seems more and more confused and discombobulated, as if he knows he's getting in too deep, but doesn't know how to reverse course.

As Seberg's Lilith continues, almost serenely inscrutable, she begins to push his buttons ever more boldly, dissolving his will, replacing it with hers. She makes him jealous by switching her attentions to Anne Meacham's worldly fellow inmate. Fonda's love-struck fragility moves ever closer to an abyss. As if in a desperate lunge toward solidity and sanity, Beatty's staffer, who by now has moved onto a small room on the grounds of the asylum from his grandmother's house in town, visits the home of his prewar girlfriend, who married another man while he was away and out of touch. The scene in which Jessica Walter (in her film debut) communicates deep unhappiness and a young Gene Hackman radiates vibrant crassness and crudity as her husband is brief, but indelible, a reminder that not all is well in the world of the so-called sane, either.

Tension mounts as credibility plummets. Kim Hunter, as Beatty's immediate boss, projects kindness, but could her experienced character be so blind? You get the idea that the entire staff is deliberately averting its eyes from what is obviously developing between Beatty and Seberg simply because the plot needs her to keep spinning her scary web until she's got him where she wants him. All that saves the film from collapse is its feathery touch in evoking the realms of madness and withdrawal into which Lilith intermittently disappears. You can't help wondering whether Rossen's failing health contributed to the film's sense of life and sanity slipping the moorings. That, the strong performances, and Kenyon Hopkins's wonderful, moody, evocative jazz-flavored score save Lilith from its shortfall in trying to shoehorn an ancient myth into a contemporary setting.

DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson

PopMatters Robert Horning

A Study in Kindness Tom Hyland from Cinema Directives

User reviews from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

User reviews from imdb Author: Michael Open from Belfast, NI

EyeForFilm.co.uk [Merlin Harries]

The Fresh Films [Fredrik Fevang]

Ralph Benner

Robert Rossen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Warren Beatty: A Private Man - Page 295 - Google Books Result Warren Beatty: A Private Man, by Suzanne Finstad

In Which Warren Beatty Is A Dirtbag For The Ages - Home - This ... Alex Carnevale from This Recording, March 28, 2011

Roth, Eli

HOSTEL

USA (94 mi) 2005 ‘Scope

By George Kaltsounakis Hostel from Cinema Scope

“People say, my movie, it’s really violent . . . But you know what? It’s theater. It’s a magic trick. It’s all done with corn syrup and fake blood. All my actors are still alive. What’s worse, my movie or Dick Cheney? Nobody actually died in my movie. People actually die because of Dick Cheney, and he doesn’t allow you to see it.”—Eli Roth in Salon, January 5, 2006

Recent signs of life in mainstream American cinema are heartening. Possibly in reaction to the jarring lurch to the right in the wake of 9/11, a growing number of films for the mass market have expressed a profound questioning of political axioms that have since taken root, and even shown glimmers of deeper ideological, if not aesthetic, revolt. (I’m referring to the likes of Munich and Syriana, but whether these turn out to be transient phenomena or the flagships of some sort of renaissance remains to be seen.) Other films, like Eli Roth’s Hostel, continue to offer familiarly revolting ideology, joining the mass-market armada that distorts unpleasant truths and nurtures a climate of fear, self-righteousness, and cultural isolation.

It would be easy to dismiss the film as yet more fodder for the multiplex, but it is fruitful to examine how Hostel, like many horror films before it, offers a gauge of repressed social or political concerns. Robin Wood delineated two broad camps of the horror genre, regressive versus progressive, and illustrated the dichotomy through a discussion of The Omen (1976) and TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). A comparison of the premises of the latter film and Hostel provides an interesting point of departure. In Tobe Hooper’s far more disturbing low-budget nightmare, evil resides in the remote American heartland, where a clan of psychotic cannibals culls unsuspecting youngsters for their human slaughterhouse. In Hostel, the site of immoral transgression, in this case a secret recreational torture complex, has been outsourced to Europe . On the face of it, one could argue that an astute allegory is immediately in effect, but everything else in the film contradicts such a reading. Rather than functioning as an effective contemporary critique, Hostel merely duplicates current circumnavigations of logistical, legal, and moral impediments to torture. As if unable to confront both the grisly underbelly of homeland security and prevailing ethics—in so doing, it would have joined the legacy of American cinema that has never failed to cast an introspective and uncompromising eye on relevant issues of the day—Hostel nervously projects national demons onto a distantly hellish haven. Roth’s film adds insult to injury (one could take that literally), or distorted fantasy to grim reality, in painting Americans as highly prized targets of torture, not as political retribution, but as sheer degenerate entertainment for the decadent rich. Easily disregarded as apolitical escapism, like so much post-9/11 pop-aganda, the film belies values that are both a product and warped refraction of the war on terror.

Roth has said that he was inspired by a Thai website offering “murder vacations,” and has also implied that Hostel houses a subversive message. But its scare tactics constitute little more than the inverted, decontextualized manifestation of an ongoing moral and political discourse, while its main undercurrents are far from progressive or subversive. Hostel is the offspring of a relentlessly fear-mongering mass culture, hell-bent on selling us a variety of bogeymen and terrorists lurking in every shadow and held at bay only by the saintly conduct of a police state whose every agency has been endlessly mythologized and feted, or by unlikely heroes like Hostel’s young American sex tourist in Eastern Europe . The film is no bold allegory, but nor is it a harmless distraction devoid of values or political currency, especially given its narrative’s central use of torture at this time, when the subject is unfortunatelyall the rage.

Embarking on a little European sex vacation, the film’s protagonists, young American dudes Paxton and Josh, team up with a happy-go-lucky Icelandic lecher (obviously destined for the chopping block) and eventually end up in Slovakia after the trio is tipped to the alleged existence of a paradise filled with loose and desperate women. They soon discover that something far nastier than venereal disease awaits them in this hostel-cum-brothel, situated in an inhospitable country where feral street urchins hunt adults, suspicious businessmen abound, police are brutal and corrupt, and horny Slavic nymphets are simply not to be trusted. In Roth’s Slovakian chainsaw massacre, unexpected hero Paxton uncovers the shady workings of an elaborate scheme whereby unsuspecting tourists are drugged and kidnapped by a ring of European lowlifes, only to languish without hope of escape in a far-flung industrial hellhole, awaiting their prolonged doom at the hands of rich reprobates who have paid dearly for the privilege of torturing them. (Americans, we learn, are the most highly valued victims.) Initially, one expects these cocky frat boys, admittedly depicted in an unflattering light, to get their comeuppance, and one of them does: a wimpy aspiring writer, whom the audience is duped into thinking is the main character, is killed off first (punishment perhaps for his excessive sensitivity, or for trusting a stranger). But his more virile, unflappable companion, Paxton, ends up bringing freedom to himself and one other ghost detainee.

To go back to Wood’s dichotomy, some horror films examine festering social sores with devious dissidence, while others do little more than reinforce the ideological status quo. Hostel utterly diffuses the possibility or punch of a timely allegory by making the architects of torture European or Asian. The participation of one particularly enthusiastic, neophyte American, coded as an aberrant psycho, is clearly and disingenuously included to detract from the otherwise obvious thrust here: that Americans remain victims, the subjects of irrational animosity, and targets the world over. Furthermore, since no opportunity is given for critical distance between the characters and the audience, there is never any doubt as to who the good guys are. Where Texas Chainsaw Massacre offered a paradigm of liberal American youth besieged by a demented patriarchal cabal (in Texas !), Hostel posits a world of difference between the lawless depravity of these machinating Slovaks and the innocent young Americans. Paxton is the character the audience is most meant to empathize with, and by the end of the film, he embodies moral indignation and righteous anger, and ultimately responds with what must be deemed just retaliation.

Despite Hostel’s distressing virulence, reviews of the film have focused mostly on its unprecedented display of graphic violence (a boring and occasionally nauseating spectacle) and ignored its roster of rampant societal phobias—from xeno to homo—which bespeak an odious sense of cultural ascendancy. Roth asks which is worse, his movie or Dick Cheney, while both the real ideological underpinnings of his film and its ultimately demagogic function in the current political climate seem to elude him entirely.

Hostel (Eli Roth, 2006) Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled

A Second Look: Appreciating Eli Roth's HOSTEL Nine Years Later ... Clarke Wolfe from Nerdist

Roth, Tim

THE WAR ZONE A 95

Great Britain Italy (99 mi) 1998

BFI | Sight & Sound | The War Zone (1998) Xan Brooks from Sight and Sound, September 1999

Mum, Dad and their teenaged children Tom and Jessie relocate from their native London to a cottage on the coast of Devon. Mum gives birth to a baby girl, Alice. Returning home one day, Tom looks through the window and sees Jessie taking a bath with Dad. Tom questions Jessie. Despite her assurances that the bath was innocent, Tom's suspicions are aroused. He hunts through Jessie's art-college portfolio and finds a photograph of his sister naked with Dad. Tom tracks Jessie to a concrete shelter on the cliff top. There he videotapes her unwillingly submitting to sex with Dad. Sickened, he tosses the camera into the sea. Again, Tom confronts Jessie. She invites him to punish her by holding a cigarette lighter to her bare breast. Dad travels up to London on business and takes Tom and Jessie along with him. There, Jessie escorts Tom to meet her college friend Carol who attempts to seduce him.

Back in Devon, baby Alice falls ill and Mum stays with her at the hospital. During a visit, Tom warns Mum about Dad. Returning home, he finds Dad has already spoken to Mum on the phone and is panicked and angry. Even when Jessie confirms Tom's accusations, Dad denies he has done anything wrong. Tom stabs Dad and leaves him for dead. He and Jessie hide out in the shelter.

There is a key shot near the start of The War Zone where the camera dollies in towards the hunched form of Ray Winstone, crawls up close behind him as he chats into the telephone and scrutinises the back of his meaty neck. It is a Peeping Tom moment: the viewer cast simultaneously in the role of voyeur and potential threat. It both mimics the movements of the tale's adolescent onlooker and foreshadows his eventual knife-thrust denouement. The whole film seems to reside in that lone, lingering point in time. Adapted from the 1989 novel by Alexander Stuart, The War Zone can perhaps best be read as a kind of nightmare of adolescence. Fifteen-year-old Tom is at once defined by his close-knit family and alienated from it. His fledgling independence has repositioned him as an outsider looking in but, as yet, he lacks the experience to interpret confidently what he sees.

So while Tom effectively serves as our guide through The War Zone, his vision is dotted with blind spots. Significantly the audience is never allowed to witness the sight which first triggers his suspicions of incest (Dad and Jessie bathing), suggesting that the boy's initial conclusions could be misguided, coloured by his own charged and complex feelings for his sister. Even when the mystery is cleared away, the film's landscape stays foggy, its inhabitants oblique and unreadable. We are never certain, for example, if Jessie's London pal is also her lesbian lover, or if Mum is entirely unaware of Dad's doings. The film's Play School-style house is home to all manner of secrets. In The War Zone, what we aren't shown is often as important as what we are.

In making his directorial debut, Tim Roth has cited Alan Clarke as a primary influence. But unlike fellow Clarke graduate Gary Oldman (whose Nil by Mouth bore obvious Clarke hallmarks), Roth proves surprisingly free of the great man's coarse-grained, edgy style. Instead, his film feels more indebted to Russian or European art-house (Roth claims Tarkovsky and Bergman as other influences). Because despite its hothouse environment, there is a chill beauty to The War Zone. Its narrative is framed in elegant long shots and nudged along by spartan editing. Its characters – frequently naked – are posed like figures in a Lucien Freud canvas; all purplish breasts and dangling cock and balls.

Like Andrew Birkin's similarly themed 1993 The Cement Garden, The War Zone trades in a kind of trancey naturalism. Throughout it all Roth keeps the acting down-played, the dialogue murmurous, the atmosphere an ongoing ennui. Fittingly the cast come together as a study in neutrals. Newcomer Lara Belmont provides a magnificently restrained and unsettling performance as Jessie. Tilda Swinton makes a still and inscrutable Mum, while Ray Winstone's past pedigree in films such as Nil by Mouth ensures that his Dad fairly crackles with the implied threat of violence.

Only Freddie Cunliffe hits a false note at times in the taxing central role. His endless thousand-yard stare finally grows overdone. In the film's dying minutes you start to spot the mechanics behind his performance, and those behind The War Zone as a whole. Because what Roth has done is to garnish a fairly stock domestic drama (seemingly nice dad; deep, dark secret) with so much artful window-dressing, rearranging familiar furnishings in a minimalist feng shui styling. This becomes apparent only at the finish, with an explosive dramatic showdown that is the scene with the least impact in the entire picture. It is the moment when The War Zone tumbles back to earth; as though Roth felt that his perfectly maintained stasis had to pay off somehow. If so, he needn't have worried, because The War Zone is at its best in its most seemingly idle moments. This is where the real drama resides, where the real spell is cast, where the picture comes alive, those quiet times before the storm.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Welcome To My Nightmare Shane Danielson talks to the director from Sight and Sound, August 1999

An elegant, unsparing adaptation of Alexander Stuart's novel, Tim Roth's directorial debut The War Zone depicts a teenage boy's discovery of an incestuous relationship between his father (Ray Winstone) and his older sister Jessie (newcomer Lara Belmont) - an event that irrevocably sunders his family even as it awakens his own sexual identity. The novel is by turns lyrical, shocking and surreal. Narrated by 15-year-old Tom (played here by Freddie Cunliffe), it describes extraordinary horror in a tone of peculiarly adolescent bewilderment, amplifying a typical teenage sense of estrangement from one's family into the realms of nightmare. Dismayed by his parents' decision to relocate to rural Devon, Tom retreats into silence, becoming an observer of rather than a participant in his family's daily life. And from this vantage he begins to notice things, to piece together the secret his father and sister are concealing. He confronts Jessie with his discovery; she denies nothing. Instead she takes him to London to meet a woman who is obviously her lover, and to whom, in a bizarre ménage à trois, Tom loses his virginity. Thus "blooded" he returns to the family home and confronts his father, with inevitably tragic results.

Yet despite the almost classical structure, ambiguities remain. Is Jessie victim, seductress or collaborator? Is Tom motivated by a desire to restore the familial status quo or to smash it beyond recognition? Is he acting out of disgust or inchoate jealousy, a petulant response to his own nascent sexuality? "It's all that," claims Roth. "All that and more. Abused children are complicit because they're made to be complicit; they keep the secret. That complexity is one of the things that attracted me to the story in the first place."

Put simply, Roth's intention here is to marry the grubby physicality of British realism to the more austere (if picturesque) tenets of the European art-house film - an aesthetic of leisurely takes, careful compositions and deliberate editing. It's a decidedly reverent approach, presumably intended to deflect accusations of sensationalism or prurience, and certainly there's nothing exploitative here - even at its most horrific the film maintains a tone of studied impassivity. Yet Roth's desire for respectability occasionally leads him astray: Simon Boswell's score, for instance, is too lush, too much at odds with the squalor of the events the film depicts. It's typical of the style of film-making to which Roth aspires - and which finds its visual covalent in the dark lustre of Seamus McGarvey's cinematography - but it also marks a definitive rupture between the British and European aesthetics he's attempting to reconcile.

In spirit The War Zone recalls Andrew Birkin's The Cement Garden (1993), taken from Ian McEwan's novel of the same name. Here we see a similar hothouse sexuality and ambiguous relationship between brother and sister. Both McEwan and Stuart (who adapted his own work for the screenplay) share a taste for the aberrant and unfathomable, for the irruption of deviant behaviour into the fabric of everyday life. And both evince a certain scepticism about the cosy integrity of the family unit.

From all accounts this project had been around for some time, but no one seemed willing to touch it. Though critically acclaimed at the time of its publication, the novel had garnered something of a dicey reputation, partly as a result of the controversy surrounding its exclusion from the 1989 Whitbread Prize after one of the judges allegedly threatened to resign if Stuart was named the winner. What has changed? Either there's been a shift in social awareness or an urgent desire to revoke taboos, depending on your point of view. But certainly after long decades of silence - or glossy treatment as in Louis Malle's Le Souffle au coeur and Bertolucci's La luna - incest and paedophilia have emerged as a dominant narrative strand in contemporary art-house cinema. From worthy-minded dramas (Aline Issermann's L'Ombre du doute, Claude Miller's La Classe de neige) to jaundiced films maudits (Happiness, Seul contre tous), filmgoers have been treated to increasingly regular instalments of the cinema of abuse.

One could argue that The War Zone goes further than any of its predecessors - if only by virtue of a single scene. Intriguingly, the incestuous act here takes place not in the house but in a disused concrete bunker, a remnant of wartime activity along the English coast. Situated on a high cliff, at the edge of a desolate landscape, the bunker functions as an exclusionary zone - a space outside the limits of the family home, the location that otherwise dominates. While faithful to the novel, this device proves faintly problematic. What does it say that the film's central crisis exists within a secondary narrative space? That here, and here alone, the dictates of conventional morality cease to apply? That the family home is to be read as a de-sexualised environment (unlikely given the presence of Tom's heavily pregnant mother played by Tilda Swinton)?

Yet the distinction exists. Tom's first realisation that something is amiss occurs when, arriving home to find the door locked from within, he peers inside a window of the house and remains transfixed by what he sees. But crucially the information is withheld from the viewer: there's no cut to his point of view, only the shifting index (appalled but also fascinated) of his expression. Later we see much more. We're taken inside the bunker, to watch the film's toughest sequence, in which a father sodomises his daughter. The camera keeps its distance - there's no unnecessary movement, no superfluous editing; the gaze is unflinching. By choosing not to depict the transgressive act taking place within the confines of a domestic milieu - by aligning it instead with this other, sexually charged space - Roth and Stuart make the bunker simultaneously a site of evil and a symbolic bastion of male sexual appetite. Something to be abhorred, but also contested and attained. And sure enough, by the film's end Tom will inhabit this space himself, his passage from adolescence to adulthood complete - a transformation that only adds to the ambiguity of the final scene in which brother and sister are together inside the bunker, their life outside, in the real world, in ruins.

The family home too is shot as a kind of fortress, isolated in a hostile landscape. Inside, life seems weirdly stalled - the rooms are in near-darkness; the silence is oppressive. The only contact with the outside world - the life they've left behind - is the telephone, upon which the father is constantly, almost furtively speaking, his back turned to his family. It's an appropriate image since this is a profoundly alienated film - more concerned with the distances between people than with their groping attempts at intimacy. And the world as it exists outside this unfortunate family is apprehended only fleetingly: a brief visit to London, an evening spent on the cliffs, a night-time drive to hospital. Mostly it's mediated through that seemingly endless string of telephone calls, that low voice, murmuring.

A comparison with Gaspar Noé's Seul contre tous proves instructive. Noé, for all his undoubted desire to shock, is careful to situate his story within a broader political context. His protagonist serves as a literal personification of social malaise, a blind force of proletariat rage. Ageing, out of work, he's a beast shambling towards extinction; the one act he believes is left to him - to find his daughter, rape her, then kill her and himself - is less the rejection of a fallen world than an angry reclamation of male potency. Though Roth and Stuart have altered Tom's father from the educated, middle-class architect of the novel to a working-class bloke made good (a necessity given the casting of Ray Winstone), lending the text a frisson of class tension, by the end his origins are unimportant - as are his reasons. He exists simply as an aggressor, the defining force within the microcosm of his own home. And Winstone's performance - steadfastly denying every charge, maintaining to the very end a tone of dismayed innocence ("You're sick," he murmurs, when finally confronted by his son) - is oddly convincing; one is reminded of Henry Czerny's portrayal of Father Peter Lavin in John N. Smith's The Boys of St. Vincent's (1993), another kindly monster.

Some viewers consider the film's lack of social context to be a failing, but I believe it heightens its effect. To link sexual abuse with wider social tensions, even tacitly, is too easy - as Noé seems to acknowledge with his film's final redemptive turnaround. It smacks of victim culture, in which responsibility can be endlessly deferred, and as such discounts the more disturbing possibility that evil is often localised, implacable, ultimately unknowable.

Many people, hearing the actor was stepping behind the camera, expected Tarantino-lite or ersatz Mike Leigh. Instead they found a bleak, thoughtful, quietly devastating film, heavily indebted to the art-house classics of yesteryear. A surprising result. But then, as Roth admits, wryly, "No matter what you do, for better or worse, your history goes with you."

Shane Danielsen: The film's most obvious quality is its sense of restraint. In many ways it's very austere.

Tim Roth: I hope so. The usual approach would be to get the camera right up close to the characters, to take the viewer into the thick of it. Because that's what we associate with realism these days: handheld, grainy, in-your-face photography. But I wanted to get very real performances - and I honestly don't think you can see a performance in this film - and then shoot them as beautifully as possible. I wanted Freddie Cunliffe to be everyone's 15-year-old son - I liked the idea of having this classical, David Lean-type landscape and then this sulky lout, shoulders slumped, head bowed, slouching through it.

Aesthetic considerations seem very important to you.

They are, but only in so far as they look back to the kind of cinema I used to see as a teenager, which I now miss terribly. Widescreen, never drawing attention to the camerawork, no fancy footwork.

Which film-makers in particular?

Tarkovsky, Visconti, Bergman - that great art-house tradition. I miss stillness, I miss silence. Death in Venice was an inspiration for its use of the camera and the silence - just people being people. Just watching the physical and verbal interaction of people is interesting, though film-makers today seem less and less willing to acknowledge that.

Having that huge [1:235] format meant I could set the camera and let the actors develop the frame and watch how they related to each other. So things would happen of their own accord, in a sense. And gradually, you get to sit at the table with the family - and then you realise you're sitting with the devil. Even the house, so squat and isolated in the landscape, becomes a strong character in its own right.

You changed a number of incidents from the book - the scene in which Jessie takes Tom to London to meet her lesbian lover, for instance.

We actually rehearsed it as it is in the book, but it didn't work. So instead I made it a scene about a first sexual encounter - though Tom has already had one of a kind when he looked through the window and saw his dad and sister together. For Jessie, it's like, 'Welcome to my nightmare' - and at the same time it's a desperate attempt to blow it apart and make it all go away. Also, it's an extraordinary bid by the older woman to help the girl and her brother whom she knows are in crisis. I think as it stands now it's much more complex and credible.

And Stuart was amenable to making changes?

Completely. Our way of working was very direct - I always said I'd give him first crack at the screenplay, but if it didn't work out I'd go to someone else, because he might be too close to it. But he turned in a terrific job. I pushed him on it. First, I set it in winter so he could look at it with fresh eyes. I made him go back and read the book again, and I also got him to read silent-movie scripts. Yet the screenplay is very different from the film - it changed again once the actors came in. You've got to be brave in an adaptation; you can't be a stickler.

Ray Winstone's performance is a lot more nuanced than viewers might expect.

When he first phoned me up and asked to have a go at it, I had my doubts. But he came in and said, "You know, it'd be great to play a good guy for a change." And I just thought, he's got it, he understands. Because the bottom line is that this guy doesn't see himself as a villain. And Ray just nailed it. He's one of the best actors I've seen.

The real standout, though, is Lara Belmont.

She's unbelievable - no previous experience, no training, nothing. I don't know what made her think she could be an actress, but she was right. The funny thing is, she's not all that interested in doing it again. She just said, "Give me a call if you're making another one," and wandered off.

You said the design changed during the shoot.

We were going to do all kinds of things that seem embarrassing to admit now. At one stage I wanted to evoke a nightmarish quality so every time a new emotional crisis was reached Tom would return to the house to find it slightly changed. It sounded very clever and ambitious, but really it was bollocks - it was me feeling acutely aware of my lack of experience, and trying to make myself think the way I thought a real director would. But one night Michael Carlin, the designer, and I went out and got pissed and confessed we both thought it was a load of arty wank. And that was that. What really made up my mind, too, were the performances. Day after day, watching the rushes, I was looking at things that seemed beautiful and completely honest - so why fuck with them? Why potentially ruin something wonderful, just for the sake of showing off?

You've often acknowledged a debt to Alan Clarke.

It's only because of him I'm sitting here. His example took me through the entire film. Alan was wonderful with actors - you felt clutched, held close, protected. He had this absolute love for his performers and that's the atmosphere I was trying to create on set. We were very careful with both the kids - even to the point of vetting the crew to make sure they were nice people. We knew there'd be a lot of tears, a lot of tough days, and we wanted people around them who'd be supportive. But it's not shot anything like the way Alan would have done it. I think he'd probably have done it for television - his whole thing was to take big subjects and get them out there to as many people as possible.

The kind of film-making you admire is thin on the ground. Even as an actor you must feel frustrated.

Absolutely. Often I find myself doing a film and realising one or two days into shooting that I've made a terrible mistake. But there are exceptions. I made a little film for Michael Di Jiacomo called Animals and the Toll Keeper - it was shown at Sundance last year. It's very poetic, very beautiful, which is probably why no one has seen it. But it just goes to show that there are people out there trying to make these kind of movies. We're just vastly outnumbered.

THE WAR ZONE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

CABIN FEVER

USA (94 mi) 2002

Cabin Fever Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Five kids looking to spend a post-grad vacation in the woods find themselves trying to fend off a deadly flesh-eating virus and the backwoods bumpkins trying to protect their own. A hit at last year's Toronto Film Festival, Eli Roth's Cabin Fever has been dismissed by some as a mere Evil Dead knock-off. But this is a specious claim considering that one of the film's many pleasures is how it manages to transcend its many shout-outs. The film is clearly indebted to the Sam Raimi whackathon, but it also tips its hat to numerous Lynchian anti-suburbia idylls and Wes Craven's skanky cautionary tale The Last House on the Left. (Within the original score by Nathan Barr and the ever-subversive Angelo Badalamenti are buried David Hess's creepy folk songs from the Craven film.) As an AIDS parable, the film appears to arrive a good 10 years too late, but Roth has fun encoding his clear-eyed political polemic in southern-fried slapstick. The horror genre is often seen as a conservative one, but this is a misnomer of sorts. Some of the best films in the genre (Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) target rather than coddle conservative hang-ups. The inhospitable teens in Cabin Fever kill a hermit (Arie Verveen) infected with the film's mysterious virus. "He asked us for our help. We set him on fire," says one teen, failing to find a context for their violence. When the man's corpse falls into a nearby reservoir, he infects the local drinking water the teens subsequently drink. The virginal Paul (Rider Strong) and his friends must suffer through a delirious and ironic comedy of errors that frustrates their attempts to flee their cabin prison after Karen (Jordon Ladd) is infected. The film's cabin fever is a contagious one and it perpetuates a vicious political cycle. These teens aren't punished for the pot they smoke or the unsafe sex they partake in, but for the conservative political ends they serve: themselves. Of course, the locals are no different. A triumvirate of yokels (a father, a son, a holy spirit?) carrying a mysterious box descends upon the teens as if they were about to conduct an exorcism. "This ain't Christian," observes one man as he approaches the pagan site. Through it all, it's difficult not to think of a hypocritical, self-righteous Reagan administration trying to contain the AIDS virus in the early '80s (notice the duplicitous and repeated use of the word "gay" throughout the film). Feverish political and religious allegories aside, audiences will likely be drawn more to the film's liberal bloodletting. Indeed, if the film's scares don't shock you, then you're sure to catch its razor-sharp wit.

Roth, Vanessa and Brian McGinn

AMERICAN TEACHER C+ 78

USA (81 mi) 2011 Official site

Seen in a theater jam packed with teachers, this is basically a walking advertisement on behalf of teachers, though one which advances several compelling stories of teachers, which is easily the most dramatically impactful part of the film, as these are truly dedicated and nurturing teachers who demonstrate beyond anyone’s expectations what teachers can be if given the chance. In a perfect world, they would be doing what they love, but due to the under appreciation factor in American society which continually devalues the work of teachers, used as a battering ram of relentless criticism by the political right, they are a grossly underpaid working group, and because of the deteriorating pay scale, the employees have become nearly 85 % women, as men have exited the system in droves. No longer able to earn a living wage, nearly a third of teachers are forced to take a second job, which jumps to nearly two-thirds when you include compensated after school activities like coaching, extra time away from home that jeopardizes the stability of their marriages and family, as they are basically at work all day and night with little chance of seeing their family and still have troubles making ends meet. Teachers that have their own babies are forced to return to work too soon, where they jeopardize their own health from sleep deprivation, as they are no longer able to take care of themselves when they are devoted to classrooms, school preparations, and taking care of their own babies which require feeding at all hours of the night. But the real character of these chosen few teachers is shown in what they can accomplish in a classroom setting, where one with a Harvard degree states simply that very little time is actually spent teaching, that more time is spent talking to kids, offering encouragement, resolving problems, performing parenting or social service skills, where they are constantly required to intervene and make quick decisions in a daily crisis mode.

The film makes no reference to the political realities of shrinking funds for public schools, never mentioning the impact of teacher’s unions, where the right wing has all but declared war on public schools and their teacher’s unions, lowering taxes, developing an uncontrollable love for charter schools as a quick fix, where few if any are unionized, putting teachers at risk if they work there long enough, as they will eventually price themselves out of the market, as they do at the Big Box economic model, forcing the hand of the school boards that layoff well paid staff and hire someone fresh out of college for significantly less pay. This is the business model for how American workers are treated in general, as there is a small window of opportunity before the higher salaries make the employee unaffordable. Success contributes to their own demise. Again, the film makes no reference to this impending economic disaster waiting somewhere down the line due to the economic instability within the states themselves to adequately pay for public schools. Instead they reveal an idealized charter school system called TEP (The Equity Project) TEP Charter - The Equity Project Charter School that actually exists, paid entirely by public dollars, where teacher salaries begin at $125,000, nearly double the national average, with an additional $25,000 bonus. What the film leaves out is that TEP teachers work twice the hours of a typical teacher, are expected to take on additional responsibilities, and pay for their own health benefits. There is no case made whether this is a workable alternative, instead it is used as a Nirvana like example of an existing system where teachers are actually treated with respect and paid accordingly. The Harvard teacher applied for a position, one of over 600 applicants for only 8 jobs, and was accepted.

What the film also shows is nearly half the teachers leave the system within 4 years, 20% of urban teachers quit every year, where their initial optimism is met by the petty bureaucratic realities, where they are routinely taken advantage of, expected to do so much more but without any additional incentives or compensation, where the realization kicks in that they can’t afford to live on this salary, as over time it’s not expected to appreciably increase. As a result, there is a high turnover of new teachers, a model that consistently destabilizes the effectiveness of the classroom, where kids can grow attached and even expect help from teachers with their real life issues. When they suddenly disappear, this may have a drastic impact on their still developing lives. Perhaps the scene of the film shows a bright and energetic black female student who’s extremely fond of a black male teacher, claiming they talk all the time about everything, but when he suddenly disappears to change careers, as he can make make twice the money in the real estate business, she is shattered by his absence, one of the few if not the only black role model in her school. Nonetheless, when one of her parents dies a few years later, he is the only one who calls to reach out for her during this time, a shocking revelation of personal connectedness that reveals how teaching is so much more than an 8 hours a day job, how it’s a lifelong commitment to these kids. In nations with what is considered the best education systems, Finland, South Korea, and Indonesia, teachers are considered career professionals with earning power equivalent to or even exceeding doctors and lawyers, where very few ever leave the system because they are so well compensated and also recognized by society as among the most valued and worthwhile professions, where it would be unthinkable, for instance, for teachers to have to reach into their own pockets to purchase books or school supplies for their classrooms, something that 9 out of 10 American teachers are routinely forced to do.

NY Daily News Joe Neumaier

This heartbreaking and essential look into the lives of those who put so much into educating other people's children ought to be seen by anyone concerned about the fate of the public school system, and the nation as a whole. A second-generation first-grade teacher in Brooklyn works 11-hour days while pregnant. A Harvard grad loves her Maplewood, N.J., middle school but heads to a charter school for its livable wage. A dedicated Texas teacher must work long hours at two other jobs, which wind up costing him his family. A California teacher with a gift for connecting to kids is lost to the real-estate broker business.

Director Vanessa Roth's movie, narrated by Matt Damon (son of a public-school instructor), is filled with sobering statistics as officials, parents and students tell of the difference a great teacher makes. Hopefully, these portraits of working people doing our most important job also will make a difference.

Village Voice [Ernest Hardy]

One of the right wing’s favorite punching bags—and even, increasingly, the left’s— is the teaching profession. Director Vanessa Roth, who co-produced American Teacher with Ninive Calegari and Dave Eggers and scored Matt Damon to narrate, counters the teachers-are-the-problem narrative with a corrective that’s unapologetic in its teacher boosterism. What makes the film more than just a cheerleading countermove is the towering amount of research it contains: historical data tracing the profession from being the domain of men to largely that of women, and the cynical economic ploy behind the shift; terrifying figures on the rates of those fleeing the profession as well as the looming crisis of a mass retirement of elderly teachers; the sobering numbers of teachers living at the poverty level and/or holding down a second job. Putting a human face on the data are teachers of all races and backgrounds who gave Roth complete access to both their professional and personal lives, showing how the two are so deeply intertwined. What’s made powerfully clear is that we’ve reached a dire point of crisis that, while largely rooted in economics, is about so much more than dollars and cents. “Without effective teachers,” says one interviewee, “we don’t have an effective democracy.”

AMERICAN TEACHER Facets Multi Media

As the debate over the state of America's public school system rages on, one thing everyone (including President Obama) agrees on is the need for great teachers. Yet, while research proves that teachers are the most important school factor in a child's future success, America's teachers are so woefully underpaid that almost a third must divide their time between a second job in order to make a living.

Chronicling the stories of four teachers in different areas of the country, American Teacher reveals the frustrating realities of today's educators, the difficulty of attracting talented new teachers and why so many of our best teachers choose to leave the profession altogether. Their stories are disheartening, but this wake-up call to our system's failings also looks at possibilities for reform. Can we re-value teaching in the United States and turn it into a prestigious, financially attractive and competitive profession? With almost half of American teachers leaving the field in the next five years, now is the time to find out.

This heartbreaking and essential look into the lives of those who put so much into educating other people's children ought to be seen by anyone concerned about the fate of the public school system, and the nation as a whole.

Directed by Vanessa Roth, U.S.A. 2011, 81 mins. Produced by Dave Eggers and narrated by Matt Damon.

American Teacher | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Alison Willmore

American Teacher is basically a feature-length commercial on behalf of the teaching profession, attesting to how important and how difficult, underpaid, and underappreciated it is. The necessity of such an ad can be chalked up to the recent education-reform documentary barrage of The Cartel, The Lottery, and most prominently, Waiting For Superman, which all controversially criticize teachers’ unions and come out in favor of charter schools. American Teacher mostly avoids these murkier policy issues in favor of following a selection of idealistic teachers in their work and struggles, and interviewing countless others about the influence a good instructor can have on a child. The film is relentlessly one-sided enough to become tiring, but it’s impossible not to feel for the main characters, who all love what they do while continually being forced to question how feasible it is.

Brooklyn-based Jamie Fidler returns to work just six weeks after having a baby—she’s out of maternity leave, and she and her husband need the income too much for her to take unpaid time off. San Franciscan Jonathan Dearman takes up real estate after he finds it too challenging to support a family on his teacher’s salary. Harvard grad Rhena Jasey leaves her public-school position for a place at New York’s Equity Project Charter School, also because of the lure of better pay and the chance, as she puts it, to be able to afford takeout once in a while. But Texan Erik Benner is the real heartbreaker: The first in his family to go to college, he’s a beloved teacher and coach who has to work nights and weekends in retail just to get by. His brutal schedule costs him his marriage, he loses his house to foreclosure, and yet he’s stalwart and uncomplaining, a poignant figure in danger of being crushed by harsh economic realities.

American Teacher, narrated by Matt Damon and co-produced by author and McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers, is at its most persuasive when outlining how difficult it’s become to keep good teachers and attract new ones with the limited compensation and respect currently on offer. It’s less compelling when it verges into coloring teachers as saints, which runs counter to the grounded arguments that teaching is a profession in which success and skill deserve to be rewarded. As a whole, American Teacher is best taken not as a standalone film, but as a valid counterargument in what’s become a hot topic in the doc world.

Film Journal David Noh

Vanessa Roth and Brian McGinn’s American Teacher contains more superheroes than even the upcoming The Avengers ever dreamed of. Their uniforms may be nothing more than comfortable sweaters and sensible shoes, but the kind of salvation they specialize in is the real deal, involving the nascent minds of this nation, as are the considerable, and truly tireless, powers they possess. They are the public-school teachers of this country who strive on, in the face of constant neglect, disrespect, and—surprise!—no money.

Just the fact that a huge majority of teachers pay for a goodly amount of school supplies for their students out of their own meager salaries is a shameful indictment of the screwed-up system in this richest of countries. Once one factors in the gruelingly long hours, not even counting weekend work, and the incredible amount of burnout which makes even the most committed, self-sacrificing instructors reluctantly leave the profession, you may sincerely wonder why anyone even signs up for these stints in the first place.

The answer to that question is a nigh-unbelievable, idealistic sense of honor and generosity reflected in the individual profiles provided in this stirring, blisteringly immediate film. There’s Brooklyn first-grade teacher Jamie Fidler, herself pregnant with her first child, who juggles that fact and all of its attendant problems of maternity leave with the dedication she feels towards her kids, as one who hails from a strong family tradition of teaching. The very young Rhena Jacey uses her Harvard degree to aid young minds, instead of becoming a doctor or lawyer, and, like everyone else focused upon here, finds her reward in the light of love and gratitude shining from her young charges’ eyes.

Particularly heartbreaking is the plight of devoted Texas history teacher/football coach Erik Benner, who finds he must take on grueling, sometimes embarrassingly menial extra jobs to be able to support his family, only to have his marriage break apart in the face of such hardship. San Franciscan Jonathan Dearman, one of a minority of men and, additionally, men of color, in the field, made the tough decision to leave teaching for the more remunerative field of real estate, to the sorrow of his kids for whom he was a real, rare role model. This is a world in which a mere extra $75 to advise an after-school cultural club—however little Spanish, say, one actually knows—is more than welcome, in spite of the time it takes one away from one’s own personal life and family. It’s telling, however, that even those who have forsaken teaching all admit to missing it nearly every day of their lives, and you believe them.

The filmmakers have done a wholly admirable job in presenting the dire, daunting facts of this truly hard-knock life, and also present sensible, honorable alternatives to America’s haplessness that are just beginning to be talked about here, and are alive in other countries with a higher grade of education, like South Korea and Finland, where teaching is actually considered the most admired of jobs, over law and medicine. There, it seems to be all about respect and proper compensation, factors largely missing in our land where the question “Why would you want to teach?” is common coin.

Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]

Slant Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]

BoxOffice Magazine [Ray Greene]

Stark Insider [Loni Kao Stark]

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Smells Like Screen Spirit [Caitlyn Collins]

NPR Neal Conan from Talk of the Nation, September 29, 2011 (16:58)

MSNBC interview (video) (5:02)

NBC: screening discussion (video) (76:44)

American Teacher: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck

Variety [Dennis Harvey]

Los Angeles Times

New York Times

The Equity Project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NYC charter school's $125000 experiment - CBS News

The $100000 Teacher: A Solution to America's Declining Public ... by Brian Crosby

Rothlaender, Jonas

FADO D+ 66

Germany Portugal (100 mi) 2016 Official site

A film about privileged white male anxiety (personified by the rise and fall of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump), as if the world is not already screwed up from the effects of it, that is something of an epic disaster. While it’s reasonably well-directed, capturing the haunting beauty of two German exiles living in Lisbon, shot by Alexander Haßkerl, the story, co-written by Sebastian Bleyl and the director, really runs off the rails, growing exceedingly more obnoxiously offensive, combining extreme insecurity with stalker behavior, where little of it ever rings true, as it feels more like a writing exercise, continually planting the protagonist in ever more preposterous situations, where by the end it feels like it will never end. The director Jonas Rothlaender recently graduated from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, where this film, his first feature, is his graduation film, and in many ways it feels like it. Opening with a giant ocean wave, followed by a few short breaths, a young doctor, Fabian (Golo Euler), appears to suffer from panic attacks. Either that or acute fears. Though when pressed into action at a hospital in Berlin to save a young woman’s life who has suffered severe cranial damage, he handles himself admirably, even though he loses the patient. Afterwards, alone with the corpse, he pulls the sheet back to get a better look at her face. Within the first few minutes, we’re already getting creepy thoughts about this guy. Next thing you know he’s sleeping in a car, where you start to wonder about his financial situation, though we soon discover he’s following a girl, Doro (Luise Heyer), though she’s with someone else, seen later stalking her down the street late at night, where he identifies himself. Turning around, she looks stunned, asking what he wants, which leads to the title sequence. Without ever delving into a back history, we learn they split up recently, but he’s quit his job as a doctor in Germany and followed her to Lisbon to try to win her back, though she seems content with a new guy, Francisco (Albano Jerónimo), where the two work together as architects.

Strange as it seems, Doro seems willing to give him another chance, though there is obviously something lacking between them, soon identified as trust. Fabian has extreme jealousy issues, where he assumes she’s sleeping with the other guy, even wakes in a delirious sweat dreaming about it, where it becomes a huge elephant in the room, as he’s constantly consumed by these thoughts. Try as he may to repress them, they spurt out from time to time, creating completely inappropriate moments, with Doro leaving the room embarrassed and in shock, reminded that he hasn’t learned a thing since they broke up. Yet somehow, he apologizes, and she takes him back, not knowing what the audience knows, as we see him stalking her throughout the city to spy on who she’s with, even going through her purse, checking the photos on her cellphone, as she continues to socialize with Francisco and his friends after work, trying to find some reality that fits his twisted delusions. They never have any lengthy discussions or deep thoughts, sharing casual sex, which are not among the better scenes of the film, as the director strangely synchronizes their moans and sexual noises, as if they happen mathematically. Again, it simply doesn’t ring true. Infatuated with the idea that things might be getting better, Doro and Fabian take a trip up the coast in a seemingly idyllic environment, where things go well, until he has to bring up Francisco again, asking if she’s sleeping with him. Annoyed that she’s already answered that same question repeatedly, it doesn’t stop him from pestering her all over again, where his fears and anxieties come back to haunt him, and he has the gall to blame her for his own feelings of inadequacy, as if she’s expected to answer each and every one of his trivialities, where the guy is a walking time bomb.

The extent of his delusions only grow more ominously, to the point where he can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, as he starts to have meticulously detailed nightmares believing they are all laughing at him behind his back. In this way, the film resembles the humiliation nightmares in Bergman’s THE HOUR OF THE WOLF (1967), though Bergman’s visionary horrors are magnificent to see, while Fabian is a fairly milk toast guy by comparison, as he expresses very little actual personality and is rarely ever seen happy or having fun. Instead he seems threatened by intimacy, where the closer someone comes to him, he must immediately lash out at them to push them away, then profess complete innocence, as if he had nothing to do with it. It’s a sick little game, and Doro eventually refuses to put up with it any longer, calling the whole thing off, dropping him flat. Like a dog with his tail between his legs, he begs forgiveness, staring at her with those wounded eyes, but after a hug, walks away. But it’s not over, much as we wish it would be, as the stalking continues. The film wears out its welcome, as it prolongs the inevitable well past the breaking point, as the audience loses interest in this guy, as he remains stuck in one-dimensional territory, where we’ve seen through his nice guy veneer, as throughout it all, he really doesn’t care about anybody but himself. So he’s not a sympathetic figure. He’s a serial stalker, so he’s used to violating other people’s space and privacy, where he doesn’t think twice, but persists until he gets what he wants. As his life falls apart, he meets another exiled woman from Finland, Anita (Pirjo Lonka), who has the best line in the film, claiming what she loves about Lisbon is that it always matches her mood. When she’s happy, it looks bright and jubilant, yet when she’s sad, the city shares her melancholy, where the film title is presumably named after the early 19^th century mournful Portuguese songs called fado, which suggest a sad longing or resignation about one’s fate, and can be heard early on in the streets of Lisbon. Following Fabian the entire journey, mostly in close-up, looming larger than life, the film loses its embrace of reality and resorts to theatrics and hyperbole, symbolic of a full-blown nightmare, where as far as he’s concerned, it may as well be the end of the world drawing near, because it’s not about anyone else, it’s all about him.

Sadly, the two worst films seen at the Chicago Film Festival, the Russian film (M)uchenik (The Student) (2016) and this film are both distributed by the same company, Wide Management, Official site. That does not bode well for them.

Fado | IFFR

Love mixed with jealousy is a poisonous combination. It already went wrong once between Fabian and Doro but she decides to give him one more chance. In Lisbon their relationship blossoms again. However, he inevitably falls back into his old pattern of suspicion and paranoia. With severe consequences.

Can you get a second chance in a relationship once it has gone wrong? Fabian thinks you can. He hopes you can. When a woman who looks strikingly like his former girlfriend Doro dies on his operating table, the young doctor decides to do everything he can to repair what had been broken. He travels after his ex-girlfriend to Lisbon, where she has accepted a job at an architect’s office. He finds a job, starts taking Portuguese lessons, sets himself up in an apartment and courts her. After some hesitation, Doro succumbs and love blossoms again. But Fabian soon reverts to his old pattern of suspicion, paranoia and accusation.

Fado is a study in pathological jealousy, obsessive dependence and poisoned love. The urge to possess slowly but surely suffocates any form of affection and inevitably turns into blind aggression. The consequences are severe.

Cineuropa.org [David González]

In 1755, Lisbon fell victim to one of the most powerful earthquakes in recent European history. The Portuguese capital was razed to the ground, burnt to ashes and engulfed by a tidal wave, during which between 60,000 and 100,000 people lost their lives. These were people who were immersed in their everyday lives, blissfully unaware of the fact that this wave of disasters was headed their way. Nevertheless, centuries later, in the present day, a young German doctor called Fabian does realise that something is looming over him when he moves to Lisbon to attempt to get his ex, Doro, back. This is something that we are introduced to right from the get-go in Fado [+], the feature-length fiction debut by German director Jonas Rothlaender (in competition at the 15th Transilvania International Film Festival). Fabian finds himself in a market in the city’s Alfama district, in possession of an engraving of the disaster, and a deafening noise suddenly makes his mind seize up, as well as that of the viewer. Something is looming over him, which is probably nothing more than… himself.

Rothlaender doesn’t use the aforementioned apocalyptic historical event as the starting point for the story of Fabian and Doro, but rather as a way of adjusting the movie’s startling, constantly strained tone. Fado is a film sat under a Sword of Damocles. The couple of lovers (played by Luise Heyer and Golo Euler) are trying to piece their life back together after she (an architect) moved to Lisbon and he (a doctor) stayed in Berlin. The astonishing resemblance between one of his patients and his ex persuades him to zoom off to the Portuguese capital as fast as he can, in search of what he has lost, very likely because of that silent monster that awakens during the movie: Fabian’s unusual jealousy. Doro seems to have begun a new life with her Portuguese friends, one of whom is Francisco (Albano Jerónimo), whom Fabian suspects that she is having a fling with. And so begins the tidal wave.

Rothlaender reveals Fabian’s insecurities to us with a harsh but steady hand, starting a kind of direct game with the audience and showing them directly what the insecure boyfriend is creating in his own mind, but not letting them distinguish between imagination and reality. In fact, it is precisely this stylistic choice that allows Fado to distance itself from the more TV film-style approach that will always hover over a story like this. Here, Rothlaender’s success thus lies in the extreme portrait he paints of an unhealthy obsession, which, while based on dramatic effect, takes on an interesting dimension when it comes face to face with the character’s overall paranoia, symbolised by the images of a tidal wave that are peppered throughout the story, leading us ever closer to the fateful dénouement. For this reason, it is no coincidence that the title of the movie alludes to that quintessential genre of Portuguese music, the subject matter of which mainly tends to focus on the fatalism of one’s destiny.

The movie was co-produced by Germany (Stick Up Filmproduktion and Atara Film) and Portugal (Primeira Idade), and has had an international sales agent (French firm Wide Management) ever since its international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

ZEIT ONLINE, Kaspar Heinrich

Since a few days ago Fabian lives in Lisbon, as he pushes for the second time on the same, disturbing engraving: Waves several meters high to go to the Portuguese port city down, burning houses a plunge, people wander about in panic. The graph shows how in 1755 an earthquake Lisbon lay in ruins: Tens of thousands died as a result of the worst natural disasters in European history. The calamity that befell just the morning of All Saints of the city, at the time shocked many in their belief in a benevolent God. But in the film Fado is Fabian fascinated by the power of Nature, at the sight of engraving he falls into a trance. He senses what is the image of himself for an appropriate metaphor, he suffers but morbidly to fear of loss.

The young doctor Fabian (Golo Euler) travels behind his ex-girlfriend Doro (Luise Heyer), which is drawn as an architect for a construction project to Lisbon. Now Fabian is suddenly in front of her and solicits a second chance. We learn both know, without knowing much of its history, but soon notice: Despite mutual affection is something unsaid between them.

Fado accompanied in great tranquility the fight of a couple in a new confidence. Here Fabian is not a man of passionate gestures, but a lanky type, rather shy, behavior, but determined to win back his love. In fact, the two approach each other again slowly, holding hands, ending up in bed. But at least with a dinner with two colleagues from Doro indicated at what is becoming increasingly clear in the episode: Fabian destructive demon is jealousy.

Now the expectable, often seen history could connect from psychopathic stalker and his victim. But the film tells refined, it is not reflected on premature Doros page. Fado evokes instead the spectators even mistrust by letting him look through Fabian's eyes. Its vision is tainted, everywhere he suspects to be deceived. Once Doro have to start all of a sudden, then beeps her cell phone of an incoming SMS or she laughs noisily at a working telephone. Since Doro exchanges behind a fence with their colleagues from tender kisses or drives it with him in the hotel room. But is that what we see there, now a reality or just fearful imagination? Should we give the pictures that suggest fraud, faith? Or rather Doros angrier expectant expressions of loyalty?

Jealousy spoils one's own perception

Jealousy stunned own perception, it is then prone to interpretations and misinterpretations. Fado cleverly plays with this phenomenon. Were the farewell kisses to colleagues just friendship or something more? Rothlaender forces the viewer almost to slip into the role Fabians.

Rothlaender graduated from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, have his autobiographical documentation family arrived in January in theaters and is now in some resumed. Fado is his first feature film and Rothlaender, who also wrote the screenplay with Sebastian Bleyl has his main character occupied remarkably against the grain. From Golo Euler almost boyish trains first speak once little chasms. It is this break with the expectations proves a godsend: Euler's open, almost guileless face invites all the more for the identification and makes its efforts to overcome the jealousy credible. Although he repeatedly rolled over like one of those huge Atlantic waves, which he always sees in a dream.

Director Award for Rothlaender

Rothlaender stays away from fast recriminations and stalking clichés, its main character is differentiated, equally vulnerable and obsessed, passionate theme staged prudent. At this year's Max Ophüls Festival for young filmmakers, he won so the Director Award.

Lisbon forms an atmospherically dense, yet discreet venue for this event and its subtle escalation. In one scene noticed a Finn who knows Fabian from the course: "I am in love with Lisbon, because it reflects my moods like a chameleon.." The city, she says, seem at any moment just to feel like herself.

It is especially melancholy that pervades the film and it does not last even gave his title. Because of Fado, those cast in singing and guitar music sigh, likes to tell of grief and deep Weltschmerz, the barely translatable Portuguese feel "saudade". So there are nocturnal, human empty streets in yellow lamplight or the pale blue sky above the gischtenden Atlantic and the misty river Tagus that give this film worth seeing the matching aesthetics.

SPIEGEL ONLINE Oliver Kaever

In traditional Fado Portuguese sing the saudade, that wistful melancholy of life that may have changed in 2016 not even winning the European football championship. In it sadness and longing for something lost mix that will never return. The main character in Jonas Roth lander debut film "Fado", the young German doctor Fabian, experienced in Lisbon its very own category of saudade. He knows His love happiness will never be fulfilled. And blame alone is himself.

The story of Fabian (Golo Euler) in Lisbon starts promising. He lives in Berlin here. Supposedly, to visit his ex-girlfriend Doro (Luise Heyer), who works there as an architect, but as it turns out quickly, he wants to win her back. Fabian looks for a job, an apartment - and he succeeds. Doro who had initially repellent and almost a little frightened, opens it again. After the first sex Fabian to cry. A man with great emotions.

However, unable to talk about his emotional life also. That Fabian internally not only move romantic revelry, Jonas Rothlaender shows in his as subtle as impressively fine film from the beginning. A fundamental uncertainty breaks in abruptly and without comment standing there images path. A giant wave rises about repeatedly wild foaming up and up, ready to devour everything under her lying.

The border of the psychological thriller

Then this strange incident at the beginning of the hospital in Berlin, as Fabian is trying to save a patient with severe head injuries, which looks exactly like Doro. Imagination or reality? And what about the shaking of the earth, which he said felt after his arrival in Lisbon? The viewer will make in the course of "Fado" repeatedly experience that he can not trust the pictures because coincide external reality and inner experience Fabian's in them.

As it turns out, failed the first relationship between Doro and Fabian at his extreme jealousy. Shocked Doro must find that it has not changed. Fabian is convinced that Doro with her colleague Francisco (Albano Jerónimo) is cheating on him. He sees the images in his head when he sleeps with her. When the two accompanied on a construction site. When he discovers harmless material on Doros camera.

"Fado" is an intense drama of jealousy, but Jonas Rothlaender can be a long time before he puts this aspect at the center of his film. He keeps his eyes on the figure Fabian open and avoid going out of their state to construct a voltage motor. The atmosphere of "Fado" is indeed increasingly tense, and always have to fear that Fabian delusion discharges in violence. But Rothlaender avoids crossing the border to psychological thriller.

Him it is important to observe a man who his negative emotions does not arise and attempts to suppress it constantly. Golo Euler plays the extremely intense with a sealed face that is used to mask. Sensational, as he leaves it to the right places and the views quite undisguised releases on Fabian's true emotional state.

With this mixture of an outer stoicism which holds the inner emotion storm tedious at bay, to Golo Euler has hyped the man of the hour in the German film and television. First film roles he landed in 2005, when he was studying at the Bavarian Theatre Academy. known to a wide audience of 34-year-old was "Born Into Pain" in 2014 with the legendary "Tatort" episode. 2016 Euler was already to be seen in the movie "Holiday"; September 29, runs with "Die letzte Sau" already his next film appearance to.

The dynamics of repressed emotions

If so come jealousy, Fabian is their mercy. It is sufficient that he like Doro and only reached its paint box; she receives a text message or maintains in a pub with Francisco: Already start chains of thought and ideas. Jonas Rothlaender hardly needs dialogues to stage Fabian jealousy attacks, he finds compelling, sexually expressive images for his condition.

Once Fabian rushes frantically through branched hotel corridors. He knows that Doro and Francisco are here, and in his mind he sees the sex, the two have behind one of the doors. Delusion or reality? mired deep in the labyrinth is Fabian his obsessions, hurt to the depths of his soul.

Jonas Rothlaender has the dynamics of constantly repressed emotions, leading to pain, destruction and discord, already very impressive in his early this year appeared documentary "Family have" examined - using the example of three generations of his own family, which under a tyrannical and egocentric grandfather suffered. He says: "If you did not face your fears, they go to the basement and lift weights."

And so is at Fabian at deadline with saudade. With him govern naked hatred and despair. He lands in a questionable Touri-disco where no Fado runs but Haddaways Euro dance Gassenhauer "What Is Love". There Fabian dancing like a madman until the bouncers throw him out. Outside still echoes the line "Baby do not hurt me no more" after.

Fado | Film | Kritik | critic.de

Spielfilm.de [Bianka Piringer] (German)

Gesehen: „Fado“ von Jonas Rothlaender – >>FastForward Magazine Gabi Rudolph

Fado : Lisbon as the backdrop for a story of jealousy - Cineuropa Vitor Pinto

Fado :: Regie: Jonas Rothlaender - Rolling Stone Rüdiger Suchsland

Fado, Road to Instanbul, The World is Mine and Rosalie Blum: Espoo ...

dffb › blog

Love and anger - EXBERLINER.com David Mouriquand

Jonas Rothlaender, director of "Fado" #TIFF2016 - Fred English Channel

Rouaud, Christian

LEADERSHEEP

France (118 mi) 2011

Leadersheep (Tous au Larzac!): Cannes Review Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from the Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2011

How strange the Festival de Cannes, itself host to such landmark films as "Fog of War" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," chose to foist such a stodgy, old-fashioned doc into the 2011 Official Selection.

With the documentary currently enjoying a renaissance of innovative work and cutting-edge investigations, how strange the Festival de Cannes, itself host to such landmark films as Fog of War and Fahrenheit 9/11, chose to foist such a stodgy, old-fashioned doc as Leadersheep (Tous au Larzac!) into the 2011 Official Selection. No doubt the selection of Christian Rouard’s film has to do with politics, which is to say its portrait of the birth of a political movement of French farmers in the region of Larzac against the expansion of an army base that would have gobbled up their farmland.

However remarkable and heroic this political movement, the eyes glaze over with two hours of talking heads and the occasional intrusion of archival footage or shots of bucolic farms.

While the film makes the claim that the international anti-globalization movement has its roots in these farmers’ struggles against their stubborn government, nothing has been done to make the story of interest of anyone outside of France. Even inside France, that interest may be limited.

The now aging members of this rebellion against forced expulsion from their land recall in far too much detail the organization of the 103 families that fought the government throughout the 1970s and the various strategies employed to gain nationwide attention to and sympathy for their plight.

If tractor parades through the countryside fail to budge obstinate ministers, then why not bring sheep to graze on the Champ-de-Mars in Paris? Which explains the amusing English title of the film. Who knew sheep could be such an effective PR weapon?

The Larzac farmers only won their battle when a new government came in with the election of Francois Mitterrand in 1981. The movement has apparently stayed active in any number of national and international controversies including the introduction GMOs into farming.

This would seem to be a more compelling story than the tale Rouaud chooses to tell — how a group of seemingly disparate and political naïve farmers wound up creating a political movement that has lasted so long. Instead Leadersheep bogs down in the minutia of long ago organizational difficulties, disputes and successes that feel like a back story to a much more interesting film.

Leadersheep Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily

The story of a modern French rural uprising, Leadersheep (Tous au Larzac!) is a documentary in the strict sense - it comprehensively and informatively reports its subject, rather than seducing us with any fancy storytelling techniques. The episode recounted is the story of an 11-year local protest against government plans to extend a military base, and offers both an exemplary power-to-the people narrative and a portent of the later ascent of the anti-globalisation movement.

It’s an involving story, but as told in the flat, talking-head-heavy style of Leadersheep, it comes across more as an earnest and over-stretched history lesson. Outside France, where the story was a national cause célèbre, theatrical potential will be scant, while TV exposure seems most likely in strictly pedagogic and political contexts (it might help, though, to choose a less facetious English-language title).

The location is Larzac, an agricultural region to the south of France’s Massif Central. The drama begins in 1971, when Michel Debré, then France’s Minister of Defense, announces his plan to expand a local military base - a move that would threaten the local sheep farming then undergoing a revival.

Local farmers, till then politically conservative, talk about how they came to stage their own 1968-style revolt as they contested Debré’s plans. The uprising begins on a small scale, with such stunts as taking sheep to Paris to raise the profile of their cause. Then the Larzac cause is espoused by a wide variety of leftists, hippies and alternative factions - including celebrity advocate of nonviolence Lanza del Vlasto, seen in archive footage as an eccentric guru figure. Major rallies follow in the region, which becomes a Mecca for French radicalism.

What starts off gently becomes an increasingly fraught concern, with the government digging its heels in and relations becoming increasingly sour between locals and the army. A stone thrown at visiting politician François Mitterand is thought to be the doing of an agent provocateur, and the story takes a particularly nasty turn when the home of a farmer and his family is bombed by parties unknown.

Several Larzac campaigners are jailed for stealing documents from an army base - one of the film’s key themes being the way that ordinary working people, who previously considered themselves non-political, risked all to defend their community and its livelihood.

This is certainly a stirring and troubling episode of solidarity against the system, and eventually one of triumph - although it appears that the campaign would apparently have been lost if a new Mitterand government had not been elected just in time to reverse the decisions of the Giscard regime. There’s some fascinating archive footage displayed here, but not enough to sustain the film’s two hours, which is overladen with Larzac veterans filmed telling what increasingly feels like a numbing chain of anecdotes.

The participants are lively and likeable, though not always charismatic enough to hold the camera at length. The one high-profile interviewee is farmer and activist José Bové, involved in the campaign, and subsequently the figurehead of the French anti-globalisation movement, which arguably had its roots in the Larzac struggle.

Rouch, Jean

Film Comment Jean Rouch in Conversation with James Blue, Fall/Winter 1967

You are one of those filmmakers most intimately involved with the problem of the existence of man in front of the camera-seeking to draw out of him not the professional performance of an actor but the revelation of what might be called his essential nature, his being. If you will, I would like you to trace your thinking for me here. As you know, Pudovkin has made the observation that the non-professional actor is unable "to be himself" when faced with the unusual instruments of picture making: camera, microphone, lights, etc. These generate an artificiality that distorts his behavior. A wall is created. What has been your experience?

All right, first the problem of this wall. You know very well that when you have a microphone - such as the one you are now holding, and when you have a camera aimed at people, there is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon that takes place because people are being recorded: they behave very differently than they would if they were not being recorded. But what has always seemed very strange to me is that, contrary to what one might think, when people are being recorded, the reactions that they have are always infinitely more sincere than those they have when they are not being recorded. The fact of being recorded gives these people a public.

At first, of course, there is a self-conscious "hamminess." They say to themselves, "People are looking at me, I must give a nice impression of myself." But this lasts only a very short time. And then, very rapidly, they begin to try to think - perhaps for the first time sincerely - about their own problems, about who they are and then they begin to express what they have within themselves. These moments are very short, and one must know how to take advantage of them. That's the art of making a film like Chronicle of a Summer.

Then another thing happens! In Chronicle of a Summer Morin and I lived in permanent contact with these people who followed the development of the film with us little by little, seeing the rushes, and the film became for them a reason for living during these months. Now then! The people caught up in this game, and seeing themselves on the screen, began to think about the character that they were representing involuntarily - a character of which they had been completely unaware, that they discovered on the screen all of a sudden with enormous surprise! And at that very moment, they began to play a role, to be someone different! This is a phenomenon that we have still not explored enough with film.

Do you remember Marcelline? The Jewish girl who walks along La Place de la Concorde recalling aloud her memories of being taken to a concentration camp during the occupation? That was the first scene we shot with Michel Brault as cameraman. We had brought him in from Canada and with him came all his lightweight equipment. All of a sudden we felt "liberated." We could go anywhere. So we thought we would try out the new material on La Place de la Concorde.

Now. Marcelline was always talking about having been deported, and each time she brought it up, she had this sort of exhibitionism that many deportees have when they want to make you feel the horror of it all. And faced with the apparent indifference of those of us who didn't know how to reply to her, all we could say was, "Yes, you don't say?" - she would make it even more horrible. So we absolutely wanted something of that in the film to explain the character of Marcelline, but we didn't know very well how to put it in.

But at that time - it was the 15th of August 1960 - there were some filmmakers out shooting scenes of that, you know, "Occupied Paris" genre, so we said - "Let's go to the Place de la Concorde. There will surely be some 'German soldiers' and then we can ask Marcelline to tell us about her experiences." But we all got up too late that morning, and when we got to La Place de la Concorde, there were no more "German soldiers." Nothing. So I said - "It makes no difference. Marcelline, you hang the tape recorder over your shoulder and take the necktie microphone, and you just go for a walk around, the Place de la Concorde - which was empty - and you say anything that comes into your head." And she came out with this monologue, which I think is extraordinary, where she just talks to herself - no one could hear her. We followed with the camera. And when I stopped the scene, Marcelline said - "I haven't finished yet." So we went to Place de l'Opera but nothing seemed to happen. Then by chance we came upon Les Halles [market place of Paris with a large steel hanger-like structure over the street]. It was empty, so we had her walk through that. And she said whatever she wanted.

And when Morin and I saw that, we were very moved. I thought it was extraordinary. And what seemed so important was that someone could speak so sincerely while walking. And what was even more impressive was that what she said came really involuntarily! And that's what I like so much about this kind of cinema: anything can happen! You never know! All of a sudden she began to talk - not of the camp, but of her return! Why? Because Les Halles resembles a railroad station. And you see, by association of ideas, she immediately began to talk of her return when her family came to meet her, but her father wasn't there. That was something miraculous. Something absolutely unplanned! We didn't know what would happen. I thought it was a miracle.

How does this tie in with what you said about your people becoming aware of a new role, a new side of themselves that they had not suspected before?

Well, when we projected this scene to Marcelline, she said that none of that concerned her! Now what did that mean? She meant - "I'm an excellent actress and I am capable of acting that!" But that's not true. Morin and I are persuaded that when she said those things, it was the real Marcelline, terribly sincere, who was speaking of all that - exactly as she felt it, as she was.

So after having revealed herself, she refused the revelation by saying she was just acting. What were the consequences on the rest of the film? Did she freeze up?

After Marcelline had seen those sequences, she felt that she had to play that role!

A role of someone who had suffered a traumatic alienation, who had lost a father, who pitied herself, a role that normally she had not projected to the world·

Now, at that time she was with a young man named Jean-Pierre, and since we were shooting the film without knowing very well where we were going, and we were all in collaboration, Jean-Pierre became involved also.

And now the very strange aspect of this kind of cinema comes out! When Marcelline and Jean-Pierre are together, all sorts of problems arise between them - problems that Morin dwelt on - problems of a couple that doesn't get along, etc. We were then the witness to something strange, which I've noticed before in other films: the cinema became for these people a pretext to try to resolve problems that they were not able to resolve without the cinema.

For example, when we were down at St. Tropez for the final scenes of the film, Marcelline and Jean-Pierre were there, and one night they got into a fight over something pretty futile. And Morin said to them: "I want to get some sleep! If you want to fight, wait until tomorrow and you can fight in front of the camera!" So they fought a little less, and then the next day we went out on the pier and let them fight it out. Of course, it was a little bit forced, but Morin and I are convinced that what they said in front of the camera was 90 percent extremely sincere, and of that 90 percent at least 10 percent of what they said to each other they would never have said otherwise. Never! Never! Never! Never! The extraordinary pretext offered was, if you wish, the possibility to say something in front of the camera and afterwards be able to retract it saying that it was "just for the film." The extraordinary possibility of playing a role that is oneself, but that one can disavow because it is only an image of one self. One can say: "Yes, but it's not me."

So to sum up - first a "hammy" artificial self-consciousness; then a reflection upon oneself and a revelation of a hidden aspect of oneself of which one was not aware perhaps; then the more or less conscious attempt to play out a role defined by this revelation and an attempt to resolve the problems of it on the pretext that this is only a film.

Now, this extremely strange game we were playing, may also be extremely dangerous. When you have people play out this psychodrama which engages their whole existence, what happens when there is no more film? I've thought about this often, and I don't think we have the right to do this. Really, I believe that we don't have the right! Because when you begin such a thing, giving people not only the possibility to express a character hidden within them which has not heretofore been revealed, but also to live out that character - well, life just doesn't stop when the film does! It goes on!

What if you take two people, a boy and a girl, and you have them meet each other and you say to them: "Anything in the world is now possible! The camera is rolling"? This is a marvelous pretext for a romance, for a voyage, for anything at all because everything is possible. But it is very dangerous because you become a kind of Prometheus creating creatures for whom you alone are responsible! The camera and the cinema are the only justification of their existence. Once that stops, what happens? You haven't got the right!

Do you see any application now of these improvisational, psychodramatic techniques that do not transgress the bounds of the right of the individual?

You can use them to help people who need to get things out into the open and can't do it otherwise and who would be helped to solve their problems in this manner. Or they can be used to tell pure and simple fiction - a story. And when that story is finished, the whole fiction is terminated.

You think, then, that a fiction story with a definite end to it will permit the nonactor to reveal himself without involving his private life to a point where the role is prolonged indefinitely?

I think that's the solution, personally.

If you wish, I see two possible directions for these direct shooting or cinéma-vérité techniques: the first is the recording of reality when there is something important, the problems of our era, etc. For this, the light, portable equipment is a marvelous tool. It must be lighter still, more flexible, no wires connecting tape recorder and camera. That's the kind of thing that Leacock is doing. You take a situation, a problem and you try to express it - attempting to be as close as possible to what you think is going on. You try to record the images and the sound of that reality - which is your reality.

The second direction is to move into fiction using these techniques, using the fiction on the one hand to tell a story, but on the other to prevent your people from becoming completely involved in such a film. That is a direction that we have only begun to explore.

Leacock has told me in an interview (FILM COMMENT, Spring 1965, Vol. 3, No. 2) that we don't have the right to use "reality techniques" in telling fiction stories.

I understand Leacock's idea very well. As soon as you begin to use these techniques for fiction, the spectator, when we show him reality, will say that it, too, is fiction! But we've known that for a long time! This feeling of "authenticity" to an image, there is no reason why it should not be applied to fiction. When Shirley Clarke used techniques very close to those of Leacock in The Cool World, she never pretended to be telling me a true story in the strict sense of the word. I was very moved by her film. As soon as a director has the honesty not to pretend that he is showing me a filmed reality - as they attempt to do in Paris-Secret or in Mondo Cane, which are pure invention passed off as being real then I see no reason why the director should not use any technique he wishes. There is nothing wrong with attempting to give to a story the greatest realism possible. The cinema has always been a reconstitution of a reality in a time and in a space which are not those in which it was made. A western shot in this technique could be fascinating. So to condemn, as Leacock does, the use of those techniques from a philosophical standpoint seems to me absurd. It's a question of professional honesty, nothing more. When you made Les Oliviers de la Justice you didn't say that you were making a "report" on Algeria. You were telling a story, and you used some of these techniques to try to be nearer to that reality which seemed to you one of the essential elements of that era. No one thought that you were deceiving us.

In which direction do you see yourself moving now?

Since Chronicle of a Summer, I've moved in two directions: the first being the use of the technique to record reality. For example, The Lion Hunters, in which I try to get closer to what is going on with image and sound - that's terribly difficult. The second direction is an attempt to tell a story in which there is an enormous part of improvisation and, above all, an enormous part of chance. Surrealism, perhaps, has influenced me in this direction. The chance occurrence is an essential thing. All of a sudden an encounter takes place between two unusual things that are normally not related and a structure is created because of this meeting. This was the case of Marcelline and Les Halles in Chronicle of a Summer. Les Halles had nothing to do with concentration camps, nor anything to do with Marcelline. She had never been there. We went there by chance. However, from this encounter something was born. So I think that you can create fiction by trying to stimulate chance, by trying to provoke this kind of encounter - using the most free reportage techniques not to film life as it is - but life as it is provoked!

George Sadoul (the French critic and film historian) told me once that Chronicle of a Summer reminded him a little bit of what the poet Apollinaire used to do, his "Poem-Objects," where he would cut together bits and pieces of conversations overheard in a cafe and try to make a poem out of them. And right there! Right there, you start to enter into that "other domain" where film can do something very important! Taking bits and pieces of reality and trying to make an artistic composition out of them - like paper collages by Braque and Picasso. That's really exciting. To find again Vertov's experiment: shoot the world apart and put it back together to express something. Cinema is the creation of a new reality. That's its real vocation!

Have any of your cinéma-vérité films been commercial successes?

No. Not one. No one else's have been either. Why? I don't know. Perhaps people don't like to see their own image.

Like Marcelline who was happier when she felt that what she was doing was fiction. Perhaps fiction is the only way of facing ourselves.

Of one thing I am sure: when you make a film, you must show it even if it's bad. You have undergone an experience. You show it to others. Then you must say - "I tried to do such and such. I failed. Why?" You have a right to fail. Because it's your duty to run risks. He who never fails, never risks anything. What is the most interesting thing in life? Very probably to run risks. That for me is our profession.

Amy Taubin in - Film Comment Jean Rouch in Conversation with Jacqueline Veuve, Fall/Winter, 1967

People say that you and Godard have had a bad influence on young filmmakers: ever since you began using unorthodox methods and materials, just about anyone thinks he is capable of picking up a camera and making a film without having first learned the craft.

I think that charge is idiotic. If people are, in fact, making films, and if we have enabled cinema to slip out of the stranglehold of ridiculous rules and industrial patterns that films have been buried in until now, then it's a very good thing. But if we have opened the door to a lot of mediocrity because every amateur is making films, then what of it?

That there are now a lot of people making films today is good enough for me. Our influence is not a bad one when we have encouraged people to make films who were not making them before. We are not responsible for the fact that some of them have made bad films. Some of these people will one day make good ones!

What films using your improvisational methods have you done recently?

The first is a film made up of a series of sketches called Paris Vu Par . . . that is, Paris Seen By· six directors: Claude Chabrol, Jean Douchet, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer, and myself. Each sketch takes place in a different sector of Paris. My film is the story of a suicide at the Northern Lines Railway station: La Gare du Nord.

The story is simple: a young girl argues with her husband because she lives near the Gare du Nord and her life is quite dull. She gets mad at him over breakfast and walks out. Suddenly she is almost run down at a street corner by a car driven by a young man who seems quite seductive. He invites her to run away with him, to live a wild adventure of love. He offers her everything she had criticized her husband for not giving her. But, either by good sense or by her bourgeois upbringing, she refuses to go with him, and the young man abruptly turns and jumps off the bridge on which they've been walking, onto the tracks below. The tone of the film comes from the fact that we live through the 20 minutes - without a visible cut - because the film is made in two 10-minute takes, with the splice hidden by a passage into a dark area. We live through everything leading up to the suicide: in a sense, we, too, become involved and, in a way, responsible for the suicide.

The second film I've finished recently is another sketch, this time one of four short films to be released together under the title The Fifteen Year-Old Widows. Each sketch takes place in a different country. They were directed by Teshigahara in Japan, Michel Brault in Canada, in Italy by Gian-Vittorio Baldi and in France by myself. With this film I am trying to get myself out of the dilemma of improvised reportage that you have to distort in order to edit. Here the dialogue has been written with the collaboration of the people who play the roles.

Do they play their own roles?

It's their own experiences that serve as material for the film, but we have interchanged the roles. It's the story of two girls: one who becomes delinquent and one who does not. But the role of the delinquent girl is played by the girl who is not, and vice versa. I have reversed the roles because I have learned by experience, in making Chronicle of a Summer, that being in a film can have a certain influence on a nonprofessional performer. It's quite troubling to put people in a film, forcing them to play their own role - either because they feel guilty afterwards or because they become exhibitionists.

This film was censored, I believe.

Yes, I had to cut out the obscene words that the girls used and also - very curiously - the opinions the girls expressed about their families. Now, to me, this film was about the failure of urban families, but to hear the families condemned by the girls was intolerable to French censors - which shows that the problem is indeed a bad one when you can't even talk about it.

Are you planning more films in Africa?

For quite a while I have thought it would be interesting to make films aimed both at African publics and at audiences of European researchers, to show them just how difficult the African problems are to solve. People are always talking about making basic teaching films, but when you ask the experts, you suddenly realize that no one knows what it is that they want to teach and no one even knows how to present better agricultural or animal husbandry techniques. We know very little, and yet that doesn't stop us from going into Africa as if we held the key to all those problems!

However, if you take a very serious look at those problems, you discover that they are not at all what we thought. For example: I have done a film on the cultivation of millet [grass seed food]. Millet is at present one of the basic food-stuffs of those people who inhabit the savannah. And it so happens that it takes three to four months of work each year to grow millet. Now, the problem of improving the cultivation is relatively complex because the rainy season is very brief, and also there are problems of overpopulation that cause the rapid depletion of all agricultural products. But before trying to resolve these problems you must first know what they are. I thought it was necessary to know how the farmers themselves have attempted to solve their problems. The film I made tries to do nothing more than show how for generations people have solved, by themselves, a certain number of problems by drawing upon local beliefs and upon a philosophy of the relationship of man to nature.

If you like, I'm criticizing all of these experts who foist off on Africa their economic development theories and planning, without first knowing anything about what has gone on before. They are a little like these missionaries who think that they should Gospelize countries they call "pagan" because they aren't Christian - as if there had never existed another religion before Christianity.

What African problems interest you most?

All of them. But at present one of the most interesting seems to be the attitude of the Africans themselves with regard to our western world: that is, their attempt to separate themselves more and more from our civilization, which they now consider out of date. For many Africans, we are the inventors of techniques, but unfortunately we don't know how to use them.

Do you see a role for the cinema as an expression of African culture?

Although one cannot yet use the term African Cinema - there are only about five or six short African films in existence - it should nevertheless be pointed out that Africans have picked up the reins and that something is happening. Using non-African techniques, using easy-to-manipulate, improved equipment, Africans have begun to make films. We will soon see, coming out of Africa, films not based on written scenarios, but created on the spot with the camera and improvised by the actors. There is one film already called La Bague Du Roi Koda (The Ring of King Koda) created in this manner. A Mr. Lassam runs a small public film society in Niamey [Niger]. He shows both conventional and ethnographic films. One day his public said to him, "Why don't we make a film with you?" So they invented a story, they shot it together, and they all looked at it together. In this way they produced a film - in this way a young African, who is almost illiterate, organized a film that became a sort of collective message from a group of people who are entirely illiterate. I think this shows a lot of promise.

The film was shown at a conference on African art held at Genes to prepare for the World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar during Easter, 1966. It was very well received - it brought a bit of fresh air. It was a good thing for young Africans educated in western schools and universities to see, all of a sudden, that what Europe had was not the only truth, that there were people back home in Africa who were bringing a sincere message straight out of the brushlands!

In the years to come, I believe that we shall witness the rise of something we never suspected: an Africa cinema culture. This is something that educated men have completely overlooked, for although there have been ethnographic films about Africa, it is a little sad that African ethnography has always been carried out only by people who come from another world.

For one of the dramas of Africa is this: the more the years go by, the more the gulf widens between the city and the brush, and the more that the African intellectuals are being separated from real African cultural traditions. So I think it's a good thing that through audio-visual means young African intellectuals can realize that there are other things than Parisian sophistication and that there are also people on this earth whom we can call cultured - men who do not know how to read nor write but who have their own culture - an African culture, and it is in that culture that the young African will find his heritage, and not in ours!

Mme Veuve has worked at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris and has collaborated with Jean Rouch on a project of cataloging and analyzing ethnographic and sociological films; two of their catalogs have been for UNESCO. With Yves Yersin, she produced a 25-minute film on Swiss farm life, Le Panier a Viande. Her interview with Rouch was translated by FILM COMMENT's former publisher, Clara Hoover.

Jean Rouch: A Tribute Jean Rouch tribute website

Jean Rouch, filmmaker About Jean Rouch, by Brenda Baugh from the Rouch website

Personal Tributes - Jean Rouch: A Tribute from the Rouch website

maitres-fous.Net another website devoted to Rouch

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010

Film Reference Overview R. F. Cousins essay from Film Reference

DER Filmmaker: Jean Rouch biography from Documentary Educational Resources

Jean Rouch as an actor Documentary Educational Resources

Jean Rouch: Information from Answers.com biography

Biography Ben Michaels

JEAN ROUCH - Films & Bio - French New Wave Director brief bio

Jean Rouch Complete Index to World Film

Jean Rouch Mubi

Jean Rouch - Breaking Open the Head A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Undated)

Reframe | Screening Room with Jean Rouch 64 minute film from Screening Room, a 1970s Boston television series that offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station, July, 1980

Subsaharan African film history Technological paternalism, by Manthia Diawara from Jump Cut, April 1987

The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch, Stoller book written by Paul Stoller (266 pages), June 1992

Rouch in Reverse Jonathan Rosenbaum on a video documentary on Jean Rouch, January 31, 1997

Jean Rouch: Cinematic Griot Amy Carp academic paper, April 2000

CHRONIQUE D'UN ÉTÉ (CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER) - Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 21, 2000

Jean Rouch: Cinéma-vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human ... Barbara Bruni from Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002

A Tribute to Jean Rouch - Rouge Paul Stoller from Rouge, 2004

Jean Rouch: A Valediction - Rouge Michael Eaton from Rouge, 2004

Jean Rouch, an Ethnologist And Filmmaker, Dies at 86 Alan Riding from The New York Times, February 20, 2004

Obituary: Jean Rouch | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, February 20, 2004, also seen here: FIPRESCI - News - Jean Rouch

"Verite Pioneer Jean Rouch" Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE, February 24, 2004

Jean Rouch's Ciné-Ethnography Jean Rouch's Ciné-Ethnography: at the conjunction of research, poetry and politics, by Lorraine Mortimer from Screening the Past, December 14, 2004

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005

Mondays: Monday 2.05.07 – Jean Rouch Screening Study guide from 16beaver>Mondays, February 5, 2007

“Vanishing Point: The Last Days of Film” Wheeler Winston Dixon examines Rouch’s view “that video is the AIDS of the film industry,” from Senses of Cinema, May 2007

Les Maîtres Fous | Savage Minds Strong includes the film on YouTube in 3 parts, from Savage Minds, June 16, 2007

Documentarism Kris Haamer, October 15, 2008

Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch edited by Joram ten Brink Saër Maty Bâ from Senses of Cinema, December 2010

Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria edited by Pierre Barrot translated by Lynn Taylor Wheeler Winston Dixon reviews the book from Senses of Cinema, December 2009

"A BOMBASTIC ELEMENT": Mali: Cinema Paradiso - Bamako Style Bunmi quotes heavily from the Barrot edited book, Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon, at “A Bombastic Element,” January 25, 2010

The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of ... book by Paul Henley (536 pages), February 2010

"A BOMBASTIC ELEMENT": DRC: A Frank Discussion about Conflict in ... DRC: A Frank Discussion about Conflict in the Congo (Paris, 1960), including a 5 minute film clip from Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), by Bunmi from “A Bombastic Element,” April 5, 2010

Jean Rouch: Ciné-Ethnography – Descriptive Ethnography Makes A ... writings of Jean Rouch at Troy Belford, edited and translated by Steven Field (456 pages), July 29, 2010, also seen at the publisher’s site here, and includes a 3-part YouTube version of Les Maítres Fous with English subtitles

Lights, camera, Africa The Economist, December 16, 2010

Jean Rouch Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010

"A BOMBASTIC ELEMENT": Nigeria: Nollywood vs. Jean Rouch Bunmi responds to The Economist article at “A Bombastic Element,” December 24, 2010

Filmmaker Provocateur: Jean Rouch | French Culture February 10, 2013

The Extraordinary “Chronicle of a Summer” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, February 21, 2013

Africa and France: The Work of Jean Rouch | IndieWire Steve Erickson, February 26, 2013

An Influential Verité Documentary: 'Chronicle of a Summer' | PopMatters Sarah Boslaugh, March 15, 2013

Wilmington on DVDs: Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un Ete ... Michael Wilmington from Movie City News, April 3, 2013

Jean Rouch And Cinema Verit : Chronicle D`un t - Filmmaking ... Anna, July 11, 2013

TSPDT - Jean Rouch

interviewed Jean Rouch in 1977 Interview with Rouch on his films Jaguar, Les Maîtres Fous and The Lion Hunters, by John Marshall and John W. Adams in September 1977

Screening Room with Jean Rouch (1980) - PREVIEW 1980 Robert Gardiner video interview with Jean Rouch from The Screening Room, on YouTube (7:41)

Jean Rouch on the future of Visual Anthropology subtitled video interview on YouTube, summer 2001 (3:14)

An Interview: John Marshall on Jean Rouch (2004) Brenda Baugh interviews Marshall on his recollections of Rouch

501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers

Images for Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean Rouch Video Available online videos (from 1 to 16 minutes)

Jean Rouch on YouTube (1:04)

Jean Rouch brief scene from a documentary by Joost Verheij, Rouch’s Gang (1:13)

Jean Rouch on the Future of Visual Anthropology on YouTube (1:57)

Jean Rouch on editing. 1982 subtitled comments on his film “Hippopotamus Hunt,” Pt 1 (4:05)

Jean Rouch on feed-back and documentary music. English subtitled, Pt 2 (2:47)

Conversations with Jean Rouch Ann McIntosh tribute to her experiences with Rouch (5:56)

Screening Room with Jean Rouch (1980) - PREVIEW Robert Gardiner interview with Jean Rouch (7:41)

Friends, Fools, Family - PREVIEW Rouch’s Collaborators in Niger, with English subtitles (7:41)

Jean Rouch and His Camera in the Heart of Africa 1986 Dutch TV video documentary from Documentary Educational Resources (16:31)

keyframe.org | A Few Minutes Jean Rouch 40 minute film by Jan Speckenbach (40:00)

IN THE LAND OF THE BLACK MAGI (Au pays des mages noirs)

France (12 mi) 1947

Jean Rouch - Premier Film, 1947-1991 Documentary Educational Resources

The director, Dominique Dubosc gives Jean Rouch the opportunity to improvise a new commentary for his first film made in 1947, In the Land of the Black Magi (Au pays des mages noirs) of a Songhay possession dance in Niger. Rouch explains the sacrifices he made due to the producer that took on his film and the “monster” thus created; his footage was re-edited with a new ending, new titles, stock footage, “tropical muzak,” and a newsreel-style narration heavy on drama and highlighting the exotic. After viewing the first version, Rouch critiques his own work and puts it in perspective in the context of the time.

Finally, the intelligence and insight of Rouch emerge as he “finishes” his first film: “This is not only an evocation of the beginnings of Jean Rouch, ethnologue and film director - it is his first film. One sees him improvising a new commentary to In the Land of the Black Magi, just as he improvised the voiceovers of most of his other films.” The film transforms from a product of colonialism built around the commentary in which “you no longer see the images,” into a new form in which the film's true meaning is illuminated and the humanity of the subjects restored.

HIPPOPOTAMUS HUNT (Chasse à l'hippopotame)

France (45 mi) 1950

Jean Rouch on editing. subtitled comments on his film “Hippopotamus Hunt” (4:05)

Chasse à L'Hippopotame (parte 1) English subtitled on YouTube (8:38)

Chasse à L'Hippopotame (parte 2) (7:50)

Chasse à L'Hippopotame (parte 3) (6:38)

Chasse à L'Hippopotame (parte 4) (9:57)

CIMETIÈRE DANS LA FALAISE (Cemeteries in the cliff)

France (25 mi) 1951

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

In his first films, those of the late-1940s and early-1950s, even though Rouch is not the experimentalist he would later become, he shows in his camerawork a sensibility that far exceeds the plain style of scientific documentation. He used a sixteen-millimeter Bell & Howell camera that had to be rewound after each twenty-second-maximum shot, an apparent limitation that Rouch considered a great advantage, since it gave him a few seconds to reflect on the next shot, change angle or distance, and thus obtain more complete and cinematically rich coverage. He uses the frame to hide and reveal details to cause surprise, straying often from the classical anthropologist’s implied contract of epistemological certainty into something more akin to a surrealist poetics. In Cimetières dans la falaise, for example, a tight shot of a man’s bare feet and slender, sinewy legs negotiating a dry, rocky mountain path is held until he walks into the distance enough for us to see he is carrying, antlike, a giant bundle on his head.

Rouch on Cimetières dans la Falaise English subtitled video interview of Rouch on the film, on YouTube (7:47)

Cimitiere Dans La Falaise (parte 1) with English subtitles on YouTube (6:59)

Cimitiere Dans La Falaise (parte 2) (9:46)

MAMMY WATER

France (19 mi) 1953

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

In Mammy Water (1955), after a ritual sacrifice is held to appease the angry ocean spirits, fishermen return to shore with a copious catch, young boys play in the gentle waves of a now-tranquil ocean, and the voice declines to comment as the images are left to communicate the relaxed joy of the moment.

fragmento mammy water ocean film footage (2:00)

LES MAÎTRES FOUS (The Mad Masters)

France (36 mi) 1955

User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Frazier (ufrazc00@umail.ucsb.edu) from UCSB, California

Simple premise of this film is to follow the effects of colonialism on indigenous Africans via specific rituals developed as a reaction to the colonial system. The film turns into a crazy elaboration on both the madness of such a political system and man himself. At once we are amazed and confused by the violent and involved trance that the Africans take part in; however, we are, at the same time, forced to recognize the power that the camera may have over those in front of it. That is, the very "reality" of a documentary is dissolved or, at least, questioned. Disturbing and essential.

Les Maitres Fous Time Out London

Documentary on the Hauku religious sect of West Africa. An extraordinary study of trance and spirit posession in which a diverse group of working men from Accra become occupied by the identities of colonial figures, both military and political. Rouch reflects on this ritual, carried out in seclusion and involving the consumption of a dog, as a means of treating mental distress, and it’s possible to extend this to consider the process, however few might actually take part, as a means by which the larger community comes to terms with the pain of its colonial inheritance.

Cine-File: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Les maîtres fous is one of the French director Jean Rouch's ethnographic accounts of Nigeria under European colonial rule. The film is a bizarre and unsettling chronicle of the Hauka movement, a quasi-religious Nigerian sect in which the members enacted rituals where they are "possessed" by various archetypes of European colonialists. Rouch devotes most of his film to a document of one of these rituals, complete with a voiceover that purports to identify the various forms that the Africans are taking on: the General, the Governor, the Doctor's Wife, and other positions of military and political power within the European ruling authorities. While Rouch's narration maintains its deadpan, unruffled calm, the contortions of the ritual become increasingly ecstatic and unhinged, as the celebrants foam at the mouth, spasm and dance spastically, sacrifice a chicken and a dog, and lick up the blood from these sacrifices until their faces are smeared.

What makes the film so odd and challenging is the juxtaposition between its relaxed narration — which affects the soothing tones and distanced objective pose of many ethnographic documentaries — and the lurid, outrageous imagery of the ritual itself. Rouch's perspective is odd, too. His narration makes the claim that the ritual is intended to be a parody of the colonial occupation, that the Nigerians are channeling their disdain for their white masters into exaggerated, stylized appropriations of the Europeans' rites and and dress and manners. He might be right. But it's hard to know just how seriously to take Rouch's claims, as again and again his narration seems less like the result of informed research and more like a series of fanciful descriptions of observed behavior. His voiceover has a searching quality that makes it seem as though Rouch is trying to form a narrative based around the images he's gathered, and this impression complicates the film considerably.

Rouch is reading a great deal into the psychology of the film's subjects, and it's questionable how valid his conclusions are. Is this ritual a defense against mental illness, as Rouch claims at the end of the film? Is it a way for the colonized Nigerians to cope with the stress of their daily confrontations with industrialized Western society, or to deal with their status as indentured laborers for the whites? It's hard to tell, but Rouch's narration, with its loose interpretations of various gestures, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. At one point he puts words into the mouth of a man swinging a chicken back and forth, suggesting that the gesture is of great religious significance when, by all appearances, it's simply idle motion. Such questions about the film's faithfulness to the intent of these rituals are constantly raised, though Rouch's authoritative narration seems calculated not to encourage dissent.

There's also more than a hint of exploitation in Rouch's portrayal of Africans engaged in bloody, wild rites that not only appear as irrevocably exotic to Western eyes, but are explicitly compared to mental illness in the film's text. Rouch is portraying his African subjects as wild men, literally foaming at the mouths, the lower halves of their faces covered in white spray as they vibrate, roll around on the floor, walk with a jerking, frantic stride that truly does make it seem as though their bodies are being propelled around by some external animating spirit that jerks them around like puppets on strings. The images are, undeniably, darkly fascinating, and often horrifying as well, particularly when the celebrants ritually sacrifice a dog and then cook up a stew with its entrails, taking hungry bites out of its head and fighting to get the "best" scraps of the slaughtered animal. One man, picked out for a closeup twice in the film's half-hour, rocks back and forth, his face smeared red with blood from the feast.

Rouch continually locates such provocative images, tracing the progress of the ritual from its tentative beginnings to the point when numerous participants have been "possessed" and taken on these alternate personalities. Rouch's narration wryly notes the appropriation of English and French modes of dress and rituals, but this too is a problem. When Rouch says that the Nigerians are holding a "roundtable conference" on the subject of whether to cook the dog or eat it raw, his voice maintains its steady, even keel, but there's an obvious note of sarcasm and irony in the counterpoint between the colonialists' ceremonies and military discipline and the crudity of the Nigerians imitating their oppressors. Rouch even inserts footage of British and French soldiers on parade, and European aristocrats in their fancy cars, to further solidify the comparison.

Intended for European audiences, the film condescends to its subjects, presenting these rituals with an unmistakable tone of "hey look at these weird Africans," even while the subtext of Rouch's narration points at the exploitation of the African people by their colonial overseers. This adds up to a very conflicted film, simultaneously poking fun at colonialist pretensions and perpetrating the stereotype of the violent, superstitious African primitive. It's obvious that Rouch, who lived and worked in Nigeria for a long time and had a definite anti-colonialist bent, meant well, but Les maîtres fous, despite its compelling, raw imagery and the interesting ideas it explores, can't get over its tonal inconsistencies.

Jean Rouch Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010

Anthropological Auteur | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 2, 1990

Jean Rouch: Les Nègres various comments about the film from Swiki

Les Maitres Fous (Mad Masters) Documentary Educational Resources

Les Maîtres Fous | Savage Minds Strong includes the film on YouTube in 3 parts, from Savage Minds, June 16, 2007

interviewed Jean Rouch in 1977 Interview with Rouch on his films Jaguar, Les Maîtres Fous and The Lion Hunters, by John Marshall and John W. Adams in September 1977

User reviews from imdb Author: Camoo from United States

Herdsmen of the Sun and Les Maitres Fou Kathleen Maher from The Austin Chronicle

Les Maîtres Fous - with english subtitles (1st third) YouTube (9:37)

Les Maítres Fous (parte 2) with English substitles (9:17)

Les Maítres Fous (parte 3) with English substitles (9:24)

"Les mâitres fous", de Jean Rouch (1951) VO sub. ... Spanish subtitles (4:53)

Les Maîtres Fous - Jean Rouch (1953) (Sub ESP) Spanish subtitles (10:06)

MORO NABA

France (28 mi) 1958

User reviews from imdb Author: crlsimon from Italy, Rome

Jean Rouch signs another work on Africa and in particular to the people of the Niger region, to which he is particularly found of, and to whom he will dedicate most of his works: Les maitrre fous, Moi un noir, la bataille du grand fleuve and so on.

This documentary is filmed in a very classic manner: an off-field voice comments the Moro Naba – Emperor of the Mossi people, also called the sun king – funeral and then crowning. The ceremony itself is extremely interesting for two main reasons: the first obvious one is the ceremony itself, with its complicated rituals and symbolism, that includes the funeral of the dead emperor, the submission of notables, the choice of a new emperor and his "limbo", that include chasing the sun during the course of the day and not being allowed to wear the Emperor's clothes until dusk. The second reason that makes this movie interesting is that it was filmed in 1958, and it is therefore also a documentary about Mossi people at that time (even if the Moro Naba ceremony still takes place today), considering also how little documentation we have on Africa during that period. That is also, of course, its turn-off. If you're expecting to see a movie about Africa, you have to consider how much as changed.

Jean Rouch well depicts the dichotomy between a hollow white men's world and a strongly communial black men world. The mass to commemorate the dead Moro Naba, the newly vested Moro Naba's visit to colonial powers and his ride in a fancy car along with whites, are all briefs and senseless parenthesis in the long day that will mark the crowning of the Moro Naba.

Moro Naba la mort du roi Mossi Jean Rouch 1957 (part 1/4 ... unsubtitled French on YouTube (8:00)

Moro Naba la mort du roi Mossi Jean Rouch 1957 (part 2/4 ... (8:02)

Moro Naba la mort du roi Mossi Jean Rouch 1957 (part 3/4 ... (8:02)

Moro Naba la mort du roi Mossi Jean Rouch 1957 (part 4/4 ... (6:26)

MORO NABA

France (28 mi) 1958

User reviews from imdb Author: crlsimon from Italy, Rome

MOI UN NOIR

France (70 mi) 1958, 1960

Moi, un Noir Time Out London

Refusing to conceal the artifice of his projects, and yet always able to craft an unforced, remarkably ‘natural’ tone in his work, Rouch here sets the scene from the outset as he follows three young Nigerian casual labourers, seeking work in Abidjan. Finding them at a transitional point in their lives, Rouch takes in their relationships and leisuretime as well, painting a vibrant picture of a cultural scene and a city on the cusp of huge transformation.

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005 (excerpt)

Finally, Moi, un noir and Chronique d’un été are the most famous of Rouch’s films, and the most fully integrated into the history of cinema. In Moi, un noir, a migrant worker from the banks of the Niger describes his life in the port city of Abidjan, the principal “actor” playing himself and voicing his own thoughts over the silent-shot images. This picture of the city’s seamier side went down poorly with the colonial government of Côte d’Ivoire, and Rouch made La Pyramide humaine (The Human Pyramid) as an attempt to make amends. This uses a similar approach to examine relations between black and white students in an Abidjan school.

User reviews from imdb Author: Andrew Nerger from United Kingdom

'Moi un Noir' is an important cinematic document by renowned French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. It is highly significant because it has been acclaimed not only as one of Rouch's finest works of 'ethno-fiction', but has also quoted as one of the inspirations for the films of the French Nouvelle Vague. Jean-Luc Godard has quoted this as being one of his biggest influences; the central characters have much in common with his protagonists in features such as 'A bout de soufflé' and 'Le Petit soldat'. They are unsure of where they are or where they are going.

During the Second World War, Rouch had served as an engineer in Africa and he became fascinated with the lives of African immigrants in France and its colonies. From 1947 onwards he had engaged in producing a countless number of films about African life. These films attempted to capture the everyday lives of residents in Niger, Mali and Ghana. He was interested not just in the effects of colonisation on the young of the countries, but also in looking at the contradiction in life between the young in France and those in these colonies.

'Moi un Noir' chronicles the everyday life of several young Africans in Treichville - a poor section in Abidjan, the largest city in the Ivory Coast. These men are immigrants from Niger who have travelled to this large city in order to become successful. The central character is Edward G. Robinson, who speaks to the audience in a voice-over narration, which gives the film its unique style. Throughout the film there is a sense that the young protagonists wish to be somewhere else, but are unable to get anywhere. It seems, however that the residents of Treichville are much the same, with the sections of town being called New York and Chicago.

These young men are also people who long to be somebody else. The central characters in the film are named after famous 'tough-guy' actors such as Edward G. Robinson and Eddie Constantine. The kids talk like these tough guys, but their encounters with others repeatedly tells us that they are a far cry from their heroes. The film also follows 'Robinson' in his attempts to find a mate and the problems which arise as a result.

'Moi un Noir' is a fascinating film and acts as a snapshot of what life was like for those residents of the colony in that decisive time between the war and independence. In addition, it is highly recommended if you are interested in the history of 'cinema verite' or the ethnographic film.

User reviews from imdb Author: Ilpo Hirvonen from Finland

When people talk about the French New Wave, they usually remember five names who formed it: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette - who were the essence of it; Cahiers du Cinema. It was basically a movement which challenged the limits of cinematic art. It researched for new dimensions of cinema. But who started it? Many people see Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) as the very first French New Wave but some feel that Jean Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) was the first. I personally couldn't agree more on the former statement but it is interesting to watch French films before the New Wave. Films that weren't really 'Nouvelle Vague'. When doing this many might come across with filmmakers such as: Louis Malle, Georges Franju and Jean Rouch. Jean Rouch was a wild documentarist whose most controversial film might just be Les maîtres fous (1955, The Mad Masters). It studied the dimensions of cinema and especially Jean Luc Godard has named it as one of his biggest influences. It was a short documentary about an African Hauka-cult with its brutalities without any embellishment.

This short introduction leads us to another documentary by Jean Rouch which also had a tremendous influence on Godard: Moi un noir (1958) which means: I, a black man. It follows the basic philosophy of documentary but it researches for new dimensions, new ways for narrative, cinematography and provoking. Moi, un noir builds around a young man living in Treichville, Ivory coast. The film deals with the change in the place, through the experiences and fantasies of young men. The basic idea of documentary is to question it all: "Is this all a set-up?" and Moi un noir does not differ in this. Of course some of it is made up but through that Jean Rouch achieves to tell us the truth, to touch us and create a reality of his own; where his characters build their own illusionary world. He researched new dimensions of cinema and through this he cleansed the feature film, through a documentary. Moi, un noir was Rouch's first attempt to combine reality and fiction - a challenge which he continued in 1961 with La pyramide humaine - a sociological documentary. In the course of time he took this challenge to a new level with Chronique d'un été Paris (1961) which is today seen as the very first Cinéma vérité "truthful cinema" film. La pyramide humaine was also Cinéma vérité but one can really see the roots of that style he already developed in Moi, un noir.

In the film we see the ordinary young men of Treichville who have made double personalities for themselves: Lemmy Caution, Tarzan and Eddie Constantine. Through this Rouch manages to show the western mythological characters we've brought to their land for their enjoyment. But in the end mockery hits us who have repressed their culture. Moi, un noir shows the era of colonial possessions. In the film sometimes we cannot be sure of who is talking. Is it a random guy in the street or is it a mythical side person, who knows.

Moi un noir brilliantly manages to show, not only the harsh life of the people, but the inequality that lies there. The rich people live in high two floor houses - close to God. When the others sleep on the ground and live in poverty. It is a very important documentary just as it i, but it is also very interesting from historical point of view. It could easily be seen as the very first French New Wave film but I think it just opened the door for others - which is no insult. Jean Rouch showed the way for Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol. He searched for new dimensions of cinema, modernized philosophy of film and cleansed the feature film.

I, a Negro (1958) Mubi

jean rouch _ moi un noir _ eu um negro 1958 non-English susbtitled on YouTube (1:52)

THE HUMAN PYRAMID (La pyramide humaine)

France (90 mi) 1959, 1961

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

In La pyramide humaine the experimental dimension of the film is of prime interest, but rather than avant-garde, it is an experiment in provoked observation. The resulting freedom from a script causes the plot and themes to tend more toward dispersion than coherence, but this is no mere proto-reality television, as evident in its serious approach to its weighty themes and its respect for its actor-characters, a racially diverse group of young men and women. Instead of humiliating them as spectacle, Rouch sets about producing productive conflicts around colonial race relations, as he describes in the meeting with the cast that makes up the film’s opening sequence. But these tensions are soon displaced onto Nadine, the young French woman who indiscriminately flirts with her male colleagues, both African and European, thus shifting the conflicts among her suitors away from race and earning rebukes from her more reserved female African counterparts. The openly self-reflexive nature of the film, framed by discussions between Rouch and the cast, foregrounds the presence of the observer and the process of provocation.

Author: Ilpo Hirvonen from Finland

The famous pioneer of Cinéma vérité Chronique d'un été Paris 1960 (1961) by Jean Rouch is the reason why he is so famous, but it has also left many of his other films into oblivion. Jean Rouch had a huge impact on French New Wave or the Nouvelle Vague and especially his influence on Jean-Luc Godard was tremendous. He created Cinéma vérité ("truthful cinema") a style of documentary which used staged set-ups and stylized editing. Chronique d'un été Paris 1960 differs from earlier films by Rouch in its style, but also in its milieus: many films by Rouch took place at western Africa, often to Ivory Coast. Les maîtres fous (1955) was a short documentary about a Hauka-rite and Moi, un noir (1958) told the story of young men living in Treichville, it was his first attempt to combine fiction and reality. The latter has also often been seen as the first, or at least the biggest pathfinder of French New Wave.

La pyramide humaine or The Human Pyramid is Jean Rouch's fictive documentary about racial prejudices. It takes place to Abidjan, Ivory Coast where a new white girl Nadine arrives to a high school. Due to her arrival a series of events start to occur: the students start to show both interest and prejudices towards each other - the blacks and the whites. This plot Jean Rouch set-up allows the students to build their own illusionary world.

Jean Rouch has left two scenes in the beginning of The Human Pyramid; before the opening credits. A scene where the main characters Nadine and Denis are walking in Paris - after the film? and a scene where Jean Rouch explains the idea of the film to the students and questions like "What is the purpose of this film?" start to come up. These two scenes are clearly a part of the "diary" of a documentary and it's Jean Rouch's way of showing that one cannot separate reality from fiction for even a moment. There's a scene in The Human Pyramid where Jean Rouch shows the material filmed till that moment to the students and let's them to stage the ending: this is the moment where fiction becomes reality.

The reality in The Human Pyramid is portrayed as intricate and multidimensional, which make us realize what is left outside of the film. Jean Rouch didn't write a script or plan the film at all in advance, he only staged the situations and let the students to improvise the dialog through that the film didn't just reflect reality but achieved to create a reality of its own. In the film Jean Rouch says that it is not important what the film occurred but what happened around the camera. Because after the film the word 'racism' didn't mean anything to the students.

It is made quite clear that when the film ends the story goes on and the problems are still out there. The Human Pyramid is just one piece of life. Jean Rouch seemed to truly understand the dynamic relation between reality and fiction. He didn't infiltrate to the lives of the students at all but let them create their own illusionary world.

Jean Rouch: Cinéma-vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human ... Barbara Bruni from Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002

CHRONIQUE D’UN ÉTÉ (PARIS 1960)

aka: Chronicle of a Summer

France (85 mi) 1961 co-director: Edgar Morin

Chronicle of a Summer | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

Jean Rouch's seminal 1961 film, for which he coined the term “cinema verite,” made in collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin. Rouch, an ethnologist, applies the techniques of his anthropological films in an attempt to document the state of the Parisian mind in the summer of 1960. Wandering the streets with their camera crew, Rouch and Morin stop passersby to ask, “Are you happy?” Some are, some aren't, making for a fascinating experiment.

Chronique d'un Eté Time Out London

The notion of a domestically-based 'ethnological study' dates at least from Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. But what distinguishes this attempt by Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin to 'bottle' the climate of Paris circa 1960 is their camera's candid assumption of its own disruptively active presence: interviewees are introduced to each other, form groups, and may well (in one case) have got married after shooting was over. In an interesting epilogue, Rouch invites them all to comment on his footage.

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005 (excerpt)

Finally, Moi, un noir and Chronique d’un été are the most famous of Rouch’s films, and the most fully integrated into the history of cinema. Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) is an inquiry by Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin into the lives of Parisians in the summer of 1960. It was one of the first to deploy light 16mm cameras and synchronised sound recording, launching a highly mobile style of filming that spread rapidly through both cinema and TV filmmaking. Chronique d’un été also sent the term “cinéma vérité” out into the world, although both Rouch and Morin were quick to abandoned it when it became clear that people in France and beyond were reading this as “truth on the screen” rather than, as they intended, the “truth provoked by filming”.

Part ethnographic survey, part theoretical discourse, part filmmaking free-for-all, this seminal gabfest takes a documentary gimmick—set up a camera and a microphone on the street and then ask random passerby whether they're happy—and breaks it apart; the result is not only a revealing and important document of a time and a place, but also a landmark examination of how people perceive themselves and of how cinema works. Describing the project as "self-reflexive" would be an understatement; co-directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin employ a discursive structure that blends the increasingly candid and probing interviews with in-depth discussions of the interviewees' responses and comments on the film as a work-in-progress, in effect expanding its scope from everyday French life circa 1960 to the broader question of whether cinema is even capable of tackling such a subject. With its extensive use of handheld cameras and direct sound, this film helped legitimize cinema verité as a genre, though it doesn't completely adhere to that—or any other—documentary technique; part of what makes this so enthralling as filmmaking is the way Rouch and Morin leap from approach to approach, seemingly willing to try anything in order to answer the ambitious questions they pose for themselves.

User reviews from imdb Author: Fiona-39 from Belfast, N.I

This film, made in the summer of 1960 by the sociologist Edgar Morin and the ethnographer Jean Rouch, aimed to be as 'true as a documentary, but with the content of a fiction film.' Facilitated by improved technology (16mm film, sync sound, light hand held cameras) it pioneered a direct or live aesthetic dubbed 'cinema verite'. It was to film 'true life', but engage on a subjective level, getting people to talk about their experiences and ambitions, and most notably, whether or not they are happy. What emerges is an absolutely overwhelming cinematic experience, a film that is deeply affecting but also that makes you think. The film begins with a market researcher, Marceline, on the street, asking people whether or not they are happy. This sequence seems to me both to confirm the importance of human relationships and point up the dissatisfaction that living in a society about to tip into consumerism engenders. The film then moves to concentrate on a set of characters. Morin was criticised for his structural approach, typing his characters (i.e. a factory worker, a petit bourgeois, a student), but a real sense of the individuals involved shines through, notably in the sequences with Angelo and Landry chatting, and Marceline recounting her experience of deportation during the war. The most revolutionary part of this film is that the makers demonstrate the impossibility of documentary objectivity when they film themselves filming - they show how the truth of the film is constructed. Questions of authenticity abound. At the end of the film, they screen it to the characters involved. Even those filmed are unable to decide whether they were acting ('hamming for the camera') or being themselves. Morin and Rouch conclude they have failed in their aim to offer a slice of life, as the very act of filming something transforms it. Truth is elusive in the attempt to represent the everyday. This film is far from a failure however - watch it and be blown away.

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

In Chronique d’un été (1961, co-directed with Edgar Morin) the camera is turned away from Africa, toward, as Rouch says, his own tribe, the Parisians. The term cinéma-vérité refers to Rouch’s theorisation, not unrelated to that of Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda (cine-truth), of a reality perceivable only through the movie camera. Not invested in objectivity, cinéma-vérité is based on provocation: instead of hiding the camera, it is thrust into a situation to serve as catalyst to produce a “cine-truth.” The term, however, soon became synonymous with the very different “direct cinema” practice, in which an inconspicuous camera is intended to capture objective truth.

Theory notwithstanding, Chronique has little in common with the explosive montage and special effects of Vertov’s avant-garde works like Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Rouch and Morin’s politically charged portrait of working and middle-class Parisians and immigrants is ostensibly set off by a simple question asked of passers-by: “Are you happy?” This man-in-the-street interview scenario has led to some misconception of the meaning of the film’s vérité as objectivity, or even as a simple documentation of the vox populi, but the film quickly takes a turn from random selection to a not-at-all-random documentary on a closed group consisting of the survey team and its acquaintances. Members of this core group are seen in interviews (which often turn into wrenching psychodrama), conversations over dinner, and other activities.

Unlike the more aleatory films Jaguar, Moi un Noir, and Le pyramide humaine, for example, in Chronique the message is far more managed. The conversations tend toward the political: Algeria, Auschwitz and Africa are frequent themes, and the subjects were members of a politically militant group centered around Morin. Like La pyramide humaine, Chronique d’un été frames its own making within itself, showing preparations, reactions to the film, and even the post-screening concerns expressed by Rouch and Morin about its future reception. At the group screening shown near the end of the film the cast’s reactions are both critical and laudatory. This reflexive frame calls into question the notion of documentary objectivity, but it does not at all undermine the film’s politics, which is reflected in the mixing of workers’ stories, concentration camp memories and descriptions of the immigant experience. These ignite some of the most cinematically powerful moments of the film when they clash and contradict each other, demonstrating the nascent fissures between sectors of the European left.

Chronique D'Un Été - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications John Baxter from Film Reference

Substantially distinguished as an ethnographic filmmaker, a studious if somewhat unscientific observer of rituals among the hunter-gatherers of post-Colonial Africa, Jean Rouch returned to his native Paris at age 40 in 1959 to encounter a new and stimulating intellectual climate. His friend, the critic and filmmaker Edgar Morin, challenged him to make a film about "his own tribe." Rouch responded with Chronique d'un été , one of the most evocative films from the makers of that ragbag of student excess and self-aggrandizement which Françoise Giroud christened the nouvelle vague. Trained in the hard school of location shooting, Rouch knew the challenge of making an urban ethnographic film was largely technical. He persuaded André Coutant at Eclair to lend him the prototype of a lightweight camera under development for the military. After use by day, it was returned to the Eclair factory at night for modification and repairs. Raoul Coutard, who worked only one day on the film, disparages Rouch's search for "cinema verité". The effort to duplicate Alexandre Astruc's ideal of the " caméra stylo ," a camera as flexible as a pen, required as much hardware as any feature film.

Chronique betrays the constraints of technique and the causation of its makers. Set-ups are studied, montage formal, photography often imitative of the cinema of performance, while a side trip to St. Tropez for an alleged holiday to observe the beautiful at play exposes the deficiencies of Rouch's philosophy of enquiry. The film is open to the same criticism of formalism as the now-historic Drew-Leacock-Pennebaker exercises in spontaneous cinema. A delight in the exercise of technique turns the aleatory by-products of low-light wild-sound filming into elements of a new style. Grain, rambling vox pop, interviews, walking tracks are chosen rather than merely being tolerated in the pursuit of truth.

But Chronique is a brilliant pre-vision of a style and approach to actuality filming that would sweep away the standard formal Grierson documentary. To begin by asking people at random "Are you happy?" was a stroke of genius. Their reactions, puzzled, truculent, thoughtful, sing with spontaneity. Nor is Rouch afraid to follow a plainly disturbed girl down into the wallow of self-pity and hysteria, leaving the watcher to make a personal determination of her sincerity. The refusal to take sides is Chronique' s strength, and the conclusion, as Rouch and Morin pace around a museum, wondering if the experiment proved anything, aptly conveys their genuine doubts. By then, however, their work had made the question largely irrelevant. The technique they created was to be the New Wave's most powerful and durable legacy.

Chronicle of a Summer: Truth and Consequences Criterion essay by Sam Di Iorio, February 25, 2013

Chronicle of a Summer (1961) - The Criterion Collection

Jean Rouch: Cinéma-vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human ... Barbara Bruni from Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002

Chronicle of A Summer - Jean Rouch: A Tribute William Rothman from Documentary Film Classics, pages 60 – 107 (pdf format)

Chronicle of a Summer and the Editing Barry Dornfield from Visual Anthropology, 1989 (pdf format)

David Reviews Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer ... David Blakeslee from Criterion Cast

CHRONIQUE D'UN ÉTÉ (CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER) - Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 21, 2000

Wilmington on DVDs: Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un Ete ... Michael Wilmington from Movie City News, April 3, 2013

An Influential Verité Documentary: 'Chronicle of a Summer' | PopMatters Sarah Boslaugh, March 15, 2013

Africa and France: The Work of Jean Rouch | IndieWire Steve Erickson, February 26, 2013

The Extraordinary “Chronicle of a Summer” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, February 21, 2013

Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, cinema verite and the problem of "actuality ... Kenneth George Godwin from Cagey Films

Chronicle of a Summer (1961, Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin ... Brandon’s Movie Memory

Chronicle of a Summer - Joyless Creatures Peter Valelly

Jean Rouch And Cinema Verit : Chronicle D`un t - Filmmaking ... Anna, July 11, 2013

Chronicle Of A Summer - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo

Criterion Confessions: CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER - #648 Jamie S. Rich, Criterion

Chronicle of a Summer Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov, Criterion Blu-Ray

Chronicle of a Summer Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bryan Kluger, Criterion Blu-Ray

Slant: Joseph Jon Lanthier Criterion Blu-Ray

Chronicle of a Summer: The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk ... Christopher McQuain, Criterion Blu-Ray

The New Yorker [Pauline Kael]

Chronicle of a Summer Kris Haamer

Chronique d'un été > Overview - AllMovie Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide

Chronicle of a Summer (France, 1961) Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin ... photo and brief comments about the film

Chronicle of a Summer (1960) Mubi

User reviews from imdb Author: Hornbull from Seattle, WA

User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: Edgar Soberón Torchia (estorchia@gmail.com) from Panama

User reviews from imdb Author: weareallamadeus from United States

User reviews from imdb Author: myxlastxsong from United States

Chronicle of a Summer | Film | The Guardian Philip French

Are You Happy? - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Peter S. Scholtes

A Second Look: 'Chronicle of a Summer' a snapshot of 1960 Paris ... Dennis Lim from The LA Times, March 3, 2013

New York Times [A.H. Weiler] (registration req'd)

The New York Times: Dave Kehr February 22, 2013

Chronicle of a Summer Blu-ray - Jean Rouch - DVD Beaver

Chronique d'un été - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chronicle of a Summer YouTube (2:05)

Chronique d'un été (extrait 1) unsubtitled on YouTube (5:04)

My Favorite Scene from "Chronique d'un été" same scene with an intro and English subtitles (5:25)

Chronique d'un été (extrait 2).wmv unsubtitled on YouTube (10:41)

Jean Rouch Chronicle of a Summer Discussion with English Subtitles YouTube (5:04)

Chronicle Of A Summer Video clip available on YouTube

LA PUNITION (The Punishment)

France (58 mi) 1962

Jean Rouch Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

Rouch’s work greatly contributed to the revitalisation of cinema that, kindled by neorealism’s location shooting and “ready-made” actors, was happening in the late-1950s. He developed—and legitimised—an artisanal, improvisational filmmaking model that employed non-professional actors, portable cameras and synchronous sound, and which had a powerful impact within French filmmaking, especially on certain nouvelle vague auteurs for whom Rouch became first an inspiration and later a marginal colleague. Jean-Luc Godard’s formal freedom in À bout de souffle (1960), Le Petit soldat (1960) and Les Carabiniers (1963), and Jacques Rivette’s extensive use of improvisation in films like Out 1: noli me tangere (1971) and Celine et Julie vont en bateau (1974) are often attributed to Rouch’s influence. Rouch, in turn, began to experiment with fiction film on the streets of Paris, filming the medium-length La Punition in 1960 and the short Gare du Nord in 1964, both of which starred Nadine Bellot, the central female figure in La Pyramide humaine. While these are minor films in Rouch’s oeuvre, they form an important dimension of his career as Paris-set narrative films with only tangential connection to Africa.

La Punition opens with an artfully narrated episode in which the camera films the seventeen-year-old Nadine (and the sound recorder she carries in a shoulder bag) on her way to class. Upon arriving she enters, but the camera waits outside, its gaze adrift on the urban landscape of bare trees and walls. The microphone, however, accompanies Nadine as she enters the building and walks into an already-underway philosophy class. When questioned by the teacher she confesses to daydreaming and is expelled from class, freeing up an afternoon in which, routine interrupted, she will wander Paris and meet and converse with three men. These mostly unscripted encounters are presented generously, including that is, the dead time, awkward silences and stammerings usually cut from both documentary and narrative films. At times the lack of chemistry between the characters makes for forced conversations, in sharp contrast to the relaxed witty voiceovers of Rouch’s African ethno-fictions. When Nadine finally decides to return home, on the way she is approached by a sequence of several men, and finally runs home exasperated. In general La Punition fails to engage, but in spite of its banality it is of interest as an experiment in employing Rouchian improvisation with a Parisian setting and characters.

SIX IN PARIS (Paris vu Par…)

Rouch segment: Gare du Nord

France (95 mi) 1965 Omnibus film with 6 directors

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005 (excerpt)

Gare du Nord was Rouch’s contribution to the “sketch” film Paris vu par… . Made of two 10-minute takes, the film involves a woman arguing with her husband, leaving their apartment, and encountering a stranger in the street outside. He asks her to run away with him, she refuses and he commits suicide. Both films also demonstrate Rouch’s desire, at the time, to film without interruption, constructing his films within sequence shots rather than on the editing table. In discussion, Fieschi agreed that Gare du Nord demonstrated Rouch’s sympathy with Surrealist poetics and openness to encounter, and was a more profound link with the movement than the “self-proclaimed Surrealism” of Fellini.

Time Out review Tom Milne

Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] (excerpt)

Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord is a small improvement, a similarly flimsy premise which is at least teased out into a story of actual consequence, bringing out the subtexts and potential meanings of the material in a way that Douchet fails to even attempt. In Rouch's short, a married couple (Nadine Ballot and Barbet Schroeder) living in a lousy apartment adjacent to a construction site spend the morning fighting, until she storms out and says she won't be back anytime soon. At this point, Rouch interrupts the overexposed quality of the visuals from the apartment, where everything looked washed-out and glistening with harsh sunlight, with a very dark and moody shot as the wife descends in the elevator. This lovely shot provides an interlude, a point of stasis and contemplation, with Ballot's profile shrouded in darkness, the elevator grate casting moving shadows across her face, as her husband's voice grows ever fainter, echoing with a metallic ring from above. It's a beautiful moment, well worth the film's brief length for that alone.

In the second half of this film, Ballot walks towards work and is accosted on the way by a stranger (Gilles Quéant) who abruptly offers her nearly everything that she was just complaining was lacking from her life with her husband: material wealth, a comfortable home in a nice neighborhood, world travel. This is a film about discontentment, especially with class status. But this man, a metaphorical stand-in for the upper class, and also a parodic one — he is so rich he doesn't think twice about leaving his expensive car idling in the middle of the road while he walks with this girl — is also discontented. He has left his suburban rich neighborhood in search of something different for himself, finding his own life too quiet and dull. In fact, he threatens to kill himself unless Ballot goes off with on a vacation, but she refuses and he follows through on his threat. This puzzling ending to some extent defuses the short's potential, which until this melodramatic turn of events, had seemed quite good. Rouch raises some interesting questions in terms of the relationship between the working classes and the bourgeoisie, and the profound dissatisfactions that can affect both classes. But while the portrait of working class life here is firmly fixed in social realities and the ordinary, the stranger's depiction of the upper-class borders on fantasy, with no similar understanding of class pressures. And the story resolves itself in such a ridiculous manner that it's ultimately hard to take any of it too seriously.

User comments from imdb Author: Aw-komon from Los Angeles, CA

User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York

Six in Paris (1968) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker

Paris vu par... (1965) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance

FCN—Review of SIX IN PARIS (PARIS VU PAR, 1965) - ScreenAnarchy Michael Guillen

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens

DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5]

DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review

DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review

DinaView [Dina Iordanova]

Six in Paris | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 1, 2008

The Stranger (Charles Mudede) review

Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [C+] Adam Markovitz

Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [3/5]

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review Kathie Smith

The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review

TOUROU ET BITTI

France (12 mi) 1967

User reviews from imdb Author: ajmbatista2 from Lisbon

"Tourou et Bitti", an eight minute documentary concerning a ritual in Niger, is yet another example of Rouch's excellence in creating documentaries which surpass the conventional documentary format. Just as frightening and fascinating as "Les maîtres fous", this one goes straight into the roots of ancient African cultures, in which music has an hypnotic effect, being at the same time an exorcism and a public show. Both the female and the male dancers are almost deities about to be unleashed... Spectral and humanitarian.

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

In 1971 Rouch made Les Tambours d’avant: Tourou et Bitti, a successful experiment with the long-take, and the model film of the ciné-trance, in which the camera-person becomes involved, or entranced, in the events to the degree that he or she achieves a sort of Dionysian fusion with the event filmed, in turn provoking the participants to respond to the camera. Rouch himself considers this to be his only fully accomplished ciné-trance film. In the middle of his attempt to capture a possession ritual in one shot, the musicians suddenly stop playing, seemingly giving up hope that the génies will appear. But when Rouch keeps the camera rolling it causes, according to him, the musicians to suppose that he could see the génies through his camera, and to resume playing, which in turn causes the dancers to enter into a trance. The successful long-take, and especially the hitch in the middle, are used by Rouch to exemplify the idea of provocation and its ideal circular instance in the ciné-trance.

JAGUAR

France (110 mi) 1955, 1967

Jaguar Time Out London

A charming ‘ethnographic fantasy’ about three young men from the Niger Savannah seeking work and experience in Ghana’s cities for a season. Improvised on-screen action and narrative voiceover after the event give the film a remarkable zest and spontaneity, helped quite considerably by the positive encounters the three enjoy. They are the Jaguars of the title, now sharp men with knowledge of the urban who here return to share their profits. In the desperate present moment, this seems to stand as a gesture of huge hope, faith even.

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005 (excerpt)

But while the Nouvelle Vague directors may have respected Rouch and been inspired by his attitude, they did not adopt his techniques, despite their suitability for realising the aesthetic they were developing. Bergala argued that the reason for this was ideological. The Nouvelle Vague wanted to be part of the mainstream cinema, not (like Rouch) on its margins. This meant filming in 35mm, which in turn meant black and white (colour was just too expensive) and post-synchronised sound. If they used 16mm at all, it was for apprentice works, although Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) appears to be an exception.

Instead, it was Rouch and Rossellini who influenced each other in a practical sense. On seeing the rushes of Jaguar in 1955, it was Rossellini who persuaded Rouch to have the actors narrate their own story. In return, Rossellini took up Rouch’s approach and filmed in 16mm when he went to India in 1957–58. These colour films, with a hand-held camera and no set script, were used by Rossellini as a means of developing the film he would subsequently shoot in 35mm. There were even instances when Rossellini used shots from the 16mm “notebooks” in the final feature, India, Matri Buhmi (1958). The 16mm films were also screened on French and Italian TV, as J’ai fait un beau voyage (1958), with Rossellini providing his own commentary, very much in the style of Rouch’s cinema, Bergala said.

User reviews from imdb Author: David Abra from Waterloo, ON, Canada

Jaguar (1967), directed by the late Jean Rouch is an "ethnofictious" film that depicts three protagonists from Songhay, Niger that embark on a voyage of discovery to the Gold (Ivory) Coast, Ghana to seek adventure and wealth. This feature length film tells the story of Lam Ibrahim, a Fulam herder, Illo Goudel'ize, a Niger River fisherman and Damoré Zika, a Zerma unsettled youth who works as a tax collector. Jaguar is a film that can be classified under the terminology "ethnofiction" or as Rouch coined it "cine-fiction". This classification can be given to Jaguar since this film associates with laboriously researched and analyzed ethnographic work even though it is depicted in a fictitious way. Jaguar represents aspects of social transformation and change. It depicts how young African men experience seasonal migration and are able to reinvent them selves as new men after completing such a vast journey. Jaguar incorporates four qualities that are said to be typical for Rouch films. It documents a specific part of the characters lives; there is collaboration with the subjects of the film; interrogation, making things happen through filming; and the use of improvisation and fantasy while exploring the subjects' lives. Rouch used various new and innovative techniques when making this film. Jaguar was filmed without sound and Rouch had to find a way to make the commentary just as entertaining as the playful ethos of the images presented in the film. Rouch had Damoré and Lam watch the picture and comment on what they saw. The talk between them was recorded and added into the films soundtrack. This innovation by Rouch and the collaboration with his subject made the commentary of the film just playful as the recorded film. Rouch was an innovator in the usage of the camera. Instead of being just an observer with the camera, Rouch went "into" the actions that were taking part around him. This can be seen in the scene with the Somba peoples when they are performing a ritualistic dance. Instead of just watching the event from a distance, Rouch takes the camera into the dance and gives the viewer a sense of participation. Rouch can also be credited with creating a sense of involvement of the viewers' senses with his work with the camera. This can be seen in various scenes in Jaguar, one occurrence of this technique that comes into mind is when the heroes of the film are venturing along the old warrior and trade routes to get to the Gold Coast and the camera shoots images of the ground and sky. This leaves the viewer with a sense of walking along with the heroes of the film and experiencing with them different elements of nature. Rouch sees the camera as an active agent of investigation and the person recording is the "interrogator" of the world. Rouch incorporates into Jaguar his infamous technique of "jump-cutting". Many of the scenes are short and not self explanatory, which can confuse and leave the viewer with a perception of chaos. Many of the market scenes are show turmoil and jump from scene to scene and show many peoples faces, expressions and enactments over a very short period of time. This confusion of "jump-cutting" can make the viewer lose his/her track and not follow a consistent theme in the film long enough to make sense of it. However the usage of these visual techniques and the commentary by the characters of the film brings a sense of involvement to the viewer. Rouch commentary in the beginning and at the end of the film can be seen as a prelude to the occurrences that are going to happen through out the picture, and as finale that concludes all that happened. His commentary works in an authoritative way that can prepares and leaves the viewer with a sense of respect for the people that are "ethnofictiously" filmed. Even though this film is improvised and the characters are acting out scenes for the camera it is still a film with ethnographic value and authenticity. Observed reality is not captured in this film, a presentation of how the experiences and feelings amongst young males who venture on long travels are attained.

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010

Anthropological Auteur | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 2, 1990

Jaguar Documentary Educational Resources

interviewed Jean Rouch in 1977 Interview with Rouch on his films Jaguar, Les Maîtres Fous and The Lion Hunters, by John Marshall and John W. Adams in September 1977

fragmento de jaguar unsubtitled excerpt on YouTube (44 sec)

the clock and the steam engine English subtitled film excerpt on YouTube (1:56)

HUNTING THE LION WITH BOW AND ARROW (La chasse au lion à l'arc)

aka: The Lion Hunters

France (88 mi) 1967

Jean Rouch • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Matt Losada from Senses of Cinema, December 20, 2010 (excerpt)

Rouch’s voiceover, even in the more classical documentary films, is not an unequivocal supplier of objective information. At times he poetically intones the long, complex formal titles of characters or spirits, at others he straddles the line between European “objectivity” and the privileging of African knowledge. In La Chasse au lion à l’arc (1965), as a group of men head into the bush to make poison for arrowheads, Rouch reports that “one goes out into the bush, because it is in the bush that bad things are made” (“On part en brousse, car c’est en brousse où, se fabrique les choses mauvaises”), reporting African knowledge in direct discourse.

The Lion Hunters Documentary Educational Resources

Footage for this film was collected over a seven year period during the 1950s and 1960s, among the Fulani herdsmen and Songhay villagers in the Savannah of northern Niger and Mali. The Songhay call this region "the bush which is farther than far the land of nowhere."

The Songhay were the dominant people of a formerly powerful kingdom, destroyed in the sixteenth century, that stretched along the Niger River from the edge of the Sahara to the rain forests in the south. The Songhay today are millet-farmers and are still considered to own the land, on which Fulani herdsmen have rights of pastorage. Songhay also own the land's game, including lions.

Lion-hunting is reserved by tradition to the Gao, a group of Songhay-speaking professional hunters, masters of the techniques and rituals of poison-making. The Gao also possess great knowledge of the bush, and are thought to have a special relationship with the spirits that inhabit its trees and waters. When lions raid Fulani cattle, the Fulani must request that Songhay chiefs send Gao hunters to their aid. The Songhay chiefs are paid by the Fulani in cattle. The Gao receive the lion's skin, skull, and other parts, including the heart which can command up to $1000 in coastal cities where it is used in medicine and ritual.

Lions generally kill only sick or injured cattle, but on occasion they will attack a healthy herd. The Gao are usually able to determine which lion is responsible, for they know the characteristics and habits of individual animals. In the film, for example, the hunters attempt to find "The American," so called because of its strength and cleverness. although lion-hunting is a test of manly courage, the Gao sing the praises not only of the hunters but also the hunted, following a kill. Once trapped and shot with poison arrows, the lion is commanded to die quickly, and to forgive the hunters. Its body is struck three times to liberate the animal's soul, so that it will not drive the hunters mad.

The film follows not only several hunts, including one in which an inexperienced Fulani is seriously wounded by a cornered lion, but also the technology of the hunt. Bows are cut from forest trees, metal arrow points are forged, and poison is made from the seeds of the "poison tree." This tree, also called the "mother of magic," is found in the bush some 300 miles south of the Gao homeland. Every four years the Gao hunters travel to this area, where they prepare the poison within a "magic circle." The seeds are boiled in water while spells are recited. Upon return to Gao country, traps are set with perfume bottles buried under piles of pebbles, for lions, the Gao explain, are like girls, adoring perfume.

The relationships between the Gao, other Songhay-speakers, and the Fulani herdsmen are intriguing. Perhaps, as Rouch suggests, the Gao serve as mediators between an ancient hunting way of life, with its spirits of the bush, and the life and gods of pastoralism and settled agriculture. One may also speculate on the economic, social, and political relationships that are sustained or even created through the lion hunt.

Anthropological Auteur | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 2, 1990

interviewed Jean Rouch in 1977 Interview with Rouch on his films Jaguar, Les Maîtres Fous and The Lion Hunters, by John Marshall and John W. Adams in September 1977

The Lion Hunters unsubtitled on YouTube (10:00)

PETIT AT PETIT (Little by Little)

France (96 mi) 1971

Petit a Petit Time Out London

The adventures of two African businessmen, who encounter Paris with an ethnographic curiosity.

Petit Ã petit, de Jean Rouch - Alliance Française in South Africa

Petit a petit unsubtitled song from the film on YouTube (1:53)

Petit a Petit English subtitled (2:07)

Petit a petit 2 (10:00)

THE YEAR 01 (L'an 01)

Rouch footage of Nigeria used

France (90 mi) 1973 d: Jacques Doillon co-directors: Jean Rouch and Alain Resnais (segment “Wall Street”)

User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil

Some movies of the seventies seem to have been made yesterday; not this one. It's in fact one of the most dated works of its era. It's some gentler version of "Themroc,",less pretentious, funny (in places) but not necessarily more palatable .

There's no story, but a spate of minisketches, some of them witty, ("There's no more property, so there're no more thieves" the warden says while opening the cells), a lot of them tedious and repetitive. There was enough material to make a very good short, but 85 minutes it's inevitably too long. In a nutshell, let's stop working, let's stop producing, let's stop everything and all you need is love. Hence the title "l'an 01" (=year 01): why a 0, by the way? This is the typically "events of May 68 way of life" film.

If you like it, try these :Claude Faraldo's "themroc," Agnès Varda's "l'une chante et l'autre pas," Jean-Luc Godard's " tout va bien."

It was Jacques Doillon's first effort. Although it seems puerile today, it nevertheless displays this director's intellectual ambitions. His best works remain the more accessible: the moving "un sac de billes" (1975) - which people who liked "au revoir les enfants" must see- and the strange disturbing "la drôlesse"(1979) which tells the story of A, a hung-up young man who locks up a teenage girl in an attic.

L'an 01 (Doillon, Resnais, Rouch, Gebe) : trouver ... unsubtitled excerpt on YouTube (38 sec)

L'An 01 | 1973 | Jacques Doillon, Alain Resnais, Jean Rouch unsubtitled excerpt on YouTube (9:28)

COCORICO MONSIEUR POULET

France Niger (93 mi) 1974

cocorico mr poulet - jean rouch - tallou a fait l'affaire unsubtitled scene from the film on YouTube (2:03)

cocorico mr poulet - jean rouch - damoure et lam associés unsubtitled scene from the film on YouTube (4:38)

Jean Rouch on Cocorico Rouch interview about the film on YouTube (4:38)

MARGARET MEAD: PORTRAIT BY A FRIEND (Ciné-portrait de Margaret Mead)

France (35 mi) 1977

DER Documentary: Margaret Mead: Portrait by a Friend Documentary Educational Resources

Jean Rouch filmed this loving and humorous portrait of anthropologist and filmmaker Margaret Mead in September 1977 while he was a guest of the first Margaret Mead Film Festival. As both a friend and colleague, Rouch reveals a glimpse of the legendary Mead in her later years. (Fellow filmmaker John Marshall was the sound recordist.)

Ciné-portrait de Margaret Mead Jean Rouch: A Tribute

Margaret Mead: Portrait by a Friend - PREVIEW with an English speaking Rouch introduction, on YouTube (6:40)

LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITE, ET PUIS APRÈS

France (95 mi) 1990

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005 (excerpt)

Finally, Thompson cited Liberté, égalité, fraternité, et puis après (1990), shown in the video screenings, as an example of Rouch’s sympathy with another Surrealist trait – provocation, or as he put it “releasing disquieting objects” into the wider world. Responding to a commission from the committee charged with celebrating France’s revolutionary bicentenary, Rouch sent two black actors out in costume to infiltrate the official pageant and interact with other actors portraying historical figures. This is followed (among other things) by a Haitian ritual in front of the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, home of Napoleon’s tomb, to reconcile the Emperor’s spirit with that of his one-time captive, Pierre Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black liberator of San Domingo.

MADAME L’EAU

France Netherlands (120 mi) 1993

Madame l'Eau Time Out London

Documentary on the drought in Niger.

On the Trail of the Native's Point of View The Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, Göttingen, Germany, May 11 – 15, 1994, essay by Jeffrey Ruoff (excerpt)

Obviously, voice-over narration need not be the only filmic technique for making interpretive statements about culture. Any fluent camera, sound, and editing style offers certain perspectives on reality. During this period of growth, ethnographic film should embrace a wide variety of styles. In the wake of cinéma-vérité, and Jean Rouch's praise of the participant camera, nearly all of the productions exhibited at Göttingen used hand-held cameras and available light, as if artificial lights and tripods were unfilmic or inauthentic devices. While a tripod was considered bad, handheld camerawork that appeared 'as steady as a tripod' was lauded. Imagine assuming about fiction film that Miklós Jancsó's roving camera was, by definition, better at representing reality than Yasujirõ Ozu's fixed camera. Rouch at least acknowledged that his camerawork in Madame L'Eau (1993) was almost willfully bad and that visual anthropologists should beware of the trap of producing beautiful images.

“Rouch Isn't Here, He Has Left”: A Report on ... - Senses of Cinema The Cinema of Jean Rouch, by Ian Mundell from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005 (excerpt)

In the context of a retrospective, the loss of Rouch’s voice means the absence of a major theme that developed through his ethnographic work. In the tradition of documentaries about Africa, Rouch’s early films have a commentary which describes what is going on for the viewer. In the 1950s, with the aid of the earliest “portable” tape recorders, Rouch was able to transcribe and translate more exactly what the people on screen are saying. His commentaries begin to re-voice this material, reflecting the rhythms used and the poetry of African ritual language, whether it be a mother mourning her son or a hunter praising the poison on his arrows. Later still, Rouch uses poetic commentary to express the full range of narrative in the ceremonies unfolding before the camera – the “oral” tradition in Africa involves movement, costume, even location to transmit meaning as well as words. While intended as a means of representing an external aesthetic, this inevitably reflected Rouch’s own “poetry” and becomes a strong feature of his style as a filmmaker. As he started to make more personal films late in life – such as Madame l’Eau – the same lyrical style reappears.

Madame l’Eau belongs to a strand of Rouch’s work which is better served by the program available to English-speaking viewers. These are the improvised fictions on African culture that Rouch made with his friends (and collaborators on other films) Damoré Zika, Lam Ibrahima Dia, Illo Gaoudel and Tallou Mouzourane. Jaguar (shot in 1954–55 but only released commercially in 1967) tells of a fictional but plausible journey of three young men from the savannahs to the coastal town of Accra to earn money. Petit à Petit (Little by Little) has Damoré and Lam travel to Paris to investigate how Europeans live in skyscrapers before returning to build one in Niamey. In Madame l’Eau, Damoré, Lam and Tallou travel to the Netherlands to see whether a windmill can be constructed on the Niger to help irrigate their fields, again returning to implement the plan.

In these and related “ethno-fiction” films, Rouch has serious points to make about the interrelation of European and African culture, and the need for Africa to find appropriate solutions to its problems. In particular, he is a champion of African ingenuity over European patronage. However these are not militant films, and Rouch gives more screen time to the comedy of these situations than any campaigning message.

film Review Essay Two Kinds of Truth, by Faye Ginsburg (opening page available only) from The American Anthroplogist, 1996 (pdf format)

Rouge – Australian online film magazine

ROUGE initially edited by Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, and Grant McDonald

Rovenský, Josef

THE RIVER (Řeka)

Czechoslovakia (88 mi) 1934

CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the 1940's Charles Coleman, Facets Film Programmer

With a tempo as unhurried and pleasant as the meandering stream of the title, The River follows a young boy through several vignettes depicting his love for a village girl, resulting in a furious battle with a fish, and a brief misunderstanding. Yet while Rovenskÿ paints this portrait of country folk with bold strokes, the film never descends into parody, remaining a gentle tribute to the simplicities and beauty of small town life. Directed by Josef Rovenskÿ, Czechoslovakia, 1934, 35mm, 88 mins. With Jarmila Beránková and Václav Jalovec.

Village Voice J. Hoberman (excerpt)

Josef Rovenský's The River (December 8) split the director's prize at the 1934 Venice Film Festival with three other Czech films, including Ecstasy; all were celebrations of the countryside. Opening with a pantheist montage and an incantatory voiceover, The River concerns—what else?—a pair of gently star-crossed young lovers. The dialogue is sparse, and the music near constant. Guy Maddin's remake would be uproarious.

The Reeler Peter Hames

Rowe, Michael

LEAP YEAR (Ano Bisiesto) B 87

Mexico (92 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Not so much a film as a formal cinematic exercise, as there isn’t an ounce of spontaneity anywhere to be seen, instead, despite stretching the sexual boundaries somewhat, every inch of this film is precisely determined ahead of time so that it all takes place perfectly centered within the frame. From the opening shot at a supermarket, the camera follows Monica del Carmen in her apartment for the rest of the movie, using static medium shots as she goes about her business of eating, talking on the phone, watching TV, looking out the window at her neighbors, dressing for bed, stepping into her one-piece full-length, long-sleeved cotton pajamas, brushing her teeth, putting on makeup before she goes out, which is usually followed immediately by another shot opening the door in the darkness as she returns with a male partner to have loveless sex. This same pattern becomes ordinary after awhile and has little if any sexual interest to the viewer. If someone expresses an interest, like wanting to know her name or what she does, she has no interest whatsoever about sharing any information about herself. In this way, she remains anonymous, but receives a regular stream of male dates who hop in the sack with her, usually seen leaving at first light the next morning.

Del Carmen plays this movie in various states of undress, but she’s a fairly plain looking woman without any real physical attributes that stand out other than her native Indian features. She spends a little time writing journalistic stories on her computer, but her employer apparently is cutting back on staff, so she has more free time on her hands. She is visited by her younger brother where they return from a carnival eating cotton candy, but other than than, her visitors are exclusively for consensual sex, where some ring her doorbell in the middle of the night and she whips off her clothes without even looking to see who it is and answers the door totally naked, which is followed by bedroom scenes where she has a tendency to grunt her way through sexual encounters, both usually ending up out of breath. In time, we notice her preference for rough sex with Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), where initially he’s the one initiating the action, calling the shots, but she has a tendency to help him go even further than what he might have had in mind. This is the only man she’s willing to show any degree of affection for afterwards, sometimes laying in his lap or resting her head on his shoulder.

As the sexual encounters grow more brutally sadistic, there’s little actual suspense, as the movie has been progressing in this direction from the beginning, so what we see onscreen is largely expected. Her masochistic behavior has no real recognizable root, though a few clues are offered, but it’s clear she’s perfectly willing to be sexually humiliated and brutalized. This film establishes its own rhythm of formalized control so that the audience becomes completely familiarized with the sexual content. Nothing shown onscreen is so unpleasant or depraved that the audience turns away in shock, storming for the exits. On the contrary, through the director’s austere precision, it all feels perfectly natural. But the sequence of the film is when she assumes command and goes in her own preferred direction, laying out her ultimate sexual fantasy as she’s furiously jacking off Arturo, who’s not asking her to stop. The occasional dark humor and meticulous attention to details recalls Buñuel’s Mexican period, where his sexual fascination was largely in the mind, as opposed to the body, but one also thinks of the obsessive sexual trauma of Ôshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976), which veers outside of all acceptable boundaries. With little dialogue to speak of and no musical score, and a set consisting of a single room, the director won the Camera D’Or at Cannes for the best first feature film.

User reviews from imdb Author: paulmx from Mexico

Laura's character is so complex. We see her living a superfluous life when she interacts with other characters, except for her brother Raul and a guy named Arturo. We descend to the darkest levels of the human psyche along with the main character and that exploration is highly successful by the director. The film is linear, with no jumps in time as does Inarritu or Guillermo Arriaga, and also includes sex scenes which are pretty explicit. The aesthetic is like "Duck season" by Fernando Eimbcke and I think the merit of the movie is the story and how it show us the life of a lonely woman living on a big city. So, after painful and rough journey, perhaps it is possible to find hope and redemption. A great Mexican film.

CIFF 2010: The First Seven Ben Sachs from Cine-File

These two films are the most hotly anticipated Mexican features to play in Chicago in some time. Both played at Cannes (where LEAP YEAR won the Camera d’Or, the award for the best first feature in competition) and both toy with controversy every bit as cannily as arthouse provocations like IRREVERSIBLE and THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER. I didn’t either film very much–or the two examples I’ve just cited, for that matter–but each is so assured in its formal attributes (composition, direction of actors, manipulation of suspense) that I wish I had admired them more. Certainly, those who like high art that breaks social taboos will find a lot of food for thought. In LEAP YEAR (2010, 88 min, 35mm widescreen), a young, ostensibly well-educated woman devotes herself to a lonely routine of writing Internet journalism and bringing home sadistic men for one night stands. The film systematically denies any interpretation for her behavior: It all takes place in her cramped Mexico City apartment, and writer-director Michael Rowe limits the dialogue to the pithy and the banal. Rowe is an Australian expatriate living in Mexico, and the most interesting thing about LEAP YEAR is that it’s the rare Mexican feature that feels as if it could take place in any country. Tellingly, the most overt cinematic influences are Belgian (the scenes of routinized behavior recall Chantal Akerman) and Taiwanese (the transformation of the film frame into a static, theatrical space is pure Tsai Ming-liang). The movie derives much of its impact from Monica del Carmen’s lead performance, which is courageous if ultimately unrevealing. Del Carmen submits to enough physical degradation as to set some kind of record for an actor working outside of porn, and she devotes herself to the role as though this were a desirable achievement. As with most of the other details, however, her accomplishment exists in a creative vacuum, exactingly realized but opaque in its purpose.

Leap Year (Ano bisiesto) Lisa Nesselson at Cannes

A fearless and haunting performance from relative newcomer Monica Del Carmen distinguishes Leap Year, the portrait of 29 days in the dispiriting existence of a young Mexican woman who seems to have little control over her life, yet perversely - emphasis on perverse - calls all the shots.

Set entirely in the small apartment of freelance journalist Laura Lopez, this first film by writer-director Michael Rowe, an Australian playwright, poet and screenwriter who lives and works in Mexico, will be off-putting to some but makes the most of its basic ingredients in searing increments. Set for a June 16 theatrical release in France, the film premieres in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes.

Twenty-five year old Laura, who only leaves her apartment to shop and pick up anonymous men for expedient rutting, is a master at putting a positive spin for others on what we can plainly see are dead-end circumstances. Eating generic food directly out of the can while speaking to her mother on the phone, she recounts the gourmet feast she’s allegedly savouring. Her neighbours probably don’t know she’s alive but she describes them as a tightly knit community of caring friends.

She lies to others but painful truths seem to adhere to her like the crummy decals on her laptop. At least one of those daunting antecedents has been with her since she was 12.

Del Carmen has zero vanity: Laura masturbates while observing the couple across the courtyard; picks her nose while typing and more or less tolerates incredibly rude behaviour from her interchangeable parade of recreational lovers.

Laura’s distinctly native Indian features subtly underline lingering class divisions in contemporary Mexico where much of the wealth accrues to those of European descent.

The only loving relationship in Laura’s shambles of a life is with her younger brother (Marco Zapata) who turns up when he’s expected as well as when he’s not.

Laura marks the 29th of February on her wall calendar with a red square. Her date with destiny may involve Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra) a guy she brings home whose sadism seems to mesh with her masochism. A sort of revenge plot takes shape in small but startling instalments.

Veteran actor Gustavo Sanchez Parra convincingly conveys both cruelty and tenderness, while long, unfussy takes make good use of the widescreen format.

Variety (Jordan Mintzer) review

A lonely Mexican woman with some major intimacy issues goes on a one-month sex spree in "Leap Year," Michael Rowe's raunchy and acutely minimalist study of urban alienation, romantic longing and bedroom practices no one should try at home. Set almost entirely inside a drab Mexico City apartment and filmed in a series of well-designed masters, pic evokes both Tsai Ming-liang's quiet studies of contempo gloom and Bruno Dumont's raw depictions of flesh-on-flesh, with a cleverly constructed story that pays off despite the bodily fluids. Semi-extreme content will attract distribs prepared to take a leap of faith.

Initially, first-timer Michael Rowe's script (written with Lucia Carreras) plays like yet another dull meditation on modern big-city blues, as we follow freelance business journo Laura ("Babel's" Monica del Carmen) through her solemn routine of eating, watching TV, looking out the window and talking on the phone with her mother.

But such details take on added significance as the narrative slides into darker waters, beginning with the first time Laura brings a guy home and the two have rough but passionless sex, the guy stealing away in the wee morning hours. This routine is repeated several times with different men, and it's not until Laura meets Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), whose taste for violent coitus seems to be Laura's cup of tea, that we begin to notice how her manic routines and masochistic urges are sheltering a deeper trauma.

As things advance toward a potentially horrendous finale, Rowe maintains a solid, unadorned aesthetic, meticulously studying an existence that's not without its own absurdist humor. Both Juan Manuel Sepulveda's widescreen setups and Alisarine Ducolomb's threadbare art direction grant significance to the most basic gestures and props, while Oscar Figueroa Jara's editing limits action to one shot per scene, a la "Stranger Than Paradise."

Whether standing or on all fours, del Carmen's performance is carefully constructed, oscillating between hard-hitting promiscuity and an everyday boredom that reveals its hidden agenda in subtle but telling ways.

Some fairly disturbing sex scenes may be a turnoff to high-brow arthouse crowds, but patient viewers will be rewarded with a conclusion that can only come from its character's intense trial by fornication.

Camera (color, widescreen), Juan Manuel Sepulveda; editor, Oscar Figueroa Jara; art director, Alisarine Ducolomb; costume designer, Adolfo Cruz Mateo; sound (Dolby Digital), Antonio Diego; sound designer, Miguel Angel Molina Gutierrez; associate producers, Olga Gonzalez, Gustavo Campos; assistant director, Rafael Ravinet Virbel. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight), May 17, 2010. Running time: 92 MIN.

Rowland, Michael James

LUCKY MILES

Australia (105 mi) 2007

Lucky Miles (2007) Ferdy on Films

The United States isn’t the only country with its panties in a bunch about immigrants, legal or otherwise. Over the last 10–15 years, Australia’s policies with regard to immigrants have slipped from relatively open to fairly hostile. While the politics of the country today seem to be favoring a return to a more liberal approach to immigration, there is still much resistance.

Lucky Miles was made as a kind of wake-up call to Australia. Rowland deliberately sets most of the action in the year 1990 to help Australians recall that it wasn’t so long ago when asylum seekers and boat people were dealt with in a more balanced way. Far from being a liberal polemic, however, Lucky Miles is a rich and entertaining film that tellingly won the Audience Choice Award at the 2007 Sydney Film Festival.

The film is based on real-life accounts of illegal immigrants who survived their journey to Australia in barely seaworthy boats, only to be dumped in the empty deserts on the northwest coast of the continent in the state of Western Australia. The film begins, however, in Cambodia in 1972, as an Australian soldier bids farewell to his Khmer lover. He gives her a business card and tells her to call the number if her family gives her a hard time. He also promises to return in a few weeks.

Flash-forward to 1990 and a jerrybuilt putt-putt filled with Iraqi and Cambodian refugees and their Indonesian mules. The boat pulls up to shore. Large sand dunes stretch as far as the eye can see. When one of passengers questions the location of the drop-off, lead mule Muluk (Sawung Jabo) assures them that just over the top of the dunes is a road where they can catch a bus into town. Khmer refugee Arun (Kenneth Moraleda) asks if the bus goes to Perth, where his father lives. He pulls out a business card to show the address. Muluk assures him it does. While the Iraqis and Khmer celebrate their arrival in a democracy where they can claim asylum, Muluk and his crew slip away.

Naturally, there is no road, no bus, nothing at all but endless desert. The Iraqis and Khmer head in opposite directions down the beach, hoping to walk to the nearest town. The Khmer manage to find a road. They see a sign, shot through with bullet holes, that puzzles them. They also see empty beverage cans along the road. One throws a rock at a can, and all of the Khmer crouch and cover their heads as it hits the can. This is comical to watch, but reflects the reality these Khmer faced in their own country. The Khmer follow the road and find a roadhouse. As they sit drinking free refreshments at the roadhouse, the owner slips off to call the police. All the Khmer are rounded up except for Arun, who was outside filling his water jugs and who runs for his life. He’s used to police who shoot first and ask questions later.

Meanwhile, the Iraqis are having troubles of their own. Yousif (Rodney Afif) bristles at the orders given by the self-appointed leader Hussam (Majed Abbas). When the pair go to collect fire wood, Hussam pulls a knife out. Realizing that Hussam was one of Saddam Hussein's death dealers, the people who killed his entire family, Yousif runs and falls over a cliff. Yousif brings the “sad" news back to the camp of Youif's demise, claiming to have called out and made a thorough search. The men, convinced by his story, continue on without thinking more about it.

Yousif, scraped and stunned, survives and starts walking. He collides squarely with Arun, who is running at full speed away from the “bad town." Arun, who has water, spares a few precious gulps for Yousif, and the men decide to join forces. Yousif wants to go back to the town, but Arun insists this would be a mistake and, holding all the cards—the water—the men set off for Perth.

Meanwhile, back at the boat, Ramelan (Sri Sacdpraseuth), Muluk’s nephew, is playing with a cigarette lighter. He accidentally loses his grip on it, and sets the boat on fire. The trio of smugglers must swim to shore. Muluk refuses to let Ramelan come with him and Abdu (Arif Hidayat), punishment for sinking the boat. Now we have several groups of illegal aliens wandering around Western Australia.

Add to the mix a trio of Army reservists who are sent to track the refugees' whereabouts. A city mouse Aboriginal named O'Shane (Glen Shea), a country mouse Aboriginal named Tom Collins (Sean Mununggurr), and country mouse white Australian Greg Plank (Don Hany) are in pursuit after reports of the smugglers' boat are made. The film makes droll comedy out of the fact that O'Shane is an Aboriginal who cannot track; he constantly asks Tom where the refugess have gone. The trio are a less physically abusive version of the Three Stooges whose misadventures, including dropping their Land Rover in a water hole, keep them one step behind Yousif, Arun, and forlorn and abandoned Ramelan, who joined the duo with promises to lead them to civilization.

This is a film that makes certain light of the dumb luck and misfortunes of its characters without caricaturizing them or diminishing the plight they are in. Although Arun wishes to avoid the police at all costs, they are his best hope for survival in the harsh outback. Yousif, "a fully qualified structural engineer" who was reduced to driving a cab in Iran for five years (a job Ramelan covets), seeks control at all costs. When, after splitting up in anger, the trio accidentally reunites in an abandoned shack, Yousif spends all his time trying to get a rusted, broken truck to run again. It seems hopeless, but he has a Westerner's sense of individual responsibility and determination.

Eventually, the reservists catch up with Yousif and Ramelan in a hilarious, realistic chase sequence that has to be seen to be believed. When news of their ordeal hits Australia's airwaves, pub dwellers near the site of their capture hand it to the little buggers for surviving so long. Arun, who was separated from Ramelan and Yousif, remains at large. He brings the picture to its inevitable denouemount through the kindness of one of those pub dwellers. The gentleness and humor sounded at the end is the perfect note for reconciliation Rowland said he hoped to achieve with this film. This is the rare movie that will make you laugh while it makes you think. I was privileged to see its North American premiere and meet its talented director and producer.

Rowland, Roy

THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T.

USA (89 mi) 1953

The 5000 Fingers of Dr T can barely contain its multiple fascinations within the 'kids' movie' format, attempting as it does to make explicit the connections between dreams, surrealism and psychoanalysis. Using the child's fantasy structure of The Wizard of Oz, it's the tale of nine-year-old Bart (Rettig), who resents his piano lessons and projects teacher Terwilliker (Conried) as an authoritarian madman bent on mesmerising his mother, killing the friendly plumber, imprisoning all other musicians, and enslaving 500 little boys at a giant keyboard to rehearse his own masterpiece for eternity. There's enough colourful whimsy here to divert a young audience; but also enough pop Freud and political allegory to keep even the most compulsively note-taking adults happy. And with a couple of musical routines that come close to defining camp, this awesome entertainment really does have something for everyone.

Turner Classic Movies review Eleanor Quin

In 1953 Columbia released The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, a live-action children's film based on a script by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Billed as "The Wonder Musical of the Future!", the film depicts the nightmarish dream of a young boy forced to endure hours of piano lessons. Featuring sets and characters as only Dr. Seuss could imagine them, the action plays out as young Bart tries to escape the clutches of Dr. T, whose sinister plan is to enslave 500 boys to play in unison on a giant piano (hence 5,000 fingers). Although the film garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, it was not well received at the time of its release. In fact, the dismal response almost soured Geisel against film and television forever. Over the years since its original release, however, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T has amassed a cult audience that embraces the film's bizarre premise and its outlandish visual design.

Geisel submitted the story line for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T in 1951. Encouraged by the success of his cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing (Best Animation Oscar, 1951), he was enthusiastic about a live-action film based on his original concept. The project was quickly linked up with producer Stanley Kramer whose varied credits included High Noon (1952), The Wild One (1954), Inherit the Wind (1960), and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). But the initial The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T script weighed in at a hefty 1,200 pages; it would not be the only aspect of production that was drastically reduced. Multiple delays and studio infighting led to budget slashing but the film's production expenses still topped out at $2.75 million, Kramer's costliest yet.

Geisel and his wife, Helen, had relocated from La Jolla, California, to Los Angeles during filming to enable him to be more involved in the production. As the problems began to mount, however, Geisel grew increasingly distressed about the project. Budget cuts meant there were only enough funds to hire 150 boys instead of the intended 500 . . . but this may have been a good thing. During a break in filming, one of the boys ate a hot dog past its prime and got sick on the giant piano. This caused a vomit chain reaction, with 150 boys barfing up their lunches on the ivory keys. Geisel would later comment, "When the picture was finally released, the critics reacted in much the same matter."

Tommy Rettig was cast as Bart; best known as Lassie's first owner, he played Jeff Miller in the TV series from 1954-1958. The television show and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T would prove to be the apex of his career; like many child actors, he would encounter multiple troubles ranging from drug arrests to bankruptcy in later years. Hans Conried, in the role of the villainous Dr. T, was once a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre and part of the original cast of the Broadway production of Can-Can. He is perhaps best remembered as the voice of Snidley Whiplash in the Dudley Do-right animated shorts featured on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show TV series. Mary Healy and Peter Lind Hayes are featured as Bart's mother and the kindly plumber Mr. Zabladowski; their onscreen romance contains an in-joke - they were in fact husband and wife in real life. Hidden away in the cast of dancers is George Chakiris, who won a Golden Globe and Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Bernardo in West Side Story (1961).

Hans Conried once said of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, "That was the film that might have changed my life....The Americans have never made a really successful fantasy, although of course this was a comedic one. The picture was badly cut in fear of the reappraisal after it was made, even if it was evident to those knowledgeable but inartistic heads of studio that it might have been an artistic triumph rather than a financial one. But in an attempt to make it one, they cut over 11 musical numbers and re-shot for one whole week. I had never had any such part before, never have since and probably never will again. We rehearsed for eight weeks before I was engaged to shoot for eight weeks, an extravagance that I as a bit player had never known....If it had been a success, with my prominent part in the title role, it would have change my life."

A tremendous amount of speculation has been done regarding The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; Freudian and Jungian analysis has been applied to the plot line and extensive theories abound, ranging from homoeroticism to an Oedipal complex. Early script notes by Geisel do suggest a heavy correlation between the film's struggles and the themes of world dominance and oppression coming out of World War II. Whatever the motivating forces, however, the result is a film that continues to delight viewers of all ages. From the clever songs and imaginative choreography to the incredible sets, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T remains a pioneering and visually delicious cinematic fantasy.

Take Two: THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T. Jonathan Rosenbaum

Viewpoints Chris Jarmick, also seen here: Epinions film review by Christopher J. Jarmick co-author of The Glass Cocoon

SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib

DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review

Steve Rhodes review [2.5/4]

The Lumière Reader

Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar

Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]

DVD Verdict- Stanley Kramer Film Collection [Christopher Kulik]

DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Stanley Kramer Film Collection

Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image]

TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]

BBC Films review Richard Luck

Rowlands, Gena – actress

The Roles of Gena Rowlands from the Gena Rowlands website

Interview with Gena Rowlands September 1999 interview with Rowlands from Premiere magazine on Al Weisel’s website

Roy, Duncan

AKA A- 93

United Kingdom (118 mi) 2002

I found this to be a much better film than what the reviews have had to say. Filmed very much in a style resembling Andy Warhol’s CHELSEA GIRLS, with 3 split screens used for the duration of the film experience. While Warhol’s film centered on a cast of odd and eccentric characters that resided in the Chelsea Hotel, providing a voyeuristic view of exhibitionists on parade, this film uses the multi-dimensional screens to highlight the split personas of the characters, and as each screen has its own sound, left, center and right, the changing motion of the sound helps move the story forward. The style provides an energy all its own. In a film that is largely an interior drama, the director accentuates the interior world of the characters even further by using varying angles of the same shot, allowing multiple character perspectives to occur simultaneously. Sometimes the near future is heard off screen before we see it on another, which may cast a different view of the present once it gets there.

This is an autobiographical film written and directed by the director himself, who was kicked out of his own home at 18 due to the sexually abusive behavior from his stepfather, leaving him to fend for himself before he really knew anything about who he was, leaving him in a whirlwind freefall searching for his own sexual identity. Brilliantly played by Matthew Leitch, who, as it turns out, was very much a young male Blanche DuBois, depending ever so much on the kindness, and generosity, of strangers, in particular the world of gay men who were interested in his good looks, and in what they believed to be his fortune, as it is only by entering the world of priviledge, assuming the identity of a young, very upper class gay lord, that he receives the status he needs to be accepted and appreciated. Like a Truman Capote exposé, much of this film is a devastating and excruciating look at class differences, how one must always pretend to be someone or something that they’re not, how in a world so filled with lies, that if you repeat the lie often enough, it begins to resemble the truth. This is a taut, well-written, multi-dimensional labyrinth that is simultaneously humorous and tragic, raw and without any artifice, exposing us to a world that feels achingly real. Stay put for the end credits, as I believe you get a taste of the Sex Pistols “Anarchy in the UK.”

Rozema, Patricia

MANSFIELD PARK A- 94

USA Great Britain (112 mi) 1999

BFI | Sight & Sound | Mansfield Park (1999) Andy Richards from Sight and Sound, April 2000

Given the recent spate of Jane Austen adaptations (notably, Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, Douglas McGrath's Emma and the BBC productions of Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice), one could be forgiven for anticipating diminishing returns from what is widely viewed as the author's least satisfying and most intractably moralistic work. But that would be to reckon without the contribution of Canadian director Patricia Rozema who, disdaining a purist approach, offers some smart and suggestive variations on the usual Regency rituals.

Rozema's previous features (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and When Night Is Falling) have all dealt with meek, repressed female protagonists who are initiated into new social and cultural worlds, before attaining self-sufficiency. In this respect, Austen's Fanny, who arrives at Mansfield Park a timid and socially unsure young woman only to become an indispensable member of the household, would seem to be another variant on Rozema's heroines.

Yet the Fanny of Rozema's film, as incarnated by a radiant Frances O'Connor, is resolutely all the things the Fanny of the novel is not: vivacious, artistic, even sexy - a self-confessed "wild beast". This Fanny is, in fact, something of a hybrid of Austen's heroine and the novelist herself (Fanny's stories and her updates to her sister Susan are based on Austen's own early writings and letters). In Fanny, Rozema creates a screen heroine we can root for (more in the mould of Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet), and a film that stands alongside the rest of her oeuvre as a paean to female artistic and romantic independence.

Rozema's emancipatory agenda is significantly different from the novel's more sober, stoic preoccupation with the upholding of true moral consciousness through abstinence and self-denial. Austen's Fanny, as the unimpeachable repository of older, High Tory values, must strike modern sensibilities as something of a prig. Rozema's heroine, on the other hand, is a modern woman oppressed by an antiquated patriarchal society. To throw this theme into sharper relief, Rozema has chosen to make the slavery issue (fleetingly alluded to in the novel) explicit. At one point, Fanny mortifies her family by raising the subject of abolition. The scene in which she discovers Tom's sketches of atrocities (gang rape included) committed against the slaves on his father's Antiguan plantations is shocking in its deliberate rupturing of the film's predominantly genteel mise en scène.

Rozema's point is that Mansfield Park, and the amorous escapades of its wealthy inhabitants, are founded on and sustained by this debased form of exploitation. This is certainly an intriguing opening-out of the novel, but in doing so the film appropriates the moral high ground in a way that further distances it from the delicacy and ambiguity of Austen's insights.

Rozema might shift the moral dynamics of the tale to suit our modern broad-stroke sensibilities, but she also has fun with the novel's romantic conventions. The initial entrance of the glamorous, seductive Crawfords is played as a comic cliché, a languorous camera tilt up their bodies intercut with hot flushes from the assembled onlookers. The central ball scene - filmed with candle-lit intimacy and rhapsodic camera swirls - and a couple of fanciful sapphic interludes between Fanny and Embeth Davidtz's serpentine, cigar-smoking Mary Crawford also confirm this as the most overtly erotic of Austen adaptations to date.

Ruben, Joseph

THE FORGOTTEN B- 82

USA (95 mi) 2004

Eerie, scary psychological sci-fi suspense thriller about losing memories, starring Julianne Moore as a mother who has lost her 9-year-old son in a plane accident, where before long, all pictures or possessions with his image, or even news references, have all but disappeared. Friends and family tell you there never was a son. That is the premise for a film that goes a little loopy in offering an explanation as to how or why something like this could happen. Poor Alfre Woodard gets lost as a well-intentioned police detective who literally gets thrown out in the mix. There are some suspenseful chase scenes and a few effective montage sequences where the love of a child comes back to life from repressed parental memories, while other similar thematic montages are oftentimes repetitive, and the film takes a turn into what looks like TERMINATOR 2, but overall, this is a good looking film that starts with what seems like an original idea, but then never figures out what to do with it.

Rudolph, Alan

REMEMBER MY NAME

USA (94 mi) 1978

Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)

Largely successful update of the noir-inflected melodramas of the '40s, with Chaplin playing the Stanwyck-style role as the vengeful but sympathetic woman who gets out of prison and returns to her former husband (Perkins) to wreak havoc upon his new marriage. What really distinguishes the film are the tremulous, nervy performances, although Rudolph's direction - while occasionally too arty - is imbued with an admirable generosity towards the characters. Also endowed with a fine blues score by (and performed by) Alberta Hunter, and crisp photography from Tak Fujimoto, it's well worth seeing.

Alan Rudolph's 1978 film about an ex-con (Geraldine Chaplin) planning revenge on her ex-husband (Anthony Perkins). It's an eccentric, stubborn, and gripping piece, in which Rudolph executes an elegant Hitchcockian transfer of audience identification from victim to aggressor. The well-worked sound track (which includes Alberta Hunter's now famous blues score) suggests the influence of producer Robert Altman, but Rudolph has a sense of plot and characterization that is dark, tortured, and very much his own. The film isn't devoid of humor, but its overriding tones are of passion and pain: Chaplin gives a performance that's so wired and immediate it almost hurts. With Berry Berenson; photography by Tak Fujimoto.

`Remember My Name'' is a film that lingers in the mind without exactly staying in mind. The actions in it are decisive but small, like stirrings in a pond. Even just a few days later it's easy to forget the little movements, yet the overall aura of the film is striking and indelible.

The picture was the second by Alan Rudolph, who most recently directed Jennifer Jason Leigh in ``Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.'' Originally released in 1978, ``Remember My Name'' opens in revival today, kicking off a seven-day Alan Rudolph retrospective at the Castro Theatre. It will play each of the seven days, on a changing double bill with seven other Rudolph titles: ``Welcome to L.A.,'' ``Choose Me,'' ``Trouble in Mind,'' ``The Moderns,'' ``Love at Large,'' ``Mortal Thoughts'' and ``Equinox.''

``Remember My Name'' stars Geraldine Chaplin as a chain-smoking, unbalanced woman who takes a boarding-house room in a small, suburban town and sets about stalking a man Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins in Alan Rudolph's `Remember My Name' and his wife. The specific reasons for her doing so are not made clear at first, except that she is a woman from the past with a score to settle.

In 1978 Rudolph was not in a position to cast A-list Hollywood stars in his film, but the result was some creative choices. Pre-stardom Alfre Woodard and Jeff Goldblum appear in small roles. But best of all there is Anthony Perkins as the stalked husband, Neil, a regular Joe who works in construction.

Perkins is quite good here -- rugged and confident. He looks right at home grabbing a beer out of the refrigerator, instead of, say, an ax. And when he has a hammer in his hand it never even crosses your mind he might hit someone with it. Yet the patented Perkins intensity comes in handy, too. When he grinds his teeth and stares bug-eyed at the road as he drives his truck to work in the morning, he looks just creepy enough to make you wonder if this really is Mr. Nice Guy, after all.

Rudolph, who also wrote the screenplay, deftly moves in and out of various perspectives, but mainly follows Emily (Chaplin) as she gets a job in a five-and-dime store and spends her free hours casing Neil's house, pitching rocks through the window and ripping up the flower bed.

The current of strangeness that runs through ``Remember My Name'' and which, later, is so memorable, comes from the sense of seeing reality through the eyes of a crazy woman.

Chaplin, who is extraordinary, adopts a unique speech pattern as Emily. She says everything as though she's rehearsed it and now is blurting it out in what she hopes will be accepted as a reasonable replica of casual speech. Emily's manner only loses its furtive, dodging quality when she feels in control or when she flies into a rage. She eventually does both.

Rudolph embellishes his film with flashes of sardonic humor. Violence is always a possibility in ``Remember My Name,'' and Rudolph comments on that in one scene by showing, for no more than a second, a billboard reading, ``Use a Gun, Go to Jail.'' A dash of incongruity -- or impish irrelevance -- is added by the fact the film is set during Christmas season. But the most comically macabre touch is the TV broadcasts throughout, which tell the continuing story of a devastating earthquake in Budapest, in which a million people are killed.

Rudolph's protagonists see these broadcasts but neither react nor care: They have their own problems.

Remember My Name Not a Through Street, by Ernest Larsen from Jump Cut, May 1979

Cine-File Chicago: Ben Sachs

CHOOSE ME

USA (106 mi) 1984

Choose Me, directed by Alan Rudolph | Film review - Time Out Tom Milne

Rudolph here brings his variation on the kaleidoscopic Altman style to perfection with a marvellous gloss on La Ronde set in a Los Angeles bar that seems real but serves as a neon-lit dream world where everyone - not least Bujold's agony aunt, solving other people's problems but herself suffering untold miseries of sexual frustration - sooner or later turns up in quest of the partner who will bring emotional fulfilment, only to discover that it isn't necessarily there just for the asking. Often very funny as well as gorgeous to look at in its ineffable blend of realism and rhapsody, it comes on a little like a free jazz improvisation on the vulnerability of the human heart to the ecstasies and disenchantments that attend it in permanent orbit.

Alan Rudolph has fallen out of fashion since he stopped making movies in the early 2000s, which is a shame because he’s one of the most idiosyncratic directors ever to work in this country. His best films are unique amalgams of film noir atmospherics, screwball-style dialogue, sinuous camerawork reminiscent of classic musicals, and a profound sense of romantic longing. CHOOSE ME is not just Rudolph’s most characteristic film, but also one of the best American films of the 1980s, a romantic roundelay infused with mystery and danger. It shows the influence of Rudolph’s one-time patron Robert Altman in its juggling of multiple characters, who include a former prostitute-turned-bar owner (Lesley Ann Warren), a lonely housewife (Rae Dawn Chong) who suspects her husband of having an affair, and a radio talk show host who lives a double life (Genevieve Bujold). Keith Carradine plays the handsome, wide-eyed stranger who romances each of these women and whose true identity is the film’s central mystery. Is he a CIA agent, a mass murderer, or a pathological liar? (At times, he seems like he could be any of these things—or maybe all three.) Carradine’s wistfulness and boyish charm have rarely been put to better use. You can understand what makes the other characters fall for him in spite of (or perhaps because of) the risk of getting close to him. Even when he’s not onscreen, the film conjures an intoxicating, amorous mood, the bold neon colors and balletic camera movements evoking a world where love is always in the air. Alternately funny, seductive, and unnerving, CHOOSE ME channels the chaotic rush of emotions that comes with falling in love as few other movies do.

As Peary notes, this “zany film” about “troubled characters who make coincidental connections with each other, put up false fronts, act crazy, and are hopelessly confused and worried about sex, love, marriage, and their inability to communicate” is a sleeper favorite of many — possibly because we can all relate to feeling this way ourselves at one point or another in our lives. The “preposterous” ensemble storyline (written by Rudolph) nonetheless “has the ‘logic’ of crazy real life”, and “we willingly suspend our disbelief because we’re touched by the characters and root for them to make it out of their misery”. This is due in large part to the “superb” cast, with Lesley Ann Warren giving perhaps her most vulnerable performance, and Genevieve Bujold digging deep into the neuroses of her character — a famed sexologist who, ironically, has never experienced satisfying intimacy herself. Carradine essentially plays yet another a variation on his standard womanizing persona, but, as Peary notes, in this film we “believe him each time” he “tells [a] woman that he loves her and wants to marry her”, and we’re relieved that he ultimately “manages to be a positive influence.” Adding to the film’s dreamlike ambience are Jan Kiesser’s cinematography (evoking a nighttime L.A. unlike any other I’ve seen) and the jazzy soundtrack by Teddy Pendergrass, whose “Choose me, baby” refrain emerges at strategic, emotionally loaded moments.

David Csontos, on May 30th, 2010 at 8:05 pm Said:

An absolute must! And one that holds up surprisingly well on repeat viewings – in fact, it may take several viewings, not to understand the film but to appreciate it fully as the ornate tapestry that it is.

This is Alan Rudolph’s only successful film as writer/director. (In 1991, he managed effective handling of a script he didn’t write: ‘Mortal Thoughts’.) Serendipity was at work here: Rudolph has perhaps the best ensemble he ever assembled; the dominating, deeply heartfelt Pendergrass vocals, as well as the supplementary jazz interludes are inspired; and the behind-the-scenes team is clearly of one mind – DP, production/costume designers, editor.

The result is a major contender for best film about ‘this crazy thing called love’. So much of the film’s examination of passion/longing/romance works so well in elucidating what a wild thing the heart can be – so it’s easy to forgive the film’s flaws.

And it is flawed in some ways. The script’s overall structure is solid but the number of coincidences is noticeable. Although there are quite a few memorable one-liners, there are times the dialogue is borderline ludicrous – and, at times, it jumps the border altogether. (I must say, some of Rudolph’s script gems are strategic exchanges that get the job done in four to six lines.)

The good news is that the flaws are perhaps less apparent on an initial viewing. That’s thanks not only to the film’s dreamlike quality (which makes realism here not all that important) but also to the top-notch cast playing the material as if their lives depended on it.

That is especially true of the leads. Carradine may still be Carradine here but, to me, this seems perhaps his most natural, relaxed performance. Ultimately, though, the film belongs to Bujold and Warren.

And does it ever! This pairing of characters is truly fascinating and the actors are clearly having a ball sinking their teeth into them. (Bujold’s solo scenes in the radio station are priceless!) Each and every scene they have together (and there are many), whether on the phone (not knowing each other’s true identity) or in person, is nothing short of riveting. A one-of-a-kind match of fate.

Though the film is generally a nourishing treat, the best may be left for last: watch Warren’s face when she’s on the bus with Carradine – I love how she slips between a feeling of bliss to “Oh, God, what the f**k did I just do?”

A fave visual: the painting in Warren’s dining room (!) is of a woman stabbing a man; at the base, it is written: “A recurring image – I have often thought of killing him.” L’amour fou, indeed!

[On my 55th.]

Unpublished monograph: Dan Sallitt 1985

MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman

The Glasgow Herald [William Russell]

TV Guide Review

The Montreal Gazette [Bill Brownstein]

The Boston Phoenix [Gregory Solman]

The Pittsburgh Press [Ed Blank]

The Milwaukee Journal [Douglas D. Armstrong]

The Eugene Register-Guard [Lloyd Paseman]

The Palm Beach Daily News [Rex Reed]

New York Times [Janet Maslin]

New York Times [Vincent Canby]

MADE IN HEAVEN

USA (102 mi) 1987

Made in Heaven Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew

Back in the '50s, Mike (Hutton) dies saving a family from a car accident. In heaven he falls in love with Annie (McGillis), a new soul waiting to be born, and he's forced to gamble on 30 more years on earth in order to search out his lost love. Will they meet again? Unlikely; he's reincarnated as under-achieving would-be musician Elmo, she as wealthy, talented Ally, spliced to an ambitious film-maker. Offbeat and very imaginative, Rudolph's movie displays the same absolute control of atmosphere - both celestial and worldly - that made his earlier work so tantalising. The narrative drifts a little as Elmo and Ally make their separate ways through the '60s, and the ending taxes credibility. But the film looks a treat, the performances are convincing and charismatic, and the result, as they say, is a real charmer.

Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum]

Alan Rudolph's movie begins promisingly: Mike (Tim Hutton), out of work in the mid-40s (in black and white), dies in an accident and finds himself in heaven (in color), where he's greeted by his amiable Aunt Lisa (Maureen Stapleton), and shortly falls in love with Annie (Kelly McGillis), an unborn soul. Heaven here is rather like Ray Bradbury's Mars, a site of nostalgic wish fulfillments, and if Rudolph and screenwriters Bruce A. Evans and Raymond Gideon had only remained there, the movie might have somehow sustained its fragile, otherworldly charm. But Annie leaves to be born on earth, and Mike, who's allowed to be reborn, is given 30 years to find her again. Inexplicably, the film remains in color as it returns to earth; the new selves of Annie and Mike still look the same, but how they're supposed to find one another with fresh identities and nearly blank memories is not made clear, and vagueness gradually gives way to muddleheadedness. Although a string of cameos by nonactors (including novelist Tom Robbins and various rock singers) leads to some awkward moments, Rudolph still shows some talent in handling professionals (such as Ann Wedgeworth and Don Murray, as well as the leads), though he's invariably better off when directing his own scripts (e.g., Remember My Name, Choose Me). But Ellen Barkin and Debra Winger—both uncredited, the latter in drag as Emmett, the heavenly emissary—do manage to juice things up a little.

Richard T Kelly: Made in Heaven (US 1987, dir. Alan Rudolph)

Following on from my lament of a few nights ago about having failed to squeeze an entry on Tourneur's Build My Gallows High into Ten Bad Dates, I've been reminded of a commensurate failure to build a spot in the book for Made In Heaven, one of the movies I really love from the mid-1980s: an affection possibly enhanced by its unavailability on DVD, which left me clinging to vague, fond memories - until, that is, I found some lovely clips on YouTube, such as this trailer...

At the final reckoning Alan Rudolph's career will probably come to be seen as one founded on the cultiest of cult movies (obviously, with Dorothy Parker and Gordon Liddy among his diverse interests, and Keith Carradine and Kris Kristofferson his favoured leading men.) And bittersweet romance has always been one of Rudolph's strongest suits. So Choose Me (1984) may end up getting counted as his masterpiece. Whereas Made in Heaven is one of those movies that most critics considered a would-be-commercial misfire, and the release version was chopped about without Rudolph's consent. But it's definitely the picture of his that I'd take to my Crusoe island.

It's a celestial Love Story that moves from funny/rueful to unashamedly cute/winsome - and then abruptly becomes a Loss Story, with terribly wrenching effect. The excellence of the narrative and its structure is the power of its metaphor.

Lovelorn Tim Hutton dies before his time saving some kids from drowning and goes to an oddball but charming Heaven, where God is Debra Winger in drag (we might indeed all find this to be the case one day...) In Heaven Hutton meets and falls in love with Kelly McGillis, and she with him. Natural justice, the viewer might say. But McGillis was 'made in heaven' and is there only to be gone from there, en route to earth: 'I'm going to be somebody's baby.' Hutton appeals to God/Winger, and is told that's his hard luck: such is life, and death. (You can watch this bit actually.)

But, the rules have one loophole - Hutton can be sent back after McGillis, reborn as a babe himself. The catch is that he won't know where in the world he's going, or anything of why he willed this to be: he'll just be an average Schmo like we all are, stumbling around in the dark. If he can find (or rather, run into) McGillis within 30 years, their fine feelings for one another will be restored like magic - 'love at first sight', you might say. If not, then love will never find either of them: the rest of their lives will be doomed to sadness, and unfulfillable ache.

Now then - did you spot the metaphor? The sense in which this obvious whimsy actually throws a sharply slanting, possibly painful light onto what is a crushingly familiar romantic preoccupation to a great many human beings? That's the wonder of this lovely movie. And YouTube preservation aside I hope it's reincarnated in a proper home format one day.

This is the ending, and if it seems especially to make no sense I believe that's because it was one of the passages most aggressively recut against Rudolph's wishes so as to sweeten an otherwise downbeat end. Still quite gorgeous, though. Contains for me the most fabulous focus-pull-plus-slight-pan in any movie. The score is Mark Isham and the final song is Neil Young's 'We Never Danced', again laid on thick as they did in the 1980s, but such is the way to High Emotional Content.

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]

eFilmCritic Reviews Kelly Palma

Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]

Made in Heaven - Entertainment News, Film Reviews, Media - Variety

Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

USA (110 mi) 1999

Probably the most lambasted countercultural offshoot since Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the horribly-reviewed Champions seems to be under attack less for what it is than for what it represents: the (supposedly) bankrupt ideals of a deluded era.

In truth, Breakfast is largely a failure — you know you’re in trouble when Nick Nolte is the funniest thing in your movie. But it’s as genuine an attempt to wrestle with the dead-end of suburban ideals as American Beauty, and if less successful, it’s also less smug. Nolte, in fact, gives an excellent performance as sniveling, manic, cross-dressing car salesman Harry LeSabre, and Lukas Haas is tenderly funny as Dwayne’s flaming nightclub-singer offspring. The main (bewildering) fault is the casting of Bruce Willis as auto king Dwayne Hoover, a highly stylized part that calls for chops the actor simply doesn’t have.

As every review has mentioned, Breakfast is indeed "incoherent" and sometimes hysterical, but the final confrontation between Hoover and his creator/author Kilgore Trout (a somewhat hapless Albert Finney), one in which Trout satirically confirms that the whole world has, in fact, been created for Hoover’s convenience, strikes a muffled blow against upper-class narcissism. Also with Barbara Hershey, Omar Epps, Glenne Headley, Vicki Lewis, and a fleeting appearance by Kurt Vonnegut himself.

Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]

As failed screen adaptations of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novels go, Breakfast of Champions fails in a pretty spectacular manner but, to its everlasting credit, it goes down swinging and sometimes even connecting. The project was a well-publicized labor of love for director Alan Rudolph (Afterglow, Songwriter), who had tried to get this project off the ground for years, and for star (and unbilled producer) Bruce Willis, who bought the rights to Vonnegut's 1973 novel and invested a sizable chunk of his own money in the project. Why they felt they could succeed in translating Vonnegut's surrealist/antimaterialist/existentialist bent to the screen where so many others before them had failed is a mystery. But one thing they should have been aware of is the problem inherent in transplanting the film's time period to the present. Vonnegut's visions are so much a part of the times which they describe that to take Breakfast of Champions from its early Seventies backdrop is to nullify its prescience and satire. Rudolph also adds surrealist touches of his own in the way of optical effects, but they only serve to distract our attention and cause us to wonder about their purpose in the midst of all this otherwise realistic activity. Nevertheless, Breakfast of Champions has its delicious moments, as well as a wonderful cast to back these moments up. Willis does his serious acting thing (as opposed to his rote action-hero routine) in a nicely understated turn as a sort of Midwestern Babbitt coming unglued. As the area's biggest car dealer and star of his own hard-sell TV commercials, Willis' Dwayne Hoover is a local celebrity who, despite all the outward appearances of success, starts each day with a ritual that tests whether this will be the day he blows his brains out with a revolver. Practically stealing the show is Nolte as Dwayne's sales manager, who fears that his boss will discover his secret penchant for dressing in women's undergarments. The scene between these two men in Dwayne's office is so well-performed and staged that it alone makes the movie worth viewing. You'll have to wade through a lot of dull repetition in the latter half of the film, but if you choose to miss the sight of Nick Nolte in a red negligee, you have only your own conscience to answer to.

AboutFilm Dana Knowles, Grade F

There is only one word for Breakfast of Champions: Excruciating. Okay... maybe two words: Relentlessly Excruciating. Actually, you can add pretty much any severely negative adverb-as-adjective to the adjective "'excruciating," and you'd still be right. Dreadfully. Horrifically. Unwatchably. Painfully. Unbearably. Torturously. In any case, I think you get the picture. If you're smart, do not see this picture.

Bruce Willis stars as small town local television "star" Dwayne Hoover, who is only a star because he stars in the TV ads for his auto dealership... which, in this particular town, is more than enough to make him a superstar. That's about as insightful and scathing as this movie gets. Are you laughing with derisive superiority yet? No? Well, too bad for you. Because this joke/insight/commentary gets run so far into the ground that I expected to be in China by the end of the movie. Dwayne is going through some sort of existential crisis. What sort? Who knows! But he must be... because he keeps putting a gun in his mouth. And he sweats a lot and looks distressed a lot. And his employees think he's been acting strangely, though what constitutes "strange" in this crowd of annoying freaks defies imagination.

This movie is nothing but a freak show--a grating, unfunny, boring, empty-headed cartoon that never ceases to make you yearn to run away. Ironic, as it seems that running away is a theme of the film, which ought to have been shown to its own characters as a catalyst... which would have made them flee, ending the movie, and putting the rest of us out of our collective misery. The CIA ought to purchase the rights to this film so as to employ it as an instrument of torture. Those pesky third-world countries would toe the line lickety-split if subjected to this monstrosity two or three times. Hell... I'd rat out my own mother to make it stop.

A talented cast is on display, but none of them should allow this to remain on their published filmographies. Except for Vicki Lewis, whose few brief appearances are almost (and I emphasize the word "almost") amusing. It's difficult to blame any of them. Their performances are all on the same nails-on-a-chalkboard wavelength, so the ultimate culprit can only be the director, Alan Rudolph. Obviously, he got what he wanted out of them. But I can't help wonder who else on earth Rudolph imagined would "want" these performances. Or this story, which feels toothless and dated as social commentary and utterly confused when it strains for philosophical pedantry. Sense can be made of it, perhaps... but my boredom was so intense that I had no desire to make the effort to piece the threads together.

What's it about? It's about a bunch of people who are unhappy and desperate and pathetic and phony and crazy. That's it. Nothing really happens. Dwayne squirms and sweats and stares blankly at the people and things around him. He occasionally hallucinates. And at one point he becomes obsessed with the name Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout (Finney) is an undiscovered author of fiction who lives in a hovel and chats with animals. He's been "discovered," finally, and is invited to be honored by the local arts festival back in Hootersville, or whatever the hell the town is called. Wacky! Harry LeSabre (Nolte) is the sales manager at Dwayne's dealership. Harry harbors a terrible secret... he loves to wear women's clothing. For our amusement, Nolte gets to strut around in spike heels and red lingerie while barking out his dialogue in that patented Nolte growl. Ain't that a laugh riot? Dwayne's wife, Celia (Barbara Hershey), is clearly unhinged. Her demeanor teeters between what appears to be a drug-addled state and what appears to be a contemplative state, both of which she conveys with a lot of zen-like gazes and haltingly delivered dialogue. She spouts advertising slogans as if they're words of wisdom, which I presume is meant to induce gasps of horrified cultural recognition and condescending head-shaking. The poor woman has been eaten by television! Her son Bunny (Lukas Haas) is a fey punk whose dream is to become a superstar lounge singer. Can you believe that?! I mean... it's not like lounge singing is art, so clearly he's been warped by the crazy and vapid culture he's grown up in! Kinda chills you to the bone, doesn't it?

The above stuff happens and keeps happening for what seems like an eternity. Then Kilgore Trout arrives in town, and we realize that he's now a star too... because the local television pimping of the arts festival has mentioned him and made him famous to the townsfolk. Suddenly, everybody knows him and reveres him. Ironic! The good news is, now that he's here to intersect with Dwayne, the movie can end soon. Dwayne is exposed to the text of one of Kilgore's books (about a guy who is the only human who has free will... God's chosen one, who must navigate the hell of coexisting with the pre-programmed humans around him as some sort of existential test), and adopts its concept as the "truth" about his own existence. Which leads him to a bout of destruction. Which leads Kilgore to stop him by telling him that "Until you're dead, everything else is life." Somehow, this wisdom salves his rage and solves his crisis. Which is either a really profound thing, or another devilishly clever, ironic absurdity. I don't know. And I don't care. I just want to forget the whole damned thing and move on with my life and someday have this abomination wiped from my memory. Pray for me, will you?

Easily the worst film of 1999. Or any other year.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Breakfast of Champions (1999) Edward Lawrenson, September 2000

Sticky-Sweet Hereafters | Village Voice Amy Taubin, September 21, 1999

Radiator Heaven: Breakfast of Champions J.D. Lafrance

eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)

culturevulture.net Scott Von Doviak

The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib

Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Ron Wells

Harvey S. Karten

Reel.com [Barbara Teasdall]

Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)

filmcritic.com upchucks its Breakfast of Champions Christopher Null

The Boston Phoenix Jeffrey Gantz

Raúl Ruiz (director) - Wikipedia

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS C- 68

USA (104 mi) 2002

Just not a very interesting film about not very interesting people, no wonder they are disinterested and bored with one another; as a book, this may work, as the slower reading pace allows the reader to digest each excruciating detail of what is accepted as "normalcy," and slowly become agitated with what happens, questioning what we see, but as a film, the faster pace is an immediate frontal assault of unpleasantries that are so annoying from beginning to end that it offers no real insights into marriage or living together, much less dentistry, and reflects rather typical views of children, that they are little nuisances, from those that never had any of their own, so sadly, it's much ado about nothing

The Secret Lives of Dentists Au contraire says Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

This is an impressive, literate film, and it remains so when it doesn’t overreach. Campbell Scott and Hope Davis are both excellent as Dave and Dana, delivering performances which register the full weight of the volumes left unsaid. At first, I was a bit perturbed that the film aligned itself so absolutely with Scott’s character and his mental anguish. But (as Jen pointed out to me), it would have been rather dishonest to do anything else, and upon reflection I realized just how absolutely this film refused to vilify Dana. (Earlier I’d watched Unfaithful, which throws Dentists’ even-handedness into hard relief.) The attention to the minutia of the daily grind of family life is astonishingly spot-on. Even though Jen and I have only cats for children, we frequently nudged each other in amused, reluctant recognition. Most films would deal with “family gets the flu” in a one-minute montage, thereby eliding the most salient aspect of the experience – the distended, bizarre temporality of illness. After a while, though, Rudolph’s less successful choices become harder to ignore. The soundtrack is overbearing, some of the fantasy inserts are sloppy and undercut the sophistication (especially the “Fever” sequence, seemingly there just to give Robin Tunney a big scene), and while I was not as bothered by Denis Leary’s performance as others have been, his continual sneering presence eventually blunts its own impact. These elements – which must work for some viewers – felt like concessions to a hypothetical Someone who needs things spelled out for them. It’s also worth noting that the kids are all wonderfully naturalistic, no preening cuteness anywhere in sight. Since they too have to perform adult-like roles in Dave’s unconscious, lesser actors could have derailed the film. All in all, a very good film with moments of greatness. [Second viewing: The Leary and Tunney portions of the film are indeed blunt and intrusive, bringing too much subtext front and center. But, for what may be purely personal reasons, all the subtleties, all the failures to connect, all the ways Dave shuts down, all the simple management of daily life, far outweighed the demerits. I even liked the soundtrack a little better; the Cat Power and Craig Wedren in particular were not, strictly speaking, necessary, but greatly enjoyed.]

Ruiz, Raúl

Film B. Kite from The Village Voice, February 7, 2006

Raul Ruiz is a unique hybrid in the history of cinema: a whale whose top occasionally crests the surface of the movie ocean; a fox in the financial jungle, surviving by wit and reflex; a spider in the crevices; a demon of energy whose every act overflows its occasion; a wrecking ball for narrative arcs and a seedsmith of story gardens. Propitious moments are rare and easily bungled, so Ruiz doesn't wait for them. The path to perfection is booby-trapped with static hells, so he chooses instead a zigzag itinerary open to deviation by any opportunity that knocks, whistles, or winks. And human will, he tells us in his wonderful book Poetics of Cinema, is "something dark and oceanic" and never a univocal drive, despite the lies of Hollywood and its "central-conflict theory." So his own career stands as will's mirror, bearing as a motto "Discovery through dispersal."

As current estimates of the Ruiz oeuvre top a hundred, it must be said that no one can quite keep track of him—he may not even be able to keep track of himself. But Lincoln Center's "Film Comment Selects" series offers an opportunity to follow a little of his recent progress by showcasing three films from 2003–05 (one, Days in the Country, was unavailable for preview). Ce Jour-Là is a median example of his lacquered later work, taking a domestic-mystery premise more naturally the province of Chabrol and using it as the occasion for some tidy Swiss jokes (even the film frame gets a good wipe at one point); another outing for his favorite figure (a murderous Myshkin); further demonstration of the futility of central conflict, via two detectives who successfully adopt a "do nothing" approach to investigation; and a scrambled mise-en-scéne readily distracted from any ostensible point. The Lost Domain is something other, and far lovelier. This Chilean elegy revolves round the relations of Max (played by Grégoire Colin as a young man and codger and by Colin's father, Christian, in middle age) with an older aviator (François Cluzet), who may or may not be the inspiration for the classic French novel Le Grand Meaulnes. In this memory companion to Ruiz's Time Regained, the temporal shifts are built around the intriguing idea that sometimes the madeleine bites back—if a gesture or sound can summon involuntary recollection, it may also be that shards of the future are embedded in the past.

Trying To Catch Up With Raúl Ruiz: A Conversation with Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum interview from Cinema Scope, July 16, 2002

“You can’t smell email,” Raúl Ruiz insisted to me the night before we had this interview at the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, explaining to me why he didn’t have any truck with the Internet. He added that lately he’s been collecting various first editions, excommunications, and death sentences, many of them from the 19th century and earlier, and he can smell all of them.

At first I was surprised by this old-fashioned form of resistance, but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Raúl is basically a 19th century figure. His largely Borgesian canon of 19th and early 20th century English and American writers (Chesterton, Stevenson, Wells, Harte, Hawthorne, Melville, et al) and his taste for rambling narratives and tales within tales smacks of a Victorian temperament.

I first encountered Ruiz’s work during my first trip to the Rotterdam Film Festival, in 1983, and it was there where we first became friends three years later —- as well as where we had this interview on January 26, in the lobby of the hotel where we were both staying. (Raúl had a small DV camera with him, and from time to time would idly shoot people coming through the hotel’s revolving-door entrance from where we sat a few yards away –- something, he explained, that he needed for his new Chilean TV series.)

Asked to produce a Welles tribute at the festival three months after Welles’s death, in early 1986, I met Oja Kodar —- Welles’s companion and major collaborator since the 60s — for the first time, and on my own initiative, knowing Ruiz’s affinity for both Isak Dinesen and Welles, lobbied unsuccessfully for Ruiz as the ideal person to film The Dreamers -— a cherished late Welles project starring Oja -— incorporating the material that Welles had already shot for it. (Oja, who held the rights, was willing to entertain the idea until she took a look at Raúl Raúl’s L’éveillé du Pont d’Alma [1985, see above] at the festival — not, alas one of Ruiz’s best. The project, however, might well have failed under any circumstances, given Welles’ reluctance to regard himself as anything other than a mainstream director in terms of his audience, some of which Oja has shared, even though his later features—-most notably, The Trial [1963), Chimes at Midnight [1965], and F For Fake [1975] —- showed exclusively in arthouses.) After that, Raúl and I crossed paths in San Sebastian and met on various occasions in other places, including Cambridge (when he was teaching at Harvard), New York, Chicago, and, most often, Paris, where he’s been living for many years on the rue de Belleville. (During this period I published a couple of extended pieces about him. The first, “Mapping the Territory of Raúl Ruiz” [1990], is included in my 1995 collection Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. The second — “Ruiz Hopping and Buried Treasures: Twelve Selected Global Sites,” which attempts to critique, correct, and supplement the first —- was published in the January-February 1997 Film Comment [and later in my collection Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons].) Over the past year or so, we’d been drifting out of touch, so this interview, suggested by Mark Peranson, offered a way of trying to get caught up again, or at least making a start.

As always seems to be the case with Ruiz, he has many projects in many different stages of realization or completion —- including a ghost story shot many years ago in Taiwan but still unedited, an adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel A Closed Book that was scheduled to start shooting in the spring, and an ambitious series for Chilean TV that he’s been working on for some time —- and, as usual, we only got around to discussing some of them.

***

1. Economic Changes

JR: How long have you been working on the Chilean project?

RR: Three years.

JR: Really. And it’s going to be how many hours long?

RR: I have just finished the fourth one.

JR: So it will be done like a serial?

RR: Yes, one hour and a half each.

JR: It will be weekly?

RR: I don’t know. That’s for the Minister of Education — or the Minister of Culture — to decide. It might show over a couple of weeks, or one week.

JR: The fact that you’re still doing things of this kind indicates that you’re still working in the same mode of production, but in other ways it seems like this must have changed over the last few years, since you’re also making more expensive films. Would you say you’ve changed the way you work very much?

RR: Things are very ambiguous in cinema. When you say more expensive films, yes, there is more money, but in film you have more possibilities with smaller structures. Let’s say, for something very normal, I am more anxious, fighting always with the production to hire more extras, fifty more actors there, and I have no control over it. For this project, I have the money, and this is about Chile, and that’s it. So I have the possibility to hire 100 Santa Clauses for a scene, or a big seven-metre-high box of matches…

JR: Like an Oldenberg sculpture.

RR: Yes. I put people inside, I put a whole school inside this box of matches, and a tavern, an evangelical church, etc. I could also use 200 people as extras if I want to — in a line, in the street.

JR: I realize that sometimes with lesser amounts that you can do more. But what I always remembered was very singular about the way you worked is that you seemed so relaxed. It seems when you have a lot of money involved, it would be harder to have a shoot in which nobody’s worried. I’m just curious as to how you found yourself, with some of the films you’re making, going through this change.

RR: I call that a kind of, well, capitulation. There was a moment where it was difficult and almost impossible to make the kind of film that I had been making.

JR: Was it basically that the sources of financing, like television, were not ready to make those kinds of films any more?

RR: Yes, all of a sudden there was nothing more with INA, which had been interested in all kind of experiments in cinema, and trying to work with filmmakers who were not only interested in the number of spectators or the traditional narrative ways of making movies. So at one moment, there was no possibility.

JR: Do you have a sense of why this economic change took place?

RR: In France, everything is connected with political power, and the Mitterrand government came into power. Because in the middle, in the left, there is the idea that cinema is the only real popular art, and democratic, like what they say about Jean Renoir and neorealism. I have nothing against that, but sometimes for me it is difficult, I don’t believe in this idea of a popular art, I don’t believe we can go very far in that way, but I believe in that moment we talked about in the 80s, 15 years ago, and the trouble started at the beginning of the 80s.

JR: So it was a supposedly left-wing government that did this.

RR: The right has had no real politics before Mitterrand. All the experimental work — let’s call it unusual work — that still exists in other arts, in music, other visual arts, is not recognized any more in cinema. It’s tough at the moment. Suddenly, they were confused by the open politics in the art. You know in France this was always true.

JR: What seems very paradoxical is that the moment when this began to happen is the moment of digital video, In other words, suddenly, when the means to make experimental work increased, the possibility of having it shown decreased.

RR: Yes. But still, this is France, and that means there is only the will of the State. The will of public authorities. That means literally that at the beginning of the 80s people making cinema were forced to move to video — I mean, forced. We got the money, we got everything, we got even more money than before, but we had to make it in video. And at that time, you know, the video was analog — we couldn’t use a small camera to make what could be reproduced in 35mm, or rework it digitally, and change everything. But at that time the will of the authorities was to develop in that direction. And that means aesthetic and economic tendencies are mixed with political tendencies, and not necessarily in a good or a bad way — sometimes it’s in a very good way. But it’s a funny thing about France that makes it different from the other countries, the political will — that sometimes the President can decide that in France we should make that kind of movie and not another.

JR: So what you’re saying is that potentially — this could be too strong a word — it becomes a kind of Stalinism.

RR: No, no, because you don’t go to jail. It’s kind of an 18th century thing. You feel like you’re at the time of Mozart, you have the money…

JR: Patronage, in other words?

RR: Yes. I am talking about the 80s. It’s still a game now. But in the 80s, people came to you and said, you have to make a film about this subject, you are free, you can do what you want, but this is the subject. Let’s say, to build a new building.

JR: Or the series about teenagers for French television, that’s an example from around that time. RR: Yes, there was a lot of freedom in that. But then they say, you must be finished September 17th because it is the anniversary of the President, and we have the invitations, and you can’t be late. It’s not very different from what happened in the 18th century in Europe. The President who decides to make a film for the birthday of his son or something like that. Or it was, of course, about the Republic. But it means more than that it’s connected with … how do you say, I have the German word, “inhalt“, or “les continue morals,” you know, the political aesthetic, it was not about that — the subject is this: spring in the city of Toulon, for example. Somehow it should be concerned with what happened in the spring in Toulon, and that’s it. I made a film about a castle, for instance, [Archambault] is just a castle, but it’s a kind of Disney inspiration, a very important moment in the history of France, and it’s a very strange form, funny, so you can play a lot with that. So I’m not complaining.

JR: Sure, but in terms of the change after that — was it making more expensive films in order to make less expensive film as well, or was it just that there were certain kinds of film that you wanted to make? The Proust film required money, obviously.

RR: Let’s say things happen to me. It’s not that I decided to do this and I tried for that, it’s what opportunities were there. Paulo Branco and I, we have more or less the same ideas in cinema, and he has the same ideas how to produce some people. To change from one filmmaker to another is a big choice, and not merely a technical problem, as it is now, for most producers. So his idea was that I was a good person to make very cheap, small, and free films. Only at a certain moment the unusual part was not very acceptable. So for a while I made more unusual and less expensive films but with no audience at all, not even my wife.

JR: Which films are you thinking about, for example?

RR: For example, there was L’autel de l’amitié (The Altar of Friendship, 1989), Le professeur Taranne (1987).

JR: And Tous les nuages sont des horloges (All Clouds Are Clocks, 1988), the one that you did with your students — is that also in this category?

RR: Yes, yes. And the Italian movies.

JR: Yes, none of which I’ve seen, unfortunately.

RR: You know that one of these movies, Viaggio Clandestino (The Secret Journey, 1994) was a movie that was supposed to be made just for one person to see, just him and some friends — literally, just like in the 17th or 18th century. But there were clandestine copies made, and suddenly RAI showed it ten times. So maybe it’s the film of mine that has been seen the most in Italy!

JR: That’s a little bit like what happened with Point de fuite (Vanishing Point, 1984), shot basically as a joke, which wound up getting bought by and shown on German television.

RR: Yes, yes, and was financed by City of Pirates (1983), which we made at the same time. The other film had a kind of patron, and this person paid for the film. But to come back to these big movies, at one moment Paolo said to me, “Maybe you could make these movies” — and a normal movie with very well-known actors was a new thing for him and for me both…

JR: Was Treasure Island (1985) a step in that direction?

RR: No, no, Treasure Island was a complete misunderstanding, because the money was there at the beginning and then suddenly the money was gone [not there anymore]. So I had to reduce the budget, and do it like a kind of B movie. This movie starts very strangely, with a good atmosphere, and then suddenly we are in a typical TV serial, because it was shot in continuity, so you can see the point at which the money starts to vanish…

***

2. Working Conditions

JR: I don’t know if you noticed this in the Rotterdam Festival catalogue, but it lists your films since 1984 and it includes Treasure Island twice.

RR: That’s because I made it twice, but one version is unfinished; I started it, but then there wasn’t any more money. Then there was something that was quite confusing: starting to produce films with la Maison de la Culture in Le Havre, trying to propose a model for making movies in the provinces outside Paris, like in the old B-movie studios in Hollywood, using the same sets and actors for the same movies. It didn’t work.

JR: Why didn’t it work?

RR: Because I didn’t find the artistic partners. Everyone wanted their own set, their own actors, their own crew. The idea that you had to use the same actors and cameraman that was used by another filmmaker was for many people like having to use the same toothbrush.

JR: There are still traces of that goal in what you accomplished — there’s the same space that’s being used in de Oliveira’s Mon cas (1987) and in your Mammame (1986), right?

RR: Yes, exactly. Sometimes it worked. De Oliveira was able to accept that kind of game, but not many others. The Centre de Cinema was reluctant to have this production outside of the system, and the professional producer complained about this, and there was public money that should be used for the distribution of culture and not production. Then there was the political game in the provinces. Finally it was half a failure, but we produced more than ten movies in a couple of years.

JR: And Mémoire des apparences (1986) came from that time…

RR: Mammame, Mémoire de apparences, La chouette aveugle (1987)…

JR: Three of your best films, in fact.

RR: They were free, for sure. I did not have a lot of money, but they were free. I started to really think about some theoretical topics that I developed later. And in that moment, Paolo talked with [Marcello] Mastrioanni, that it would be nice for him to go back to the period in the 1960s, when he used to make very unusual movies with Marco Ferreri. With Mastroianni and [his daughter] Chiara, I tried to make a narrative that was not conventional in that there was not one but three narratives that were combined in such a way that they could make a kind of cubist impression in narrative terms [Three Lives and Only One Death, 1996]. In visual terms it was very simple, it was kind of flat. And then there was Catherine Deneuve, to get back to the actors. The actors helped me a lot. I have to say that Deneuve accepted to make a movie with me, I only told her the story. She said you can use my name, I accept the movie, with no script at all.

JR: It seems to me that the Mastroianni film was very much in your earlier mode.

RR: Geneologies of a Crime (1997) was more ambitious than the others. And of course, the other one, which I was happy with, and I am still happy with, is Time Regained (1999). There were not so many worries with that one. This American accident, Shattered Image (1998), I fought to make, and I now have a film about what it means to make a film in America — why American movies are the way they are. It’s a very strange film because I thought about it in the terms of American movies. In the American cinema there are good guys and bad guys. The good guys are the artists, let’s say the filmmakers, and the bad guys are the actors, sometimes the producers. I found new bad guys, who were the technicians, the workers, who were so obviously disconnected with the project, with the story of the movie. In France, you can get a good price from an electrician if he likes a script, if he finds it interesting and not very commercial he can, let’s say, work Saturdays for free. And I thought that the relationship with the producer was ambiguous because he had the money coming from everywhere and he had to deal with those other producers, and everyone had a very precise idea about the movie. And the discussion was at the level of where to put the camera. That was new for me. The idea that I decided where to put the camera was new to them. The editor was the director, and not the cameraman.

JR: That’s extraordinary. So in other words that crew was accustomed to working on things with a director who didn’t decide where to put the camera.

RR: It seems to me most were coming from TV. Normally, the director does nothing, as the camera is placed by the cameraman, and the director looks when everything is ready, and then the actors are directed by the coach. There is no connection, and you are supposed to cover the scene. I was always arguing with the script girl, who said I didn’t cover the scene. And people would say where is the [covering shot, where is] the master shot? This was a film about dreams, and there were two dreams, so it was only mental images, and once you make an establishing shot you are disturbing the oneiric feeling. This is easy to understand. And they understood, of course, but they were still disturbed by the idea that there was no master shot or establishing shot. The idea that you had to convince people to do this and not that was new to me, and it was completely normal for an Anglo-Saxon mentality that you have to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. In this last movie I made in Chile, I didn’t speak much, and they had no idea why I wanted something.

JR: But has it ever happened where you have to give different reasons to different people for the same shot?

RR: Yes, yes.

JR: In other words you can’t say the same thing to the cameraman, the producer, and the actor.

RR: In this case, the cameraman was Robby Müller, so he also had another approach. No, with the technician, it was for a simple reason. If you place the camera, say, vertically, it has to be a special task, so you have to wait for one hour. Normally I do it myself, and then ask the cinematographer to look and say okay. Robby accepted, because with many other directors in Europe it is normal to do that. But the technician was in a kind of shock that a director would do that and his cinematographer wouldn’t complain.

JR: One thing I want to get back to a little bit, because I’m curious about how it became different, in certain ways, was Time Regained. I would assume that one of the obvious differences in a production like that would be that more had to be scripted in advance, as opposed to your other films.

RR: No, many scenes were written on the day of shooting.

JR: They were? But of course you had the décor all ready and things like this.

RR: No, what would happen sometimes is that you have the description, you work with the art director or other people who work on the décor, and suddenly you end up with many more possibilities, so you have to use them.

JR: I’m also curious about what happened when you passed from Pascal Bonitzer to other screenwriters, if there was a conceptual change.

RR: Bonitzer and I are very old friends, so there was a kind of complicity. Sometimes I wrote the scene and he corrected the mistakes, sometimes he wrote them and I corrected. Many times he was in one room in my apartment, and I was in another one, and we worked on the same scene.

JR: I remember during that period you were thinking in terms of a lot of possible locations instead of sets…

RR: Yes, in Time Regained there were locations, there are some studio sets, but very few. Gilles Taurand was, let’s say, more professional, if you want to use that word. I gave the indication, and he wrote the script. And I wrote maybe only five scenes, not a lot. Normally I write half of the scripts, more or less.

JR: It’s obviously not the same, but I’m wondering if there’s any resemblance to what happened on Shattered Image, because you wrote less of that also.

RR: Shattered Image was written … yes, it was taken somewhere, it was kind of the results of some of the games I used to play in films. I wrote one scene in Shattered Image, the one with the witch. Because the scene was too conventionally mysterious, it was a kind of normal witch, with a young girl who helped her. I made it more of an everyday ceremony, not a special thing. So that’s not the only reason. In general I respect the script. As you know in America, there is a lot of rewriting, so you are never sure what you are shooting!

JR: This was the case on the Proust film?

RR: On the Proust film, during the shooting, I wrote all the story of the cup of tea, with Gilberte, because I was trying to find a way to show her avarice. Gilberte has a very complicated connection with money, she’s very stingy. She has real problems. And I wanted to show it without losing the romantic aspect of her. And suddenly with the cup of tea that was obvious. It seems to me it was a way to show that it was more than money, but her relationship with things, and the world that is disappearing. And I wrote that, and there was some rewriting by Gilles Taurand because I wanted to develop more a couple of scenes. And there were some scenes that were cut after that, because as you know the film was much longer.

JR: How long was the first cut?

RR: Oh, three hours and a half.

JR: I see. It seems like there were many cases where the premises were predicated on a certain advance planning … certain visual ideas that the scenes were built around. Things about changing perspectives a lot, particularly, in the opening sequence, but later also in Balbec also, which are very interesting because they make the scenes a little bit like theme parks. A shot becomes like a ride in some ways. I also remember that you had very strong feelings about the cast at one point; it seems like it must have gone through lots of changes.

RR: In Time Regained?

JR: I remember there was a time when there was a danger of Depardieu being imposed on you.

RR: Yes, yes, but the trouble was only with Charlus. The others, less … The fact is, you have to be very careful with Paolo Branco because he goes very fast. So you can say to him it would be good with that actor, and two hours later, he’s got him.

JR: There was an anticipation that to have someone who was not French doing Proust would be controversial, but it proved to be less controversial than expected. Did I hear correctly that you became a French citizen around that time?

RR: I am not a French citizen! No, no, no, I am Chilean. I am a resident. I tried to become a citizen many times, but there was always a paper that was missing. Then I decided not to try that any more, because you have fewer and fewer days in this life, so one day in itself becomes important.

***

3. Recent (and Not So Recent) Work

JR: There’s a recent film of yours that I haven’t seen, that was screened at Cannes last year…

RR: Yes, Savage Souls, Les âmes fortes, which is an adaptation of Jean Giono. That was kind of a compromise, but not really. Somebody proposed to me a script, I read it, and it was interesting for me to take a script that had nothing in it written by me. And it was a very unusual script, as it looks completely formal, normal, and flat, narrative and style on one level. But there were some surreal things, the way some of the events happened. It’s a very simple story with a young, beautiful, and poor girl who comes with her friend to a place, and finds a protector. You can see Emile Zola in the film, but it’s Giono, so it’s very ambiguous. The fact is this girl tried to destroy the protector for no reason at all because she is in love. And it’s this kind of love story between her and her protector. It’s not sexual at all. And the less sexuality you have there, the more it happens in real life. And she kills her husband, but you never know if she really does this herself or if she gets someone else to kill him, she’s very ambiguous.

JR: What’s interesting is that there’s a link here between your desire to hearken back to a certain traditional mode of production that involved taking on assignments, and not just generating all your own projects, which is what happened with Shattered Image and Savage Souls. But it seems you do an equal number of your own projects, though maybe not as many as before.

RR: The projects became big because it’s the only way at this moment, but I still have small things here and there and the digital is what makes that possible. The only problem is, I don’t know any cinematographers who can deal with the digital as it is now. It’s complicated. There is perspective, but it’s flat at the same time. So you’re in a kind of Flatland. I worked a little bit with Eric Gautier, who is great with classification of lights, and I worked with a Chilean cameraman, and I worked alone, and there’s that possibility that you can make your own image at the same time the film is being made, so you can play with this game. It was so extraordinary in L’Amour fou (1986) by Rivette, who used a combination of 35mm and 16mm. Now you can use a small camera and a normal one — a little bit bigger, with more stability — so you can move from one to the other.

JR: So that’s what you’re doing on that Chilean project?

RR: Yes, I’m playing with that. And the difference in palette between the two cameras is not enormous.

JR: I’ve noticed that the difference between analog and digital is becoming less precise, at least to the viewer. When you’re seeing digital, it’s not immediately obvious. But what about some of the deep focus, wide-angle effects? Are those still possible?

RR: I think now, yes. You have the simulation of 24 frames, which means you are close to real cinema. But what’s interesting as well is you can play with the film image or modify it if you want. Some of the ideas I had for making movies that I put in the Poetics of Cinema, for instance…

JR: Is there a second volume of this available in France now?

RR: There will be very soon. I reworked this general theory, which is more of a conceptual simulation, playing with the function of a shot. If you remember that the first statement that in a movie there is an image, or the audio-visual structure of images that push you to develop stories, and not the story that pushes you. That means you have to change the way of shooting. You have to deal with images first. Suddenly you realize there is some connection between objects, let’s say, and that gives you the idea to develop it a little bit more, and little by little you have a little microstory that if you succeed in connecting with the macrostory — let’s say the strategic story that the film is telling — you can make a connection between a normal narrative, if you want, and a not so normal one. But there are other possibilities.

JR: I haven’t yet seen your film with and about the artist Jean Miotte, but I have seen for the second time here Combat d’amour en songe ( 2000), and it’s a film that I feel very conflicted about. In a way it’s a lot like some of your earlier films; it made me think about your opposition to central conflict theory, as you discuss it in Poetics of Cinema. But in comparison to Manoel on the Isle of Wonders (1985), which is still my favourite in some way of your films, it loses me after a certain point. For the first 15 or 20 minutes, it seemed like this might be your richest film. But by the end, while it continues to be rich, it becomes harder to watch. And the reason why is that emotionally it seems to stay on one level, whereas in Manoel, there is more of a sense of a journey.

RR: Maybe, maybe. I’m not sure, what this film has is the structure — which is more explicit than in many others of my movies, because I practically describe the method at the beginning. So I have nine narrative topics, and they have a combinatory that is shown. And then the game I played was to write during the shooting, and when you do that there are high and low levels that you have, because of the freedom.

JR: One important determining factor, though, is that most of the film was shot in one location. Or was it two locations?

RR: There were a couple of places, yes.

JR: It seems to me there was one location in Portugal that was used in a lot of your other films. Was it a monastery you were using this time?

RR: No, no, it’s esoteric. You have many esoteric places in Portugal, and this is one of the most famous, in Sintra. And it was built using the number nine — and that was a hassle, because I didn’t know until I started shooting that suddenly everything was concerned with the number nine. So you can call that movie an esoteric movie, literally. We played with esoteric games and if you know those games you can give another dimension to the movie, but that means that when you play with all that combinatory, to me, that makes things colder.

JR: Yesterday, when we were both speaking at the “What (is) Cinema?” symposium here, I was arguing that in some ways, for some people, film is literature by another means. It seems to me that this film is literature by other means, in some ways, and I suspect that Miotte par Ruiz (2001), which I haven’t seen yet, is painting by another means.

RR: To me, in [the] Miotte I am just trying to discover what abstract painting means, at least for him. And what game he is playing. And little by little I discovered that he was playing many games — I made a list. And this game got more and more precise as the film goes on. Finally I discovered that he was making an explosion of painting, and then there was a kind of calligraphy with the black; sometimes it was good, sometimes it was less good. And the key to that movie is the character of sports; it’s sportive.

JR: This also makes me think that there is possibly a theoretical aspect, which I would connect with Mammame, which is the question of how you film painting, just as Mammame was about the question of how you film dance…I’m sure there are many other films we’re leaving out here. One played at the New York Film Festival and is about the little boy who is lost…

RR: Oh yes, La Comédie de l’innocence (2000). I have two films with the same name.

JR: Really? What’s the other one?

RR: La comédie d’innocence. I made it before. One is called Comédie d’innocence, and the other is called Comédie de l’innocence. Just for trouble, as you know, there is an enormous market of titles, and people protect an enormous number of them. You can put a title on a film and then discover that you don’t have the right because it is already protected by law, so that you have to pay royalties. So I used a title that was my own, and I then changed it a little bit.

JR: It seems to be there’s a danger that people eventually will order one film and wind up receiving the other! I also noticed that in the catalogue there is a film called Huub (1989). Is this the film you were making about the late Hubert Bals, the former director of the Rotterdam film festival?

RR: Yes, I made it, and I finished the first editing. Then after awhile the company went bankrupt, and then the material they had was sent to Duke University, where it is now.

JR: There are several of your films that are in this kind of limbo, aren’t there? The Taiwanese film … and, actually, I finally managed to get a copy of Manoel, but it’s the English-subtitled French dubbed version which was on Australian television. To me it was wonderful that it survived, because there was a time when no one seemed to know where it was.

RR: It’s in the Portuguese Cinémathèque.

JR: Oh it is. In the original Portuguese?

RR: Yes.

JR: That’s right, because the original three-part miniseries was never subtitled. I remember when it showed here in Rotterdam they had a voiceover translation.

RR: It was also shown in the Cannes festival, no?

JR: Maybe so — at least the shorter version, The Destiny of Manoel, was. I’ve never seen that — though everyone who’s seen both says it isn’t nearly as good as the original. But it was here, in Rotterdam, where I saw the full version. In fact, it was even given a prize here that year.

RR: I guess I wasn’t around at the time.

Raúl Ruiz (director) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks ... profile page

Mapping the Territory of Râúl Ruiz | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 15, 1987

Splitting Images [THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH & LOST ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, February 28, 1997

BFI | Sight & Sound | Time Regained (1999) Keith Reader from Sight and Sound, January 2000

Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) Cyril Béghin from Rouge, 2003

ROUGE Index 2 Raúl Ruiz: An Annotated Filmography, an entire edition dedicated to the works of Raúl Ruiz, from Rouge (2004)

Trois Vies et une seule mort (Three Lives and Only One Death) Adrian Martin from Rouge, 2004

Proust Regained: On Raul Ruiz's Time Regained and Filming the ... Proust Regained: On Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained and Filming the Unfilmable, by Robert Castle from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 3, 2006

girish: Raúl Ruiz October 3, 2006

Raúl Ruiz | Film Studies For Free October 12, 2008

Mysteries of Lisbon - Film Comment Tony Pipolo, July/August, 2011

On the Long and Winding Road of Raul Ruiz's Epic Mysteries of Lisbon J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, August 3, 2011

Raul Ruiz, 1941-2011 J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, August 19, 2011

Raúl Ruiz, 1941-2011 | Obituaries | Sight & Sound | BFI obituary by Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, August 19, 2011

Raúl Ruiz, 1941 - 2011 on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson at Mubi, August 19, 2011

Film Studies For Free: Double Vision: Links in Memory of Raúl Ruiz, a ... August 19, 2011

In Memory of Raúl Ruiz (a guest post by Jeremy M. Davies) - Big Other August 20, 2011

Observations on film art : Ruiz in memoriam: Rules and ruses David Bordwell, August 25, 2011

Capitulating for the Camera's Sake: the Late Artistry of Raúl Ruiz ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 2, 2011

Raúl Ruiz's Interactivity: Some Reflections on His Evolution | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 25, 2011

Senses of Cinema [Josh Anderson] Mysteries of Lisbon, December 19, 2011

Michael Wood reviews 'Mysteries of Lisbon' · LRB 5 January 2012 January 5, 2012

The Evening Class: PFA—The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz Michael Guillen, February 8, 2012

The Evening Class: THE LIBRARY LOVER: ROSENBAUM ON RUIZ Michael Guillen, February 13, 2012

The Evening Class: THE LIBRARY LOVER: ROUGE ON RUIZ Michael Guillen, February 14, 2012

The Evening Class: THE LIBRARY LOVER: MUBI ON RUIZ Michael Guillen, February 14, 2012

The Evening Class: THE LIBRARY LOVER: CINEFILES ON RUIZ Michael Guillen, February 15, 2012

The Evening Class: THE LIBRARY LOVER: MARTIN ON RUIZ Michael Guillen, February 15, 2012

Three Lives and Only One Death - Senses of Cinema Beata Lukasiak, August 28, 2012

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the month: Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) Jonathan Romney, December 2012

Tony Pipolo on “Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz ... Tony Pipolo from Artforum, November 30, 2016

"Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz" - Fandor David Hudson, December 1, 2016

Raúl Ruiz: Filming Many Worlds Adam Thirlwell from The New York Review of Books, January 8, 2017

BOMB Magazine — Raul Ruiz by Carole Ann Klonarides interview, Winter 1991

BFI | Sight & Sound | Mexico Rising: Interview Nick James interviews the director in Sight and Sound, January 2006

THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH (Trois vies et une seule mort) B+ 91

France (123 mi) 1996

extreme happiness is a form of misery; generosity is a form of tyranny

Four really zany interwoven stories, all featuring the late great Marcello Mastroianni in different roles, the beginning of which is marvelously inventive and daring, using elusive points of view, unusual camera angles, and a fascinating visual style, but the narration loses its daring by the end and gets caught up in a story within the story, and goes on and on at length in a mysterious whirlwind of existentialism, losing the initial dramatic intensity and loony fun from the opening moments.

The story begins with a returning husband who earlier abandoned his wife and was presumed dead, now returning 20-years later and introduces himself to the new husband. Woven into this fabric is another story about the missing man being held hostage by miniature, ravenous fairies who love to eat roses, but settle for newsprint largely from Communist newspapers. Twenty years pass in what appears to the viewer as only one day, featuring magical glimpses into a world the fairies allow him to see. Eventually he murders the new husband and returns to life with his former wife where each acts as if nothing at all has happened.

We see an anthropology professor who hates Carlos Castaneda walking away from a lecture appearance one day, deciding instead to become a bum after spending one night in a cemetery. All the other bums are jealous of this guy because everybody seems to give this guy money, lots and lots of money, more than he was making as a professor, until one day the bums decide to beat him up, but he is saved by a new wave prostitute who just happens to love Carlos Castaneda. They discuss theories of negative anthropology together over coffee.

A multi-millionaire businessman involved in real estate deals finds a young couple, which happens to include Mastroianni’s own daughter, Chiarra, and secretly sends them anonymous contributions of support, setting them up in a chateau, eventually becoming their butler who can only see them when they ring for him, showing nothing but contempt for them when the bell is not ringing. The businessman knows he invented these characters, but when he starts being visited by his own inventions, it forces him to take matters into his own hands, and with the use of a gun, he walks away unscathed into another euphoric Parisian night.

Trois Vies et une seule mort (Three Lives and Only One Death) Adrian Martin from Rouge, 2004

Splitting Images [THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH & LOST ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, February 28, 1997

Three Lives and Only One Death - Senses of Cinema Beata Lukasiak, August 28, 2012

Strictly Film School Acquarello

MetroActive [Michael S. Gant]

Variety [Deborah Young]

San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]

Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]

Three Lives And Only One Death Movie Review (1997) | Roger Ebert

Four Men in One Body, And It's Mastroianni's - The New York Times Stephen Holden

DVDBeaver.com [Fred Patton]

Three Lives and Only One Death - Wikipedia

SHATTERED IMAGE

Great Britain Canada (102 mi) 1998

If Vertigo isn't the best film in Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre, it's certainly the most peculiar and beguiling, a tale of romantic obsession that builds into a Technicolor fever dream, as Jimmy Stewart's pursuit of Kim Novak slips into the realm of fantasy. Raúl Ruiz's excruciating meta-movie, Shattered Image, reverses perspectives and offers "two" Anne Parillauds to Vertigo's "two" Novaks. In a nod to her famous role in La Femme Nikita, Parillaud #1 is a cool assassin in Seattle hired to kill her lover, played by a smirking William Baldwin. She dreams about her alter ego, Parillaud #2, a demure newlywed honeymooning in Jamaica who's suspicious of her doting husband (Baldwin again), and has nightmares about being a ruthless assassin in Seattle. Their parallel storylines, unified by a traumatic rape, are meant as a sort of psychological shorthand, a high-minded attempt to put Parillaud's internal struggle in visual terms. While interesting enough as a technical exercise, thanks to the shimmering surfaces of cinematographer Robby Muller (Down By Law, Breaking The Waves), Shattered Image is saddled by two dreadful lead performances and a stultifyingly banal script by former Love Boat producer Duane Poole. As much as Hitchcock is praised for his ingenious craftsmanship, Vertigo and its better imitators, such as The Double Life Of Veronique, work because the audience has an emotional investment in the characters. Festival regular Ruiz (Genealogies Of A Crime) has style to burn, but his film is empty at its core, a psychological thriller without a single compelling psyche.

Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams

Foreign directors often find their way into the American market through genre pictures, so when Shattered Image begins with a man being gunned down in a chrome-and-steel restroom, there's cause to worry that the Chilean/Parisian director Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death) has jumped into Hollywood's giant maw. The opening credits, too, offer little encouragement, with such minor talents as William Baldwin and Anne Parillaud taking the leads. But while Shattered Image is the kind of movie in which black-clad figures murmur "It's done" into cellular phones, the film quickly develops into something far more sophisticated than the average detective thriller.

Parillaud, best known for her starring role as La Femme Nikita, plays Jessie, a Seattle-based assassin whose apartment is as empty as her life; her answering machine fills up with calls from her mother and her shrink, and no one else. But when she sleeps, Jessie dreams of another Jessie, this one a honeymooner in Jamaica, on the run from a dark secret. This Jessie dresses in pastels and coos sweetly to her new husband, Brian (Baldwin), but she is haunted by the spectre of a man she is sure has followed her. And when this Jessie dreams, tossing in her soft hotel bed, she dreams of a woman in Seattle, an assassin, dreaming of a soft-haired figure in a Jamaican hotel.

The similarities between the two women's lives don't end with their starring roles in each other's fantasies. In addition to playing the Jamaican husband, Baldwin plays the victim Seattle Jessie murders in the opening scene, as well a man, also named Brian, whom she seduces in a public aquarium. Graham Greene, the target of a Seattle hit, also appears as the furtive figure taking pictures of the honeymooning couple, and Lisanne Falk, who takes out the contract on Greene's character, also shows up as a Jamaican vacationer with eyes for Jessie's husband.

Less The Wizard of Oz than a retake on Bergman's Persona (with a small dose of Angel Heart), Shattered Image is Ruiz' examination of the power of trauma to warp the human psyche, the way the mind bends to accommodate a reality too horrific to confront. What links the two Jessies, more than common faces, is the fact that both were raped, and the emotional pain has literally splintered their lives in two. It's a while before we know if Shattered Image is a psychological drama or a metaphysical one, if one Jessie is a figment of the other's imagination or if both are real. But it becomes clear that neither the vulnerable newlywed nor the hard-bitten assassin can survive without the attributes represented by the other.

Aided by the brilliant cinematographer Robby Müller (Breaking the Waves, Paris, Texas) and production designer Robert de Vico, Ruiz makes each Jessie's world a function of her mind, as if the whole film were one great dream in which both lived. Jessie's Jamaican hideaway, with its soft light and pastel colors, seems comforting and secure, but it's also home to the film's most disturbing imagery, as a barefoot Jessie walks into a room covered with crabs, or her husband kisses the suicide-attempt scars on her wrists. Jessie's Seattle is more controlled, but more thoroughly inhuman, a landscape of sharp, unfamiliar edges, full of precarious glass structures which might disintegrate at a moment's notice.

For all its visual sophistication, Shattered Image does indulge in literal-minded imagery on occasion; a vertically split tracking shot with half the foreground and half the background in focus only calls attention to itself, and the moments when Ruiz literally "shatters" the on-screen image are too reminiscent of Persona to come across as more than a film-buff nudge. But the film's dense, Möbius-strip allusiveness is endlessly fascinating, and its rich psychological undercurrents pull you in and hold you tight. In the end, Shattered Image is a detective story of sorts, one in which the investigation leads not to answers, but to different kinds of questions.

Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker

Shattered Image Gerald Peary

DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger

Film Journal International (Peter Henné)

Apollo Movie Guide [Cheryl DeWolfe]

Variety.com [Godfrey Cheshire]

The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

New York Film Festival [David Ng]

TIME REGAINED (Le temps retrouvé, d'après l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust) B 85

France Italy Portugal (162 mi) 1999

Time Out London

An extraordinary conflation of avant garde art film and deluxe literary period drama, this ambitious assault on Proust's 15th volume in Remembrance of Things Past constitutes a peculiar triumph. Numerous film-makers have been defeated in the attempt, but exiled Chilean Ruiz never hesitates. His version is a bold, dazzling time trip which nevertheless honours the complexity of the original, and indeed will likely play best to those already familiar with it. The first scene serves notice that this is no ordinary adaptation: as Marcel (Mazzarella) dictates from his deathbed, and the camera pans across mementoes from a life among the French aristocracy at the turn of the last century, the furnishings loom ever larger, as if mocking the author with his own mortality. Ruiz goes on to use the full panoply of surrealist camera tricks. We're plunged into the very thick of French high society, as Marcel remembers his love for Gilberte (Béart), her equally ravishing mother Odette (Deneuve), the controversial Baron de Charlus (Malkovich), and his affair with the composer Morel (Perez). Now, it must be said, it's a toss-up which is more bewildering: the extremely entangled social relations which form the chief topic of everyone's conversation, or Ruiz's elegant, avant garde party tricks. Yet the starry cast helps us keep track (Malkovich is outstanding, even in French), and sustained over a mighty 155 minutes, the film casts quite a spell. Proust watches on, a smile on his face and a tear in his eye; the director' s 'happy confusion' sums it up very well.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Time Regained (1999) Keith Reader from Sight and Sound, January 2000

Paris, after World War I. The reclusive and asthmatic Marcel Proust, all but bedridden, is finishing his opus A la recherche du temps perdu. He scrutinises photographs of the major figures in his life and the fictional text. The rest of the narrative oscillates between the Verdurin and Guermantes salons in Paris, Marcel's childhood in the village of Combray, his youthful summer vacations at the Norman resort of Balbec, later stays in Venice and the war years in Paris.

From childhood to maturity, Marcel moves through an at once real and imagined world whose denizens include: the camp Baron de Charlus, Charlus' one-time lover the violinist Charlie Morel, the war-hero Saint-Loup and his wife Gilberte, the Prince de Guermantes and his wife Oriane, the brassy socialite Madame Verdurin, Charles Swann and his coquettish wife Odette (Gilberte's mother), and the actress and singer Rachel. Past and present, the experienced, the remembered and the partly forgotten overlap and flow into one another like the stream with which the film begins. At the end, the older Marcel watches as his boyhood self runs along the beach at Balbec, time at last regained through art.

Review

The less-than-linear form of the synopsis above illustrates one of the major difficulties in filming or writing about Proust's towering classic of modernity. The story of an invalid writer facing premature death who retrieves through art his childhood anxieties and adult frivolities, the gap between the overarching narrative and the myriad smaller narratives which comprise A la recherche is too vast to be bridged even in a film as long as this. Earlier Proust-based films have dealt with this problem by narrowing their focus to the microcosm that is Un Amour de Swann (Volker Schlöndorff's film of that title), or to the final days of the historical Proust's life as he wrote against the clock of death (Percy Adlon's superb Céleste). For Time Regained Raoul Ruiz adapts a similar strategy, but goes for broke by concentrating on the work's final volume, in which its multifarious narrative strands converge and it becomes clear that its end is in its beginning. The result is richer and more inclusive in its sweep than previous adaptations and more visually spectacular. The colours - notably the gold of many of the salon scenes echoing the sands of Balbec or the architecture of Venice - are ravishing, and the movements of the camera, at once caressing and sweeping, impart a thrill rarely encountered in the cinema.

Nonetheless, Time Regained is anything but a heritage movie, as you would expect for a film made by a Chilean expatriate with a background in leftist politics and experimental film-making. Ruiz rewrites Proust in cinematic terms. The camera movements - particularly at the end where we move from the Guermantes salon through a 'room of memory' dotted with top hats to a terrace and the beach at Balbec - correspond to the oscillations of the written narration between the recollected and the imagined, the past and the present. In this respect the film evokes Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, notably in the salon scenes (Madame Verdurin's high-pitched laugh, as if poised on the brink of hysteria, echoes Delphine Seyrig's in Marienbad).

Time Regained is a tour de force, gorgeous yet stark. That starkness is achieved partly through the constant threat or actual presence of war which gives an edge to the scenes of brittle social comedy, partly through the unflinching way the film treats such scenes as Charlus' flagellation in Jupien's gay bordello, which offsets potential charges of voyeurism by the exquisitely simple device of framing the narrating Marcel in a window as the blows descend. The cast are on the whole splendid. Catherine Deneuve is at once queenly and raffish as Odette, Emmanuelle Béart gives the most mature performance of her career as Gilberte and Marie-France Pisier is magnificently high-camp as Madame Verdurin. If there is a false note it's struck by John Malkovich's Charlus - competing, alas, with Alain Delon's magnificent performance in the Schlöndorff film, and far too reedy-voiced and mincing to carry the same weight as Proust's grotesque, but ultimately loving and loveable character.

My one anxiety concerns how accessible Ruiz's film will be to an audience with little or no knowledge of the source novel. Its extraordinary textual sweep is likely to bewilder such viewers. The brief allusions to the force of involuntary memory, notably in the 'madeleine scene', could well pass them by altogether. However, Ruiz has come closer than either of his predecessors to the superhuman task of filming Proust in his entirety, for which it would be churlish to criticise him. The audacious transposition of the finale, from an epiphany in the Guermantes salon to one on a Norman beach, works because the waves of the sea echo the flowing stream of the beginning, in a triumphant cinematic correlative of what a leading Proust scholar once described to me as an extraordinarily happy ending. The happiest ending, for viewers unfamiliar with the original, would be for them to be drawn to it by Ruiz's masterly film.

Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) Cyril Béghin from Rouge, 2003

Tony Pipolo on “Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz ... Tony Pipolo from Artforum, November 30, 2016

Captain Fantastic: Sail With Raúl Ruiz in Search of Lost Stories ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice, December 14, 2016

Proust's Big Premiere; Carrey's Big Collapse | Observer Andrew Sarris, June 26, 2000

Thursday Editor's Pick: Time Regained (1999) - Alt Screen

Time Regained - The AV Club Scott Tobias

The Observer [Philip French]

Print Article - Minneapolis Steve Erickson from Minneapolis City Pages

San Francisco Examiner [G. Allen Johnson]

Time Regained Movie Review & Film Summary (2000) | Roger Ebert

New York Times

COMÉDIE DE L’INNOCENCE (Comedy of Innocence)

France (100 mi) 2000

After his inspired Time Regained, Ruiz returns with this brittle, rather drab-looking Buñuelian 'comedy' (from a novel by Massimo Bontempelli) about a nine-year-old boy, Camille (Hugon), who announces to his bewildered mother (Huppert) that his name is Paul and he'd like to go home, now, please. He takes her to an apartment on the other side of Paris, claims to recognise 'his' room, and what's more, the woman who lives there (Balibar) seems to recognise him as the child she lost two years before. Ruiz presents this surreal conceit with matter-of-fact dispassion (and suspense chords on the soundtrack), even as the boy's family go to pieces.

Dennis Grunes

After the fall of Allende in his native Chile, Râúl Ruiz relocated to France, where he has become so prolific a filmmaker it is as if he feels he is living on borrowed time that he must cram full with unceasing work. The name of the surrealist writer-director now appears in credits as “Raoul Ruiz.”

In the late 1970s he made what I consider his masterpiece: Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (L’hypothèse du tableau volé, 1978). Its bizarre “explanations” of tableaux vivants based on a bogus series of “discovered” paintings throw into question all such self-involved, convolutedly rational, dictatorially arbitrary exegesis. Soft, dim, in rarefied black and white (the cinematographer is Sacha Vierny), its bewitching visual aspect suggests the self-reflective interiority of Poe. The monumental wit of Ruiz’s Hypothesis scarcely dimples the smooth surface of this dream of a film, this film of dreams. Other brilliant, dreamlike works by Ruiz include the Dutch film On Top of the Whale (Het Dak van de Walvis, 1982), which takes aim at cultural imperialism and in which a character slides from one gender to another without anyone’s noting the change, the visually intricate and sublimely Pirandellian Three Lives and Only One Death (Trois vies & une seule mort, 1996), which took the top prize of the critics at São Paolo, and Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé, 1999), from Proust. “For his lifetime contribution to the art of cinema,” Ruiz was honored at Berlin in 1997.

Comedy of Innocence (Comédie de l’innocence) is based on an Italian novel, by Massimo Bontempelli, whose title translates as The Boy with Two Mothers. The screenplay is by Ruiz and François Dumas. Camille announces a change to his mother the day after his ninth birthday. Henceforth he will call her by her first name, Ariane, and he asks her to take him, by taxi, to the apartment of his real mother, a route that he directs. This other woman, Isabella, lives in a much more modest section of Paris. Both are artistic—Ariane, a painter; Isabella, a violinist. Isabella also had a son who would have been nine, who drowned two years ago. She is now claiming Camille as her own. She accepts Ariane’s invitation to move into her and her husband’s mansion until the dispute of who is Camille’s real mother is resolved.

The style of Ruiz’s use of the camera is fluent, soft and quiet, like a silken, inviting river. Everyone except Isabella seems in denial of the possibility of impending tragedy; Ariane’s whole life is one of smoothing things over. It never occurs to her, until it is almost too late, that the fact of her maternity is an open question, that parents do not own their children, that children have unruly emotions and imaginative lives of their own, that the status quo of established family relations can disappear—can drown—in a heartbeat. Here is a film to enlighten every parent and break every parent’s heart. In the course of Comedy of Innocence, Ariane rudely wakes from an unexplained nightmare. When all is said and shown, one wonders whether the film itself is Ariane’s nightmare.

To me, there is greater Ruiz and lesser Ruiz, and despite the film’s suggestive poetry I place Comedy of Innocence in the latter category. I find disagreeable two aspects of the film, and these set me to the bottom, rather than the top, of the whale. Taking our cue from Ariane and from long shots of him through windows, we come to believe that a companion of Camille’s is imaginary. When it turns out that the boy is real, I felt Sixth-Sensed—cheaply tricked. Then there is the whole faintly whispered subtext of incest, with Ariane’s brother, Serge, a doctor, living right above Ariane and her spouse, and the joke being made that, at birth (Serge performed the delivery), everyone agreed that Camille most resembled this uncle. Left as some sort of floating tease throughout the film (the displacement of the boy’s having two fathers to his having two mothers), this area of suggestion depresses me, no matter what it may do for anyone else. A sore point here is that Serge’s mistress is Ariane’s cook and Camille’s governess, that is to say, Ariane at a remove. Perhaps I could better navigate these waters if I were more naïve—deaf, that is, to the whispers and blind to the murkiness.

On the other hand, an aspect that I love is the hinted connection between the two mothers—their buried identity, if you will. The connection is introduced with bravura cinema. Ariana closes her eyes, adrift in reverie; undulating water fills the screen—the point, perhaps, where a child drowned; Isabella opens her eyes, completing the connection. Isabella represents all the parental suffering from which Ariane’s cocooned, upper middle-class existence has kept her aloof. More: Isabella represents a dimension of social and individual possibility from which Ariane’s cocooned, upper middle-class existence has kept her aloof. There but for the course of the script go I.

Isabelle Huppert plays Ariane, her composure a bourgeois mask. In the course of the film, the mask collapses; it dissolves into a suffering human face. This is a great performance.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Comédie de L'innocence (2000) Paul Julian Smith for Sight and Sound, March 2002

Cinematic Sojourns [m] June 19, 2007

Films de France [James Travers]

Digital Fix [Noel Megahey]

digitallyObsessed! [David Krauss]

DVD Talk [Holly E. Ordway]

New York Times [A.O. Scott]

TV Guide [Robert Pardi]

Variety [Deborah Young]

BBC [Jamie Russell]

VERTIGO OF THE BLANK PAGE (Vertige de la page blanche)

Belgium (81 mi) 2003

Le Vertige de la page blanche (Vertigo of the Blank Page) Marie-Luce Bonfanti from Rouge, 2004

DAYS IN THE COUNTRY (Días de campo)

aka: Journées à la campagne

Chile France (89 mi) 2004

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Continuing his preoccupation with the interpenetration of time and memory, fiction and reality of Time Regained (that would be further explored in the subsequent film The Lost Domain), Days in the Country marks Raoul Ruiz's first Chilean feature film in thirty years. Perhaps inspired by the curious radio news broadcast of his own death, an aging gentleman, Don Federico (Mario Montilles) decides to retire to his country estate in order to put down on paper an unfinished novel that has consumed his thoughts for decades - the incompletion of which has been a long-running joke and recurring topic of conversation by the regulars at his habitual café. But returning to the solitude of the country proves to be an immersive, if not surreal, experience as characters from his unrealized novel begin to act out their roles in real life, and memories from his past - his devoted maid Paulita (Bélgica Castro), family friend and town physician Dr. Chandian (Francisco Reyes), and even an old neighbor who died from an accidental dog mauling - begin to resurface in the present (made all the more tortuous and fantastic by their physical resemblance to the regular cast of characters at the café). Ruiz's whimsical conflation of reality and imagination defies easy categorization or tidy resolution, but nevertheless, provides a witty, incisive, and ingeniously crafted meditation on mortality, regret, memory, and the iterative process of artistic creation.

Días de campo/Journées à la campagne (Days in the Country) Maxime Renaudin from Rouge, January 2005

THE LOST DOMAIN (Le domaine perdu)

France Italy Romania Spain (106 mi) 2005

Strictly Film School Acquarello

Recalling the whimsical, organic transections between past and present, dream and reality, literature and real-life of Raoul Ruiz's earlier films Memory of Appearances and Time Regained, The Lost Domain is a more somber and pensive, yet still vibrant, impassioned, and intelligently constructed exposition on the process of maturation, the demystification of a childhood hero, and the inevitable loss of innocent wonder and fanciful imagination. As the film begins, a unseen narrator recounts a tale from his Chilean hometown of a ghost ship once moored near the shore whose presence only became an unprovable myth - the stuff of legends - after the villagers ceased to speak of its strange presence on the horizon and recount its fantastic tale. This introductory notion of tale-telling as the figurative lifeblood to existence and identity serves as the Pirandellian framework for Ruiz's tale of a boy from a rural town who is befriended by an abstracted French aviator and chronic storyteller, Antoine (François Cluzet) (and whose life curiously mirrors the wandering hero from Alain-Fournier's classic novel, Le Grand Meaulnes) after he makes an emergency landing in their community during a topographic surveying expedition. Weaving through past and present as the boy, Max becomes a kind of de facto tale-teller at various stages in life: first, as a young flight instructor (Grégoire Colin) training Antoine, now an obsolete pilot unable to navigate the controls of a modern airplane during World War II, then as a middle-aged country gentleman who harbors a young couple after breaking curfew to meet with him and find information on his grandfather, Antoine, who was declared missing in action after conducting a night-time reconnaissance operation during the war. At each juncture, the encounter becomes an understated elegy of time passed - a skeptical young man refusing to acknowledge his youthful gullibility, a middle-aged man who regrets his imposed estrangement from his boyhood hero during their last encounter, an old man acutely aware of his mortality and solitude.

The Lost Domain Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Lots of international filmmakers have brief moments in the sun -- invites to festivals, traveling retrospectives, small-scale commercial distribution of their work -- only to fall back into relative obscurity with the cinephile establishment. There's always some exciting young director on the horizon, or so the assumption goes. This has happened a few times to Raoul Ruiz (the 'o' is optional, and seems tied to whether he's working from France or not), and The Lost Domain is a truly bizarre artifact of this lack of widespread scrutiny. In this situation, some filmmakers will dig in their heels and give vent to their most abstruse private visions, while others will bend their work towards the expectations of the mainstream arthouse marketplace. But The Lost Domain seems to move in both directions at once. Bookended by an enigmatic introduction and a plodding conclusion seemingly designed to dispel all remaining mystery, Ruiz's latest spends the majority of its running time hovering in a state of tantalizing indecision. This has been part of the Ruiz m.o. for quite some time. Possibly our most Borgesian filmmaker, Ruiz has exploited otherwise untapped potentials for cinematic storytelling, using looping time, repetition, character shifts, and circling, ethereal camerawork to defeat (or at least suspect) the built-in materiality of the photographic film image. His style treats the physical world as raw material for the dream-work, subjecting it to endless displacements and condensations. The Lost Domain is a treatment of subject matter perfectly suited to this approach. One of Ruiz's only films to directly address the Chilean coup that sent him into exile, it shifts between two registers of the past: World War II and the rise of Pinochet's junta in the 70s. These are two different moments in the life of Maximo (played by Gregoire Colin in the distant past, Christian Colin in the 70s segments), an Air Force officer stationed in Britain during the war and, although a Chilean citizen, a man steeped in French culture. In short, Max is in part a fictional stand-in for Ruiz, and the personal nature of The Lost Domain is one of the picture's most remarkable strengths. Whereas a documentarian like Patricio Guzmán captures the hard facts and grand human toll of the deposition of Allende and installation of fascist rule, Ruiz documents the private psychological effects of losing one's country and one's larger place in the world. In part the story of a battalion of fighter pilots, The Lost Domain features a repeated motif of men moving model airplanes through the air, practicing evasive actions before they become necessary. Ruiz's camera functions similarly; its swirling motions turn ordinary moments in daily life into indeterminate, groundless impressions, and his repetition of snippets of dialogue imply that Max's life has the quality of an endless dress rehearsal or a perpetual aerial maneuver, with the promise of terra firma always deferred. This airy, memory-flux aspect of Domain can get frustrating at times (an interlude at a "ghostly" masked ball seems misplaced, just a chance for Ruiz to get his Russian Ark mojo going), but even though it lacks the textual grounding of Time Regained (Ruiz's biggest U.S. hit), there is a poetic and political exigency to Ruiz's technique. He's depicting homelessness and exile, the imprint they leave on the mind, the fact that time itself -- even the ability to narrate one's own life -- is compromised when severed from space. Sadly, the film is almost scuttled by the aforementioned coda, wherein elderly, present-day versions of the two main characters reunite for the benefit of narrative closure and an almost insulting thematic summation for the gray-hairs in the cheap seats. The fact that grounded pilot Antoine (François Cluzet) and Max (G. Colin) look like Martin Short and Dustin Hoffman in their wigs and wrinkly prosthetics only gives off an added air of desperation. After circling the earth with free-floating metaphor, why a Hail Mary pass worthy of The Notebook?

MYSTERIES OF LISBON (Mistérios de Lisboa)

Portugal France (272 mi) 2010

Mysteries of Lisbon - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Ruiz took such delight in the form of plots—the texture of their exposition; the tricks they employed to introduce characters; the jolt their twists could give—that he sometimes mischievously pushed them into incoherence, piling on characters and revelations and backstories and reversals until the plot became a kind of abstract field of information without a clear sequence or plan. In Mysteries of Lisbon, his four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of a novel by the 19th-century Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, he had the space to tell a story of breathtaking complexity that nonetheless keeps its shape. (The film also exists as a longer miniseries.) It starts with the reunion of a supposedly orphaned boy with his estranged mother and from there expands into an epic, densely peopled story of deception, intrigue, murder, elopement, and disguise, set against the backdrop of Portugal’s 1820 revolution. The result was one of Ruiz’s most successful movies, and an ultimate flowering of his later style.

The New Yorker [Richard Brody]

The director Raul Ruiz’s elegant intellectual gamesmanship and elaborate historical fantasy starts small and simple, with the story of a boy whose obscure background gradually comes to light through the efforts of his teacher and protector, a priest at his boarding school—whose own background proves equally surprising. Ruiz weaves a shaggy-dog story of shifting identities and intertwined destinies, from the mid-nineteenth century to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; his characters spill their tales in flowing monologues, and he stages the events with an air of intrigue that’s amplified by his sly, insistently roving camera and his sinuous, theatrical long takes. In its more than four hours, the movie offers only a handful of emblematic images and memorable lines of dialogue; the director is after neither the inner nor the outer life, but, rather, the peculiarity of the storytelling life. He relies heavily on the blandishments of fine furnishings, gorgeous settings, and stiff manners (the proceedings aren’t far from a cerebral and Continental “Masterpiece Theatre”), but, along the way, he offers a sharp and subtle debunking of a key myth of modernity: its vaunted social mobility. For Ruiz, the aristocratic age, before identity cards and international files, was when no one really knew what was in a name. In Portuguese, French, and English.

Time Out London [David Jenkins]

‘Mysteries of Lisbon’ is Chilean director Raoul Ruiz’s mellifluous, flashback-driven melodrama in two parts which was his penultimate completed film before he died at the age of 70 in August 2011. This magnificent work clocks in at four hours and 16 minutes, and one reason to try and shoehorn it into your schedule is that it’s being heralded as the summation of Ruiz’s gigantic career, during which he put his name to more than 100 features, shorts and TV series. It deserves to be mentioned alongside such opulent costume epics as Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’, Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ or Ruiz’s own ‘Time Regained’, though it’s also a must for fans of the slow-burning, dialogue-driven TV series the BBC made in the 1970s and ’80s, such as ‘Edge of Darkness’ or ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’.

Set in Lisbon around the turn of the twentieth century (but always skipping back and forth in time), this colossal journey begins with a young orphan named João wondering if he’ll ever know who his parents are. The man who runs the orphanage is the benevolent Father Dinis (Adriano Luz), a man revealed as João’s life-long protector and who, it transpires, has been intricately involved in the messy business of João’s parentage. Another man, a drunken, belching gypsy known as Knife-Eater (Ricardo Pereira), is given a passage into high society under the alias of Alberto de Magalhães when Dinis (now playing the master of disguise) buys his loyalty away from a nobleman who has paid him to slay João at birth.

Endlessly discursive yet always controlled and compelling, ‘Mysteries of Lisbon’ examines the complexities of love and marriage while assuring that secrets exist only to be revealed and that the course of our lives is constantly manipulated by the tiny, off-hand desires of others. The script, which is adapted from a little-known novel by Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, makes sly references to the story’s self-contained neatness, such as when Dinis announces in a voiceover that ‘in life, there are events and coincidences of such extravagance that no novelist would ever dare invent them…’

The production design and costumes are immaculate, while Ruiz’s camera glides around soirées, ducks under tables and peers from behind curtains. The suggestion is that it’s a world any innocent bystander can infiltrate, but also that immersing yourself in other people’s petty affairs can be surprisingly engrossing if you view them from the correct vantage point. So actually, we’re not just asking you to make room for Ruiz’s breathtaking soap opera, but to block-book a week, a month, a year to (re)discover the largely unknown back catalogue of this quietly virtuoso and sadly departed filmmaker.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the month: Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) Jonathan Romney, January 2012

Raúl Ruiz, who died in August, has left behind a magisterial four-hour saga set in 19th-century Portugal that serves as a fittingly elegant summation of his life’s work. Jonathan Romney explores the Mysteries of Lisbon

The dominant mystery in Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon (Místerios de Lisboa) is that there is no mystery: everything is explained, sooner or later. No sooner does the narrator João raise the question of his parentage than we discover his mother’s identity; the story of his father follows closely. Nothing is withheld for long; you might call this a story of transparency, in which all truths are eventually available to the eye of knowledge. Hence the overtly voyeuristic staging of one bedroom tryst, with heavy curtains ostentatiously pulled aside to frame the action for our benefit.

Based on a novel by the prolific Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-1890), Ruiz’s chamber epic follows a topos of 19th-century fiction, according to which all things are knowable – at once by the author, the narrator and (implicitly or otherwise) God, represented here by the omniscient, omnipresent, protean Father Dinis.

Scripted by Carlos Saboga, Mysteries of Lisbon might at first appear unusually sober by Ruiz standards. It’s Viscontian in its austere elegance; the sumptuously staged period action is often executed in flamboyantly extended single takes – characteristically in elegantly gliding shots, as if the camera were executing a stately dance around the characters. Gorgeously photographed (digitally) by André Szankowski, the film frequently fixes its actors in compositions that resemble tableaux vivants, modelled variously on salon paintings of the era and Spanish Golden Age interiors.

Mysteries fulfils all the requirements of the European prestige costume drama, and exists in two forms – as the 266-minute theatrical release, and as a TV series in six one-hour episodes. By all accounts Ruíz, who died in August 2011, preferred the cinema cut, perhaps rightly: the abridged Mysteries has a self-contained concision (all things being relative) that allows its themes to resound with each other, as in a sealed echo chamber.

Without having read him, one suspects that Castelo Branco might be ranked among the most obscure major writers of his century (Manoel de Oliveira adapted his Doomed Love and based Day of Despair on his death). One guesses that Castelo Branco was a candidly derivative writer, for Mysteries of Lisbon, written in 1854, clearly owes much to Balzac and to the prolific French serial writer Eugène Sue, author of the similarly involved Mysteries of Paris (1842-3).

Particularly characteristic of such fiction is the theme of permanent social flux. Characters rise and fall dramatically, and sometimes change identity altogether. The story hangs between two shapeshifters – Father Dinis and Antonio de Magalhães – who are at once doubles and polar opposites, divine and satanic presences, both of them surrogate fathers to João. Magalhães, a criminal benefactor à la Magwitch, finances the young man thanks to the money paid by Dinis for sparing his life. The same money allowed Magalhães (the erstwhile thug ‘Knife-Eater’) to reinvent himself as a Byronic corsair and society firebrand. He embodies the story’s social critique, revealing that between a lowly cutthroat and a society buck, there may be very little moral difference.

Magalhães’s counterpart is Father Dinis: priest, spy, puppeteer, master of disguise – and in more ways than one, servant of God, the course of the narrative seemingly being Dinis’s manipulation in the name of divine providence. Dinis represents the holy side of that quintessential 19th-century figure, the endlessly mobile social manipulator – the underground Napoleon; in Balzac, this figure is played by the criminal Vautrin, one of whose alter egos is a priest.

Dinis may be an angelic Vautrin, but he has a sinister aura, as incarnated by the saturnine, self-effacingly mischievous Adriano Luz. A shadowy presence, he glides in and out of the action, appearing and disappearing through overt tricks of camera movement – at one point vanishing during a single shot, leaving only his hat and cloak behind. His multiplicity is revealed in an extraordinary scene in which João ventures into Dinis’s secret sanctum (his backstage area, if you like) containing the costumes and props of his former selves; as Magalhães speculates, the priest too may be just another persona.

The suggestion is that all selves are provisional – just as, in a Christian perspective, the earthly being is a transitory disguise for the soul. Hence there’s a dizzying whirlwind of parallels – of tales of doomed loves, lost parents, ruined fortunes, in which even Dinis discovers the secret truth of his own origin. The theological gist of this is that everything is created – by a divine arch-novelist, as it were. The film constantly asserts its own fictionality, not least by urging us to believe in its reality – “It is not a work of fiction, it is a diary of suffering,” goes the opening epigraph.

In fact, this is a standard ploy of the classic European novel – one that draws attention, paradoxically, to the bottom line of fictiveness. We are told, with dizzying perversity, “In life there are events and coincidences of such extravagance that no novelist would ever dare to invent them.” The mise en scène too highlights theatricality, with stagehand-like servants often shifting furniture into position. A key leitmotif is João’s toy puppet theatre, which periodically represents the action we’re about to watch.

While much of the film plays superficially as a classical costume drama, it nevertheless abounds in Ruizian touches. The most outré is Magalhães’s servant, perpetually executing an agitated tap-dance. Repeated devices include Ruiz’s patented use of furniture that floats free of its moorings, notably in the haunting final shot; a repeated image of young João in profile, as if detached from the action he witnesses; and the consistent staging of action outside windows, most notably the tussle that takes place behind Dinis’s coach, culminating farcically in a pair of legs suspended in mid-air.

All these could be seen as gratuitous flourishes of auteur style, but they serve to undermine the naturalistic illusion, to remind us that everything we see is an effect of narration – and perhaps, more than that, of dream. Realistic coherence collapses towards the end. Learning that he is essentially a supporting character in other people’s stories, João (by now revealed to be Pedro) appears to shoot himself dead. But he reappears alive and travels overseas, presumably to Brazil. There, on his deathbed, in a chamber uncannily replicating his childhood room, he starts dictating the narrative we have been following for over four hours. Ruiz then cuts back to João’s childhood, with the suggestion that the boy, delirious or dying, has invented or dreamed everything. As João’s bed drifts into the sunlight of his window, and a closing white-out, the story at last dissolves before us, an ephemeral mirage of life.

While Mysteries of Lisbon was not in fact Ruiz’s very last film, it could be seen as a valedictory summum of his oeuvre – his fabulously omnivorous contemplation of imagination and history. The film flickers with echoes of Ruiz’s work: stories about fateful childhood (Treasure Island, Comédie de l’innocence), multiple identity (Three Lives and Only One Death), illusion (Life Is a Dream, after Calderón), society and memory (his magisterial Proust adaptation Time Regained, to which Mysteries could be considered a crypto-sequel).

One could see Mysteries as a disguised autobiography, ‘Ruiz’ almost rhyming with ‘Dinis’ – for the Chilean was himself a disguise artist as well as a manipulator of story, masquerading variously as a French, a Portuguese, even an American filmmaker. But most of all, this surpassingly eerie saga is surely Ruiz’s very own The Tempest, in which the director as Prospero – fabulist, philosopher, dreamer – contemplates the lives of his puppet cast and finally closes the lid on his toy box of fiction.

Mysteries of Lisbon - Film Comment Tony Pipolo, July/August, 2011

A magisterial meditation on narrative and cinema, Mysteries of Lisbon is the most glorious achievement of Raúl Ruiz’s prodigious career and one of the first cinematic masterpieces of this century. Based on the multivolume work (untranslated into English) by 19th-century Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco, the four-and-a-half-hour film whets the appetite for its original six-hour incarnation for Portuguese television. Less starstruck and more satisfying than Time Regained (99), Ruiz’s take on Proust, Mysteries immerses us in the unbounded pleasures of plot, character, action, and intrigue, replete with a lyrical score and grounded in a myriad of vibrant performances.

But the film is also imbued with an ironic spirit and authorial consciousness typical of Ruiz. The camera moves incessantly, passing through walls, assuming the pose of an eavesdropper, or impishly blocking our view of an action it deems trivial—strategies familiar in the director’s oeuvre but never more resonant or stirring. Both romantic and modernist, Mysteries is driven by what Ruiz calls (in his 2007 study Poetics of Cinema 2) the complementary strategies of detachment and involvement. In the hands of a master at the top of his game, we are instructed in the arts of narrative and cinematic invention even as we succumb to their seductions.

To recount the plot of the film is to engage with its reflexivity, as each story stumbles into another and points of view shift in a continual spiral that is less a matter of digressions than the irresistible lure of storytelling. Were the film to continue for 50 or 100 hours, one imagines it might subsume all possible stories from the period of its setting—late 18th- to mid-19th-century Portugal and France—into a tapestry threatening to extend geographically with Borgesian design, a human comedy to surpass Balzac’s.

While the film revels in this multilayered fictional world, its preface, presumably from Branco’s original, disavows fabrication: “This story is not my child nor my godchild. It is not a work of fiction; it is a diary of suffering…” Indeed, as each story unfolds in painstaking detail to meet a prior one or anticipate a later one, we discern, in the amassing of coincidences and incidents, the debilitating weaknesses of human nature, the persistent question of parentage, and the dire effects of class structure and maternal abandonment. As in Doomed Love, the only Branco novel translated into English (filmed by Manoel de Oliveira in 1979), romantic relationships are either thwarted or disastrous—a depressing realization, somehow overshadowed by the enthralling nature of this chronicle.

As suggested by the film’s scope, no single point of view dominates. The first-person framing narrative of Pedro da Silva (who is called João at first) yields for long stretches to other stories, which recount circumstances that have affected his life: his illegitimate birth, the doomed love affair of his parents (Angela de Lima and Don Pedro da Silva), the murder of his father, his rescue from being drowned, and the disastrous marriage forced on his mother. Raised by Father Dinis, the priest who bargained for the child’s life (while disguised as a gypsy) with his father’s assassin “Knife Eater,” Pedro is reunited with his mother in adolescence, only to lose her again when, stricken with remorse after her husband’s death, she enters a convent. Ironically, Knife Eater, having since refashioned himself as businessman Alberto de Magalhaes, tries to help the now adult Pedro monetarily, but the latter has sworn to avenge Elisa de Montfort, Alberto’s former lover. Humiliated by an aborted duel and despondent over his mother’s death, Pedro sails away to Tangier, then to Brazil where he falls ill and dictates his life story to a servant.

Ironies are piled upon ironies while the theme of maternal abandonment is constant. Father Dinis learns that his own mother died in childbirth and that his father entrusted him to a friend before entering the religious life. In fact, the Friar Baltasar who tells him all this is . . . his father. And in recounting the tragedy that befell the mother Elisa never knew, Dinis fails to add that this Blanche de Montfort, whom he loved, died in his arms. Unwittingly, Elisa voices the sentiment that bluntly poses the entire question of absent mothers when she wonders if it were not such events that made her own life so miserable.

As even this sketchy outline hints, the ironies and complexities of this narrative move well past six degrees of separation to a metaphysical view of the world. A devout Catholic, Branco believed in sin, redemption, and an omniscient God—ideas that weave through the film via Father Dinis, whose wisdom and insight are trifles compared to the presumably divine gift of bi-location that allows him to materialize everywhere and intervene in everyone’s lives. His sudden appearances and vanishings are miraculously—and wittily—announced by the camera, which tracks back or reframes to the right or left to reveal his presence when we had no idea he was remotely in the vicinity. Both witness and mediator, Father Dinis is the only character summoned by the camera—a deus ex machina of Christian pedigree.

I f this reading accords with Branco’s religious convictions, Ruiz’s stance, while respectful of his source, is more wryly poised. The very interventions that seem supernaturally motivated also sustain the narrative and keep the action and characters alive. Clearly, Ruiz admires the fabulous design of Branco’s novel, which “happens” to underscore the author’s belief in divine order. Then again, in the spirit of the balance between detachment and involvement, perhaps Ruiz fluctuates between faith and irony. He stated in a radio interview with Michel Ciment that “distancing” did not imply for him what it did for Brecht.

A scene exposing the behavior of the aristocracy while avoiding reduction to sociopolitical critique demonstrates this. During a furious argument between Pedro’s mother, Angela, and her husband, the Count of Santa Barbara, while her rival Eugénia listens nearby, the camera passes from room to room, as if desperate not to miss anything while seeking a safe exit. Its lateral movement tends to flatten the depth of field, creating a theatrical aura. But more importantly, the effect triggers what Ruiz, in another context, calls “intense detachment,” designed to awaken the analytic faculty even as it arouses emotion. The scene is the product of a triple perspective, all mirrored by the treatment: Father Dinis’s omniscience (the camera’s distance), the hell of Angela’s marriage (the action itself), and Pedro’s conjuring an unwitnessed scene that both compels and frightens him (the camera’s gaze vs. its flight). Beyond reflexivity, the strategy of “intense detachment” fosters the viewer’s deeper involvement on all levels—a layered perspective altogether suited to the embedded nature of a fiction constructed by stories within stories.

This differs from an overtly reflexive scene of Ruiz’s invention. In a room displaying the costumes of Father Dinis’s various guises, as well as his mother’s skull, the priest, scanning these memento mori, says, “And now, my friends, let’s talk,” to which the camera responds with a 360-degree track around him. While I prefer the less literal touch—amusingly symbolized by a nervous tic of the Count whereby his tongue repeatedly pushes against his inner cheek—the scene does suggest a shadowy, even demonic, side to Father Dinis. His brusque chastising of João/Pedro for invading his secret chamber resonates with the Old Testament God’s proscription against eating from the Tree of Knowledge, as the well-preserved garb of his other identities hints at a Manichean quality to his interventions. Such notions are contradicted, however, by Father Dinis’s life as a young man in France (under the name Sebastiao de Melo) and the circumstances that led him, like his father before him, to renounce worldly love and to become the ripest candidate in Branco’s theology for the role of divine emissary.

Father Dinis’s counterpart is ex-assassin Alberto, a man of sensuality and violence, but also of an integrity that belies his origins. Repelled by the hypocrisy of the nobility, he defends Angela against gossip and belittles duels of dubious honor. Only when his baser instincts are aroused, as when he throttles the maleficent Elisa, does Father Dinis again call him Knife Eater, his name when they made the deal that launches the narrative. As men of multiple identities, they recognize each other years later—thanks to Alberto’s telltale belch—as compadres in the human comedy playing opposing but complementary roles.

Ruiz’s direction of actors is an underrated measure of his skillful lacing of engagement with irony. While the performances are uniformly excellent, a few seem uncannily right. In a manner both blunt and understated, Adriano Luz’s Father Dinis commands with a warm, world-weary voice, free of unctuousness or sentimentality. The brooding and industrious Alberto—Lord Byron as capitalist—is embodied in Ricardo Pereira’s physical bearing, an artful blend of animal magnetism and courtly grace, his every move at once furtive and forthright.

Among the film’s pleasures are the sounds, hues, and intonations of spoken Portuguese, so sensuously articulated that even a non-speaker listens attentively. Matching its appeal is the pristine cinematography of André Szankowski, in which lighting and shadows shape mood without melodrama, and colors are neither tritely decorative nor overripe. Shot with what Ruiz calls the “mythical Genesis,” a digital camera compatible with almost any film lens—and capable of registering a depth of field comparable to 35mm—the brilliance and clarity of the images, in both long-shot exteriors and deep-focus interiors, articulate the spatial relationships essential to that rhythm between involvement and detachment.

As the narrative approaches closure, this balance courts a few ambiguities. When Pedro shoots himself after the aborted duel with Alberto, the story continues as if he had not. As he lies ill far from Lisbon, the toy theater from his childhood is to the left of his bed. In the Ciment interview, Ruiz dismisses the prop as a ploy to save time and footage, but it resonates powerfully as a teatro mundi. The cardboard sets and figures appear more than half a dozen times before key events in the child’s life, prefiguring the action to come—suggesting the preordained nature of all things even as they serve as a reflexive trope. When his mother leaves him for the convent, the boy angrily knocks over the figures as only a first-person narrator can do.

His gesture follows a shot alluding to a classic moment of maternal abandonment: the cabin scene in Citizen Kane. Ruiz reverses the deep-focus shot in which Charles is seen through a window playing in the snow as his mother sits in the foreground signing his life away to Thatcher. In Mysteries, as mother and guardian, framed by a window, decide João’s fate, the boy, close up in the foreground, looks at the camera and mouths their words. This look and address suggest a fusion—or confusion—of first-person and omniscient narrators, and not only because, unlike Kane, it is the older Pedro who reviews the memory. Mysteries of Lisbon is that rare film that incites serious reflection on the logic and limits of first-person point of view in narrative cinema. The ramifications of this may explain Ruiz’s addiction to stories within stories, which, apart from whatever pleasures such narratives provide, give proof to the simple truth that no story can avoid overlapping with others, that no individual point of view can possibly tell the whole story.

In the final scene, Pedro revisits an early memory in which, in a feverish state, possibly following an epileptic fit, he was attended by a woman he did not yet know was his mother. The image is optically distorted, the figures wavering in an unstable space from the boy’s dizzying perspective. (In Ruiz’s 2000 film Comedy of Innocence, the same kind of distortion expresses a child’s confusion about the identity of his mother.) The replay of Pedro’s memory is transformed into a vision of undivided maternal love that he can only fleetingly imagine. Scanning the hallucinatory image, the camera excludes everything from the frame but mother and child, embracing them in an iconic but fragile moment before they bleed into a dazzling light that fades into the white of the screen.

It is Ruiz’s deftest, if cruelest, touch: an image of consummate beauty and devastating loss in an ambiguous context. But even if the film is the feverish dream of an exceedingly imaginative child, the final shot implies that, however long and intricate our lives, they often crystallize, like narratives, into a single fixated image. Detachment, Ruiz has said, allows us to “understand the process of falling in love with a work of art.” What should we “understand” here? Is the primal image of a longed-for mother too archaic for contemporary viewers? And does detachment soften the blow of its wrenching effect? I doubt Branco left his readers with such questions. Perhaps even Father Dinis, who complains of the burden of “knowing too much,” would throw up his hands and say, “God only knows.”

Senses of Cinema [Josh Anderson] December 19, 2011

Michael Wood reviews 'Mysteries of Lisbon' · LRB 5 January 2012 January 5, 2012

On the Long and Winding Road of Raul Ruiz's Epic Mysteries of Lisbon J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, August 3, 2011

David Bordwell October 11, 2010

Raul Ruiz's fiction romance | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, September 15, 2011, also seen here: Chicago Reader [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Mysteries of Lisbon - Wikipedia

NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (La noche de enfrente) C- 67

Chile France (110 mi)

In the manner of Manoel de Oliveira, the aging 100-year-old-plus Portuguese director who won acclaim for his film INQUIETUDE (1998), listed as film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s favorite film of the year in 1998‎, but when shown at film festivals generated more walkouts than any other movie, as the detached uninvolvement and heavily stylized artificiality is not for everyone. Subsequently, for many, this will be like watching paint dry, despite the ringing endorsement from many critics who suggest this is the director’s swan song, having passed away shortly after his 70^th birthday from complications of a lung infection following a liver transplant in 2011. With Raúl Ruiz, who made over 100 films in his lifetime, you have to know what you’re getting yourself into, where speaking personally, the only films really liked are THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH (1996), starring Marcello Mastroianni in different roles, and Catherine Deneuve in GENEALOGIES OF A CRIME (1997), both of which are highly inventive yet remain approachable. When he starts adapting literary sources, like Proust in TIME REGAINED (1999), or this film adapted from a selection of Chilean writer Hernán de Solar’s most popular children's stories in Across the Night, the result is so literary that the experience is consumed with reading subtitles, where there’s so much dialogue that you’re literally reading a movie instead of watching it. The exaggerated, absurdly mannered style may amuse some, but to others the emotional detachment is so severe it resembles mannequins walking across the stage. Like de Oliveira’s INQUIETUDE, which was a tryptich of three stories with a touch of surrealism, this also has a dreamlike interconnecting thread of multiple storylines. The film is largely a riff on the art of storytelling, where the writer may be infinitely more absorbed in the process than most viewers will ever be, as the style is simply too abstract. This generated many walkouts as well, so before venturing, one might suggest a familiarity with Ruiz or a curious interest in searching out films that are something altogether different, except for de Oliveira, where in this case they are kissing cousins.

Honestly, it’s hard to see what people like about de Oliveira or Ruiz making films in exactly the same style as de Oliveira, as they are 100 % complete artificiality, without an ounce of realism anywhere to be seen. OK, fair enough, sounds like it could be visually inventive. Perhaps it is, except it is overloaded with dialogue throughout, as these are literary adaptations, so these guys don't like editing the words, so they're all there, which means you have a choice, either watch the screen and miss the subtitles, or read the subtitles and miss the screen. But when you watch the screen, it's literally filled with lifeless characters that make Bresson seem melodramatic in comparison, as these are literally cardboard characters. You could actually take a pair of scissors and cut them out of the frame and that's how they would look throughout—never changing, while the subtitles continue to forward endlessly throughout the entire picture with incessant monotonous dialogue. Rosenbaum loves this stuff, which is stiflingly pompous and elite, and among the most boring film experience anyone could have in a theater. If you want to read a book, read a book, fine, but why should moviegoers be forced to read a movie? It's reminiscent of Godard's shift in the late 60's from cinema to revolutionary slogans and phrases which felt like political indoctrination, feeling like someone is force feeding you something against your will. Something inside has the better judgment to resist and reject what's onscreen, as otherwise it's actually closer to hypnosis.

TIFF 2012 MUBI Coverage Roundup on Notebook | MUBI Fernando M Croce at Mubi, also here: #9

Night Across the Street, now that’s more like it. It’s the last film Ruiz officially directed before his death, and, as soon as the protagonist finds himself in an oneiric translation class and the alarm clock in his pocket starts ringing and scuttling away like an excited pet, I knew it would be a gratifyingly strange farewell. Drawn from three short cuentos by Hernan del Solar, it’s a procession of nested apparitions, projections and reveries arranged like a testament written in smoke. At the center is an old office worker (Sergio Martinez) recalling his early years as an imaginative boy, when he could spar with Long John Silver and take Beethoven to the movies. But who’s remembering (or imagining) whom? Retirement and mortality (the same thing, just about, to a prolific fable-weaver like Ruiz) and dwindling time (“You can almost touch it as it passes”) are imprinted on every collapsing composition, and yet this is a most joyous vision. There are Proustian incantations and CGI screens, peerlessly elegant visual jokes, a personal look at Chile’s past that’s more resonantly political than any of Pablo Larraín’s Pinochet-era dramas, plus an absurdly lovely metaphor for filmmaking in the main character’s collection of model ships in bottles. Aptly, it closes on a séance: Here we are attempting to analyze a great director’s swan song, while he chuckles softly from the hereafter.

Screen Daily [Jonathan Romney]

Raul Ruiz’s epic multi-strander Mysteries Of Lisbon may have been the last major offering from the Chilean-born globetrotting experimentalist, but Night Across The Street (La Noche de Enfrente) is the farewell film proper from Ruiz, who died last year. It’s a whimsical and tender leavetaking note to the world, to cinema and to his native Chile, from which he was exiled for many years.

Ruiz, who completed Mysteries despite an illness that required major surgery, was clearly preoccupied with his mortality while making La Noche, and the film is very much a last testament - yet one of the jolliest hearted valedictories that cinema has ever produced. Unlike Ruiz’s recent, relatively mainstream work, Night Across The Street is a fluid essay in film as poetry, like his French-made work of the early 80s (e.g. City of Pirates).

Dream-like à la Cocteau, and altogether free-associative, it is likeliest to appeal to initiates, who will be dewy-eyed over it. Crammed with pleasures as it is, the film is also over-extended, and judicious trimming by editor Valeria Sarmiento (Ruiz’s wife and long-time associate), especially in a slow final stretch, could bring tighter focus. Commercial prospects are slim, but that was never Ruiz’s prime concern, even at his most approachable.

Set in contemporary Chile, the film is about an elderly office worker, Don Celso (Hernandez); as retirement looms, he awaits the mysterious stranger who, he’s convinced, is coming to kill him. Don Celso is first encountered attending a poetry class (where adult pupils all sit eyes closed), held by Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), who may or may not be the French novelist of the same name (whose Les Ames Fortes Ruiz adapted in 2001).

The film cuts between the present and Don Celso’s childhood: we see him as a solemn, precociously philosophical boy prone to chatting with Long John Silver and Ludwig von Beethoven, the latter accompanying him to a memorable film screening. Present-day Chile, however, isn’t evoked in a remotely realistic manner, much of the action taking place in a hotel where characters oscillate between life and death: in one of the film’s drollest twists, the dead (victims of a sudden massacre) hold a séance to contact the living.

Many of the film’s ideas are motivated by verbal conceits, such as those debated over by Giono and Don Celso at the start. One particularly eloquent image is that of time solidified in little marbles; another is the idea of words as “butterflies of uncertainty”, which certainly applies to Ruiz’s films too. But while this is a very literary film, it’s also rapturously visual, showing Ruiz’s love of trompe l’oeil at its most unashamedly tricksy, with plentiful use of CGI backdrops.

The camerawork is as lithe as ever, and Inti Briones’s photography is gloriously coloured, especially in the use of warm rose hues and of bronze shades for the seascapes. The many-shaded dialogue takes in elliptical musings, surreal wisecracks and tart in-jokes about Chile. Playful and wildly imaginative to the last, this film shows Ruiz going out dreaming, and laughing.

"It was very autobiographical," said producer François Margolin of Raúl Ruiz's last film, Night Across the Street, after its New York Film Festival press screening. And that, said the producer, was odd, "because Raul was absolutely not a director that made anything that was autobiographical. It's as if he finished his career with his first film." The director of 115 films in just under 50 years, Ruiz was more than just fluent in the language of film; he was a poet of cinema. True to form, Night Across the Street rarely falters, maintaining its surrealistic deadpan as assuredly as it does its golden-brown palette. Yet it often drags, feeling longer at 110 minutes than Mysteries of Lisbon did at 272.

This visually elegant film toggles back and forth between the boyhood, late-middle-age, and post-death limbo of the story's protagonist: Don Celso, played by Sergio Hernández in old age and Santiago Figueroa in youth, when the character is known as Rodo. In a signature Ruiz shot, something often plays out in the foreground while a separate but related scene unfolds farther back, usually seen through an open door or window. Seeing Celso in one section of the frame while people plot against him in another makes the scene far more interesting, whether we're watching while Celso is being forced into early retirement or while a young man is talking about how to kill him. The layered visuals also rhyme with Ruiz's style of storytelling, which includes stories within stories, lots of shifting back and forth in time, and elliptical transitions from realism to surrealism.

As a boy, Celso dreams into being three imaginary friends—a language-loving French writer, an empathetic Ludwig von Beethoven, and a canny old pirate named Long John Silver—who keep him company all the way through to the afterlife. You'd think that might comfort him, but it only seems to piss him off. "Who do they think they are?" he sputters, when he sees the three conducting a séance together. "Don't they know I invented them?" Ruiz also has fun with a recurring metaphor about time. Celso and his imaginary friend Jean Giono (Christian Vadim) agree that time in the sleepy Chilean seaside town of the story passes not like a river flowing by but like marbles of differing sizes rolling past, and Ruiz amplifies that image with brief shots of cosmic marble games.

Night Across the Street too often degenerates into long perorations or overworked metaphors. Time and again, whatever momentum the story has gathered is lost as people gather in a room to listen dutifully as one or more of their number delivers a speech, and the alarm clocks that surround Celso are a much clunkier reminder than those marbles of the passage of time. A bit in which a sexy woman from Celso's office keeps wandering into the frame to ask for a four-letter word for her crossword puzzle is mildly funny at first, but winds up feeling like the too-long setup for a failed anecdote.

Yet there are moments of genuine mystery in this film, which often feels as if its come to us, as Margolin put it, "from somewhere that is not this life." When a young man asks Celso, after his death, about the "massacre" he survived at his boardinghouse before killing himself, Celso objects to the man's dramatic language. "They moved, that's all," he says of his dead neighbors, his words hinting at the kind of acceptance of death that may come only to those who know they are very near it. "They moved to another world."

Review: Night Across the Street - Film Comment Aaron Cutler, January/February 2013

Over the course of the seventies more than 40 Chilean filmmakers went into exile in France. One of them was Raúl Ruiz. He left Chile for Europe a month after the military coup that replaced Salvador Allende’s Socialist government with Pinochet’s hard-line regime. The majority of Ruiz’s over 100 subsequent films—many of them edited by his wife and fellow expat Valeria Sarmiento—were made in his new home country, of which he became a citizen. Towards the end of his life, though, he returned to Santiago to shoot what became his final work. Aware that he was dying, Ruiz intended the film to be shown posthumously. He passed away in Paris in August 2011, but he was buried in the country of his birth. Night Across the Street, his final testament, premiered at Cannes last year.

The film is based on two stories by the Chilean writer Hernán del Solar, but typically, it’s not so much an adaptation as what Ruiz called an “adoption,” incorporating references to certain of his own films, his cinematic influences, and personal history, and imaginative twists and turns of his devising. The nominal story centers on Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez), an elderly clerk nearing forced retirement whose wind-up alarm clock dances noisily when it’s time to take his pills. Don Celso is keenly aware of and even obsessed with the passage of time. As he discusses his life with exiled French writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), he also knows that he will soon die.

While he anticipates his imminent murder by a mysterious assassin, images from his youth appear. He sees an adolescent self (Santiago Figueroa), nicknamed “Rhododendron,” in deepening friendship with the aging Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra), and explaining the modern world to Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), his favorite historical figure, whose need for recognition as a great artist gives his own life purpose. As the composer examines a battery he’s picked up from the ground during a funeral procession, little Rodo tells him that machines are going to do everything for men. Beethoven walks away muttering, “How sad.”

A viewer might find this moment irrelevant, but then again why not include it? Indeed, after Don Celso’s boss tells him that he’s lately become incoherent, the film itself seems to come to the defense of incoherence. The port city of Antofagasta, rendered flagrantly artificial in Night and filled with old-fashioned, oddly gleaming buildings, exists outside of time. Past, present, and future, and illusion and reality, dissolve as the film’s scenes line up like marbles, all of equal weight and value. This approach to storytelling is present throughout Ruiz’s body of work, whether lovingly star-studded or blithely obscure. In his 1995 book Poetics of Cinema 1: Miscellanies, Ruiz rejects what he calls “central conflict theory”—the Hollywood- inherited notion that a story must work towards resolving a single driving conflict—in favor of a “shamanic cinema” which can summon real and imagined memories in intuitive sequence.

Don Celso lives in a world in which anything seems possible at any moment. Yet the free-associative mind dictating Night Across the Street’s action belongs neither to him, nor to any other character’s, but rather to the film itself. Ruiz aimed to create entire films with which viewers could identify. Night, which liberates its lowly clerk from the dread of a humdrum life, looks with eyes liberated from many kinds of dictatorships—the dictatorship of narrative, as well as those of bureaucracy, patriotism, power worship, and official histories.

Throughout his life, Ruiz sought to respond to the world’s finite number of official histories with an infinite number of imagined stories, free of all constraints, including mortality. “You can’t kill yourself. You lend yourself to death,” Don Celso tells Jean Giono, echoing one of Ruiz’s favorite maxims: “Dying is no big thing.” In time, the film shows death to be just a place across the street, and when people go there, friends await them.

TIFF Preview -6: Viola | Night Across the Street | After ... - Cinema Scope Boris Nelepo

The alarm clock that the elderly Don Celso carried around all of a sudden started ringing when he least expected it––in the middle of a translation class taught by a man named Jean Giono. The clock got so excited it ran away from its owner: it’s such a chore to chase your own possessions. While his classmates closed their eyes, Don Celso looked around. It seemed like a dream. Then the classroom became empty, alarm clocks blaring from under each table: the time was up. Don Celso’s employer decided to put him out to pasture, and a stranger named Rolo Pedro showed up on his doorstep. It wasn’t long before Don Celso realized he’d come to murder him.

Or maybe it was like this. There was a boy bizarrely named Rhododendron, who used to take Beethoven, his favourite composer and a close friend, to the movies to see adventure flicks starring Randolph Scott and Errol Flynn. One night, Long John Silver appeared, seemed to step right off the screen, and they became friends, too. The boy tells of a sudden massacre at home; then the boy will grow up to be Don Celso; then he will die.

It all boils down to the eternal question from Zhuangzi’s butterfly parable: is the dying Don Celso dreaming of his childhood, or is it a boy dreaming of his impending old age? Nestled in Raúl Ruiz’s most comfortable spot, i.e., between two worlds, the interim feel of Night Across the Street is further accentuated by the very mise en scène, as Ruiz shows in one frame parallel action taking place in two different rooms, or stages the dialogues between characters against highly stylized, early-cinema rear projections. Between the salad days and the vale of years—as in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) or Time Regained (1999). Between the past and the present: note how defiantly the characters ignore new shopping malls and glass buildings. Between life and death, for that matter: it’s Ruiz’s farewell picture, specifically conceived to be shown after he was gone.

The way the two realities blend into one another and coexist concurrently drew Ruiz to fellow Chilean Hernán del Solar’s writings in the first place. Three of his short stories inspired the film: “Wooden Leg,” “Rhododendron,” and “La noche de enfrente.” In his home country, Solar has long been a household name in children’s literature, and is also among the co-founders of Chilean imagism. Ruiz couldn’t ask for a better match: replete with mysteries, secrets, and adventures, Solar’s books preserve an engaging sensation of ambiguity, entwining facts and fiction until it’s impossible to tell the difference.

Reiterated many a time, it soon becomes just as impossible to tell what “Rhododendron” means: a fish hanging on the wall in Don Celso’s house, his childhood nickname, or the name of the killer who is also himself. As a matter of fact, Rhododendron is a plant of the heath family; James Joyce, a well-known admirer of obscure diction, also appreciated the rolling, gleeful sound of the word. Having spent most of his life in the French countryside, Giono was yearning for Antofagasta, a place that enticed him with the melody of vowels it contains. Or so, at least, claimed Ruiz, who made the writer’s dream come true when he set his last movie there.

Antofagasta Rhododendron Atalaya de mi aljama Hotu Matu’a. Rhododendron turns into Rolo Pedro, while the ending echoes the beginning with a different flower––this time around, magnolia. In City of Pirates (1983), the gorgeous maid chanted the magical, “Atalaya de mi aljama” as the little boy (Melvil Poupaud) pricked up his ears; Hotu Matu’a was one of his many names. Just like Jean-Claude Biette, whose low-key, unassuming style Night Across the Street is most reminiscent of, Ruiz always trusted the logic of poetical concords to steer his narratives instead of turning them over to the tyranny of a сentral conflict. The latter he protested in words (Poetics of Cinema) and in deed (over a hundred films). This incantation would be incomplete without Funchalense, the name of the ship of the dead in Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983). The ghosts that sailed it badly needed a living man onboard; in Night Across the Street, Don Celso, at least temporarily, fills in as the sought-after living man surrounded by his entourage of the living, the dead, and the fictitious.

Night Across the Street is not just a comma in Ruiz’s filmography—it is the period. While many perceived Mysteries and the pataphysical Ballet aquatique (2011) as his last will and testament, Night Across the Street is the meeting point for all the wanderers who inhabited his universe. A meta-Ruizian film, it unlocks the secret recesses and false compartments of his entire oeuvre, and allows us to see it from an entirely new perspective. Hence the self-referential element: Ruiz had already adapted Giono (2001’s ambiguous Les âmes fortes); the captain from Three Crowns revered Beethoven; Adamov was an Absurdist playwright, whose play Le professeur Taranne Ruiz adapted in 1987. Such references quite vividly prove that all the books and movies you’ve absorbed remain within you, just like the late writers of yore are no worse to talk to than the regular people around you. Beethoven, who follows the protagonist everywhere, helps Ruiz make his startling point.

Stéphane Mallarmé, whose “A roll of the dice will never abolish chance” seems to underlie La noche, is also mentioned, as his poem tells, among other things, of a shipwreck and a sea captain; Ruiz was always an avid fan of all things nautical and buccaneerish. Speaking of dice, La noche is nurtured not only by wordplay, but by actual games as well: the frames are overflowing with toys and dolls, the characters play dominoes and marbles. The latter are involved in a mesmerizing homage to The Seventh Seal (1957): Don Celso, upon seeing Death, sits down to play with him––probably for the last time. The protagonist’s room is cluttered with ships in bottles; Ruiz, perhaps, made just as many films. It’s hard to come up with a better analogy for filmmaking: enclosing handmade beauty in a fragile case.

Something of a companion piece to City of Pirates, Night Across the Street borrows extensively from its predecessor: a bloodbath, an ouija-board session, a mysterious house by the seaside. The similarities between the movies, however, run much deeper. The melancholic City is imbued with a longstanding feeling of exile stemming from the author’s sad experience of leaving home against his will: Ruiz made it right after he returned for the first time to Chile after he had left for France. The garden of allegories in the film was the battlefield of ideas; the defeated had to flee. Dealing with the notions of return and homecoming, Night Across the Street is the filmmaker’s most overtly political statement in years, and also gives him a chance to travel back in time to before the dictatorship. It’s no coincidence that Sergio Hernández plays a leading role, appearing for the first time in a Ruiz film since Dialogues of Exiles (1975).

The moment he comes on screen, the 40 years that have passed no longer seem to matter. Night Across the Street acutely posits that time is non-linear, and moreover, relative in its essence. At the very beginning, as Don Celso discusses the intricacies of time with Giono, we see people behind their backs strolling backwards along the embankment, just like the waves in the opening sequence of City. Rhododendron, a very well-read boy, struggles with science and math; for every question, including the year Chile was founded, he has two answers. Ruiz defies the concepts of past and future, because the space he depicts is devoid of time altogether, which allows Stevenson’s characters to engage in casual conversations with Beethoven.

“It’s time to sleep. We are old.” These are the final words of Solar’s “Rhododendron”; the final word of Ruiz’s last film is, simply, “Cut,” said over the end credits. Death is, indeed, the ultimate cut in a series of long takes, yet Night Across the Street, with each and every frame, appoints death as the ultimate artist in charge of erasing the difference between real people and figments of imagination. As the film draws to its close, Giono, Beethoven, and Long John Silver sit around a table, watched by the cast: the living, the dead, the deader, recovered either from a dream or from the past. “Did Napoleon really exist?” Professor Taranne pondered. Never before had anyone illuminated the obvious in such a stark fashion: death renders us all confabulations, works of fiction, so that we could live on—in paperbacks, word-of-mouth stories, history textbooks; Stevenson’s characters, great composers, and Napoleon himself obtain citizenships of another world where truth and a good yarn are one. Did Raúl Ruiz really exist? Let’s hope Don Celso will send him our love.

Cinema Guild: James Quandt July 30, 2013

The L Magazine: Max Nelson

Night Across the Street | Reverse Shot Max Nelson

Raúl Ruiz's Night Across the Street is an Arresting Puzzle | Village Voice Michelle Orange, February 13, 2013

The New Yorker: Richard Brody January 07, 2013

Cannes 2012. Raúl Ruiz's "La Noche de enfrente" Daniel Kasman at Cannes from Mubi, May 21, 2012

CIFF 2012: Night Across the Street (La Noche de Enfrente, 2012) Marilyn Ferdinand

Mortal mischief: Raul Ruíz’s La Noche de Enfrente Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Sight and Sound, May 21, 2012

PopMatters: Jordan Cronk at Cannes, May 21, 2012

DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Raúl Ruiz’s LA NOCHE DE ENFRENTE » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 25, 2012

Hollywood Reporter [Jordan Mintzer]

Variety [Justin Chang]

Time Out New York: David Fear

Ruiz, Carlitos Ruiz

LOVESICKNESS (Maldeamores)

Puerto Rico (90 mi) 2007

Lovesickness (Maldeamores) | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge from Screendaily

A bright new talent emerges from Puerto Rico in writer/director Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz, whose debut feature Maldeamores (aka Lovesickness) is a warm-hearted and witty tryptych of stories about the dysfunctions and masochism of love. The film had a strong reception at its Tribeca Film Festival world premiere last week and it should play myriad festivals before its run is over, winning over audiences wherever it screens.

It's a minor work which runs to just 90 minutes, but arthouse buyers and Latin specialists should go out of their way to see it, if only to keep an eye on Ruiz Ruiz for the future.

It also marks a calling card for the tiny Puerto Rican industry, and was among the first projects to be given a grant by the PR Film Corporation's 2003 incentive law.

Ruiz Ruiz is influenced by the new Latin American cinema movement and his realistic, handheld shooting style and gritty working-class settings are not so far removed from Amores Perros or City Of God. The difference here is that he is so generous in his humanity that even the most disturbed characters are sympathetic.

The film is bookended by two sequences in which a couple drive along a barren highway, getting into arguments about the pettiest things – a song on the radio, for example – and ending with the woman opening her door and hurling herself out of the car. The couple set the tragic-comic tone of the subsequent three interweaving stories.

In the first, Ismael (Guzman) and his distraught wife Lourdes (Hernandez) and son Ismaelito (Torres) are driving to the funeral of Lourdes' grandmother. But when they stop for a toilet break, Lourdes finds out from her brother-in-law that Ismael has been cheating on her with her cousin. While she sets off on her own to find her cousin and confront her, Ismaelito meets his first girlfriend.

In the second story, an elderly couple, Flora (Brito) and Cyrilo (Marrero), who have been living in the same house for 28 years, despite being divorced for the last 12 of them, are faced with the arrival of a houseguest, Flora's first husband Pellin (Alvarez) who abandoned her and their children many years before. Although reluctant to take him in, Flora is soon seduced by Pellin to the consternation of the jealous Cyrilo.

The third story follows a disturbed man Miguel (Gonzaga) who lives with his controlling mother. One day, he proposes to a busdriver Marta (Pedro) with whom he says he has fallen in love. When she laughs him off, he takes out a gun and hijacks the bus she is driving, holding the passengers hostage until a priest arrives to marry them.

Each story has a bittersweet resolution, but there is much humour along the way and the actors are uniformly strong, never resorting to sentimentality in the portrayals of their lovesick madness.

Brito, a New York-based actress who was brought in to play Flora, is especially vibrant, representing the heart of the film as a woman finally in charge of her desires and her men.

Rulfo, Juan Carlos B 83

IN THE PIT

Mexico (80 mi) 2005

Resembling the old documentaries showing the construction of the Empire State building, where the camera followed the builders high up into the open steel beams, the territory that sends normal humans into immediate vertigo, this Mexico City documentary follows the thousands of employed workers who are building an elevated freeway called El Segundo Piso, shot between 2003 and 2006, where to date, this mammoth project is still incomplete. Shot by the filmmaker himself, it’s immediately impressive that he climbs up onto the unprotected girders to film men at work, concentrating on a handful, letting them tell their own stories as they work. What he finds are men that are thankful to have a job at all, that brag about their bravery scaling the heights, and who have a horribly backward idea about women, as one willfully confesses his wife-beating prowess, another mentions that his wife initiated all social activity, inviting him into a dark corner and he decided to “go with the flow.” Another makes constant catcalls to women from high above, the stereotypical construction worker attitudes of uneducated and largely unsympathetic men.

What’s interesting here is not the humorous banter or the dire predictions of the workers, who instill a respect for the rising body count that is developing with the building of this project, but the combination of stunning time lapse photography and a brilliant sound design from Leonardo Heiblum who finds inventive industrial sounds to enhance what we see onscreen. Much of it feels experimental, as there’s little narrative, so the bold imagery actually drives the film. One man falls down an uncovered deep hole and must be pulled up by a rope, losing his grip the closer he comes to safety, eventually grabbed by several men and pulled out of the hole with perhaps only a few broken bones. Much of these workers paint a picture of their dead end lives, where the 24 hour a day work shifts keep them away from any wives, girl friends or family, and most don’t even own a car, claiming they’ll never even be able to enjoy the fruit of their labor, believing this project is so immense that it will never be completed. In a stunning, uninterrupted seven and a half minute aerial shot from end to end, a helicopter flies low over the partially completed bridge, capturing hundreds of workers on the uncompleted sections and following a few cars driving over the completed sections, where at times they flew low enough that one of the workers yelled out catcalls to the women seen below from the helicopter. The bridge itself has a futuristic look, making a sweeping gesture above the overcrowded city below, much like the original intentions of the monorail system at Disneyland, where passengers ride high above what may as well be an invisible population below.

Sundance-winning documentary about Mexico City workers building the humungous ‘El Segundo Piso’ elevated freeway. Captured toiling, bantering and philosphising in director Juan Carlos Rulfo’s raw, wobbly DV footage, the curious cast of characters invoke the social problems you’d expect (corruption, poverty, perilous working conditions), but it’s the rich mix of lives that grips. There’s poor picked-on, good-natured ‘Shorty’; the woman who talks about her encounters with God and the Devil; ‘El Guapo’, who hits on every woman he sees; a cowboy planning on retiring when he’s 32; as well as the unsympathetic ‘El Grande’, who brags about battering his wife so much she couldn’t open her eyes. You long for more context on both workers and project, though a breathtaking five-minute-plus helicopter shot along the snaking concrete-and-iron colossus at the close helps distract from any moans.

Concentrating on the construction workers building the upper-deck to Mexico City's immense Periferico highway, Juan Carlos Rulfo's In the Pit is a documentary defined by symbiosis, its melding of musical instruments with construction site sounds (clanging jackhammers, crunching iron, screeching machinery) a sonic reflection of its portrait of men becoming intimately, inextricably associated with their artificial creation. Shot between 2003 and 2005, the film focuses on a group of workers either stuck toiling away in a giant concrete hole or atop towering columns designed to support the elevated freeway, the apparent lack of safety measures hinting at the precariousness of their professional (as well as personal) lives. Working-class men who dream of something better as they try to keep food on the table, In the Pit's speakers offer a variety of unvarnished (optimistic and cynical) perspectives on their situation, with crane operator Chavelo's soft-spoken diligence contrasted with mason El Grande's verbose anger and disappointment—and, in his wistful discussion of past fun with hookers and cocaine, resentment as well. Commenting (with a heavy dose of heaven-and-hell religiosity) on the many lives lost at the site, a traffic officer remarks that many souls are embedded in the construction. It's a notion that Rulfo embraces, while also matter-of-factly highlighting—via shots of a worker ("El Voyeur") trying to catch glimpses of women's panties in the cars passing by below, and in a scene of Chavelo missing the bus and thus being forced to walk home—the fact that the men are risking life and limb to erect a structure many of them will never use. The film isn't, however, an overt critique of socio-economic divides as it is simply a compassionate attempt to shine a light on its subjects' individuality and basic humanity, culminating with a six-minute aerial shot traversing the entire freeway that pays tribute to their toil by elucidating—with hypnotic beauty—the sheer scope of their architectural achievement.

The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]

Early in the Mexican documentary In The Pit, a deeply religious traffic guard discusses an old legend claiming that whenever a bridge is built, the devil asks for one soul in order to ensure its durability. Apparently, this constitutes a health-insurance policy. In following a construction crew as it works on the Second Deck—a mammoth 10.5-mile bridge intended to relieve Mexico City's notorious gridlock—the film never overtly condemns the powers-that-be for cutting corners on safety and needlessly placing construction workers in harm's way. In fact, director Juan Carlos Rulfo observes almost passively, generally withholding judgment on anything in particular, though the cumulative effect of hair-raising moments (ironworkers hanging on columns over the freeway, rocks dislodged by rainwater dropping to the "pit" below, a scary late-hour freefall) is unquestionably damning.

For the half dozen or so workers profiled by Rulfo, the prospect of death is just a matter of course, but the men display a vastly varying and often fascinating range of opinions on how to deal with life. On one end of the spectrum, there's "Chabelo," an unflappably good-natured man who takes everything in stride, quietly convinced that the right perspective is the key to happiness. On the other, there's the misanthropic "El Grande," who bitterly laments that real money in Mexico City is earned through corruption, and honesty "only gets you beans and eggs." In between are several other colorful characters, including a self-professed lothario who strolls around with a porno mag stuffed in his back pocket, and a "voyeur" who likes to proposition women from great heights.

One of the film's many ironies is that love of any kind isn't really an option: These men are married to their work, and the few that aren't have been through multiple divorces. The other irony is that almost none of them earn enough money to afford a car, so they'll never drive across the bridge they've spent three years building. To its credit, In The Pit doesn't hammer these points home too emphatically; Rulfo's simple strategy of sticking close to his subjects and allowing them to wax philosophical about their lives and labors pays off. His real affinity for them only surfaces in the final 10 minutes, when his camera soars above the semi-completed structure, awed at their achievement.

The Second Deck of the Periférico freeway wends its way through 17 kilometers of Mexico City sprawl, lifting untold tons of steel and concrete over an unknown number of graves. The men and women who slaved on this vast urban renewal project are the ostensible subject of In the Pit, a documentary haunted by the ghosts of those who died in its construction—and cursed by mixed-up priorities.

Filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo finds an endless number of ready-made spectacles for the delectation of his high-def video camera: ant-sized men toiling in gaping dirt holes, cataracts of traffic roaring through the night, immense platforms hoisted in place. Lovely to look at, In The Pit is energized by an impulse to abstraction; the strongest images aspire to something like the harrowing lyricism of Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog's operatic docu-poem on the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Rulfo's strong eye compensates for a weak ear, overly indulgent of a cutesy-clever score (by Leonardo Heiblum) arranged from ambient clanks and snippets of talk, a sort of perky techno-concréte ideally suited to a Periférico promotional video.

That's not the only miscalculation. Against the grain of his industrial enthrallments, Rulfo attempts the human-interest angle—to very little interest. Rulfo's keenest curiosity is for perfecting time-lapse tableaux. Of filthy, gentle Isabel; dreamy, poetic Natividad; affable, stoic Pedro; handsome, optimistic Vicencio; and shit-talking, wife-beating José we learn scarcely more than may be reduced to a pair of adjectives. In the Pit's empathy feels strictly skin-deep, its insight even shallower. Eavesdropping on his working-class heroes, he settles for bits of insult, macho bonhomie, vague musings, bromides. When a worker is killed by the roadside, the emphasis lands on a photogenic scatter of debris.

In the midst of this nifty picture-making, one searches in vain for the big picture. One resonant sequence stands out largely because it stands alone. "I say they should be working 24 hours," sneers a well-fed motorist in a DKNY T-shirt. "They are working 24 hours," rebuts an off-screen voice. "Oh yeah? That's good. But it's still annoying."

What's irksome here isn't aesthetics per se but the pretense that they speak to human rather than plastic values. The movie climaxes in a wondrous helicopter shot traveling a great length of the Periférico. You'd marvel at the labor entailed were marvelous videography not so clearly the point.

IN THE PIT Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion

Most films and TV shows set in the workplace devote little time to actual labor, concentrating on workers' interactions. A documentary shot in a massive Mexico City construction project, "In the Pit" is no exception. In some respects, it draws on techniques usually associated with fiction, portraying its subjects as characters. Yet it doesn't tell a story. One assumes the film takes place in chronological order, but that guess might be wrong. The bridge-building project it depicts is huge, employing hundreds if not thousands of workers. However, Rulfo hones in on a handful, who are too individualized to come off as mere types. "In the Pit" plays as if he took one of Andreas Gursky's huge, glossy photos and zoomed in to focus on the people hidden amidst the large scale.

From the very beginning, it's obvious that "In the Pit" is no ordinary documentary. Intertitles offer some background information on the bridge, which spans 10.5 miles of elevated concrete, but they're more literary than strictly factual. Underneath these words, a strange tune plays. It mixes childlike synthesizer melodies with clanking metal percussion. Is the rhythm part of the score, found sound or a combination of the two? Most documentaries-indeed, most films of any kind-are far too lazy to bother using music to raise such questions. By doing so, "In the Pit" implies a new approach to labor-in fact, its entire score incorporates sound effects from construction sites. Rulfo's film is an enormous gesture of respect towards the Mexican working-class, but it doesn't sanitize or idealize its subjects. While their banter includes plenty of playful insults, it also encompasses constant gay-baiting and harassment of women on the street. "El Grande" (whose real name is José Guadalupe Calzada Placencia) nostalgically recalls his past as a gangster-in those days, his pockets were full of cash and he spent his time partying with prostitutes and cocaine-and eventually confesses to repeatedly beating his wife. Fortunately, most of the other workers are more thoughtful. One spends his spare time racing horses. For several-including the sole woman to get much of Rulfo's attention-God and Satan are constant presences on the site.

Whatever they have to say, Rulfo's interest in these construction workers never flags. While much of "In the Pit" consists of the director interviewing them, he erases his own presence as much as possible. He offers no explanatory voice-over. At their best, his interviews feel like conversations, but they're one-sided chats. At several points, workers ask him direct questions. He leaves their queries in but edits out his answer.

"In the Pit" looks as though it were made with more resources with most documentaries. Most of it was shot on high definition video. However, Rulfo, who also served as his own cinematographer, seemed to have little control over the lighting, leading to a rougher look than HD usually produces. This isn't a film for people suffering from vertigo-some of the camera angles Rulfo was able to get, high up in the bridge, are dizzying. He asks the workers if they ever get scared at such heights, but one would like to know his own answer.

The implications of "In the Pit's" opening song suggest that it'll bridge the gap between work and aesthetics. While Rulfo's film looks slick, he doesn't make the construction site look beautiful. He obviously devoted a lot of care to the cinematography, but he avoids turning a dangerous, grinding job into a source of pretty pictures. He does make one major misstep-turning to 35mm for time-lapse photography. These scenes tear "In the Pit" away from its carefully constructed realism towards the New Age mush of Godfrey Reggio, making work and traffic look like abstract, even animated images.

The 10-minute aerial shot that concludes "In the Pit" finally resolves the tension between focusing on workers and their work. In effect, Rulfo zooms back out, fading his subjects into the background and showing us a macroscopic view of the bridge. It's a breathtaking sight, especially as the helicopter glides over completed sections into ones still being built. The film never abandons working-class perspectives-in fact, it integrates workers' speech into the electronic music that plays over this scene-but it suggests that something worthwhile did come from all the struggle and sacrifice that went into the bridge. Few narratives end with such a stunning surprise.

Its title rendered as In the Pit, Mexican filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo’s En el hoyo could equally have had the noun translated as hole or grave, the latter a horror come-on but in this case related to the God-fearing musings of a female construction crew traffic director. Haunted by the “not one but many [lives] unavoidably” lost, sad-faced Natividad Sánchez Montes refers to a national legend that the Devil (whom she has seen) demands a soul as guarantor for every bridge.

In the construction-site profanity that abounds, one hardhat issues an expletive-filled warning that the foundation trench will fill with water, and in fact it soon all but disappears from the film (leaving only an opening and closing well from which an injured man is rescued). What is left for the great bulk of the documentary is an overpass, specifically a 2003-05 stretch of steel-and-concrete ten miles of the Second Deck of the capital’s inner Periférico freeway.

Eric Steel’s 2006 The Bridge controversially focused on the Golden Gate Bridge as a magnet for suicides, on those who jump and the witnesses and loved ones who must bear grief. Also seeking the human frame behind the steel, Rulfo’s aim is to record the lives and hopes of the working class who usually “will stay anonymous . . . as a number and a statistic.”

It would seem the film means to draw the viewer inwards, to excite empathy for these pleasant, sometimes emotionally lost men and a woman. Backed by a cacophony of machine groans, sighs, whizzes and bangs seconded by Leonardo Heiblum’s hardly noticeable industrial music score, this laudable effort does achieve some sense of modern metropolises’ redefinition and constant, noisy reconfiguration of themselves.

Though earnest, however, In the Pit does not take off. Adequate as a spare overview, it fails of its purpose to make engaging the “hopes, desires, faith and strength” of these subject citizens who normally go unnoticed and unsung. (America’s heroification of 9/11 first responders, firemen and workers is one outstanding anomaly.) Its international awards résumé includes Sundance’s World Cinema Jury Prize to Best Documentary but belies a lack of significant penetration beneath surfaces. The blame is not to be laid entirely on the filmmaker’s doorstep, for, Eric Hoffer romanticizing aside, these subjects are more Eddie Carbone of the fittingly named A View from the Bridge: hard-working Joes, they are minimally educated and, PR to the contrary, not all that articulate about themselves and their world.

Compounding the difficulty is the jump-around use of high-def digital video, with time-lapse 35mm inserts, so counterproductive that a first identifying subtitle for each of the half-dozen or so principals and ending titled still photos cannot fix who is who, not even with the aid of press handout blurbs. True, as they relax under camera scrutiny, they appear likeable and some vague philosophy does emerge, of fatalistic resignation to this hard lot in life. Even so, the most effective cinematic moments are the non-individualized last ones, a flyover of the completed spans, of indistinguishable work groups waving from those still under construction, and the only shots of the affected working-class barrio with the business and high-rise urban center at a physical and social distance.

The sole somewhat differentiated figure is that of “Chavelo” or “El Chaparro,” first on the scene, noticeable from what his nickname “Shorty” indicates, the butt of jokes about hygiene and body odor. Largely some forty feet up with helmets but no safety harnesses or resting below between shifts, occasionally in the cab of a wide-load truck or, once, showing off a home or rather confusingly riding bareback in what looks a two-horse fair race, the men’s talk is what one would expect: comments on specific female legs in the traffic-jammed cars at street level or on women in general, boastful or shy love, past glory, lousy pay that still beats farm wages, and kidding about their fellows’ prowess or sexual deviations. Man-talk, adolescent-talk, although, surprisingly, nothing about sports.

What emerges is at best a bland surface picture of those whom without the least thought one passes most every day in the great city, men who in a physical sense make such cities. That they are different, or that something special is to be learned from them (if only that they are really not very different) is arguable, but in any case In the Pit does not rise to its occasion.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/ [David Rooney]

Literally and existentially down and dirty, “In the Pit” is an absorbing documentary about work and the transformation of men into laborers. Directed and shot with sensitive attention to detail by Juan Carlos Rulfo, the film takes us into a world apart, populated by members of the construction crew building the second deck of the Periférico beltway in Mexico City. For the city’s inhabitants, each of whom apparently spend an estimated 1,485 hours a year commuting, and mostly on public transportation, the construction is at once a nuisance and a possible solution. For the most part, like construction sites everywhere, it is also hidden in plain sight.

Skip to next paragraphMr. Rulfo takes a distinctly personal approach to his subject, eschewing issues of public policy, environmental impact or even much by way of factual information or history about the beltway. Instead he introduces us to a handful of men, most of whom work in the ground or high in the air, and one fatalistic woman, who helps move traffic through the beltway’s completed areas and likes to talk about death.

Shooting with a digital camera, Mr. Rulfo sticks close to the workers, following them in and out of wide-yawning muddy holes, where they tease one another mercilessly as they claw through the earth. Their camaraderie feels touching and true, even if it seems at least partly predicated on communal survival.

There are some singular personalities here, including the jovial Isabel Dolores Hernández, a small man with a saucy hitch in his walk who also seems on the move and, like most of the workers, has a work-site nickname, Chabelo. There’s also José Guadalupe Calzada Placencia, or El Grande, who, as his moniker suggests, looms large on site and on screen. Given to bursts of harsh laughter, El Grande proves to be the film’s sole shadowy figure, a man whose aggressiveness hides some uglier truths. As he does with all the workers, Mr. Rulfo fixes a cool eye on El Grande. When, during one offhand moment, he casually confesses to beating a family member, the filmmaker offers no comment; he just keeps the camera going as El Grande buries himself in words.

There are other men with other words and from other worlds, most notably the impossibly romantic Vicencio Martínez Vázquez, who wears his luxurious long hair tied back when he’s on the job, only to wear it loose around his shoulders when he’s racing horses bareback. A single cut from the image of Mr. Vázquez in his construction clothes to a shot of him immaculately dressed in his cowboy costume speaks volumes about the private selves we keep tucked inside our workaday persona.

Much like the film’s knockout final image, an uninterrupted aerial shot of the beltway that seems to go on forever, a bird’s-eye view of this heroically scaled project, Mr. Rulfo knows how to make images say much more than they might otherwise.

Although he assumes the classic direct cinema, fly-on-the-wall approach for much of his film, Mr. Rulfo occasionally breaks with tradition and throws out a question at the men. These periodic inquiries and the intimacy of the camerawork make the film feel more personal than many documentaries, and over time you grow as aware of the man behind the camera as you become familiar with the men he’s shooting (especially when both are hanging off some wincingly tall abutment). This individuated touch is also evident in Mr. Rulfo’s rigorous specificity, his self-aware limitations. With “In the Pit” he isn’t advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.

Rúnarsson, Rúnar

VOLCANO (Eldfjall) B 86

Iceland Denmark (99 mi) 2011

This is sort of an Icelandic variation on the King Lear theme, suggesting retirement’s not always what it’s cut out to be, featuring a mammoth performance by Theódór Júlíusson as Hannes who is retiring after 37 years with the local school, where his no nonsense answer to what he would do in his spare time is that he would grow old and die. Shot in a seaside location off the rugged coast of Reykjavik, the film opens in a prelude of displacement, highlighted by an actual volcanic blast destroying another seaside village on Vestmann Island, when the Eldfell volcano erupted in 1973, forcing an evacuation of the entire island to mainland Iceland for several months. As Hannes and his wife soon found jobs in Reykjavik following the evacuation, they never returned to their homeland, raising a family instead in their small home, which is the site of nearly the entire film. This is not an easy picture of happy family harmony, as Hannes is disgusted by the presence of his family, as his own children are economically successful, but are the picture of ingratitude, where he feels uncomfortable when they visit, which is largely to visit their more open hearted mother Anna (Margrét Helga Jóhannsdóttir). Hannes is of the view that a man who shows feelings is exhibiting the characteristics of a girl, an old-fashioned, misogynistic view that doesn’t set well with the others, as the man routinely rails against the imperfect world around him, which is so overwhelmingly demonstrated that it actually shows a bit of humorous Icelandic character, as his criticisms exhibit a bit of wit and even local charm, something that would go over well in the pubs.

There is a brief view of Hannes taking a drive out into the magnificent interior of Iceland, surrounded by jagged peaks, where he grows annoyed and frustrated at himself, apparently for not having the will to stick a hose into his mouth from his exhaust pipe. Shortly afterwards, we see him make daily excursions out to sea in his beat up old boat, bringing back enormous-sized fish at night. On one occasion, however, the boat springs a leak offshore, too far away from land to swim. Initially he starts bailing the water furiously, but then slows down to a stop and instead amusingly pulls out a cigarette, as if this is his last request on earth, where he pulls deep drags from the smoke with water up to his knees before frantically starting to bail water again. We later see his boat being towed by a rescue team while he and another are continuing to rapidly bail water to stay afloat. The boat is eventually towed to his back yard where it sits collecting dust. But upon his return home that night, pulling off his wet clothes, he overhears his son and daughter’s assessment of his wretched and pitiful display of inhumanity, where they wonder why their mother puts up with it, as she’s usually the target of his miserablism, both wishing she’d just up and leave him once and for all. Anna, being the more self-sacrificing, has apparently never uttered a word of discontent. Hannes, however, sees this as an opportunity for redemption, for a second chance at life, even in this late stage. Ironically, seemingly happy, just after enjoying her favorite meal, she suffers a debilitating stroke, leaving her nearly entirely brain dead with a slim to none chance of recovery.

The tone of the film changes at this point, as the mix of ribald Icelandic humor has been a constant delight, easily the best thing in the film, where this man’s misanthropic attitude is hilarious, especially taken to the degree that he does, where just about everything pisses him off. But with his wife’s illness, he tempers the worldly wrath and decides he can bring her back home and take care of her himself with the assistance of daily visits from a nurse. Caring for an invalid is no easy task, but Hannes is driven to do the best he can for her, while his two children conspire against his wishes to have him removed from her presence once and for all and have her sent to a nursing home, as they simply loathe the man. Hannes surprises even himself in learning to lovingly look after his wife, but continues to exhibit rather indifferent feelings towards his own children. When they come to the house to visit their mom, however, he does enjoy spending time with his grandson Kári (Ágúst Örn B. Wigum) rebuilding his boat, which is hard work, claiming his efforts will make him a co-owner, as the boat has been passed down through generations. This cyclical theme is accentuated by images of stark loneliness, suicide idealizations, a loving family member lying helpless in a coma, meddling children, and the natural beauty of the blustery sea which foretells the tragedy and fortitude needed to survive in this harsh and unyielding world, winner of the 2nd Prize in the New Directors Competition at the Chicago Film Festival, “a film that triggers a deep emotional response that has nothing to do with sentimentality. It juxtaposes domestic space with the dramatic Icelandic landscape to riveting effect. Not just another film about redemption, Rúnar Rúnarsson's debut depicts the moral ambiguity of the choices facing a complex, older man.”

Volcano David Jenkins from Time Out London

A towering central performance from actor Theódór Júlíusson lends profundity and emotional resonance to this icy and interior character study by talented Icelandic writer-director Rúnar Rúnarsson. He plays cantankerous, recently retired school janitor Hannes, a man whose hulking frame, aggressive behaviour and conservative views have left him isolated from friends and family. Only his doting wife remains, but his entire world capsizes when tragedy strikes and he must embrace a life of righteousness and compassion. So bleak are the machinations of the story and the way it’s shot (in cloudy greys and rusty browns by cinematographer Sophia Olsson), that it’s a tough film. But this total commitment to its enveloping, dour tone makes the tiny moments of respite and redemption all the more valuable.

Volcano Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily, including a short interview with the director by Wendy Mitchell here: Runar Runarsson

It is a odd concept to construct a coming-of-age tale around a recently retired 67 year-old man, but writer/director Rúnar Rúnarsson’s moving and neatly made drama manages to do just that, driven by a powerful and nicely uncompassionate performance by Theódór Júlíusson as a man who finds a reason to live at the most unlikely of time in his life.

On the surface Volcano is a bleak and gloomy story, but it develops into a tender tale…the final chapter of a love story between two ordinary people set against a simple suburban landscape in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. The film is an easy fit into film festival programming, but somewhat tougher to release theatrically outside Scandinavia.

When Hannes (Rúnarsson) retires from his long-time job as superintendent at a school it is clear he is heading into a void. He contemplates suicide before heading home where he has a taciturn and monosyllabic relationship with his wife Anna (Jóhannsdóttir) and is ill-at-ease with his two grown-up children who come by mainly to see their mother.

Hannes goes out fishing in his battered motor-boat, but when the craft starts to leak he has it delivered to the front garden so he can work on it. But appearances can be deceiving - there is still passion in their marriage, and after a little late-night sex he heads off the next day to get some Halibut so that his wife can make her favourite soup.

But as the pair settle down to enjoy their evening meal, Anna collapses with a massive stroke. She is given little hope of recovery by doctors, but Hannes insists on staying at her bedside, and then to his children’s annoyance - and bemusement of hospital staff - he decides to take her home and care for her 24 hours a day.

This is when he finds a new reason for living…and comes of age. He tenderly looks after Hanna, learning how to change her diaper, feed and wash her and give her morphine injections when her painful moaning grows intense. She is essentially brain-dead, but he refuses to leave her side. His dedication also sees him grow closer to his young grandson - the pair work on Hannes’ boat when the boy’s father comes to visit Anna, and gradually Hannes comes to finally show affection to the boy.

When it becomes clear that Anna is in terrible pain Hannes is faced with a hard decision…but it is decision he makes based on love rather than frustration and anger.

Rúnar Rúnarsson’s film is neatly, simply and elegantly constructed, largely shot inside the couple’s simple home, but also featuring a few telling exteriors, such as Hannes’ fishing trips and a visit at the end of the film to the volcanic town where the couple came from, but left many years before after an eruption devastated the town. It is slowly paced, but makes great use of music in the opening and closing moments.

Often the shots are beautifully framed, with the most telling a simple scene of Hannes sitting in the hospital waiting area and his two children arriving, but not embracing him and sitting on a separate bench. It is a sad and tender scene, and perhaps a moment that seals his determination to adjust his life.

Despite some hot-and-heavy old-age sex, "Volcano" is not going to be many folks' first choice for a date movie.

Despite some hot-and-heavy old-age sex, Volcano is not going to be many folks’ first choice for a date movie. But Icelandic writer-director Runar Runarsson’s drama is a love story observed with tenderness that never compromises its truthfulness. It will strike affecting chords for anyone who has dealt with a partner or elderly parent’s illness, and the painful decisions that arise from it.

While the stoical nature of his characters may be unmistakably Scandinavian, and his central figure at times appears to be hewn from the scorched volcanic rock of his birthplace, Runarsson’s debut feature explores universally relatable experiences. There’s the shock to the system that retirement brings to many men whose sense of purpose is defined entirely by their work; the difficult realignment of a couple’s dynamic when that man is suddenly home all day; the cold terror of almost losing a loved one; the questions about quality of life when motor skills and brain function are impaired; and the need of the healthy partner to assume care-giver duties, regardless of the impracticalities.

The slow-burning drama addresses these concerns without didacticism in a context that’s naturalistic but also quietly poetic. What will be most provocative, in countries where euthanasia remains a contentious issue, is the film’s matter-of-fact eloquence in making a case for delivery of a compassionate death.

An economical opening scene shows the pride 67-year-old Hannes (Theodor Juliusson) has taken in his job as a school caretaker, as he relinquishes responsibility to his replacement. The momentous weight of that step is conveyed when minutes later, we see him contemplating suicide. Hannes’ cranky behavior at home and brusque manner with his wife Anna (Margret Helga Johannsdottir) prompt harsh comments from their son Ari (Thorsteinn Bachmann) and daughter Telma (Elma Lisa Gunnarsdottir), which Hannes overhears.

A mishap in his beloved fishing boat leaves Hannes shaken and humiliated. He initially responds to Anna’s concern with his customary anger, but in a moment of vulnerability later that night, they reconnect with a passion that appears to have been absent for years. A reprieve of unexpected happiness follows but is cut short when Anna suffers a major stroke at the dinner table.

Juliusson makes Hannes’ emotional devastation, revealed mostly in solitude, profoundly moving. Likewise his indignation when Ari and Telma challenge his decision to remove Anna from the hospital and undertake her care himself at home, with help from a visiting nurse. There may be truth in Ari’s accusation that his father is looking to atone for years of taking his wife and family for granted, but that doesn’t make Hannes’ intent less honorable.

There’s an attention to the unsavory details of elder care that instantly distances this story from the saccharine Hallmark fare that it might have been in another cultural context. But even the blossoming of a timid bond between Hannes and his grandson (Agust Orn B. Wigum) as they work together on the battered boat gracefully sidesteps cliché.

Shot in a simple, unfussy style and deliberately unhurried, this is undeniably a small movie and unlikely to register much beyond the festival circuit. But it has heart and integrity. In just a handful of short scenes, Johansdottir sketches a complete history of a marriage and of a love that endures despite the inevitable erosion of time and familiarity. And Juliusson’s physical and emotional journey back to the island he and Anna left behind years earlier carries tremendous poignancy.

www.variety.com [Alissa Simon]

Vestmannaeyjar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rush, Dan

EVERYTHING MUST GO C 75

USA (96 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

Watching a guy laying around in his front yard in a lounge chair drinking beer, his clothes and personal belongings strewn about from a wife who kicked him out on his ass, turned into a lumberingly slow and somewhat pathetic yard sale for the next few days, is hardly one’s idea of great cinema, rather, reminiscent of some neighbor who’s become a public nuisance, airing his dirty laundry in public, which feels like leaving his dog outside subjecting everyone to his constant barking. In most neighborhoods, there’s usually at least one guy who refuses to mow his lawn, even as the rest appear perfectly manicured and golf course textured green. The last ornery guy in the neighborhood movie was Clint Eastwood in GRAN TORINO (2008), where a retired blue collar worker sat on his front porch drinking beer and fumed if anybody stepped on his lawn, continually uttering racist tinged expletives under his breath, eventually deciding to take matters into his own hands, becoming something of a neighborhood buttinsky, butting into other people’s business. Here the viewer waits for other neighbors to show up to butt into this guy’s personal business, which is the subject of the movie, which suggests one guy’s sorry plight is also our own. Like homelessness, there but before the grace of God go I, so to speak. But rather than dissect a social phenomena of people getting thrown out on their asses in America, losing their jobs and their homes, and in some cases their families, this movie prefers to hang around on the guy’s front lawn and see what social phenomena can happen. Again, rather than show real lives in anything resembling real life situations, the director prefers taking the Hollywood route of imagining how he can get the audience to sympathize with this one lame guy, supposedly a stand-in for all of the rest of us, thinking his personal transformation into a decent human being could be a road map for our own troubled lives. If only it were that easy. But the reason most are out on their asses in America is not because they are self-centered louses who drink too much, who probably deserved to get canned from their job in the first place, but decent folks who have been laid-off as it’s easier for their companies and factories to move overseas and pay a pittance than pay American workers a decent wage. But you won’t hear any of that in this movie, which all but ignores the real social problems and instead centers on a character study of a guy whose world has been turned upside down.

Films like this pretend to care about real life issues, but really what they’re doing is placing a star actor in an everyman’s role and then hope that it generates good revenue, hoping the actor gets good reviews and everybody working on the film gets to stay working in the business. That’s the Hollywood dream, where in this case the idea of taking a successful television comedian and offering him a sympathetic role as just a regular guy will allow the public to see him in a different light. In Hollywood, that’s considered going out on the edge and taking a chance. Many will get suckered into this scheme, and that’s all it is, a scheme to raise money, like a pyramid scheme or TV evangelists begging for dollars or any other, where they attempt to fool the public into donating dollars. Character studies continue to rely on the ROCKY (1976) formula, a rags to riches saga that usually shows the subject in an abject state of being down and out, usually desperate and all alone in the gutter, without a friend in the world where life is a waste, until eventually, oftentimes by pure accidental luck, fate offers them a second chance where they scratch their way back into human decency and hope to have the opportunity to do things differently next time around. Now they are better prepared, and the viewer gets to see the people who help them on their path of redemption, like an extended family, seen here as Rebecca Hall, the neighbor across the street, and Christopher Jordan Wallace (excellent, by the way), son of late rap artist Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G.) and R&B singer Faith, all of which prove the adage that “It takes a village to raise a child.” This generic formula is as old as mud, but the public is usually a sucker for it, so in Hollywood, they use it all the time, as it’s known for paying off at the box office. Sticking comedian Will Ferrell in the lead role, allowing him to play a loveable loser, a downhearted guy who can actually provide a textured, understated performance, going against type, will likely draw sympathy for his portrayal, the big lug. Hollywood has been putting guys like this onscreen since before the days of the Depression, where the audience can get a few laughs as they sympathize with the character’s plight. What they forget is that the actor is getting several million dollars for his portrayal in front of the camera, hardly deserving of the public’s sympathy, more likely their outrage.

Are famous actors, as opposed to unknowns or non-professionals, the best vehicles to deliver this kind of sentimentalized social message, one laced with so many broken American Dreams? Apparently not, as in this wealthy neighborhood, who believes Ferrell is in need of anything? In real life, he probably drives around in a Mercedes. But in Hollywood we’re asked to suspend belief and believe what’s happening onscreen. The quandary here is if it wasn’t Ferrell onscreen, no one would be watching the film, as it would be languishing on a shelf somewhere without anyone taking notice. Ferrell brings an audience, but also artificiality, as he’s a commodity spokesperson, a walking commercial for his own career, always pandering to the audience for approval. Unfortunately, this makes the movie about the famous actor playing a downhearted sot who needs another shot at life, leaving all the rest of the working stiffs who are out on their asses to fend for themselves, as this film hardly notices you, and uses your sorry plight for sympathy that is directed towards a millionaire actor instead of the real people who deserve it. That’s the ass backwards approach in Hollywood, as they suck all the money out of you so you don’t have anything left to offer to those in real need. Some people are misguided enough to think that just choosing to see a movie like this is a profound expression of their left-leaning political sympathies, as if it’s donating money for the right cause. Well it’s not. It goes right into the coffers of the Hollywood culture that invented this kind of generic entertainment mixed with a light social message. It’s a breezy way of getting people to try to take a social issue seriously. Is Will Ferrell the right spokesperson for the American economic freefall? Probably not, as his idea of comedy probably leans more toward TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN (1969).

Everything Must Go Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Trevor Johnston

Sacked after a drink-related misdemeanour, a middle-aged sales exec finds his departing wife has locked up their suburban home and left all his belongings on the lawn. In this assured adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story ‘Why Don’t You Dance’, Will Ferrell tackles a serious role as the shambling alcoholic pausing to reflect on the detritus of his life – turning his crisis into a five-day yard sale. Director Rush’s screenplay makes the encounters with friends and neighbours rather too obviously meaningful, but strikes exactly the right note of caring caution when it comes to the central role, impressively executed by an underplaying Ferrell, who’s spot-on in his portrayal of befuddled mid-life denial.

Digital Spy [Simon Reynolds]

Based on a short story by Raymond Carver, Everything Must Go casts Will Ferrell as Nicolas Halsey - an alcoholic executive who arrives home after losing his job to discover that his wife has locked him out of the house and thrown all his stuff on the lawn. Nicolas subsequently spends the next several days on the lawn trying to make sense of his life, with his efforts assisted by a number of curious neighbors and passers by. Director Dan Rush has infused Everything Must Go with an extremely low-key sensibility that's certainly reflected in the film's consistently deliberate pace, with Ferrell's personable and charismatic performance certainly proving instrumental in initially capturing the viewer's interest. Ferrell's surprisingly strong work ultimately anchors the entirety of the proceedings, and it's worth noting that the actor never shies away from portraying his character's alcoholism and sporadically mean-spirited personality. The decidedly (and unapologetically) uneventful vibe - Nicolas really does spend the majority of the proceedings on that lawn, after all - is punctuated by the presence of a few compelling stand alone interludes, with Nicolas' visit with an old high school friend (Laura Dern's Delilah) undoubtedly standing as the movie's emotional high point. Despite the meandering narrative, however, Everything Must Go does remain surprisingly watchable for the most part - with the film's only real misstep a final 15-minute stretch that ultimately feels a little needless (ie the movie reaches a point where it could logically, and satisfactorily, end, and yet it keeps chugging along). In the end, Everything Must Go is far more effective as a showcase for Ferrell's surprising and engrossing performance - as the film proves that he can be quite effective when he's not acting like an over-the-top buffoon.

Will Ferrell had us rolling in the aisles with comedies Anchorman and The Other Guys, but his latest role offers an abrupt change of speed for the former SNL star - so much so, in fact, that's he's slammed on the brakes at full force to a near-standstill. Comics looking for acting cred in drama is nothing new - Robin Williams and Jim Carrey have both had success - so with a sombre Raymond Carver short story as source material, Ferrell is making a bid to be taken seriously.

Newcomer Dan Rush writes and directs this wryly comic drama, casting Ferrell as salesman Nick Halsey, whose life takes a tailspin when he loses his job, wife and home, and lapses back into alcoholism. With his belongings turfed out of his marital home and the locks changed, Nick camps out in the yard doing little else but downing beers. His sponsor Frank (Michael Pena), neighbor Samantha (Rebecca Hall), and Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), a young boy living down the road, all offer support in various forms. Eventually, Nick is given a permit to hold a days-long outdoor sale - allowing him to stay on the yard and sort out his life. The sale becomes a metaphor, as the clearing away of possessions he shared with his wife allows him to move on.

Ferrell delivers a carefully restrained performance, bringing occasional flashes of his comic skills in his relationship with Kenny and his conniving boss Gary (Glenn Howerton). Like Ben Stiller's Greenberg, this is wilfully indie and almost too laid-back for its own good. It's incredibly lethargic and, though the central idea is a nice one, it never completely gets any emotional purchase. It's a shame, because the individual performances are solid and Ferrell clearly has dramatic chops. Somehow, though, it turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

Cinephile [Matthew Thrift]

Featuring a strong central performance from Will Ferrell, but ultimately lacking the bite of previous Raymond Carver adaptations, nominally Short Cuts (1993) and Jindabyne (2006), this is the second incarnation of the story, having already been made into the short film Everything Goes (2004) by Australian filmmaker Andrew Kotatko with Hugo Weaving and Abbie Cornish. It’s a meandering film, that whilst comfortably entertaining offers little that’s unexpected, bearing a resemblance to a neutered Bad Santa (2003) in its portrayal of alcoholic Nick Halsey, forced to live on his lawn for a week when his (unseen) wife kicks him out the house for sleeping with a colleague on a business trip, changing all the locks and dumping his furniture and belongings in the street.

Having just been fired for drinking on the job, Nick finds he has nowhere to go and so arranges his furniture as a kind of living room on his lawn, refusing to budge when the neighbours call the cops. Luckily his AA sponsor is a police detective (Michael Peña), who tells him the only way he can legally stay out there is by holding a yard sale, which he’s allowed to do for no more than five days, after which he must go. Go where, we’ve no idea, but as he takes stock of his life by itemising and pricing up his possessions to sell, he starts on the predictable road to recovery and self-discovery, helped along by local kid Kenny (Biggie Smalls’ son Christopher Jordan Wallace) and pregnant neighbour Samantha (Rebecca Hall), who take on the role of a surrogate family for Nick.

It’s certainly a tonal departure for Ferrell, offering even more of a straight role than his previous flirtations (Melinda and Melinda, Stranger Than Fiction), but his character here is somewhat overwritten, providing behavioural explanations and cod-psychological insight in place of ambiguities, particularly when explaining the (date rape?) scenario to Hall that led to his living on the lawn. We’re not invited to sympathise with him necessarily in his actions or alcoholism, but we are asked to take pity and assume that whilst he’s clearly made mistakes, he’s ultimately a good person (cringingly reiterated in a cameo from Laura Dern). It’s all very Californian in its attitude to addiction and recovery, epitomised in his relationship with Peña, and the cynic in me found the ease of his redemption and personal change of direction a far cry from that of say Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945) or Peter Mullan in My Name Is Joe (1998).

It’s a conventional film, conforming to a picture of middle-aged malaise in suburbia familiar from countless other ‘independent’ American comedy dramas and whilst the dialogue is occasionally nuanced, it’s invested with an unearned weight of delivery that thinks itself more profound and affecting than it really is. Dan Rush’s direction is flat and uninteresting, and the film feels much longer than its 96 minute running time, especially frustrating when the film continues on past its more logical conclusion. It’s very much a vehicle for Ferrell, clearly keen to show some range outside of his more zany comedic efforts, and whilst perhaps successful in that respect, offers little else to raise it out of mediocrity.

Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]

Will Ferrell is not unconvincing as your average dude. In fact, the man who once did George W. Bush better than W. himself pretty much nails it as Nick, a mid-level executive at a nondescript company with a medium-sized house and manicured lawn in a familiar enough Arizona neighborhood. Nick’s glory days as a high school baseball player, his time partying in college, and his honeymoon in Japan might as well be ancient history. Mundane real life has caught up with him, leaving Nick with an unhappy childless marriage and an alcohol addiction.

When Nick’s drinking gets him into yet another tangle while on a business trip to Denver, he’s fired and returns home early, Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy in hand, to find his wife has finally kicked him out—literally. All of Nick’s stuff has been dumped on the front lawn, and the locks have been changed. When Nick’s company car is repossessed, the family cell phone plan cancelled, and joint checking accounts frozen, he’s left with little else to do but sit on his La-Z-Boy on the front lawn and slug back beers, until a neighborhood kid finally lights a fire under him.

The slight problem with casting Ferrell is that while he’s been playing the guy next door for years, he’s been doing it as a gag. Seeing Will Ferrell in a dramatic role is like seeing him in a straightjacket. He’s very skilled and surprisingly disciplined, as an actor, but I for one find it almost disconcerting when he doesn’t swing for the fences at every comic opportunity. Though he adds some mileage to an otherwise quite average character, it really becomes a film about Will Ferrell trying not to be funny.

Basing his screenplay on a Raymond Carver short story, director Dan Rush misses some things, though this setup is so ripe with potential. Rush puts us face to face with a guy who’s been cut off completely from suburbia. No cell, no car, no credit. The only piece of the suburban-consumerist pie he has left is the proverbial front lawn. But Rush blows it, completely unaware of how truly meaningful it is to be stripped of these material things we as an audience so take for granted. Nick quickly finds workarounds, and by the second act, the rote story takes center stage. The fact that Nick is actually living on his lawn is almost superfluous. What a missed opportunity, and in socially regressive Arizona no less—the Stepford State, as a recent transplant friend of mine calls it, for its lopsided attention to cosmetic materialism.

Rereading the story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” I’m amazed a film this far removed from the spirit of its source material can still claim to be an adaptation. Carver was one of the sharpest purveyors of irony, and it’s with irony that Rush could have a shaped a real gem of a film. Carver’s vibe is invoked once when Nick upsets his new neighbor, Samantha (Rebecca Hall), belligerently describing to her how pathetic and average her life is. It’s a scene the writer would have been proud of, yet it’s one of the few. Instead, too much time is spent on clichés, like the developing friendship between Nick and Kenny (newcomer Christopher Jordan Wallace), the kid who eventually gives some needed life perspective by stating the film’s obvious themes with childlike innocence.

Between Ferrell’s battle with typecasting, Rush’s missed opportunity to really explore the pervasive irony of suburbia, and the atrocious plotline involving the kid, there’s actually a story worth watching in here somewhere. The one or two redeeming scenes certainly keep it relevant, and even if Ferrell is unable to crack jokes, he’s still very effective. I was on board several times when it appeared this would turn into a more remarkable film, but alas, in the end it’s about as unremarkable as the bland residential street on which it takes place.

Everything Must Go reviewed: Does Will Ferrell have a Bill ... - Slate Dana Stevens

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Everything Must Go Review | I Guess It's 'Cause You Run ... - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

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Fledgling Filmmaker Casts Against Type Jonah Weiner interviews Farrell from The New York Times, May 6, 2011, also seen here: NYT: director interview

Russell, David O.

THREE KINGS C+ 79

USA Australia (115 mi) 1999 ‘Scope

An odd, irreverent war movie that feels like it could have been a Coen Brothers project, which actually begins after the First Gulf War has been declared over and is set in a humorous, distinctly absurdist tone, where the highly expressive “Scope imagery is awash in endless desert landscapes and bleached out colors. Guys are wrapping up their duties before being shipped back home, and inadvertently stumble upon an opportunity. Finding a detailed map hidden on a captured POW, it appears to lead to the hiding place of Saddam Hussein’s stolen gold bullions from Kuwait. A couple of soldiers start to get ideas, the steady as a rock Mark Wahlberg, the never crack a smile Ice Cube, and the crazy as a loon Spike Jonze, who can’t keep his mouth shut under any circumstances. While they’re perusing the map, in walks Special Forces operative George Clooney, a wise ass who wants in on the deal. First thing the next morning, these wizards of war figured they’d have the whole thing wrapped up by noon and they’d all be set financially for life.

Based on the conditions of peace, these guys figured they’d be left alone by Saddam’s men, as Americans are on their way out of Iraq, while Saddam has designs on quickly punishing his enemies in order to shore up his power base. These Three Kings (yes there’s four, but who’s counting?) find an underground bunker that is hiding a huge stockpile of black market goods, which they find tempting, but it’s not what they’re looking for. Halfway to their next destination, Clooney realizes they’ve been bamboozled, so they turn around and try again. This time, the circumstances are almost too unreal, as Saddam’s men not only show them the gold, but help them pack it into a van. As they are about to leave, they find it troubling to witness acts of torture occurring in plain view on the street. Clooney decides to be a hero and stand up for the downtrodden, yet it only leads them deeper into a moral crevasse that appears neverending.

Basically, all hell breaks loose after the Iraqi’s shoot what appear to be deadly poisonous gas in the direction of their escape, causing them to swerve off the road and hit a land mine, exploding their vehicle. Men in alien-looking gas masks and jumpsuits fill the screen in a cloud of mist. A couple of them seem to kidnap Wahlberg, while the others escape to safety in an underground safe house. Wahlberg is taken to an undisclosed location and tortured, which is actually a highly personalized reflection on just what the Americans are doing in Iraq, bringing it up close and personal. Meanwhile, Clooney makes a deal to share the gold with about 50 refugees who demand safe passage to the Iranian border. Much of this actually looks like an Indiana Jones adventure story, but there’s plenty of suspense as the refugees agree to help the Three Kings rescue Wahlberg, who is now protected by plenty of Republican Guard troops, more than they can overpower. So they have to devise a plan that mixes hilarity with action, including gigantic Hollywood explosions, quick-witted humor, and the reality of death staring them in the face along with the debris strewn along the wayside that reflect the consequences of war. Someone actually asked me afterwards if this was based on a true story, so there was enough spare realism interspersed through the black comedy and bleak absurdity of war to remind viewers that there were serious questions to consider, most of which never get any honest answers.

The Sheila Variations [Sheila O'Malley]

After creating a Freudian black comedy with Spanking The Monkey and reviving screwball in Flirting With Disaster, David O. Russell has reinvented himself yet again. Three Kings, his latest, marks his arrival as the creator of subversive mainstream genre films; even if, given his track record, it's not a label he's likely to keep for long, he wears it well. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze star as U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq just after the end of the Gulf War. A prisoner's map puts them on the trail of a fortune in gold stolen from Kuwait, and soon takes them to a small village where they believe it to be hidden. There, against the better judgement of some, they find themselves involved with villagers eager to rebel against Saddam Hussein. Working from a story by novelist John Ridley, writer-director Russell has created an exciting, politically charged adventure movie that combines the dark, fringes-of-war atmosphere of Apocalypse Now with elements more familiar to films in which Americans tote guns. Using action sequences sparingly, and thus effectively, Russell creates a palpable sense of danger. Consequently, it's never clear where Three Kings is going, and where it does go is often uncharted territory for action movies, as the protagonists find themselves encountering characters on both sides of the Gulf conflict who cause them to question their perceptions of the war itself and American foreign policy in general. A refreshingly smart, universally well-acted film with sharp humor (even if the latter creates some jarring shifts in tone), Three Kings, like The Matrix, is everything mainstream Hollywood films can be but usually aren't: formula-breaking, thoughtful, subversive, exciting, and risky.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Three Kings (1999) John Wrathall from Sight and Sound, March 2000

Iraq, March 1991. The Gulf War has just ended. US soldiers Troy Barlow and Conrad Vig find a map of the bunkers behind Iraqi lines where Saddam Hussein has hidden gold bullion looted from Kuwait. After getting wind of the story, Major Archie Gates convinces them, along with their staff sergeant Chief Elgin, to help him steal the gold. The four soldiers locate the bullion in a bunker concealed beneath a village well. Saddam's soldiers make no attempt to stop them because they are busy suppressing local rebels. Reluctant to abandon them to their fate, the Americans decide to take the villagers with them, even though it's against official US policy.

As they are leaving the village, they are gassed by Iraqi Republican Guards. Troy is captured and tortured. Gates, Conrad and Chief are rescued by rebels. In return for a share of the gold and an escort to the Iranian border, the rebels help to rescue Troy, but Conrad is shot dead by a sniper. Fulfilling their part of the bargain, Gates, Troy and Chief escort the rebels to the Iranian border, only to be arrested by Gates' superior Colonel Horn for acting against US policy. As a result, Iraqi border guards are able to recapture the rebels. But Gates convinces Horn to secure the rebels' safe passage into Iran; in return, Gates, Troy and Chief agree to give back the gold.

Review

A big-budget war movie starring George Clooney might seem like a huge departure for the writer-director of two intimate, subversively comic dissections of family life, Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster. But from the opening minute of Three Kings, it's clear that David O. Russell's idiosyncratic vision has survived the transition unscathed. Spotting an armed Iraqi in the desert just after the Gulf War ceasefire, and unsure exactly what their orders are, Sergeant Troy Barlow asks his comrades: "Are we shooting?" But instead of giving him a clipped affirmative or negative, they misunderstand him, launching into a cross-purposes riff on possible meanings of the phrase. As the atrocities pile up, Russell's dialogue never loses this screwball edge - not even in the torture scene, where the Iraqi interrogator Captain Said batters Troy into admitting how screwed-up US society must be to have forced Michael Jackson to have plastic surgery in order to look white.

The film's visual touches are correspondingly bizarre, not least the full-colour close-ups inside a body to demonstrate the damage bullets do to internal organs. But the film's surrealism, whether showing desert bunkers piled with looted consumer goods or towers of flame reflected in lakes of spilled oil, seems less a flip stylistic decision on Russell's part than a direct and honest response to the extraordinary conditions of the war itself.

Russell never lets his quirky asides get in the way of a streamlined and classically structured Hollywood action-movie plot. The story itself, for instance, isn't all that far removed from the Clint Eastwood vehicle Kelly's Heroes (1970). The satirical tone, meanwhile, owes more to a very different Hollywood war movie of that era, Robert Altman's MASH (1969). Russell may share Altman's irreverence and cynicism but, unlike Altman, he never lets go of his humanity. Everyone in this war has their reasons, even the torturer Said, who is given a moving speech (powerfully delivered by the French-Moroccan actor Saïd Taghmaoui) about the slaughter of his child by American bombs.

Beyond the hip comedy and slick, action-driven narrative, Russell also offers a serious indictment of the conduct of the war, not least the way George Bush encouraged the Iraqi population to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and then refused to go to their support. In venturing into Iraq, Gates and his team are motivated purely by greed; that they end up doing any good is entirely by accident - and only by going directly against official US policy.

What lingers in the mind far longer than the smart dialogue, the slightly cartoon characterisations or the neat feel-good ending is a vivid sense of the sickening nature of modern warfare: poison gas, land-mines, cluster bombs, chemical pollution, torture chambers and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, among other things. But these horrors, to Russell's credit, are conveyed with a minimum of sanctimonious outrage. Among the rebels rescued by Gates is a little girl. Both her arms are in plaster, but Russell never directs our attention to this detail, nor stops to explain it. How her arms were broken is left to our imagination.

Slate [David Edelstein]

"Are we shooting?" calls a boyish American soldier (Mark Wahlberg) to distant buddies at the start of Three Kings. He stands in a flat, whitish Iraqi desert dotted with mounds. On top of one, far away, an Iraqi waves a rifle and some kind of cloth. Is he taunting the American? Appealing to him? Is he surrendering or on the verge of opening fire? Hard to tell: The light is too glaring; the man's frantic gestures too alien. A title has informed us that it's 1991, that the cease-fire with Iraq has just become official. "Are we still shooting people or what?" the soldier calls again. In the absence of a clear answer--of a clear anything--he raises his rifle and shoots. The soldiers reach the Iraqi as he's hemorrhaging, a look of wonder in his dying eyes. "You shot yourself a raghead!" whoops one, but the American who fired--identified by an on-screen title as U.S. Army Sgt. Troy Barlow--recoils from his handiwork. The war is over and Barlow has just killed his first man.

That scene is like a mini Beckett farce with a cruel jet of gore for a punch line. Barlow is shooting at people he doesn't know and can barely see for reasons that are never apparent in a place that's as foreign as the surface of the moon. All that's finally real is the blood. From this brilliant overture, it's obvious that the writer-director, David O. Russell, wants to break down your defenses against cinema's violent imagery: He's juxtaposing farce and atrocity in ways that few American directors have dared. And he's not stinting on the carnage, either. The movie's most talked-about close-up shows the track of a bullet as it enters a body, plowing its way through tissue and into a liver, which releases blackish bile. (Reportedly, Russell had bullets fired into a cadaver.) No wound, the director is saying (screaming, in effect), should ever be taken for granted.

It helps that Russell is fueled by genuine outrage at that most jumbled and arm's length of wars: the one that pretended to be about the "liberation of the people of Kuwait"; the one that ended up (once the oil wells were recaptured) rebounding on Iraqis who'd been convinced by President Bush to take up arms against Saddam Hussein. As the protagonist, Special Forces Capt. Archie Gates (a hard, brooding George Clooney) declares in his first scene, "I don't even know what we did here." Cynical and disgusted, Gates gets wind (so to speak) of a wild discovery: a map lodged in the rear end of an Iraqi prisoner that shows what appear to be bunkers holding loot plundered from Kuwait. Announcing that he has no moral problem stealing from Saddam what Saddam has stolen from the sheiks, he joins with Barlow, Barlow's buddy Vig (skinny Spike Jonze, director of the upcoming Being John Malkovich), a game but witless redneck, and the resourceful Chief (Ice Cube) in search of the motherlode. Millions of dollars worth of gold bullion, Gates says, can be loaded into their Humvee without firing a shot, and they'll be back at camp before lunch.

At this juncture, Three Kings seems poised to turn into a relatively straightforward genre piece--a perverse "caper" movie with a touch of Gunga Din (1939). But the surreal setting hints at dissonances, disturbing incongruities. The white light scorches every surface--it seems to be eating into people. Details of the natural world are bleached out, but artificial colors--such as the pink and green footballs the soldiers pack with explosives and lob from their speeding vehicle for sport--leap out of the screen like radioactive Christmas baubles. The action comes in jarring spasms. A cow is blown up during an exercise, and the Americans are showered with bloody chunks of beef--a harbinger of the insane slaughter to come. When Gates and company reach the village where the gold is supposed to be stashed, the Iraqi people think they're being liberated and rejoice, pushing their babies on the "United States of Freedom." They can't understand why the Americans aren't chasing away Saddam's soldiers, whose mission, in light of the cease-fire, has shifted from fighting the American-led alliance to ruthlessly suppressing all signs of Iraqi rebellion.

The weird juxtapositions in these scenes are the movie's soul. Inside a bunker, a soldier uses a NordicTrack in front of a television just down the corridor from a torture chamber. Piles of cell phones, Cuisinarts, blue jeans, and gold watches sit side by side with weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi soldiers turn machine guns on a truck that's heading for the village, riddling its driver with bullets. When it skids into a building and overturns it doesn't explode: Its tanks are full of milk for the starving people. Gates and his men have gone beyond the computer simulations and the TV cameras. As Russell has said, they've "fallen down a rabbit hole" into a place where nothing makes sense. It's the same twilight zone that Steven Spielberg attempted to capture in Saving Private Ryan (1998). But Ryan, set in World War II, ultimately lacked Three Kings' sense of moral chaos.

Three Kings lacks something, too, but only because its imagery is so ferociously original that Russell can't quite find a structure worthy of it. All at once, the movie becomes a "conversion" melodrama--the kind in which an amoral, Bogartish protagonist is unable to ignore injustice and so throws in his lot with the oppressed. It's a winning formula, but a formula all the same. Whereas the opening manages to be shocking and ironic at once, the picture's turning point is crudely manipulative. (Don't read this if you want to be surprised--but I do recommend you read this, because it's not a good surprise.) A wife leaves her little daughter and howls for Saddam's men to free her husband; a soldier pulls her away, holds a gun to her head and then, in full view of her spouse and child, blows her brains out; and the little girl throws herself on top of her mother shrieking, "Yuma! Yuma!" while the woman's blood gushes into the sand. This shocking act recalls the climax of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), in which a prisoner is executed with similar defiance, and Russell builds to the same wordless exchange among the protagonists: Those manly looks that say, "We're outnumbered and outgunned. We could leave now with our money. But if we do, we'll never be able to live as men again." But the victim in The Wild Bunch was morally compromised: He'd shot people himself for no good reason. And he didn't have a wide-eyed little girl bearing witness to his murder.

No doubt Russell would justify the starkness of the mother's killing by saying you can't make a movie about the obscenity of violence without showing something so obscene that it scalds us. I don't quarrel with his intentions. But after that sequence, a part of me shut down. Where do you go from something like that? To more horrible killings? To more absurdist comedy? The climax--in which Gates and the others decide to escort a horde of noble Iraqis (men, women, children, the elderly) to the border and are predictably converged upon by Saddam's men, unfriendly American troops, and a CNN reporter (Nora Dunn)--isn't bad; it just feels cheap compared to what has preceded it. In Time, Richard Schickel calls the genre structure a pretext for a "surreal essay" on the Gulf War, and he might be right. And it's also true that a studio such as Warner Bros. would never have spent $50 million on a film that didn't have a conventionally rabble-rousing outline and an upbeat finish. But I think those conventions diminish the movie. If I'm holding Russell to the highest standards imaginable, it's only because his vision is that powerful.

It's also possible that Russell is too sadistic by temperament to make a fully convincing anti-war film. He's out to blast us. He wants to punish the characters--and the audience--for their ignorance. At the time of the Gulf War, a study showed that a majority of heavy CNN viewers (people who watched seven hours a day) who supported the action believed that Kuwait was a democracy, and the soldiers here are portrayed in a similar state of gung-ho naiveté. One of the film's most outlandish (and effective) scenes is the torture of Barlow by an Iraqi officer (Saïd Taghmaoui) who wants to "educate" him. The session begins with a bizarre dialogue about Michael Jackson--an African-American superstar who in the Iraqi officer's view was driven by bigotry to whiten his face and straighten his hair--and winds up with the Iraqi pouring oil down Barlow's throat in a brutal effort to drive home the war's real aim.

We hate and fear the Iraqi, but when he tells Barlow that he lost his 1-year-old son to an American bomb, Russell cuts to a shot of the child in its crib as the ceiling caves in. When he asks how Barlow would feel if his wife and daughter were similarly killed, Russell cuts to a shot of the mother and child as the walls explode around them. The connections among enemy soldiers have rarely been made so palpable--or jocular. An Iraqi officer trying to escape from the smoke-filled bunker with a huge pile of blue jeans isn't so different from the Americans lugging bullion in Louis Vuitton bags. And both sides share a reverence for Infiniti convertibles and Rolexes. Three Kings is not the first anti-war movie in which opposing soldiers have recognized themselves in one another before pulling the trigger, but it might be the first to make the point in a way that has nothing to do with liberal humanism. The movie takes the view of a mordant social scientist who recognizes that consumerism has become the true world religion.

Russell's first two films, Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996), were much smaller in scale, but both were products of the same angry sensibility. In the latter, the director used farce not to lighten the drama but to darken it, so that the slapstick debacles seemed to spring from the hero's roiling unconscious. In Three Kings, those debacles spring from the blind desires of nations--from the collective unconscious. A war movie that opens the instant the war has ended, Three Kings is among the most pitiless autopsies ever filmed.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Burn, Blast, Bomb, Cut J. Hoberman from Sight and Sound, February 2000

Three Kings : neocolonial Arab representation Lila Kitaeff from Jump Cut, Summer 2003

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, by Jack G. Shaheen, book review by Christian Blauvelt from Jump Cut, Spring 2008

Latino and the Chicano warrior in the U.S. national body Barbara Korte from Jump Cut, Spring 2008

culturevulture.net Tom Block

“Three Kings” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir

Three Kings - TCM.com Jay Carr

Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin]

Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]

Images Movie Journal [Gary Johnson]

filmcritic.com crowns Three Kings Athan Bezaitis

Film Intuition [Jen Johans]

EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray

Epinions.com [Bill Chambers]

Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

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Crazy for Cinema

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Plume-Noire.com Review Fred Thom

Movie Reviews UK Michael S. Goldberger

Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]

Needcoffee.com - Movie Review Widge

Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell

Variety.com [Todd McCarthy]

BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Halflidason

San Francisco Examiner [Wesley Morris]

Tucson Weekly [James DiGiovanna]

I ♥ HUCKABEES C 71

USA (105 mi) 2004

An authentic disaster, despite using some of the best actors on the planet, all of whom give only glimpses of character, like a continually revolving door, this feels like a completely empty, vacuous experience, the kind of film that ends up giving you a headache, filling you up with an overwhelming, never-ending assault of wordy pomposity mixed with comic book images that just goes nowhere. How this script ever got approved, I have no idea. While the premise sounds amusing enough, a young man who seeks the help of existential detectives (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to sort out the missing gaps in his day-to-day reality, but the detectives take on the role of being the over-controlling thought police, snooping around windows, bugging conversations, even emptying garbage cans in pursuit of clues, challenging every theory or mystification about discovering the meaning of life, nurturing their clients back to the helpless void where they started, so what have we learned? Along the way, they even have a rival detective, played by none other than Isabelle Huppert, a real life existentialist whose business card reads: “cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness.” The film is a series of comedy skits all strung together, none of which are really very funny, but it maintains a tone of absurdity throughout the entire ordeal, so while it’s an attempt at screwball comedy, it’s really much more of a high-brow experience of the ridiculous. Mark Wahlberg is funny as a would-be serious fireman, with an obsession about petroleum, who never takes his boots off. Jon Brion’s musical score is breezy and lightweight, not offering much in the way of anything new.

I ♥ Huckabees Not so, according to Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack

Unlike the excruciating Waking Life, Huckabees has the decency to be intelligent without taking its cosmic pronouncements seriously. In fact, the film is so determinedly goofy that at times I bristled at its whimsy. As a humorless academic leftist, I expect the problems of Big Oil, suburban sprawl, and eco-friendly corporate posturing to be treated with the appropriate reverence, so Russell's calling-forth of these issues in order to deflate do-gooder self-righteousness was a welcome punch in the face. And yet, where does the film end up? After showing the havoc wreaked in individual lives when progressive action and personal identity get all mixed up, Huckabees winds down in vaguely circle-of-life mode, hinting (like the old AA slogan) that analysis may in fact be paralysis. But isn't it analysis, in the form of social theory, that allows us to not get conned by the Brad Stands of the world? What's more, painting Brad's pretty-boy corporate maximizing as the pitiful crying-on-the-inside of a scared little boy just won't cut it. Nevertheless, Russell's film succeeds because it does the seemingly impossible -- it treats heavy social and philosophical issues with a light touch. Rather than providing answers, it's content to "stir the pot," and to give a silly but respectful platform to some secular cosmologies that can certainly use the airtime. Also, let's not forget that according to a preview article in Variety, Huckabees was yet another film offered to the Competition slate at Cannes 2004 and rejected. Apparently Fremaux prefers farting green ogres. Sidenote: After struggling lo these many years to explain dialectics, and the whole "everything is different forms of energy in continuous motion" thing, now I can just show the floating-particles clip.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: I Heart Huckabees (2004) Ben Walters from Sight and Sound, December 2004

David O. Russell's all-star I Heart Huckabees mines corporate culture and existential neuroses for screwball laughs

In David O. Russell's second film Flirting with Disaster (1996) Téa Leoni's Tina - the adoption researcher mismanaging entomologist Mel Coplin's reunion with his birth parents - observes that: "No matter where we are in our lives, we can't help but feel that there's something missing; that there's something out there that's going to make us feel complete, give us a sense of belonging, connectedness if you will."

"This woman," Mel's adoptive mother replies, "strikes me as being very dangerous."

Identity, belonging and their attendant neuroses have been at the heart of all Russell's pictures, but his latest explicitly brings such concerns to the fore: I Heart Huckabees is surely the first Fox film marketed with the tagline "An Existential Comedy". Revisiting and developing these themes through a formal playfulness and self-referential narrative reminiscent of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, Huckabees pays equal attention to the corresponding anxieties - so tartly expressed by Mrs Coplin above - about disrupting the apple-cart of the unexamined life.

Following a coincidental triple encounter with a lanky Sudanese refugee, environmental activist Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) recruits "existential detectives" Vivian and Bernard Jaffe (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) to unravel the fluke. The precise ins and outs of what existential detective work involves are kept deliberately vague: like two philosophy professors squatting in a sleek corporate law firm, the bookish Jaffes have a select band of clients who seem to learn of their services through the discreet business cards they leave in public places.

The investigation of Albert's case turns out to require surveillance of every aspect of his life, from bathroom procedures to his vexed professional relationship with Brad Stand (Jude Law), a slick young exec with retail chain Huckabees who is exploiting Albert's environmental pressure group Open Spaces Coalition to improve the store's image (and advance up the corporate ladder). To unsettle Albert even further, Brad submits to investigation by the Jaffes too. It's a process - as explained by Bernard - that encourages its subjects to dismantle their personality and accept that "everything is connected and everything matters". Also affected by their probing is Brad's trophy girlfriend and Huckabees spokesmodel Dawn (Naomi Watts). Meanwhile another of their clients - disillusioned firefighter Tommy (Mark Wahlberg) - is drawn to the rival teachings of French nihilist Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert).

Like Mel in Flirting with Disaster and Ray in Russell's first feature Spanking the Monkey (1994), Albert is an intense, ambitious young intellectual (wearing a rumpled suit, he cycles from location to location carrying notebooks of his self-penned poetry) stymied by family circumstance. Incest was the strongest element in Spanking's constellation of domestic dysfunction, while Flirting with Disaster made genetics the root of an existential crisis. In Huckabees Albert's parents are a classically neurotic, bickering Jewish couple, and in a scene typical of Russell's screwball approach to psychoanalytical trauma Vauban blames Albert's insecurities on his mother's distance; that Schwartzman's own mother Talia Shire plays Albert's mom adds an extra frisson to her questionable defence ("I gave my life to this selfish bastard").

Leaving the inadequacies of their families behind, Huckabees' characters attempt to construct an identity by other means: Albert has his nature-loving poetry ("you rock, rock") and a penchant for planting stills of himself in photographic archives; Brad specialises in self-aggrandising anecdote (anodyne tales of celebrities who have endorsed the Huckabees brand). Work is central to all four leads' sense of self, and professional crisis the defining factor in their breakdowns: it is Albert's ejection from his coalition that tips him into despair, while the careerist Brad throws up when asked to deliver his trademark anecdote - an excruciatingly dull titbit about country singer Shania Twain - to the Huckabees board. To the store's consternation, Dawn shifts from perky spokesmodel to dowdy "Amish bag lady" while Tommy turns his hose on his crewmates and bemoans their truck's gasoline consumption ("I'm not a hero - but we'd all be heroes if we stopped using petroleum").

As with Russell's other films, Huckabees moves its audience from initial bafflement to a broader apprehension of a situation rife with complexity. The Gulf War satire Three Kings (1999) fits this mould as much as Russell's family comedies: that film's opening confusion ("Are we shooting? I don't know the answer, that's what I'm trying to find out") is echoed in Albert's obscene interior monologue which overlays the opening birdsong ("Motherfucking cocksucker motherfucking shit-fucker. What am I doing? I don't know what I'm supposed to do any more. Fucker. Fuck! Shit!"). Russell's process involves unpicking his characters' motivations on their own terms, so even as obnoxious a figure as Brad can be sympathetically interrogated without our being asked to like him. (Dawn's transformation, however, is a little less convincing.)

Most impressively realised is Mark Wahlberg's Tommy, whose affecting combination of sincere concern and infantile aggression often appears in the same scene: moments after explaining sweatshops to his daughter with a pained frown he's decking someone who refers to Bernard as his therapist. In a stand-out set-piece dinner-table showdown with Sudanese refugee Stephen's adoptive family Tommy rapidly progresses from debating geopolitics to lobbing bread rolls.

The Jaffes too are rather sweet: Hoffman's Bernard is sagely rumpled with scarecrow hair; Tomlin's Vivian is slickly dressed in black but a little fuzzy round the edges. Their scatty warmth contrasts nicely with the icy nihilism of Huppert's Vauban: where the Jaffes' card promises "crisis investigation and resolution", Vauban's offers "cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness"; where she is unobtrusively feline in her surveillance techniques, Vivian is ridiculously blatant.

Yet in other ways Vauban stands for disorder while her rivals aim for clarity. The Jaffes' visual motif is a field of interlocking rectangles, first glimpsed on a blackboard then echoed in the digital segmentation of the screen into the interconnected blocks of which, Bernard maintains, reality is composed. Vauban, on the other hand, embraces pain and mess: the bruising woodland quickie she shares with Albert is surely the dirtiest sex scene of recent years, as, having smeared mud across one another's bodies, they couple with her lying sprawled face down across a log, dangling stilettos quivering in time to his thrusts. There's a transgressive thrill in watching Huppert, an actress best known for bourgeois refinement, rolling in a muddy puddle - or in hearing Tippi Hedren use the F-word - that chimes with Huckabees' theme of the redefinition of character (echoed by the strategy of casting archetypal supermom Mary Tyler Moore as the squawking Mrs Coplin in Flirting with Disaster).

Bernard's notion of free-floating conceptual segments becomes part of a formal approach that builds on Three Kings' glimpses of imagined scenes. Most obvious here are the images of Albert's thought processes as, zipped into a body-bag to reduce sensory stimuli, his attempts to clear his mind give way to violent and disturbing fantasies. Relaxation techniques involving characters sitting in trees prove similarly unconstructive, while the vision of a Madonna-like Brad as the infant Albert's lactating mother is hard to dislodge. The production design by K.K. Barrett (who worked on Being John Malkovich, Human Nature and Adaptation.) includes an Escher-like maze of corridors and quirky office spaces that would suit a Kaufman screenplay - a resemblance strengthened by such wacky touches as a Spanish crone brought in to chant to the Jaffes' clients about poverty as "a kind of spiritual petit-four" or a cantaloupe left on a desk for no reason.

Russell shares Kaufman's attention to the banal ("If we see you floss or masturbate," Vivian tells Albert, "that might be the key to your entire identity"), and like Adaptation. this is a story that comments on its own unfolding. Jon Brion's score - an eerie synth fairground suite in waltz time - adds to the atmosphere of self-conscious reflexivity, as do jokes about the impenetrability of the central conceit: "You can't deal with my infinite nature, can you?" Dawn bleats. "That is so unfair!" Brad gasps. "Wait, what does that even mean?"

That Huckabees never answers this question is perhaps unsurprising: as with Bernard's free-floating segments, which crash to the floor on interruption, the film's pleasures are somewhat transitory, its mild cartoonism never challenged by the ethical jolts of Three Kings. Despite references to "the big September thing" and Vauban's assertion to Albert that where the Sudanese Stephen "was orphaned by civil war, you were orphaned by indifference", the links between the characters' crises and broader socio-political concerns are unclear. Meanwhile the investigators' rival philosophies can't presume to offer revelatory insights into being and nothingness. That the characters are more contented among the detritus of the apple cart might be enough - as Tomlin's character Mary blithely advises in Flirting With Disaster : "Identity is nothing but a construct. You mustn't fixate on it."

“Hearts and Minds: A screwball comedy about philosophical crisis, I ♥ Huckabees provides a featherlight crash course in weighty matters.” Gavin Smith from Film Comment, September/October 2004

"What's the most important thing in life?" That is the question Special Forces Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) poses, out of the blue, at a pivotal moment in David O. Russell's 1999 film Three Kings, his absurdist take on the aftermath of Desert Storm. This man-of-action's answer? "Necessity."

Five years, two wars, and one national catastrophe later, the same question, more or less, provides the basis of Russell's extraordinary and truly delightful new comic panorama, the improbably titled and unfashionably Heartfelt I ♥ Huckabees. But this time there is no one-word answer.

Russell's protagonist is Albert (Jason Schwartzman), a frustrated activist-poet and the founder of Open Spaces, a coalition dedicated to curbing suburban sprawl. Troubled by three chance encounters with an "African guy," Albert hires a pair of "existential investigators," Vivian Jaffe (Lily Tomlin) and her husband, Bernard (Dustin Hoffman), in order to get to the bottom of this apparently random chain of events. Husband and wife work opposite ends of the case: while Vivian investigates Albert's day-to-day routine, Bernard sets about breaking down his conception of reality, uncovering the fear and loathing that rage within Albert's psyche and showing him how to accept the interconnectedness of existence.

Albert's nemesis is golden boy Brad Stand (Jude Law in a remarkable performance), a smooth, charming sales exec at Huckabees, "the everything store"- think Wal-Mart with a breezy pop-culture makeover. The happy-face personification of corporate control and conquest, Brad is in the process of co-opting Albert's coalition to further promote the Huckabees brand. Brad and his girlfriend, Dawn (Naomi Watts), who, as "Miss Huckabees," serves as the company's national spokesmodel, are the perfect wasp couple - a living advertisement for inauthenticity as a way of life.

As part of his "dismantling," Albert is assigned his own personal "other" - the belligerent, dysfunctional fireman Tommy Corn (Mark Wahlberg), who is consumed with an obsessive belief that the petroleum industry is the root of all the world's ills. Meanwhile, the Jaffes face a nemesis of their own in Caterine Vaubert (Isabelle Huppert), "France's dark lady of philosophy." She stalks Albert and Tommy in an effort to make them defect to her nihilistic credo, according to which "universal truth is cruelty, manipulation, and meaninglessness."

With conceit piled on conceit, I ♥ Huckabees may sound a bit silly - but so did Being John Malkovich. Indeed, Russell's film, like Three Kings before it, is unavoidably part of the millennial reality-upending zeitgeist that has given us The Matrix and the collected works of Charlie Kaufman. Moreover, you could read I ♥ Huckabees as a Zen-influenced response to the ironic nihilism of Fight Club, another reality-warping meditation on materialist discontent and psychic anomie. Perhaps Huckabees could be more profitably likened to both Alain Resnais's great 1981 film, Mon oncle d'Amérique, and Richard Linklater's life-is-a-dream masterpiece Waking Life.

More deeply idiosyncratic, more subversive, and yet more sweetly beguiling than any of the director's previous films, I ♥ Huckabees constructs a sui generis film of ideas, building on the anti-naturalistic tendencies of Three Kings with its sporadic suspensions of narrative, subjective visualizations, and surreal incongruities. Along the way it takes aim at materialism, celebrity worship, the dominance of corporate culture, and the denial-riddled inauthenticity of modern identity. Nothing if not ambitious, Russell handles everything with the lightest of touches and a sense of unexpected joy, greatly aided by Jon Brion's lilting, buoyant score. Lowdown slapstick meets genuine angst, while satiric jabs collide with deep thoughts and playful profundity as Russell plays multiple personal/philosophical viewpoints against each other until his game ends in a mutually agreeable tie.

I ♥ Huckabees is a rarity - a tremendously optimistic film for a truly dark time. It should make you laugh, and it might just make you cry. And if you've always wanted to understand the dynamic between "pure being" and "the drama of human suffering," or fathom what happens in a meadow at dusk, this is the movie for you.

Online Exclusive: David O. Russell interview - Film Comment Gavin Smith interview from Film Comment, September/October 2004

A SELECTION OF EXCLUSIVE OUTTAKES FROM GAVIN SMITH'S INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR OF I ♥ HUCKABEES.

Selling the concept
The only person I had to pitch it to was Lorenzo di Bonaventura at Warner Bros. I said it's about these existential detectives who people hire to investigate their lives and the nature of reality, and it's going to be a comedy. So I wrote that, and then Lorenzo left Warner Bros. after a very famous altercation, and I was there with all these people that hated him and didn't want to do anything that had his stink on it, and I didn't know them. Then suddenly I was shopping this thing all over town. Scott Rudin came in and said, "I'll give this to [Paramount president] Sherry Lansing but she won't get it at all, even though she had said she'd like to have a film like The Royal Tenenbaums or in this direction." A lot of people were like that with Three Kings too, they're like, "I don't get it. I don't understand what you're doing here." And then afterwards some of those same people said, "Oh, now I completely get it."

Anyway, I wrote this comedy about that, its working title was Zendo. I owed something to Miramax, and I asked them to work with Lorenzo because I liked him - he helped me with Three Kings. I thought this way I'll take care of the Miramax obligation and I'll have the best of both worlds: Warners for production and Miramax for marketing. Warners hasn't a clue how to market a film like that and Miramax can be a little pesky in production. And because he's such a good friend and facilitator, he said, "Okay, want to do another one? We'll roll the costs into the next picture." So I said I'd write this other one, let me think about it.

Huckabees' roots
In a certain way it goes back to Flirting with Disaster, in that [the main character is] investigating his identity. They get to be detectives, and Tea Leoni gets to be [Ben Stiller's character's] detective. Also, [the films are similar] in terms of a bunch of people just talking in a familiar environment. I am trying to take ideas and marry them into a character and narrative world, and not be didactic and simplistic. One of the intentions of Three Kings was to have this dynamic tension between all these questions. Soldiers seem to have won a war but they find they don't know anything about the situation. So again it's having the rug pulled out from under your feet, and saying, Let's inquire deeper. So it's going after ideas and having feelings and ideas side by side, and also having some fun with it. I couldn't have handled it 10 years ago. There are things you gotta keep private and then you wonder as you become a public person if this stuff will ever become part of your work. There's something liberating about it.

The meaning of Three Kings
The most boring part of Three Kings to me is the heist and the gold. When I was doing marketing, I said the gold is the McGuffin. And the guy who had just come from McDonald's to run marketing didn't know what a McGuffin is. And I looked at him, and I said, "You don't know what a McGuffin is, do you? But you know what a McMuffin is." I couldn't resist. The main characters in Three Kings just want to go and get the gold and leave - and the mission of the first Gulf war was a little like that: we're going to go and set everything properly, and leave. Set properly for our extraction of oil. Well, what about these people? Now you're going to walk away and leave that? I couldn't believe no one had made a film about that.

Personal life seeps in
The things I care most about were put into this movie. On Three Kings, I would just want to sit in my trailer and watch Rushmore and stay in that world, but I'd have to walk outside and be in the desert with 200 Arab extras and guns and military shit. This film is a world that I love to be in, it was like a graduate course for me. I was consciously thinking, How do I think about these questions? And suddenly the blanket came to me and I said, We'll put that in the film - something that served the movie yet also served my understanding of these things. It was a part of my own meditation or reflection, struggling and grappling with this Rubik's cube, and I gave it to Dustin [Hoffman] as a late addition because I thought it made it so clear. At one point I had Dustin's character take out a paddle and a Ping-Pong ball and start hitting it back and forth while they were talking so that they stopped thinking - which actually became more the Isabelle Huppert character's domain.

Character relationships between Bernard and Vivian and Caterine
In the end Albert [Jason Schwartman] accuses them of working in concert, although they deny it. I went back and forth on whether that should be true or not. In a way it doesn't matter. I had a long backstory with them that got cut out - it was a whole other movie in a way. Caterine [Isabelle Huppert] had been their graduate student, they had been lovers in a kind of triangle like the one between Nietszche, Rilke, and this woman called Salome - I think she went off with Rilke. I liked the idea of these intense people transcending normal social relationships. I also tried to have Bernard [Dustin Hoffman] and Vivian [Lily Tomlin] go through their own crisis during the movie, but it was too much. I wanted them to have to confront a lot of shit themselves, and the problems got thrown back on them and their expertise got taken away from them, which in a way is what any teacher wants from any student. Caterine was also conceived as a Moriarty figure - I like the idea of the detectives having a nemesis.

Dismantling identity and reality
It's like what Dustin says in the movie. You can't tell where your nose ends and space begins. What you think is distinct and separate and solid is porous and indistinct. That idea's like a touchstone. I'll try it on in any given context. In Three Kings, okay, you've got guns, you feel frustrated, you haven't seen violence - what is violence? Let's talk about that for a second. We've seen a lot of movies, but what is it really like when a bullet goes into your abdomen? Take a second to think about that. Which is like getting you out of one dimension into the other dimensions and trying to expand our very narrow mental software a little bit. Which happily also has a comedic effect.

Jon Brion's score
I was so fortunate to get that guy. I loved his music for Punch-Drunk Love. Jude Law said music captured the vibe of last summer when we shot the movie. I said, "What specifically do you mean?" And he said, "The emotion, the chaos, the wondering," and then he paused and said, "The joy." Which completely took me by surprise, but felt completely right. That there's a joy in the movie and in the music. Then you have these other matters in there.

The bookend opening and closing images of the film
Well, it's a blurry shot of greenery, like pointillist painting or those cubes. In a way when you squint, you start to see the blanket a little. The hard distinctions are blurred, and the unity is more evident. I like that the film starts with that granular, grainy feeling and returns to that. At the beginning, Albert's talking from a sense of frustration that I identify with, he's swearing and nothing seems to make sense, though he's trying to keep a good front up, and he's angry about the whole proposition of his life. By the end he's come to a place where he can make a better peace with that. It's still as fucked up as it was, but he's come to that Zen thing of accepting something in its fucked-up nature.

Directing actors
I like to let the camera roll and not stop, and talk through lots of different takes. So the actors would forget I'm there. Rather than stop, reset, now very consciously recraft your next performance. Things would get looser. I'll talk to them during the takes, shout out some stuff, especially if it's a rollicking take. And the rhythm of the language and the energy of the scene is very important to me. They can do it their way, but when I communicate what the rhythm should be, and I think they got it every single time, there's not a scene in the movie where I felt they didn't do it the way I envisaged it.

The enigmatic title
There was really no title I was happy with. I stuck with it because I like that it has a Heart in it. It seems to make an ironic comment about those sorts of bumper stickers but it doesn't mean it ironically; I think at the end there is a kind of embrace of the Huckabees character. There's an integration of Brad [Jude Law] and Albert.

Marketing a film that rejects everything marketing stands for
[Laughing] We're gonna have this infomercial where the detectives kind of deconstruct the infomercial and the notion of promotion as they're doing it. And they say, Isn't something that's happening to you serendipitously or spontaneously more alive in some respects than actually having it promoted to you? And so the infomercial is gonna kind of eat its own tail as their doing it. And we're going to drop this debate between Bob Thurman and these physicists right in the middle of it, just cut to it. These physicists talk about 10 dimensions. They say we are people who thought the world was flat. A thousand years from now people may look back at us and say that we could only see in three dimensions. We don't have any idea what is to conceive in 10 dimensions.

Offscreen :: David Owen Russell's I Huckabees Daniel Garrett from Offscreen, July 31, 2005

“Confused, Struggling America.” David Walsh from World Socialist Web Site

my review of his film I ♥ Huckabees Jeffrey Overstreet from Looking Closer

my wild and crazy interview with David O. Russell Jeffrey Overstreet from Looking Closer, October 5, 2005

“Existential Body Bag.” Bryant Frazer

Wild at ♥ : All-Star Cast Wages War on Corporate Expansion J. Hoberman, September 14, 2004

The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Village Voice Dennis Lim, September 21, 2004, also seen here: Village Voice

I hate Huckabees. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein

“I Heart Huckabees” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

New York Sun [Nathan Lee]

Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]

“I Heart Huckabees: Premodern Help for Postmodern Times.” Matt Kirby from Metaphilm, November 12, 2004

The Aesthetics and Politics of Film: December 2005 December 8, 2005

Defending the Indefensible [Sarah Strover]

DVD Times [Mike Sutton]

DVD Times [Gary Couzens]

Cine Outsider [Lord Summerisle]

Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]

Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe

Blueprint: Review [David Brook]

Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]

alibi.com [Ari Aster]

Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]

Existentialism: Wikipedia Definition

Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism Is a Humanism

Summary of Some Main Points from Sartre's "Existentialism and Human Emotions"

THE FIGHTER B 83

USA (115 mi) 2010 ‘Scope

This is something of an endurance contest, as from start to finish, this adrenaline-laced cinéma vérité film challenges the audience’s ability to absorb an incredible amount of punishment in the form of having to endure weird and hysterical behavior from such dysfunctional human beings, all of whom happen to be the family of Micky Ward, a legendary boxer from Lowell, Massachussets. Something of a lifelong project in the works for actor Mark Wahlberg, who worked incessantly in the gym and in the ring for several years to prepare himself for this role, claiming to have been influenced by the boxer as a kid growing up in Boston due to his notoriety as a hard nosed, no nonsense boxer with a reputation for going toe to toe in the ring and refusing to quit. While the definitive book written about Micky Ward’s life is called Irish Thunder: The Hard Life & Times of Micky Ward, written by former ESPN anchor Bob Halloran, but surprisingly, it was not used for the movie, which leaves out much of the fighter’s celebrated real life story, like the last 3 years of his fighting career, where for three years in a row (2001 – 3) his fights were named by Ring magazine as the #1 boxing fight of the year, with one of those fights heralded as the fight of the century. So it’s odd that this would not be included in the movie.

Instead, using plenty of overlapping dialogue, the movie lingers on a few of his early fight failures and his growing discontentment with the sport, emphasizing the whirlwind of family distractions that surround him, including his smothering, psychotically overbearing mother (Melissa Leo) who insists she be his manager as anyone else outside the family would steal his money, and his goofy, crack addicted, jailbird older brother (Christian Bale), a former fighter still living on his legacy who trains him when he’s not missing somewhere getting high. Both are stronger, hysterically over-the-top personalities that unfortunately devour the leading subject and take center stage, elbowing out Wahlberg for precious screen interest, making his story by comparison seem formulaic and predictable. The director seems to misjudge the focus of his film, turning it into smaller existential dramas that burst out of control, leaving out of the movie precisely what endears this fighter to audiences. In fact, there is nothing in this film that connects the fighter to the allegiance of supporters from his blue collar community, which is what inspired Wahlberg to make the movie in the first place. Instead it’s a film that highlights misplaced priorities, relying on people who have proven themselves to be unreliable and incompetent in managing his career, yet relying on them anyway because they’re family. This loyalty may seem commendable to some, but it nearly derails his career, which only gets back on track when his brother goes to jail and is out of the picture.

The film bears a strong resemblance to Darren Oronofsky’s THE WRESTLER (2008), who was originally slated to direct the movie and is listed as one of the producers, shot on the same grainy film texture that supposedly accentuates the seedy and unglamorized world of the sport. Mickey Rourke’s lead performance is a stunner, literally inhabiting the character, as he not only performs the required physical elements of the sport with an effortless grace, but he evokes sympathy in nearly every scene with his griseled, world weary character, while Wahlberg is overshadowed by the crude and shallow behavior of those around him, only really asserting himself in the ring. Amy Adams as Ward’s bartender girlfriend stands her ground, but she’s no match for the mature femininity of Marisa Tomei, a woman who can stand up to Rourke with her own battle scars while keeping her beauty and dignity intact. Both leads feature failed or fragile family connections, where Rourke breaks your heart trying to reconcile a non-existent relationship with a beautiful teenage daughter he has neglected, while Wahlberg has to come to terms with the destructive capabilities of his own brother who nearly brings his career to ruins, but also motivates him in the corner like nobody else. Their emotional connection, however, really only resonates inside the ring.

There’s no question which film succeeds, as Rourke miraculously accepts the pain and endures all the punishment inflicted upon him, both physical and emotional, as he silently endures, while in Wahlberg’s case, his family’s disreputable behavior punishes the audience, continually forcing them into an uncomfortable zone that overshadows Wahlberg’s understated performance throughout the entire movie, making Ward’s success story seem formulaic instead of a natural outgrowth of his character, which, if truth be told, is never revealed, as the movie version is too busy following the zany antics of his brother. Overall, this is an exhausting rather than an exhilarating or inspirational movie, where the audience soon grows tired of the ever more exaggerated and disgusting outbursts from this family, who are more revolting than intriguing. There are moments of intimacy that develop between Wahlberg and Adams, but they are extremely brief and painfully underdeveloped. We learn little about Ward’s life except through the horribly destructive world of boxing, where it’s also about family, loyalty, devotion and betrayal while attempting to succeed in two of the most brutal enterprises on earth, boxing and drugs. Unfortunately, the film is overly conventional without a memorable lead character, where what’s unconventional is the overreliance on family dysfunction surrounding him, so when the fighter’s career finally reaches a peak, all we remember is the wretched miserablism that is associated with getting there.

The Fighter | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias

With the notable exception of his exuberant performance as the unstoppable Dieter Dengler in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, Christian Bale has spent the decade since American Psycho playing roles that showcase his anger, austerity, or some combination of the two. It’s been so easy to forget the charismatic star behind all that jaw-clenching seriousness that his remarkable turn as Dickie Eklund in The Fighter comes as a welcome surprise. Looking nearly as gaunt as he famously did for The Machinist, Bale plays a crack-addicted former boxer—the “pride” of working-class Lowell, Massachusetts—who seems to earn second, third, and fourth chances purely on the basis of his crooked smile and shambling underdog charm.

Bale’s live-wire performance typifies the many major and minor elements that elevate The Fighter from the deeply conventional sports movie it might have been into the endearingly offbeat sports movie it turns out to be. Based on a true story, the film focuses on the relationship between half-brothers: Dickie, a former palooka whose greatest achievement was a spirited showing against Sugar Ray Leonard, and Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a bruising welterweight whose loyalty to his flaky brother and brassy, controlling mother (Melissa Leo) has stunted his growth. Micky’s relationship with a bartender (Amy Adams) gives him the confidence and support to consider a different course, but at the expense of a painful fallout with his family.

Stories about working-class boxers punching above their station aren’t exactly new, but director David O. Russell (Three Kings) and his team do everything they can to evoke the humble setting and the complex—and often quite funny—dynamic between Micky and a family that doesn’t always have his best interests at heart. Wahlberg normally disappears in quieter roles, but here he subtly conveys the weak, impressionable kid who quivers behind his hulking exterior. The film occasionally gets too cartoonish with the local color, but its tone is brash and big-hearted, and the decision to go broad leaves plenty of room for Bale to play Dickie as New England’s answer to Ratso Rizzo. The Fighter doesn’t try to upend the genre, but it’s a reminder of how satisfying these movies can be when they’re done right.

exclaim! [Will Sloan]

In his first appearance as Dicky Eklund (a washed-up boxer who reached his peak when he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, though some think Leonard tripped), Christian Bale sits on a couch with his legs jittering, staring at the camera. Then, when he begins to talk to the off-screen director, he fiddles with his arms a little before quickly resting one on top of the couch.

When next we see him, he's ostensibly doing road repairs in Lowell, Massachusetts, but really, he's just goofing around, mugging heavily for brother Micky (Mark Wahlberg) and some assembled neighbourhood friends. And, man, it's some heavy-duty mugging. I considered saying Bale's performance bordered on being too big and Oscar baiting. Of course, then I saw the real-life Dicky in the end credits and he didn't seem so far off.

When The Fighter begins in the mid-'80s, Dicky has been coasting for a while on his reputation as a promising fighter who never made it. When HBO commissions a no-holds-barred documentary on his crippling crack addiction, Dicky relishes the attention (we see him mugging and calling himself "Hollywood" to a bunch of prison inmates just before the documentary airs).

Melissa Leo has a similarly showy role as Micky's ferociously overbearing working-class mother/manager, who along with Dicky, hinders his career as much as she helps. Between these two loud, loud performances (three, actually, if you include Amy Adams as a tough-as-nails girlfriend), Mark Wahlberg is an ocean of calm as Micky Ward, a legendary fighter whose achievements would eventually eclipse his older brother's. When Micky poses for publicity photos for a world heavyweight championship match, Dicky finds a way of sneaking into the side of the frame. Bale manages the same trick during Wahlberg's understated-to-the-point-of-invisible performance. It's hard to remember a lead actor being so generous with the spotlight.

Wahlberg leaves a bit of a hole in the film's centre, truth be told, but The Fighter is engrossing nevertheless. "With the possible exception of the romantic comedy, no film genre is more strictly governed by conventions ― or enslaved by clichés, if you prefer ― than the boxing picture," writes A.O. Scott in The New York Times. The Fighter has all the familial melodrama you might expect from a boxing picture, sans the melodrama.

This is the most stylistically restrained film yet from director David O. Russell (Three Kings, I ♥ Huckabees), who lets his actors do most of the heavy emotional lifting (he tactfully resists any temptation to lay on an over-the-top musical score). The script, too, does the neat trick of seeming to follow every boxing movie cliché about a fighter escaping a destructive family before subverting them in the second half ― none of these characters are "bad" and all of them try, sometimes misguidedly, to do the best for each other. Except, perhaps, for Micky's five sisters.

Boxoffice Magazine [Amy Nicholson]

As bantamweight boxer 'Irish' Micky Ward, Mark Walhberg enters the ring to the Whitesnake power ballad "Here I Go Again on my Own," the least apt anthem for a bruiser weighed down by an entourage that includes his manager, trainer, girlfriend, mother, father, brother and seven sisters. His problem is that he can't go anywhere on his own—certainly not across the country from Lowell, MA to Las Vegas for paid training. David O. Russell's family-first dramedy is powered by knockout performances, but doesn't have much message or thrust. A slim film that carries itself like a champion, The Fighter will win praise and dollars that it doesn't quite deserve; in this Oscar season, it's a boxer elevating his stats by taking down weaker competition like The Town.

Lowell, Massachusetts is a factory town and the birthplace of Bette Davis and Jack Kerouac, but by the late '70s, its fortunes had fallen so low that local boy Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale) was christened "The Pride of Lowell" simply for surviving—not winning—ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard, even knocking Leonard off his feet (though rumor has it, he tripped). Lowell is also an excuse for Russell to dive into chowdery accents, but at least Boston-raised Wahlberg's is earned. It had better be—Wahlberg fought for five years to get this biopic made, two of them spent buffing up at the gym.

Like Rocky, Wahlberg's Micky Ward wasn't a dynamo. Instead, his strategy was to stand still and take his punches until his opponent got tired, and then knock them out with a blow to the gut. He'd take seven rounds of punishment to deliver one devastating hit, making his wins brutal, boring and improbable. Even in the movie, the announcers are begging him to quit by his bloodied round three. And like Rocky, this is a story about a broke mug who takes his lumps on and off the ring—has there ever been a boxing story starring a middle class guy with options?

The only guy Wahlberg knows who manages to duck trouble is his older brother Dickie (Bale). During his fights, Dickie dodges and weaves like a weasel. Outside the ring, he's the same way, bobbing and swaying when he talks, his eyes goggled and neck loose like an ostrich. Even when he screws up, no one, especially not mom Melissa Leo (great in her hate-able role), stays angry for long. It's fun to see Bale shake off his movie star gloom to play a character that survives because of his charm. Onscreen, he hasn't cracked a smile since Captain Corelli's Mandolin; here, he's a showboating comedian, and footage of the real Dickie Eklund runs over the credits solely to prove that Bale nailed his twitchy charisma. Those tics are part him and part drugs. And the drugs are part of why he's agreed to let an HBO crew follow him around—he's cracked out enough to believe that they're cheering on his boxing comeback, rather than pitying him as one of the stars of the gritty doc High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.

His family should know better, but like him they've all bought into the myth that boxing's their ticket to the big time. They're a clan of drunks with dreams. Ward's seven sisters are used for great comic effect. They're not individuals; they're a collective force of nature. (Only a few even get names, that is, if you call Red Dog and Beaver names.) In one scene, they and their mother spill out of a single four-door sedan, bouffants waving in the breeze, like a car of clowns itching for a bar fight.

Their target is Amy Adams, who as Wahlberg's main squeeze is encouraging him to ditch these zeros and get himself a real shot at the big leagues. His hemming and hawing between family and his future is what passes for the plot arc, but we'll find more intrigue watching the mousy-voiced Adams draw her shoulders back and tell her future in-laws to go screw themselves. This movie invites us to leer at Adams' ass, and that, along with her turn as a salty bartender, is continually fun and full of surprises. Still, the movie as a whole is a punching bag stuffed with boxing clichés down to the tracking shots of Wahlberg jogging his way fit. But in its small moments, say when Walhberg sighs that his robe misspells "Micky," The Fighter feels clued-in to the very small, very tough world of a man trying to make his way out of his block—and after getting to know his family, you want to help him pack his bags.

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]

A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity [Adam Lippe]

Stephanie Zacharek | Movieline

A Nutshell Review [Stefan S]

The New Yorker [Anthony Lane]

'The Fighter' Review: Wahlberg, Bale Enter the Boxing Ring - TIME Mary Pols from Time magazine

Review: The Fighter Triumphs - Film.com Amanda Mae Meyncke

The Fighter, The Tourist, All Good Things, The Company Men | Film ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal

BeyondHollywood.com Brent McKnight

Movie House Commentary [Greg Wroblewski]

DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]

'The Fighter' Review: Wahlberg and Bale Kick Some Butt - The ... Jenni Miller from Cinematical

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Movie Review - Fighter, The - eFilmCritic Rob Gonsalves

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The Fighter - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Sean O’Connell

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Latest Movie Reviews - RopeofSilicon.com Brad Brevet

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Turns out to be almost as blandly formulaic - ShowReview Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion

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film review: The Fighter > Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy - indieWIRE

Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] also seen here: Common Sense Media [Jeffrey M. Anderson]

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The Fighter: The Hydras of Lowell Are Hungry by Lindy West - Film ... Lindy West from The Stranger

Christian Bale Gets Testy About Everything but The Fighter John H. Richardson interviews the actor from Esquire, November 15, 2010

Letting His Role Do the Talking Dennis Lim interviews actor Christian Bale from The New York Times, December 3, 2010

Behind Camera, Checking the Ego Interview of the director by Melena Ryzik from The New York Times, December 8, 2010, which includes audio comments from a video (2:50): Anatomy of a Scene: 'The Fighter'

The Fighter | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly

Variety.com [Peter Debruge]

The Fighter: A hard-hitting boxing story that scores on the big ... Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail

Review: The Fighter - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough

'The Fighter': Ferocity, angst, ambition and bonds - Philly.com Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Fighter (A-) | Dallas-Fort Worth Entertainment News and ... Chris Vognar

Movie review: 'The Fighter' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Micky Ward Official Website

New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott, December 9, 2010

Ex-Bad Boy Eager for a (Filmed) Fight Dennis Lim from The New York Times, April 30, 2010

Micky Ward - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Micky Ward Biography Biography Base

2001 Fight of the Year

2002 Ring magazine fight of the year

2003 Ring magazine fight of the year

Videos for Micky Ward

Professional boxing record for Micky Ward The Fight of the Century! Featuring Arturo Gatti and Mickey Ward, by Frank Gonzalez from East Side Boxing, May 19, 2002

"Uncommon Valor" Franz Lidz from Sports Illustrated, June 16, 2003

"Ward, Gatti for Fight Night Round 3 Cover" David Adams from Xbox, December 12, 2005

The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward Robert Mladinich from The Sweet Science, December 13, 2007

"Revisiting the Fight of the Year for 2001: Micky Ward vs. Emanuel Burton" Rafael Garcia Quinones from Bleacher Report, January 9, 2010

Micky Ward Arturo Gatti Friendship - The Real Story Behind The ... Chris Jones from Esquire magazine, December 17, 2010

The Fighter Micky Ward - ESPN Video - ESPN Micky Ward talks about seeing his life story portrayed on screen, from YouTube (3:15)

video essay Kevin B. Lee film essay, a side by side comparison of the actual fight and the movie (4:52)

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK B+ 92

USA (117 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival and the Audience Award at Austin, this is another candidate for the feel good movie of the year, where mainstream audiences will love the quirky romance with a happy ending, while cinephiles will love the originality of the characters and the honesty of the script, as this is a compelling story that uses contrivances like good luck charms, not afraid to make the most of oddball plot twists, with terrific performances, excellent musical choices and solid direction, where the ensemble cast shines throughout. Nonetheless, initially this story only goes so far, something of a portrait of an eccentric, following the exploits of an excitable young man, Bradley Cooper as Pat, a guy that became unhinged when he saw his wife in the shower with another man, causing such a violent reaction that he placed himself under the mercy of the court with a plea bargain, losing his job, his house, and his wife, spending 8 months in a mental institution attempting to regroup before his mother finally brings him back home to his parents, Robert De Niro as Pat Sr. and Jacki Weaver as Dolores. His father’s undergone a few recent changes of his own, losing his regular job and now runs a bookie operation, trying to raise money for his restaurant by taking bets on sports events, as he is a rabid Philadelphia Eagle fan, where Sunday afternoon’s in front of the TV watching an Eagle game is sacred territory, using a lucky handkerchief and any other black magic mojo he can think of to improve his odds. Pat has other things on his mind after the hospital, and all he can think about is developing a positive mental attitude about his life in order to win his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) back, believing this is his silver lining, getting in shape and losing weight like she requested and changing his life for the better, while everyone else refuses to mention the obvious, that he’s had no contact with her since the hospitalization and she’s likely moved on without him.

Much like his father, Pat lives by his obsessions, much of it triggered however by his untreated bipolar mood swings, where he feels guilty about taking the psychotropic medicine, goes for long periods unmedicated hoping he can improve on his own, but inevitably suffers recurrent roadblocks, such as violating restraining orders, where he is simply unable to deal with his uncontrollable anger, beautifully juxtaposed with the mind-altering music of Led Zeppelin. Adapting the material from Matthew Quick’s novel, the director has written a very clever script, as the quirky individuality of the character is often hilarious, especially the means by which he attempts to adapt to the real world, such as his angry discovery of Hemingway’s ending of The Sun Also Rises, where it’s more about social alienation than mental illness, where the director has to carefully straddle the line not to poke fun of people with serious mental health issues. Russell’s stroke of genius is introducing Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany, another person who’s gone through her own depression issues, having recently lost her husband to a senseless death, where the directness of their language together couldn’t be more refreshing, especially when talking about the reactions to various prescribed medications at a family dinner, where they’re like two peas in a pod, both seen as oddballs within their own families, but their heightened state of vulnerability gives their characters a unique perspective. Having seen Lawrence now in three pictures, including 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Winter's Bone (2010) and Like Crazy (2011), she has literally stolen all three movies with the exceptional nature of her performances, and here she simply makes the movie, which would be nowhere without her, picking up the pieces left behind by Pat’s distinctively unsettled life and continually maneuvering him into a better place, without him realizing it. She brings the dramatic conflict of authentic language and stark emotion directly into the focus, tenderly accepting him with all his flaws intact even as Pat continues to dream of his perfect life with his wife Nikki.

There’s a nice contrast between the idealized and obsessive fantasy in Pat’s head and the supposed perfect marriage of Pat’s brother-in-law (John Ortiz) with ice princess Julia Stiles as Veronica, Nikki’s sister, where she’s equally obsessed that everything in her house has to be in proper order, adding additional pressure to their marriage, where missteps are simply not allowed. At the same time, Pat’s father obsessively plays the numbers, betting his family’s livelihood on the outcomes, while Tiffany at times seems equally deluded about turning Pat’s life around, where she gets him to promise to be her dance partner in a heavily stylized ballroom dance contest which requires plenty of strenuous rehearsal time. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is set to Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash - Girl From The North Country - YouTube (3:42), where the mixed moods of the two unique characters strangely and appealingly come together, as they do in the song. A few trailer sequences are set to “Silver Lining (Crazy Bout You)” by Jessie J, Silver Linings Playbook Music Video (2012) - Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence Movie HD YouTube (2:39). The beauty of Tiffany’s character is Jennifer Lawrence’s nuanced performance, showing extraordinary range in an Oscar touted performance, bringing sympathy to such a complicated and misunderstood life, always remaining true to her feminine nature by defying the easy road, continually doing the unexpected because that’s what’s required, as people are that complicated to deal with. Adding to the mix are several side characters, like Chris Tucker as a fellow inmate from the hospital, perhaps Pat’s best friend in the movie, who tries to “blacken up” their dance moves, or Anupam Kher as Pat’s psychiatrist, who is also, inexplicably, another obsessed Eagle’s fan. Yes, the contrivances are fast and furious, but here they hardly matter, as they’re beautifully integrated into the mysteriously jagged storyline which brings these two improbable characters into our lives and makes them worth caring about, turning this into a highly entertaining Christmas holiday classic, bringing the indie world of David. O. Russell into the mainstream, providing comic inspiration with plenty of internalized soul searching, where it’s all about spending Sunday afternoons with the family, with Mom in the kitchen fixing crab fries and Dad sweating out the point spread.

cinemixtape.com [J. Olson]

With Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell combines the handheld style of The Fighter with the amped-up performances of I Heart Huckabees, to sometimes winning, frequently enervating effect. The festival’s audience award winner, and an obvious frontrunner for the Philadelphia Film Festival’s opening night — organizers said details were still being worked out — the film stars local boy Bradley Cooper as a mental patient released into the care of his Eagles-obsessed father (Robert De Niro) and highly tolerant mother (Jackie Weaver). The combination of B-Coop’s anxious acting and Russell’s mobile camera works the nerves it’s meant to work, to the extent it’s an almost physical relief when Jennifer Lawrence turns up; beside Cooper, she’s a cool drink of water.

Exclaim! [Scott A. Gray]

David O. Russell makes a welcome return to quirky, psychological relationship comedy after the assured, but pandering Oscar-baiting of The Fighter.

Based on the book by Matthew Quick, about a man who, after a violent mental breakdown, attempts to reintegrate into a socially acceptable lifestyle emphasising positivity, Silver Linings Playbook fits thematically somewhere between the wacky existentialist musings of I ♥ Huckabees and the hilarious, unfiltered honesty of Flirting With Disaster in Russell's oeuvre.

The idiosyncratic director/screenwriter proves once again that he's one of the best in the business when it comes to extracting fantastic performances from both proven thespians and leading men more known for their looks than acting chops.

Bradley Cooper (Midnight Meat Train) commits to the best acting of his career as Pat Solitano, an obsessively fixated hopeless romantic recently diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. After serving an eight-month stint in a mental institution, Pat is remanded into his parents' custody, the obsessive-compulsive and highly superstitious football fanatic Pat Sr. (Robert DeNiro, showing that life with the Fockers hasn't completely atrophied his comic talents) and the sweet-natured matriarch anchoring her neurotic family, Dolores (the wonderful Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom).

By the time Pat meets fellow guileless outsider Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence, delivering an electric performance that could earn her another Oscar nomination), a widow who buries her grief under promiscuity, the fairly standard plot isn't what makes this film so relentlessly engaging – it's the degree of unselfconscious candour and volatile chemistry between Cooper and Lawrence's characters as they negotiate notions of normalcy in an elaborate, unwitting courtship.

That's not to reduce the importance of Russell's unique sense of pacing and fluid camera direction, but this is among his least deliberately stylized works. Still, he can't resist indulging in a few tricks. The handful of bombastic zoom shots he peppers throughout the film is just that though: indulgence.

When you've got the ability to coax a subtle performance out of Chris Tucker in a film that's all about cutting through unnecessary artifice, there's no need to self-consciously remind viewers of your acumen as a visual stylist.

Minor contrivances aside, Silver Linings Playbook is the year's most consistently witty and honest mainstream dramedy.

Esquire CULTURE BLOG Stephen Marche, November 23, 2012

On paper, I am supposed to hate Silver Linings Playbook with every fiber of my being. It's a quirky romantic comedy, starring actors who became famous in blockbusters (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) trying to prove their acting chops by playing wounded, slightly daffy characters. There's a bunch of sappy side plots, too — a once-distant father who just wants to be close to his son, an Indian psychiatrist who's a rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan, a meth-head with a heart of gold. I should hate all of them. The plot hinges on a dancing competition, for chrissake. Even writing it down now, after having seen the film, I'm stunned that I didn't flee the theater. I'm still kind of amazed. How is it possible that I loved this movie?

Part of the answer has to be the acting. Screw Lincoln. This movie is easily the best ensemble performance of the year. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence both fully acquit themselves in roles that could easily have become unbearably grating. Robert De Niro plays an Italian-American father without the New York bluster, and it is one of my favorite of his performances, period. He's ground down and confused and tender and not tough at all. At the Toronto Film Festival, where this movie won the people's choice award, often handed out to Oscar sleepers like Slumdog Millionaire, the general consensus was that De Niro deserved Best Supporting Actor for his performance. It's a reasonable possibility. This movie also sees the return of Chris Tucker, in a sadly miniscule part, as the aforementioned meth-head with a heart of gold. The moment he appears onscreen, all you want to do is see more of him. Quentin Tarantino has recently claimed that he's only going to make three more movies. We can only hope that one of the three is set aside for Tucker. Robert De Niro doesn't get upstaged that often onscreen. Chris Tucker does it to him twice in this movie.

I've argued before that quirkiness in American culture is often a way of pretending to be original while remaining happily and utterly conventional. Though Silver Linings Playbook is definitely quirky, that equation does not apply here. The movie flouts conventions from beginning to end, becoming in the process one of the most subtle, most sophisticated movies about mental illness ever made. Madness in the movies, and in art generally, usually takes one of two forms. In serious work, madness is a kind of glamorous otherworldliness, a portal into deeper perception. Of course, as anyone who has actually been close to anyone with real mental illness knows, the insane are not glamorous. They are terribly, terribly dull, except that their dullness is shot through with moments of pure terror. The first half of Silver Linings Playbook focuses on portraying exactly this difficult reality, the grind of trying to get somebody's mind back together, the grim setbacks, the tepid successes, the sudden collapses. This is a courageous move, because the clichés of glamorous madness are so prevalent and so easy, and they make for so much more pleasant and comforting a viewing experience.

But Silver Linings Playbook is at least half-comedy as well, a genre with its own insane approach to insanity. The romantic comedy has always relied on "zaniness" and other forms of muted craziness to make characters sympathetic. The Onion captured the ludicrous cliché perfectly with "Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested." The movie comes dangerously close to falling into this chasm, where we love the characters because of their damaged natures, and their irrational antics are treated as "learning to be yourself." But, in the end, the redemption the characters achieve — this is, after all, a David O. Russell movie — is much more reserved and quiet than in a typical romantic comedy. The aura of forgiveness that permeates the ending is played in a minor key. The movie stays true to itself. The happy ending really is only a silver lining. The clouds are still looming.

It takes guts to make a movie that avoids the easy clichés of mental health — resisting the glamour of self-destruction as much as redemption. This spirit is reflected in the characters as much as in the movie itself. They come to recognize the perilous closeness of tragedy and comedy in the struggle to build a life out of internal catastrophe. According to some reports, one in five Americans is currently on medication for a psychiatric disorder, which makes the story in Silver Linings Playbook, sadly, not all that uncommon. That new reality makes Silver Linings Playbook not just one of the year's most refreshing movies, but one of its most necessary.

World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]

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The American Spectator : Silver Linings Playbook James Bowman, also seen here: JamesBowman.net | Silver Linings Playbook

Silver Linings Is a Platinum Film - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Silver Linings Playbook, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens

Why Does the 'New Yorker' Hate David O. Russell? | The Awl Choire Sicha from the AWL, November 26, 2012

Silver Linings Playbook: Mental illness movie? Not really. L.V. Anderson from Slate, November 29, 2012

The Playlist [Keith Jagernauth]

thesubstream.com [Mike Cameron]

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'Silver Linings Playbook' — Review - Movieline Alison Willmore

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'Silver Linings Playbook': A Clear-Headed Comedy ... - The Atlantic Christopher Orr

'Silver Linings Playbook': At Last, Bradley Cooper ... - The Atlantic Wi Richard Lawson from The Atlantic Wire

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Silver Linings Playbook (2012) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

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A Nutshell Review: Silver Linings Playbook by Stefan on Myspace Stefan S.

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Silver Linings Playbook : The New Yorker Film capsule

Robert De Niro: 'What keeps me awake at night? My ... - The Guardian Killian Fox interviews actor Robert De Niro from The Observer, November 24, 2012

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Silver Linings Playbook | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Cath Clarke

Silver Linings Playbook | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw

Silver Linings Playbook – review | Film | The Observer Philip French

Movie review: 'Silver Linings Playbook' - A&E - Boston.com Wesley Morris

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AMERICAN HUSTLE B+ 92

USA (138 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official Site

The one thing Hollywood does know how to do is churn out lightweight comedies, often vulgar and tasteless, and utterly forgettable. But when they feature big name celebrities, they make tons of money. Occasionally, by some strange alignment of the stars, they even turn out better than advertised and become a memorable part of cinema history. Who would have thought the strange and twisting plot of SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), featuring two big name male stars in drag avoiding the mob while chasing after Marilyn Monroe would be so funny? David O. Russell has always had a thing for comedy, the weirder the better, where I HEART HUCKABEES (2004) was so outlandishly bizarre that he was unable to make another film for 6 years, having been sent to Hollywood Siberia, apparently, where he spent his time in the Cinema 101 re-education gulags learning how to make a studio film. Having mastered that art, he’s been on a roll ever since, churning out three remarkably popular and critically acclaimed hits, from THE FIGHTER (2010), which starred an Oscar winning performance by Christian Bale along with Amy Adams, to the immensely popular Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which starred Bradley Cooper and an Oscar winning Jennifer Lawrence. AMERICAN HUSTLE brings all four together in a hilarious screwball comedy, and while it opens with the acknowledgement, “Some of this actually happened,” if you stick around until the end of the final credits it ends with the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction.” Any resemblance to real life has long since been obliterated by the exaggerated mayhem that is this movie. In fact, the Russell film this most resembles is the droll comedy I HEART HUCKABEES, but instead of being so mystifyingly baffling, caught up in some existential wasteland of humor, this film actually hits the mark and is drop dead hilarious from the get go, where the screenplay by Eric Singer and the director is little more than one continuous blur of one-liners. In fact, it’s all about the creation of zany characters furiously running around with very little character or story development, where the film really is a bit of a con job itself as it has a huge and gaping hole where the reality is supposed to be, memorable for the dazzling assortment of comic bits, but lacking any sense of complexity or depth. This is the kind of film, however, that is so well constructed that it might be forgiven.

Loosely based (to the point of being unrecognizable) on the ABSCAM scandal in the late 70’s and early 80’s, which was an FBI sting operation offering bribes that lured several U.S. Congressmen and a Senator, not to mention other lower rung political players. Perhaps most surprising were those few that refused to take bribes, including U.S. Senator Larry Pressler and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. The unique nature of the sting operation is that is was masterminded by Melvin Weinberg, a convicted con artist who helped plan and conduct the operation in order to avoid serving a 3-year prison sentence on ten counts of fraud, and was actually paid $150,000 for services rendered. They dangled the money of various FBI informants posing as oil sheiks to 31 targeted officials, using questionable entrapment methods throughout. The duplicitous sex life of Weinberg included a wife (who committed suicide) and a mistress that he eventually married, with both continually at odds with one another. While the film has the celebrity feel of another star-studded OCEAN’S ELEVEN movie (2001, 2004, 2007), where it’s mostly silly fun wrapped up in surface superficialities, never digging very far under the surface, where complexity isn’t even a consideration, as instead it’s an old-fashioned Hollywood movie that just wants to enthrall the audience with pure entertainment. Of course, the Hollywood film this most resembles is George Roy Hill’s THE STING (1973), a box office smash winning 7 Academy Awards, which was also inspired by real life con men, featuring plenty of likeable big name stars, including Robert Redford and Paul Newman still in their prime working together in an easy going gangster thriller with plenty of Depression era pathos along with its fair share of laughs. Hill’s film is given a harshly realistic setting, where the unraveling of the sting operation is a thing of beauty, while Russell’s film couldn’t be more artificial, where the wretched excess of the era is played with exaggerated characters and settings, all pushing the boundaries of believability, as if everyone’s channeling the exaggerated comedy of Second City alumni Alan Arkin, creating an over-the-top melodrama that is largely satiric of Scorsese films like Goodfellas (1990) and CASINO (1995), especially with some overly conspicuous costume choices and swooping camera movements from Linus Sandgren that create a stunning, operatic effect.

AMERICAN HUSTLE is this year’s Argo (2012), the Academy Award winning film that was largely a tribute to Hollywood itself, or the year before with The Artist (2011), where these are examples of feelgood industry tributes that have little to do with the actual best film, where they end up being chosen because of the way they positively represent the industry. While this could be the third film in a row to win for pure Hollywood entertainment, it’s hardly the best film of the year, though it is a wondrous expression of Hollywood moviemaking, an elaborate series of hoaxes that grow deliriously out of control, where the thrill is watching a train wreck happening with such audacious fun, turning into a comic farce, each step along the way more mockingly disastrous than the last. While the film will likely get credit for the writing, perhaps the funniest film of the year, and the loony direction which is kept under control by Russell, but what’s most spectacular are the wall-to-wall performances. Christian Bale (who gained 40 pounds for the role) plays the Melvin Weinberg role of Irving Rosenfeld, a lifelong con artist, currently specializing in art forgery, whose own personal eccentricities are on display in a wordless opening scene where he attempts to glue his hair together. While he owns a string of dry cleaning businesses in New Jersey, they are largely a front for his nefarious business practices. Into his life comes Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a former stripper from New Mexico who is now posing to be someone else, disguising herself as a British heiress, Lady Edith, with a line of credit from her London bank accounts, who blows Irving’s mind from the outset. They meet at a party over a common inspirational interest in Duke Ellington’s “Jeep’s Blues” Jeep's Blues - Duke Ellington 1956 YouTube (5:19), where the two become fast business and romantic partners, even though Irving already has a demanding wife Rosalyn, Jennifer Lawrence, and an adopted son, who are all but missing in the first half of the film, which takes a particular fascination with their prolific illegal activity, where business was never better as the two combine to offer fake loans at $5000 per investor, using only the most financially desperate clientele, but they make a calculated error when sizing up Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) who turns out to be an FBI agent.

DiMaso insists they can only escape jail time if they help him nail some bigger fish, promising to let them go if they can help make four significant arrests. The back and forth power struggle between the two men about who’s in charge leads to a ridiculous display of male arrogance, with Sydney playing them both against one another, though she really wants to flee the country with Irving right then and there, as otherwise they’ll get sucked into a labyrinth of governmental inefficiency, since they’re not the real professionals in the business, which is exactly what happens. DiMaso ends up crazy as a loon, an overambitious agent who goes over the head of his by-the-book boss (Louis C.K.) and reels in an equally ambitious District Attorney Anthony Amado (Alessandro Nivola), who authorizes most of what he asks for, including a leer jet, $2 million dollars in cash, and an entire floor of a luxurious hotel, while another Fed agent, Michael Peña (who acknowledges he’s Mexican), poses as a billionaire oil sheik with money to invest in rebuilding Atlantic City. But they need a guy with connections who can reel in the fish. For that they call upon Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), a New Jersey mayor sporting a pompadour to die for. Polito’s charm is loving what he does, where he leads a charmed live with a happy extended family and plenty of exposure to the limelight, which he no doubt cherishes the most, as he’s a man of the people who loves to surround himself with crowds of well wishers. When he bolts, refusing to take the bait, Irving pulls the “I’m just a guy from the neighborhood” routine, enticing him with the idea of a huge construction project that will employ plenty of people, where he can be the guy to literally rebuild Atlantic City back to its once promising stature of the Las Vegas of the East. Once Polito’s on board, the next step is to meet his friends and associates that can help bankroll the deal. At this point, the film simply loses all touch with reality and enters another dimension that we only ever see in pictures. Due to Carmine’s insistence upon family values, Irving is forced to bring his wife, leaving Sydney to pout with Richie.

Like every other movie she’s ever been in, Jennifer Lawrence simply steals every scene she’s in, no matter who’s in the cast, and here she hits prime real estate. While Irving and Richie are cowering in the corner after taking a look at Carmine’s friends, who are all mob connected, Rosalyn simply marches right over and makes herself comfortable, with these guys crawling all over her like a moth to a flame, and she’s loving every second of it. While this is happening, there’s the brewing animosity between Rosalyn and Sydney, both in bad girl modes who literally hate each other, but to top it off they are wearing plunging necklines with the most sexually revealing dresses (with Adams channeling Bernadette Peters, who should receive royalties), where they’re like alley cats with one another, finally duking it out in the ladies room in what has to be one of the best scenes of the year. Simultaneously the men get down to serious business, where the mob’s chief negotiator, flown in from Miami just for the occasion, is none other than Victor Tellegio, the uncredited Robert De Niro, who is the chief spokesman for Meyer Lansky, the Florida mob boss, and they want in on the deal, demanding $10 million dollars by the end of the week to show if they’re really serious. The scene of bad girls has escalated to the most brutal and godawful evil men on the planet, where Irving can be seen sweating at the table, especially when Tellegio stares a hole straight through him. Truly, it’s a pleasure to see De Niro carry this degree of weight as the ultimate heavy, as nobody does it better. From there, the film only spirals more out of control into pure spectacle, as this is where the hoax meets real life, where these guys are in way over their heads and now could get themselves and their families killed for dealing with the wrong guys. Adding mobsters to the film is a touch of glory, where it’s particularly exhilarating to see Irving dance arm in arm with Carmine in a celebratory all night drinking mode to Tom Jones singing “Delilah” Tom Jones - Delilah ( 1968).avi - HD YouTube (3:15), which is paralleled by an earlier disco scene with Richie and Sydney carousing on the dance floor to Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes - Don't Leave Me This Way YouTube (6:06), becoming a pulsating disco fantasia. All in all, this is an endlessly entertaining comedy continually spinning out of control, where perhaps the supreme moment is watching Jennifer Lawrence grow deranged while performing her own crazy rendition of Paul McCartney & WINGS - Live And Let Die YouTube (3:11), hoping to crush her husband’s crazy ambitions and teach him a thing or two about marital fidelity, using the mob to get the message across. Russell energizes his film with a killer soundtrack of choice music of the 70’s, but mostly this is a brilliantly directed film that feels as if we're floating on air, a sensational choreography of madcap comedy, changing emotions, and utter chaos that continually changes shape before our eyes, a sleight of hand maneuver that’s meant to dazzle and delight.

American Hustle | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... Guy Lodge from Time Out London

In the six-year absence that followed 2004’s delirious ‘I Heart Huckabees’, David O Russell seemingly acquired a taste for studio filmmaking – but that’s not quite the same as going mainstream. ‘The Fighter’ and ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ played as exciting experiments to see just how much of Russell’s clattering, chaotic creative sensibility could survive the Hollywood formulae of the boxing movie and romcom, respectively. A lot, it turns out, and ‘American Hustle,’ his whirling, wilful take on the con caper, is no different; with much of its sensational ensemble drawn from Russell’s two previous films, it’s a loose trilogy-capper.

‘Loose’ is the operative word throughout. ‘Some of this actually happened,’ quips an introductory title card, as the film launches into a fictionalised, digressive account of the FBI’s notorious Abscam sting of the late 1970s. The plot, in which Christian Bale’s dopey New Jersey dry-cleaner moonlighting as an art forger Irving Rosenfeld is coerced by sleazy federal agent Richie DiMaso (a poodle-permed Bradley Cooper) into a plot to bring down several high-ranking politicians, is certainly knotty enough.

But ultimately story is secondary to Russell’s delicious detailing of character and milieu. A brilliant, wordless opening scene, in which Bale applies a vole-like toupee to his bald pate with heartbreaking care, sets the tone for a film as much about personal disguises as professional ones.

It’s also a love story, oddly affecting in its cold-heartedness, between two falsely confident tricksters: Rosenfeld is alternately wooed and wound up by slippery Sydney (a fierce Amy Adams), as his garish Jersey-girl wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) watches from the sidelines. Wounded but powerfully deranged, belting out ‘Live and Let Die’ in her literally gilded suburban cage, Lawrence is entirely extraordinary here, improving on the performance that won her an Oscar for Russell’s last film. Long may this collaboration continue: in her, he’s found the ideal firestarter for his brand of lively, fraying human comedy.

American Hustle | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jesse Cataldo

David O. Russell's American Hustle opens on the wretched sight of Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) crawling out of a disheveled hotel bed, belly sagging over his pants, bald head peeking through thin skeins of hair. What follows is a bit of demented primping, as the aging con artist struggles to whip up the presentable illusion of a full coif. There's nothing novel here, either in the casual cruelty afforded by Russell toward a grotesquely conceived character or the facility of the metaphor he's presenting, but what's unexpected is how the scene turns out: Through a motley combination of glue, dyed cotton, and elbow grease, Irving manages to approximate a full head of hair, an unlikely ruse whose success is mirrored by this manic, surprisingly entertaining film.

Coming off two instances of overwrought, artfully gritty Oscar bait, Russell responds with a similarly conceived spectacle that actually works, mostly because it plays its material toward farce rather than tragedy or uplift. Where The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook used loaded issues of familial dysfunction and mental illness to establish rough-and-tumble bona fides which balanced out their pat conclusions, American Hustle only magnifies its initial disorder as it progresses, building into a maelstrom of shifting allegiances and dueling plots. This is a film that confirms all previous issues with Russell's loud, jittery direction, yet does so within a madcap milieu that suits the story he's trying to tell, serving to efficiently muddle the outlines of a continually developing series of puzzles.

Reveling in the potential for gaudy dress-up and shouty overacting afforded by the baroque disco-era setting, the film charts Rosenfeld's exploits as the small-time hustler teams up with partner and girlfriend Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who enlivens his operation by posing as a posh British heiress. Things start to get out of hand after the pair is first busted for fraud, then strong-armed into service by ambitious FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). DiMaso uses them to run a basic con on unsuspecting businessmen, before quickly surrendering to the same unchecked greed that motivates all the shady operators depicted here. Going over the head of his supervisor, he chases after bigger and bigger targets, ending up with an international scheme involving fake Arab sheiks, prominent politicians, and dangerous mobsters.

Formally ostentatious and unrepentantly messy, the film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many '70s period pieces make painfully overt. Every overstated camera swoop and nonsensical body-part zoom functions as both a further expression of directorial agitation and yet another red herring, slapping a visual analogue onto a story already loaded with false clues, double-dealing, and outright lies. Originally titled American Bullshit, the film ends up as a compulsive, often intensely obvious study of unbalanced personalities, all engaged in some kind of desperate masquerade, all caught up in the frantic push and pull between chaos and control.

There's nothing especially substantial about Russell's erratic presentation of this shaggy-dog story, but the combined energy of his madcap style and Eric Singer's well-constructed script is satisfying, making for the sort of unsentimental absurdist playground seen in Three Kings or I Heart Huckabees. In this atmosphere, the abuse of characters for cheap gags and the garish parade of outfits and hairstyles become just another disreputable facet of a film fixated entirely on the importance of surfaces. The same goes for the reckless shooting style, with its insistent, annoying habit of making a muddle of the widescreen frame. This also ends up serving some actual purpose, conveying the total lack of order that defines these undercover operations and backroom dealings, which might seem too efficient if presented in neat, precisely plotted compositions.

It's befitting this unruly approach that American Hustle becomes more about a culture of diffuse deceit than any of the hollow characters it presents. No one is redeemed, and though some get a happy ending, these conclusions leave them as ensnared within hopeless, outward-projecting fantasies as they were at the start. Based very loosely on the outlines of the FBI's ABSCAM operation, the film draws energy from the real-life particulars in the same way that it leeches off a familiar New Hollywood vibe, playing up the genre's implicit distrust of authority and jazzy, profanity-spiked dialogue as further signs of an all-encompassing disorder rooted in a frenzied devotion to keeping up appearances. All these roughly handed tropes get pushed into a sweaty, often derivative jumble that, like that sleazy combover, somehow ends up as convincing.

Richard Corliss Time magazine

Irving Rosenfeld approaches the bathroom mirror without bothering to ask who’s the fairest of them all. Paunchy of gut and bald on top, he knows he has work to do. Like a surgeon of sleaze, he glues a toupee thatch to his pate, arranges the lank hair on his temples across his skull and shellacs the whole mop with hair spray. Now he just needs to suck in his gut and don a three-piece suit and — voilà! — he’s 1970s New Jersey’s idea of a presentable businessman. Or con man, that is: Irving sells art forgeries and takes money for investments in fantasy companies. Charles Ponzi might say, with a connoisseur’s appreciation, “Now that’s a schemer.”

You watch the first scene of American Hustle and think, That’s Christian Bale doing another of his life-imperiling body transformations. Bale lost 62 lb., from a muscular 182 to an emaciated 120, for the lead role in The Machinist; somehow he survived. This time he gained 40 lb. and walked with an older man’s slouch. For his trouble, he herniated two discs. He also crept inside Irving’s body and spirit to play — no, to convincingly be — a grifter working the long con. Doesn’t everybody, really, through white lies and easy evasions? “We’re all conning ourselves one way or another,” Irving-Bale says, “just to get through life.”

The best way we can think of to get through 140 minutes of your life would be to see American Hustle, a balls-out story about political corruption that director and co-writer David O. Russell turned into a crazy, conniving comedy: history replayed as sparkling farce. Russell reunited the star pairs from his last two films — Bale and Amy Adams from The Fighter, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence from Silver Linings Playbook — then Cuisinarted the romantic alliances until everyone had a chance to get screwed in one way or another. The New York Film Critics Circle recently acknowledged the toxic, tonic splendor of American Hustle by giving it awards for Best Film, Best Supporting Actress (Lawrence) and Best Screenplay (Eric Warren Singer and Russell). These should be the first of many awards from now until Oscar night.

The movie opens with a title card that reads, “Some of this actually happened,” and concludes, in the last of the end credits, with the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction.” In other words, trust no one in the movie to give you the facts, and don’t trust the movie, either. (Singer’s original script had the more accurate title American Bullshit.) It’s a semi-true take on Abscam, the infamous sting operation in which the FBI, beginning in 1978, videotaped politicians who accepted bribes for political favors. A daring bluff that led to the conviction of U.S. Senator Harrison “Pete” Williams and six other members of Congress, Abscam was the Argo ruse — but in the U.S., not in Iran, and with a nonexistent hotel instead of a fake movie as the bait. It also lacks anyone that Hollywood might identify as a hero.

In the Russell-Singer comb-over of the facts, Irving juggles the demands of his mouthy wife Rosalyn (Lawrence) and his sham-English girlfriend Sydney (Adams) while reluctantly cooperating with an ambitious FBI agent, Richie DiMaso (Cooper), in the proposed sting of Camden Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) and other Jersey officials. In a movie with four narrators, the point of view is necessarily skewed, and the viewer’s sympathy shifts as Richie falls for Sydney, Irving begins sympathizing with Carmine, and Rosalyn fools around with Mafia cutie Pete Musane (Jack Huston, late of Boardwalk Empire). ”Everybody at the bottom crosses paths,” Sydney observes, “in pools of desperation.” But the real bottom-feeder, the most ruthless, frantic manipulator may be Richie the Fed.

That opening scene with Irving at the mirror hints that American Hustle might settle for mocking the ’70s, the ultimate bad-hair decade and, for metropolitan New York City, a scream of bankruptcy and graffiti. The film does make fond fun of the music, clothes and decor, which earn kudos for production designer Judy Becker, costumer Michael Wilkinson and music supervisor Susan Jacobs. There is a disco scene and that ’70s marvel the microwave. (Told not to put metal inside her new “science oven,” Rosalyn promptly inserts a casserole with tinfoil, and the thing explodes.) But all these references are in the service of channeling the flailing energy of that time.

This was the last New York City decade defined not by the wretched excesses of the superrich — the scam artists on Wall Street — but by the ferocious, occasionally criminal strivings of the middle and lower classes. These snarling underdogs defined New York City movies too. Though American Hustle resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino in certain particulars of plot and milieu (but not in its visual style, which is more functional than Scorsese-ecstatic), the real touchstones for its outer-borough shenanigans are Saturday Night Fever and the Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon: manic street operas, in which the arias were Italians and Jews shouting at one another. (Russell is Jewish on his father’s side, Italian on his mother’s.) The film’s masterly organization of chaos and intelligence is a reminder that comedy is just tragedy, but faster, and it underlines the slick timidity of what passes for movie comedy today.

The real Abscam story was no less strange. The Irving character, Melvin Weinberg, was indeed a grifter who considered himself a world-class actor. “Playing someone else still comes easy,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1985. “It’s my life.” One of his meatiest roles was fronting the Abscam sting in order to avoid a prison sentence on 10 counts of fraud. Mel did have a girlfriend, the English-born Evelyn Knight, and a wife, Marie. (Mel was 54 in 1978; Marie 46.) During his time testifying at the trials, in 1979, Mel moved with Marie to Tequesta Hills, Fla., secretly setting up Evelyn in a nearby condo. Boisterous marital confrontations ensued, and Mel moved in with Evelyn. In 1981, when Marie sued for divorce, Mel asked her to delay the action until he concluded negotiations on an Abscam movie, Moon Over Miami, to be directed by Louis Malle and starring John Belushi as Mel.

On Jan. 21, 1982, the ABC news program 20/20 aired a segment in which correspondent Tom Jarriel quizzed Mel about the allegations of his keeping gifts he was supposed to pass on to public officials. When he denied this, Jarriel showed him a videotape of Marie, in her kitchen, turning a microwave to show that the serial numbers had been removed. Mel spumed his denials, unconvincingly. A week later, Marie was found hanged in a condo adjacent to her own, with a note that read, “My sin was wanting to love and be loved, nothing more.” Mel’s eloquent elegy to his late wife: “She was a cuckoo.” On March 5, Belushi died, scotching the movie project. Two days after that, Mel married Evelyn.

That story would make a compelling movie as well. American Hustle is less an exposé than a character study of people who may not have much character but do live by their own odd ethical code. Take Sydney, for example. The duplicity that is a means to an end for Irving is her golden goal. “My dream, more than anything, was to become anyone other than who I was,” she tells Irving as they make out among revolving racks of clothes at one of the dry-cleaning stores he owns. She left Phoenix, adopted what she thought sounded like a posh English accent and, perhaps in tribute to Barbara Stanwyck’s aristocratic alter ego in The Lady Eve, called herself Lady Edith Greenley.

Sporting couture with V-necklines that plunge to the navel, Sydney is a moll’s vision of class, a bland blonde transformed into a vixen by her own iron will. She demands the same commitment from Irving, telling him, “You’re nothing to me until you’re everything.” Adams, we’re convinced, can do anything: comedy (Junebug), drama (The Master), musical theater (Into the Woods at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park). This year she aced Lois Lane in Man of Steel and the best-friend role in Spike Jonze’s Her.

She carries the first half of American Hustle, working in tones subtler but no less intense than those of the other stars. She’s amazing in a scene where Sydney confesses to Irving that she’s not English royalty. Emptying herself of affectation, Adams keeps swerving in and out of her Brit accent. By the end, her eyes are filled with tears that, damn it, she will not let drop. Even when losing control, a lady must keep her poise.

Lawrence’s Rosalyn — the woman Irving leaves at home, the better to frolic with Sydney — is no lady. But she has the con artist’s knack of getting what she wants by threat, sex appeal or whine; Irving calls her “the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate.” Playing a woman who in real life was twice her age, the 23-year-old Lawrence makes Rosalyn a hot number, as explosive as aluminum foil in a microwave. Rosalyn describes the odor of her nail polish as “sweet and sour, like flowers, but also garbage.” That’s how Lawrence plays her: she exudes the heavy, intoxicating scent of danger. And when this ignored wife realizes her power to put the kibosh on Irving, and by extension the whole Abscam sting, she blossoms or festers into a creature worthy of a Mafia man’s ardor.

Heroically stolid in the Hunger Games movies, appealingly morose in Silver Linings Playbook — and in those films a treat to watch as she expressed complex emotions with virtually no facial tics or sweeping gestures — Lawrence gives this movie’s most overtly comic performance, lending Rosalyn a body and dynamism rarely seen since Judy Holliday played the not-so-dumb blonde Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, 63 years ago. She doesn’t so much steal the second half of American Hustle as own it. Adams effectively passes the baton to her, in a superb acting ensemble dominated by the actresses.

We do not mean to demean the male leads. Cooper, a hoot in hair rollers, summons the ferrety fury of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, ups the IQ and applies the razor’s edge of satire to Richie’s big dreams. Renner plays Carmine (a sweetened version of real Camden mayor and New Jersey state senator Angelo Errichetti) as a people’s politician, an idealist who’ll take money in the casino deal to bring thousands of jobs to Atlantic City. The surprise here is that Renner, so impressive in The Hurt Locker but largely stranded and cramped in tough-guy hero roles ever since, finds Carmine’s soul through delicate comic timing. No wonder Irving feels sympathy for the guy — he’s less a villain than a gregarious putz. (Also excellent: Louis CK as Richie’s FBI boss and Robert De Niro in an unbilled role as Mafia fixer Victor Tellegio.)

Reveling in its ’70s milieu and in the eternal abrasion of sexy women and covetous men, American Hustle is an urban eruption of flat-out fun — the sharpest, most exhilarating comedy in years. Anyone who says otherwise must be conning you.

In Review Online [Dan Girmus]

Pick of the week: A dazzling American con, circa 1978 ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, December 13, 2014

Abscam, the NSA and the '70s: The real “American Hustle ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, December 14, 2013

David Denby: “American Hustle” Review : The New Yorker December 16, 2013

The Best Movies of the Year : The New Yorker David Denby, December 19, 2013

Review: Amy Adams and Christian Bale play the long con in ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny

Slate [Dana Stevens]

PopMatters Bill Gibron

Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]

Review: David O. Russell's 'American Hustle' Is Snazzy And Fun ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE

Review: 'American Hustle' Todd Gilchrist from The Playlist

'American Hustle' Review: Confidence Schemes - Pajiba Daniel Carlson

1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]

Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]

PopMatters [Jesse Hassenger]

Film Racket [Chris Barsanti]

JamesBowman.net | American Hustle

The Film Stage [Jordan Raup]

American Hustle (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anne-Katrin Titze

Tim Grierson Screendaily, also seen here: American Hustle | Reviews | Screen

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

'American Hustle': When Brilliant Acting is More than ... Caryn James from indieWIRE

Home Theater Info DVD [Douglas MacLean]

American Hustle - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, Blu-Ray

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD with Pictures [Luke Bonanno]

AVForums - Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]

DVD Sleuth [Mike Long] Blu-Ray

DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]

DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Matt Paprocki]

Blu-ray.com [Martin Liebman]

Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]

AMERICAN HUSTLE Movie Review: A Funny Tribute To ... Devin Faraci from Badass Digest

American Hustle (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]

TheDivaReview.com [The Lady Miz Diva Vélez]

Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive) Goat

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2013 [Erik Beck]

Little White Lies [Anton Bitel]

Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]

Jay's Movie Blog [Jay Seaver]

Twitch [Eric D. Snider]

Some of this con actually happened [Jerry Saravia]

And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]

Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]

Half a Canyon [Nick Chen]

Telegraph [Robbie Collin]

John Anderson Thompson On Hollywood

Daily | David O. Russell's AMERICAN HUSTLE | Keyframe - Explore ... David Hudson at Fandor

American Hustle: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney

'American Hustle': David O. Russell's Entertaining Abscam Comedy ... Justin Chang from Variety

American Hustle – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, also seen here: Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]

Observer [Mark Kermode]

Examiner.com [Chris Sawin]

Examiner.com [Kay Shackleton]

Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]

FoxNews.com [Justin Craig]

The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]

American Hustle is a con to fall for | City Pages Stephanie Zacharek

Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]

Alibi.com [Devin D. O'Leary]

Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]

'American Hustle' ensemble puts the 'con' in confidence - latimes.com John Horn from The LA Times

American Hustle - Roger Ebert Christy Lemire

New York Times [By MANOHLA DARGIS]

Robert Ito Amy Adams profile from The New York Times

JOY B- 81

USA (124 mi) 2015 Official site

Another oddball piece for David O. Russell, among his more idiosyncratic works that seem to relish their own absurd dysfunction, leading the audience through a circuitous path that includes weird family meltdowns and abysmal financial failure, where all hopes and dreams are shattered and the audience is forced to endure a heroine that is literally wiped off the mat, forced to admit her abject failure before, by some miracle, the situation changes, leading to a fairy tale ending that bears little resemblance to everything that came before, perhaps suggesting there is a tenuous line between success and failure. Perhaps most improbable of all, and likely undetected by most viewers following the sheer lunacy in which the way the story is told, is that the film is actually a quirky biopic based on a real-life person, Joy Mangano, one of the producers of the film and the inventor of the Miracle Mop, her first product, but also the inventor of over 100 patents, including Huggable Hangers, the best-selling product in the history of the Home Shopping Network. After starting her career at QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience), an international shopping network, by selling an astounding 18,000 mops in just 20 minutes, she founded her own company, Ingenious Designs LLC, eventually becoming the face of the Home Shopping Network, where she remains one of their most successful sellers, with annual sales topping $150 million. As of 2015, her net worth is around $50 million according to Joy Mangano Net Worth | Celebrity Net Worth, yet none of this is known to audiences ahead of time, instead there is a simple opening dedication, “Inspired by the true stories of daring women. One in particular.” Most may be unfamiliar with Joy Mangano, but will only know about her on the strength of Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, where for most of the film she’s a struggling, unemployed housewife just trying to keep her beleaguered family together, as it appears to have ample opportunities to implode upon itself.

The third consecutive pairing of actress Jennifer Lawrence along with actors Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro working with this director, after Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013), Russell uses an interesting narrative structure, interweaving scenes from a televised soap opera, including legendary soap actors Susan Lucci from the now cancelled All My Children, and from General Hospital, Donna Mills, Laura Wright, and Maurice Benard, showing them in full melodramatic mode, resorting to the use of a gun to protect some underhanded family embezzlement, living in a hyper-traumatic universe that is artificially inspired, creating a parallel world with that of the living, but this holds the rapt attention of Joy’s mother Terri, played by a near unrecognizable Virginia Madsen, who literally never gets out of bed, living a life consumed by watching soap operas. Still distraught over her failed marriage, she goes ballistics every time her divorced husband (and Joy’s father) shows up, Rudy (Robert De Niro), immediately erupting in a shouting match, with Rudy inevitably trying to take charge in the worst manner imaginable, like a bull in a China shop, breaking things on the floor that Joy is obliged to clean up afterwards. Joy’s marriage has crumbled as well, though amicably, apparently, as her ex-husband Tony (Édgar Ramírez), an aspiring, out of work musician is living in the basement, while Joy and her two young children live with her mother and grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), who provides an all-knowing narration, seemingly aware of the present, past, and future, reminding viewers that she always found something special in Joy, knowing that she would be successful if she just follows her dreams. This sunny, overly optimistic view contrasts drastically with the financially dire and often contentious surroundings of this household, where the family is in a constant state of friction. Yet in flashback mode, we see her picture book wedding, which looks like it could have been shot during THE GODFATHER (1972), including a blissful rendition of Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid,” Jennifer Lawrence and Edgar Ramirez Sing ... - YouTube (2:19), while even earlier we see her at age ten playing with her best friend Jackie, showing meticulous care in cutting and folding white paper, creating an exquisite imaginary world that she keeps in a box by the side of her bed.

The internalized mindset of the story seems to be an age of self-inflicted narcissism set to the sounds of Cream singing “I Feel Free,” Cream - I Feel Free - YouTube (2:44), revealing an out-of-control family on the verge of collapse, where Joy is the only one bringing home a paycheck and the only thing holding it all together, as everyone else is pretty much useless, thinking only about themselves, where their exclusive self-centered views are continually exasperating. Graduating from her Long Island high school at the top of her class, Joy avoided college to pick up the pieces of her parent’s failed marriage, eventually helping do the books for her father’s auto-body business, putting her constantly at odds with Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm), Rudy’s same-age daughter from another marriage, who undermines her every chance she gets. This petty squabbling literally defines the picture, becoming a crumbling glimpse of a middle class family teetering on the edge, where it’s impossible to think anything good could come out of this continual dysfunction. But Joy still has a best friend in Jackie (Dascha Polanco), someone who has always believed in her, her grandmother’s continual optimism, and her own unfailing belief in herself, so when she enthusiastically comes up with the bare outlines of a business project, creating a self-cleaning mop that simply outcleans the competition, she does what any young entrepreneur would do under the circumstances, ask for help, and money, from her family, which includes her father’s new girlfriend named Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), a wealthy widow with a fiercely protective interest in her late husband’s fortune. While it’s all somewhat amateurish, where she’s inclined to place too much trust in her partners, the film does a good job in demonstrating just how significant the hurdles are in any startup business, where all the significant investments and major decisions are made prior to seeing any returns, where some investors blink when they see the amount of incurred debt and get cold feet. Where Joy goes wrong is thinking others in the family share her same interest, where it’s curious how quickly they drop her to protect their own financial bottom line, adding to the cyclical picture of family dysfunction. While every rags to riches story is unique, and behind every success story are a multitude of projects that fail, this film incredulously spends more time on all the things that went wrong, leading to moments of utter disillusionment, where many in the audience literally gasp that this could be happening in a Jennifer Lawrence movie, who may as well be America’s sweetheart, where her one opportunity for success may end in financial ruin. It’s a dizzyingly complicated finale, where it gets more than a little convoluted along the way, as there are literally dozens of impasses and side roads, each more improbable than the last, turning into some kind of international corporate espionage tale, yet somehow she prevails. It gets a bit tricky how she pulls herself out of the abyss, and it’s not for the faint of heart, but the underlying message is not how you respond to success, but to setbacks incurred along the way, where how you overcome adversity is what makes all the difference.

Review: Joy | David O. Russell - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, January/February 2016

David O. Russell’s latest film opens with a small-screen view of an impossibly stilted soap opera, its actors planted like trees on their marks in front of the studio cameras. It’s the favored show of the nearly bedridden mother of Joy Mangano, the future miracle-mop-inventor who still lives with her parasitic Long Island family, a bastion against dysfunction (but also a part of it). It’s not a bad guiding metaphor—that Joy herself is stuck in the recurring deflating, chauvinist narrative of her life that permits her no personal expression or advancement.

That’s about as intriguing as Joy the movie gets before turning into a film-length advertisement for the self-empowerment of its working-class protagonist. All the usual fun Russell crossfire is here, however, with people speaking their kooky minds and getting in each other’s business, like Robert De Niro as Joy’s estranged father who runs an auto-body shop, or a bewigged Isabella Rossellini as his newfound wealthy-widow love. But as soon as Joy gets that look in her eyes and pursues her invention, it’s the gumption show.

Fortunately, Lawrence could mop the floor and it’d be interesting (which, in fact, she does). Her energy and genuineness, and ability to surprise by modulating happy and sad emotions despite her outward glow, are all impressive. But it’s still not enough to save the film, which bumps along to an abrupt, broken-backed ending.

Joy | David O. Russell – In Review Online Matt Lynch

Joy begins with an on-screen dedication to “daring women” and a scene from a hypothetical cheesy soap opera in which two women argue about the men in their lives, the love that they want, and the power that they deserve. It’s a surreal introduction to another of David O. Russell’s worlds, where outsized, almost folk-ish popular narratives (like those of a faded boxer’s comeback, or a team of con-artists) are populated with seriously neurotic, often very damaged people. Imagine an episode of ’80s prime-time soap Knots Landing or Dallas but with the emotional register of a Cassavetes film (even actual soap stars like Susan Lucci and Knots’ own Donna Mills cameo here). That’s what Russell is shooting for, but it consistently fails because he eschews both structure and any sort of formal cohesion, and in this case even his favorite lead actress Jennifer Lawrence (in her third consecutive collaboration with him) lets him down.

Joy is extremely loosely based on the life of Joy Mangano (Lawrence, but you knew that), inventor of the Miracle Mop, an apparently revolutionary mop that’s better than any other mop. Mangano lives in a crumbling house with her two children, her grandmother (Diane Lane), her possibly agoraphobic mother (Virginia Madsen), and aspiring singer ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez). Oh, and then ne’er-do-well dad (Robert De Niro) gets dumped by his girlfriend and moves in too. They’re a typical Russell ensemble: a shrill, shrieking bunch, constantly hollering at each other and haranguing Joy (despite her endless, selfless support) while she suffers in silence.

It’s decidedly odd that Russell, who once channeled some truly hilarious existential panic about the deleterious effects of capitalism and advertising on self-actualization in I Heart Huckabees, would make a film wherein a woman finds herself by becoming a great saleswoman.

Only once Joy lands the Miracle Mop on home-shopping TV channel QVC does the movie temporarily wake up, with a dreamlike sequence in which she becomes a spokeswoman for her product on live television. A rotating set flips through different domestic scenes (a living room, a kitchen), row after row of telephone operators spring into action behind the camera while the producer and network head (Bradley Cooper, who for some reason won’t stop talking about Barry Diller) looks on amazed and Joy shifts incrementally from terrified deer-in-headlights to confident host right in front of us (and her family watching at home). It’s a pretty wonderful oasis given that the rest of the film is barely controlled; Russell must simply let the actors do whatever they wish. The constant jagged cuts and rough ADR suggest that he figures it all out in the edit, and there’s no rhythm or consistent tone in the script or the camerawork. That leaves Lawrence rudderless, and she’s got no choice but to fall back on her two most reliable tricks: crying freak-outs and steely reserve.

Is this merely meant as an idiosyncratic drama of empowerment through hard work, intuition, and self-confidence? If so, it depicts very little of that simple concept. So much of the nuts-and-bolts of designing and building the mop are elided for cacophonous screaming matches and baffling characterizations (why is Joy’s half-sister Peggy so mean?). An out-of-nowhere finale involves Joy single-handedly intimidating what appears to be a mafia extortion attempt, and makes precious little sense. It’s also decidedly odd that Russell, who once channeled some truly hilarious existential panic about the deleterious effects of capitalism and advertising on self-actualization in I Heart Huckabees, would make a film wherein a woman finds herself by becoming a great saleswoman. The soap opera parody, the QVC fantasia, the domestic prison, the mob shakedown; there’s nothing unifying Russell’s typically hyperactive shifts beyond the desire to get inside Joy’s head, but that isn’t possible when everything else seems so arbitrary.

Joy to the World Nick Pinkerton from Artforum, December 23, 2015

DAVID O. RUSSELL’S JOY, a biopic of home-shopping television personality and Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), focuses on its subject’s early years of struggle, though toward the end we get a glimpse of Joy as the self-made tycoon of later days, installed in her office behind the imposing desk from which she runs her empire, which doubles as a buffer from the world.

It’s a potent image, recalling the conclusion of Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956), in which Dorothy Malone, scion of Texas oil royalty, is left alone in her deceased father’s office, shouldering a new burden of responsibility. Joy, like Todd Haynes’s justly praised Carol, is in direct dialogue with the legacy of the Hollywood melodrama in which Sirk worked, and broaches some of the same questions that Sirk’s films continue to. To wit: Was Sirk, as he would later claim to sympathetic interviewers, smuggling critiques of American capitalism into his seemingly straightforward tearjerkers, or were the films precisely what they appeared to be? (Those inclined to see for themselves can do so in a knockout retrospective that begins today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.)

Based on a script by Bridesmaids screenwriter Annie Mumulol, Joy may be taken on the surface as a celebratory portrait of actualization through the mastery of the business world’s mechanisms—unlike the broken, condemned Malone, Joy ends with an image of poise, power, and self-reliance. (“Inspired by True Stories of Daring Women, and One in Particular,” reads the film’s epigram.) Through the course of the film we see how Joy, out of necessity, develops these attributes. The movie’s narrator, Joy’s supportive, saintly grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), introduces our protagonist as a preternaturally gifted preadolescent with a passion for tinkering. We then reconnect with Joy as an adult, sometime in what appears to be the mid-1980s on what is apparently meant to be Long Island. Few of this little girl’s big dreams have come to fruition: Having foresworn a college scholarship for family obligations, she now works at an airline ticket counter, and shares a house that’s hardly a home with her two kids and her divorced mother (Virginia Madsen), a shut-in TV junkie. Dad (Robert De Niro) barely bothers to disguise his preference for Joy’s half-sister, Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm), who works with him at the family auto-body shop, though after things go south with his current girlfriend, that doesn’t keep him from moving back to share the basement with Joy’s live-in ex-husband, Tony (Édgar Ramírez).

Though most of her immediate family never shows any indication that they’re capable of looking past their own self-interest, Joy does have a few helping hands, like Tony, her childhood best friend, Jackie (Dascha Polanco), and benevolent Mimi. If there is any doubt that Mimi is a guardian angel, the fact that she continues to narrate Joy’s story after she passes away should put this to rest. Such supernatural occurrences are not unheard of, and the attempted tone of the film might be described as kitchen-sink magic realism. The birth of the Miracle Mop is presented as something truly miraculous, the idea for it coming to Joy in a burst of divine inspiration, and Russell treats this moment of inception as solemnly as if he were shooting Virginia Woolf conceiving of To the Lighthouse. Seemingly the answer to her prayers of escaping her dead-end life, the development and sale of the Miracle Mop only creates more problems, as Joy has to contend with unscrupulous and predatory businessmen. To take care of one, she heads all the way to Dallas for a face-to-face showdown and, emerging victorious into the Texas heat, basks in the artificial snowfall of a toy store’s vitrine—a Christmas miracle on Commerce Street.

Openly concerned with the interplay between mass culture and everyday existence, Joy begins by dropping us into a piece of black-and-white drawing-room drama, only to reveal that we are in fact watching the soap opera that has supplanted lived experience for Joy’s mother. The soap also happens to reflect the domestic turmoil of Joy’s own life in an exaggerated, histrionic register, even haunting her nightmares, but our heroine’s progress through the film may be described as a journey from passive consumer to active producer of mediated imagery, from receiver to transmitter. This happens by way of the at-first hesitant sponsorship of Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), an executive at a newly launched, innovative cable company headquartered in Amish country: QVC. (It stands for “Quality, Value, Convenience.”)

The QVC studios are a wonderland where rotating sets transform kitchen to patio at the push of a button, Joan Rivers lives again (in the person of doppelgänger daughter Melissa), and a sales counter announces new fortunes made in a scant few minutes of airtime. The scenes here, in which Joy discovers her vocation as a pitchwoman, have a liberating brio found nowhere else in the film, though as soon as she leaves the studio her family sets upon her anew, increasingly resembling a predatory pack working together to bring down their prey. The most endearing thing about Russell is that he is—to a degree depressingly uncommon among directors of his stature—actually concerned with the lived lives of Americans hovering between genteel poverty and the middle class, a vast portion of the country that rarely sees itself represented at the multiplex. Problem is, aside from details of production design that might have been inspired by any episode of Roseanne—the laundry hamper on the ironing board in the kitchen and the coffee cup full of ballpoint pens on the table—he rarely depicts the milieu convincingly.

This isn’t to say that Russell or any filmmaker need necessarily constrain themselves to whatever passes for realism, but without a base-level foundation he tends to fall into a pattern of spastic effusion, a violent lurch accompanying each of the short-attention-span shifts in register. (Hal Hartley’s approach to creating a mystical-realist bridge-and-tunnel country is a worthwhile comparison.) Joy’s eventual escape and ascendance, covered in a Mimi-narrated postscript, has an aspect of blue-collar Cinderella wish fulfillment about it, as well as an undertone of melancholy. However, rather than find a way for opposing ideas to coexist and overlap in the same scene—think of the first meeting between the lovers on the floor of Frankenberg’s department store in Carol, which occurs at the busy intersection of class lines and desire both sexual and acquisitive—Russell’s movie staggers from one theme to the next, shrilly insisting all along the way that the viewer feel something.

It succeeds, but the result can’t have been the desired one: Russell’s films so often give one the feeling of being buttonholed at a party by a breathless, insistent boor. His latest is less peppy than pummeling, and in working desperately to keep the energy level up, Russell offers further proof that he uses pop-music cues worse than any other working director. His admirers usually cite his work with actors as his strength, but while star Lawrence is merely miscast—the part calls for someone with a few more city miles on them—practically everyone else is fumbling with untenable, one-note roles. The film’s turbulence might be meant to reflect the messiness of Life Itself, but the result is as phony as the stains meticulously daubed onto Lawrence’s dowdy single-mom blouses. It’s a dizzy, dervish-like movie that can be read as a celebration of capitalism, an economic cautionary tale, both at once, or total political confusion à la Russell’s Three Kings (1999)—but there’s little allure to look closer at a movie that offers little in return for leaving you so wrung out.

Film of the Week: Joy - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, December 25, 2015

There’s a very high WTF factor to David O. Russell’s comedy-drama Joy. Early on, when his heroine (Jennifer Lawrence) is working at an airport desk, Russell’s camera sweeps briskly past a long, angry queue. “What’s your name? ‘Joy’?” rasps a discontented customer. “You don’t seem so joyous to me today!”

Both these effects, the rushing camera move and the dyspeptic one-liner, are fun, yet both seem to be fundamentally superfluous—flashy bits of garnish that don’t seem in any way intrinsic to the film. Well, Russell has long had a reputation as a director who doesn’t like either himself or us to get bored, and this twitchiness has made him one of the most unpredictable—or just plain uneven—filmmakers in contemporary Hollywood. It means that he can dazzle with an unpretentiously bustling blue-collar drama like The Fighter—arguably his most substantial film to date—and an all-out fireworks display such as American Hustle, an exuberant retro riff that was a more juicily Scorsesean film than its contemporary on the release circuit, The Wolf of Wall Street.

But then you get an infuriating piece of extended facetiousness such as I Heart Huckabees—and while Joy is far more confident and to the point than that misshapen UFO, it’s very nearly as puzzling. Joy is a type of film that few serious film-makers attempt these days—an honest-to-God rags-to-riches success story. It’s a thinly disguised biopic of American inventor and entrepreneur Joy Mangano, creator of the self-wringing Miracle Mop (and other modern marvels, unfortunately not featured here, such as Huggable Hangers and the Forever Fragrant odor neutralizer range). Joy is specifically about the tormented birth pangs of Mangano’s mop, but as shoppers know, it all worked out fine. The tagline could have been: “She created a mop. She cleaned up.”

The film, as two captions announce at the beginning, is “Inspired by true stories of daring women… [beat] One in particular.” It all starts with a snowbound evocation of the working-class childhood of Joy (played as a girl by Isabella Crovetti-Cramp), a plucky, wide-eyed kid first seen playing in the snow. In her room, she makes paper models of an ideal happy home, prompting her half-sister Peggy to tell her she needs a handsome prince. “I don’t need a prince,” says Joy—but growing up, she saddles herself with one anyway.

The action cuts to Joy as an adult, in a cluttered and ostentatiously dysfunctional household. Her parents are divorced; her mother Terry (Virginia Madsen) sits in bed all day watching TV soaps, while dad Rudy (Robert De Niro), who runs a repair shop, has been sent back home as “damaged” by the woman he left Terry for. Dad is made to move into the basement along with Joy’s ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez), a charming Venezuelan crooner who never quite fulfilled his promise as a Latino Tom Jones, and never got it together to move out either. All Joy’s childhood dreams have turned sour—beginning, it seems, at the moment that her parents egregiously failed to patent for her the quick release dog collar that she invented and could have made a mint from.

Joy is desperate to break out of her life’s dull prison, but her big moment will be purely serendipitous. Dad starts dating wealthy Italian widow Trudy (a madcap Isabella Rossellini, relishing every barked imprecation and wagged finger). Trudy invites her new beau’s family to join her on board her late husband’s boat, but no red wine—“It might stain the teak! wood! deck!” Sure enough, wine is spilled, Joy gets down on all fours to wipe up the mess—and has a eureka moment as she realizes that mops ought really to be better. Like every good inventor in the movies, she first starts muttering aloud—then dashes upstairs to do some sketches (“Three hundred feet of continuous cotton loops, that’s what I drew”). Hoping for finance from Rudy’s squeeze, she satisfactorily answers the dead husband’s “Four Questions of Financial Worthiness” despite Trudy’s reservations (“It is possible that she is a fatally flawed underachiever”). Soon a Latina workforce (none of whom, it should be said, get to be characters as such) move into Joy’s basement to start assembling the product.

The film’s script—by Russell and Bridesmaids co-creator Annie Mumolo—proves, from here on, to be interested more than anything in the selling of Joy’s creation. We go from the sneaky pitch in supermarket car parks (“Self-wringing, huh?”), to a visit to the headquarters of shopping channel QVC, where Joy sits in a waiting room that’s like a vast chapel—one of the moments at which the film most clearly appears to be attempting some kind of satire. It’s hard to know whether QVC exec Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) is being presented as a friend or a foe, a white knight or a jerk—he’s the one who eventually gives Joy her big chance, but he introduces himself with a long droning speech about how Barry Diller entrusted him with a key position, a piece of media-world shop talk that won’t mean a great deal to general audiences, and certainly didn’t mean a great deal to me.

The rest of the story is fairly predictable—Joy fails at first, then succeeds, suffers a seemingly insuperable reversal of fortune, yet beats the odds. She learns to work the TV system on her terms, refusing to dress in the standard Eighties home-shopping uniform: “I wear a blouse and I wear pants. This is who I am.” The narrative gets bogged down in an intrigue involving a patent dispute, but Russell gets himself out of these doldrums by treating the rest first like a thriller (Joy infiltrates a lowlife’s warehouse), then like a Western, as she strides across a Dallas street to a showdown with a Stetsoned enemy—having first cropped her hair for the occasion, like Joan of Arc on the eve of battle. Russell makes such heavy weather of Joy’s warrior-woman intrepidity, it’s a wonder he didn’t kit her out with Katniss Everdeen’s bow and arrow for this sequence: mirror shades and leather jacket must suffice.

It’s really hard to tell whether Russell intends to tell a straight-up inspirational poor-girl-made-good narrative or to spin the whole thing for satire. There are wry flashes in the whole TV-world sequence—most obviously betokened by the presence of Joan Rivers (played by her own daughter Melissa Rivers)—but when the calls start coming in, and the mop proves a hit, we seem genuinely to be dealing with the same kind of triumphant epiphany you’d find in a sports movie.

If it’s hard to gauge exactly what Joy has in mind throughout, it’s because Russell seems to try whatever works, whenever it comes into his head. It’s also partly because the film is so bizarrely narrated—it’s told, for a start, in intermittent voiceover by Joy’s loving grandmother (Diane Ladd). She is actually dead during much of the action, but nevertheless narrates as if from the afterlife (and in any case, makes a twinkly-eyed posthumous appearance at her own funeral: “I felt I wanted to stay near her and watch over her”). Grandma Mimi’s omniscient narrative has a Hallmark card coziness—“She couldn’t know that one day she would move into a beautiful house…”—but it’s hard to know whether or not we’re supposed to perceive this as being as hokey as the TV soap parodies that are interspersed throughout (and which come across as joylessly stilted, even by the standards of the real thing).

Joy is for the most part a bewildering mess—possibly because its four credited editors are a sign of structural problems, possibly just because Russell throws too much directorial dash at us when he should be making things simple. For example, there’s barely a character here that isn’t introduced with some sort of demented flourish—like Tony, first seen singing a salsa version of “Mama Told Me Not to Come”—but who subsequently remains just a personable pillar of strength hovering in the background. Grandma is barely there, a mere wraith in the making, while Virginia Madsen is mainly kept at a distance behind a huge pair of Eighties spectacles. Apart from a cheerfully crazed Rossellini, the person who has most fun is De Niro, who seems—on the evidence of this and Silver Linings Playbook—to perk up for Russell as for no other director these days. He’s doing the same kind of curmudgeonly routine as in that other film, but gets some great lines to do it with, whether delivering a singularly off-message wedding speech, or sniping at his ex: “Of course I’m disturbed—you’re the Great Disturber!” As for Lawrence, who got to play the bristling comedienne in American Hustle in a way we’d never seen before, she doesn’t have anything like as rewarding a role here. She gets her big angry, determined moments—(“Never speak—on my behalf—about my business!”) but for much of the film, Joy is a closed-off paragon of forbearance and determination, her smooth face oddly, even unsettlingly mask-like. Nevertheless, Lawrence’s opacity lends a certain chilly reserve and ambivalence to a film that’s otherwise often outrageously clunky and on the nose, especially in the musical choices: Sinatra’s “The Good Life” for a yacht ride, Cream’s “I Feel Free” for the triumphant finale? Really?

However, there is ambivalence of a very weird sort, especially in the repeated association of Joy with falling snow, and her placing in cold white refrigerator-like environments that suggest, over the course of the film, that she only survives by hardening like ice. A late flash-forward to Joy’s future shows her in a luxurious mansion, sitting at her desk dispensing benevolence to two humble petitioners who hope that she’ll back their invention: she’s magnanimous and gracious because she’s been in their position. But perhaps that crisply perfect white suit she now wears tells its own story. We also see her in this part of the film ruefully inspecting her old paper fence and tree, now crumpled—her very own Rosebuds. For what is the film, after all, but Russell’s very own female-skewed Citizen Klean?

Sight & Sound [Graham Fuller] December 31, 2015

David O. Russell's Self-Reflexive “Joy” - The New Yorker Richard Brody

'Joy' Review: David O. Russell Mansplains The Female ... Kristy Puchko from Pajiba

Why Is The True Story of David O. Russell's Joy Such a ... Katie Calautti from Vanity Fair magazine, December 17, 2015

Joy is joyless, and easily David O. Russell's worst film | The ... Tasha Robinson from The Verge

Five Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From 'Joy ... - Forbes Cliff Oxford from Forbes magazine, December 28, 2015

World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]

“Joy”: Another Jennifer Lawrence-Bradley Cooper-David ... - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, January 1, 2016

David O. Russell Fails to Deliver Joy - Slate Dana Stevens

'Joy': Review - Screen Daily Tim Grierson

INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: The Baconation [Steve Pulaski]

Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]

Jennifer Lawrence Hustles, but 'Joy' Does Her No Favors | Village Voice Melissa Anderson

Film Review: Joy | Film Journal International Chris Barsanti

Review: David O. Russell's Bold And Vibrant 'Joy' Starrin ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist

Review: Jennifer Lawrence gives her all but cant quite make ... Drew McWeeny from Hit Fix

Movie Review: Joy -- Vulture David Edelstein

[Review] Joy - The Film Stage Michael Snydel

Joy · Film Review Joy reunites David O. Russell and ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club

Joy | Film Review | Slant Magazine Jaime N. Christley

DVDTalk.com [Jeff Nelson]

Joy | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli

DVD Talk [William Harrison]

DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]

AVForums - Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]

Daily Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]

Aisle Seat [Mike McGranaghan]

Joy :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Curtis Woloschuk

Vague Visages [Josh Slater-Williams]

Popdose [Bob Cashill]

TwitchFilm [Jim Tudor]

The Upcoming [Emma Clarendon]

Film Racket [Jason McKiernan]

Reviews Joy David O. Russell For some, it may ... - Exclaim! Matthew Ritchie

10 interesting facts about the movie "Joy"! (List) — Useless ... Rania Strataki from Useless Daily, December 27, 2015

How Much Of A True Story Is 'Joy'? Jennifer Lawrence Says ... Zainab Akande from Bustle, December 17, 2015

The Real Joy Mangano on the Biggest Challenges of Building a $3 Billion Empire Zoe Henry from Inc, January 9, 2016

Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]

Irish Cinephile [Eamonn Rafferty]

David O. Russell Loves Soap Actors -- Vulture Ira Madison III

David O. Russell on Joy: 'Jennifer and I did what we had never done ... Jack Shepherd interview from The Independent, January 5, 2016

Jennifer Lawrence, David O. Russell Talk Making of 'Joy' Pamela McClintock from The Hollywood Reporter

Film Review: 'Joy' - Variety Justin Chang

Joy (2016), directed by David O. Russell | Film review Cath Clarke from Time Out London

Joy review: Jennifer Lawrence cleans up in amiably messy mop biopic ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian

Joy review – Jennifer Lawrence as QVC queen | Film | The Guardian Jonathan Romney from The Observer

Joy, film review: Jennifer Lawrence cleans up in ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab

Joy review: 'Jennifer Lawrence's brilliant fairy tale' - The Telegraph Robbie Collin from The Daily Telegraph

Irish Film Critic [James McDonald]

South China Morning Post [James Mottram]

Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]

Vancouver Weekly [Michael Scoular]

Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]

The Buffalo News [Jeff Simon]

Cambridge Day [T. Meek]

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Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]

Why did so few people see 'Joy'? David O. Russell has some theories ... Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times

New York Times [A. O. Scott]

Joy Movie Review & Film Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley

Joy - Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

David O. Russell on 'Joy,' Jennifer Lawrence and Embracing ... The New York Times

Joy (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Joy Mangano: Products from Inventor Joy Mangano | HSN

Russell, Ken

THE DEVILS

Great Britain (105 mi) 1971

BFI | Sight & Sound | Raising Hell Mark Kermode from Sight and Sound, December 2002

Ken Russell's The Devils, about demonic possession in Loudun, was released in 1971 with a key scene cut. Mark Kermode wants this 'rape of Christ' restored

When Sight & Sound recently published its polls of the top ten films of all time, two correspondents (one film-maker, one critic) cited Ken Russell's dark 1970s masterpiece The Devils as one of the ten greatest achievements of cinema history. The first was Alex Cox, director of such cult classics as Repo Man, Sid and Nancy and Highway Patrolman, who had been instrumental in presenting the longest available version of The Devils to the British public via BBC2's 'Forbidden Cinema' weekend in May 1995. The second was myself, a critic who had long argued against the censorship of extreme cinema and who was now engaged in a crusade to reinstate the censored scenes cut from Russell's film prior to its 1971 release. Working with Paul Joyce's Lucida Productions, I had spent two and a half years researching and filming the Channel 4 documentary Hell on Earth, during which time I had made a discovery which Russell and his former editor Mike Bradsell would hail as "a magnificent find": a reel of previously unscreened censored footage, featuring restorable versions of key sequences from The Devils including a lengthy segment known to fans of the film as the 'rape of Christ'. Described by Russell as containing "some of my finest work", this sequence had long passed into legend, surviving only in stills archived at the British Film Institute, in the pages of Tim Lucas' indispensable Video Watchdog and in Russell's animated descriptions of a "quite dazzling and disturbing montage of images which brought things to a shattering climax." Wresting this footage from the darkened vaults and placing it in the glare of the public gaze where it rightly belongs has been a tortuous process which stands as a testament to The Devils' continuing power to shock and startle.

A story about brainwashing

The story The Devils tells is an engrossing one, based on the extraordinary real-life events that climaxed in the public burning of Father Urbain Grandier in the French city of Loudun (aka Loudon) in 1634. In Russell's movie Grandier (magnificently played by a brooding Oliver Reed) is a handsome, charismatic and womanising priest whose common-leadership qualities put him at odds with King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) and Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) over their planned destruction of Loudun's fortifications. When the increasingly demented Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave) claims she has been visited by an incubus named 'Grandier', Father Mignon (Murray Melvin) calls for the church's chief exorcist Father Barre (Michael Gothard) to perform torturous rituals on her body and soul, which intensify her lustful ravings. Soon an entire convent of Ursuline nuns are claiming seduction by Grandier's black magic and indulging in spectacular blasphemous orgies which attract tourists from as far afield as Paris and seal the accused priest's fate as an emissary of the Devil. As Grandier is tortured and burned at the stake, he calls for his people to look to their city, the walls of which are destroyed even as he succumbs to a lingering, infernal death.

Despite their apparently fantastical nature, the historical facts behind The Devils are well documented in everything from Trollope's 1878 Sketches from French History to recent translations of Michel de Certeau's The Possession at Loudun. Most celebrated of the accounts, however, is Aldous Huxley's 1952 classic The Devils of Loudun, which is credited on Russell's movie - alongside John Whiting's stageplay The Devils (first performed by the RSC in 1961) - and which had already provided the inspiration for Jerzy Kawalerowicz's respected Polish film Mother Joan of the Angels (1961). Introduced to the project by his producer, Russell remembers being "knocked out" by Huxley's book and wanting his film to inspire a similar reaction in audiences. Using dialogue from Whiting's play and detail from Huxley's historical account, the director set about mounting what he would later call "my most, indeed my only, political film". For him (as for Huxley), this was "a story about brainwashing"; despite having converted to Catholicism a decade earlier, Russell was confident that the events at Loudun had nothing to do with demonism or the supernatural and everything to do with the corrupt marriage of church and state. Inspired, he penned a screenplay which would put his passion for this theme first on page and later on screen - with hell-raising results.

Shot at Pinewood on awe-inspiringly pristine sets designed by fledgling artist Derek Jarman to evoke Huxley's image of "a rape in a public toilet", The Devils was a controversial project from the outset. Initially written for United Artists, for whom Russell had already directed three successful movies (Billion Dollar Brain, 1967; Women in Love, 1969; The Music Lovers, 1970), The Devils was promptly dropped when "somebody at UA actually read the script" and was subsequently picked up by a rival studio. Even before shooting was complete, salacious stories began to appear in the British press of naked nuns being sexually assaulted by drunken extras during the filming of the demonic orgy scenes, and of underage performers being present during the rehearsals for a scene involving nudity. Lengthy negotiations with the British censors resulted finally in the granting of an 'X' certificate, which was promptly overturned by many local councils (which simply banned the film outright) and vociferously opposed by Festival of Light spokesman Peter Thompson, who called for the certificate to be withdrawn and for new chief censor Stephen Murphy to resign. Meanwhile, the howl of critical outrage that greeted the film's release in the summer of 1971 came to a head when an apoplectic Russell physically attacked Evening Standard writer Alexander Walker live on national television, striking him about the head with a copy of his own review in a confrontation that has gone down in the annals of British television history.

But for all the public agitation The Devils provoked, it has only ever been seen in versions which dilute the unfettered excesses of Russell's intentionally ferocious vision and which temper the on-screen extremities the director had worked such magic to conjure. Twice butchered in America by its own distributors (for both 'X'- and later 'R'-rated US releases), the most complete version remains the British 'X'-rated edition which BBFC records log as having been trimmed by 89 seconds prior to the film's UK release. Yet my own investigations have revealed that somewhere between four and five minutes of footage which Russell intended for inclusion was slashed from The Devils prior to BBFC submission, consigning entire sequences to the cutting-room floor, most notoriously the orgiastic centrepiece that has become known as the holy grail of Russell's black mass: the 'rape of Christ'.

Spectacular perversion

In Russell's original vision this sequence was to be both the thematic and visual climax of The Devils, bringing the various threads of political, religious and sexual corruption together in a scene of spectacular perversion. In the original assembly this sequence immediately followed an act of deception by the king, who visits the carousing nuns of Loudun in disguise to see for himself the "miracle" of their alleged demonic possession. Handing Father Barre a holy relic which he claims to be a phial of Christ's own blood, the king watches in amusement as his gift swiftly drives the demons from the gibbering nuns before being revealed to be nothing but an empty box. Spurred to new heights of hysteria, the nuns batter Father Barre to the floor and unclothe a priest before charging the altar where hangs a vast statue of an anguished Christ. Tearing down the crucifix and laying it on the floor, the nuns proceed to engage in a maniacal ravaging of the statue, watched from on high by a masturbating Father Mignon whose breathless exertions are matched by a series of eye-popping crash-zooms from an overhead view of the blasphemous orgy.

Although the sequence sounds almost ludicrously over-the-top, its true meaning is revealed by the subtle intercutting of sombre shots of Father Grandier. Depicted on his return journey from Paris taking a humble roadside communion with his beloved Madeleine, Grandier - who is blamed for all this madness - is seen in almost dreamlike tranquillity breaking bread and blessing the communal wine amid the natural beauty of God's creation. Even for those of a particularly small-minded and prurient bent, it's impossible to view this sequence without appreciating the stark contrast between Grandier's private act of faith and the nuns' public charade of blasphemy. No wonder the Reverend Gene Phillips S.J., who has long taught The Devils at Loyola University in Chicago, considered the sequence to be justified when he viewed it in rough cut back in 1970, concluding that although it portrayed blasphemy, it was not in itself blasphemous.

Sadly, however, the Reverend Phillips was to be one of only a privileged few who were allowed to make up their own minds about the 'rape of Christ', since the sequence was slashed in its entirety from The Devils for reasons that are now cloaked in confusion. According to Russell, outgoing BBFC chief John Trevelyan had seen the movie in rough cut and made some unofficial suggestions for trims prior to submission to the censors. Russell clearly remembers Trevelyan, who had fought to get Women in Love through the board with its naked male wrestling intact, viewing the 'rape' and telling him the sequence would have to go in toto. "The point is," recalls Russell, "he had conceded on a number of other points and although I thought this sequence was important he felt strongly that the point had already been made, and no matter how much I argued he just said no."

Editor Mike Bradsell, however, insists that while Trevelyan may indeed have objected to this scene, the real problems came from the film's American financiers, who were simply appalled by what Russell had put on screen. Bradsell remembers very clearly the ill-fated screening of The Devils during which three US studio executives started muttering disconcertedly from the opening frames of the film, and in the middle of which Russell's associate producer Roy Baird suggested that they retire to a nearby pub since things "clearly weren't going well." Later, in a room at the Dorchester hotel, Russell recalls that, "They really let me have it." Cuts were promptly ordered, with the greatest objections being voiced about the 'rape of Christ', which Bradsell remembers being nixed in its entirety at the request (read demand) of the studio.

Whether it was the censor or the studio who had the final word remains unclear. Although Russell defers to Bradsell's memory for detail, it seems likely Trevelyan would have both seen and objected to the sequence, perhaps realising it was exactly the sort of material to which his colleagues at the BBFC would react with dismay. Certainly by the time The Devils was officially submitted to the censors in February 1971 the sequence had hit the cutting-room floor, and although a few fleeting, residual shots remained to trouble the BBFC (the sight of a nun spiralling naked from a rope, for instance), there is nothing in the board's records to suggest that the 'rape of Christ' was ever officially seen or rejected by the examiners. All that is certain is that this extraordinary sequence, which clocked in at between three and four minutes, was deftly excised by Bradsell, leaving Russell with a memory of "the reel of film, just lying there" before disappearing into oblivion, missing, believed destroyed.

It was in the knowledge of its probable destruction that I started searching for this sequence back in 1999, spurred on by Ken's vivid description of the piece and encouraged by recent unearthings such as that of the excised footage from The Exorcist which I'd been able to present for the first time in Nick Freand Jones' BBC documentary The Fear of God. Working with director Paul Joyce (whose documentaries on Oshima, Wenders, Roeg and Kubrick had earned great critical respect), I made a nuisance of myself in America, where we enlisted respected archivist Mike Arrick to make ultimately fruitless enquiries at the studio's Burbank vaults. Having drawn a blank, Paul and I turned our attention to the UK, where Ken was now convinced any surviving material would finally have come to rest. Initially the studio was tolerant of our badgerings, particularly since finding extra footage could facilitate a commercially viable reissue of the film. But when a final pleading request by us to check one outstanding item which was believed to be utterly innocuous in fact turned up a canister containing negative cuts of whole sequences deleted from The Devils, this enthusiasm began to wane.

Bawdy pantomime

Viewed in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks, these religiously controversial scenes (which include a bawdy pantomime of priests fornicating with nuns; a lengthy interlude of naked nuns at leisure in their convent in the presence of a large dog; an extended sequence of Vanessa Redgrave's Sister Jeanne kissing and caressing Grandier's charred bone which she then uses - off screen - as a dildo; and two entire assemblies of the 'rape of Christ') were once again deemed unfit for public consumption. Despite offers by Lucida Productions to reinstate this material into The Devils at its own cost with the assistance of editor Mike Bradsell, the studio balked, declaring the "distasteful tonality" of the material to be entirely out of step with current company policy. Once again, the Americans who had initially financed Russell's outlandish vision decreed that the director had gone too far, and chose to censor their own property. It was only after much complex legal negotiation that Channel 4 was granted the right to exhibit this material at its own risk, and even as I write, mere weeks from our projected transmission date, I am aware that this right may yet be rescinded and those sequences may yet remain unseen.

Whether or not Russell's extraordinary vision would be enhanced by the reinstatement of this recovered material is clearly a matter of personal opinion. Having viewed an assembly of this sequence which Bradsell had brilliantly orchestrated with found fragments of Peter Maxwell Davies' electrifying score, Russell declared himself to be "delighted" with the results and enthusiastic about the sequence's imminent restoration. As things currently stand, however, there is little chance that the film's original backers will sanction such an act, though the possibility of sublicensing the material to an independent distributor remains an option. For the moment, though, Russell's beautiful monster must remain where it has always been: caged within the confines of state and studio censorship, cast out of the catholic canon of mainstream cinema.

Ken Russell's Portraits of Composers Ken Russell’s Portraits of Elgar, Delius and Mahler, by Donald Phelps from Rouge, 2006

LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM

Great Britain (93 mi) 1988

Lair of the White Worm Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine

Christianity and paganism clash in Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm, a campy account of the horrors that beset a small England town when the mysterious Lady Sylvia Marsh (Catherine Oxenberg) decides to conjure up the ghosts of worms from long ago. An unearthed reptilian skull and several Roman coins seemingly provokes one woman's curious sexual hallucinations that bring to mind Julie Taymor Titus. Having helped Roman warriors rape and kill a group of nuns during days of yore, a snake with a hearty sexual appetite returns to the present looking for more sacrificial lambs. Heir to a family of dragon-slayers, Lord James D'Ampton (Hugh Grant) suspects Marsh of wrongdoing once she reveals her penchant for "Snakes & Ladders." Russell's compositions are gorgeous to look at though it's the deliciousness with which the story unravels that made Lair of the White Worm Russell's most enjoyable film since his masterpiece Crimes of Passion. One amusing scenario here says everything that needs to be said about Russell as a director: James discusses worm-lore while his friend Angus (Peter Capaldi) voraciously chews on spaghetti. Cheap effects and gratuitous displays of nudity only heighten the film's delirious demeanor.

Russell, Keri – actress

Keri Russell Styled by Daniela Paudice, photographed by Wayne Maser in New York City for Vanity Fair, May 2006

Russo-Young, Ry

YOU WON’T MISS ME

USA (81 mi) 2009

YOU WON'T MISS ME Facets Multi Media

A kaleidoscopic film portrait of Shelly Brown, a twenty-three-year-old alienated urban misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital. This absorbing character study features a startlingly raw performance from Stella Schnabel as an aspiring actress who drifts through a series of meaningless sexual encounters, failed auditions, and public breakdowns, repeatedly lashing out at the world she struggles to comprehend. You Won't Miss Me employs an elliptical, fragmented narrative, while creating a truly singular and unpredictable portrait and also showcases a variety of cinematic techniques (16mm, Super 8, and digital video formats), that show us the kind of character rarely depicted on screen. This extraordinary film gives pathos to the frenzy of the youthful desire for acceptance and like an updated version of Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, You Won't Miss Me astutely taps into the psychology of a frustrated generation.

Village Voice Nick Pinkerton

You Wont Miss Me, Ry Russo-Young’s character study of a gal passing the worst years of her life in cool North Brooklyn, leads off with a scene that lets you know right away that you’re in the good hands of a young director sensitive to the idiosyncratic details that breathe life into a movie. We start with a guy and girl, mid-20s, seemingly confused by how they came to be alone together in this skanky apartment. What follows is less a seduction than a dazed “Why not?” as Stella Schnabel’s blurry-voiced aggressor comes on to the longhair. They have a Morrissey-themed flirt, as if transcribed from life; she backs him into bed, and he goes along, trailing with a wary, compulsive chuckle. The film follows Shelly, a 23-year-old whose life is scheduled around idle promiscuity, theater auditions, and therapy sessions—listening in on her confessions gives the movie its diaristic quality. The unhappy luxury of “quarterlife” aimlessness is taken at face value while Shelly, played with piss-and-vinegar by Schnabel, is an engaging and even likable screw-up, all the more so for being actually a little crazy. When she has one of her bridge-burning eruptions, like a hotel room flip-out on a misfired road trip, you can’t look away from the flames.

The Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]

For a great ode to fucking shit up, bypass Enright's pretense for the fire-starting, tantrum-improv You Won't Miss Me, made with commitment and absorbing sympathy by director Ry Russo-Young and star Stella Schnabel (an art-world scion, playing an open-bar debauchee who never seems to work, but makes rent). Schnabel's Shelly is an easy lay, intense enough to spook you the morning after, but not commitably crazy, spending her twenties hungover at auditions after swapping chlamydia with any Williamsbeard scrub in a bad band. Miss Me gets its milieu's bathroom-sex stink and, in scenes like the sudden slash of insults between Shelly and a girlfriend on a spoiled weekend trip, has a pure 180-proof burn.

Russo-Young has been affiliated with the unassuming lowercase-title crowd formerly known as mumblecore, but I'm betting she's too much of a live one to settle for critics' "modest" and "wryly observed" backpats. Miss Me is the most successful, but hardly the only, study in repining youth here.

Time Out New York [JNick Schrager]

Ry Russo-Young’s sophomore feature won’t completely disassociate the writer-director from the mumblecore movement she was lumped in with after her 2007 debut, Orphans—not least because of her latest film’s raft of SXSW-alumni cameos. Nonetheless, this often-bracing effort differentiates itself from that indie genre by wallowing in scuzzy self-destruction instead of generational, woe-is-us quirkiness, via the tale of an aspiring actress named Shelly (art-world heiress Schnabel). She’s an out-of-control twentysomething recently released from a psychiatric hospital, and struggling—sloppily, bitterly, miserably—to find purpose and love through awkward auditions and unfulfilling hookups.

The film’s frequent montages of Shelly wandering about Williamsburg, Brooklyn (shot with grainy, aspect-ratio-fluctuating expressionism and marked by Shelly’s confessionals to her shrink) push a bit too hard into affectation. Her pain and fury, however, never feel less than real during her drunken, smoke-shrouded one-night stands and disappointing mornings-after. Schnabel exudes disgust, fear and longing with an unvarnished rawness far removed from the hipster ditziness of many celebrated low-fi efforts, and the result is a work that radiates a boozy, Bukowski-esque downward spiral, all alcohol-fueled anger and aimless sadness.

NewCity Chicago Ray Pride

The moment is past but the moment is now: In 2009 Williamsburg, Shelly, a woman of 23 or so, (Stella Schnabel) contends with intense desires, average expectations, quotidian disappointments. Shelly’s inner life is suggested by a voice-over that’s as much interior monologue as it is diary entry or recitation to a therapist, as well as a visual style fashioned in multiple bold formats. There’s an intermittent score by Will Bates as well that uses a percussive tattoo like an accelerated heartbeat, shared by Stella and the film itself, in the same fashion Jon Brion did with his music for “Punch-Drunk Love.” Ry Russo-Young’s second feature, “You Wont Miss Me” (sic), at first glance resembles other contemporary low-budget, digital video idioms, but in fact, it’s a quietly constructed, sharply observed, unsentimental of-the-minute “Alice in Wonderland.” The final shot of the movie is a gorgeous slap, prompting that reference, ending with just the right note of the character’s knack for provocation but also her essentially uncentered existence. There are elements in Russo-Young’s filmmaking that I wouldn’t presume as influences, but as parallels that rang true to me. For instance, in the nonjudgmental approach to depicting Shelly’s instability but also youthful female sexuality, a fond comparison could be made to the sensual nightdream of Claire Denis’ “Friday Night.”

There is a blend of vigor and languor in a recurrent image of Shelly on the back of a motorcycle, a passenger with a helmet on, moving her hands and arms as if to take flight, as in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s way of observing his beloved, mercurial female characters, especially an image in 2001′s “Millennium Mambo” of Shu Qi lost in reverie as she rises through the sunroof of a car gliding through curves of nighttime Taipei and waves her arms in similar fashion. And I’m quite serious in comparing the palettes and editing style to the fistful of scenes that have been shown from Orson Welles’ as-yet-uncompleted “The Other Side of the Wind.” It’s jagged, but just-right. There are brief appearances by filmmaking colleagues like Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg. After a second viewing, “You Wont” still flows with a confidence that was present in Russo-Young’s first feature, “Orphans,” but comes fully into its own here. And star-co-writer Schnabel gives Shelly a strong presence, while embodying a fragile flower in full bloom in a bright shiny neon city.

There are quietly sophisticated elements throughout, from the pacing of Shelly’s moods and sometimes-brutal confrontations with female friends as well as the young dates she admires or wants, scruffy bedheads to a man. There’s also a simple compositional motif of triangular elements (a ladder on a mostly bare stage, a clock’s hands at 3:40, hands raised above heads) that imply the constant possibility of an emotional folding-in, a damaging implosion. Some information is sketched in with an offhand stroke: Shelly’s quick-bitten fingers; Williamsburg shown by a glimpse of the Peter Luger Steakhouse sign as a couple turn a corner and by a cab ride across that strange fabled bridge. The dialogue is naturalistic but with sweet quirks: “Not now but right now”; “It smells like babies covered with flowers”; a director speed-describes his “multidisciplinary multimedia extravaganzas”; “At least I don’t come across as a cry for help”; “You’re one of those people who’s gonna kill themselves in five years so I don’t want to say anything more and implicate myself.”

I could go on—even the less-than-lucid characters are observantly spoken—but I’ll end with this image, which is a bookend for me with the challenging final shot. Shelly and a friend go to Atlantic City to see a band whose lead singer she likes, wants. (Onstage, the guy has clown dots of rouge on his cheeks, feminizing his already androgynous features.) She and her friend fight, bitterly, but there’s a moment in the band’s hotel room where he’s fallen asleep. He’s folded up, jackknifed slightly more than going fetal, and his pack of Parliaments is on the bed inside this triangular composition. That’s beautiful form, but Shelly watches him sleep. Watches him sleep. Sweet boy who might smell like a baby and cigarettes, not nearly the Dionysian ideal she watched prance onstage. Behind her gaze, we hear the TV that’s on in the room. It’s an ad, a commercial for a lost puppy shelter. The heart breaks. Shelly’s eyes are wide and still. The song choices throughout are strong and suit each scene where they’re placed, and come to think of it, “You Wont Miss Me” is as much pop music as movie: lyrical, simple, with refrains, and yet in its final glance, unresolved.

Slant Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]

YOU WON’T MISS ME Michael Tully from Hammer to Nail

IFC.com [Alison Willmore]

Quiet Earth [Don Neumann]

On Golden Pond, directed by Mark Rydell | Film review - Time Out

Boxoffice Magazine (Vadim Rizov) review

Director interview Damons Smith interview from Filmmaker magazine, December 8, 2010

Stella Schnabel interview Bilge Ebiri interview with actress Stella Schnabel from The Vulture, January 23, 2009

Director site

The Hollywood Reporter (Frank Scheck) review

Variety (Ronnie Scheib) review

Movie Review - 'You Wont Miss Me' - 'You Wont Miss Me' With Stella ... Jeannette Catsoulis from The New York Times

Rydell, Mark

ON GOLDEN POND

USA (109 mi) 1981

Generation gap tearjerker with Fonda and Hepburn as a septuagenarian married couple visiting their lakeside New England bungalow for their 48th summer together. When middle-aged daughter Jane arrives with boyfriend and his teenage son in tow, the scene is set for the artificial befriending across the generations - Fonda teaches the boy to fish, to read Treasure Island (a 'real' life alternative to chasing girls and television). This adaptation of Ernest Thompson's immensely calculated 1978 play leaves you wishing Jane Fonda's IPC production company had never become involved as she regrets (the relationship she never had with her father), Hepburn flutters, and the elder Fonda mutters (the four-letter words that are supposed to endear him to us as a salty old 'character'). Two of Hollywood's best-loved veterans deserved a far better swan song than this sticky confection.

filmcritic.com David Bezanson

The early 1980s were the best of times and the worst of times for movies. Hollywood produced a lot of entertaining blockbusters (the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Terminator movies, Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, WarGames, Airplane!, Risky Business, and so on) which kept the movies fun and exciting. But Hollywood also produced a string of mainstream dramas like Sophie’s Choice and Ordinary People which were punishingly grim, superficial, and shallow. Of course, most film critics at the time viewed the former with contempt, and praised the latter as the greatest works of art since Mozart.

On Golden Pond was definitely one of the latter category -- a manipulative, Oscar-ready mainstream drama. But surprisingly, it’s not a bad movie.

Ernest Thompson’s play about a couple of septuagenarian weekenders in New Hampshire griping about old age is a stalwart of community theater, but it lacks the dramatic punch necessary for the movies. So Thompson extensively rewrote the script, adding some unnecessary drama and so much profanity that I remember one of my pre-teen friends saying at the time, “I thought the movie was OK, but dude, it was swear city!”

As a further box-office ploy, the dying Henry Fonda was cast in the role as the old husband, Norman Thayer, and in the role of Thayer’s estranged daughter was… Jane Fonda, Henry's real-life daughter. In the film, Jane Fonda’s character uses so many ugly curse words to describe her father that her mother finally slaps her, which is way overdue.

Fortunately, her mother is played by Katharine Hepburn, whose luminous presence and quiet dignity carries the movie. In Hepburn’s performance, her character’s love for her husband and her exasperation with him are two sides of a coin. Hepburn uses the part to communicate many of the conflicting feelings of old age: the joy of living, the fear of being alone, disappointment in one’s children, and acceptance of the past, present, and future.

The New England scenery is good, but the direction is pedestrian, and the only thing that Jane Fonda contributes to the film, other than her name, is overacting. That said, the Hollywood retouches do not completely obscure the moments of wisdom in Thompson’s script, and the pathos in Henry Fonda’s and Katharine Hepburn’s last marquee performances makes On Golden Pond a worthwhile film.

On Golden Pond - TCM.com Eleanor Quin

On Golden Pond The Backflip as Cultural Solution, by Deborah H. Holdstein from Jump Cut, July 1982

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: ON GOLDEN POND | IndieWire Aaron Aradillas, February 1, 2012

A Year with Kate: On Golden Pond (1981) - Blog - The Film Experience Nathaniel Rogers

On Golden Pond - Mark Rydell - 1981 - film review - Films de France James Travers

FilmFanatic.org » On Golden Pond (1981)

DVD Talk [Holly E. Ordway]

On Golden Pond: Collector's Edition Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest David Krauss

On Golden Pond (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Oktay Ege Kozak

Review for On Golden Pond (1981) - IMDb Walter Frith